Non-Representational Theory (NRT)

In the following sections, an explanation of NRT and its properties is presented first, followed by an introduction to the key concepts of NRT, and finally criticisms associated with NRT.

3.6.1. What is NRT?

Non-Representational Theory (NRT) emerged from the innovations of non-representational thought, performances and practices developed by the counterculture of the 1960s (Rycroft, 2007). During the mid-1990s, Nigel Thrift (see Thrift, 1996; 2005; 2008) and associates (Dewsbury, 2000; 2003; Dewsbury et al., 2002; Wylie, 2005) developed NRT further. For

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Thrift (2008), NRT's interest lies in "the geography of what happens". This offers a descriptive "bare bones of actual occasions" (p. 2) with an accent on "how space and time emerge through embodied practice" (Macpherson, 2010, p. 1-2). The philosophical antecedents of NRT are located in the phenomenological traditions of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, the neovitalist approaches of Bergson, Foucault and Deleuze, and the poststructuralist perspectives of Butler and Haraway (Cadman, 2009; Macpherson, 2010; Vannini, 2015).

NRT provides researchers with a rich and eclectic set of resources to investigate the "more- than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds" (Lorimer, 2005, p. 83) that can be used to "unlock and animate new (human and nonhuman) potentialities" (Thrift & Dewsbury, 2000, p. 411). Researchers are encouraged to re-examine their reliance on representation through "social constructionist" accounts and move "away from a view of the world based on contemplative models of thought and action toward theories of practice which amplify the potential flow of events" (Thrift, 2000b, p. 556). That is not to say representation is not taken seriously, but rather NRT challenges us to view representation as a form of "presentation" (Dewsbury et al., 2002, p. 438), or something that is "more-than representational" (Lorimer, 2005).

3.6.2. Properties of NRT

NRT is not a theory and defies definition (Cadman, 2009; Waterton, 2013): it can be regarded as a "style of thinking" that places import upon praxis (Thrift, 2000a, p. 216), or even as a series of "tactical suggestions" (Dewsbury et al., 2002, p. 439). In his latest articulation of NRT, Thrift (2008) formulates his "hybrid genre for a hybrid world" (Vannini, 2015, p. 3) into seven core tenets (Thrift, 2008):

1. To "capture the 'onflow' ... of everyday life" (p. 5);

2. To be "resolutely anti-biographical and pre-individual" (p. 7); 3. To focus upon practices, performances and actions (p. 8); 4. To recognise the agency of human / non-human actants (p. 9); 5. To be experimental (p. 12);

6. To stress the importance of affect and sensation (p. 12); and 7. To incorporate formations ("poetics") of space (p. 15).

Designed to sharpen researchers' senses, these tenets enable them to "hear the world" and allow the world to "speak back" by developing techniques and ways of thinking that generate fresh ideas and opens up the imagination and sense of play (Thrift, 2008, pp. 18-20). NRT is

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challenging and, at times, oblique. For example, memory is often neglected or has a "ghostly presence", where its "close cousins" affect, emotion and imagination are privileged in the research and literature (Jones, 2011, p. 875). Where memory is entangled with emotion, affect is entwined with imagination and creativity (ibid.). It is a piece of "transgressive data" that is often unaccounted for (St. Pierre, 1997).

Nevertheless, NRT offers an "ideographic presentation of detailed descriptions gathered from a variety of sensitivities" (Hill et al., 2014, p. 384). For example, there are areas of daily life that are rarely valued, quickly forgotten or remain uncaptured by traditional research methods. These can be revived (Dewsbury, 2003), allowing for a new range of human and non-human actors to be examined (Anderson & Harrison, 2010).

3.6.3. Key Concepts in NRT

3.6.3.1. Affect

Affect is an important philosophical concept for NRT and more broadly in sociomaterial

approaches. It refers to the reciprocal capacity for bodies to affect and be affected, it is linked to the self-feeling of being alive - that is vitality (Cadman, 2009; Thrift, 2004). According to Nigel Thrift (2008), affect is regarded as those "energetic flows" or intensities that pass between bodies (human and non-human) in ways that generate some form of change (Hill et

al., 2014). The concept of affect encompasses passions, moods, feelings, and emotions, but it is

not defined by theories of emotion, though affect and emotion have been erroneously used interchangeably (Cadman, 2009; Hill et al., 2014). As Thompson and Hoggett (2012) explain:

Affect concerns the more embodied, unformed and less conscious dimension of human feeling, whereas emotion concerns the feelings which are more conscious since they are more anchored in language and meaning. (pp. 2-3)

For example, we can tell if someone is angry by how they look, walk, carry themselves, by the gestures they deploy, by the tension that may be visible in their bodies, all this we register before they even speak.

3.6.3.2. Atmosphere

Within the social sciences there is growing literature on the concept of atmosphere (Anderson, 2009; Bissell, 2010; Biehl-Missal & Saren, 2012; Adey et al., 2013; Anderson & Ash, 2015). In such work, this concept has opened new approaches for thinking towards and around the

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relationship between bodies and spaces in ways that attend to the often-taken-for-granted, and the implicit effects that encounters between human and non-human bodies can generate (Adey et al., 2013; Anderson & Ash, 2015). As Dyson (2009) notes:

[T]he atmospheric suggests a relationship not only with the body and its immediate space but with a permeable body integrated within, and subject to, a global system: one that combines the air we breathe, the weather we feel, the pulses and waves of the electromagnetic spectrum that subtends and enables technologies, old and new, and circulates ... in the excitable tissues of the heart. (p. 17)

Thus, atmosphere can be understood in a meteorological sense as "a turbulent zone of gaseous matter surrounding the earth and through the lower reaches of which human and non-human life moves". Atmosphere can also be understood in an affective sense as "something distributed yet palpable, a quality of environmental immersion that registers in and through sensing bodies while also remaining diffuse, in the air, ethereal" (McCormack, 2008, p. 413).

3.6.4. Criticisms of NRT

A major criticism of NRT is that it is an ambiguous concept, partly because of its complex ideas and partly because of its limited application in research (Vannini, 2015). Specifically, there are concerns around the notion of "non-representational" and how researchers "represent" something that is "fundamentally non-representable" (McCormack, 2002; Carolan, 2008). The issue arises when analytical attempts to explain non-representational phenomena "ultimately dies" (Carolan, 2008, p. 412). Scholars using NRT consider the term "more-than representational" as a suitable compromise (Lorimer, 2005).