``On the path which leads to that which is being thought, all begins with sensibility.

''
Gilles Deleuze (1994a, page 144)
1 Introduction
In his essay ``Species of spaces'', Georges Perec puts forward a programme for the
study of the everyday life of a street. He writes:
``Observe the street from time to time, with some concern with a system perhaps.
Apply yourself. Take your time... . Note down what you can see. Anything worthy
of note going on. Do you know what is worthy of note? Is there anything that
strikes you? Nothing strikes you'' (1997, page 50).
In this paper I am concerned with Perec's task, the everyday life of cities. However,
following Perec's comments, my main concern is to become aware of the unseen. The
questions that concern me are of the very close, the familiar, and the habitual. These
distracted things, I wish to claim, form the unseen in the act of seeing, or as Gilles
Deleuze put it, ``The unthought [that] is ... not external to thought but lies at its very
heart'' (1988, page 97). Nietzsche recognised that our thinking is directed towards that
which is furthest away, towards `eternals' and `essentials', while the `closest things', in all
their complexity, are forgotten. In consequence he commented that ``Every question of
politics, of the social order, of education has been falsified to the very bottom'' (1977,
page 270). Perhaps not every question, yet in this paper I argue that before and within
our consideration of representations, of significant things, there are other processes
operating through our distracted, tactile `knowing' (Benjamin, 1992; Taussig, 1992). In
section 2, via Raymond Williams's concept of a `structure of feeling', I explain why these
processes have been excluded in favour of contemplative `eternals' within social analysis.
I claim that the unthought in thought revolves around embodiment. Our embodi-
ment is implicated in everything we see or say. How is it that we could observe or
inhabit a street and not notice anything Michel Serres asks why the background noise
of our being is hidden from us, as the noise of the everyday must surely be tremendous?
Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities
of the everyday
Paul Harrison
School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol BS8 1SS,
England; e-mail: Paul.Harrison@bris.ac.uk
Received 9 June 1998; in revised form 15 January 1999
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2000, volume 18, pages 497 ^ 517
Abstract. Recently social analysis has turned its attention to `the body'. In this paper the author
considers the implications of such a turn for social analysis itself. The main discussion of the paper
concerns the indeterminate or `elusory' nature of embodiment and its productive relation to `sense
making' in everyday life and contemplative thought. The author examines how these aspects of
embodiment have been marginalised within social analysis and the effects of this marginalisation in
understandings of subjectification. Describing the processes of subjectification in terms of `habit' and
`style', the author suggests that the disclosive and performative in the everyday have been ignored in
favour of a search for the foundations of the everyday and the subject. An argument is put forward for
the groundlessness of being in terms of its potential to be otherwise. The above discussions are
described in terms of the ability of collectives to make sense from the fleeting and ephemeral feelings
and experiences of everyday on-going comportment. Finally it is suggested that through a considera-
tion of the performative, collective, and material nature of embodiment contemplations of everyday
life should be understood in terms of enaction and immanence.
DOI:10.1068/d195t
He answers, ``We have eyes in order not to see ourselves, ears in order not to hear
ourselves. The observer observes nothing, or almost nothing'' (1982, page 77). As
Maurice Merleau-Ponty put it, ``our body is not a space like things; it inhabits space
or haunts space'' (quoted in Thrift, 1996, page 13). Contained within Perec's problem is
its obverse, which the cognitive scientist Francisco Varela states: ``How are we to
understand the very moment of being there, when something concrete and specific
appears?'' (1992, page 325). Varela is asking how does something show up as significant,
how out of this complexity is sense made? In section 3 of the paper I deal with these
issues, considering the production of the consistency of embodiment and the sensible
through the practice of habits and inhabitation. Or, how we always enact and enframe
the world in order to see and say something, to move on, and for doubt to end.
Throughout these sections there is an aim to valorise the `sensate'; that which is
felt, experienced, and sensed. This valorisation is based upon the claim that ``on the
path which leads to that which is being thought, all begins with sensibility'' (Deleuze,
1994a, page 144). In the final section of the paper, section 4, a description is given of
the potential of such sensibility to be otherwise. How, through the disturbance of
habits, sensation becomes the basis of disclosing new worlds, forcing us to think. The
aim is avoid a phenomenological account and present an argument concerned with the
collective and nonpersonal nature of sense and feeling. This is done in order to show
that in the everyday enactment of the world there is always immanent potential for new
possibilities of life, which may open new spaces of action, ``articulating a second poetic
geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning''
(de Certeau, 1984, page 105). Considering the unseen in the everyday involves more
than just epistemological consideration, but an awareness of the performed manners of
everyday life as ontological; the manners of ``Linking acts and footsteps, opening
meanings and directions'' (de Certeau, 1984, page 105). An always emergent ontology
understood as `fluid' and whose spontaneity replaces the `eternal' and the `essential'
(Deleuze, 1993, page 56).
2 Experience and the everyday
``it is the reduction of the social to fixed forms that remains the basic error.''
Williams (1977, page 129)
2.1 Structures of feeling
In 1977 Raymond Williams put forward the concept of a `structure of feeling'. An
ambiguous concept, it describes an attempt to grasp that which is ``actually being lived,
and not only what is thought is being lived'' (page 131). It refers to those ``experiences
to which fixed forms do not speak at all, which indeed they do not recognise''
(page 129). A structure of feeling indicates the edge of semantic availability, a place
where experience encounters language. The aim is to valorise experience for itself;
experience as a mode of ``practical consciousness of a present kind'' (page 132, emphasis
added). Williams allies the terms `feeling' and `experience', where `experience' does not
indicate the past tense, but rather modes of experiencing. Williams is clear that such a
valorisation is a challenge to the traditional mode of operation of social analysis. To
bring to attention that which social analysis excludes, the unfixed, the unformed, and
the sensate, is to risk introducing
``All the known complexities, the experienced tensions, shifts and uncertainties, the
intricate forms of unevenness and confusion, [which] are against the terms of
reduction and soon, by extension social analysis itself'' (1977, pages 129 ^ 130).
In this section I wish to work through this challenge. My aim is not to provide a
defence of `social analysis', but rather to consider the implications of Williams's
concept. These implications, I believe, will not go away. As various writers have noted,
498 P Harrison
there is a demand for a change in the style of practice of `social analysis'.
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A demand
which is often phrased in the most basic terms of an appeal to the complexity of the
world and of life. Gordon comments that while such an appeal may seem banal, ``it is
nonetheless a profound theoretical statementperhaps the most important theoretical
statement of our time'' (1997, page 3). Important because it is precisely the realisation
that there are many things to which `social analysis' does not speak which counters the
traditional aims of mastery and the drive for purity (Game and Metcalfe, 1996; Latour,
1988; Law, 1994).
In this section I wish to highlight two aspects of social analysis that are prob-
lematised through a `structure of feeling' approach to the everyday. Through these
problematisations I aim to indicate the disruptive position occupied by the `sensate'.
