1 Life, but not as we know it
When it was enthusiastically pointed out within memory of our present Academy
that race or gender or nation...were so many social constructions, inventions,
and representations, a window was opened, an invitation to begin the critical process
of analysis and cultural reconstruction was offered.... The brilliance of
the pronouncement was blinding. Nobody was asking what’s the next step? What
do we do with this old insight? If life is constructed, how come it appears so
immutable? How come culture appears so natural?
(Taussig 1993: xvi)‘production,’ then, is used according to the meaning of its etymological root
(i.e. Latin producere) that refers to the act of ‘bringing forth’ an object in space.
(Gumbrecht 200 4 : xiii)a knowledge of arrangement or disposition is, of all others, the most useful.
(Humphrey Repton 1803, cited in Wall 2006: 6)But can we really assume that the reading of such texts is a reading exclusively
concentrated on meaning? Do we not sing these texts? Should the process by which
a poem speaks be only carried by a meaning intention? Is there not, at the same
time, a truth that lies in its performance? This, I think, is the task with which the
poem confronts us.
(Gadamer 2000, cited in Gumbrecht 200 4 : 6 4 )we can and we may, as it were, jump with both feet off the ground into or towards
a world of which we trust the other parts to meet our jump.
(James 1999 [1911]: 230)Introduction
Since the early 1990s I have been engaged in an attempt to develop what I call
non-representational theory. The chapters in this book are some of the later
results of that project, following on in a direct line from Spatial Formations(Thrift
1996) and Knowing Capitalism(Thrift 2005a). Indeed, the three books should
be considered together: they are all part and parcel of the same economic-cum-
cultural-cum-political venture.