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Lets initiate the meaning behind this blog - ideas of 'art' and 'life'. This is freestyling, I have always assumed that 'art' as it has been developed and debated throughout 'Western' thoughts was always missing an important or significant element to its understanding. What it is, I cannot define it for the time being. But it is becoming clear that 'art' somehow reflects the 'other'--that's another body of knowledge in desperate-need of being clarified and contextualised, at least historically. What I mean by this ('other') is very much influenced by the philosophical works of M. M. Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas. Both appeal--at least to me--to a relational--aesthetic of (understanding) being. I remember talking to a Philosophy student a couple of month ago about my thesis and his response to my attempt at fusing Heidegger, Levinas, Bakhtin, and Derrida into a text about a Tongan-born artist was basically summed-up in one sentence--roughly "Why would you use Philosophers in an Art Histroical text?" So, already I am vulnurable here to criticism by hard-core-passionate students of Philosophy who thinks Heidegger or Derrida is saying this and not that or talking about this and not about that. I can understand this in regards to Heidegger, but Derrida?

I am also wide open for harsh criticism from students of Pacific or indigenous knowledge and the inevitable process of 'decolonisation' which makes sense from the outset and to which I offer no resistance. However, I am--at least for the time being--a believer in that phrase that everybody keeps saying about the Master's house and the Master's tools--something about dismantling the Master's house with the Master's tools? Whatever it is, it sounds convincing to me, especially as the process towards decolonisation means from the outset a movement imbued with the dynamics of 'destruction'--or to use the French Dictionary, "deconstruction". [Still Freestyling] I understand this process to be taking place within an always already space imbued with problematics of the ends--that is, what is at the end of decolonisation? What are the infra-structures there in place to accommodate the mind at the success of this alleged inevitable process or step in a Pacific or indigenous person's journey towards self-deiscovery?

How can we accommodate this process without ever knowing the tools with which we were and are still colonised by? Our own native worldviews? But how much of this system or process......[I got lost here]

2bcont...