The third development is the fixing of a still, contemplative gaze, which is able
to capture transience. Such a gaze is found in art from the eighteenth century
on but reaches a kind of technological fulfilment in the photograph, especially
with the growth of popular photography from the end of the nineteenth century
onwards. Crawshaw and Urry (199 7 ) argue that popular photography consists of
a set of socially organized rituals which fix a place, a ‘language’ of material objects
through which we understand and appreciate the environment (and the material
objects themselves) and a means of organizing time itself. In each case, what are
being described are a set of practices which momentarily fix the body and other
things in spaces and times by producing spaces and times in which they can be
fixed.^7
The fourth development is the forging of a body of knowledge about social
interaction as the distillation of detailed body practices. Such knowledge can
already be found in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century (for
example, in the development of various movement notations) but it reaches a peak
in the twentieth century with the rise of various knowledge of body practice from
work on the psychology of body language and gesture, though work on bodily
intonations of space, as in Hall’s ‘proxemics’ (Hall 1990), through to the detailed
conversational analysis of symbolic interactionism, ethno-methodology and the
like to be found in the work of Goffman, Garfinkel, Sacks and so on (e.g. Burns
1992). In turn, this knowledge, much of which was developed in academia and
other relatively formal arenas, has gradually seeped out into everyday life as a whole
new corporeal curriculum of expressive competence, for example through courses
on body language (now being given, for example, to checkout operators in some
supermarket chains), cultural awareness training and all manner of training in
self-presentation (cf. Giddens 1991; Thrift 199 7 ). Thus, what was quite specific
knowledge has become general and routine.
Each and every one of these four developments of body practice stretches
out the moment, most especially by paying detailed attention to it. They expand,
if you like, the ‘size’ of consciousness, allowing each moment to be more carefully
attended to and invested with more of its context. Taken together, they may be
seen as constructing a slow-down of perception, as much as a speed-up.
Re-enchantment
These developments have to be taken in concert with others to complete my
argument. One of the most damaging ideas that has swept the social sciences and
humanities has been the idea of a disenchanting modernity (Thrift 1996). This
act of purification has radically depopulated thinking about Western societies
as whole sets of delegates and intermediaries have been consigned to oblivion as
extinct impulses, those delegates and intermediaries which might appear to be
associated with forces of magic, the sacred, ritual, affect, trance and so on. Now,
however, the contemporary turn towards vitalist ways of thinking (cf. Watson
1998b) has made it much easier to see that the magic has not gone away. Western
societies, like all others, are full of these forces (Dening 1996; Muecke 1999).
Still life in nearly present time 65