Environment and Planning A 2003, volume 35, pages 1907 ^ 1932

DOI:10.1068/a3582

Witnessing space: `knowledge without contemplation'

John-David Dewsbury

School of Geographical Studies, University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol BS8 1SS, England;
e-mail: j.d.dewsbury@bris.ac.uk
Received 20 March 2002; in revised form 30 January 2003

Abstract. This paper is about the importance of witnessing and how such an act, or call, makes place
or our place in the world. Pushing forward the agenda of nonrepresentational theory, this is about
attending to differences those imperceptible, sometimes minor, and yet gathering, differences that
script the world in academically less familiar but in no less real ways. I am thinking here about the
folded mix of our emotions, desires, and intuitions within the aura of places, the communication of
things and spaces, and the spirit of events. Such folds leave traces of presence that map out a world
that we come to know without thinking. Throughout, I argue the political importance of our current
debates concerning a performative appreciation of society's unfolding. In the first part of the paper I
sketch out the academic territory that makes witnessing space potentially unfamiliar by problematizing the representational setup and the interpretation of empiricism that facilities knowledge
production. In the second part I present an overview of the operation of Gilles Deleuze's thinking
as a possible apprecenticeship in becoming able to perceive, and hence better able to express,
the folded mix of the witnessed and witnessing world. In the third part of the paper I investigate the
philosophical and ethical mechanics of the act of witnessing itself, translating the arguments found
here to question the laws regulating the act of representation. Throughout, as an exemplary witness to
that which I am trying to present, the paper is haunted by Olga Tokarczuk's novella The Hotel Capital.

``I would like to call an event the face to face with nothingness. This sounds like
death. Things are not so simple. There are many events whose occurrence doesn't
offer any matter to be confronted, many happenings inside of which nothingness
remains hidden and imperceptible, events without barricades. They come to us
concealed under the appearance of everyday occurrences. To become sensitive to
their quality as actual events, to become competent in listening to their sound
underneath silence or noise, to become open to `It happens that' rather than to
`What happens', requires at the very least a high degree of refinement in the
perception of small differences.''
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1991, page 18)
Introduction: high degrees of refinement in the perception of small differences
This paper is about attending to that part of the world full of occurrences that have
little tangible presence in that they are not immediately shared and therefore have to be
re-presenced to be communicated. These subsequent re-presentations are fraught with
difficulties most apparent in their seeming inadequacy; problematizing representation
is, however, the challenge, the solution, towards an engaging reinterpretation of the
world. The imperceptibles elided by representation include emotions, passions, and
desires, and immaterial matters of spirit, belief, and faithall forces that move beyond
our familiar, (because) denoted, world. These are not light matters for they forge the
weight of our meaningful relation with the world. This underplotted, underplotting
rhythm to our lives has had recent academic acknowledgers: in geography (Anderson
and Smith, 2001; Thrift, 2000); in sociology (Gordon, 1997); in political philosophy
(Bennett, 2001); and in performance studies, unsurprisingly the most sustained
(Phelan, 1993; 1997; 1999; 2000). What they all have in common is an attention to the

1908

J-D Dewsbury

ethical possibilities held in potential within our every act given that this is a world in
which the metaphysical referent for truth is now in doubt. The call is to stop separating
the world out into meaningful representations on the one hand and ephemeral sensations on the other, and to become attentive instead to truths folded into the fabric of
the world itself. This requires us to realize that we are only a part of the world, of the
making of place, for the world (materialities) believes in us as much as we (emotions)
believe in it. Likewise, the distinction between the academic and the everyday is
blurred. Academically, the task is the investigation of ``the policed spaces of silence
in and in between the disciplines'' (Clough, 2001, page 1). Touching upon the everyday,
this speaks to those events where we find ourselves called to witness that which is
otherwise imperceptible, and otherwise irrevocably lost, and which is perhaps the
most truly personal. In both cases this is about grasping that which mystifies and
surpasses meaningstraining, outpacing, and exceeding the ease of communication
of given meaning. Above all, it is a political task. It is about accepting the call to the
world's witness. Jean-Luc Godard made the distinction in his work that you can make
political films and you can film politically. My direction in this paper is to place at the
forefront the urgency of the second distinction seemingly not as relevant as dealing
with actual social problems, with actual political content. Filming politically becomes
thinking politically: how do you talk up what is important in the world; how do you
capture personal as well as collective involvement in the world; and how does our
mode and focus of attention witness the world into being in quite different, and hence
political, ways? This paper is, then, about setting up the problem we are engaging in
when we seek to promote alternative ways of accounting for the way the world is or
seems to be, which in particular account not necessarily for the sociality of space but
for other senses of commonality within space itself.
The stress of the paper, then, is in presenting a blueprint world that transgresses
the stage of representation, creating a space to think where there is no model for
action, emphasizing the world's unspoken demands in the present more than its
prescripted futures. Therefore, in the first part of the paper I sketch out the academic
territory that makes witnessing space potentially problematic by sighting the general
overdependence that social science has on the representational setup and the interpretation of empiricism to facilitate knowledge production. In part 2 I present an
overview of the operation of Gilles Deleuze's thinking as a possible apprenticeship in
becoming able to perceive, and hence better able to express, the underrepresented world
of emotional and intuitive bodies and the scripts they produce alongside the affects,
energies, and ghosted presences of things and spaces. This continues the debate on
empiricism, taking on first Deleuze's reconceptualization of the enterprise in one of
his underlying concepts, that of transcendental empiricism, and then second the style of
his philosophy in terms of his later concept of the fold. Here I want to emphasize
Deleuze's inquisitive concern for representation, always because he wanted ``to think
in terms other than those of representation'', always because his general concern was ``how
representation comes to be identified with knowledge'' (Hayden, 1998, page 5). Then,
third, I theorize the context of witnessing, showing why it plugs into a more creative
space for social explanation and, in the process, validates such an act. To exemplify and
experiment upon witnessing, this paper is haunted throughout by the testimony of a
novella, Olga Tokarczuk's The Hotel Capital (2000). From this, tackling the disregard for
what lies at the margins of sense, I want to stress that the call for testimony is as
important, or more important than, the testimony itself. Seeing this writing as an act
of witnessing, extractionsremnantswill be taken from the novella to space out, make
tangible, the way witnessing sees us move ethically beyond being `all too human' to being

Witnessing space

1909

open to the world as a whole. Through all of this, the movement of the paper is towards
that which was never before:
``To that which was never before, we cannot relate, just as we cannot relate to that
which has already been. The moment we relate to that which was never before, we
have transformed it into something recognizable, as if it had always already been.
The moment we relate to that which has always already been, we have transformed
it into something new, as if it had not been before'' (Duttmann, 2001, page 3).
Above all, this paper is about that ``way of negotiating the always unsettled
relationship between what we see and what we know'' (Gordon, 1997, page 24, paraphrasing John Berger); as Jane Bennett has recently argued, keeping our thoughts in
touch with Tokarczuk's novel, ``the mood of enchantment may be valuable for ethical
life'' (2001, page 3).
Part 1: the problematic link between representation and empiricism
``There's a profound link between signs, events, life, and vitalism: the power of nonorganic life that can be found in a line that's drawn, a line of writing, a line of
music. It's organisms that die, not life. Any work of art points a way through life,
finds a way through the cracks.''
Deleuze (1995, page 143)
But perhaps to say `myself' is already to say too much; not much of myself is left when, in the
little service room at the end of the corridor, I put on a striped apron while, at the same time,
taking off my own colours, my body smell, my favourite earrings, my warpaint make-up and
high-heeled shoes. At the same time I take off my exotic language, my strange name, my sense
of humour, my face lines, my taste for food not appreciated here, my memory of small events.
[...]
A cool shadow lingers in the hotel's yard. I come in through the back door and immediately I become aware of strange intermingled smells of cleaning materials, freshly laundered
linen and the walls sweating with the excessive turnover of people. [...]
And once the hotel awakens, it will set to work, unhurriedly digesting me, it will even get at
my thoughts and absorb all that is left of me, it will feed on me before I noiselessly disappear ...
It is then that I cross from the domestic part of the building to the Guests' Quarters. I can tell
this by the smell: the scent is that of Armani, or Lagerfeld for Men, or of the seductive elegant
Boucheron. I recognize these scents from the free samples in Vogue magazine. [...]
This, to me, is the specific smell of the second floor ... which I recognize instantly the way
one recognizes an old friend, while on my way to the changing room where
A transformation
takes place. Clad in the pink and white uniform, I find myself viewing the corridor with different eyes ... What I am singularly interested in now are the numbered rectangles of doors in
the corridor's vista. Behind each of these eight rectangles there is a room the four-cornered,
prostituted space which every few days gives itself to someone else. [...]
Tokarczuk The Hotel Capital (2000, pages 35 ^ 37)

The performance here, in this written testimony, is an art, a reflective stance to

living, that points a way through the cracks of our organic organization of life, a
way through the organization representational (systems of signification and validation), social (Capitalization), and biological (survival)(1) that keeps that `always
(1) I do not want to be misunderstood here: by each of these I mean the way their importance
overrides at a social level the personal level. For example, instances of this personal level include:
the inability to put into words a personal felt reality (representation); the need for personal space
and time away from the orchestration of Capitalism and the `rat' race' mentality (social); and the
needs of the individual to feel a sense of belonging aside from the obvious hand-to-mouth requirements (biological). Of course, this is a caricature because performatively we utilize the social level
to invent such spaces for personal investment.

