become means of transporting ‘instincts’^1 which are best thought of as particular
territories of becoming, maps mapping out ‘populations’ of identities and forces,
zones and gradients, through differentiation, divergence and creation.
Behaviour can no longer be localized in individuals conceived as preformed
homunculi; but has to be treated epigenetically as a function of complex
material systems which cut across individuals (assemblages) and which trans-
verse phyletic lineages and organismic boundaries (rhizomes). This requires
the articulation of a distributed conception of agency. The challenge is to
show that nature consists of a field of multiplicities, assemblages of hetero-
geneous components (human, animal, viral, molecular, etc.) in which ‘creative
evolution’ can be shown to involve blocks of becoming.
(Ansell Pearson 1999: 1 7 1)Maps are their own practitioners, in other words
The second source of inspiration is the revival of interest in the non-cognitive
dimensions of embodiment. Probably 95 per cent of embodied thought is non-
cognitive, yet probably 95 per cent of academic thought has concentrated on the
cognitive dimension of the conscious ‘I’. Without in any way diminishing the
importance of cognitive thought (though certainly questioning its exact nature),
we can conceive of non-cognitive thought as a set of embodied dispositions
(‘instincts’ if you like) which have been biologically wired in or culturally sedi-
mented (the exact difference between the two being a fascinating question in itself),
action-oriented ‘representations’ which simultaneously describe aspects of the
world and prescribe possible actions. There has, of course, been a considerable
amount of work on body practices stemming from the work of authors as different
as Mauss, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu (e.g. Taussig
1994 ), which recognizes that much of human life is lived in a non-cognitive world.
But I think it is fair to say that its implications are only now being worked through,
most especially in areas like performance studies, feminist theory and non-
representational geographies. In particular, when we say that human beings act
to think or that they learn by doing, we need to refigure what we count as thought
and knowledge. In particular, much cognitive thought and knowledge may,
indeed, be only a kind of post-hoc rumination; ‘to be aware of an experience means
that it has passed’ (Norretranders 1998: 128). For example, most of the time, an
action is in motion before we decide to perform it; our average ‘readiness potential’
is about 0.8 seconds, although cases of up to 1.5 seconds have been recorded.^2
As McCrone (1999: 135) makes clear, none of this means that conscious aware-
ness is just along for the ride. Rather, we can say that the non-conscious comes
to be more highly valued – the ‘not properly conscious impulses, inklings,
automatisms and reflexive action’ can no longer be regarded as trivial. And, at the
same time, conscious awareness is repositioned as a means of scrutinizing and
focusing these actions. To put it another way, what has been found is that the
body has a number of ways of conjuring with time that work through structures
of anticipation, the something to be known which is very often the result of the
58 Part I