ABSTRACT
It’s the affirmation which gives the quote its force. The affirmation not just of one thing, one subject, one angle, but of many. And beyond this, an affirmation of life, of existence as such, as precarious, as active and as unforeseeable. We will move to a more traditional mode of introduction in a moment however for now let us stay with Foucault’s dream. What would ‘criticism’ have to be to be capable of all these things, of this affirmation and this potential? It seems to us that it would have to be itself multiple, itself composed out of many things. It would have to work out how to move differently, how to step from one topic to the next, one matter to the next, and initiate new ways of relating, walk new routes without tripping, (or at least not often). It would have to take risks, invent new terms, new tones, new objects. It would draw new maps. Perhaps most importantly, it would have to continue changing, not settle in the satisfaction of a judgment but keep experimenting. Further on in the interview from which the quote above comes, Foucault suggests that
It is our view that non-representational theories1 are best approached as a response to such a situation. If one single thing can be said to characterise nonrepresentational work in Human Geography over the past 15 years it is the attempt to invent new ways of addressing fundamental social scientific issues and, at the same time, displacing many of these issues into new areas and problems. In doing so we believe that it has multiplied ‘signs of existence’, helping to introduce all kinds of new actors, forces and entities into geographic accounts and, at the same time, aiding in the invention of new modes of writing and address and new styles of performing Geographic accounts. While the consistency of these attempts may sometimes be hard to see, an issue we will consider below, on a basic level what has linked this diverse body of work is a sense of affirmation and experimentation. In this we believe that they share the ethos of Foucault’s dream and, moreover, its invitation to do and think otherwise.