1910

J-D Dewsbury

something inaccessible' away from view. This is the limit of representation but not
representation's limit; this last is the space where representation leads us into an
encounter with that which is always inevitably somewhat inaccessible. It is the space
where we apprehend that inaccessible quality but for a fleeting moment and through a
personal register, which means that after the experience we find it difficult to testify
and be its witnessthe organization of representation lets us down. And yet there is
the hope that in such felt capture we are not alone, that it can be made to make sense
for other people, that there is a line of nonorganic life that can be drawn. A line of
spirit of shared, but not necessarily equally understood, appreciation. If representation
at its present limits misses the reality that we seek to capture through it, maybe art,
Tokarczuk's writing, and its performative character ``stands as both the medium of
this failure and the agency for the hope of its restitution. In the moments of representational crash performance opens meaning and sends the spectator elsewhere''
(Heathfield, 2000, page 21).
The performative space here is asking: ``What if this space emptied of all identities
were already a community?'' ``What if we have a sense of community beyond identity
politics and beyond place?'', in other words that we belong in the world already ``to a
community before it is a community of ...'' (Wall, 1999, pages 120 ^ 121). The space of
belonging described here is that barest moment, that precise moment of connection
that draws you into a sense of belongingof beginning to `feel-in-place' more than you
were a moment before. We are speaking here of the ``property that founds all possible
belonging'': that moment coming into being by virtue of a pure `being called'. This is
the moment where world and individual, folded together, call each other into existence.
Addressing this, as Henri Bergson (1946) has argued, ``philosophy should be the effort
to go beyond the human state'' (page 46), attending directly to the space of the coming
community (Agamben, 1993).
In Bergsonism, Deleuze reasserts this sentiment by arguing that in failing to take up
this effort to go beyond the human condition we condemn ourselves ``to live among
badly analysed composites, and to be badly analysed composites'' (1988, page 28; see
also Ansell-Pearson, 1997). To continue to keep hold of those aspects that make us
human we need to work continually upon new forms of thinking those aspects that
easily slip from view: our emotions, desire, and faith. Such aspects are often solely
addressed in terms of individual convictions, and being stuck in the phenomenological
subject as this suggests really does not get at the material and immaterial phenomena.
We need:
``To reject simultaneously the form of a consciousness or a subject, and the groundlessness of an undifferentiated abyss'' (Deleuze, 1986, page 14).
For me this is about getting back to a moment of prediscursive experience; to recommence everything, all the categories by which we understand things, the world, the
subject ^ objective divisions; to recommence everything so to pause at `mystery', as
familiar as it is unexplained, of a light which, illuminating the rest, remains at its source
in obscurity (Irigaray, 1993, page 151). I think this means moving against the general rub
of representation by becoming more intimate with the contours of representational
possibility.
The representational setup

``Thanks to an arrangement which is like the symbol of all perception, each one feels
himself to be the centre of the theatre.''
Marcel Proust (quoted by Bennington, 1988, page 12)

One of the main consequences of this predominance of representational understanding

is that there is a totalization of thought in the very artifice through which we present

Witnessing space

1911

that which we are attempting to understand. In his earlier work, Jean-Francois Lyotard
used the term of a theatrical setup or dispositif to act as a motif for much of his critique
of this representational system of Western philosophy. The theatrical metaphor portrays
his view that the representational system operates like the theatrical machinery that lies
hidden from the spectator, off-stage:
``For the sign is, as Pierce said, something which replaces something else for someone. Hide ^ show: theatricality'' (Lyotard, 1988, page 95; quoted by Bennington, 1988,
page 14).
That someone includes usthe social scientists, the researchers, and the writers. In
some way we are all false witnesses to what is there.(2) So, even though the philosophical drive moves against the apparently sterile setup of totalizing representations, the
presentation of ideas is trapped within the structure it is trying to critique. In my
opinion, this sterility is only apparent. Significantly, this appearance is valid from
both sides: from the side of representational theory because of the belief in the
representational structure as being able to give an account of everything; and from
the side of nonrepresentational theory because of the danger of getting carried away
with an absolute critique of representations. The apparent sterility comes from this last
point: that in getting carried away with critique you fail to appreciate that the building
blocks of representation are not sterile in themselvesonly when they are used as part
of a system. The representational system, its structure and regulation of meaning, is not
completeit needs constant maintenance, loyalty, and faith from those who practice it.
In this regard, its power is in its pragmatic functions: easy communication of ideas
(that restricts their potential extension), and sustainable, defensible, and consensual
agreement on understanding (a certain kind of understanding, and hence a certain
type of knowledge). The nonrepresentational argument comes into its own in asking us
to revisit the performative space of representation in a manner that is more attuned to
its fragile constitution. The point being that representation left critically unattended
only allows for conceptual difference and not for a concept of difference as such. The
former maintains existing ideological markers whilst the latter challenges us to invent
new ones. For me, the project of nonrepresentational theory then, is to excavate the
empty space between the lines of representational meaning in order to see what is
also possible. The representational system is not wrong: rather, it is the belief that
it offers complete understandingand that only it offers any sensible understanding
at allthat is critically flawed.
As there are evident gaps in the representation of our understandings, there are also
many uncharted, or perhaps forgotten, cartographies for orientating our appreciation of
the world in which we find ourselves. Modestly, we should not forget that the task of the
researcher, the academic, and the philosopher is one that only arrives at a partial
apprehension of the `eventhood' of the world. Assessing this task therefore lies less in
the `truth' that comes with a belief in absolute knowledge, and more in the style of
thought required to open ourselves up to the gaps of knowledge hidden behind the claim
of representation to have covered all possible eruditions. As Deleuze puts it, there is:
``A theatre of multiplicities opposed in every respect to the theatre of representation,
which leaves intact neither the identity of the thing represented, nor the author, nor
spectator, nor character, nor representation which, through the vicissitudes of the
play, can become the object of production of knowledge or final recognition.
Instead, a theatre of problems and always open questions which draws spectator,
(2) For example, Lyotard uses the example of the historian who ``is supposed to undo all the
machinery and machination, and restore what was excluded, having knocked down the walls of
the theatre. And yet it is obvious that the historian is himself no more than another director'' (1988,
page 180; quoted by Bennington, 1988, page 10).

1912

J-D Dewsbury

setting and characters into the real movement of an apprenticeship of the entire
unconscious, the final elements of which remain the problems themselves'' (1994,
page 192).
In other words, this is about the researcher's task of inventing concepts which have the
potential for making coherent grasps of the world's theatre of multiplicities, and which
have the power to deal with these open questions. Concepts are thus like the accoutrements of ritual, enabling us to get a sense of that which is more of spirit than of tangible
action; they are props for the act of witnessing. They may be badly drawn, painful to
think, costly in the exchange of certainty, but they assure creativity, transform the dead
tissue of thought, and allow openness.
The problem of empiricism

A starting point here is the phenomenologically given space of immediate experience

ground out of the body. This is the world of substance, flesh, and viscerality that seemingly presents a way of thinking a human geography based on the principle that the
intelligible comes from the sensible, that we need to be attentive to that space before
understanding combines with signification, that ``everything in the understanding comes
from the senses'' (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987, page 54). Empiricism is often understood
by this very principle. We know how to read and understand this philosophy. We know
that in principle we can comprehend that it makes sense, that it is an acceptable and
workable starting point. The question remains, then, `how to act upon this principle in
principle?' In other words, in theory it makes sense, but in practice what does it mean to
do research in this way, starting directly through the body? I think we have to theorize
more. So, investigating this philosophically, the belief that the intelligible comes from
the sensible is no more than an abstract first principle from which one poses all future
investigations. For example, `where and how does the sensible come into existence?'
`from Being?' or `from an intentional embodied Ego?' or `from the brute reality of the
forces (of perceptionlight, sound, etc) that are the sensible?' At what point, and how,
does sensing become a moment of having made sense? In his earlier work on Hume,
Deleuze assists us by turning the tables on our concerns:
``It is not the question `Does the intelligible come from the sensible?' but a quite
different question, that of relations. Relations are external to their terms'' (Deleuze
and Parnet, 1987, page 55, original emphasis).
Deleuze illustrates this modification of empiricism with the example that `Peter is
smaller than Paul', arguing that this relation of size (smallness) is not predicated on
the innate essence of either Peter or Paul but is, rather, in the middle and exists as
such. This therefore argues for relations that are external to their terms, pressing us to
turn against a totalizing image of the world where understandings of relations or
individuals are all based upon a first abstract principle that transcends the actuality
of lifefor example, that the intelligible `comes' from the sensible (see Deleuze, 1991).
Recast in Deleuze's empiricism, the emphasis is not that the intelligible, or indeed the
sensible, comes first, but that it is the `comes' as such that matters: it is the spacing of
connection, the place between sensing and making sense, the relation itself that is
important. The old empiricist setup had neutralized the affirmative difference so
beloved by Deleuze, and so required by us now; failing to see this keeps us within
representational difference:
``In that the relation must always remain identified with, and therefore reducible
to, its term(s); any alteration on the part of one is met with an equal alteration
on the part of the other, such that a thing's essences and its properties maintain
the equilibrium of a constant identity or generalized equilibrium'' (Hayden, 1995,
page 286).

Witnessing space

1913

Thus, to take Deleuze's empiricism forward into human geography we need to focus on
relations by thinking space in between things. Let us move between the texts, back into
the space of the Hotel:
Room 226 looks as if it has only just been occupied. Luggage still unpacked, newspaper
untouched. The man (judging by the men's cosmetics in the bathroom) is probably an Arab
(Arabic labels on the suitcase, an Arabic book). And almost instantly, a thought: what is it to
me where this next guest in the hotel comes from and what he's doing here? I encounter only
his belongings. A person is merely the reason why these things have found their way here, just
a figure which relocates them in space and time. In fact, we are all transitory inhabitants of
things as trivial as clothes and as big as the Capital.
Tokarczuk The Hotel Capital (2000, pages 41 ^ 42)

In terms of internal relations, our understanding of who we are and who this Arab
man is is strung across the immediacy of the signifying detective work produced in our
identity via the task of encountering belongings as a cleaner. Fixed identities police the
interpretation. This is not all bad, for it allows us to understand that that which we are
required to clean could alter out identity (internal relations between subject and
object). On the other hand, in terms of external relations, understanding is contained
within a wider space of association: the space itself and that which it allows to
happenthe billowing in and out of temporal investments that allow individuals
to have a place in the world. Thus, for example, the sensation of place, that something
more and other than ourselves, `The Hotel Capital' itself as a set of relations, of
happenings. We need, then, to look more purposefully at the conditions, transformations, and distributions of relations actualized within the social world and attend to the
relations themselves. But how do we attend to this outlook? The first response is that
the emphasis would be clinical in approach, in that it is about writing a world partly as
an ``attempt to make life something more than personal, to free life from what imprisons it'' (Deleuze, 1995, page 143). Second, what if the empirical evidence here is
interpreted from the point of view of external relations? Deleuze argues that, ``it is not
enough to create a logic of relations, to recognize the rights of the judgement of
relation as an autonomous sphere, distinct from judgements of existence and attribution'' (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987, pages 56 ^ 57). The question here, then, is `how do we
witness the playing out of attributions, the actualization of life as it happens in all its
complexity?' This is not a task that can be fully accomplished; it is more an alternative
research ethos that touches upon the small intricacies of life.
``For to think is to experiment and not, in the first place, to judge'' (Rajchman, 2000,
page 5).
In relation to witnessing the world, such intricacies are the sensations affecting us all
the time and, if we are attentive enough, we find are supported and enhanced by the
fabric of the world and its making-sense architecture (and here I am not just thinking
of semiotic signification, but literally of architectural space itself, for example, chapels
for prayer, confession boxes, etc). In the philosophy of Deleuze we find a set of
instructions for enacting this attention:
``Substitute the AND for IS: A and B. The AND is not even a specific relation or
conjunction, it is that which subtends all relations, the path of all relations, which
makes relations shoot outside their terms and outside the set of their terms, and
outside everything which could be determined as Being, One, or Whole ... . Thinking with AND, instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS: empiricism has
never had another secrete. Try it, it is a quite extraordinary thought, and yet it is
life'' (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987, page 57; author's underline).

