Baudrillard's nonrepresentational theory: burn the signs and journey without maps

Can we burn the signs and journey without maps? In other words, can we travel from representational theories, through Baudrillard's critique of representation, to forms of theory that are somehow nonrepresentational? In this paper I hijack and go beyond Baudrillard's concepts of the precession and orders of simulacra to illustrate two main things: first, how the history of geographical thought has been one of representational theory, where there was seen to be a relationship, and then commutation, of theory and the real world; second, how representational theories are perhaps out of tune, unable to explain adequately, or change, our digital and commodity ^ sign soaked culture of simulacra, simulations, and reproductions. Overall, I attempt to show clearly how, through his poststructuralist critique of representation, Baudrillard is challenging us to rethink theory as doubly nonrepresentational. DOI:10.1068/d280t (1) Structuralist thought extends the Saussurean tradition of analysing conventional signs, where all of human culture, including the real, is viewed as mediated by signs. In contrast, the Peircean and North American tradition does not exclude `natural' signs and studies both anthroposemiotics and zoosemiotics. This other tradition has influenced writers such as Deleuze and may provide a direction and inspiration for Thrift's development of what he calls nonrepresentational theory. `̀ ... get away from Cartesian intellectualism, with its understanding of being as a belief system implicit in the minds of individual subjects, and return to an understanding of being as `the social with which we are in contact by the mere fact of existing and which we carry with us inseparably before any objectifications' '' (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, page 362). In other words, although sometimes we frame representations, sometimes we do not (our actions are unformulated if sensitive to our situation and goals), and so an understanding of the subject in practice is, Thrift contends, fundamental to the makingöthat is, performanceöof human geographies. Furthermore, Thrift argues that we need to be aware of practical intelligibility and inarticulate understanding precisely because they form the background through which the representations we make become comprehensible. In short, the outcome of Thrift's critique of representation is that the emphasis of human geography should be on practicesöeither on their reproduction (stable repetitions), or on the production of new practices (perhaps inspired improvisations)öbecause it is practices (performances using materials to hand) rather than representations that are at the root of the geographies that humans make every day. It is this emphasis on practicesöthrough processöthat has led Thrift to ideas about performance and to an interest in research on such practices as dancing. However, although Thrift's ideas about nonrepresentational theory are certainly interesting (but should not Thrift's ideas really be called antirepresentational? how are Thrift's ideas `nonrepresentational' exactly?) they are not what this paper is about. This paper is not an attempt to contribute to, or align the thinking of Baudrillard with, what at the moment is being called `nonrepresentational theory'. In other words, I am not trying to bind Baudrillard into a future `nonrepresentational turn' that is centred upon practices and the background. What I am arguing in this paper is that there are other quite different ideas that you might, perhaps more obviously, call `nonrepresentational theory'. Indeed, I thought about giving this paper the title `nonrepresentational theories' because surely there are poststructuralist ideasöthose of Baudrillard, for exampleöthat could be called `nonrepresentational'. Thus, I will try to show in this paper how Baudrillard's ideas play themselves out if you are thinking about how theory might be somehow nonrepresentational. I will argue that Baudrillard's critique of representation (whether you agree with it, or not) has an end logic that pushes one towards the idea of developing a form of theorising that is nonrepresentational and that is a quite different form of nonrepresentational theory to anything that Thrift is writing about. In short, what I will try to make clear here is that what you might call `nonrepresentational theory' is contentious and Thrift's nonrepresentational theory is certainly not the only form of theory that you might call `nonrepresentational'. In the grand tradition of social theory, Thrift has been trying to convince us that a whole set of famous thinkers can be brought into the fold of his nonrepresentational theory. Thrift (1999, page 303) has produced a diagram of what he calls ``the life-time-lines of non-representational theory'', where he lists, labels, and lumps together all sorts of people: Mead, Goffman, Blumer, Garfinkel, Husserl, Bergson, Bachelard, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, de Certeau, Deleuze, Foucault, Irigaray, Bourdieu, Giddens, Bakhtin, Vgotsky, Shotter, Haraway, Butler, Game, Grosz, Latour, and Law. Now, my observation from this list is simply that in developing his style of nonrepresentational theory Thrift has deliberately missed out several distinguished poststructuralists (such as Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Derrida)(2) (2) Thrift (1996) has written about poststructuralism and its influence on his nonrepresentational theory. He labels Derrida's and Lyotard's projects as problematic in that they are `representational ^ referential', and contrasts these with Foucault's and Deleuze's (and Guattari's) projects, with which he largely agrees, and regards as `nonrepresentational ^ practical'. This explains Thrift's 68 R G Smith