to look like internalisation (of thought and subjectivity) now appears as a gradual
propagation of organised functional properties across a set of malleable media’
(Hutchins 1995: 312); ‘the true engine of reason... is bounded neither by skin
nor skull’ (Clark 199 7 : 69). Thus, as Hayles puts it:
no longer is human will seen as the source from which emanates the mystery
necessary to dominate and control the environment. Rather, the distributed
cognition of the emergent human subject correlates with – in Bateson’s phase,
becomes a metaphor for – the distributed cognitive system as a whole, in
which thinking is done by both human and nonhuman actors.
(Hayles 1999: 290)Not only do objects make thought do-able (e.g. Latour and Hermant 1998)
but they also very often make thought possible. In a sense, then, as parts of net-
works of effectivity, objects think. We might even go still further, by arguing that
‘everything that is resounds’ (Lingis 1998: 99):
It is not that things barely show themselves, behind illusory appearances
fabricated by our subjectivity; it is that things are exorbitantly exhibitionist.
The landscape resounds; facades, caricatures, halos, shadows, dance across
it. Under the sunlight extends the pageantry of things. The twilight does not
put an end to their histrionics. In the heart of the night the pulse of the night
summons still their ghosts.
(Lingis 1998: 100)The fourth source of inspiration is the genealogy of the body practices which
must be a large part of an ethology of ‘instincts’ – these are now, finally, coming
under intense scrutiny. Grouped around terms like ‘performance’, and around
theorists like Bourdieu and Foucault, researchers in the social sciences and
humanities have, over the last 20 years, begun to produce a history of particular
organs (e.g. Hillman and Massio 199 7 ; Jordanova 199 4 ) and particular body
practices – from drill to dance. But it is true to say that we still understand very
little of how the body practices that comprise ‘us’ have come down to and inhabit
us, passing into our being, passing our being back and forth between bodies and
passing our being on (Hayles 1999).^3
These four sources of inspiration allow us to begin to sense, through this
combination of work in areas as diverse as biology, philosophy and performance
studies, what an understanding of that little space of time that is much of what
we are, a space not so much at the edge of action as lighting the world. I will call
this domain ‘bare life’ after Aristotle’s notion of Zoé, a ‘simple natural sweetness’
(Agamben 1998). Of course, it is not really bare; bare life pulses with action. And
it is not simple. And it is not preternatural. But what such a notion allows us to
do is to point beyond the grand notions of bodily hexis like habitus towards some-
thing more specific and more open to description. And it does two more things.
One is to begin to understand qualities like anticipation and intuition as not just
60 Part I