PhD | (Un-)Doing the World: On the Double-Bind of Aesthetics in Performative Relationality

PhD | (Un-)Doing the World: On the Double-Bind of Aesthetics in Performative Relationality
PhD candidate: Jonathan Kirn
Institution: Utrecht University/Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICON)
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Maaike Bleeker, Prof. Dr. Paul Ziche

Jonathan Kirn (he/his) is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University and a freelance dramaturge and production manager. In his PhD project he diffractively connects Karen Barad’s agential realism and Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic theory through a case study in cymatics (the visualization of wave effects), asking what aesthetics can contribute to discourses on posthumanism, ecology, and relationality. The project studies the performance of boundaries between human, nature and technology, focusing on how these differentiations come about and are troubled both in scientific and aesthetic practices. Moreover, it pays attention to the ways in which such practices engage with any indeterminacy of these boundaries, suggesting that engaging with indeterminacy is necessary to address the relationality of the world, and can help to develop ways to act that are not solely geared towards human benefit, but towards sustainable modes of living within a more-than-human world.

On a theoretical level, diffractively connecting Barad and Adorno, the project develops a notion of aesthetics as a critical, performative and material-discursive practice of engaging with a range of phenomena, not limited to any conventional understanding of art. In turn, it posits that such a practice of aesthetics allows to better understand the performative making of boundaries, particularly their latent indeterminacy, which is crucial to understand relationality