WTF? Yesterday i went to a decolonise sussex hookup at brighton’s onca gallery. Thought the boom was meeting up, reading a text and chatting about it.
turned out to be the reading and chatting ++.
++?
A few things.. however, here i’d like to focus on one “thing” – safe space/s and aboutness with colonization in mind.
About what?
“Safe spaces” are something i discussed ABouT with a few people – but never done in an intentional way.
Intentional way?
Well.. I have to say that in some way, the auction in decurators gallery was – un intentionally – sort of a safe space. People came out saying that they felt free to be and say wtf might be on their minds.
While this isn’t a formal “safe space” – it has turned out to operate pretty much.
However, yesterday, it was 1st time i was in a space that intentionally fancied itself as being a safe space.
While i critisised safe spaces, it was always About them rather from being in any. Now that i was, i wonder. A critique might still be about as i was in one – not all.
How very kantian?
Might be, but i don’t think this view is defined by kant. its a question, for me, of sensations rather than senses, and from an equality, perhaps an emancipation, of sensations, rather than a question of knowledge, knowing and processes of reasoning.
After being in one such safe spaces, after myself feeling not entirely safe and def not free – am saying myself, though might have misread other’s similar feelings – i think that perhaps there is a slight tendency to exaggerate the importance of being there and “actually” experiencing.
As if that phisicality is “more” than that of considering, of aboutness, of being about something.
But surely, being about is dependent upon something else being the subject of the aboutness?
Yes. Exactly. and then is it not the question of sensing the aboutness itself? the being in about that is just a being of its own.
If i have a question regarding safe spaces that is to do with an excluding language which fails to be inclusive despite best intentions – intents i support – this is aboutness that is precisely in the About section to do with safe spaces, no?
Indeed, it might be argued that this very about is a sensation that could be as in and of itself, without any person meeting in a place and calling it a safe space.
But then, how do you know the feelings of being excluded in a safe space weren’t a result from some prejudicial thinking?
Exactly. If my thinking of the about were to do with being dependent upon the subject, then perhaps there was prejudice. However, unlike apriori knowledge, the claim that about is a sensation in and of itself, as physical and as valid as any other physical experience – it is also separated from the experience of being in a safe space room.
Can this not be linked? the about and being in a safe space?
Sure it can be, but not by the about’s own necessity. The safe-space-aboutness can also be linked to being in a supermarket, wondering about time, and choosing one’s pepper.
Not linked?
Not by necessity.. Its not needed for each to be linked for its own Being..
Following the meeting, one of the facilitators said that they felt a need to be not about something but actually make an effect outside the meeting room.
i felt that as a very derogatory notion since it seemed to presume people in the meeting might not carry out different effects from the time together into some other conjunctions in their lives, and that meeting up was somehow a non event, somehow a time waste that is not to be compared with the “doing things” in a non-about world.
I found the assumptions and the non questioning of them, to be both limiting and abusing a certain possible power position by the facilitator..
Now the question is whether or not to email this to the group?
Perhaps not before mentioning an online exclusion?
Exclution?
Say i was someone without the finance or knowledge of how to go online?
Say I wasn’t a facebook user?
Are digital technologies, the capitalist way of doing them, is a kind of contemporary occupation? Colonialisation?