A few invaluable quotes and ideas from Nigel Thrifts’s Non-Representational Theory : space, politics, affect (2008). The following is brief. I underlined huge swathes of the book and made notes throughout.
“… this book is about new kinds of practice which […] leave room for values like messiness, and operators like the mistake, the stumble and the stutter” (Thrift 2008: p18, referencing Law 2004). I love this. Even in the arts, and especially in photography, there seems to be little room for stumbles and stutters. Instead, didactic instruction and moralistic signalling abound. Rather than discovery and inquiry, we are treated to personal manifestos around identity which seem to reinforce division rather than tackle it in any productive way.
“…consciousness seems to be a very poor thing indeed, a window of time – fifteen seconds at most – in which just a few things (normally no more than six or seven) can be addressed, which is opaque to introspection and which is easily distracted. Indeed, consciousness can be depicted as though it hardly existed, as an emergent derivative of an unconscious.” (Thrift, 2008: p6). If is this the case, how reliable are the didactic representational messages that flood our screens, from artists, politicians and marketeers (who, one might argue, are all much of a muchness nowadays anyway).”
“… non-representational theory privileges play: play is understood as a perpetual human activity with immense affective significance, by no means confined to just early childhood, in which many basic ethical dilemmas (such as fairness) are worked through in ways which are both performative and theoretical.” (Ibid: p7) Yes, play!!! Again, even in the arts, there is an assumption that lecturing is going to change everyone’s minds, improve their behaviours, and alter the world (an hubristric intention). Play, however, is where things might happen.
“…non-representational theory is experimental. I make no apologies for this. After all, ‘no battle has ever been won without resorting to new combinations and surprising events’ (Ibid: p12 referencing Latour 2005: 252) It’s good to see this and I wish more people would take it on board. As I read the book, I was reminded repeatedly by how tricky it has been at times to introduce simple play to artists.
“I want to retain a certain minimal humanism.” And “dropping the human subject entirely seems to me to be a step too far.” (Thrift, 2008: p13) Thank God! As expressed by Crosson and Žižek in footnotes from an early draft of my MA research project: “Rather than discarding the category of the human or purporting to move beyond it, it seems more productive to treat humanism as a fraught, unfinished project that exhibits the contradictions central to many of the ideals associated with the Enlightenment.” Crosson, J. Brent. ‘Humanism and Enlightenment’. In The Oxford Handbook of Humanism, by J. Brent Crosson, 175–205. edited by Anthony B. Pinn. Oxford University Press, 2021. [PDF] pp.15/33. Or “Maybe I’m too naive here. But I think there are things which are not bad in the liberal tradition. Don’t just dismiss liberalism as neo-liberalism. Never forget that feminism, socialism – they emerged out of the liberal tradition.” in Read, F. ‘Slavoj Žižek: We Are Addicted to Chaos’. UnHerd. Accessed 10 August 2022.)
All of Chapter 7–From born to made: Technology, biology, and space. My written MA research project, which is a dialogue that takes place inside a constructed and imagined womb between a fleshy subjectivity and a mythical robotic subjectivity is another way of exploring the themes Thrift covers in this chapter. Indeed, somewhere or other, recently I have written about being made instead of born. I am certain I will return to this chapter again.
And finally, Thrift is suspicious of the binaries we set up between nature and culture as well as between biology and the social. The book is filled with references that I might have found useful doing my research although that may have taken me down a different path. Such as: “Distance from biology is no longer seen as a prime marker of social and cultural theory (S.P. Turner 2002). It has become increasingly evident that the biological constitution of being (so-called ‘biolayering’) has to be taken into account if performative force is ever to be understood, and in particular, the dynamics of birth (and creativity) rather than death (Battersby 1999). (Thrift, 2008: p174, my italics as it relates so much to my own work.)
Although one can find complaints online about Thrift not being political enough (the final chapter Turbulent passions
Towards an understanding of the affective spaces of political performance is extremely political so I am not sure I agree with those criticisms) and also about the term Non-representational being a bit illusive and a little inaccurate, I am immensely glad to have read it. It’s dense because it is packed with fascinating stuff – what a knowledgeable, well-read theorist. I never thought of myself as a geographer – but I suppose I am exploring the landscape of the fleshy/digital hybrid, so perhaps I was mistaken.
Refs:
Crosson, J.B. (2020). Humanism and Enlightenment. The Oxford Handbook of Humanism, pp.175–205. doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190921538.013.33.
Read. F. (2022). We are addicted to chaos. [online] UnHerd. Available at: https://unherd.com/thepost/slavoj-zizek [Accessed 18 Jul. 2023].
Thrift, N.J. (2008) Non-representational theory space, politics, affect. London: Routledge.