By the `sensate' I do not quite mean the body, though this is obviously part of the
sensuous, nor am I referring to pure sense data coming from outside the self. Rather
I wish to consider the sensate as something much closer to a form of knowing and
being in everyday life. The sensate is what Michael Taussig is concerned with when he
asks, ``what sort of sense is constitutive of this everydayness?'' (1992, page 141). It is
something that being on the `edge of semantic availability' is at the edge of ourselves; it
is the relation to an outside and constitutes the surface on which we dwell in everyday
life (see Probyn, 1996; Taussig, 1992). Below I wish to show the failures which prevent
the acknowledgement of such things. As intimated above, this lack of acknowledge-
ment involves the joint process of reduction and classification. After regarding these
processes, I close this section by putting forward a first formulation for an ontology
that may allow us to acknowledge and move on from the failings identified.
2.2 The exclusion of experience
The first failing that Williams notes in the traditional consideration of experience
concerns the fact that ``In most description and social analysis, culture and society
are expressed in an habitual past tense'' (1977, page 128). This action is characterised
by the ``conversion of experience into finished products''. The consequence of this,
Williams argues, is the focusing on fixed forms which stand over lived experience.
The failure identified is the inability of knowledge in social analysis to do anything
other than hold onto, produce, and represent, the fixed and the dead; a failure to
apprehend the lived present an open-ended generative process; as practice. The everyday
experience of the lived disturbs categories of thought by way of contingencies, excess,
and indefinite answers. As Ludwig Wittgenstein notes:
``If we think of the world's future, we always mean the place it will get to if it keeps
going as we see it going now and it doesn't occur to us that it is not going in a
straight line but in a curve and that its direction is constantly changing'' (1988,
page 5e, original emphasis).
It is because of the uncertainty and provisionality that feeling introduces that it is
excluded. This is the move of reduction, the antipathy of order to an irreducible
multiplicity, it is signalled by closure (see Serres, 1985). To live in the world is to be
involved in the constant changing of direction (constant variation), not the determin-
ism and normativism of a straight line. As Trevor Kavanagh writes, drawing on Serres,
to live in everyday life is to live in the ``fluid, turbulent and blended'' (1986, page 938).
How does the mode of analysis that Williams wants to challenge manifest itself ?
Traditional analysis may be defined by the form of an operation and position taken
towards the lived based on the search for extrinsic sources of causality (that is, the
mind, an interpretation, a socialised disposition), to events (Lynch, 1993). Such a
(1)
See, for example, Agamben (1993), Game and Metcalfe (1996), Gibson (1996), Gordon (1997),
Probyn (1996), Rose (1997), Thrift (1996).
Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday 499
definition is in line with the place Williams (1977) accords to `fixed forms' of knowledge
and explanation. Analysis of this sort operates through the implementation of encod-
ing terms, [as described in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's (1983; 1988) account of
molar analysis], which attempts either to bring unity or identity to the multiple or to
theorise its lost unifying object. Greg Lynn describes this process as proceeding from a
predetermination of identity which allows for the formation of a ``proportionally
closed, static system based on the reduction of variables through the averaging of
differences'' (1997, page 162). The analysis thus proceeds through establishing fixed
points
(2)
which act to reduce the multiple to the same (identity) forcing a monological
finalisation of the subject (becoming the same). Such an operation may be described as
the reduction of meaning to a sign and plane (meaning-system) separate from the
immediate domain of an act (Jackson, 1983). This mode, as Taussig critically summar-
ises, is the reading of
``ideology into events and artifacts, cockfights and carnivals, advertisements and
films, private and public space, in which the surface phenomenon... stands as a
cipher for uncovering horizon after horizon of otherwise obscure systems of mean-
ings ... such a mode of analysis is simple-minded in its search for `codes' and
manipulative because it superimposes meaning on the `natives' ' point of view''
(1992, page 141).
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The second failure highlighted by Williams follows directly from the first; that
which cannot be reduced is deemed to fail the epistemological test of validity:
``And if the social ... [has been described as] ... the fixed and explicit the known
relationships, institutions, formations, positionsall that is present and moving,
all that escapes or seems to escape from the fixed and explicit and the known, is
grasped and defined as the personal: this, here, now, alive, active, `subjective' ''
(Williams, 1977, page 128).
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Williams's aim in the structure of feeling is to draw the alive and active out of the
`personal', out of its position(ing) within silence of the subject (page 131). In doing
so Williams questions the consequences of mastery and accurate representation in
`formal' social science:
(5)
a Foucauldian question of the power of knowledge, one which
strikes at the heart of `critical social science'. If we follow Williams for now, the
treatment of the social as the fixed and immobile leads to the rarefaction of abstractions
that can only react with abhorrence to the lived (as outlined above). This action implies a
relegation of certain forms of knowing (and being) to the secondary position of the
subjective; to matters of opinion, to dreams and fantasies, to unverifiable and fleeting
`feelings', and to the position of the `native' [see, respectively: Deleuze and Guattari
(1994), Cohen (1993), and Gordon (1997), Taussig (1992) and Probyn (1996)]. The
enclosing of the lived within the private and idiosyncratic allows for the functioning
of a purified critical judgment. The silence of the subject indicated by Williams is the
(2)
The term `fixed point' is drawn from Andrew Gibson's (1996) reading of Serres.
(3)
Not surprisingly, many of the critiques of this form of encoding analysis have come from
anthropology, see in particular Gil (1998), Ingold (1995), Jackson (1983), Stoller (1997), Taussig
(1992; 1993; 1997).
(4)
The terms `this', `here', `now' indicate the problem deictic terms present for any attempt to
sustain a formal, structural theory of meaning based on the separation between langue and
parole (see Bennington, 1988; Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; Gil, 1998; Glendinning, 1998; Perloff,
1996; Wittgenstein, 1953).
(5)
Such a path of questioning is now well known. In philosophy see Deleuze and Guattari
(1988; 1994), Foucault (1997).In feminism see Barradoti (1994), Grosz (1994; 1995), Haraway
(1991; 1997). In actor network theory, see Latour (1988; 1993), Law (1994). In geography, see
Bingham (1996), Rose (1997), Thrift (1996; 1997). In cultural studies, see Gordon (1997) and
Probyn (1996).
500 P Harrison
silence of the lived before the strategies of knowledge. Strategies which always place
those
``who practise them in the august position of always being right, of always being the
wisest, the most intelligent, and the strongest. These philosophies always and
eternally come down to strategies of war'' (Serres and Latour, 1995, page 134).
To pay attention to the texture and the skin of the everyday is to valorise that which
is perceived as mirage. Yet to maintain calling sensibility and feeling mirages is
to maintain a duality between realism and antirealism, between object(ive) and sub-
ject(ive), thus allowing for the recuperative operation of thesis and antithesis. Neither
side of the partition is good enough for the challenge that an attention to experience
requires. Rather, and this brings me to the next part of our consideration of a structure
of feeling, to consider experience demands that we acknowledge what Nigel Thrift
(1996) has called an `almost-not quite' ontology; an unfinished or processual ontology.
