Beside our selves : panic as unbecoming

Abstract

Beside Our Selves: Panic as Unbecoming is a creative PhD in an experimental container. Part autotheory, part experimental poetics and part literary performance, it explores the phenomenology of panic and the ontology of the panicked subject and their entangled relationship to the social, the political, the speculative and the material. I explore how subjectivity is constituted by panic within a practice situated at the intersections of pathology, philosophy, and politics?and also in excess of these categories. Through this intersectional lens I develop a complex politics of panic arising from a phenomenologically layered understanding of what happens to bodies and subjectivities in the event of a panic attack. "Beside Our Selves" makes these relations explicit through a creative experimental practice that is driven by situated knowledges gleaned from my personal experience with panic and its affective siblings across a lifetime. I employ Arts Based Methodology, mobilised via the practises of autotheory, experimental poetics and performance, to generate affective atmospheres and reveal the entangled nature of the body in and of the world, as well as what it is that panic can reveal about the existential condition. Using the autotheoretical work of sociologist Jackie Orr and employing Merleau-Ponty's concept of the "flesh of the world", I chart the complex ways in which panic can be both annihilating and transformational. The work of Karen Barad and Magdalena Gorska shine a light on these intra-active relations. As part of the original scholarship of this thesis I utilise the concepts of "ictic vocalities" and the "shimmer body", to explore whether we can turn states of panic into sites of productive agency. "Beside Our Selves" is comprised of a dynamic and deconstructed website which can be navigated in a non-linear manner and is a container for texts, objects and ephemera which flesh out and augment the exegesis. The exegetical work and the website exist in a feedback loop, always mutually referential. This form mirrors the non-linearity and dissolving boundaries at the heart of the world of the panicked subject.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English
Supervisor	Rachel Morley (Supervisor) & Milissa Deitz (Supervisor)