Adorno in Negative Dialectics (1966) used the term “vertigo” to describe the impact of what he called “unframed thoughts.” By this Adorno refers to thought that has been unleashed from a “bureaucratic way of thinking” and that, in turn, creates a kind of mental or intellectual or psychic vertigo in the sense that the mind confronts reality without the usual frames andsupports. The negative in Adorno lives separately from its dialectical relationto positivity and is part of an “anti-system” within which reconciliation and repair play no role. The negative, in other words, has to perform its philosophical work without concerns for unity, coherence, truth and identity: negation has no purpose, no goal, no triumphal conclusion, no particular outcome.

Vertigo of this kind sets up an altered relation to entropy, one that does not resist entropy or gravity but surrenders to disorder and downward momentum. Precisely this approach to dizziness, vertigo and entropy was taken up recently in an ensemble dance performance choreographed by Faye Driscoll in2024 and performed by a group of Black, brown, Asian queer and non-binaryperformers. The work, Weathering, is a wild and complex dance performanceby a motley crew (in the best sense). In this performance, the dancers or actors were perched precariously on a spinning platform, nominally a bed, that moved slowly at first but that accelerated throughout the performance until it reached a vertiginous climax. The increasing speed corresponded to the intensification of disorder on the mattress as the bodies struggle to hold on,to stay upright, to keep their bearings, to orient. As the speed increases so does the sense of chaos and precarity and the dancers begin to lean in towards each other, dealing frantically with a dispersed center that will not hold.

Weathering is very much a gestural statement about unworlding, climate collapse, vertigo and the ravages of capitalism as they play out with uneven impact on Black, brown and Asian queer and trans bodies. As the platform, in Weathering, increased in velocity and transitioned from barely moving at the start of the performance to careening by the climactic point, the bodies themselves begin to lose coherence. Like a piece of clay on a potter’s wheel, the sculpture formed by the bodies on the mattress seemed at first to be coherent and geometric, orderly and connected. But as the speed increased, it was as if the potter had removed her hands and the clay began to fly around forming wobbly, unstable shapes that cohered for a moment and then dissolved. Clothes flew off, bodies leant into one another or fell from the platform, and generally speaking, entropy set in – the loss of control became evident as the bodies leaped on and off the spinning platform that the audience could now recognize as a globe, a globe that was inthe process of unraveling and coming undone under the pressure of humanpresence. The performance, a total ensemble piece with no solo dancer and with performers who depended upon each other for moments of stability and focus when in the eye of the storm, was a brilliant way of linking human movements to the unseen and unfelt forces of entropy that structure our undoing. The aesthetic gestures that make up Weathering are a seemingly negative set of activities that oppose the making up of a self or the imagining of a world thatcan hold that self in place. Instead, Weathering throws the bodies from its unstable surface and hurls them across space and time, forcing them to feel the velocity of global rotation, the weight of gravity, the dizziness of life on a dying planet and the process of things falling apart. The entropic motion that propels Weathering towards chaos is precisely an orientation towardsincreasing formlessness and vertigo. Our ideas, as Adorno implied, when released from regimes of meaning that keep them stable, spin dangerously andgeneratively out of control. Our dizziness is not our downfall so much as a portal to a new way of being, a being that depends on others, that demands that we hold fast to the bodies around us, and a mode of moving that is uncomfortable, devastating and completely necessary.