This is where Ahmed is useful, because she herself is interested in those moments of orientation, moments in which the world, its objects, and its others try to orient us—and fail. What happens to the body that refuses the orientations laid out for it? Ahmed torques the metaphor of Husserl’s table:

 

The hope that reproduction fails is the hope for new impressions, for new lines to emerge, new objects, or even new bodies, which gather, in gathering around this table. The “new” would not involve the loss of the background. Indeed, for bodies to arrive in spaces where they are not already at home, where they are not in “place,” involves hard work; indeed, it involves painstaking labor for bodies to inhabit spaces that do not extend their shape. Having arrived, such bodies in turn might acquire new shapes. And spaces in turn acquire new bodies. So, yes, we should celebrate such arrivals. The “new” is what is possible when what is behind us, our background, does not simply ground us or keep us in place, but allows us to move and allows us to follow something other than the lines that we have already taken. (Queer 62)

 

We surely want our composing technologies to help us move, to allow us to “follow something other than the lines” already laid down. But to do so, we need to know how those objects already orient us along particular trajectories—and why.