Struggling with the reccuring reduction of being to knowing: placing thin hope in aesthetic interventions

Abstract

This article explores how aesthetic gestures, experiences, interventions might help us make visible certain problematic, enduring, and historically contingent aspects of the troubling ways of being in which we, modern/Cartesian subjects exist in the world. The article does not seek to ultimately suggest some pedagogical strategies or approaches that will help us deconstruct/dismantle these problematic aspects. Instead, it proposes that the common way in which we imagine solutions to our problems, is the very way, through which these problems are being created in the first place. The text pays particular attention to two problematic constitutive characteristics of the modern/Cartesian subject. First is the reductivist insistence on having our being reduced to knowing (Andreotti, 2016) that results in having our relationship to the world mediated (exclusively) through knowledge. Second is our insistence on being able to see/sense/experience ourselves only as separate, presumably autonomous, individuals that ultimately ends up producing us as such..