In providing an `almost-not quite' ontology of experience the aim is to give a positive
rearticulation of experience, moving it from that which is excluded to that which is
emergent.
2.3 The emergent
``human nature continually passes into existence, and it is precisely this incessant
emergence that constitutes its expressivity.''
Agamben (1993, page 20)
In this section I wish to suggest that we would do best to consider experience and feeling
as emergent. Through the term `emergence' I aim to show some of the elusory nature of
experience: it is a termwhich allows for the expression of contingency and fluidity. As will
become apparent such a term is necessary if we are to avoid the failings outlined above
and proceed in an antireductionist analysis of the everyday. These qualities of emergence
may be found in consideration of Giorgio Agamben's (1993) ontology of the `whatever'.
`Whatever' is Michael Hardt's somewhat awkward translation of the term quodlibet.
Hardt describes it as referring to ``that which is neither particular nor general, neither
individual nor generic'' (quoted in Agamben, 1993, page 107). Indeed, the whatever is
prior to all levels of classification: ``[the] common and proper, genus and individual
are only two slopes dropping down from either side of the watershed of whatever''
(Agamben, 1993, page 20). The whatever is placed against theorisations of being
founded on the structural or hierarchical division of being into intrinsic or extrinsic
essences. Such analysis of being, Agamben argues, both presupposes itself and believes
it can possess itself. Rather he writes,
``My qualities and my being-thus are not qualifications of a substance (of a subject)
that remain behind them and that I would truly be. I am never this or that, but
always such, thus ... . Not possession but limit, not presupposition but exposure''
(1993, page 97, original emphasis).
Agamben foregrounds the emergent and never fully determined nature of being
(becoming): ``a being that refers not to an ontological ordering of essences but to the
very conjuncture that brings forth its manners'' (Probyn, 1996, page 22). Agamben is
putting forward a performative understanding of being. Deleuze explains this in terms
of the relation between stuttering and language:
``the performative ... is what happens when stuttering no longer affects preexisting
words, but, rather, itself ushers in the words that it affects; in this case, the words do
not exist independently of the stutter, which selects and links them together ... we are
faced here with an affective and intensive language (langage) and not with an
affection of the speaker'' (Deleuze, 1994b, page 23, original emphasis).
Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday 501
Deleuze's concern to show that an affective language is not an affection is an attempt
to demonstrate that actions are not reflections of underlying structures (of the world or
the individual) but enactments of a world and an individual. I want to draw two points
from Agamben's consideration of being (becoming).
First, an understanding of emergence demands a new `spacing of knowledge', away
from depths and the heights and towards surfaces (Deleuze, 1990a). To explain: emer-
gence, or exposure, are not real predicates (being this or that), but on-going process,
processes which continuously render or coordinate a `sensible' surface (Probyn, 1996).
The surface becomes the focus as we stop digging for the `solid gold of things'
(Foucault, 1970) or distancing ourselves in the name of critical purity. The whatever
here is not indifferent to being (becoming), but rather being such that it always matters
(Agamben, 1993, page 1): the whatever surface(s) of the everyday, the `this, here, now,
alive, and active' of ongoing emergent existence such that it always counts. Here I mean
all the `minor circumstances' of everyday life, culinary practices, dress styles, the gait of
bodies, the things on my desk, the wear on the carpet (see Probyn, 1996, page 30;
Serres, 1985). It is from the active, productive, and continual weaving of the multiplicity
of bits and pieces that we emerge: out of the ``shapes and contours of our bodies, the
recurrent verbal and behavioural patterns ... the recurrent diagrams of our emotions,
attitudes and posturings'' (Lingis, 1994, page 155).
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The `I', the bounded subject,
stands after these compositions as a mythical unity.
Second and following from this, emergence is always at its limit, which is to say
that experience and feeling are always at their limit. In `being-thus' as opposed to being
`this' or `that', feeling and experience are to be understood as a relation with an outside
(Agamben, 1993, pages 63 ^ 69). Or, as John Shotter puts it, feeling and experience are
`boundary phenomena' (1993). Shotter asks
``why shouldn't [an] expression of a thought or intentionthe saying of sentence or
the doing of a deed, for exampleoriginate in a person's vague and unordered
feelings or sense of the context they are in?'' (Shotter, 1993, page 108).
Feeling and sensibility are the rendering of the emergent surface, the sense we have of a
`good' ordering, or the disturbance we feel when something is `out of place'; the sense of
``fleeting, particular, momentary influences'' (Shotter, 1995, page 2) out of which con-
scious questions arise [see also Bateson (1958) on `ethos']. Sensibility and feeling are in
touch with an outside because they are constantly attaching, weaving, and disconnect-
ing; constantly mutating and creating. This is the ``anonymous, pre-personal life of our
bodies [which] remains invisible to us'' (Shotter, 1995, page 2, emphasis added), the
constantly changing background which we fail to notice.
To sum up, the `sensate' is the surface and limit of everyday life. It is the
in-between of the `vague and unordered feelings or sense of context'; the skin, texture,
and ethos of everyday life. The sensate governs the continual movement from the
multiple to the singular, from the whatever to the singular. This summary allows a
first formulation of the unthought in thought, one in which the movements of
thought emerge ``only in the event of a problematisation when thought comes to
reflect upon and offer responses to tensions, difficulties and problems in a gathering
of practices'' (Schwartz, 1998, page 19). The sensate is the surface and limit which
may tense, or go unnoticed. It is important to note that as this emergence is on-going
it can always happen otherwise: potential inheres to the sensateI will return to this
issue below. In the next two sections I wish to explore and develop this formulation.
The aim is to provide a rearticulation of experience in terms of the on-going
performance of everyday life.
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I will return to the interplay between embodiment and materiality in section 4 below.
502 P Harrison
3 The end of doubt
`` `Have I reasons?' the answer is: my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall
act, without reasons.''
Wittgenstein (1953, number 211)
3.1 Introduction: lost wallet
Imagine you are walking down the road with nothing much on your mind, perhaps it
is the end of the day, ``You are in a relaxed mood, in what we may call the `readiness' of
the walker who is simply taking a stroll'' (Varela, 1992, page 325). You put your hand in
your pocket and realise that your wallet is missing.
``Breakdown: You stop, your mind-set is unclear, your emotional tonality shifts.
Before you know it, a new world emerges: you see clearly that you left your wallet
in the store... your readiness-for-action is now to go quickly back to the store''
(pages 325 ^ 328).