1914

J-D Dewsbury

Crucially, then, thinking in this alternative fashion between things in themselves

disrupts the justification for conventional qualitative techniques. This inbetweenness,
the place of interrogation in this paper, is the space of the event; or, rather, I want to
argue that this inbetweenness can be apprehended if we think in terms of events rather
than foremost in terms of individual people [as I have argued elsewhere (Dewsbury,
2000)]. It is also the reason that Deleuze writes ``I have always felt that I am an
empiricist, that is, a pluralist'' (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987, page vii). And above all,
for future social scientific research, it is about giving the right place to description.
This has been argued foremost by Nigel Thrift, who provides a legend for this alternative mapping that demands stressing again, not least so as to maintain the call and
the endeavour to keep working at the challenge it sets before us:
``The difficultyI might sayis not that of finding a solution but rather of recognising as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it ... . This
is connected, I believe, with wrongly expecting an explanation, whereas the solution
of the difficulty is description, if we give it the right place in our considerations''
(Wittgenstein, quoted by Thrift, 1998, page 221).
Stalling here: for some, such descriptive methodological experiment is pretentious and
off the mark. Moving again: I do not doubt the potential validity of those sentiments
but I also, and more strongly, believe in the politics of forming understanding from a
different orientation point, from a different but equally valid agenda from which to
mark academic enterprise. Here, it is a question of style rather than of competence:
``In each case style is needed the writer's syntax, the musician's modes and
rhythms, the painter's lines and coloursto raise lived perceptions to the percept
and lived affections to the affect'' (Deleuze, 1994, page 170).
It is a question of looking at things in an unusual way: to look instead at the spaces
between individuals; to seek responses beyond the lived perceptions or affections; and to
make our perspectives vibrate in order to rend the percept from perceptions and the affect
from affections (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, page 176). It is methodologically having
the courage to present rather than represent: I am thinking there of the power that art and
place can have to move us, and which, in translation to the rational space of academic
argument, hold their argument in the way they present to us something other, arrive
unannounced, unattended, and without destination. Thus the key is in `just' presenting
these moments, a sense that there is here something that we believe in, which we know to
affect us, and which we cannot quite apprehend in a tangible way. Can we trust mere
presentation? This is the question and this is where the concepts of affect and percept
come in. The presentation, be it the intensity of a work of art or the sensations of a dance,
communicates its own meaningit is just that it is on a different register to that which we
are used to. This is what makes it so difficult and why it requires experimentation.
The Deleuzian conceptualization of affection and perception breaks down those
common signifying associations that script representational communication. It breaks
the sensation down into their brute, felt, building blocks to that of affects and
percepts. In speaking neither of subject or object, nor you or that which is seemingly
affecting you, it speaks of that which is between, the relation itself, the immanence of
the world, a virtuality, an effect. It is, then, that intangibility in the world (that I am
trying to gesture towards in this paper) that appears. Thus:
``Affects and percepts are thus the generic and immanent elements constitutive of
a life ... . `[L]ife' is constructed on an immanent place of consistency that knows
only relations between affects and percepts, and whose composition, through the
creation of blocks of sensations, takes place in the indefinite and virtual time of
the pure event (Aeon)'' (Smith, 1998, page xxxv, original emphasis).

Witnessing space

1915

Thinking the empirical, or the sensible, in and through the relation of affects and
percepts is to constitute a domain of thought freed from the closure of representational subjectivity enabling presentations of that otherwise-unwitnessed space of
emotions, desire, and faith. This is Deleuze's transcendental empiricism which ``affirms
the work of creating difference in much the same way as the work of art affirms the
non-representational experience of the sensible'' (Hayden, 1998, page 16). Here:
``On the one hand, his concern is with actual experience as empirical multiplicity or
diversity, which has as its condition nonconceptual difference. In this respect
Deleuze is opposed to the notion of experience found in representationalist theories
which seek to identify the real with the conceptual categories of the possible. On
the other hand, Deleuze is also concerned with the necessary conditions of the
creation of Ideas, that is, with empirical multiplicity as that which allows for
the actualization of the conceptual'' (Hayden, 1998, page 7).
The important point is that Deleuze speaks of the transcendental and not the transcendent. Let us be clear as to what is meant by this: a move away from meaning
centred on the consciousness of an individual subject and a move towards a preindividual and impersonal zone that takes us beyond subject ^ object distinctions (see
Agamben, 2000, page 225). Thus for Deleuze, `what happens', its cause, ``is immanent
... when its effect is `immanate' in the cause, rather than emanating from it'' (Deleuze,
1990, page 172; see also Colebrook, 2001, page 69). To think beyond the located point
of human observers, to think a social science that encompasses the inhuman and is
an inhuman philosophy. Undoing the single horizon from which we see the world
allows the canvas to be torn, threads to be pulled apart and edges to be redrawn.
``Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and
perhaps ever greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the
incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see. This is to say that all artists
struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their wishes summon
forth) than against the `cliches' of opinion. The painter does not paint on an empty
canvas, and neither does the writer write on the blank page; but the page or canvas
is already so covered with preexisting, preestablished cliches that it is first necessary to erase, to clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as to let in a breath of air from
the chaos that brings us the vision'' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, page 204).
A breath of air occurs if we move our thinking towards the apprehension of those
unwitnessed spaces. This means thinking about what is going on, to think of events
rather than subjectivities, to realize that there are hidden, intangible, associations
(affects and percepts) of emotion, desire, and faith existing between subject (individual
body) and object (material world).
Summary

We need to understand the degree to which we are caught in the ``creative suspense
when `what to do' is no longer Given' '' (Doel, 1999, page 10). This requires us to be
more attentive to the fact that we become with events: the identity of the cleaner is as
much the identity of the Hotel itself. `The Hotel itself ': the practices that make it up,
the many possessions, occupations, and events it has given room to. We can precisely
call this `haunted space' and take it seriously, for beyond the human perspective the
world is populated by what Deleuze calls `pure' events: ``indeterminate infinitives
that are not yet actualized in determinate modes, tenses, persons, and voices'' (Smith,
1998, page xxv). For example, we do not yet know what we are going to encounter in
the Hotel today, what will be required of us, what we will witness in ourselves, nor the
responsibility we will house in being called to witness. We need, then, to appreciate that
the ``world itself is an event and, as an incorporeal ( virtual) predicate, the world

1916

J-D Dewsbury

must be included in every subject as a basis from which each one extracts the manners
that correspond to its point of view (aspects)'' (Deleuze, 1993, page 53, original emphasis). This way of thinking certainly causes problems (no bad thing) but here are two
that should be of concern. The first anxiety is about how we can come to think this
Deleuzian world of events grappling with the virtual as well as the actual world in
which we live. The second problem concerns the belief the world has in us, that it is the
world that forces us to think, pointedly urging us to move beyond humanist subjectcentred and intentional interpretations of knowledge. How? How about by allowing
the world's place in interpreting us to gain more recognition? Here I am thinking
about the work of John Law (2001), in particular that pitched in terms of materiality,
and that of Francisco Varela (1999), who tunes our attention to those unseen, unintended, aspects of everyday doing that disrupt our self-centred (ontologically, rather
than amorally, speaking) interpretations of easy going on. Let us pick up these two
concerns in more detail as I turn to the operation of Deleuze's thinking as a possible
apprenticeship in becoming able to perceive, and hence better able to express, this
folded mix of the witnessed and witnessing world.
Part 2: a Deleuzian apprenticeship folds

``A certain way of reading and writing is required, something like what Deleuze and
Guattari refer to as rhizomatic reading and writing, which brings conceptualizations from various writings together, assembling them on the same plane so that
these concepts can be made to provoke a problematization.''
Clough (2001, page 6)

The virtual

The actual
Singularity/Event
Moment of actualization

Figure 1. Fold of apprehension.

Three aspects of Deleuze's thought are appropriate to our endeavor to witness space in
alternative ways: the art of his thought (a fold of invention, that of imagination and
purpose); the tempo of his thought (a fold of time, that of the experiential and the
referential); and the spirit of his thought (a fold of the Earth, that of the conceptual and
the empirical). First, then, it is the style of thinking that Deleuze delivers us to. When he
asks `What is philosophy?' in his final collaboration with Felix Guattari, Deleuze
answers that it is the art of formulating, fabricating, and inventing concepts. Although
this is pitched in relation to philosophy, it explains a practice that can equally operate
for theoretical work in other fields: in particular here, the social sciences that think
spatially (space featuring in one of its guises as a concept itself). This can be seen in
Deleuze's own mixing of his philosophy when he addresses the art of the cinema:
``It is a practice of concepts, and it must be judged in the light of other practices
with which it interferes. A theory of cinema is not `about' cinema, but about the
concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other
concepts corresponding to other practices ... . It is at the level of interference of
many practices that things happen, beings, images, concepts, all the kinds of events''
(Deleuze, 1989, page 280).

