registers are continuously expanding but also in part because the sheer cultural
diversity of how space appears is increasingly being recognized as more than culture
or body (e.g. Levinson 200 4 ; Wilson 200 4 ).
The book
Having outlined some of the main tenets of non-representational theory, let me
now move to the book itself. This book is motivated by a heterogeneous series of
inspirations, rather than just one. I will point to a theoretical agenda first. I do not
subscribe to the spirit guide approach to social science. Thus, for example, though
I take Deleuze’s work on topics like the gap between sensation and perception,
the difference between possibility and virtuality, the heterogenesis of both material
density and subjective action from a pre-individual field, and the different time-
images of repetition and recurrence, to be important, I am afraid that this has not
produced a total makeover of my work in a way that has now become quite
common in some quarters, a makeover that sometimes seems to resemble a reli-
gious conversion. There are elements of Deleuze’s work that I remain out of sorts
with^51 and, in any case, I do not think that it is the function of a social scientist to
simply apply the work of philosophers (as in a Deleuzian approach, a Foucauldian
approach, an Agambenian approach, and so on). It seems to me to be a highly
questionable assumption that modern social science stands in this kind of sub-
ordinate relationship to a set of themes from Western philosophy^52 or should see
its task as simply echoing the assumptions those themes may make. So far as I am
concerned, social scientists are there to hear the world and to make sure that it
can speak back just as much as they are there to produce wild ideas – and then out
of this interaction they may be able to produce something that is itself equally
new. But they must share with philosophers like Deleuze one ambition at least
and that is to render the world problematic by elaborating questions. To simply
offer solutions is not enough.^53
At the same time, in recent years, there has been an equal tendency to argue
that social science must be more practical, policy-oriented, and so on, a tendency
which risks losing touch with wild ideas completely; it is the kind of social science
that does not understand the basic point that it is producing a form of intelligibility
which ‘can only confirm the prevailing views within those institutions that
generated the data’ (Rawls 2002: 5 4 ) and in fetishizing the values of method-
ological rigour seems to me to miss a large part of the point of social science by
purposefully going about deadening itself (Law 2005) when that is both pointless
and unnecessary.^54
Instead of all that, this book is about new kinds of practice which are compelled
by their own demonstrations and therefore leave room for values like messiness,
and operators like the mistake, the stumble and the stutter (Law 200 4 ). To some
these practices will appear to be just idle chatter but I prefer to see them as vehicles
for bringing into view the conditions of meaning, not so much a means of going
further as a technology for tackling inconceivability (Fenves 1993). After all, and
this point is crucial, it seems to me to be of the greatest methodological importance
18 Life, but not as we know it