Varela is at pains to point out that something important has happened here, and has
happened `before you know it'. There has been some form of interruption. Here is the
sequence: relaxed readiness, a breakdown, a gap opens up, and then an emergent order
takes place. There has been a move from the singular to the multiple, from the actual
to potential and then back again. Freezing the sequence at the moment in which we
have an `un-clear mind set', at the point where our `emotional tonality' is shifting, it
is possible to say that we are at an interval: in-between stimulus and response. What is
going to happen has yet to be determined and, further, the manner in which this
moving on will occur ``is neither externally decided nor simply [internally] planned''
(page 329). The interval is thus charged with potential, it is a ``swarming of possible and
emergent modes of existence'' (Goodchild, 1996, page 60; see also Massumi, 1996),
from which an emergent order, a consistency (of a sort) will occur. In this section
I wish to suggest that it is habit which surrounds such encounters and resolutions, and
it is habit which is interrupted in intervals; from the embodiment of habit a consistency
is given to the self which allows for the end of doubt: embodiment as configured and
configuring. This section forms the basis for the discussion in section 4 on the nature of
embodiment that allows moving-on through intervals: embodiment as reconfiguring. In
providing such accounts we will be in a position to understand Varela's claim that there
is no simple determination in an event, thus fulfilling Williams's requirements of an
analysis of experience. Further, such a rearticulation will allow us to understand the
feelings and gestures of the everyday as central to any understanding of power relations
and their potential to be otherwise, a move which allows us to understand the type of
change Taussig is indicating when he writes that
``[it is] only at the depths of habit [that] radical change is effected, where the uncon-
scious strata of culture are built into social routines as bodily dispositions'' (1993,
page 25).
This rearticulation has a number of phases. I start with embodiment as action, as it
is in the acknowledgement of the continual motion of the body that we may locate the
configured and configuring. Following on, the consistency of habit considers the solid-
ifying of such movement into habits of enframing action and perception which allow
for doubt to end. In habitat: situating habit the discussion turns to the situated and
collective nature of embodiment and subjectification via a consideration of territory
and a form of life. The aim of these sections is to show how embodiment is determinate
in the contemplation of `this' or `that' while embodiment itself remains `such' and `thus'.
3.2 Embodiment as action
The body is always in motion, always in action, ``The body... does not tend to a state
of rest; it maintains levels of tension available for efficacious operation'' (Lingis
quoted in Thrift, 1996, page 13). The fact that the body is always in action should
Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday 503
act as a check upon too much determination in any consideration of its nature. It is a
check, however, that has gone relatively unnoticed. Following Williams's concern for
moving beyond `fixed forms' of knowledge and Agamben's for a performative under-
standing rather than presupposition, it is possible to say that much theorisation of
the body proceeds by considering it as `this' or `that' and not `such' and `thus'.
Conceptualisations of the body fall into this trap when the body is taken purely as
an object of inscription, as a passive and secondary phenomenon. The incorporation
of the body into social theory has generally proceeded by interpreting
``embodied experience in terms of cognitive and linguistic models of meaning... . In
this view the human body is simply an object of understanding... a kind of vehicle
for the expression of a reified social rationality'' (Jackson, 1983, pages 328 ^ 329).
That the body is inscribed is without doubt, yet to stop at this point is a serious error,
as Ian Burkitt comments:
``history is not written into us only as text. It develops in bodily organisms with their
own rhythms and capacities, emerging first as disciplines but eventually as disposi-
tions for practicesthe very things which enable us to act '' (1994, page 23, emphasis
added).
When the body is considered as solely a site of social struggle and governance it
remains something which stands in for and emanates from society; as something to
be interpreted. Via the linked processes of reification and purification the configuring
roles of the body have been excluded (Radley, 1996). In ignoring these aspects of
feeling, experience, and action, there has been a continual valorisation of the conscious
mind over embodiment. There is a failure to acknowledge embodiment in its actions as
a generative and expressive medium. As Elizabeth Grosz comments, ``The body is not
an object. It is the condition and context through which I am able to have a relation to
objects'' (1994, page 86). To articulate the configuring abilities of the body involves
asking a certain set of questions. Rather than asking `what a body means' or `what a
body is', rather than asking `what a body stands for', the questions become `what can
a body do?' A shift from aetiology to ethology (Deleuze, 1990b; 1992; Deleuze and
Guattari, 1988). A shift from considering the body as cadaver to regarding it in and
through performative embodiment.
Deleuze and Guattari articulate the configuring aspects of the embodiment
through their depiction of the body without organs. Brian Massumi describes:
``Think of the body without organs as the body outside of any determinate state,
poised for any action in its repertory; this is the body from the point of view of its
potential, its virtuality'' (1992, page 70).
The body without organs is without organs because a ``body (corps) is not reducible to
an organism'' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, page 366, original emphasis). The body
without organs is populated by free sensations, nonhuman intensities; it is ``what
remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy,
and significances and subjectifications as a whole'' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988,
page 151). The body without organs is pre-subjectification. The understanding that
Deleuze and Guattari offer is one which concerns the potential of the body to act in
terms of these nonhuman or prehuman sensations: ``[the body without organs] is not at
all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices'' (pages 149 ^ 150). Here we
find an explicit attempt to replace the treatment of the body as form with a kinetic
understanding: the body understood through the potential combinations it can enter
into and the affects it can experience and produce in relation to these sensations. In
order to grasp Deleuze and Guattari's argument it is important to understand that
``You can never reach the body without organs ... you are forever attaining it, it is a
limit'' (page 150). As Ian Buchanan (1997) puts it, the body without organs is what
504 P Harrison
the body could be able to do and feel; it is that with which embodiment grapples.
Before we are able to understand the full role and implications of the body without
organs (in section 4), we have to understand Deleuze and Guattari's theorisation of
the organism.
3.3 The consistency of habit
``Were it not for the continued operation of all habits in every act, no such thing as
character could exist.''
John Dewey (1922, page 38)
According to Deleuze and Guattari (1988) the organism emerges through the in-folding
of memory into the body; the building up of habits. We may think of this process as the
laying down of the strata of the body. Starting with disorder, habit serialises, integrat-
ing, separating, and joining together; configuring, to give a consistency and render a
surface. Paraphrasing Constantin Boundas (1991), the organism is a task which must be
fulfilled and habit is that which responds to this task. Without habit the organism does
not exist, without the repetition given in the contraction of habits there is no articula-
tion; no organisation and no subjectification. Thus the organism
``is a stratum on the BwO [body without organs] ... a phenomenon of accumulation,
coagulation, and sedimentation that in order to extract useful labour from the
BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, dominant and hierarchized organizations''
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, page 159).
As noted by Burkitt above, this in-folding or contraction of habits is not inscriptive in
form, but rather is concerned with the rhythms, attitudes, or manners of embodiment.
Importantly, as Burkitt also noted, it is in the in-folding of habits which provides us
with `the very things which enable us to act'. Habits, the strata of the body are
necessary; they form an abode for the flesh (Cache, 1995; Deleuze and Guattari,
1994). This abode is made up of the `sets of practices' of habit which give definition
to the subject, which allow us to place a fossil like `I' in front of our continual variation
(Lingis, 1994, page 155). Habits are an enframing which protect the flesh from the
virtual and filter out the `background noise'; a finite apparatus of capture in the body
without organs. It is this sense that Deleuze and Guattari write
``Flesh is not sensation... the flesh is too tender. The second element is not so much
bone or skeletal structure as house or framework. The body blossoms in the house''
(1994, pages 178 ^ 179).