Witnessing space

1917

In this way the theoretical enterprise at work through the empirical encounter is about
intervening with the conditions that make possible the production of new modes of
existence. I see this as a folding and a weaving because the concept ``posits itself and its
object at the same time that it is created'' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, page 22), which
is to say at the moment of the encounter. In this way, the fold also presents the
simultaneity of thought. A fold is the two moments of a dice throw: the weave of
the dice that is thrown (experiential) and the dice that falls back (referential). These
are the ``two hours of a single world'', a simultaneous enactment of the ongoing
constitution of the world: the hour of chance, and the hour of necessity, respectively;
the chance of the encounter which forces us to think and the necessity of being able to
go on in relation to that which it delivers us to (see Deluze, 1983, pages 25 ^ 26). Instead
of causality ^ finality we have chance ^ necessity: ``not a probability distributed over
several throws but all chance at once'' (page 27). This ``appeals to another kind of
philosophical `orientation'. It tries to work with zones that are precisely not completely
determined or localizing, where things may go off in unforeseen directions'' (page 27).
These `unforeseen' moves move us into the second fold of Delueze's work the
scrumpled-up mix of time. Thinking in relation to the event, in tune with Deleuze's
transcendental empiricism and open to the call of witnessing, our research consequently opens itself up to variable relations with other domains. It is not my aim in
this paper to present any theoretical or empirical analysis as an answer in itself: rather,
it is to show a way of thinking through a problem. I am not trying to prove a theory,
nor am I, through empiricism, attempting to present a moment of how the world really
is. Rather, starting at an interface with the world that produces a certain problematicthat of the experiential encounter within the space of Tokarczuk's writingthe
question is more about asking how wein all of our disciplinary guisesmight come
to make sense of the encounters that perform the world. As Smith points out, ``it is not
easier to read an image, painting or novel than it is to comprehend a concept'' (1998,
page xii). This is precisely the question of presentation, the modes in which we, as
academics, express our work; the technological forms and translations through which,
and the spaces and places in which, we put our work on show. So it is not enough to
show what I am trying to work through via different means for example, a video of a
performance, or a piece of text, or a particular paintingas if they could encompass
in their different style of presentation that which is apparently nonrepresentational in
writing. The point is what style we take up and use within the sphere of academic
interpretation.(3) Those other styles that interfere with ours (if we have such a bounded
style) force us to think and in so doing conceive of alternative concepts that offer up
another way of understanding the world; not just any understanding, but understandings that can be seen to do something precisely because these mixings of domains take
place in the particular context that brings them about. Consequently, the stance of a
Deleuzian understands that the academic practice cannot be taken independently of
other practicesthe artistic, the scientific, or the theological. This does not mean that
it has to account for all the others, an impossible and unhelpful task (in my view, the
academic veracity of what I want to set forth is derived from the ability to distil
potential avenues that are necessarily partial). Rather, it is to be open to the full
richness of the concrete through the bringing together of any potential combination
of the elements in the specific relationshipsthe stance of the theologian moving
alongside that of the artist producing a conceptual space for the social scientist which
neither the one nor the other could capture.

(3)

I hope to have demonstrated this through my lengthy use of Tokarczuk's novella.

1918

J-D Dewsbury

This relationship is an experimentation in contact with the `real' (as in the empirical
richness of the concrete), that which operates a particular fold: that of the experiential
and the referential. Experientially: this is what brings us into thinking. It is one way of
understanding the nature of your attention as you are engaged within a practice. And
yet something more takes place. Referentially: the practice takes hold of you. The sensed
action of the encounter is filtered in order to make it do something for you, rather than
it being something that just does something to you. This is a fold because neither the `for
you' or the `to you' is superior. Together they make up the algebra of being able to `go
on', to live through, to cope, to act, and to believe.
This leads me on to the third fold shaping Deleuze's thought; that of the conceptual
architecture given to us through the notion of the plane of immanence``the image
thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one's
bearings in thought'' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, page 37). This, then, is the fold of
theory and practice, of the conceptual and the empirical. This concept of the plane of
immanence is often misread and, because it seems to be able to encompass everything,
it is likewise misunderstood as some form of transcendent plane. This is not the point
of its creation (see Goodchild, 1996, pages 46 ^ 47). Rather, through this concept
Deleuze argues that when we are at work in dealing with the world in any of our
guisesas artist, academic, scientist, or even lover we are working with ``concrete
multiplicities' where a whole host of processes are bringing the present moment about.
This renounces the notion of emanation or projection in favour of connection. It does
not follow the realm of signification premised on an Absolute origin, but looks to what
connections, encounters, and interferences actually do. It is not that origins are
removed altogether: it is just that they have durations that make them less grand and
nontotalizing. These connecting processes leave their mark even in their multiplicity.
Back in The Hotel Capital:
Room number 200 is empty, the bed rumpled, a few bits of debris and a bitter smell of
someone's hastiness, of their turning over in the bed, of their feverish packing. This somebody
must have left early in the morning, probably had to rush in the airport or maybe to a railway
station. My job consists of removing the traces of this person's presence from the bed, the
carpet, the wardrobes, the cabinet, the bathroom, the wallpaper, the ashtrays and finally the air
itself. This is not easy at all. It's not enough just to clean. The vestiges of the personality left
behind by the previous occupant have to be overcome by my own impersonality.
Tokarczuk The Hotel Capital (2000, page 38)

Here we have a series of concrete, empirical, instances bringing about certain

processes of connection in the very performance of action. We could take anyone of
these lines of connectionthe smell of haste, or the biological forces either etched into
the folds of the sheets or scattered as molecules in the airknowing that it is just one
multiplicity out of the full field of multiplicities that come to constitute this plane
of immanence (a hotel bedroom, the situation of catching a plane, the task of clearing
the space for new occupancy). All these multiplicities are immanent to one another
because they come about through contact with the same world. This moves against
transcendentalism for it is not suggesting that this immanence has existed once and for
always. Rather, it is that this idea of immanence captures the fact that the concepts
that we have created to get a grip on the world are immanent to a host of other such
compositions of concepts in that they are coming out of the same encounter (for
example, the impersonal presence of the cleaner).
A plane of immanence is, then, that autonomous realm, the image that thought
gives itself, in which we hold the particular concepts we are creating or working with

Witnessing space

1919

together (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, page 7). It might seem transcendentally vast
in comparison with our immediate appreciation of the concrete moment, but that is
because there are so many lines of flight and concepts that we could have taken, and
perhaps created, in coming to grips with this moment of the world's unravelling. In this
way, the plane of immanence is constructed by the concepts we create and put to use.
Equally, as the creation of concepts is derived from being immanent to the world
`something in the world forces us to think'the plane cannot be transcendental in the
manner of being once and for always because it is changing along with the world. Thus:
``Creating concepts is constructing some area in the plane, adding a new area to
existing ones, exploring a new area, filling in what's missing. Concepts are composites, amalgams of lines, curves. If new concepts have to be brought in all the time,
it's just because the plane of immanence has to be constructed area by area,
constructed locally'' (Deleuze, 1995, page 147).
This is not a reified academic endeavor. In their hybrid position between the sciences
and the humanities think here on the work of John Law, Annemarie Mol, and
Kevin Hetherington: ``We take it to be urgent to address the question of the spatialities
in which nontranscendentalisms may reside'' (Law and Mol, 2001, page 610)geographers have been caught in the midst of accepting that the relation of theory to practice
is one of either two approaches, namely: the priority of theory over practice, or vice
versa. Performing space is how we write space, which, as a practice, an arche-ecriture
common to all action, is how we site space in our thinking. To space, so to speak, is to
break down that theory ^ practice distinction.
``Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural
history as walking, eating, drinking, playing'' (Wittgenstein, 25, 1967).
So, in the midst of this ongoing action, of us in the world and the world in us (the fold),
we peculiar as academicsnow Deleuzian apprentices and thus an amalgam of artist,
scientist, theologian make a cut into the series of unravelling associations. Intervening
through such cuts is the act of witnessing, even if it is subconscious and unintended; it is
to witnessing space that I now turn as I head towards conclusion.
Part 3: the question of witnessing after Agamben and Badiou
Witnessing is about intervention. In this it produces two movements: one away from
the self towards the unknown, the unsayable; and the other towards the self, demanding that it acknowledges its responsibility as that unique witness. The world is, then, as
experienced through all the witness's senses, so real and yet so uncertain, almost
unconvincing. Another room:
Number 224, occupied by a Japanese couple
I feel moved while cleaning here, amazed by this mode of being which seems like not being at
all. I sit on the edge of the bed, absorbing this absence of theirs. It touches me that the
Japanese always leave a small tip a few coins neatly stacked on the pillow ... when they leave
the tip it is not for me but for the room, for its silent continuance in the world, for its constancy
amid the inexplicable inconstancy. The two coins left on the pillow preserve the illusion
that such rooms exist even when nobody looks at them. The two coins dispel our only essential
fear that the world exists only in the act of seeing and there is nothing beyond this.
Tokarczuk The Hotel Capital (2000, pages 39 ^ 40)

1920

J-D Dewsbury

Witnessing moves thought by permanently unfixing and altering the perspective,

denying any one figuration or representation of the way the world is`the act of
seeing becomes one of believing, it dispels our one fear that there is nothing beyond
this, and yet by being a witness fear is called into being, as a moment of witnessing,
because we cannot be sure'. These movements towards and away from the self, reassuring and then fearful, are each tangential to the other, immanent, but never whole, never
a final picture of what happened. The key conceptual personae concerning witnessing
for Giorgio Agamben are the quodlibet (Whatever), which ``refers not to the general or
the particular, the generic or the individual, but to the `singular' in the sense in which
Deleuze and Badiou use the term'' (Wall, 1999, page 123). To follow Thomas Wall's
argument further here, and use to it to prise some of the misconceptions surrounding
nonrepresentational theory and the appeal of witnessing, there is nothing mystical,
magical, or otherwise other in any way about this set of new perspectives on the social.
The Whatever, the `nonrepresentable', is so ``not because it is withdrawn, silent,
negative, or removed, but because it is too common (Wall, 1999, page 123, original
emphasis).(4) That room's silent continuance, this most common Whatever:
``is what needs to be repeatedly approached and exposed, for the most common is
only in its approach, its exposure, its `coming' ... [It] is the neutralization of identity
that is in every representation while remaining noncontemporary with that representation. It is only glimpsed in profile, or in the shadows of a perception or a
feeling'' (Wall, 1999, page 124, original emphasis).
A couple of points to take forward from this. First, the call for testimony, for witnessing, is more significant than the testimony itself. This is not, then, something that is
established once and for all, but something that is always coming amongst an infinite
series of modal variations (Agamben, 1993, page 19). Second, there is something that is
within everything but that is not fully actualized within any one means of making it
apparent, like in representation, for example. In other words, we have come to rely on
representation too much because we expect too much from it.
``What is language that does not say perfectly and preserve in itself an Unsayable,
an Ineffable, a Mystery?'' (Wall, 1999, page 130). This leads us to another alternative
space of hope, the space of `never-having-been', where the human has not yet been
born, has not yet been defined with all manner of exclusionary significations and
prejudices. This is the ambiguity of language which is necessarily both of, and not
that of, the human (after Maurice Blanchot). Expliciting this further, demonstrating
the influence of Blanchot, Agamben's writing on language is also about implication,
about folding, about the simultaneously experiential and referential space between
``the named thing and its being-named, between the name and its reference to the
thing: between, that is, the name `rose' insofar as it signifies the rose and the rose
insofar as it is signified by the name `rose' '' (1993, page 96). This is about grasping the
pure thusness of being as well as the manner in which this thusness becomes signified,
and hence tangible. All meaning is full of holes, so why do we not give meaning to the
intangible immateriality of the worldwe know its pure thusness, through the experience of our bodies, but we seen reluctant to signify it and make its weight upon us
more concrete. The space of literature, however, moves beyond our trepidation, making
(4)

