Non-Representational Theory: Space|Politics|Affect by Nigel Thrift

Abstract

Non-Representational Theory: Space|Politics|Affect , by Nigel Thrift . 2007 . Series: International Library of Sociology. New York: Routledge. 325 + x. ISBN 978-0-415-39320-1, cloth, $150; ISBN 978-0-415-39321-8, paper, $49.95. For all its sobriety, scholarly comprehensiveness, and explanatory lucidity, Nigel Thrift's Non-Representational Theory is a startling book. I shall begin by describing at some length the context for the book and the reasons for my claim. One of the common and less than rigorous responses to postmodern “theory” is that all the features celebrated by postmodernists—antifoundationalism, dencentered cognition, embodied intensities, continual creation without determined ends, nonidentity, and pure difference—actually serve to consecrate and reinforce capitalism. Postmodern theory, particularly in its French mode is deemed to be dehistoricizing, depoliticizing, obfuscatory, and a new opiate for the people in a world in which, as Deleuze and Guattari enthusiastically announced, “the people are missing.” Perhaps the clearest exponent of this notion that theory in general is tied to a detachment from localized politics and concrete contexts is Terry Eagleton. For him, any endorsement of the aesthetic (Eagleton, 1990) or “events” as dissolutions of our reified and alienated subjectivity is yet one more ideological ruse to preclude us from examining the political in its historical and social complexity (Eagleton, 2001). Many have attempted to defend French theory against such accusations of its complicity with capitalism. Some, like Fredric Jameson, have retained the postmodern emphasis on the primacy of semiotic systems and mediated understanding, but have also regarded a properly Marxist attention to the historicity of such mediations as the ultimate horizon (Jameson, 1981), thereby allowing for a utopian thought of the realization of relations beyond ideological agonistics (Jameson, 2005). Others hailed Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994) as a long-deferred but finally redemptive sign that poststructuralism had, all along, been a mode of critical politics mistakenly assumed to be a form of textualism in its initial Anglo-American dissemination (Sprinker, 2008). Derrida's mode, in Specters, of post-Marxist political intervention relied upon the necessarily radical nature of the spirit of Marx's text: it is precisely because we are given Marx in the form of a text that requires a labor of reading that it can never be exhausted once and for all, and therefore haunts the present, opening up a future of readings and solicitations that cannot be reduced to Marxism, just as deconstruction or the inhabitation of textual forces could not be reduced to Derrideanism. But it was this emphasis on the labor of reading, and also on a future that was in no way predictable or bounded by the past (and this because of a spirit of the text that could open up any materiality), that allowed for what has now come to be known as the “affective turn.” If Jacques Derrida was, however unfairly, associated with textualism and the linguistic paradigm, Deleuze and Guattari (and the proper names upon which they drew, including Henri Bergson, Gabriel Tarde, Alfred North Whitehead, and a Marx attentive to the genesis of social machines) have been celebrated as enabling an account of living systems that would not be a return to history and politics “after” theory (De Landa, 2006). On the contrary, if one is to think theoretically, with a profound intuition and interrogation of forces, then it is necessary to go beyond already existing terms, spaces, and contexts in order to consider the dynamic relations and living potentials from which structures emerge. That is, if theory in its first phase had emphasized mediation, relations, and structures—insisting that there is no life in itself but only life as encountered through determined and historico-political systems, then the turn to affect is no less suspicious of the grand explanatory schemes of historical understanding, but now emphasizes those forces and potentials from which relations and positions are generated. This is not a return to the subject, to agency, to a liberal emphasis on norms and critique so much as a radicalization of the notion of structure. If the 1980s marked a rebellion against high theory with a turn to historical performance and narration, and the 1990s generated a passion for the body, then the 2000s have witnessed a frenzy of interest in affect (too often watered down to the more easily understood concept of emotion). Affect, unlike emotion or feeling, is a potential for response that is not yet actualized. This is how Deleuze, following Bergson, defines the notion in his book on cinema (Deleuze, 1986). Any body has a range of possible responses to its milieu; if it is not a living body but a mechanism then its responses will be determined in advance. To understand social systems as ideologically