In my hometown last spring a weird smell lingered on the streets of the city centre. That morning the newspaper headlines reported about the smell with speculations by a handful of experts from various fields on the possible source of the smell and whether it was a danger or just an odd occurrence. Perhaps it came from a shutdown wood mill. Or the bogs. Is it sulphur? Or perhaps invasive tactics of the neighbouring country, hybrid warfare, harnessed wind. The discomfort of uncertainty dwelled for the day. Speculations accumulated around the smell.
Cultural theorist Marina Vishmidt wrote about speculation and how it could be a useful tool to understand how the social, political and economical are organised and intertwined in contemporary times. Vishmidt states that “art, in its contemporary register, is both a speculative commodity and a species of future-oriented practice which […] aspires to knit together the fractured present of ‘contemporaneity’.” To turn to the standpoint that art is worldmaking and a place to imagine future, is to work closely with speculation. Speculation as such is also partly aesthetic judgement, where its formation is affected by the immaterial: one’s experiences, emotions and desires.
Vishmidt often mentions negativity, as it is understood in philosophy, where the lack of something generates a drive or desire to do something; to fulfil the need caused by the lack. Negativity is intrinsic in human nature in the sense that we always need something (food, drink, companionship) in order to live. But needs and desires seem today ever more complex and abstracted, and in this complicated form they are also ingrained in the political and social system we live in. Trying to figure out whether a need one feels is true or false seems like a trivial game (and either way the prize turns out to be a hoax).
Adapting to a system is easier when the ‘facts’ you learn to affirm work in your favour. But those who the system was not made for, have no need to think in ways that reinforce the existing reality. Through negativity, speculation could then also be seen as generative for change and other possibilities. We also need negation in order to construct meaning and knowledge. Without ongoing negation, only that which already is, is strengthened and ratified further. To construct new meaning, is to think with ambiguity, with the surreal, with speculation.
The smelly spring day reminded me of an incident a couple years back, when the morning news told about a mysterious loud bang heard during the night in the outskirts of that same city. The same kind of speculation and questioning ensued. A factory? A bomb? A weather phenomenon? I was fascinated that in the news they spoke with uncertainties and speculations in all seriousness while simultaneously there’s something indescribably arbitrary and even humorous in the onomatopoeic word that is bang.
As people often are, they were at a loss for words when confronted with the unexpected, the unplanned. I imagined people talking about the bang, trying to communicate and relate their feelings and experience of hearing a sudden loud sound, trying to recollect that fleeting moment. Like trying to recall to someone how they talked in their sleep, knowing that what you heard and what they said are a different thing. Or catching yourself saying something knowing that it might not be true, but saying it anyway.
So in the end, we navigate through the speculations. Looking for the one that fits, trying to relate to one another. Looking for connections; a painting inside a painting. The illusion of clarity, of neat categories, sections and order are broken with that which goes through and is transversal; like a lingering smell. A scent. A sense of displacement. The material is either confined, or then it dissipates; like a photograph framing a situation and also a confinement of matter; the photons captured by an apparatus.
What to turn to, then, once it has all disintegrated? Looking for answers in the fire. Turning to the mystic when it all seems too much to comprehend. Everything needs an explanation, a justification, except for the rich. But this abstraction is also a tactic. Not knowing should not inhibit the possibility to imagine; to imagine the prized possession to melt away, the sick healed, that nurturing was not alienated, that the fire would shout back.
“Every joint thought, will at some point split off into a dozen different ones, until nothing much remains but splinters of radical change. We merely throw back and forth, the glowing embers reminiscent, of a land romanticized.” (Excerpt from the text in Linda Voorwinde’s collage).
-Isa Lumme