The Slow Aesthetic Pulse of Emptiness

Abstract: This paper offers a glimpse into a yearlong interdisciplinary Faculty Learning Community’s (FLC) collective journey into the pedagogical and ontological potentials of slow aesthetics. During the 2022–23 academic year, we met to observe, think, create, teach, read, question, and learn slowly. We read several texts which served as prompts for artful engagements that included writing, photography, improvisation, and collage. We also centered Patricia Carini’s descriptive processes in our meetings. Through these activities we sought to make visible the multiple frames constantly working on how we see and act in the world. The aesthetics of attending to everyday words, objects, embodied experiences through our conversations and visual choices brought us closer to the ontological fullness of emptiness. Habits of mind and ways of being were placed on display as these practices of slow ontology revealed the relational in learning and a cascade of multiplicities of meanings whose presence often gets overlooked in the neoliberal customs of the university. Opening ourselves to the generative space of emptiness gave heterogeneous bodies of matter a space where new affects, new connecting relations, became possible. The aim of this paper is to bring the affirmative practices and productive tensions of slow aesthetics forward into the everyday, ordinary world where we teach, learn, and continue to become together.