determined, to understand bodies as conditioned by systems, or to picture the brain as some type of computer or representational calculus of the world is to begin with an extended, primarily mechanical, understanding of space in which a field is not altered by the events that take place. By contrast, living or intensive systems are affective: a body or force is nothing other than a capacity to affect and be affected. Further, time is no longer the time taken for an event to unfold, for affect is crucially tied to speeds and slownesses. A body receives an affect, and it is the delay or indetermination between the reception of a force and reaction to that force that constitutes its complexity. Affect is therefore a way of thinking dynamic fields, in which there are not bodies and terms that exist in space so much as spaces that unfold from the encounters and relations of bodies. It is in this context that we need to read Thrift's Non-Representational theory. Thrift at once offers an exhaustive account of the implications of what he broadly refers to as nonrepresentational theory. Representation, or the idea that there are minds that somehow picture a world and then decide to act upon it, has been an object of criticism for some time. Where Thrift's book is at once pertinent and singular is in his wholehearted embrace of the theoretical trend against representation—against the idea of a centered viewpoint, knower, or system that might yield “a” politics—while happily refusing to defend or apologize for the ways in which this theory might be hijacked by management theory or various other non-anticapitalist practices. Far from lamenting the fact that invention, creativity, flexibility, becoming, process, and self-creation are motifs of a late capitalism oriented to service cultures and responsive marketing, Thrift outlines the political positivity of these developments. For him the fact that these radical potentials are thoroughly intertwined with the world as it is should not lead us to a sense that capitalism is inescapable. If calculation and efficacy (if not efficiency) go “below” and beyond the mind to include prepersonal affects and suprapersonal networks then this is not a cause to diagnose the present as one of total and biopolitical infiltration and domination. Thrift does not even seek to disengage a radical from a coopted tendency of these forces and time-spaces. Rather, his book's primary force is performative rather than diagnostic. All those features that others might regard with a mood of bleak loss—loss of critique, loss of an outside, loss of an engaged and self-conscious multitude—Thrift repackages as cause for optimism and a shift in point of view. This book embraces and encompasses many trends. It manages to combine a range of theoretical motifs, such as affect, performativity, populations, militarization, and a range of proper names, such as Deleuze, Ranciere, Bhaba, and Certeau, and yet emerge with a general mood of hope, rather than become mired in a war of theoretical paradigms. A key example of this productive spirit is the concluding chapters’ outline of the increasing militarization of urban spaces, alongside the production of misanthropy that such intense monitoring and surveillance will generate. But it is precisely here, amid the feeling of encroaching resentments, resource depletion, catastrophe, and negative passions, that Thrift's book intervenes. If it is the case that polities are less organized by governing beliefs and ideologies and more by the affective attachments and mutually formative relations that are not objects of conscious decision or manipulation, then this opens the way directly to affects of generosity and community (where the latter is not understood as common understanding so much as mutual and unavoidable imbrication). The value of Thrift's book is that it faces up to the ways in which the very features that are so often hailed as modes of disruption to capitalism are already intertwined with late capitalism. This is no simple-minded appeal to affect and intensities in opposition to capitalism; nor is it a mournful lament that “today” capitalism knows no outside. Rather, capitalism itself bears within its very operation points of potential affective production and expansion. One obvious objection to the book might be that it relies on a synthesis of thinkers and notions that would not be possible if Thrift had considered their concepts and arguments in greater detail. It is true that a common feature of Deleuze, Virno, Varela, Sloterdijk, Certeau, and others is a consideration of dynamic relations that precludes either a focus on individuals as simple agents, or systems as grounding conditions. But it is also the case that the living systems of, say, Varela are those of organisms and autopoeisis (so that Thrift can attend to capacities of ongoing creation), while Deleuze's entire engagement with Guattari was concerned with boundary-disrupting and counterorganicist potentials. Thrift's attention is almost