Preface
This book summarizes and extends a batch of work carried out since the late 1990s
concerned with what I call non-representational theory. On one level this is a book
about the dynamics of susceptibility and about how we are being made susceptible
in new ways. Of course, we are continually being made into new creatures by all
kinds of forces, but it is surely the case that as the world is forced to face up to the
damage done, so we can no longer move along the same cul-de-sacs of practical-
cum-conceptual possibilities. Other possibilities need to be alighted upon for
thinking about the world. That requires boosting inventive attitude so as to produce
more contrary motion.
Then, on another level, this is a book about apathy. Given what has to be faced,
it seems important to find a way of expanding the capacity for action in a world in
which action is severely circumscribed. But it is not the heroic, individualized and
autonomous action of a certain kind of activist – ‘self-confident and free of worry,
capable of vigorous, wilful activity’ (Walzer 1988: 313) – that I want to concentrate
on in this book. Rather, rediscovering, at least to an extent, seventeenth-century
notions of agency and selfhood, it is an action that can be associated with passivity,
but a passivity that is demanding, that is called forth by another (Gross 2006).
In days when the Iraq War, Afghanistan, 9/11, 7 / 7 and other such events often
seem to have claimed total occupation of the Western academic psyche, and many
academics have reacted accordingly with mammoth statements about warfare,
imperialism, capitalism, global warming, and numerous other waypoints on the
road to perdition, it is difficult to remember that other kinds of political impulse
might also have something to say, something smaller and larger, something which
is in danger of being drowned out. Instead this book keeps faith with the small
but growing number of determined experimentalists who think that too often we
have been asking the wrong questions in the wrong way: those who want to re-
materialize democracy, those who want to think about the exercise of association,
those who want to make performances in the interstices of everyday life, those who
are intent on producing new and more challenging environments, those who want
to redesign everyday things, those who, in other words, want to generate more
space to be unprecedented, to love what aids fantasy, and so to gradually break
down imaginative resistance. Rather like Darwin’s restless earthworms, slowly going
about the work of tilling the soil (Graham and Thrift 200 7 ), they are attempting