Agency is molecular: moved by being moved to moving or co-constitution in intra-active knowledge production
This practice-based PhD aims to intertwine theoretical research and artistic practice on the basis of knowledge production by conceptually thinking through motion, with movement informing the methodological counterpart in performative research settings. I argue that movement and the concept of motion, in their immanent potential for in/determinancy, transport possibilities of transversality that have been neglected in western Modernity. Both offer the means of moving beyond the bifurcated exceptionalism of Modernity's epistemology. The project interrogates its own positioning from within by affirming embodied ways of knowing, which are marginalised within the rationalised epistemes in European Universalisms (Wallerstein). In doing so it also takes a stand against appropriation. From a feminist position, new materialism's situatedness (Haraway) and relational objectivity (Barad) are particularly suitable tools for a shift from within. The apparatus definitions of Agential Realism gather insights through agential cuts that provide a transient exteriority-within, allowing modifying the bounds of knowing from within. The primary chapters examine the impact of practicing through theory and coalesce into a final experiment that reverses the process. Applied to the path of thoughts, movement's induction of changes to matter initiates an essential process of creating space for delinking (Mignolo/Walsh) and unlearning (Singh). The foundation of both practice- and theory-based approaches is Barad's notion of intra-active doing-being, which provides an understanding of agential intertwinement by approaching matter through and with interferences. In experiments, electronic devices were set to receive techno-sound-reverberations as diffractional concerns (noise), that transposed mattering (meaning) from co-constitutional forms. These 'voices', enacted in material-discursive experiments of various entangled engagements in different molecular matterings (body-mind, nature-culture, non-human-human, other-self) are typically ignored, denied, or misunderstood by the notorious bifurcation of the western metaphysical matrix (Jackson). Listening to matter’s iterative performativity (Barad) disclosed uneven levels of capacity (Wilderson) within such non-interrogated generalisations as the flattening to 'we' of the Anthropocene discourse. This awareness of interferential reverberations demands a multidirectional pluriverse of capabilities, which compromises any one-world (Law) exceptionality.
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