2019 — Essay

Freedom and Fiction

Patricia Reed

Glass Bead Journal, Site 2

Situatedness, in this view, is best described as an ongoing continuum of positioning and interaction, where the excessive possibility of a given site is rendered intelligible via interaction, creating an affordance for repositioning in excess of a given site. This positioning-interaction continuum allows for more accountability in both epistemic (reasoned cognitive mobility) and ethical terms (grappling with the ramifications of repositioning). In terms of the epistemic ‘site’ and the constraints endemic to it (as a broad historical situation), the possibility for its ‘escape,’ the possibility for its historical repurposing, is not contingent on the discovery of novelty wholly external or alien to it. The possibility of its escape, for the invention of historical discontinuity, in other words, a new site in excess of, and different to the existing one, can be cultivated at the level of situated interactions. The situation in excess of a given episteme, is equal to the construction of new grounds upon which to base the positivity of knowledge, but its novel construction of an elsewhere, of a ‘site’ unfamiliar to it, is a consequence of situated interaction that generates new positions from which to see.