understanding the worlds (Levinson 2003). Then there is the consequent ability
of joint action periodically to work across different social fields, refusing to respect
boundaries. And finally there is the ‘adaptive unconscious’ (Wilson 2002) working
ceaselessly and nonconsciously to interpolate/interpellate the world. These are
not insignificant qualities and they give a significant role to style, a particular way
of practising joint action that can be equated to agency in this book.
My stamping ground for these kinds of thoughts has often been dance, but it
could just as well have been building or music, two other baseline human activities
which, so far as I am aware, are found in all societies, including those of the great-
est antiquity. For my purposes, dance is important: it engages the whole of the
senses in bending time and space into new kinaesthetic shapes, taps into the long
and variegated history of the unleashing of performance,^36 leads us to understand
movement as a potential,^37 challenges the privileging of meaning (especially by
understanding the body as being expressive without being a signifier; see Langer
2005; Dunagan 2005; Gumbrecht 200 4 ), gives weight to intuition as thinking-
in-movement, foregrounds the ‘underlanguage’ of gesture^38 and kinetic semantics
in general (Sheets-Johnstone 2005), teaches us anew about evolution (for example
by demonstrating the crucial role of bipedality), and is able to point to key
cognitive processes like imitation and suggestion which are now understood to be
pivotal to any understanding of understanding (Hurley and Chater 2005) and,
indeed, desire.^39
The aforegoing paragraphs allow me to say something, finally, about ethics.^40
I have been painting a very faint view of human agency, to put it mildly. The
classical human subject which is transparent, rational and continuous no longer
pertains. Classical ethical questions like ‘What have I done?’ and ‘What ought I
to do?’ become much more difficult when the ‘I’ in these questions is so faint,
when self-transparency and narratibility are such transient features. Similarly, more
modern ethical questions like what it means to be genuinely open to another
human being or culture take on added layers of complexity. Clearly, becoming
ethical now means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to
act but which we cannot fully choose (Butler 2005) and taking responsibility – in
a sense to be specified – for the dilemmas that subsequently arise. But this hardly
counts as a revelation.
What I will want to argue for, in concert with Santner (2001: 6), is a generalized
ethic of out-of-jointness within which ‘every familiar is ultimately strange and
...,indeed, I am even in a crucial sense a stranger to myself’. But, rather than
see this form of answerability as a problem, it can as well be thought of as an
opportunity to build new forms of life in which ‘strangeness itself [is] the locus of
new forms of neighborliness and community’ (Santner 2001: 6). In turn, this ethic
of novelty can be connected to the general theme of ‘more life’, for it suggests
a particular form of boosting aliveness, one that opens us to our being in the midst
of life through a thoroughly ontological involvement.^41 For, what is clear is that
all too often in our everyday life we are notopen to that pressure and do not inhabit
the midst of life, and thus live everyday life as, well, everyday life, clipping our own
wings because we inhabit cringes that limit our field of action.
14 Life, but not as we know it