And it is for these reasons that Deleuze and Guattari warn against rapid destratifica-
tion of the organism:
``Staying stratifiedorganised, signified, subjectedis not the worst thing that can
happen; the worst thing that can happen is to throw the strata into demented
suicidal collapse'' (1988, page 161).
Any attempt to reorder the organs rapidly can lead to the `depopulation' of the body
without organs, emptying it of all articulation; the tearing down of the abode of the
body which leaves it fully open to the (nonhuman or prehuman) cosmos.
At this point I wish to draw an example of the work of the consistency of habit
from Alexander Trocchi's autobiography. In the passage quoted below Trocchi
describes his father, his daily routines, and their fragility.
``Sunday. My father would awake before the milk and the morning papers were
delivered. ... At nine he shaved. Not before. The number of such necessary enter-
prises was very meagre. He had to spread them thinly over his day, as he spread the
margarine thinly over his bread, to prevent the collapse of his world. The fort wall
was a frail one between my father and his freedom. He shored it up daily by a
complex ordinance. He was chosen for by an old selector system of tested rites. He
Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday 505
gargled, watching his eyes in the mirror. He polished his shoes. He prepared his
breakfast. He shaved. After that he staved of chaos until he purchased the morning
paper. Births, marriages, and deaths. He moved up and down the columns at the
edge of himself. But with the years he achieved skill'' (1992, pages 86 ^ 87).
Much may be said about this passage; what Trocchi means by his father's `freedom',
the negotiation of old age, his father's loneliness. However, my concern here is to
illustrate the importance of habits for the maintenance and creation of something we
call a `self'.
The strata of the body form the enunciative `frame' of the organism: they define
what it is possible to see and to say (Deleuze, 1988). The contraction of habits gradually
reduces the potential, or virtuality, of the body to do things otherwise. In the context of
Varela's example we may say that when the circuit between stimulus and response
becomes habitual the disorder of the interval is, to a certain extent, excluded. (Or, in
the case of Trocchi's father, skillfully managed.) We should understand, therefore, that
habit is not experience, habit is not the result of a simple empiricism; it is prior to
experience (Deleuze, 1991). As the organisation of the organism habits provides the
``a priori conditions under which all ideas are formulated and behaviour displayed''
(Deleuze, 1988, page 60, original emphasis); that which makes `behaviour', `mentality',
and `sets of ideas' possible (pages 48 ^ 49). Importantly, these a priori are not Kant's
`transcendental unity of apperception'. Enframing does not add up to a totality but an
assemblage or a composition of/on the body without organs. Wittgenstein explains,
(with different metaphors):
``I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them
subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the
sense that anything holds fast, but in the movement around it determines its
immobility'' (1969, number 152, original emphasis).
In-folding is an `` `adding to' directed not at an `adding up' to some totality'' (Probyn,
1996, page 24). There are no solid foundations of embodiment, embodiment does not
`stand for' any social rationality. Rather, foundations are understood to be carried by
and outcomes of acts of folding and enframing.
The account given of the architectonic of subjectification by Wittgenstein, Deleuze,
and Guattari moves away from traditional understandings of essence and fixity, in
which solid and `discoverable' foundations of thought `in here' or the world `out there'
are understood, stand over the fluid surface of the everyday. As Wittgenstein writes ``At
the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded'' (1969, number 248).
We should not underestimate how much of our day-to-day lives such unfounded sets
of practices occupy; these are practices which make up our distracted attention of
(and to) the everyday (Benjamin, 1992; Taussig, 1992) in which doubt ends. We can
begin to understand how important these unfounded `beliefs' are for consistency of
subjectification through an example provided by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores,
and Hubert Dreyfus:
``If we did not have any practices for working at desks or eating at tables, we would
not encounter desks, chairs and tables as meaningful. We would encounter them as
mere artifacts, requiring explanation'' (1997, pages 17 ^ 18).
Any apparent circularity in Spinosa et al's account between subject and object,
between world and self, arises from the view of either the object(ive) or subject(ive)
being prior to practice or enactment. Drawing on Martin Heidegger's notion of
worldliness and discussion of intentionality, Spinosa et al attempt to avoid either a
subjective or objective transcendence. Habit and sense are understood not as the
possession of the subject, as a Husserlian phenomenology would have it, nor are
they taken to exist objectively, as they are that by which the objective world shows up.
506 P Harrison
Rather, how things show up to us is understood as inseparable from our (disclosive)
actions towards them. Dissatisfaction with this way understanding arises from believ-
ing that because we are certain of things (for example, that we have no doubt of the
desk in front of us), there must be permanent, explicable, and exhaustible reasons for
our certainty. The search for the foundations of certainty in the world, the fact that
we do not doubt all appearances, traditionally breaks down into a search for its basis
either in the world (realism) or in the mind (idealism). Hence we tend towards either
a search for objectivity in attempting to match up our mental representations with
reality or accepting social constructivism's idealisation of language.
Neither of these accounts takes notice of the actions of our bodies towards objects,
towards the desk. Instead, we remain in the fruitless task of attempting to join a
disjointed understandings, of self and world, of agency and structure. Wittgenstein
gently mocks the search for essences and eternals, for grounds of belief, in philosophy:
``I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he [sic] says again and again `I know
that's a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this,
and I tell him: `This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy' '' (1969,
number 467).
In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein offers an alternative: `` `Have I reasons [for a
belief, for an action]?' the answer is: my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act,
without reasons'' (1953, number 211). Wittgenstein is not saying that we necessarily
act without reasons, but that our reasons for action are never absolute, never `well-
founded'. We can never discover either objectively or subjectively the full basis for our
belief in the desk (or the tree) as our belief has no representational content by which it
may be validated. Rather, our belief is in our acts; in the practices of using desks and
comprehending trees. We may say that doubt ends in the organisation of the organism;
or; doubt ends in our active embodiment, not in the reflexive or abstract rationalisation of
that embodiment. It is in this manner that belief which is not founded acts and in acting
can, quite literally, make sense:
``Cognitive structures emerge from recurrent patterns of perceptually guided
action... cognition consists not of representations but of embodied action. Correla-
tively, the world as we know it is not pregiven; it is, rather, enacted through our
history of structural coupling'' (Varela, 1992, page 336, original emphasis).
3.4 Habit: situating habit
What had Wittgenstein's philosopher failed to take into account when looking at the
tree? He (sic) had forgotten his active embodiment in the world. In order to understand
the work of embodiment it is necessary to stall both objective and subjective tran-
scendence and to consider both subject and object as provisional, relational, and
enacted outcomes. However such a consideration is difficult since practice, from (at
least) Rene Descartes onwards, has been understood as representational (in that action
may be explained in terms of mental beliefs and desires). The work of Heidegger offers
an alternative account.
Heidegger does not deny intentionality in human activity, but claims it is located in
the way humans relate to things in their mode of comportment. Intentionality is not
therefore attributed to consciousness, but to the emergence of sense:
``In all comportment toward beingswhether it is specifically cognitive, which is most
frequently called theoretical, or whether it is practical-technical an understanding
of being is already involved'' (Heidegger; quoted in Dreyfus, 1991, page 54).
