Nigel Thrift - Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect

Non-Representational Theory

Non-Representational Theory presents a distinctive approach to the politics of everyday life. Ranging across a variety of the spaces in which politics and the political unfold, it questions what is meant by perception, representation and practice, with the aim of valuing the fugitive practices that exist on the margins of the known. This book questions the orientation of the social sciences and humanities and makes essential reading for researchers and postgraduates. It revolves around three key functions:

it introduces the rather dispersed discussion of non-representational theory to a wider audience,

it provides the basis for an experimental rather than a representational approach to the social sciences and humanities,

it begins the task of constructing a different kind of political genre.

Nigel Thrift brings together further writings from a body of work that has come to be known as non-representational theory. Thrift's noteworthy book makes a significant contribution to the literature in this area and provides a groundbreaking and comprehensive introduction to this key topic making Non-Representational Theory an incredibly useful text for students of social theory, sociology, geography, anthropology and cultural studies.

Nigel Thrift, Professor at the University of Warwick, is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Bristol. He has authored, co-authored and co-edited more than 35 books and over 200 journal articles. His research includes work on international finance, new forms of capitalism, cities, social and cultural theory and the history of time

Founded by Karl Mannheim

Editor: John Urry

Lancaster University

Recent publications in this series include:

Risk and Technological Culture

Towards a sociology of virulence

Joost Van Loon

Reconnecting Culture, Technology

and Nature

Mike Michael

Advertising Myths

The strange half lives of images and

commodities

Anne M. Cronin

Adorno on Popular Culture

Robert R Witkin

Consuming the Caribbean

From Arwaks to Zombies

Mimi Sheller

Crime and Punishment in

Contemporary Culture

Claire Valier

Between Sex and Power

Family in the world, 19002000

Goran Therborn

States of Knowledge

The co-production of social science

and social order

Shelia Jasanoff

After Method

Mess in social science research

John Law

Brands

Logos of the global economy

Celia Lury

The Culture of Exception

Sociology facing the camp

Bulent Diken and Carsten Bagge Lausten

Visual Worlds

John Hall, Blake Stimson

and Lisa Tamiris Becker

Time, Innovation and Mobilities

Travel in technological cultures

Peter Frank Peters

Complexity and Social Movements

Multitudes acting at the edge of chaos

Ian Welsh and Graeme Chesters

Qualitative Complexity

Ecology, cognitive processes and the

re-emergence of structures in

post-humanist social theory

Chris Jenks and John Smith

Theories of the Information Society

3rd Edition

Frank Webster

Mediating Nature

Nils Lindahl Elliot

Haunting the Knowledge Economy

Jane Kenway, Elizabeth Bullen,

Johannah Fahey and Simon Robb

Global Nomads

Techno and new age as transnational

countercultures in Ibiza and Goa

Anthony D'Andrea

The Cinematic Tourist

Explorations in globalization, culture

and resistance

Rodanthi Tzanelli

Non-Representational Theory

Space | politics | affect

Nigel Thrift

Non-Representational Theory

Space | politics | affect

Nigel Thrift

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2008
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

2007 Nigel Thrift

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-203-94656-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-39320-5 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-415-39321-3 (pbk)

ISBN10: 0-203-94656-1 (Print Edition) (ebk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-39320-1 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-39321-8 (pbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-94656-5 (Print Edition) (ebk)

Copyright 2006/2007 Mobipocket.com. All rights reserved.

Reader's Guide

This ebook has been optimized for MobiPocket PDA.

Tables may have been presented to accommodate this Device's Limitations.

Table content may have been removed due to this Device's Limitations.

Image presentation is limited by this Device's Screen resolution.

All possible language characters have been included within the Font handling ability of this Device.

PART I

PART II

PART III

This book summarizes and extends a batch of work carried out since the late 1990s concerned with what I call non-representational theory. On one level this is a book about the dynamics of susceptibility and about how we are being made susceptible in new ways. Of course, we are continually being made into new creatures by all kinds of forces, but it is surely the case that as the world is forced to face up to the damage done, so we can no longer move along the same cul-de-sacs of practical-cum-conceptual possibilities. Other possibilities need to be alighted upon for thinking about the world. That requires boosting inventive attitude so as to produce more contrary motion.

Then, on another level, this is a book about apathy. Given what has to be faced, it seems important to find a way of expanding the capacity for action in a world in which action is severely circumscribed. But it is not the heroic, individualized and autonomous action of a certain kind of activist 'self-confident and free of worry, capable of vigorous, wilful activity' (Walzer 1988:313) that I want to concentrate on in this book. Rather, rediscovering, at least to an extent, seventeenth-century notions of agency and selfhood, it is an action that can be associated with passivity, but a passivity that is demanding, that is called forth by another (Gross 2006).