By Apostolis Artinos
A pair of scales, two arms, and the pointer in the middle, what it shows, what it silences.
We live in a fetishism of measurements, where government, business, as well as individual policies are modulated in analogy to opinion polls or other mathematized findings. Elements that dissimulate the objectivity of their truth, its evaluated validity. Measurements capture what has been voiced by the world. A defined, obliging language which attempts to name the unspeakable and fathom its inexperience. But the truth of the world is not e-vinced, is not de-fined. The truth belongs to the unstated, the undefined and the imperceptible. It is this very condition of the language, the incongruity of its origin that does not realize its unity. The multiplicity of the of the world is not located in findings but in errors, in the missing of points. Points that beget exceptions and untraceable domains. Statistical subjects do not exist, verified quantities neither, only the inflation of the One. An incongruity to be registered nowhere as it cannot be admeasured. A black hole that agitates every possibility for conclusions. Regarding people and their materialistic world, we can verify nothing, but the exceptionality only of its truth. Precisely as is also worded by Alain Badiou, in his Public Seminar: "Bodies, Languages Truths"originally delivered at the Victoria College of Arts, University of Melbourne, on September 9th 2006: “There are only bodies and languages except that there are truths”.Whatever stands out, whatever is missed by comprehension, this non- appropriation of it, is also the “non reducible” of its truth.
Measurable quantities are not completely reducible to the being of things, there will always be something missing, and what is usually imprinted in the measuring is nothing more than their most tenuous fold. This distinction, together with the difference that arises, is what renders things unique, what turns into substance their existing dimension, their ecstatic experience, an experience that evaluates the world in terms of the non being of its name. Measurements are not the reality of things but its elemental structure the sterile ground of the sense, which will distort these points of measurements towards the direction of desire and ideas. An orientation that removes and metabolizes an orientation that distorts. This phantasmal proposition that inactivates its material, the materiality of the real in the sphere of its poetic inspiration. Therefore, it is the ob-jects (ob-jec-texts) of the world, and not its objectivity, which ascribe its forms. Its sub-jectified intake, which also becomes its empirical reception and its morphic emergence in the land of the conceptual. Our materialistic entourage, even in this ecstatic dimension, is thus perceived as an utterance of Speech, as a movement that moves outward, beyond the defined, pure being, responding to the apex of its illusory diversions and affiliations. Things do not emerge within their being, but in the night of their remembrance. They exist in the same way existence may exist, beyond existing, as Heidegger maintained. There where they also communicate their differences and they discharge their being.
The world is composed in its differance, in a complexity of origins that inscribe its being. The differance is multiple and also multiplicative. A disparaged ontology that is wasted in the dispersion of its points, in their disorderly escape. Demersal, rhizomatic endings which germinate in the fortuitousness of the winds. The degree of differance among the things and the languages signals an impassable, but at the same time permeable threshold. A circulation that aggravate the traces, reforming them by means of their encounters and their joint auditions. They are located and they locate. They train within a chaotic condition which dismisses every possibility of their taking form. There where they are detected they are also vaporized. The more the differance is recognizable the more misapprehended it is in the eyes of the other. Each time, it assumes the form of its paranoia. A “seem to be” organized in the distortion and in its parasitic enunciation. This unlimited complexity of languages which is beyond the logic of identities and differences, only a deviation, a deviation in general.
Surely, things are materialized within a specific language which gives them form and sense. A language that dictates them. But, on the other hand a series of unique, incidental distortions divert this creative procedure, encapsulating within the things, the possibility for an unfamiliar sense, their availability οn a different scene. Theseare, of course, the objects of art, but is also the commonplace of things, which are available in its heterotopic dimension. The objectivity of the world that undertakes its ex-emption. A radical change that is located not so much in the ‘seems to be’ of the materiality of objects, as in the additional sense that is ascribed to them. On their shape we read the un-inscribable of their differance, a differance that exempts them from the world of things and their practical meaning, dedicating them to their otherwise being within the world. The seduction of the objects of art derives from this element that sits upon the object, in the form of stardust, distorting its being and ascribing it to its nonexistence. A nonexistence defined by (the element) itself, and becomes the way of its sole existence. There is a ‘not to seem’ inscribed in the thing, the concealing of a dimension that exceeds the being of things and establishes their transcendent sense. A dimension that also ascribes the hyper-conceptual position of the thing as an ob-ject within the world. Art invests on this in-ability of the objects, their nonexistence, their transcentological differance. The minimal that had absolutely no value at all may, on the re-meditative pedestal of the art, regain its heresy, from that which Badiou will name “Contingent Transformation”. A position that demonstrates the non-inscribable trace of the thing which dwells dormant in materiality. This is the grandiose movement of Duchamp, to elevate the thing to the position of the object of art, and to distort it beyond its being, in the orbit of its dialecticalisation. Thus, the thing is not Kant’s thing-in-itself ( das Ding an sich) but the being of its differance and therefore the being of its dialectic, its dialecticalisation conversion. Henceforth, a real ob-ject of the world that stimulates its network and its unique range.
What is it then that these scales of Dambassina measure? If they measure anything, to be precise if they exhibit anything, this is no more than the scale of distortion and differance of their object. Even there where the sequence of arms seems to obey certain logic, there is always a misapprehension lurking to undermine the explicitness of the interpretation. What is exposedhere are things that have been previously weighed within their experience. They are not objects of indifference, or fortuitousness, but predicates of thought that test their objectivity on the subjective facet of their perception. Theorems that demonstrate the dialectic of the opposite pole, the tolerance and endurance of their unadulterated difference. What is opposed in the two arms of the scale, and the middle pointer tolerates, is logics beyond zer-o-ne. Ontological distinctions of asymmetric and asymptotic identities which have at their disposal the differences of the world as well as the margin of their correlations. On the pedestal of these scales what is evaluated is on the one hand the transcendentological identity of the objects, and on the other the domain of their influence. The one which reads the other the one which tolerates the other, the one which undermines the other. A dialectic of presence and absence, a dyadic order, after all an “intersubjective coordination” as Lacan will say. A language, this language of 0 and 1, which dictates the Other, its sequence, the range of its message, and then again this message is being repelled, abandoned, drifting in the region of the inexpressive, as Freud has pointed out. Thus, the silver cloud of a fishing line, a pile of keys from the housesof her life which are barely weighed with some dust red in colour with the word sex written on it, a lock of her daughter’s hair together with a wishbone, some dust green in colour with some dust blue in colour, a kitchen with her egg, the solitary head of a boy doll made of porcelain, all metaphors of impossible categorizations, which, nonetheless, the emotional and aesthetic experience, jointly articulates, transforming them into seduction, into pure forms of seduction. The real may be true in its distinctions, but is revealed in its escapes, in the seduction of its objects, when they are deducted, and respond no more. All amounts to hermetisms of the language, the non reducible of our world, its surplus, whatever it may exhibit, whatever it may silence.
Lydia Dambassina, The Gini Coefficient, 11thOctober – 19thNovember2016, Genimosque(YeniJami), Thessaloniki