Tim Ingold (1995), characterises the difference that Heidegger is trying to make as that
between the building perspective of representational analysis and the nonrepresenta-
tional account of a dwelling perspective (see Heidegger, 1993).
Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday 507
The starting point for the building perspective, Ingold writes, is
``an imagined separation between the perceiver and the world, such that the perceiver
has to reconstruct the world, in the mind, prior to any meaningful engagement with
it. Here then is the essence of the building perspective: that worlds are made before they
are lived in'' (1995, page 66, emphasis added).
The building perspective operates a Cartesian divide between mind and body, between
thought and action, in which mind and thought come first. This divide is the result of
the attempt to locate the basis for certainty, to catch a sidelong glance at the `real'. The
actor is thus conceptualised in immaterial thought which has the status of an occult
spirit in, but not of, the world (Farnell, 1994). Cognition without extension. To counter
this Ingold puts forward the dwelling perspective, in which
``people do not import their ideas, plans or mutual representations into the world,
since that very world, to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty, is the homeland of
their thoughts. Only because they dwell therein can they think the thoughts they
do'' (1995, page 76).
Taking the example of constructing a house, as Ingold does, the building perspective
suggests that the house is fully formed in the mind of the builder before any action is
made. However, the dwelling perspective, while not denying the importance of abstract
contemplation, suggests that such contemplation presupposes the builder knows what a
house is, that the builder has `dwelled therein'. Ingold continues
``Human children, like the young of many other species, grow up in environments
furnished by the work of previous generations, and as they do so they literally come
to carry the forms of their dwelling in their bodiesin specific skills, sensibilities and
dispositions'' (page 77, emphasis added).
These specific skills, sensibilities, and dispositions, sedimented into the body, are
incorporated (implicated) contexts: ``the entire cerebral ^ nervous system as an interior
milieu in contact with its own exterior'' (Canning, 1994, page 84).
Embodiment revolves around an ever-ongoing combination of heterogeneous
elements; a continual collective individuation of objects, things, contexts and other
bodies. The unity of embodiment is a fusional multiplicity; a (whatever) composite,
both less and more than One (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983; 1988; Irigaray, 1985). Habits
as skills, sensibilities, and dispositions form series of motifs and counterpoints, enfram-
ing an inside of the abode (subjectification). Each habitual series of gestures is an
expression of counterpoints of dwelling; an expression of a mode of being-in-the-world,
or a form of life.
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Sense is the minimum condition for the unproblematic continuation of a form of
life within which doubt may end. Enframing, based in the habitual patterns of everyday
bodily practice, gives rise to the potential conditions of truth and the end of doubt. Deleuze
explains:
``Signification does not establish the truth without also establishing the possibility
of error. For this reason, the condition of truth is not opposed to the false, but to the
absurd: that which is without signification or that which may be neither true nor false''
(1990a, page 15).
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(7)
On territory and motif, counterpoint and habitat see Deleuze and Guattari (1988, chapter 11),
on boundary setting in language games and forms of life see Genova (1995), Lynch (1993),
Malcolm (1995), Perloff (1996), Wittgenstein (1953) and below.
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However, as Deleuze (1990a, page 71) points out, sense does not exist in exclusive opposition
to nonsense (unlike the true and the false). I will return to this issue below.
508 P Harrison
Or, as Wittgenstein famously wrote:
`` `So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true or false?' it is what
human beings say that is true or false; and they agree in the language they use. That
is not agreement in opinion but in a form of life'' (1953, number 241, original
emphasis).
The sensible describes `quiet agreement' (Malcolm, 1995) upon which the end of doubt
appears to rest. Only appears to rest, as this background is not a metastructure; it is
not before or after its realisation (as in the building perspective), but ongoing and
performative. It is in this manner that sense is the unsayable in the sayable, in that
sense is inferred indirectly and ``does not exist outside its expression'' (Deleuze, 1990a,
page 21). Or, as Wittgenstein puts it; ``the unutterable will beunutterablycontained
in what has been uttered'' (quoted in Genova, 1995, page 107, original emphasis).
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The
organisation of the organism remains the inherent, invisible and contingent `grounding'
of any statement or visibility. It is possible to see how such provisional, or situated,
grounding may be mistaken for a primary or transcendental structure. However the
manner of `grounding' is a result of the manner of the organisation of the organism.
Rather than offering a fixed point or determination such `grounding' allows for a form
of life to continue ``so long as one thinks it can't be otherwise ... . This presumably
means: so long as such-and-such is not brought into question at all '' (Wittgenstein,
quoted in Genova, 1995, page 160, original emphasis).
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3.5 Summary
Returning to Varela's example of a minor breakdown in ongoing coping in the case of
the lost wallet, we are now in a position to answer some of the questions posed. What
is interrupted? A series of habitual gestures that constitutes the thresholds of sub-
jectification (the enframing of the abode of the body). We have seen how habits
solidify embodiment and thus the flux of everyday life, allowing for doubt to end in
a shared form of life. We have not yet considered how this sense is made out of the
multiplicity and between forms of life. The only hint we have of emergence are the
`shifts in emotional tonality', the `vague and unordered feelings of context' that is
the movement of perception into imperceptables: the reconfiguration which takes
place as an order emerges which enframes and discloses a world. This move, I wish
to suggest, is creative. It could always happen otherwise. The interval is `swarming
with possible and emergent modes of existence'. This is the point of alteration
identified by Williams in his concern for the structure of feeling and by Taussig in
change in habit; the potential to make sense and so create forms of life rather than
adopt them. Contra Heidegger, and as we saw in the discussion above in the primacy
of the `ungrounded', there is no one proper dwelling but rather a proliferation
(Latour, 1993; Thrift, 1998), and it is precisely in this proliferation that pragmatic
change resides:
``can we put the ungrounded first, analyzing the relations between grounds and
forms, grounds and identities, in terms of the potential for free ungrounded move-
ment that is always virtual in them?'' (Rajchman, 1998, page 89).
This is the concern of the final section; the creativity of moving-on.
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And it is in this sense that Wittgenstein wrote ``My work consists of two parts: the one present
here plus all that I have not written. And it is this second part that is the important one'' (quoted
in Genova, 1995, page 108, original emphasis).
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The bringing into question of that which cannot be questioned within a given form of life
starts the process of having to make sense, to construct or move to another form of life, this will
be explored in section 4.
Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday 509
4 Breaking habit
``Everything is founded in the possible, all representations originate in the belle
noiseuse, all states come from chaos. The most common forgetting is that of the
possible.''
