Paul Fraser Harrison

Making Sense: Embodiment and the Sensibilities of the Everyday

Recently social analysis has turned its attention to ‘the body’. In this paper the author considers the implications of such a turn for social analysis itself. The main discussion of the paper concerns the indeterminate or ‘elusory’ nature of embodiment and its productive relation to ‘sense making’ in everyday life and contemplative thought. The author examines how these aspects of embodiment have been marginalised within social analysis and the effects of this marginalisation in understandings of subjectification. Describing the processes of subjectification in terms of ‘habit’ and ‘style’, the author suggests that the disclosive and performative in the everyday have been ignored in favour of a search for the foundations of the everyday and the subject. An argument is put forward for the groundlessness of being in terms of its potential to be otherwise. The above discussions are described in terms of the ability of collectives to make sense from the fleeting and ephemeral feelings and experiences of everyday on-going comportment. Finally it is suggested that through a consideration of the performative, collective, and material nature of embodiment contemplations of everyday life should be understood in terms of enaction and immanence.

'How shall I say it...?' : relating the nonrelational.

As the ideas of the relational and relationality become part of the everyday conceptual make-up of human geography, in this paper I seek to recall the insistent and incessant importance of the nonrelational. In dialogue with nonrepresentational theory, as well as its critics, I suggest that any thought or theory of relationality must have as its acknowledged occasion the incessant proximity of the nonrelational. The occasion for this discussion is a consideration of the relationship between suffering, pain, or passion and the thematising actions of representation, communication, narrativisation, and theorisation. Such affections, it is claimed, present social science with a particular problem, a problem which revolves around an irreducible nonthematisability within these dimensions of corporeal existence. Drawing on the writings of Butler, Derrida, and Levinas I offer an account of how this problem or impasse allows for a rethinking of the ethical within social analysis and of the nature of representation, corporeality, and intersubjectivity.

Corporeal Remains: Vulnerability, Proximity, and Living on after the End of the World

This paper offers a sustained reflection on the nature of corporeal vulnerability as an inherent and noneliminable aspect of corporeal existence. One of the many remarkable things about the recent interest in embodiment, emotion, practice, and performance, in the body-in-action, in the social sciences is the general lack of thought that has been given to the fact of vulnerability. The paper suggests that thinking through the nature of vulnerability could have a considerable effect on how we think about embodiment as well as on wider processes of subjectification, signification, and sociality. However, because of the persistence of a primary role being given to intentional or auto-affective action in the theorisation of embodiment across a number of theoretical perspectives, vulnerability remains largely unthought of within much current work on the body within Anglo-American social science. Drawing on the writing of Emmanuel Levinas and reflecting on experiences of corporeal expropriation such as insomnia and exhaustion, I suggest how we may begin to think sensibility and the sensuous beyond their almost exclusive interpretation in terms of comprehension, purpose, or intention while retaining the irreducibility of corporeal life to a matter of social construction or contextual epiphenomenon. Thus, the paper develops an account of corporeal life as inherently susceptible, receptive, exposed, as inherently open beyond its capacities, and reflects on the implications of this realisation for thinking about the genesis of meaning and signification and the social relation.

The Space between Us: Opening Remarks on the Concept of Dwelling

Somewhat surprisingly the concept of dwelling remains largely unconsidered within contemporary geographical thought. Despite signs of a renewed interest in the term it remains all but bereft of a sustained critical appraisal and as a consequence firmly tied to the name and writing of Martin Heidegger. The aim of this paper is to begin to open the concept up beyond this attachment and to provide a rationale for its reassessment. Through a double reading of dwelling, once via Heidegger and again via Emmanuel Levinas, I offer a twofold consideration of how the concept can be assembled, orientated, and organised. Where Heidegger organises and articulates the concept around an enclosed figure being-at-home-in-the-world for Levinas dwelling gains its significance from a constitutive openness to the incoming of the other. These are two accounts, then, which differ radically in their apprehension of the concept and in the unfolding of its implications but which agree on the central importance of the concept in the determination, figuring, and phrasing of subjectivity, sociality, and signification. Ultimately, what emerges from these opening remarks is a depiction of two attempts to make thought respond to and reckon with the event of space: two attempts to bring to thought the space between us.

