Sum, Parts (2025)

Introductory essay ‘Sum, Parts’ as part of Clipping 2, edited by Federica Notari and Cleo TSW. Reading at Nieuwe Instituut (NL).
 

‘Sum, Parts’

I first encountered one iteration of this phrase as part of dialogue in a romantic comedy, where the protagonist reaches the realisation that her love interest is, she declares, “less than the sum of his parts.” As she articulates this disappointment, it timestamps the moment in which she, at long last, sees who he really is—she locates his value, and in doing this establishes her own. For her and everyone involved, this is a very good thing that sets up the last ten minutes of the film.

The phrase is, however, a deviation of the oft-cited axiom attributed to Aristotle: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts; but this is itself a betrayal of the original formulation in Metaphysics, where Aristotle writes: the whole is something besides the parts, and not merely the sum of them all. The term ‘greater’ is used to name a distinction in form and affect, rather than a synonym for ‘more’ or ‘better’. (...)

Absolute Scenes (2025)

Reading at Don't Pay Your Rent, at Rietlanden Women's Office (NL).

Beginnings (2025)

Essay for the publication Beginnings, initiated by Manon Michèle and published by Ex. Coda. Readings at San Serriffe (NL) and *rile books (BE).

All Possible Futures (2024)

Reading at the 2024 Critical Studies End-of-Year Programme.
Side 1, Side 2

It's Structural (2023)

Readings at the 2023 Critical Studies End-of-Year Programme at Tempel, and for 'Bitter Tongues' at the Rietveld-Sandberg Library.

Time's Arrow: or the Nature of the Offence (2022)

Read on Sourcetype

I first encountered Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Project for a Monument to Ludwig Feuerbach (1986) last summer while visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. The print features four main panels, from left to right: 1. A crop of an arrow’s fletching and shaft;  2. A crop of a rifle barrel;  3. 4. The quote ‘Every Goal Negates’ by German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. ‘Every Goal Negates’ is an extraction from Feuerbach’s Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830): Every goal negates; where there is no destruction, no negation and sacrifice of independent existence, there is no purpose. Purpose is Spirit, but Spirit is the death, the destroyer, of sensible reality.

What Feuerbach makes claim to is that the act of conquering necessitates revision and redirection, which in one way or another implicates a negation of the past and of pastness. The establishment of new ‘goals’ and the proliferation of new practices, methods, and technologies developed to reach them, spells imminent doom for its predecessors; relationships need re-examination and potential overhauls. In Finlay’s print, we only see that the rifle succeeds the arrow, but the quote reads like a mantra that suggests this overwriting continues insofar as new dominant forces surpass old ones; so on and so forth, alluding to a cause-and-effect simplicity and directionality of past and future history.

Margin (2019)

MARGIN: The sidelines within a situation, group, or page. A position which has little power, importance, or influence. Within a social context, being ‘on the margins’ refers to a semantic location. It designates people who live outside socially stipulated norms (and therefore generally excluded from ‘regular’ society), whether by choice or otherwise. In the context of a page, a margin is physically measurable and typically frames the main content of a page from its edges—since 2007, the default margins on Word has been 2.54cm all around. In any case, when a margin runs too thin, there is a keen likelihood of anything on it getting completely cut off.

On the Word ‘Layer’ (2018)

Employing scientific language, a layer is a thickness of a thing, typically assumed to be lying over or under another. Layers suppose countability, be it of the tangible—layers of sponge cake—or the covert—layers of meaning—sort. Layer upon layer makes layers, makes stacks, makes piles, makes heaps.

One time, I read on the Evening Standard about a man who wore fifteen layers of clothing to skirt baggage fees at Keflavik Airport in Iceland. He overheated while airborne, had a fit, and passed out. Too many layers is too thick; stuffy; stifling. Another time, I was at Bermondsey Station en–route to work and was approached by a lanky teenage surveyor to describe myself in three words. Too few layers is too thin; lame; depressing.

Over the years, I've developed a habit of never exceeding four master layers in a single project file. Each layer is established on the foundation of utility and clarity. It takes strategy—intervention is necessary to combine, compress, edit, and delete—regroup—these heaps, to piles, to stacks, to layers, to layer. In these measures of possession and dispossession, a layer can thus be comprised of heaps as much as a heap be comprised of layers. This proposes that the capacity of a single layer might then be infinite, and can only be defined through categorisation. This ‘and’ that. This ‘or’ that. How exactly to determine this—Intelligently? Analogically? Deductively? There are an abundant number of other words with the '-ly' suffix that excellently describes the possible modes of categorisation.

In Plath’s Cut, she slices layers off her thumb instead of an onion, unhinging her—this laceration an open window for her descent into anguish. After all, the heart sees not mere appearances—ornaments, aesthetics, accents, a bloodied finger—but looks beneath it to scrape up its more substantial, significant parts. An endlessly rich and layered, yet ruthlessly solipsistic world that most are unable to enter. All disruptive passions—rudely rendered visible in an ordinary moment—suddenly comes into focus, exploiting all the ways she is present. Or I am.