Serres (1985, page 24, original emphasis)
We do not make our habits, they are never really `ours'. In the continual motion of
bodies habits provide recognisable, regular points; determinations and trajectories:
territorialisations. Habits give us indications of humanity; they begin to impute a
depth, an identity, an invariance. It is possible to think there was something there to
begin with, rather than something which has been enacted. Enframing and in-folding
can almost close the surface in on itself and ``Here sneaks in the idea of understanding
as a special mental process'' (Wittgenstein, 1967, number 445). We get an impression of
a subject rather than processes of subjectification; as Trocchi noted of his father, ``He
was chosen for by an old selector system of tested rites'' (1992, page 86, emphasis
added); as Dewey (1922) noted, it is only in the functioning of habits that we get
determinable character. The serialisation of habits can lead us to posit a transcendental
`common sense' and thus the normative and naturalising mistakes of phenomenology
(see Deleuze, 1994a; Lingis, 1994). Linked to this mistake, as noted above, is the dismissal
of feelings and affections as `subjective', again imputing a subject which`feels' rather than
feeling as configuring of subjectification. In this light phenomenology is transformed
``into an ontology of intensive forces, extended forms, and of the `folding' or `inter-
nalisations' of these forces and forms ... from phenomenology to nomadic sensation''
(Boundas, 1991, page 5).
We should recall that it is the body without organs which is folded, contracted, and
enframed:
``the BwO is that glacial reality where the allusions, sedimentations, coagulations,
foldings and recoilings that compose an organismand also a signification and a
subjectoccur'' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, page 159).
The body without organs is the destratified limit of nonorganic life, of vitality without
determination; the machinic plane of immanence (de Landa, 1992; 1997; Guattari,
1992; Smith, 1997). What is in-folded, what constitutes the inside of subjectification,
is this outside: its passing into expression. In such a light, creativity and imagination
can seem too-human traits. However, in this section I wish to suggest some areas
where we may find some of the creative potential of everyday life. In doing so I aim to
follow Michel de Certeau in suggesting that there is an ``immense remainder con-
stituted by the part of human experience that has not been tamed and symbolised in
language'' (1984, page 61). And in this remainder lies potential for things to be
otherwise.
4.1 Life in the aggregates
``Our true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, with-
out landmark or a point of reference.``
Foucault (quoted in Probyn, 1996, page 113)
If subjectification is on-going in-folding and enframing then it seems as though we
should be able to locate its history. Guattari (1993) gives an account of an experience in
Sa o Paulo which attempts precisely this. When looking down from a bridge over a
traffic interchange he experienced ``an intense impression, fleeting and undefinable
[which] brusquely seized me'' (page 140). On reflection Guattari came to realise that
this feeling was ``as if something from my early childhood was speaking to me from the
heart of this desolate landscape'' (page 141). He continues, ``There was, in fact, a
homolographic relation between a very old perception... and the present one''
510 P Harrison
(page 141). In the composition of light, distances, concrete, and movements, something
of his past waited for him. The encounter, Guattari claims, revealed a rift in subjecti-
fication: ``Providing a glimpse, in a quasi-pedagogical way, of the stratifications of the
self'' (page 143). However, in attempting to find a connection between then and now he
was unable to find a single thread, no single determination.
The self is distributed through the aggregates. Edifices call out, they are abstract
machines which mould our distracted attention: ``Thus we shall speak of partial sub-
jectifications: the city, the street, the building, the door, the hall each itself and in
composition a centre of subjectification'' (Guattari, 1993, page 146). Trocchi's father's
razor, mirror, and newspaper. Geology replaces genealogy. Walter Benjamin (1992)
proposes the distracted and habitual as our means of `understanding' the city. Distrac-
tion absorbs architecture into the body, and vice versa, via tactility (as in the description
of counterpoint and habitat above):
``To the question `How in our everyday lives do we know or perceive a building?'
Benjamin answers through usage, meaning, to some crucial extent, through touch''
(Taussig, 1992, page 144).
An embodied, geohistorically specific, sensuous knowing (enacting) of the everyday.
Benjamin is not studying an individual but modes of subjectification, a distracted
collective of habits and gestures. Benjamin picked out places where modes were being
problematised, most famously in the Parisian arcades. Benjamin took the arcades as a
threshold which, through the combinations of glass and steel, ambiguities in the
coordination of private and public, inside and outside, speeds and slownesses, prob-
lematised dwelling. Like Naples, the arcades were porous (Benjamin, 1985a), they
opened up the possibility for new forms of dwelling, new forms of socialisation, and
so new forms of life; the arcades ``opened for a moment the possibility of forms of
experience based upon a new relation to nature and new social relations'' (Caygill,
1998, page 133). These possibilities were founded on a new serialisation of the physis
(see Benjamin, 1985b; 1992): a disruption of habit. Benjamin's work was dedicated to
the loss of these possibilities and yet he found the arcades haunted by the foreclosed
potential of different dwellings, haunted by lines of flight.
Alternation in dwelling may be produced by potentials in the combinations of
materials,
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alterations in the texture of the weave: for example, the introduction of
the domestic electric lightbulb which contains the potential for an increase in literacy
(Schivelbusch, 1988), or, the installation of a computer in the home which can, to a
variable extent, redistribute roles in a household. Thus
``One should for all reasons avoid all talk of a return to the subject, because [the]
processes of subjectification vary enormously from one period to another and
operate through very disparate rules. What increases [subjectification's] variability
is that power's always taking over new processes and subordinating them to the
play of forces ... . Subjectification isn't anything to do with a `person': it's a specific
collective individuation relating to an event'' (Deleuze, 1995, pages 98 ^ 99, emphasis
added).
Life in the aggregates may appear determined but this is the view from the `building
perspective' which attempts to locate change in the world before it is lived in and
then overdetermines. Such a view estimates possibilities rather than potentials (see
Cache, 1995). To understand creative change then, we must look to immanent poten-
tial in process, to enactment in and of the world.
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See Deleuze and Guattari (1988, chapter 11) on `assemblage converters'.
Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday 511
4.2 At the interval
``We should consider the idea of a sensory, and more generally bodily imaginary.''
Cornelius Castoriadis (1997, page 331)
There is always something more than the collection of equipment and something more
than habit. In section 3 we saw how habit enframes our contemplation, providing the
space in which doubt may end. And yet habit, for all its repetition, does not open new
spaces of action:
``finding a situation familiar means simply having an appropriate set of dispositions
and having them respond on cue ... people do form habits and find situations
familiar, but there is another feature of familiarity that is different from, indeed
opposed to, this sort of habituation. One can find a situation familiar even when
one has never experienced its like before'' (Spinosa et al, 1997, page 19).
Spinosa et al suggest that it is style which allows movement across such divides, from
one context to the next. `Style' here has a technical definition, it refers not to `one
aspect among many' in human activity, it is ``not an aspect of things, people, or activity
but rather what constitutes them as what they are'' (page 19). Style is that which allows
for their reconfiguration.
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To habit's passivity, style is an active synthesis. To differ-
entiate style and habit more clearly we may think of the difference between habit and
improvisation. Habit would involve doing what we expected, habit gives technical
competence, whereas style operates on free variables in a given assemblage, drawing
out differences; it is a mode of improvisation which operates on (and in) immanent
potentials.
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This division of habit and style is not strict but relational; what is habitual
in one situation can become stylistic in another. It is important to note that, through this
contextual and relational definition, style is understood as nothing personal, retro-
spectively we may apply it to an individual but such individuation is a (purifying)
regulatory fiction (Massumi, 1997); a mistaken `heroisation' of styles.
