Fluid Philosophy

Abstract

Philosophy’s elaboration of concepts and theories has long depended on an earth-bound lexicon of continents and grounds, islands, terrains, reference-points and touchstones. This way of thinking about our being-in-the-world betrays our condition as humans, ‘forgetting’ that we are creatures born into movement and subject to constant flux. But what if we were to change the element within which we think, and relinquish our parcels of conceptual ground in order to remain open to the element of water and its associated qualities of fluidity? The work of performance artists Douglas Wright, Lemi Ponifasio, Michael Parmenter, Nina Nawalowalo and Sam Trubridge, all currently living in New Zealand, and several of whom have ancestral ties to Pacific Islands (Samoa and Fiji), reflects a common readiness to re-think the human condition in terms of the sea so that, for the space of a performance, our being-in-the-world becomes a being-in-the-water. From a confrontation with the immanence of ecological breakdown, to the interactions between moving bodies and a liquid medium, each work demonstrates ways of thinking that set adrift our ideas, call into question the solid ground on which we walk and navigate new routes of enquiry and discovery on seas both rich and strange. By proposing relationships between humans and the sea inside and out, between humans and the Pacific, these performing philosophers remind us that the first step in redressing imbalances in the world is to connect with the world and to relate to that ocean—without trying to make it ours. To relate also means to be, and to let be.