Imprecise geometries

A body encounters its memories on the outside. Proceedings are other bodies constantly reminding you of what you can do, which other bodies and territories you can connect to. Time is pure difference (Deleuze, 1990; May, 1996). It is not only the compacted bodily memory, but it is the instantiation of the throwing together of bodies in a sociability. 'What can a body do?' It might seem as if every time we face this question we face a recuperation into the strata. I f bodies are machines, if machines distribute bodies - if a bodily memory is the sedimentation of a body's repetitive extension and connection with other bodies, its imbrication in the machine - then how might a body increase its affects? I f the sociability of the body is its subjection, then what hope do we have? Well, strangely enough, the sociability of the body, as well as being the imposition of a death sentence, is also precisely the means for the body to take flight. Every encounter brings together a whole memory of capabilities of the bodies involved. But as

Bourdieu (1977) reminded us, the outcome of an encounter is never certain until it has been completed. For Deleuze and Guattari (1988), every encounter is the actualisation of a particular potential. An encounter is characterised not ju s t by what relations were connected (actualised), but the ones that could have been but were not (potential). Just as every body is an envelopment of difference (its extension and connection to a m ultiplicity; in fact, the body's very m ultiplicity), so an event is also an envelopment of difference. Out of the pressing crowd of potential outcomes, only one was selected and actualised (Watson, 1998; Dewsbury, 2000). But, the potential forces, the external relations immanent to the actualised event, still constitute that event. They are the event's outside, its other possibilities of becoming that make the actualised outcome so poignant, so joyous, so painful. To meet a stranger and to encounter their prejudice is painful because immanent to this encounter is the potential of meeting a stranger and making an untrammelled connection, falling in love.

Memory - what is brought to the encounter, what is encountered - is not a finite set of capabilities. To say that memory is encountered is to say that it is potential. This is also to assert the exteriority of the relations between bodies; the exteriority of bodies, of memory. Perhaps this might be clearer if we merely concentrate on capabilities. Following Merleau-Ponty and Michel Serres, Massumi (1997) takes a game of football and merely looks at what allows things to happen. The action on the field, the flow of the game, is not a mere result of the rules of the game or the sum of the decisions of the individual players, no matter how good they are. Rather, the flow of the game emerges from of the relations between its elements - players and their capabilities (bodily memory), ball, weather and rules. It is the arraying of the play - the distribution of each of the teams across the pitch; the position of the ball; the relation of these to each other and to the goals etc. - what is happening in-between all these elements, and the emergent, what could be ju s t about to happen, potential that determines the play. Michael Owen does not make a particular run

unless the rest of the elements are in a fortuitous relation to him. It is the relations, given the situation, of how things could affect each other - the 'field of potential' (or 'virtual' field) - that is the momentum for change. Modifications of the 'field of potential', which continually happen on the actual field, is the 'subject'. As actual events affect the field of potential, so the changes in the field of potential (re)constitute the actual through defining what it could become. What a body can do, then, is the exteriority of its relations. A body is forever becoming as it constantly comes into new relations with a re-arrayed outside. Its organs are remade, always different, as constitutive relations are made anew. The question then becomes how is it that organs persist or exist at all (Dewsbury, 2000); and we have already seen something of how memory, how the potential of bodies, is restricted, is clamped down. Here there is a line to be carefully trodden, between, on the one hand, bodies as produced effects, constantly reinserted into structures of power, and, on the other hand, bodies constantly deterritorialising and becoming-different. Bodies are not ju s t effects in assemblages (Thrift, 1997), but rather are elusory (Radley, 1995). That is, bodies have the capacity to configure relations as well as becoming produced by a combination of forces and materials. Again, this resonates with the Deleuzian idea of bodies as the active instantiation of machines. Bodies can improvise creatively. Moreover, there are unintended consequences to their actions. Mistakes are a commonplace in everyday life. And the messiness of bodies arguing further belies the possibilities of their determination (Thrift, 1997).

Our bodies are central to our becoming-different, but this becoming- different can only occur through our bodies' practical engagement in the world. Thrift (1996; 1997) borrows Merleau-Ponty's idea of the flesh, a dynamic interleaving of the body and the world, to gesture towards the nature of our practical involvement with others and objects. Our bodies transform as they connect to other bodies in the world, transforming those other bodies too. Together, these bodies

work together, forming a prehension (a grasping between hand and tool, one human and another) but this assembling is a process, an event. It has to be acted out. Our bodily senses develop and transform as our bodies become connected with others. Bodies affect one another, becoming expressive in the process, deploying imaginary sensory distinctions, for instance in "the way a dancer touches her partner with a lightness that signifies (that is opens or invites) gentleness rather than distance" (Radley, 1995: 15).

