ARCHÄOLOGIE – Archaeology

Archaeology is a sad science. Whilst archaeologists are digging for the origin (ρχή) they find ruins, shards and splinters, the clues of its inexistence. There is no intact origin. There are only fragments, remnants, sediments, debris, nebulae, dust of past eras.

Fictions of a ρχή that turns archaeology itself into fiction – a narrative, an aberration, a phantasm and adventure.

BEJAHUNG – Affirmation

Part of the affirmation is the acceptance of the unknown. Affirmation exists only as venture and generosity. She is: shouting out ‘yes’ to the uncertain, the greeting of ghosts. She is also a call for incommensurability, blindness, madness. But it is a sort of insanity without whom nor art nor thought could exist.

CLOUD – Cloud

Clouds are cushions. They are soft almost weightless, like ships navigating in the skies. They always carry hope, promises, illusions. At the least they carry the next rain. No human being lives without clouds. As carriers they are like nomads and form a caravan of floating camels. Even the tiniest dreams stick to them. A glance to the clouds blocks the sight and extends it to the invisible. Once the clouds clear we can see the sun.

DISPLAY – Display

It is always an offer. In most cases it offers not itself but others, the unknown, the strange, monsters or ghosts. The display implies a heterogeneous range of things. There are things to see whilst it activates the new ordering of its elements. It invites us to rearrange the world. Therefore it is political: Because it implies (undefined) orders – the mission to see, to think, to feel and to live differently than beforehand.

EVIDENZ – Evidence

Artworks are promises of evidence. We need to mistrust them, for only through the mistrust does the shimmer of evidence becomes visible to us. Only there in the lie, they do not lie.

FUNDSTÜCK – Found Object

Every found object expresses the wishes and projections of the finder. I never find anything. To be precise, it is the object that finds me, as if it was waiting for me to be found. The object that bumps into a subject and activates it. Dissolved into my world, the found object appeals to its strangeness, heterogeneity, and inconsistency. It tears a hole in the fine woven web of facts. All art that aims for more than confirmation of what we all know has to pass this hole.

GLÜCK – Luck

The luck is in the future and in the past. It has no presence or none other than its representatives, such as memory or expectation. As soon as it kicks in, it dissolves. It is only real in its disappearance.

HAUT – Skin

No life, no generation, no culture exists without its specific dreams and fictions. Each subject is coated in its own narratives. We won‘ t reveal a deeper layer of truth beyond the narrative. Without them the subject disappears. This doesn’t mean that there is no true life in the fictive. It signifies that the fictive life is also fiction – and a hope that Adorno sticks to ex negativo. The coating of the subject can be described as sediments of a collective unconscious. It could be interpreted as layers of skin., where molting is not excluded. One layer replaces the other. Sometimes the fiction of the fiction lessness becomes fiction = a dominant narrative.

IMAGINATION – Imagination

Is the capacity of imagining the absentee. As creative power, it accelerates the subject beyond its own realities. It allows the subject to fly, ignoring gravitation and aiming for the farthest future and past. Imagination is presence through absence: The extensive present.

JENSEITS – Beyond

The beyond is on this side, it is entirely part of world. The idea of positive ‘Hinterwelten’ (Nietzsche) belongs to the tradition of occidental Onto-theology. Thereby is the back inherent in the front, as the depth is to the surface. A new metaphysics should be surface metaphysics. It would examine the presence of the absent in the present. It would recognize reality and materiality as shimmering evidence of this absence. There is a beyond and it is here and now.

KOMPASS – Compass

Wherever the needle points to, nobody wanders life without compass. There is noone out there who doesn’t cling to narratives, might they be of mythic, religious, cultural or scientific nature. Every single critic of ideologies cannot be buoyed facing this simple fact derived from daily life observations. Only the one who confronts ideology with being unbetrayable and unreplaceable, might have access to a critical examination of the situation, whilst the latter does not gain in clarity.

LUFT – Air

There is no outside for there is no panoptic perspective. None of that kind that would allow to approach an eternal, encompassing order. We cannot even examine the material in its given standardized sense. The sense is lacking. Otherwise we have an overload of an overload of interpretation, evaluation, manipulation, shifting, deconstruction, instrumentalization of the empirical and materialistic givens. To think within the space of constituted reality and to navigate through it means to become contaminated and affected by it – leaving traces in it. One could  attempt to speak of reciprocal determination, if determination was not attached to an inflexible concept of reality lacking the necessary freedom.

MATERIAL – Material

Our thinking is always threatened by stereotypes that are mono-causal and mono-perspective constructs. Those block our clear view on inconsistent, surreal and incommensurable parts of reality. Our handling of history (or of the so-called history, cause indeed, it isn’t about a coherent structure, which sense prevails in principle and which development strictly bound down to causality) will always be one with constructions and reconstructions of history. There is no historian out there who is not a translator. But the matter he translates is already itself product of translations other translators beyond his reach. It is about translations of translations: in the thinking, in the art, in what one could call speculative historiography. Art and philosophy participate in this as they operate within reality and history with the creation of their own material.

