Splenic thinking: A speculative provocation in performance and practice

This article explores ‘splenic thinking’ as a speculative, embodied methodology for artistic and choreographic practice. Emerging at the intersection of performance, medical humanities, traditional Chinese medicine and affect theory, the spleen is reconsidered not only as an anatomical organ but also as a conceptual apparatus for filtering, metabolizing and holding ambiguity alongside performance philosophy. Drawing on historical, cultural and posthuman perspectives, as well as reflections from embodied workshops and diverse writing practices, splenic thinking is presented here as a practice of attentiveness to the overlooked, the melancholic and the metabolically entangled. The article proposes that to think with the spleen is to attend to what is unspoken, marginal and internally processed, offering a diagnostic and generative framework for understanding knowledge production through the choreographic. This is not thinking as clarity or cognition, but as filtering, dwelling and releasing. Splenic thinking invites artists and researchers to write, move and notice differently.