This paper is connected with a particular event, the death of my father. I feel a need to write the event and yet, as I make clear in this paper, I am not at all sure that this is what I want to do. In a sense, I believe that this writing down is a part of the problem. I do not want to take over my father's being by making him into fodder for yet more interpretation, by colonising his traces.Why? Because my father was a good man who did a lot of good; more than most, I suspect. Almost nothing that he ever did was written down and whereas I once would have seen this as a problem I now think that putting his life in order through text, in order to rescue him from the enormous condescension of posterity, may, in certain senses, be just another form of condescension. I am not sure, in other words, that he needs writing down, or, put in another way, we need a form of writing that can disclose and value his legacyöthe somatic currency of body stances he passed on, the small sayings and large generosities, and, in general, his stance to the worldöin such a way as to make it less important for him to be written.As I work up a nonrepresentationalist style of work that I hope can describe and value this legacy, this thought is constantly at the back of my mind.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 asöwith a few exceptions ömost 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 ödanceöas illustration of some of the steps I have traced out. Some tentative conclusions follow.