The body is a verb, an activity. The body is eventful. It might be part of an assemblage, but these dynamic connectivities are made and practised (Dewsbury, 2000). Our performative actions construct the world, but they are the art of the live, the art of now (Thrift, 2000: 233). The performative unfolds the next moment allowing change to happen (Dewsbury, 2000: 475). Performative action gathers in heterogeneous substantial elements, constituted abstractions, and other forces, and produces something new out of them (Dewsbury, 2000: 490). We measure out our time (Chronos), organising it as an expectation of what we expect to come. A bodily memory of a prehension is encountered as we arrange our actions in response to those of others around us. As each body participates in this incessant arrangement, each attempting to anticipate the actions of the other, the time between them comes to be ordered, an ordering of their (inter-)actions. Yet, the very incessant nature of tim e, its flow (Aion)

constantly disrupts this unfolding order, opening up other potentials of what might have been (Dewsbury, 2000; Foucault, 1977)

The reproduction of order, of structure, of the Other, then, is not assured, because events are always unfolding (Thrift, 2000: 216, after Phelan, 1993). Again, we return to the question of how structures, organisation, and the Other become reproduced. It is the eventfulness of the performative actions by which we live our lives that necessitates a 'm odest' theoretical approach (Thrift, 1996; 1997) to the political and the social. It is time as the flow of a pure and constant differentiation

{Aion) that ensures that the distribution of inequality, unfairness and hierarchy is a process. We constantly re-enact our hierarchies day by day in our practices. Whether these practices are those of the multitude of employers and employees, customers and suppliers that combine to make a multi-national corporation work; or whether these practices enact the more diffuse or informal institutions that inflect our everyday interactions, the eventfulness of these practices guarantees the mutation of these structures. A structure of power comprises a multiplicity of local relationships of force (Foucault, 1979). These relationships constantly rearrange themselves, expressing the forever shifting balance between the strategies by which technologies of control are brought to bear, and the tactics deployed to resist them. The tactics used to resist or negotiate with institutionalised modes of

power are forever proliferating. Moreover, heterogeneous elements forever find new ways to relate themselves. To adapt to these constantly emerging challenges - tactics and desire - structures of power are required to perpetually renew themselves.

A 'm odest' theory concerns itself with precisely this process of distribution of inequaiity, unfairness and hierarchy. Such theoreticai approaches do not subscribe to the inevitability of any particular form of structure or theory of exploitation. Neither, however, does it deny such processes as exploitation. Rather, it understands them precisely as processes, processes that are practised and that admit change. While taking a modest theoretical approach, one can still be cognisant of structures or hierarchies previously encountered and previously theorised. Yet, one cannot take these structures or hierarchies as given. The cognisance of these structures and hierarchies must be used only in the process of getting to grips with what is going on here and now. So, rather than commit to the inevitability of an already proscribed process, we shouid look to how we enact these hierarchies day by day. Such an approach opens up our political understanding to how we change, develop and deepen the mechanisms by which populations of bodies become unequally distributed and related. By

insinuating itself into the constant eventfulness of practice, however, such an approach also opens up a potential for a politics and a mode of living that moves beyond these particular inequalities.

One way to become political, then, is to create an ethics that supersedes particular machinic relations producing bodies and their capacities for action and affect. But, how to act ethically? Buchanan (1997) says it's all about health. To be healthy is maximise the body's affects, its capacities to affect and be affected. 'W hat can a body do?', not 'what is a body?' Attending to the health of the body is to make relations that further maximise the new relations that the body can make. Don't look for a return (to a homeland, to an origin). Don't try to think what a body is (male, female, white, black, sexy, unsexy). All this achieves is to relocate the body in a grid of identification, in a machinery of subjection, of violence, of telling bodies that they can't do this, they can't do that. Instead, think with an and: link up, connect unexpectedly, open up onto the multiplicity between us.

Be friendly says Goodchild (1997). Be open. Open up your body, extend it. Supersede either/or and head out onto the exciting plane of and ... and ...and ....To detorritorialise is not ju s t to leave a territory. It is to react back on that territory, to effect a decomposition. A territory is substantial. It brings together certain relations; it is a selection of these relations. A useful deterritorialisation breaks down the enforcement of quantitative space; it brings a connective ethics closer. So don't ju st make any old connections. Certain connections are better to be made than others. Heed Buchanan's warning: certain connections should carry a government health warning. Literally. Anorexics flee from a certain machinic connection of organs to food (a repetitive relation). But their line of flight does not push the limits of the body - death - further away (Buchanan, 1997). A pure intensity, a connection to the body-without-organs, but to the exclusion of other connections.

A useful politics is not always about jumping into the abyss. Sometimes death is the only political option. Gilroy (1993) recalls the suicide of slaves: death presented a more promising political option than a life lived as a slave. Being a slave was hardly being alive, anyway: it was merely having being, for only the Master had consciousness, knowledge of his own life. In the long run, however, the tyranny of the opposition between knowledge and being needs to be broken. Gilroy invokes Foucault's recognition that both knowledge and experience are constituted by machineries of power. Experience has been constructed as the way we come to recognise ourselves (Skeggs,

1997). It is a political act to insinuate oneself into this very constitution, to question it and challenge it at every step of the way: "The critical ontology of ourselves ... has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them " (Foucault, 1984: 50).

This is already beyond mere bodies and pleasure, yet does not recuperate us back to desire as already constituted, as constituted as bodies (Butler, 1999). Rather, it is drawing a map as a nomadic becoming (Braidotti, 1994). Some mappings might end up being a naming and conquering, an instrument of colonialism. A nomad, on the other hand, never stays long enough in one place to conquer. Nomadism is making connections to a place and moving on. It is about forever redrawing the map, the map as the cutting edge of deterritorialisation. This is not a precise geometry. Yet, a useful map also shows where you have been: this is the measure of your deterritorialisation. Freedom does not abandon the organicised body completely, but reconstitutes it, extending its capabilities (Watson,

Chapter 3