Thinking Will

Thinking while walking my infant son, I enter the wide terrain of “Art and Trauma” headed toward the notion of “damage-centered research” articulated by Eve Tuck in her open letter of 2009. Why would we doubt that artists can express traumatic experiences without reifying the damage caused through such experiences? It turns out that this is the important question.

How do plants perform? Why do people talk about this? How else might we think of what plants do? Why should we care what plants do and how they live?

A convergence of Will’s grief work and theatre scholarship. Why don’t we attend to death onstage with the same sensitivity as we attend to the death of a loved one?

“Thinking Will” is the name of a 6-part project dedicated to extemporaneous thinking. I invited topics from friends and colleagues, and then I whittled the list down to 6. In episode 1, I think through conspiracy theories by drawing on the term “Pharmakon,” which itself has a rich history in philosophical thought.