ABSTRACT
We are not good at thinking movement. Our institutional skills favour the fixed and static, the separate and self-contained. Taxonomies, hierarchies, systems and structure represent the instinctive vocabulary of institutionalized thought in its subordinating of movement and transformation. The philosopher Whitehead (1925) called this the principle of simple location in which clear-cut, definite things occupy clear-cut, definite places in space and time. There is movement-of a kind: the simple movement of definite things from one definite place to another. But it’s a form of movement which denies the restlessness of transformation, deformation and reformation. Simple location reconstitutes a world of finished subjects and objects from the flux and flow of unfinished, heteromorphic ‘organisms’ (Whitehead, 1925). For Whitehead, movement resides in the infinite flow of ‘mutual relatedness’ where mutuality is not a property common to individual terms but an ambiguous space that lies between terms and which resists resolution and identification. Mutuality tells us that betweenness is mute, mutable and motile; it eludes placement and location in the useful and usable scheme of utilitarian things. Movement, then, comes in two forms: the movement of things in locatable space so that one is able to think and speak them (i.e. locate, from the Latin loguor, to say, tell, indicate), and where to place (i.e. locate) means to placate, please (Latin placere, to satisfy, be agreeable, resolve); the movement of the mute and mutable which cannot be spoken because its radical elasticity cannot be limited and thus located. So we might say that strategies of locating and placing are ways of forcing the mute to speak, of disciplining the wildness of mutability.
