ABSTRACT
If we are to follow Michael Billig’s lead in our inquiries into how our own human capacity to think works , and how we come to develop such a capacity in the fi rst place, we must move from thinking in static forms to thinking in terms of our dynamic involvements out in the world with the others and othernesses around us. We must change our attitudes, our orientations, what we focus on and pick out for further study, the ways in which we relate ourselves to our surroundings as we live our lives and move around within them. We must allow the fact of our immersion in an unending fl ow of complicated activity continually going on around us to play a part in determining what and who we are to ourselves. We cannot continue with what seems to be the mass illusion of our time, that single individual persons are already fi nished wholes unto themselves, and that at best we construct relations with the few others around us, whilst we forget that our ways of being, our styles of thought and talk, our values and what we care about (Frankfurt, 1998), and much more, that all emerge from the dynamic intermingling of strands of fl owing activity within which we are already immersed.
