no (adv.)
“not in any degree, not at all.”1
Second element is from Proto-Germanic *aiwi-, extended form of PIE root *aiw-.”2
*aiw-
“Proto-Indo-European root meaning vital force, life; long life, eternity.”3
“It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit ayu- “life;” Avestan aiiu age, life(time);” Greek aiōn “age, vital force; a period of existence, a lifetime, a generation; a long space of time,” in plural, “eternity;” Latin aevum “space of time, eternity.”4
No-place is a provocation for the mind. Reimagine your understanding of your self and identity in relation to the cross-border blurry histories your body holds. While the word ‘no’ is a literal negative, a negation, a denial, a lack, something missing in the common sense of the word; its history holds in it the potential for everything. Life itself. Space. Eternity. Time.
Reimagine this word and open yourself up to the potential of it, of your self and its deconstruction. Allow dissolve. Re-form in the borders which mark your place in this world. Upend essentialism. You have no nature inherent to you. Though the world sees you within the boundaries we construct for Others, find new associations here. We have eternity on our side.
No-Place as an idea is not akin to utopia in the sense of being an aspirational or perfect place. Instead, it poses a counter to the All-Place. A counter to the idea that perfection must be homogenous and all consuming. A counter to the notion that peace comes at the cost of hidden suffering for the most marginalized. It is a counter to the all-white utopia imagined by International Modernism in the architectural sense. A counter to the kind of all-place cityscape imagined in science-fiction of the cynically sadistically consumerist late-twentieth century. The no-place imagines the same processes of globalization and interconnection dreamed of in these futures without resolution into universality and homogenization.
Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.5
No-place is placeless in the sense that it can lack physicality (actualization), but not placeless in the sense that it marks an embodied engagement with the world (life). You create no-place as you live, as you breathe, as you experience. You actualize.
No-Place is grounded in this actualization. It is the resolution of allspace as a percept: you view the world with your eyes and therefore construct an image of the world in your mind. It engages with the haptic reality of sensation: you feel the world with your body and in this way you become the world.
“The ‘I’ that is its body is, of necessity, a mode of embodying, and the ‘what’ that it embodies is possibilities.”6 It does not seek to colonize, to develop, or to collectivize the individual, but regards the nuances of embodied experience as fundamental to the performance of the lived.
No-Place does not reject the idea of place completely, instead it marks out territory in processes of becoming. We are made aware of the disillusion imbued into space and artifacts, the illusions of belonging, of fixed identity, and authenticity. It is instead the liminality that can be played with. The boundaries which are acknowledged, edged, and discarded. We seek out vectors to become with- and acknowledge the forces which construct the immanent plane.
To put it succinctly, no-place implies the idea of no-fixed-place. A nomadic movement in-between, and a knowledgeable disintegration of any of the static modes of being which emerge in our lived condition. No-place has been my short-hand to describe immanence as perceived from within a life, but it is knowingly a life which is open and in a process of continual construction. Non-linear, rhizomatic, dissolve. It is a paradox insofar as there is no such thing as no-place. Yet, it so aptly describes the experience of embodied liminality felt within the cyclic fictions of our combined disillusion.
Note: This Manifesto features parts originally published in the author’s masters thesis titled the Artifacts of No-Place on pages 223-226. The full document can be downloaded here.
------------------------------
[1] Douglas Harper, “no,” Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed April 15, 2020, https://www.etymologyonline.com/word/no.
[2] Harper, “no.”
[3] Douglas Harper, “*aiw-,” Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed April 15, 2020, https://www.etymologyonline.com/word/*aiw-.
[4] Harper, “*aiw-.”
[5] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 25.
[6] Judith Butler, “Performative Acts of Gender Constitution An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: London: The John Hopkins Press, 1990), 272.