Exposition

Letting NOTHING do itself (last edited: 2022)

Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano, Mark Douglas Edmund Price

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


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1516672 Dap.Tuk ELB2022 CC BY-NC-ND
1554282 DAPTUK_step2 ELB2022 CC BY-NC-ND
1582167 Elisabeth Laasonen BELGRANO Elisabeth Laasonen BELGRANO CC BY-NC-ND
1608057 GOTHENBURGLONGVERSION2WAV ELB2022 CC BY-NC-ND
1668724 LNDI_GU_2022 ELB2022 CC BY-NC-ND

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