Compensations for Not Knowing (a Proposal)*

Compensations for Not Knowing: a series of performances for video or elsewhere

Materials: books / texts I and other performers “know” to varying degrees, about which we will
speak and write extemporaneously, converse and interact with.

Intending: “Amateur” epistemology? / exegesis evolved to an imagined telos, producing excess in
absences the compensatory describes.

What won’t the compensatory hold?
Producing system’s inversion
Is it medieval to pursue this beautiful purposelessness amidst violence (when people are dying)
To unite the soul and the body
The mirror of entropy is an insanely deliberate imagining of information and know-how
The number of angels, the number of aeons
A conceit for ambient not knowing, gestures of psychotic insisting

How to proceed?
Will you proceed by questions?
By outright lies?

What is the difference between lying and the imagination in this case? Falsifying? What will be
your relationship to these texts?

Speech and logos seem at issue, what presentation is. The mind self-organizing in relationship to
objects, material. For that matter -- another mind. The “mystery” of what occurs when minds
involve each other as the mystery of why something exists instead of nothing.

Where to begin? By reading a line of text, a word? By reading marked passages or passages at
random and commenting on them? By bringing different things (words) to a collision? Chance
encounter as interpretive strategy.

Who is my addressee? Who is the real addressee, if not an “art” audience? Should the addressee not
be the mind itself? As in prayer / meditation. Non-religious “praying,” prayer in place of
knowing. Is prayer compensatory?

Prayer augmenting what we can not know, and only insist.

As the monologue in a voice addressing the other as an other, the doubled voice of one entity.
“no” thyself. “not” know. now thyself. I is two or more others talking to itself in the same
voice. The interior becoming exterior, creating place for the exterior inside itself, furthest
inside. A limit of inside.

To “perform” this presentation is then no performance. But the presentation of withdrawing to no
longer be one. Confronted by a shared object, or a mind also trying not to be one: by soliloquy,
imaginative seizure (clairvoyance), storying, song, breath. By the vicissitudes of listening.

This profound listening in the interior, the radical interior; or an equally profound listening in
the face of an other’s words.

Which may be the interlocuted Same.

To inter-locute: as in two or more entities involved in circuits, among circuits.

Is the voice a circuit?

*to Eliza Newman-Saul