Negation as Condition of Possibility for Imagining Anew

The capitalist machinery colonizes our unconscious, shaping our imaginations. Its simulacrum of social interaction defers genuine experiences of ‘being-with’. Rather than negate these realities, we want to negate the negations that shape the capitalist machinery itself by engaging with the amorphous preverbal states of our performance-as-research practices.By opposing gravity, I stand up; by negating qualitative differences, I define concepts. By way of ‘no’ I individuate, implying conscious experience of myself as part of a wider complex. In this sense, individuation is contrary to the fetishized individualism of neoliberal identity politics.The founding statement is ‘no’. ‘No’ is constitutive of individual and collective selves; ‘no’ is the rite of passage from amorphous preverbal states to capitalism’s semiotically stabilized reality. Since the plurality of ‘noes’ experienced preverbally marks the passage from the amorphous to conceptually defined experiences of reality, syntonizing with ‘no’ in our selves/bodies enables the emergence of unprecedented imagination, a route to that which is not yet colonized by the positivistic logic sustaining capitalism. Saying ‘yes’ to ‘no’ as structural enabler cancels out the dichotomic logic that encloses us in prefabricated ways of imagining.What is not yet holds the potential of the not yet imaginable. ‘No’ is the gatekeeper of what does not exist yet. ‘No’ drives the body to action; it gives rise to the space in-between, to boundaries as means in motion. Bodies oscillate through different places and qualities of ‘no’; bodies give and take ‘no’. ‘No’ is the flexible boundary, the body’s skin, the (im)material in-between, the actant managing the relationality of things, the skin as negative semipermeable membrane. What happens to collective imagination when I touch and am touched by ‘no’?At the crossroads of artistic manifesto and academic article, our article benefits from our experience as movement-based artists, practice-based teachers and critical theorists

Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Negation · Visual arts · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy

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