32 See, especially, the book by Soden (2003) on falling.
33 Kwinter stresses the tool-less nature of this activity but this aesthetic is relative, to put
it mildly.
34 We should not make too much of this, of course. At different times in history, various
means of producing continuously bounded sites have been invented that have stabilized
sites over long periods of time. A good example is barbed wire (see Netz 200 4 ).
35 What exactly I mean by this is outlined in some detail in Chapter 6 of this book.
36 And not in some naïve way in which the history of dance as complicit with social
structuring.
37 Most particularly, dance provides an understanding of style as a particular way of doing
body; ‘dance would be the style not as that which is added on to a body in creation
itself: style not as that technique through which creation takes place but as pure creativity
with no end or ground outside itself’ (Colebrook 2005b: 8). The body is neither a norm
towards which bodies ought to strive nor a mere existing that expresses some prior norm
of human creativity. However, I retain some scepticism about the residual romanticism
I find in this quasi-Deleuzian point of view which is why I finally prefer Deleuze and
Guattari’s later work on territorialization.
38 See McNeil (2005). I have tried to take in the whole spectrum of senses since my early
work. See, for example, my writing on smell and on vision. I am particularly impressed
by the histories of the senses currently coming out of North America (See Rath 2003).
39 Thus I have become very interested in the possibilities of transposing imitative theories
like that of Tarde with the kinds of conflictual mimesis championed by Girard (cf.
Fleming 200 4 ).
4 0 I should add that I start out from the assumption that
there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that
humans must enact or realize. That is the only reason why something like an ethics
can exist because it is clear that if humans were or had to be this or that substance,
this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible there would only be
tasks to be done.
(Agamben 1993: 4 3)4 1 Thus, ‘God is above all the name for the pressure to be alive in the world, to open to
the too much of pressure generated in large measure by the uncanny presence of my
neighbour’ (Santner 2001: 9). Or, as Latour (2002: 7 ) puts it, in a thoroughly
Whiteheadian vein, ‘God is the feeling for positive, instead of negative prehensions’.
4 2 In Aristotelian terms, as energeia. It is worth remembering that in past times art and
craft were much more closely bound together: indeed the word for craft used to be
‘art’. This is an occlusion that I want to see revived as a politics. Additionally I would
want to see the meaning of craft broadened out to cover activities such as teaching and
the like, which are too often excluded from its orbit.
4 3 The metaphor of craftsmanship has other benefits too, for example, a willingness to
explore ambiguity, a commitment to the task for its own sake, and its often tacit nature.
44 That does not just mean the spatialization of experience as an always having been
possible (see Middleton and Brown 2006) but also the way in which spaces feel.
4 5 This very perception may itself be historically specific, of course. See Wall (2006).
4 6 Given the size of the gut – its surface area would cover a small room if laid out flat –
this really would be a geography.
47 As in the work of Emmanuel Lévinas.
4 8 As in the work of Michel Henry.
4 9 A restatement of the classic point that thought cannot be divorced from its object,
understood now as meaning that ‘the ontology of the sensible is not separable from
the constitution of material assemblages and processes themselves’ (Toscano 200 4 a:
xxi).
Notes 257