Flickering, Spilling and Diffusing Body/Knowledge in the Posthuman Early Years

Abstract

Following Deleuze and Whitehead, we begin with a movement from without, a process, never with a ‘subject’ of a process. This page merely opens onto what Manning and Massumi describe as ‘a commotion of relational activity, each vying to be written down, to be the conduit of the field’s summing up in a determinate expression’ (2014, p. 12): Texts are traversed by a movement that comes from without, that does not begin on the page (nor the preceding pages), that is not bounded by the frame of the book; it is entirely different from the imaginary movement of representation or the abstract movement of concepts that habitually take place among words and within the mind of the reader. (Deleuze, cited in Blondel, 1985, p. 145) Amid this commotion, the moment of beginning our chapter is defined by what our senses are compelled to attend to (Mukhopadhyay, 2008). Yet even before our pen and paper begin to seduce each other in virtual intimacy, relational activity is already at work across heterogeneous fields of experience: the echoes of an invitation to write; our calling to familiar systems of linguistic symbols; collaborating in the imaginary of the emerging book; awkward relations with deforestation; seductive ecologies of preceding chapters; the ebb and flow across French, Canadian, Italian and American theorists; the shifting terrain and traditions of philosophy; the politics of the printing press and technology; the nourishing workings of the dorsal aorta and a multiplicity of intensely vibrating senses.