As described in section 3 habits are sets of techniques for on-going coping of and
within given forms of life, in relation to this style operates by drawing out the potential
of such contexts. Style operates by liquefying (molecularising) some of the consistency of
habit. Habits set boundaries for forms of life and so ways of seeing and saying,
delineating a field in which certain moves are sensible: ``To say `This combination of
words makes no sense' excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the
domain of language'' (Wittgenstein, 1953, number 499). Yet, as we also saw in section 3,
the demarcation of borders is unsaid, (configured through embodiment), and never
complete (only sufficient). Thus between every move within a form of life the boundary
between sense and nonsense is ambiguous. At each stage a leap is made (see Glendin-
ning, 1998). Beneath all statements is the murmur of all other potential statements which
remain unsaid. A leap brings the potential of the occurrence of unexpected outcomes
(the necessity of chance). This `unknowing' is a sign that
``reality is a hollow image and that its structure is alveolar. Intervals always remain
and intercalated phenomena always slip into them, even if they finally break the
frames of probability apart'' (Cache, 1995, page 23).
Given the intervention of an event (a stuttered word, a loss of footing, a door slam-
ming, a misplaced wallet, a newspaper not delivered), random lines can be thrown out
from a form of life, a swerve occurs; `something has happened', `how did we get here?'
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Deleuze (1995) talks of the style of writers, sports players, and others, in which style is
understood as the production of `transversals', new lines and serialisations of action and thought
(see Massumi, 1996; 1997; Smith, 1996; 1997).
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On improvisation see Belgrad (1998), Johnstone (1979), Schieffelin (1998), Tufnell and Crickmay
(1993).
512 P Harrison
Style is the passage through such unfurlings, a collective individuation of the field of
potential which makes sense through a new combination (see Smith, 1996). A new
example is thus given which may alter the manners of `grounding'.
Style always refers to life, always to a `style of life', as it is always an embodied
doing. The term `style of life' should not mislead, it does not refer to a complete
survey of a life, but to movements in living. As Alan Radley (1995; 1996) points
out, styles of life are fragmentary, fleeting, and ephemeral. Deleuze explains: ``Some-
times it takes just one gesture of word ... a style of life [is] not anything personal, but
inventing a possibility of life'' (1995, page 100). To invent a possibility of life is to
make sense: to operate a de tournament within the conditions of sensation and so
synthesise a new difference (Smith, 1996). In making sense situations are transformed
and as such ``the possibility of another way of living'' (Radley, 1996, page 569) is
created.
4.3 Summary
``sense is never a principle or an origin... it is produced.``
Deleuze (1990a, page 72)
A `style of life' for Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault is about producing modes of
subjectification and expression, it is concerned with inventing possibilities of life. As
such it is an attempt to make, through embodiment, new forms of sense appropriate to
tasks in hand. This is the aim of Guattari's (1992) `ethico-aesthetic paradigm' and
Deleuze's (1997) `critical and clinical' programme and Michel Foucault's (1997) later
work on aesthetics. A style of life, in producing sense, is always collective; a form of
life always involves more than one, (becoming never happens alone). Producing sense
always involves the nonhuman, always involves composing a body without organs, not
as antihumanism, but as a realisation of the nonhuman that occupies the centre of
in-folding. Life is always about the combinations (doses) of aggregates: ``The human is
in the delegation itself, in the pass, in the sending, in the continuous exchange of forms''
(Latour, 1993, page 138). To make sense is to alter the habitual passage and manner of
such exchange, to introduce disturbances which operate on the potential immanent in
the relations of aggregates and embodiment.
Deleuze writes that the Spinoza's question of `What can a body do?' is ``prac-
tically a war cry'' (1990b, page 255). To expand the potential of sense is to disclose
new worlds, rather than constantly maintaining the passivity of habit or a transcen-
dental search for the essential and eternal. Radley comments that ``bodily gestures
become important when they are taken to be expressive of a style of life, not when
denoting a mood or response'' (1995, page 10), such expressions are nuclei of poten-
tial relations, they provide sensuous resources for seeing and saying in other ways
(see Thrift, 1997). Change at the depth of habit implies such alteration, and Benjamin's
feeling of haunting, of possible worlds lingering in the arcades, shows how quickly such
change becomes captured and habituated. Yet Benjamin indicates that alteration
always remains immanent and perhaps it is this which we should remember when
observing the everyday life of cities and in considering what is significant and what
is not:
``Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades and stairways.
In everything they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforeseen
constellations. The stamp of the definitive is thus avoided. No situation appears
intended forever, no figure asserts its `thus and not otherwise' '' (1985a, page 169).
Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday 513
5 Conclusions
This paper has attempted to show how ephemeral moments of feeling as sense then as
sense making are that which moves thought. How, out of the unthought, thought
emerges. Within certain forms of life we may unproblematically take things as `this'
or `that' via enframing and habit. However, embodiment always remain `thus' and
`such'; it is indeterminate, or `elusory' (Agamben, 1993; Radley, 1995; 1996). The elusory
nature of embodiment is not a sign of lack, of a missing centre, but rather indicates its
potential and its performative being (becoming). This is the ungrounded nature of
action and thought.
Feelings, experiences, and sense are never the `owned' by a person, rather they are
impersonal events and encounters. John Marks writes that ``One's own story is inter-
esting in that it has something to do with a life that `passes through' the individual''
(1998, page 6). The life which passes through us is indicative of the `geology' of the
collective, the aggregates in and through which we live, rather than the genealogy of the
Individual or the Subject. A structure of feeling provides the conceptual tool by which
we may understand what feelings, what senses, may pass or have passed, what feeling
and expression moves to sensibility, forms of life and thought. Williams stresses the
emergence of new structures of feelings; ``new relationships and kinds of relationships
are continually being created'' (1977, page 123). It is, I have argued, an alteration in
what can be sensed and a making of sense as the problematisation of thought which
gives the enactment and disclosing of such new worlds: ``the conditions of sensation are
at the same time the conditions for the production of the new'' (Smith, 1996, page 41,
original emphasis). This is what Deleuze (1990a, page 72) calls the `great politics'; the
making of sense. The potential to introduce swerves or de tournaments within habitu-
ally enacted worlds. Thus, everyday feelings, sensations, and modes of experiencing
must be considered against their `personalisation' and then dismissal. The aim is to
realise that they are continually productive of the social, of styles of life, and so of
subjectification in the webs of `quiet agreement'. Taussig (1992) comments that so far
social critics have `fumbled the constructivist pass', at the expense of the challenges of
poesis. Approvingly he quotes Nietzsche:
``How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and
this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so
called `reality'. We can destroy only as creators'' (quoted in Taussig, 1997, page ii).
Acknowledgements. Many thanks to Nigel Thrift, Charlotte Howse, JohnWylie, and J-DDewsbury
for their constructive criticism and forbearance in the development of this paper. I would also like to
thank my three anonymous referees for their thoughtful and useful comments.
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