Exposition

Letting NOTHING do itself (last edited: 2022)

Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano, Mark Douglas Edmund Price
open exposition

About this exposition

Western thought emphasises rival schools winning or losing debates: it speaks of knock-down arguments, fatal inconsistencies, of destroying, attacking, and defending positions. 'Philosophical triumph' is a sublimated mode of WOUNDING and SHAMING any opposition. The ancient Greeks used the word aischuné to talk of an opponent being 'put to shame' – a feminine noun. The 'loser' of an argument is (dis-)figured as less rational, less human. Their Otherness is amplified until they capitulate. Canonical references to thinkers as midwives, nurses, or mothers of ideas are rare: such metaphors imply intimate co-operation and the fleshy, impure materiality of thought. Yet attempts to vanquish the canonical masculine-dominator style of thought with some version of a non-wounding, compassionate mode of thinking readily mimic the power-structures and gender-binaries they seek to oppose. This 'war-model of thought' is ultimately nihilistic – it characterises differences as antitheses, then seeks to destroy the 'opposition'. Such is the problem we seek to address. During the last two years we have explored philosophical, theological, and aesthetic issues via a praxis-led 'Ornamentation' method. Starting from NOTHING, we allow elements which seem meaningless in themselves to ‘flash up’ (Barad 2017), entangle through intra-action, accumulating and complexifying the material 'on its own terms', becoming poetic, scholastic and ecstatic. Unknown to one-another, neither contributor has any 'territory' or 'position' to attack or defend. This is not a dialogue, a dialectic, nor even 'two persons making something together'. It is a trans-human performance, a method for allowing the space and material between the contributors to “endlessly open [...] to a variety of possible and impossible reconfigurings” (Hinton 2013:182); “blasting, bursting open, and scattering […] to effect a complete reorganization of meaning” (Barad 2017:41); becoming a/live environment - an ecology in which the world can create itself.
typeresearch exposition
keywordsNothing, Ornamentation, performance, Phiilosophy, Theology, Aesthetics, Mystics
date04/02/2022
last modified31/10/2022
statusin progress
share statuspublic
copyrightELB2022
licenseCC BY-NC-ND
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1516617/1516618


Copyrights

nameDap.Tuk
copyrightELB2022
licenseCC BY-NC-ND
usagesaudio
nameDAPTUK_step2
copyrightELB2022
licenseCC BY-NC-ND
usagesaudio
nameElisabeth Laasonen BELGRANO
copyrightElisabeth Laasonen BELGRANO
licenseCC BY-NC-ND
usagespicture
nameGOTHENBURGLONGVERSION2WAV
copyrightELB2022
licenseCC BY-NC-ND
usagesaudio

Comments are only available for registered users.