Barbad Golshiri, aporia, 2007. Sound, 1:18:00 (segment)

 Aporia, or abstinence from the pleasure of meaning — the radical decision to abstain from reproduction of knowledges. An enlightened young man, well tempered on East/West Divan, undertakes a hand job in an overgrown cemetery of Western Antiquity, and scatters his nominal seed for the birds.  He wants to escape from thoughts that make him suffer, he decides to cancel himself as a source of words and images, what he is after is some respite from the imaginary and pleasures of image and text (aplasticism). Bland, drawn-out video footage resembles any classical representation of a new vision emerging among the ruins of old. He faces away, and only turns back towards a spectator with an oxymoronic utterance, “I don’t know what aporia means,” again and again. As he nestles among the broken graves, he abstains also from the phallic idea, from the dogma of pro-creation. This neutral negation, or rhetorical abstinence, formulated in Beckettian assertions in the negative — “nothing is left to tell” — clears out the space for that what he does not abstain from — public engagement, togetherness, cooperation, alterity, and resistance. “For the moment, it would be his last howler, he need only relax, he’d disappear, he’d know nothing either, there we’d be the two of us, unbeknown to ourselves, unbeknown to each other, that’s a darling dream I’ve been having, a broth of a dream.” A recurrent one.