Double Negation as Aporetic Fabulation; or, How to Make (almost) Nothing

Abstract

This is a paper on how to be in the world enough for it to appear. The intent is to propose a meta-methodological framework for decentering representational and conceptual absolutes encountered and conjured in geographical research and everyday life. Modelled as a conceptual and methodological double negation, of i) fabulating an ii) experientially temporary and cognitively cessative non-fabulatory event from which iii) novel, fabulatory devices inevitably must redetermine themselves, it will demonstrate how something makes nothing, and why certain somethings; non-fabulatory events referred to as aporetic artistic fabulations (AAF), are better at contorting the ontological paths, corners, and crevices that substance-, subject-, and logocentric premises too readily stretch into a straight line.

To elucidate how such disruptions engender onto-epistemologically rich thoughts unthought, and how AAF can be meaningfully integrated into conceptual fabulations beyond geography’s continuous courting of the Mitteleuropäische canon and its arbitrary archconcepts of ‘being’ and ‘something’, the paper draws on the, in geography, much-neglected philosopher Nishida Kitaro. Exploring the noetic quality of non-fabulatory events, the paper further challenge the prevailing emphasis on critters, monsters, myths, and mothers in the canon of feminist speculative fabulation. Attempting to bring into observable pause the hyper-creative dynamism inherent in Kitaro's linchpin concept of the place of Absolute Nothingness, it instead lingers in the contingency of the ineffable and penumbral. Finally, it posits that repeated engagement with AAF, as a mechanism of cognitive cessation, offers a fecund means to condition the conditions of subjectivation.