Fiddling Nero

A Futile Exercise

Ideas are projectiles launched into time (Braidotti,2002)

…a shift in emphasis away from the propositional content of ideas to the charge, quality and degree of the intensity they express. This cannot fail to appeal to feminist theorists who have asserted the proximity between the thinking process, life and the lived experience. Feminism has contributed in fact to rethinking the living processes of existence, literally the spaces in between the mental and the physical, the theoretical and the experiential. Feminist philosophers (Lloyd, 1985) have also connected this shift to the task of overthrowing centuries-old dichotomies. It is this quest for overcoming dualism and reconnecting life and thought that forms the bottom line of a possible alliance between feminism and nomadic thinking: it is a joint commitment to re-thinking subjectivity as an intensive, multiple and discontinuous process of interrelations.

Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses, Polity, 2002, p.69.

Poetic licence operates like a hiatus an “agent provocateur”, a short circuit into the atrophy of a situation that finds itself in a state of political, social, confessional, ethnic, economic or military crisis or lethargy. Through the absurd and sometimes impertinent nature of the poetic act, art provokes a moment of suspended meaning, a sensation of senselessness that may reveal the absurdity of the situation. Via this act of transgression, the poetic act makes one step back for an instant from the circumstances. In short, it may make one look at things differently.   Francis Alÿs, transcript of a talk given in Beirut in December 2008, sent by e-mail to Mark Godfrey, September 2009

Francis Alÿs, El Ensayo, 1991-2001

 Politics is not the exercise of , or struggle for power,… [but instead] consists in reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible.

Jacques Rancière,

Aesthetics and its discontents, Cambridge 2009, p.24.

 

The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible , the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a messge as a vehicle. It is a dream of an art that would transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations.

Jacues Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, London and New York, 2004, p.63.

 

Roman Signer

Old Shatterhand, 2007