Being too common it is a nonspecific basis: ``a ground, an underneath, a base in the sense of basis
... [it] is in something that does not lie between the finite logical categories and infinite ideas of
reason, does not lie in the space of difference, in the limit condition ... the ground lies beneath both
reason and the understanding, beneath both being and logic, beneath both ethics and cognition. The
ground finds its home in the imagination, its girding in sensation'' (Lash, 1999, page 232, original
emphasis). This all sounds too mystical, and it sounds like just another foundation.

Witnessing space

1921

tangible our apprehension by presenting us with a perspective on the immaterial world

that is not directly seen but indirectly felt.
a few coins neatly stacked on the pillow ...

Tokarczuk The Hotel Capital (2000, page 39)

``It is not the identity of the thing and yet it is nothing other than the thing (it is none-other''
(Agamben, 1993, page 101, original emphasis). The unit of space is herein shattered by
singularities because they communicate with each other not via the means of some organic
community of reference already in place, but by the coming community of their affects.
Take the example that Wall gives of the event of these singularities and the politics they
gift to us by being attentive to the unrepresentable and the underrepresented: the example
is that of character actors, or perhaps extending his example from the early studio
Hollywood pictures to the contemporary space of the `extra':
``Character-actors are employed by Hollywood to represent the business and hum
of everyday life. They are paid to represent what happens when nothing happens:
everydayness. Waiters and waitresses, cabdrivers, cooks, petty crooks, ordinary GIs,
musicians, servants, shopkeepers, secretaries, bureaucrats, and stool pigeons''
(Wall, 1999, page 136).
These singularities can lead us in their affect to a plane of shared intensity, to this non,
none-other, place of transcendental imagination, ``equally active and passive, or
perhaps purely passionate'' (Wall, 1999, page 138); this is where we find ourselves
becoming. This is something that is in many ways figural. It does not, however, remove
us from the need for representation altogether, for as much as it moves against
representation it needs representation to make part of it actual and tangible (see
Rodowick, 2001). Thus, in Tokarczuk's novella we have an example of this more modest
engagement with representation, we have a literary ^ ethical style of expression because
it becomes a space to witness those intangibles that are about being unbound from
notions of identity and hence the support of representational systems. In this expressive
space we encounter sensible singularities. Likewise, cinema, in its technological and
aesthetic development, can be seen as the exemplary Deleuzian space for this: a new
experience of the sensible freed from point of view, both in terms of judgment and
opinion and of aspect. Freeing perception, then, from one perspective to encompass
several viewpoints. This is achieved in two key ways: through attention to events, and
blocs of sensation. On the one hand, the space of the events, where we seize upon a fold
both of activity and of passivity, is seen as an expression of ``an action referred to the
agent as immanent cause'' (Spinoza, quoted by Agamben, 2000, page 235). On the other
hand, within the blocs of sensation in embodied action, as opposed to the cinematic and
painterly space to which Deleuze alluded in order to communicate a sense of these
phenomena, we have the affective dimension of things. This is critical, for:
``Ordinary experience labours under the burden of passivity, enervation and dullness.
This is because, though humans still have imagination, the nonhuman world has
had all life stolen from under it. Special effort, a whole literary-ethical regimen, is
needed to infuse everyday objects artificially with energy or force'' (Bennett, 2001,
page 80).

1922

J-D Dewsbury

Room 229 possesses special qualities. It entices, makes promises, brings surprises. In itself it
seems like any other room ... And yet it gives off the impression of being emptier than all the
others. I can hear my own breath, I see my hands swollen from the water, the mirror gives back
my reflection in a less coincidental fashion. Whenever I walk into this room, I stiffen. Last week
there was a couple of lovers here, perhaps a newly married couple. They rumpled the bed, threw
around the towels, spilled the shampoo. What was left after them were yellow stains on the sheet
and a huge bouquet of flowers, the witness of vows of love I was sorry to have to throw away.
[I break the story here to pause upon this event of witnessing]
It is harder to bring this room into a state of readiness to receive guests as it has its individual
face. It receives people with consideration. I suspect that one night spent here is enough to get
them trapped, to bring unquiet dreams, to hold them a little longer, to bring out desires and
overturn carefully laid plans.
Tokarczuk The Hotel Capital (2000, page 47)
Witnessing the immaterial

Not to fight the boundaries of language, then, not to grapple with the invisible made
through being unsayable, but to grasp the potential in the event of matter, where here
``what is intended is neither the word as object nor the word insofar as it actually
denotes a thing but, rather, a pure potential to signify (and not to signify), the writing
tablet on which nothing is written'' (Agamben, 2000, page 218, original emphasis). This
is about becoming accustomed to the immaterial and spiritual in our thinking, as
much as we are accustomed to the empirical ground of that about which we are
thinking. This is about citing those unmeasured, invisible, energies that affect our
world and make us believe in it in particular ways.
``Daily we use unmeasured energies as if in our sleep ... . Sometimes, on awakening,
we recall a dream. In this way rare shafts of insight illuminates the ruins of our
energies that time has passed by. We were accustomed to spirit [Geist ] just as we are
accustomed to the heartbeat that enables us to lift loads and digest our food''
(Benjamin, 1999, page 6).
This is Deleuze's empiricism, and for us now it involves the recognition that there is a
philosophy as well as a science of lived experience. How can I put this? `Do we need to
question why there is Being?' Yes we do, but increasingly we seem already to have
answered this question. But remember, we are no longer just scientists but artists and
theologians too. What is Being? What does Being mean and how does the way we think,
and thus live, affect this? Foucault was, of course, the expert on this, diagnosing that
scientific `structures' and the `subject' are opposed only in appearance (Badiou, 2000,
page 81; see Deleuze, 1986). The answer to this philosophy of lived experience, so my
argument in this paper goes, rests in our expanding the remit of the ways in which we
witness space into being both in a material and in a significantly immaterial form. But
again, how might we get close to this state, to sensing this immateriality? Contemplate
``the pure fact that one speaks, that language exists'' (Agamben, 2000, page 220),
``a language completely devoid of meaning function'' (de Man, 1986, page 96), and you
touch upon the events of life that are more than human and more than the intent of
consciousness. You are at least becoming aware of an inhuman geography, not one
of other than human capacitytechnology, networks, information, and the likebut
one of spirit:
``The `inhuman', is not some kind of mystery, or secret it is linguistic structures, the
play of linguistic tensions, linguistic events that occur, possibilities which are
inherent in languageindependently of any intent or any drive or any wish or
any desire we might have'' (de Man, 1986, page 96; author's emphasis).

Witnessing space

1923

I am interested here in things that do not exist within representation's eye, in spaces
whose life is not apparent. This is to question acutely and personally what it is that we,
as academics, make visible and sayable. This is to think seriously about the ways in
which we decide what senses are sensible in that they are allowed presence in our
arguments as significant and valid commentaries to the point at hand. The responsibility here lies with the audience of the dissemination of such work that tries to touch
upon these things as much as it does with the author of such work. That has always
been so. For example, intuition, emotion, and faith are generally notions or feelings
cast out of this knowing space; and yet I cannot help but think that the fabric of the
world out of which our actions are etched is one stitched by precisely these kinds of
sentiments. However, this is not something that can be imposedit can only be
exposed.
``Poetry no longer imposes itself; it exposes itself'' (Celan, 1981; quoted by HellerRoazen, 1999, page 5).
Exposure, here, is to speak of the communication that there is something. The communication itself presents not meaning but rather just that something (the `It happens'
rather than the `What happens', to echo Lyotard (1991) again. It also therefore gives us
this space of witness where we are exposed to the fact that the immaterial is somethingonly it cannot be imposed (known), it can only be exposed (felt); that is why we
are called to be its witness. To witness is to be called by an event.
Witnessing (something): the felt

What, then, of our subject of inquiry, this immaterial event? A double question, for we
are talking here both of the subject matter at hand and of the matter of the agency of
situation, of the constitution of the individual and the singularity of affect (neither
privileged). The former speaks of that which is brought into being as that which is to
be questioned. The latter of what it is that constitutes the subjectthe person, the self,
the force, or the event. What is the subject? One thing for sure is that in my inquiry
here we have moved beyond a position solely concerned with the cogito and consciousness to one rooted in experience, experience crucially rooted in life. This might sound
phenomenological but this life is one of uncertainty and multiplicity; thus it is, as
Michel Foucault stressed, the rise to the level of a new question:
``Does not the entire theory of the subject have to be reformulated once knowledge,
instead of opening onto the truth of the world, is rooted in the `errors' of life?''
(1998, page 68).
Witnessing such spaces is not easy, it calls us to betray our roots in habitable modes of
thinking, to betray the easy position of thinking out of the Subject, shifting the focus
ever so slightly to keep things alive, to be in tune to the vitality of the world as it
unfolds. For Deleuze and Agamben this shift in focus is crucial for a politics of the 21st
century for it is about the enigmatic cipher of bare biological life as such: a Life ...;
``but what does it mean for absolute immanence to appear as life?'' (Agamben, 2000,
page 228). It is about accepting and being attentive to encounters that open us up
to an alterity which nevertheless remains absolutely immanent (see Agamben, 2000,
page 223).
``The indefinite as such does not mark an empirical indetermination, but a determination of immanence or a transcendental determinability. The indefinite article
cannot be the indetermination of the person without being the determination of
the singular'' (Deleuze, 1997, page 5).
The politics of witnessing: beyond the limits of thought

`A life ...' is a matrix of infinite desubjectification (Agamben, 2000, page 233) that
always therefore sets us thinking; and I mean actually thinking, actually living.

