Kintsugi

I began this process with questions: Does a deconstructionist/ post-modernist approach necessarily imply relativism or an ‘anything-goes approach’? Is there space for the complexity of the empirical existence of emotions in ‘development studies’ and ‘conflict studies’? Can these complexities perhaps be engaged through considerations and activations of the aesthetic (both literary and ‘artistic’) and, if so, how may these perhaps interface with ‘development studies’ and ‘conflict studies’? At the onset of this process (which is not necessarily so easy to actually pin-down) I knew that, given certain constraints (for example the spatial constraints of this research paper) I would not be able to entertain imaginings of comprehensive engagements with these interfaces, that this entertainment would be for arrogance, for the comfort of the phantom of ‘mastery’. That is, I had an idea at the ‘beginning’ that, in the ‘end’, it would perhaps be most productive to generate frictions, moments of complicity, to engaging in seepages and smugglings in ways that could perhaps provide starting points for further explorations. In this paper: monsters, monstrations, supplements, symposiums, paranoia, dirt, disciplines, intuitions, experientiality, readings, readers, intimacies, frames, prosthetic bodies, threads, unravellings, systems, neural networks, masquerades, contraband, violence, inventiveness, banalities, florescences, embarrassments, claustrophobia, unfastenings, and more, and less. Metaphors stand in place of assertions of the ‘objects’ of this paper due to shifts that will be made in ink; the reader is implored to read, to take what is experienced to be relevant, to risk. There is thus already complicity of subject matter and operating methodology; a complicity that will be explored and experimented with throughout this research paper. The research of this paper occurred, to a large degree, in the form of eight encounters, discussions and engagements regarding the aesthetic, and with various practitioners differently ‘of the aesthetic’. This research pointed me in a variety of directions and provided me with a number of considerations that have been pivotal to my process and central to the construction of this research paper. While the various ‘objects’ of these practitioners were discussed in process, these are not included here, cannot be in turns taken. Rather, these encounters provided me with the opportunity to think through the visual in more complex and nuanced ways, in ways which are inseparable from the entirety of the text. For this reason, they have been referenced throughout as critical informants, as a complex network, rather than being constructed as some separable structure neatly confined in await of analysis. Here is a territory, “fundamentally in contact with an elsewhere. As such, it is a space that is not only ‘produced’; it is also a space that circulates, that is constantly in motion”, it is “en fuite (leaking, fleeing)” (Mbembe and Nuttall, 2004: 12). In modesty, in the end this only: while some seepages may sink, that others may swim.