We face when experimenting for the sake of newness, a nothingness – what we might mistakenly conceive of as the “void.” But this is not the void of pure emptiness – in the binary sense of “the opposite of fullness.” Rather the act of actively and knowingly refusing or “blocking” the known – opens our practices up to the fullness of a creative universe beyond and within the given. A radical generative otherness that has always been there.
This negativity – this “nothingness” is perhaps closer to the Japanese term “ma” – which can be translated as nothingness – but a more careful translation would render it as a generative emptiness or gap or pause. And it is this “ma” – this “nothingness” of the generative pause that John Cage and his conceptualization of silence as anything but silent, and our practice of experimental blocking both engage. The comportment to radically pause – to leave space “empty” is to allow it – and not us, to be generative of something new – an “emptyfullness” becoming…
Here, the practice of “not knowing” that allows a nothingness to emerge is a very demanding and highly engaged stance – or comportment – that has many important aesthetic and ethical dimensions (and these practices of a via negativa – a way of the negative are far closer in resonance to Buddhist traditions than Christian traditions).
