Minding the emptiness of nothing: methodological nothingness and the spatial anthropology of futility

Abstract

As an exercise in autoethnographic fieldwork, resolving to sit in meditation practice (zazen) in the middle of a road traffic island, flanked by the concrete expanse of an expressway flyover, one’s presence partly concealed by vegetation, does seem a rather pointless endeavour. And insofar as it does lack an obvious rationale, its ‘purpose’ becomes that of an exercise in futility predicated on the phenomenology of both emptiness and nothingness. Emptiness here is invoked with reference to the Mahayana Buddhist concept of sunyata, which prompts awareness of, and philosophical reflection on, the constitutive entanglements of form and emptiness. Nothingness, for its part, is oriented towards observation of what Georges Perec calls the ‘infraordinary’, a process of seeing and writing ‘flatly’ that is ‘barely indicative of a method’. Taking this method-that-is-not-a-method as its performative starting point, this paper sets out some tentative thoughts towards a spatial anthropology of futility that is centred around a futile fieldwork experiment in methodological nothingness. In keeping with the subject matter under discussion, the paper is written ‘on the go’ in the sense of starting from nothing and foregoing a purposeful direction of travel other than that which is tactically premised on the methodological elicitation of something from nothing.

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