1924

J-D Dewsbury

``It happens by means of answers and questions. It is not argued'' (Lyotard, 1997,
page 117).
In his essay ``The general line'' Lyotard (1997), quoting from Nina Berberova's novel
The Revolt, writes that everyone has their own `no-man's-land', a domain that is theirs
and theirs alone, a domain that consists of living in ``intervals unchecked'' (1997,
page 115). Three aspects of this `no-man's-land' resonate here. First, humanity is only
human if people are allowed to have this `no-man's-land' (page 116) a no-man's-land
of emotions, desires, and faith. Second, this no-man's-land is not a secrete despite its
``secret existence'' because it is not a question of you not saying what you know about it
as ``you don't know what should be said'' (Lyotard, 1997, page 116). I think this is
particularly key when we try and bring emotions into the academic space steeled against
such sensibilities (see Anderson and Smith, 2001; Widdowfield, 2000). Anderson and
Smith outline the importance of emotional geographies, and for me draw attention in
particular to a space where we might grow in our ability to express these emotional
spacings:
``An emphasis specifically on emotionally heightened spaces may usefully illustrate
the way that social relations are mediated by feelings and sensibility. It may
also provide the experience and expertise researchers need to track emotional
geographies into less obviously emotional domains of life'' (2001, page 8).
Emotionally heightened spaces make explicit our unchecked no-man's-land. So my point
is to address Rebekah Widdowfield's concern that ``we have become so concerned about
how far or indeed whether we can speak for, and articulate the experiences and emotions
of `others' that we have forgotten or dismissed the ability to speak for ourselves'' (2000,
page 205). There is an emotional vocabulary that spaces a commonality between `others'
and ourselves, and expressing thought through this vocabulary assists in negotiating that
divide between researcher and researched. The specifics of the emotions have a `secrete
existence', but the tendency is shared. Third, these `no-man's-land' moments:
`` `are crucial to demarcating any sort of ``general line'' '. The `general line' is not the
line of life in general, of life `such as it is'. The second existence is nonetheless sweet
in relation to `the life everyone sees'. It suspends it a little, it dwells within it from
time to time and sweeps it away, but without one knowing anything about it. The
second existence does not really wrong the first; it opens little parentheses within
it'' (Lyotard, 1997, pages 117 ^ 118; quoting Berberova's novel).
We do not know what should be said about these ``little parentheses'', but it is to the
task of illuminating and being able to witness them that we now turn. It is in fact
the reason why thinking through the event is so important, and why eventhood features
prominently in the concerns of several philosophers of the 20th century. In particular
these concerns are naturally drawn towards and refracted through the event of
Auschwitz, not least because the attempt to make sense here through recourse to a
transcendental realm beyond representation finds our reasoning `` `always already'
defeated by Auschwitz because no pre-existing Idea is adequate to it and any Idea we
may cobble together afterwards is going to reek of this original (suppressed) failure''
(Buchanan, 2000, page 75). Noting the adjudication of juridical law by this representational philosophy, Agamben writes of the space left in the wake of Auschwitz that the
``law does not presume to exhaust the question'' (1999, page 7). So, citing the work on
Auschwitz, the way it illustrates the philosophical mechanics involved in the concept of
the event, I am concerned here in investigating the remnants of experience and the way
they produce a space of testimony for eventhood. And that this is a space that openly
questions our ability to make sense of the event and a space that requires us to invent
concepts adequate to this enunciation of experience that is beyond the law (of reason).
(And I do believe there is a space beyond the Law).

Witnessing space

1925

``Whoever assumes the charge of bearing witness in their name knows that he or she
must bear witness in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness. But this
alters the value of testimony in a definitive way; it makes it necessary to look for
meaning in an unexpected area'' (Agamben, 1999, page 34).
There can be no witness of the event itself; it is impossible to represent. It exists in
representation as a wrong exists in the economy of justice. For example, in these terms
of justice:
``This is what a wrong would be: a damaged accompanied by the loss of means to
prove the damage ... . Either you are a victim of a wrong, or you are not. If you are
not, you are deceived (or lying) in testifying that you are. If you are, since you can
bear witness to a wrong, it is not a wrong [because in bearing witness you are in the
process of righting that wrong and achieving justice], or you are deceived (or lying)
in testifying that you are a victim of a wrong'' (Lyotard, 1988, page 5).
This does not mean that there is no event. Just because you cannot prove that something happened, or that something is happening, does not mean that it did not happen,
or that it is not happening. This is the expression of the `double bind'. As Agamben
notes, the impossibility of bearing witness to the event has a double sense in ``that it is
impossible to bear witness to it from the insidesince no one can bear witness from
the inside of deathand from the outsidesince the `outsider' is by definition
excluded from the event'' (1999, page 35). Agamben proceeds to argue that the double
sense of witnessing produces a ``threshold of indistinction between inside and outside''
(1999, page 36) that can be evident in the testimony that the witnessing calls into being.
Thus:
``What makes the power of testimony ... is not the words but the equivocal, puzzling
relation between words and voice, the interaction, that is, between words, voice,
rhythm, melody, images, writing, and silence. Each testimony speaks to us beyond
its words, beyond its melody, like the unique performance of a singing'' (Felman
and Laub, 1992, pages 277 ^ 278; quoted by Agamben, 1999, page 36).
The space of art takes the place of the logical impossibility of expressing through
representational systems of meaning the experience of the witness who bears the
impossibility of bearing witness. If you consider the body of the witness, and the state
of affairs that it is witnessing, then you can make the distinction that, in relation to
the timing of the event, bodies and states of affairs exist only in the present. It follows
then that it is possible to provide testimony of the `present' of the experience. However,
there are relations between bodies and states of affairs that exist as effectsmuch
as I mentioned earlier that there are affects, zones of affect, that exist between lived
affections. These effects, then, ``are not bodies, but, properly speaking, `incorporeal'
entitites'' that ``are not things or facts, but events'' (Deleuze, 1990, pages 4 ^ 5). Being
beyond the present these effects exist as lacunae in the actuality of that present:
``This is why what is borne to witness cannot already be language or writing. It can
only be something to which no one has borne witness. And this is the sound that
arises from the lacuna, the non-language that one speaks when one is alone, the
non-language to which language answers ... . The language of testimony is a
language that no longer signifies and that, in not signifying, advances into what
is without language, to the point of taking on a different insignificance'' (Agamben,
1999, pages 38 ^ 39).
This `different insignificance' leans towards an alternative logic of sense that requires
novel ethical consideration. Questions at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy, the development of concepts exhibited in Difference and Repetition (1994) and The Logic of
Sense (1990), have a particular value in working upon the ethics needed here.

1926

J-D Dewsbury

``Between these event-effects and language, or even the possibility of language, there
is an essential relation. It is the characteristic of events to be expressed or expressible, uttered or utterable, in propositions which are at least possible. There are
many relations inside a proposition. Which is the best suited to surface effects or
events?'' (Deleuze, 1990, page 12).
The answer that Deleuze gives to this question is this alternative `logic of sense', and he
means this literally: the answer is sense, that ``mysterious fourth dimension of the
proposition'' (Buchanan, 2000, page 77). Propositions exist alongside the material
world of things, including the human body as it is caught in the present. A proposition
is an inquiry as a happening, as a problem, and as a subject of thought. In thinking
towards an appreciation of the logic of sense, Deleuze presents the concept of the
proposition through four dimensions. Other than sense, the three dimensions are
denotation (or indication), manifestation, and signification. Denotation is the relation
of the proposition to an external state of affairsthe selection of particular images
``which ought to represent the state of affairs''; manifestation concerns the relation
between the proposition and the person who speaks it ``it is the domain of the
personal ''; significant ``is a question of the relation of the word to universal or general
concepts, and of syntactic connections to the implication of the concept'' (Deleuze,
1990, pages 13 ^ 14, original emphases). Sense is thus in many ways what is left unsaid
by the other three dimensions, given that the unsaid does not yet make sense. In
Deleuze's terms, sense is the ``expressed of the proposition ... an incorporeal, complex,
and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in
the proposition'' (Deleuze, 1990, pages 19, original emphasis).(5) Again, sense does not
exist as such because we have no means to express it directly. If Agamben has asked us
to ``look for meaning in an unexpected area'' (1999, page 34), much as Deleuze urges
us to be worthy of the event, I think that we need to pay attention to the space of the
event and to the logic of sense that subsists within it. We therefore need to create
concepts which extract sense worthy of the event. Seen in this way, the soliciting of
the eventits surface effects and its prepersonal and nonlanguage is a question
of ethics.
But how might we begin to do this? What we have achieved so far is the realization of
the problem that representation brings: an awareness that accepts that some aspects
of the world are misrepresented, underrepresented, and even inherently nonrepresentational. The problem of representation is thus inventeda formulation of Bergson's
philosophy that is underrated:
``The truth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a question of finding the
problem and consequently of positing it, even more than of solving it ... . The stating
and the solving of the problem are here very close to being equivalent'' (1946,
pages 58 ^ 59, original emphasis).
Such a stance is very close in style to the demand for description to be given the right
place in our geographical stance towards understanding the world. Thus in following
Bergson's `Method', and the tenet of Ludwig Wittgenstein's thinking, we have already
begun to extract sense worthy of the event by inventing this problem of representation
and by refining the statement of the problem through the descriptions we make
possible. In other words, if representation fails to capture aspects of the world, and
if it neglects the nonrepresentational aspects, we need to situate the understanding that
(5)

``The question is as follows: is there something, aliquid, which merges neither with the proposition or with the terms of the proposition, nor with the object or with the state of affairs which the
proposition denotes, neither with the `lived', or representation or the mental activity of the person
who expresses herself in the proposition, nor with the concepts or even signified essences?''
(Deleuze, 1990, page 19).