In the absence of practice.

Increasingly the focus of social analysis and explanation is falling upon doings, on actions and practices, insofar as they are understood to be the origin rather than the effect of signification and meaning. This paper offers a sympathetic critique of such ‘ontologisation’ of practice, asking what is presumed about the human and the social when practice is taken as the primary social ‘thing’. The critique works by outlining, somewhat tentatively, a ‘phenomenology’ of dreamless sleep; a situation and a state in which a subject cannot be said to be doing anything at all. The figures that will be discussed below lie flat out; for the moment they have no bearing or gait, no focused or dispersed attention, no reflexive, deliberative or tacit understanding. This discussion is developed through a reading of Tim Ingolds (2000) landmark essay “The temporality of the landscape” (in The Perception of the Environment Routledge), here taken as exemplary of a broad range of practice based approaches. While looking specifically at issues around skill, place, and sociality, the overarching claim of the paper is that thinking about sleep and about being a being which sleeps provides a way of touching on the susceptibility and finitude of corporeal existence. A susceptibility and a finitude which, I suggest, are the very condition of possibility of practice and action.

The Caesura: remarks on Wittgenstein’s interruption of theory, or, why practices elude explanation

This paper aims to bring the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein into contact with the growing interest and concerns over the status of practice, performance and non-representational ‘theory’ within human geography. Drawing predominantly on Wittgenstein’s later work, the aim is to use Wittgenstein’s comments to illuminate how certain presuppositions and idealisations over the nature of understanding and meaning are or have been built into our (social scientific) modes and methods of explanation. Thus Wittgenstein’s work is used as a diagnosis––a diagnosis of how the modus operandi of giving an explanation can, and often does, prevent us from acknowledging the practical and the performative, from witnessing the taking-place of meaning and understanding. The paper carries out this task by focusing first on Wittgenstein’s critique of the role of ‘rules’ and ‘rule-following’ in the construction of social scientific accounts and secondly, through a consideration of the implications of Wittgenstein’s ‘scenic’ style of writing through which he attempts to deconstruct the epistemo-methodological idealisations and representationalist desires of social analysis. The claim here is not that Wittgenstein’s work provides the solution to the problematics which confront us in considering the status (or otherwise) of practice, but rather that his work may provide us with other ways of going-on, ones more sensitive to the eventful, creative, excessive and distinctly uncertain realms of action.

After Affirmation, or, Being a Loser: On Vitalism, Sacrifice, and Cinders

What could it mean to hesitate before life? To be unwilling or unable to affirm existence? And who or what would suggest such a thing? What type of monster would embrace sadness over joy, despair over hope, failure over success? And yet this is what is proposed. This article starts from a suspicion, a suspicion that, contemporary claims to the contrary, life is not innocent, that any affirmation always contains a disavowal, and that we are, whether we like it or not, always bound up in structures of sacrifice. More formally, the claim will be that with the maturation of Nietzsche’s legacy in the humanities and social sciences, and the rise of new forms of vitalism, a new conception of life has taken root, one with far-reaching implications for thinking about politics, ethics, and existence as such; this is a rapidly unfolding onto-bio-political framework. The article offers an alternative account, one in which life is always already involved with loss, always the life of survival, always life–death.

Quark and Lepton Evolution Invariants in the Standard Model

We construct a set of exact Standard Model renormalisation group evolution invariants which link quark masses and mixing parameters in a completely new way. We examine their phenomenological implications and infer a simple combination of Yukawa coupling matrices which appears to play a unique role in the Standard Model. This suggests a possible new insight into the observed spectrum of quark masses. Similar evolution invariants are obtained for the leptons in the case of Dirac neutrinos.