This paper is anchored in an interdisciplinary research project called Living Archives. The thoughts emerge directly from artistic and philosophical research into performance, archiving and mobile technologies, but rather than discuss the content and methods of a particular research project the topics of value and knowledge are handled more experimentally by means of a triangulation of somatic practices, William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), and the novel by Don DeLillo entitled The Body Artist (2001). The peculiar tensions between a current bodily practice, an early 20th century formulation of ambiguity from literary criticism that informed early approaches to encryption, and a contemporary work of fiction permit a more fluid set of questions to emerge. Two orientations to the topic of transvaluation are offered: a slippage between internal and external, and the affective power of ambiguity as a constructive or destructive force.

somatic; affect; ambiguity; archiving; immanence; value