The
act of sailing involves the interaction of the boat and the skipper and the
water and the wind. Learning to sail requires the negotiation between and with
these different elements; it is a process of facilitation or mediation that
attempts to make good the turbulence created by the pull of the water and the
push of the wind. Sailing thus involves a mode of attendance or attention to
these different and often competing forces; moreover, an intuition for knowing
when to yield and for recognizing when to assert control. Our own experience of
being in the world might equally be thought of in terms of these interrelations
and co-dependencies. Subject formation is a highly contingent process that
takes place somehow between and through the event of affecting and of being
affected by other things.
The trope
of sailing and the figure of the helmsman have become recurrent motifs within
my recent research practice, used to articulate the sense of interconnectedness
inherent within the experience of ‘being’; moreover, for intimating towards how
lived experience might be steered actively through the cultivation of
‘helmsman’s knowledge’. In the first instance, ‘helmsman’s knowledge’ involves
an acknowledgement of oneself as a force amongst other forces, awareness of
one’s capacity to both affect and be affected by other things. Secondly,
‘helmsman’s knowledge’ might be developed as a ‘tactical’ form of knowledge
capable of navigating or working with life’s contingent forces and pressures,
by harnessing (rather than simply being blown about by) the push and pull of
these various ‘winds’ and ‘currents’. Drawing on my own live experience of
various art encounters, alongside selected theoretical and philosophical ideas,
I am currently working on new writing that elaborates the notion of ‘helmsman’s
knowledge’ or the endeavour of ‘steering a life’ as an ethico-aesthetic
practice.
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