'[3] Instead of studying and representing social relationships, non-representational theory focuses upon practices – how human and nonhuman formations are enacted or performed – not simply on what is produced.
[4] "First, it valorizes those processes that operate before … conscious, reflective thought … [and] second, it insists on the necessity of not prioritizing representations as the primary epistemological vehicles through which knowledge is extracted from the world".
[12] This is a post-structuralist theory inspired in part by the ideas of the physicist-philosopher Niels Bohr,[13][14][15] and thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour, Michel Serres and Karen Barad, and by phenomenonologists such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
[16] More recently it considers views from political science (including ideas about radical democracy) and anthropological discussions of the material dimensions of human life.
Richard G. Smith said that Baudrillard's work could be considered a "non-representational theory", for example,[16] which has fostered some debate.