In Front of Meaning: Revisiting Surfaces after Nietzsche’s Corpus
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Nietzsche’s undertaking might be understood as an attempt to rescue the ostensibly groundless abstractions of culture from the looming threat of nihilism. The answer, as he saw it, lay in the re-evaluation of our own transformative capacities, as they might be realized through the senses. In practice, the Nietzschean approach, toward the question of meaning, promises to place its advocates sensibly ‘in touch’ with material surfaces. But as this process nurtures the affects of difference, as some sensible communion with the Earth, it also rigorously challenges some well subscribed, but questionably divisive, epistemological attitudes. As such, this task uses a vivid visual-aesthetic paradigm (that is Caspar David Friedrich’s painting of The Wanderer above the Sea of Mist) to introduce the positive and involving potential of Nietzsche’s distributive, perceptual framework: a process which begins to link Nietzsche’s body-led philosophy with material culture studies, through a vision of materiality that might also be associated with speculative realism and minimalist art. The aim then, is to begin weaving each of these discourses together in a fashion that might point to a role, and perhaps even a need, for sensualcreativity, at the front of academic engagements with objects.