The edges of the earth: critical regionalism as an aesthetics of the singular

Abstract

This paper engages in a critical reflection on regionality as a discursive space interfused with and exceeded by singular aesthetic experience. Rejecting models of power based on centre/periphery models, the paper develops a concept of “earth” as the grounding and ungrounding of experience within global informational fields, as the openness of experience to the outside. To be earthed is to be subject to trauma, or the effects of the delayed return of a primary contact. As “original” material (as home, as ground) the earth retains itself, but only through a traumatic exposure to its own dematerialisation. Developing key ideas of singularity, exposure and contact by Jean-Luc Nancy, the paper proposes a practice of “contact aesthetics” the aim of which is to respond to the problem that the body has in its capacity to unify itself in the affective-perceptual world in which it is immersed. The problem posed for experience within the global milieu is not one of unity, but one of contact: how does a body remain in contact with itself, and with others to which it feels an affinity? An aesthetics of experience would be concerned with the problem of contact, by making bodies affective to one another within emerging globalised fields. The paper discusses the issue of a contact aesthetics in terms of regional spaces and experiences accessed genealogically and archivally-a “regionalism” not only at the periphery, but also at the very heart of “centred” experience.