itinerant space

An Artist Learning the Cello: Ethical Reorientation as Radical Empathy
Stuart Lee

Together With What Follows:
A Treatise on Relational Ontologies.

I have pondered, to some extent, on the relational desires of the post-human effort and the need to bridge the divide between the transversal other and its own relational origins. We have, on the one hand, a reflexive co-becoming, enmeshed in a world where self-determination exists within and because of the other, the complicated convergences of difference within the same system, and the attempt to reconcile themselves into some relational form. Here, this reflexive reciprocity—the post-human subject seeking relation not with a wholly external other, but with an other that is also enmeshed in its co-constitution—is entirely relational. This mutual, ongoing process of transformation, in which entities become what they are through each other, in a way that is self-aware or responsive to that relational entanglement, I argue, is never really conceived in full. In fact, there is a blind spot: from within working across human desires, ecological needs, and all the time within a ‘technological epoch,’ that reveals itself as the paradox of relation[1] – that to be in relation is to misapprehend what that relation entails. In this sense, the post-human project remains suspended between its awareness of entanglement and the impossibility of fully inhabiting it. So, what is the post-human within these relations today, and why does it labour so?

Rosi Braidotti rightly reminds us that ‘we are all in this together,’ yet the toil of that relation is well, laboured. In some ways, the desire is that we ‘better understand and reflect the contribution of the humanities to knowledge and society[2]’ in a climate where the same offerings are actively being defunded, refused, and undervalued[3]. So where do we go from here? And more so, is it worth the effort?

Within the online realm, a phrase widely attributed to twentieth-century Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, that ‘effort is only effort when it begins to hurt’, commonly does the rounds on quote sites and sun-drenched meme grabs. Rather than it being a direct quote, we have this from an interpretation of his writings on what it takes to transcend our boundaries of relational ‘mania[4].’ Yet how long do we in the humanities have to sustain this requirement to be fortified, ready to once again take to the fore our argument that multi-perspective ways of knowing are of equal value as social imaginaries, to ‘overcome dichotomous and decisive constructions of the world’[5]? Are we at a divide where some relations fail to ‘materialise’ within these constructions and their effects? What happens in the refusal between material realities?

The Paradox of Relation: Desire, Misapprehension, and Difference

The post-human desire to relate is often undercut by the impossibility of fully knowing, completing, or inhabiting entirely the relationality that drives its continual incompletion. Art, in this case, is an important interlocutor, necessary yet always negotiating its limits. The terms of engagement the artist employs when trying to speak through the new materialist turn are, therefore, best understood as borrowed. So, here we have a collision point between the materially embedded relation and the aesthetic scaffolding of representation. To be embedded is to accept our place within structures. When reading through the physicist, philosopher, and feminist scholar Karen Barad’s intra/action, this placement means working from within the very system that conditions. Barad argues that to think in this way means to forego any subject – object contradictions [6]. Thus, what we have is a charged field of relations in which what becomes escapes a predefined authorship. The pre-individual in this sense is a reservoir of potential. Barad’s fuzzy indeterminacy, embraced as a conceivability, can never actualise itself through the aesthetic alone, or by itself, but only through an acknowledgement of a difference that is the catalyst for a potential other. Precondition is the desire to escape the definite landing and allow the fall into the void when jumping between discrete states.

In this sense, the pre-individual is often signified as fuzzy, signalling vagueness, yet this indeterminacy cannot actualise itself through aesthetics alone. Art cannot resolve relationality by representing it. What it can do, however, is acknowledge difference as a catalyst rather than a problem. Difference is not something to be reconciled into harmony; it is what makes relation possible at all. The precondition for such work is a willingness to resist the definite landing. To be relational is to accept the risk of falling between discrete states, to remain suspended without guarantees. This fall is not a failure but a method. It is an ethical and aesthetic commitment to remain with the unresolved, the misapprehended, the incomplete.
Producing difference in the Deleuzian sense, when forced by the encounter, is what my current practice seeks to retain. An Artist Learning the Cello employs repetition over a planned breakdown of John Cage’s 4:33 into second increments. Each performance is a temporary configuration of forces and tensions, failures, and futilities [7]. Each iteration individually suspends the usual demand for output, allowing the haecceity of the event to form a co-composition containing a thisness. What remains here in each recording is not content, but a trace of difference within the ambiguity of the non-relational. So, here we have ongoing performance, which, as an act of continual re-becoming, establishes a method for generating new thought and form. Unfolding through these repeated gestures, as it were, is a remaining within a moment of becoming that escapes any attempt to stabilise a binary meaning praxis. Each repetition, simply, is not a methodological device, but a temporal fold in which the work continually encounters itself otherwise. This specific orientation toward practice rejects the notion of closure upon completion. Each event, each take, in its collapse of endings, becomes a constellation of moments that do not accumulate but diverge. To remain attentive to this divergence is to acknowledge that the singularity of practice lies not in the work’s objecthood but in its capacity to generate conditions for its own emergence continually. In this way, An Artist Learning the Cello becomes less a documentation of process and more an experiment in ontological method: research that listens to its own recursions. What persists across the recordings is not progress but affective ambiguity – a trace of difference that resists assimilation into representation.

Cage’s 4:33 stopped at silence as a phenomenological framing of a revelation [8]. Yet, each performance – or what I call iterations is evidence of silence as a condition for difference. In this way, silence is treated not as an absence of sound, but as a material engagement that is different every time, an ongoing field in which new relations to ecological grief return. Each return is not a repetition, but the moment through which the work learns how to begin again. And in an age where we find ourselves in weather cycles, nationalistic returns, and enlightenment repetitions of entropic collapse, An Artist Learning the Cello and its Deleuzian gestures demonstrate that repetition is not a performance inertia, but the fragile soundings to strive after a life that wants to begin again, becoming otherwise through its loss and its remainder.

[1] See Bernard Steigler, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (Polity Press, 2019) https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4B7EvQEACAAJ. For Stiegler, a “technological epoch” names the regime of tertiary retention that organises thought and desire; our digital “absence of epoch” industrialises these retentions, producing noetic disorientation and requiring negentropic practices of care as a counter to entropic capture

[2] Rosi Braidotti and others, The Edinburgh Companion to the New European Humanities (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) p. xvi

[3] Heather Stewart and Dan Sabbagh, ‘Davos 2026: The Last-Chance Saloon to Save the Old World Order?’, The Guardian, 18 January 2026, section Business, para. 7 https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/davos-2026-donald-trump-us-wef-world-economic-forum.

[4] José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (Routledge, 2021) PP. 133 – 4. Here, we consider Ortega y Gasset’s description of the effort required to counter regressive ‘manias’ within systems that hinder a more cohesive and productive way of thinking through relational ontologies espoused by the New Humanities and their aims.

[5] Braidotti, 2024. p. xvi

[6] Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)

[7] Here we use Deleuze as a way to understand the precondition. See Daniel Smith, John Protevi, and Daniela Voss, ‘Gilles Deleuze’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Summer 2023 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2023) https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/deleuze/ [accessed 7 February 2026].

[8] Artists such as Guy Livingston, Kyle Gaan, and David Toop, have explored extensively the ways in which silence acts as a mechanical device in music structure, I’m much more interested in its agential operator as a ‘way of’ knowing and the phenomenology therein.