ABSTRACT
In a recent review of ethics within geography Jeffery Popke (2009, 81) highlighted the diverse body of work that constitutes non-representational theory as an area which might offer ‘a different set of resources for considering matters of ethics and responsibility’. In particular, Popke (2009, 84) suggests that non-representational styles of thought speak to ‘a different kind of ethics, one that takes the form of an ethos rather than a morality or a set of principles grounded in universal norms or juridical constructs. Such an ethos works toward encounters that open us to a generous sensibility, one that might be capable of re-enlivening our affective engagements with others and fostering a heightened sense for what might be possible’. In this manner, non-representational theory is seen to orientate an ethics of performative dispositions, of practice and embodied judgement, creating an ‘ethics of enactment’ (McCormack 2005, 142), wherein moments of generosity and responsibility arise from within the unfolding of events (Thrift 2004a; Dewsbury 2000). The ethical impulses of non-representational thought have been most clearly articulated by Derek McCormack (2003) and Nigel Thrift (2003a, 2004a), in suggesting how an account of ethics might arise from ‘unreflective, lived, culturally specific, bodily reactions to events’ (Thrift 2000, 274). Here the negotiation of the immediate present provides a space not for the application of pre-given moral tenants, but for the emergence and cultivation of ethical sensibilities which value moments of generosity and open engagements with difference. Popke (2009, 84) though raises a question of this work, warning that ‘our ethical vision is likely to remain stunted if we limit ourselves to a consideration of the affective potentialities lurking within events and encounters, without also posing the broader question of how events and encounters become constituted as the locus of a shared sense of conviviality and solidarity’. In this chapter I want to take seriously this concern in order to
develop an account of non-representational ethics which arises from such a space of ‘conviviality and solidarity’.
