“Like a submerged theme or anathema, hesitation seems to leave a strangely blurred trail that comes into sharp focus wherever – in the long history of the West – a culture of action and a culture of work are refracted and reflected on. Hesitation accompanies the imperative of action and making things happen like a shadow, like ruinous opponent. One could speak here of a hesitation-function: wherever acts manifest themselves and chains of action are organized, there will always be a marked slackening, a pause, a stopping, an interruption. This also establishes an asymmetrical relationship to time and history. Insofar as action, according to Nietzsche, unfolds within forgetting at the same time as bringing forth history, its shadow, hesitation breaks through this history, stepping outside of its context to evoke a specific memory: a memory of what has not been, of a past that was never present, of acts and actions that will not take place – or not yet.

Let’s turn to a different, active aspect of hesitation that distances itself from any basis in lethargy. This second aspect includes an idiosyncratic accuracy, an idiosyncrasy at odds with the solidity of global situations, the irrevocability of verdicts, the finality of solutions, the certainty of consequences, the duration of conformities, and the weight of results. Plus a well-founded mistrust of any belief in salvation through progress. Procrastination begs to differ. It is the articulation of a complicated mindset which, rather than looking for answers to questions and solutions to problems, assumes that the given answers and solutions contain further questions and that problems remain unsolved. Surrounded by solutions, one does not necessarily find the corresponding problems. Hesitation presupposes complexity: its arithmetic gets carried away with smaller and smaller numbers. It endures linearity and the monotony of the world reluctantly, if at all: “Now the fact is that this world is uncommonly and notoriously manifold, which can be put to the test at any moment if one just takes up a handful of world and looks at it a little more closely.” (Franz Kafka)”

(Joseph Vogl, On Hesitation, 2007)

oh oh oh, getting excited again, it all resonates in my head (or am i just looking for excuses for my own failures..). is there a way to produce hesitation? what would it look like? how can you give it space and time, let it unfold?