attempt to move on from Deleuze and Guattari’s famous aphorism from Anti-
Oedipus, ‘The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory’, by documenting how
the unconscious has become both together, as the factory and the theatre have
blended into each other. Thus ‘Still life in nearly present time’ considers the ways
in which modern societies are experimenting with ‘neutral’ material backgrounds
for commercial gain, burrowing into bare life in order to come up with the goods.
I associate bare life with that small space of time between action and cognition
and show the way firms have become ever more expert in operating on this new
territory for commercial gain. It was one of my first attempts to show up how the
backgrounds through which we live are changing as new disciplines have their
say. ‘Drivingin the city’ is intended to demonstrate just how radically bodies
are changing as they are augmented and extended by these backgrounds, as they
subtly redefine what counts as experience. The chapter argues that de Certeau’s
understanding of walking as the archetypal transhuman practice of making the city
habitable cannot hold in a post-human world. By concentrating on the practices
of driving, I argue that other experiences of the city now have an equal validity.
In other words, de Certeau’s work on everyday life in the city needs to be reworked
in order to take into account the rise of automobility. The bulk of the chapter is
devoted to exploring how that goal might be achieved, concentrating in particular
on how new knowledges like software and ergonomics have become responsible
for a large-scale spatial reordering of the city which presages an important change
in what counts as making the city habitable. ‘Movement-space’ takes a slightly
different tack by arguing that the background of experience is being changed
irrevocably by means of mass calculation which is, perhaps, better described as
‘qualculation’ with the result that every event turns up digitally pre-disposed,
so to speak. The chapter then moves on to consider how this qualculative back-
ground is producing new apprehensions of space and time before ending by
considering how new kinds of sensorium may now be becoming possible. I
illustrate this argument by considering the changing presence of the hand, co-
ordinate systems, and language, thereby attempting to conjure up the lineaments
of a new kind of movement-space.
The second section attempts to articulate some of the political stakes that arise
from non-representational theory. Written in the late 1990s the single chapter in
this section forms a kind of pivot. ‘Afterwords’, was an attempt to make a definitive
statement about non-representational theory by focusing particularly on the motif
of performance as the key to a politics of experiment. It is intended as a message
of hope, of a longing for a future of stutter and clutter that can produce new places
within which more interesting practices are able to produce more habitable worlds
(Miyazaki 2006).
Having sketched in a background, I can then move on to some more recent
work. Non-representational theory has been interpreted by some as being simply
a political message of unbridled optimism. That is not the case. As if to prove it,
the book ends on a darker note, emphasizing that the quest for a new kind of
political that I want to follow may try to multiply positive prehensions, but that
it is not therefore a quixotic quest for the new moral styles we so desperately need
24 Life, but not as we know it