Witnessing space

1927

representation brings alongside the understandings that it denies. In this way we can
recognize one of the reasons why Deleuze finds Gottfried Leibniz's theory, that each
individual is a monad that expresses the world, so instructive: in a given moment of
representation, or signification, or performative action, in the unfolding duration of the
life of an individual entity, the world is actualized (see Massumi, 1997).
``In each world, the individual monads express all the singularities of the world an
infinityas though in a murmur or a swoon; but each monad envelops or
expresses `clearly' a certain number of singularities only, that is, those in the vicinity
of which it is constituted and which link up with its own body '' (Deleuze, 1990,
page 111, original emphasis)
It is from this that we can grasp a key stance within the act of witnessing, that:
``A world can be viewed from two perspectives: that of the individual which actualizes and incarnates in its body singularities which `evolve' through forms of folding
(envelopment, development, etc), and that of the singularities which continue to
persist and subsist over and above their particular incarnations and actualizations
within an individuated body and self'' (Ansell-Pearson, 1999, page 87).
A stance, then, of being attentive to the way we believe in the worldthe singularities
that evolve out of our investments and beliefs and the way the world believes in us
the subsistence of things that draw us into certain ways of being in the world.
Conclusions: wiping away the tears (6)
``What we most lack is a belief in the world, we've quite lost the world, it's been taken
from us. If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous,
that elude control, you engender new space ^ times, however small their surface or
volume. It's what you call pietas. Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it,
has to be assessed at the level of every move. We need both creativity and a people.''
Deleuze (1995, page 176, original emphasis)
Fleshing out the location of the ambivalent is an important gesture towards breathing
space into the pressing politics of life. This is for some perhaps too intimatesquared
at a too personal, specific, and microlevel but this is precisely the space where we
need to reinvent and reinvigorate political concepts to measure up to the technicization
and globalization of political communities in the next century, this century, our century
(Beardsworth, 1996, page xi). It is the space where these impacts are felt. Fortunately,
as I have argued here, social science is beginning to engage more seriously and in a
more sustained manner with those areas of explanation that are less points of clear
articulation and more lines that are seemingly intuitively experienced. Let me offer
three spaces for thought that might help us take these engagements further.
Life knowledge over power knowledge

First, this engagement reflects and requires a `wilder' sort of empiricism (Rajchman,
2001, page 9): one that engages life rather than the self. This is the concern of Deleuze's
transcendental empiricism, to look beyond the personal life in contrast to the world of
subject and object.
``Phenomenology expected `lived experience' to supply the ordinary meaning of
every act of knowledge. But can we not or must we not look for it in the `living'
itself?'' (Foucault, 1998, page 475).
(6)

``Certainly, it is painful to learn that Concept indicates a society of information services and
engineering. But the more philosophy comes up against shameless and inane rivals and encounters
them at its very core, the more it feels driven to fulfil the task of creating concepts that are aerolites
rather than commercial products. It gets the giggles, which wipe away the tears'' (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1994, page 11, original emphasis).

1928

J-D Dewsbury

As Foucault also comments in an earlier essay, ``the descriptions of the phenomenologists

have taught us that we are living not in a homogenous and empty space but, on the
contrary, in a space that is laden with qualities, a space that may also be haunted by
fantasy'' (1998, page 177). It is the descriptions, the productions of phenomenology and
not its concepts, that gifts us this outlook upon this other immanent and immaterial,
imagined yet real, world. These descriptions point us towards `life' itself taking us away
from mere biology towards matters of spirit, reminding us of our place in a world that
is not solely human. Thus, in Deleuze's late words, ``a life of pure immanence, neutral,
beyond good and evil, for it was only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of
things that made it good or bad'' (2001, page 29). This stance towards the immateriality of the world is not just fantasy but an attitude that offers a serious politics for
investigating who we are today. I think it represents a genuine and important shift
away from thinking life solely in terms of power knowledge, that which orchestrates
meaning and purpose in life through the orientation of the self constructed to serve the
state and the economy, towards apprehending life knowledge, that which speaks to
the affirmation of life itself, to our feelings, desires, and beliefs that give us investments
in the world and which make us feel that we belong.
Minoritizing expression

Second, talking to this life knowledge requires different modes of expression which, in
turn, require us to experiment more, to let go of those anchoring points that serve to
say so little about who we are but which, nevertheless, offer security in their mass
signification. No difference, no risk, no creationwe need to minoritize:
``What defines the majority is a model you have to conform to: the average European adult male city-dweller, for example. A minority, on the other hand, has no
model, it's a becoming, a process. One might say the majority is nobody. Everybody's caught, one way or another, in a minority becoming that would lead them
into unknown paths if they opted to follow it through'' (Deleuze, 1995, page 173).
Now there is a politics: opting to follow unknown paths. It is academically hazardous,
depends upon an openness to embrace uncertainty in the pursuit of operationalizing
potential. As Foucault put it, ``We have to dig deeply to show how things have
beenhistorically contingent, for such and such a reason intelligible but not necessary.
We must make the intelligible appear against a backdrop of emptiness and deny
its necessity. We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces.
To make a truly unavoidable challenge of the question: what can be played?'' (1997,
pages 139 ^ 140).
``We here come upon what Bergson calls `fabulation' ... . To catch someone in the act
of legending is to catch the movement of constitution of a people. A people is
something already there. A people, in a way, is what's missing, as Paul Klee used to
say'' (Deleuze, 1995, pages 125 ^ 126).
There is, then, a history to doing this, to actualising the sentiment: it demands that we
take art seriously, that we look again at the aesthetics of Goethe, Mallarme, and Klee,
and at those movements that married art with social commentary: thus Breton and
Surrealism into the Situationalists. Together their work gathers and spreads the agitations of modern experience, mediating that experience ``to reveal unforeseen kinships,
proximities, and relations'', opening up ``to possible languages domains that had
remained silent and marginal until then'' (Foucault, 1998, page 174). The crack in the
edifice of society's rubric of majority control is closing as we continue to neglect
the expressive and transformative potential of art; we as academics need to reinvest
in this potential (see Massumi, 2001).

Witnessing space

1929

Witnessing and ethics

Third we need to relocate our concerns through the many questions that witnessing space
raises. Who or what is called upon to bear witness? As I have set out, it is an impossible
task; no subject exists that can meet its undertaking. We are something other than the
subject. There is, I believe, something more than the material world that touches upon
the inhuman and the event. Think about it like this: understanding in the concrete,
material, and unquestioned sense has always been a misunderstanding. Understanding
and its continuity is part routine and part rupture, part knowing coordination part
instinctive knowing. As Tom Conley writes, ``communication appears to be a flickering
of signs and objects rather than a passage of information between emitters and receivers''
(1992, page 41). That said, ``a rupture is initiated when an encounter is begun, but an
illusion of a continuum is needed to initiate and maintain contact with other'' (page 42).
There are many performances bridging the gap between so-called reality and fiction,
knowing and faith, holding together that which would otherwise fall apart, juggling in
tandem routine and rupture, ethical code and affective propulsion.
``Codes and criteria are indispensable parts of ethics, and surely will not work
without a sense of obligation or subscription. But these last things are still not
sufficient to the enactment of ethical aspirations, which requires bodily movements
in space, mobilization of heat and energy, a series of choreographed gestures, a
distinctive assemblage of affective propulsions. Nor can they nurture the spirit of
generosity that must suffuse ethical codes if they are to be responsible to the
surprises that regularly punctuate life'' (Bennett, 2001, page 3, original emphasis).
Another kind of understanding exists, then, in the space beyond the limit of expressible
reason-giving (it is in that sense that it is unarticulated). The enactment of ethical
aspirations is part push, part pull: push on our part, through our knowing and
personally censored routine; and a pull on the part of the world in which we find
ourselves deliveredwe becoming in mutual constitution with the world. This gives
notice to our unformulated, and thus inarticulate, knowledge and it is here that social
science needs to make space (to) speak more decisively about how ``our bodily knowhow and the way we act and move'' encodes ``components of our understanding of self
and world'' (Taylor, 2001, page 34).(7) In constructing a terrain for witnessing the world
in a different way, it is useful to consider the fact that understanding is captured less in
our representations than in our appropriate action:
``Practical activity, unlike `theoretical' activity, implies an engagement with a reality
independent of ourselves and our thoughts ... . When we interact for practical purposes
with the natural environment, which is profoundly independent of our thoughts, we do
so collectively ... . That is to say: we know the world with our institutions, and by virtue
of our institutions, not in spite of them'' (Bloor, 2001, page 105).
The point is that thinking of practices differently, and aside from any subtle sense of
continuity, produces different worlds to witness. Or, rather, refigures the very nature
of witnessing, and hence producing knowledge, altogether. It is not that the knowing
how to go on is not always questioned: it is just that we are more aware of it when involved
in radically unusual contingency. Witnessing is about being open to this radical contingency, to the event; it is not about assisting through our interpretation of action the
reinstatement of structurethe world is simply not the same again, we cannot reinstate
it. At the societal level, of course, we construct the world as something familiar. Likewise
at the sense of the level of brute connectionbe that intellectually monological or
(7)

This is served notice to in speech-act theory, where ``speech, precisely because it is a bodily act,
is not always `knowing' about what it says. In other worlds, the bodily effects exceed the intentions
of the speaker'' (Butler, 1997, page 141).

