The Inarticulation Engine
Marie Reichel, Katarina Damiani, Sanja Anđelković, Jo O'Brien
The Inarticulation Engine is a performative research framework for artistic inquiry that begins where propositional language loses its organizing power. We propose a lecture performance that speculates beyond the limits of language by weaving together elements of text, reading, singing, sound, and embodied sculptural performance. We depart from dominant epistemologies that privilege fluency, coherence, and semantic clarity, and understand the breakdown of speech as a productive condition for knowledge production. In this sense, inarticulation—manifesting as babble, delay, fragmentation, or material articulation—operates as the infrastructure through which thinking is redistributed beyond the speaking subject. The Engine operates through four interdependent modules—Delay, Haunting, Transition, and Surface—each activating a distinct mode of inarticulation. Delay mobilizes confusion, slowness, and non-resolution as strategies resonating with queer-crip critiques of temporal narrative coherence (Kafer, 2021). Haunting foregrounds tonguelessness and linguistic doubling, treating language as historically saturated and inhabited by absent voices (Philip, 2015). Transition situates speech loss within conditions of war, illness, and migration, externalizing fragmented subjectivity through speculative institutional forms (Stengers, 2010). Surface displaces articulation onto an assemblage, where translation unfolds through material and spatial encounter. This understanding of surfaces as leakage zones for correspondence underpins our emphasis on contact, friction and permeability as places where articulation occurs without linguistic mastery (Ingold, 2023). Rather than producing arguments or conclusions, The Inarticulation Engine stages conditions in which knowledge emerges relationally and remains unresolved. As a transferable yet unstable apparatus, it contributes a methodological proposition for artistic research: meaning may arise most forcefully through engagement with the limits of language itself. References Ingold, Tim. Bringing Things to Life: Material Flux and Creative Entanglements. Polity Press, 2023. Kafer, Alison. “After Crip, Crip Afters”. South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (2021): 415–434. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8916158 Philip, M. NourbeSe. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Wesleyan University Press, 2015. Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Translated by Robert Bononno. University of Minnesota Press, 2010.