NARRATIV – Narrative

Reality is the promise of consistency that cannot be held up (analog to a well known part of the Aesthetic theory, in which Adorno defines art as ‘a promise of fortune that is refracted’^[1]). Artistic and philosophic thinking intensify their relation to reality through mistrust. This works only by hinting to its contingency: She is as she is but she is not necessarily as she is. She could be different. Such as history in general could have been different as she did. Part of the thinking is the continuous practice of zooming out of the narratives. Of those that we assume too often as reliable and necessary.

OFFENHEIT – Openness

The web woven of ‘known’ facts is not eternally determined it is open for alterations. There are zones that are undefined and areas of freedom. Those are products of the collision between a subject and the dominant narratives and evidences.

PRODUKT – Product

To think means to be brave enough to mistrust the evidence (what suggests and directs their naturalness a priori presumed as being unquestionable). The significance herein is the non acceptance of their authorities. Rather to vortex them through their transformation, reconfiguration, retranslation or, as Deleuze might have put it – their genesis. The latter is not only historical (in the sense of linear) but trans-historical within history. This is not related to idealism. It would be in opposition to every idealism, if it would not normally occur as realism without us noticing that what we call realism most of the time actually is another idealism. One might call this also idealism of facts or the belief in reality.

QUEER – Queer

Not the thought nor the sexuality are queer. It is the real itself that does not fit into the simplest patterns or indices. The queerness of the real turns it into an undeniable excessive demand. In the space of the latter we observe the subject jumping back and forth, not due to indecisiveness but due to knowing about the disparity, multiplicity and transformability of reality.

RELIKT – Relic

The past is stored in the relic. It is the evidence of its disappearance. It is present absence and therefore can only represent a fetish.

SYMBOL – Symbol

In ancient Greek the word means sign. Höderlin says we are undecipherable. But first of all we are surrounded by signs and we rely on those to orientate. Similar to a landmark, the symbol carries the promise for orientation. The symbol expresses a promise for sense and orientation that cannot be held up. That is why symbols have to be cracked like an oyster – to force them to reveal the hidden.

TRAUM – Dream

In dreams we have encounters of a specific kind. Whilst dreaming, the subject of improbability opens up in front of us. While awake, it exists in clearly defined borders. The dream opens this space, not because there is a hidden truth – but because the dreamer does not care about the truth.

UMGEBUNG – Surrounding

Regressive fantasy or actual wisdom: It means to merge with the surrounding, like Bataille’s animal that, after him, is like water in water.

VULGÄRARISTOTELISMUS – Vulgäraristotelismus

Artistic practice gains its relevance from the artists denial of reality. This has nothing to do with escapism. The opposite is true: the artistic practice enhances its contact to reality through removing its dominance. The artist as DJ, does not follow any strict line nor teleology or given sense in her practice. But it is experimental research that opens up the space to the undefined, the invisible, the uncharted territory. It is about the denial of the Vulgäraristotelismus, for the latter claims that everything exists already and that we shall accept our existence as bored-boring reconstructors of the given or past. It is far more alarming, even dramatic: there is more to invent and these inventions concern all realities in this world. It’s still out in the open, despite stable facts, irreversible history and an extensive lack of freedom. Despite alienation of the subject through its history and culture, despite economical imperatives, the dictatorship of ignorance that flood the entire planet.

WAHRHEIT – Truth

The subject floats within the richness of the existing as well as in the ontologically disparate. It floats in some sort of stream of contingency. The domain of the existing is particles of reality, is open and undefined. There is no eternal truth in it. In the contrary, it is rather as if its truth is to find in its own inconsistency. The promise of reality is reneged over and over again, for it is here where the thinking of philosophy and art operates and navigates.

XENOGRAPHIE – Xenography

One may call the artistic as well as the philosophical thinking xenographic. It is the registrar of the strangeness of a pretending familiar world. But thinking only exists through breaking with the familiarity.

YIING – Yiing

In ‘the Book of Changes’ Yiing light and night are differentiated in the same way as life and death are. But differently to the Occidental philosophy, the Chinese does not dramatize these differences.

Therefore in Chinese philosophy there is no need to synthesize these differences. In case this happens anyway, we are dealing rather with natural synthesises, where contrasts are only transitions. The subject itself is transition, a sort of multiplicity of different alternating states.

ZYNISMUS – Cynicism

The cynics will always have the determinism at hand to justify their passivity for everything is already decided. But this is not true. Our realities are fragile. This means that they are not eternally stable, they change. There remains a lot of space in the undefined. It is the undefined and contingency that allows for an open future (a future that was reducible on its past would not be one) – the inconsistency of our world. Art is this: the openness of the subject to these inconsistencies, operating with uncertainties and non existing evidence, the affirmation of the contingency of reality. The latter is prolonged wherever, whenever, why ever, always in the future, today ad infinitum to its farthest borders and beyond.

^[1] Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, GW 7, Frankfurt a. M. 1970, S. 205.