1930

J-D Dewsbury

biologically essentialthere is a familiar sense of innate natural behavior. However, at the

space of bodily connection, in the eventhood of the moment where the experiential and
the referential is folded, there exists the potential for alternative worlds.
There is, then, a whole new politics at hand in witnessing space as a form of
knowledge (the immaterially felt) without contemplation (being called to witness),
and that is being open to the eventhood of the world. In the space which Deleuze's
thought leaves behind, or rather creates in front of, us, this is about the encouraged
``creation of new values and senses in the affirmative constitution of life and human
existence'' (Hayden, 1998, page 6). Theorizing the making of place thus needs to attend
to the less visible spacings that go to make place up.
``In this dimension, there will be little sense in distinguishing between organic life
and animal life or even between biological life and contemplative life and between
bare life and the life of the mind. Life as contemplation without knowledge will have
a precise correlate in thought that has freed itself of all cognition and knowledge''
(Agamben, 2000, page 239).
We need, then, to give space to the singular and the unique; to warrant the knowledges
contained herein much as we would if we were dealing with circumstantial evidence. We
need to work on apprehending apprehensively the flash of the felt before we wrap it up with
contemplation. That is not to say that contemplation does not enhance experiencewe
only have to witness Tokarczuk's writing to realize thatrather it is to point out that
certain arrangements of the world apprehend within us biological and spiritual emotions
speeding us to different understandings in the flash of an encounter. Also, and finally, we
need to acknowledge, and handle alongside our apprehensions, that there are massive
historical and highly coded ongoing dramas which shift and shape the expressions of our
hidden selves, our emotions, along a much grander timescale. It is also to acknowledge and
investigate the fact that there are spaces that enable particular expressions that scrumple,
precisely like a Baroque fold, time as memory, time as instant, and time as time itself.
Guests are going out into town, their stomachs demanding lunch. Angelo of the Soiled Linen
has settled in his little service room and is packing linen into big sacks ... I become aware that
Angelo's proper place is not in a hotel, not even a hotel as elegant as this one, but in `The Song
of Songs'. This is where he might be wandering leaping from mountain to mountain like a
young deer. Because Angelo is as beautiful and imposing as the mountain in his native
Lebanon.
He nods his head, indicating an elderly couple leaving room 228 ... He is tall, with a
slight stoop, but in much better shape than she is. Perhaps he is younger, or perhaps he is just
cheating time. She is small, wrinkled, trembling, barely able to walk.
`They are Swedish. She has come here to die', says Angelo knowingly ...
I go into their room ... There is not much to do here .. the air is not reverberating with bad
dreams, groans, excitement ... When I make the bed I am struck by the absence of any tangible smell. Its like it is with children. Children's skin does not have any smell by itself, it only
captures and retains outside smells: the air, the wind, the grass crushed by elbow and the
wonderful, salty smell of the sun. ... When one sleeps with no sin, no long-term ambitions, no
angst and no despair, when the skin becomes thinner and thinner, paper-like, when life is
escaping slowly from the body like air from a rubber toy, when one sees one's past as something completed and closed up, when in the night out begins to dream about God, then the
body ceases to mark its presence in the world with a smell ...
On the bedside table two books are resting next to each other ... [One] book is the Bible,
in Swedish. I cannot understand anything and yet all seems so familiar. A red bookmark
marks the book of Ecclesiastes. I run my eye along the page and I have the impression that I
am beginning to understand it. First individual words and then whole phrases float out of
memory and mix with the print. `That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath
already been; and God requires that which is past'.
Tokarczuk The Hotel Capital (2000, pages 52 ^ 54)

Witnessing space

1931

Acknowledgements. I would especially like to thank David Conradson and Alan Latham for
organizing the forum on ``Performance, Practice and Space'' and to acknowledge their encouragement
and patience. I am extremely grateful to and appreciate of the support of Nigel Thrift and Sarah
Whatmore in fleshing out and giving me the space to risk thinking some of the ideas in this paper.
I am also grateful for the detail, care, and consideration of the comments and questions of the three
anonymous referees for this paperthey were enormously helpful and stimulating, thank you.
References
Agamben G, 1993 The Coming Community translated by M Hardt (University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, MN)
Agamben G, 1999 Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive translated by D Heller-Roazen
(Zone Books, New York)
Agamben G, 2000 Potentialities (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA)
Anderson K, Smith S, 2001, ``Editorial: emotional geographies'' Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers, New Series 26 7 ^ 10
Ansell-Pearson K, 1997 Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition
(Routledge, London)
Ansell-Pearson K, 1999 Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (Routledge, London)
Badiou A, 2000 Deleuze: The Clamor of Being translated by I Burchill (University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, MN)
Beardsworth R, 1996 Derrida and the Political (Routledge, London)
Benjamin W, 1999 Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913 ^ 1926 (Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA)
Bennett J, 2001 The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ)
Bennington G, 1988 Lyotard: Writing the Event (Columbia University Press, New York)
Berberova N, 1989 The Revolt translated by M Schwartz (Collins, London)
Bergson H, 1946 The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics translated by M L Andison
(Philosophical Library, New York)
Bloor D, 2001, ``Wittgenstein and the priority of practice'', in The Practice Turn in Contemporary
Theory Eds T R Schatzki, K K Cetina, E V Savigny (Routledge, London) pp 95 ^ 107
Buchanan I, 2000 Deleuzism: A Metacommentary (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh)
Clough P, 2001 Auto-affection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Technology (University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)
Colebrook C, 2001 Gilles Deleuze (Routledge, London)
Conley T, 1992, ``Michael de Certeau and the textual icon'' Diacritics 22 38 ^ 49
Deleuze G, 1983 Nietzsche and Philosophy translated by H Tomlinson (Athlone Press, London);
first published 1962
Deleuze G, 1986 Cinema 1: The Movement Image (Athlone Press, London); first published 1983
Deleuze G, 1988 Bergonism translated by H Tomlinson, B Habberism (Zone Books, New York);
first published 1966
Deleuze G, 1989 Cinema 2: The Time-image translated by H Tomlinson, R Galeta (Athlone Press,
London); first published 1985
Deleuze G, 1990 The Logic of Sense translated by M Lester with C Stivale (Athlone Press, London);
first published 1969
Deleuze G, 1991 Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature
translated by C Boundas (Columbia University Press, New York); first published 1953
Deleuze G, 1993 The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque translated by T Conley (Athlone Press, London)
Deleuze G, 1994 Difference and Repetition translated by P Patton (Athlone Press, London); first
published 1968
Deleuze G, 1995 Negotiations: 1972 ^ 1990 translated by M Joughin (Columbia University Press,
New York); first published 1990
Deleuze G, 1997, ``Immanence: a life ...'' Theory, Culture and Society 14(2) 3 ^ 7
Deleuze G, 2001 Pure Immanence (Zone Books, New York)
Deleuze G, Guattari F, 1984 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia translated by R Hurley,
M Seem, H Lane (Athlone Press, London); first published 1973
Deleuze G, Guattari F, 1994 What is Philosophy? translated by H Tomlinson, G Burchell (Verso,
London); first published 1991
Deleuze G, Parnet C, 1987 Dialogues translated by H Tomlinson, B Habberjam (Athlone Press,
London)
de Man P, 1986 The Rhetoric of Romanticism (Columbia University Press, New York)

1932

J-D Dewsbury

Dewsbury J D, 2000, ``Performativity and the event: enacting a philosophy of difference''

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 473 ^ 479
Doel M, 1999 Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science (Edinburgh
University Press, Edinburgh)
Duttmann A G, 2001, ``Never before, always already: notes on Agamben and the category of
relation'' Angelaki 6 3 ^ 6
Foucault M, 1997 Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Essential Works of Foucault
1954 ^ 1984 Volume 1 translated by R Hurley (The New Press, New York)
Foucault M, 1998 Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of
Foucault 1954 ^ 1984 Volume 2 translated by R Hurley (The New Press, New York)
Goodchild P, 1996 Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (Sage, London)
Gordon A, 1997 Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)
Hayden P, 1995, ``From relations to practice in the empiricism of Gilles Deleuze'' Man and World:
An International Philosophical Review 28 283 ^ 302
Hayden P, 1998 Multiplicity and Becoming: The Pluralist Empiricism of Gilles Deleuze (Peter Lang,
New York)
Heathfield A, 2000, ``Out of sightforced entertainment and the limits of vision'', in Void Spaces
Eds H Glendinning, T Etchells (Site Gallery, Sheffield) pp 20 ^ 23
Heller-Roazen D, 1999, ``Editor's introduction'', in Potentialities Ed. G Agamben (Stanford
University Press, Stanford, CA) pp 1 ^ 23
Irigaray I, 1993 An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Cornell University Pres, Ithaca, NY)
Lash S, 1999 Another Modernity: A Different Rationality (Blackwells, Oxford)
Law J, 2001, ``Economics as interference'', in Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial
Life Eds P du Gay, M Pryke (Sage, London)
Law J, Mol A, 2001, ``Situating technoscience: an inquiry into spatialities'' Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 19 609 ^ 621
Lyotard J-F, 1988 The Differend: Phrases in Dispute translated by G Van Den Abbeele (University
of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN)
Lyotard J-F, 1991 Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (Columbia University Press, New York)
Lyotard J-F, 1997 Post-modern Fables (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)
Massumi B, 1997, ``Which came first? The individual or society? Which is the chicken and which
is the egg?: the political economy of belonging and the logic of relation'', in Anybody
Ed. C Davidson (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) pp 174 ^ 189
Massumi B (Ed.), 2001 A Shock to Thought (Routledge, London)
Phelan P, 1993 Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge, London)
Phelan P, 1997 Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (Routledge, London)
Phelan P, 1999, ``Performances of `Death in America' '', in Performing the Body/Performing the
Text Eds A Jones, A Stephenson (Routledge, London)
Phelan P, 2000, ``Love's geography'' Performance Research 5(3) 86 ^ 89
Rajchman J, 2000 The Deleuze Connections (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA)
Rajchman J, 2001, ``Foreword'', in Pure Immanence G Deleuze (Zone Books, New York) pp 7 ^ 23
Rodowick D N, 2001 Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Duke University
Press, Durham, NC)
Smith D, 1998, ``Introduction `A Life of Pure Immanence'', in Critical and Clinical G Deleuze
(Verso, London) pp xi ^ liii
Taylor C, 2001, ``To follow a rule ...?'', in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader Ed. R Shusterman (Blackwell,
Oxford) pp 29 ^ 44
Thrift N, 1998, ``Steps to an ecology of place'', in Human Geography Today Eds D Massey, J Allen,
P Sarre (Polity Press, Cambridge) pp 220 ^ 243
Thrift N, 2000, ``Afterwords'' Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 213 ^ 255
Tokarczuk O, 2000, ``The Hotel Capital '' Granta 72 33 ^ 54
Varela F J, 1999 Ethical Know-how: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition (Stanford University Press,
Stanford, CA)
Wall T C, 1999 Radical Passivity (State University of New York Press, Albany, NY)
Widdowfield R, 2000, ``The place of emotions in academic research'' Area 32 199 ^ 208
Wittgenstein L, 1967 Philosophical Investigations (Basil Blackwell, Oxford)

2003 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain