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Before I start looking at the Penumbra, as I promised in the last post, I need to explain why I am doing what I am doing. Or in other words, what might appear as making meaning out of molehills, needs to be justified as an intellectual inquiry and a exposition on the context from which I speak. The first concept I want to introduce is the Penumbra. However, to begin talking about penumbra, I will have to begin by talking about Light (and possibly shadows). In fact, in this post, it is still too early to talk about Penumbra, and it will remain, like the intangible ghost that it is, unrevealed, invisible and reticent in this post. However, what I seek to do is to talk about the problems of Light and Darkness and Shadows and Visions, in order to lay out the framework through which all subsequent concepts and ideas will be explored in these discussions.

In Science education around the world, children are taught about light in a very strange way. Initially, they are told that light is a particle, that it travels in a straight line, and that is how we are able to make beams of light which can be focused on a particular object to give it light and life - like a spot light on a stage, that allows for the particles to shroud the actor in a focus. Eventually, without actually contradicting the earlier knowledge, students are taught that light is a wave, that it travels in wave like functions, creating crests and troughs or light and shadow, thus allowing us to scatter light over a large area through a small pin-hole – like the projection in a movie theatre where the waves hit the silver-screen to produce motion, movement and an illusion of life.

I begin with this ambiguity towards light because, it brings into focus – if I may use a light metaphor myself – the two central ways in which light has been at the core of how we understand and imagine the world around us. As a Particle, we see light as a space that converts darkness – which is the absence of light – into shadows. Indeed, it is because of light that shadows exist; the light, so to speak, allows us to see shadows, which are otherwise just unseeing and unseeable darknesses. As a Wave, we see light as connecting other sources of light – geographies, people and times – thus creating the idea of coherence and giving us the much needed mortal reassurance that we are not alone. Light, then, as this Particle-Wave thing pervades not only our imagination of the contemporary, but also that of the pasts and futures.

It is embedded in our languages – where we think of history as that Particle of Light that converts boring and everyday Past into exciting and significant history. We imagine the Wave of Light as a way of divining future and extending our journey through time. Across different cultures and spaces, light has been at the centre of how we see – Seeing without light is more difficult than flying without wings – and how others see us. From the moment of the European Enlightenment, where knowledge, like light, was to help us see the Real World (in capitals) to the moment of neo-liberalisation in Asia, where countries like India are made to shine – We have an official India Shining Campaign since 2001 – as beacons of hope for the proposed restructuring of the world, Light, has been the central obsession of almost all human endeavour.

This Particle-Wave nature of light is a significant symptom of a rupture, or a moment of blindness that we have towards light. Because we are able to see through light, and because of light, we are actually blinded towards light, with light and often to the circumstances within which light exists. So simultaneously erotic and everyday is our relationship with light that we can only think of it as the ‘natural’ way of being. Light, in our times, has become a hegemonic, coercive, erstwhile dominant aesthetic which becomes the reson de etre for all our quests, aspirations and ambitions.

It is sometimes interesting to see what happens when alternative paradigms of light are created, often in art and in fantasy. Terry Pratchett, a British fantasy writer, for instance, shows us the subversion in his Disc-World novel Thud. Pratchett creates a race of underground dwelling dwarves and their mythologies of Light, as they create their own myths of origin. Here is a small excerpt about Tak – the maker of worlds in dwarf creation stories:
"The first thing Tak did, he wrote himself.
The second thing Tak did, he wrote the Laws.
The third thing Tak did, he wrote the World.
The fourth thing Tak did, he wrote a cave.
The fifth thing Tak did, he wrote a geode, an egg of stone.
And in the twilight of the mouth of the cave, the geode hatched and the Brothers were born.

The first Brother walked towards the light, and stood under the open sky. Thus he became too tall. He was the first Man. He found no Laws, and he was enlightened.

The second Brother walked towards the darkness, and stood under a roof of stone. Thus he achieved the correct height. He was the first Dwarf. He found the Laws Tak had written, and he was endarkened.

But some of the living spirit of Tak was trapped in the broken stone egg, and it became the first troll, wandering the world unbidden and unwanted, without soul or purpose, learning or understanding. Fearful of light and darkness it shambles for ever in twilight, knowing nothing, learning nothing, creating nothing, being nothing”

I bring this particular fantasy excerpt because Pratchett is hinting at a certain, much needed turn in our vocabulary, attitude and frameworks towards understanding light - to escape both our moments of enlightenment and endarkenment, and explore the troll in its twilights and nothingnesses which we have ignored so far. It is a moment of complete dissension, a moment to talk neither of light nor darkness, not of focus and attention, not of images and shadows, but the in-between liminalities that reside in the interstices of our blind-spots. It is time to explore the nothing that we have not known, the nothing that we have not learned, the nothing that we have not created, and the nothing that we have not allowed to come into being.

It is this particular turn away from light (and hence by association, the darkness and the shadows) that discussion seeks to unpack in its articulation of a lexical turn that seeks to explain contemporary research and practice in theory and art. The lexical turn seeks to not merely dismiss existing categories or replace them with equally dominant and hegemonic categories of epistemic origins. Instead, it proposes to repurpose existing epistemes and ontologies, and see how new digital technologies of the self lead to examining new conditions of theorisation and practice in our fields of inquiry and engagement. And now that we have this in place, next stop, beyond light and shadow, but also between them, Penumbra.