Afterwords

Abstract

Gradually, then, it has become clear to me what I am trying to do. I want to provide a body of work which values creative praxis. This will not be easy as—with a few exceptions—most academics nowadays still tend towards impoverished views of praxis which leave remarkably little room for creative exorbitance. Thus, for example, many modern social and cultural theorists would find it difficult to understand the import of Wittgenstein's famous question, “what remains over from the fact that I raise my arm when I subtract the fact that my arm goes up?” In effect, what I attempt to provide is the beginnings of an answer to this question. In the first part of the paper I am therefore concerned with an account of a style of thinking which I call nonrepresentationalist. In the second part of the paper I then broaden the discourse by considering the ways in which this style of work might be linked to other developments in the social sciences and humanities grouped around the notion and the motion of performance. In the third part I consider one particular mode of performance—dance—as illustration of some of the steps I have traced out. Some tentative conclusions follow.