thoughts emerging from Renaud Barbaras’s Desire and Distance and his discussion of Bergson’s critique of the metaphysics of nothingness (related ideas from Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Kraus in their book Formless and their examination of works of art that explore the theme of ‘formlessness’ also have a floating influence)
o as Barbaras states, paraphrasing Bergson, objects don’t come out of ‘nothing’ because ‘nothing’ as a reality is an impossibility, so objects come out of the objective ‘all’ – an existence that is full of ‘not empty’
o there is only ‘substance’, which has not appeared out of nothing, but is background, source, and outcome all at once
o this is a flattening to an irremovable one-ness that merges all effects into primary causes that loop or double back onto themselves at an essential level – i.e. matter is self generating
o this removes ‘nothing’ from the role of reality’s ‘other’
o it removes materiality from the idea of an ultimate genesis and makes it an un-made constant (there was no ‘big bang’, no ultimate beginning to everything – such concepts are an impossibility on the level of experiential or known reality)
o materiality is the un-made maker of all that is made and un-made
o materiality is a permanent, ontological ‘static’ ceaselessly fluctuating with activity of one sort or another (nothing is free of it, there is always movement somewhere within a thing or place)
o materiality actualises non-nothingness as indestructible in a continuum that is self-given
o “from dust to dust” means there is only dust (Duchamp grew dust piles, he called it ‘dust breeding’, and deliberately incorporated it as a ‘painting’ layer in his work – Bois, Y. & Krauss, R. Formless, a user's guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997. p.226, & note 2, p.284)
o framed in this way, movement in the everyday takes on a different shade – things are forever bubbling and brewing in the present – a present that never goes away – the changes are in a location’s self-changing processes – this takes action that is normally thought of and perceived as linear and directional in a spatio-temporal sense, its ‘passing-through’ quality, and fixes or cements it in place so that it can’t move in or out of the static ever-present moment – all it is doing is self-altering itself while remaining glued against the ongoing surrounding moment
o as perpetual fluctuations in and of the constancy of the moment-location, movement becomes part of locations that change partially in an illusory way, or more accurately perhaps, in a partial way, in that materiality never goes away and neither does the moment and neither does ‘location’ – this reveals a conceptual split – because moving bodies move into new locations, backgrounds and locations change around them and are continually replaced, but the phenomena of ‘background’ or ‘location’ never goes away, body’s not only ‘pass through’ these, they also ‘carry’ locations around them as a physical constant which they can never shed – so on one level movement can be seen as the kaleidoscopic changing of a fixed reality – and in this sense, people are always attached to location and are of it as embedded aspects - no matter where they are, people are always embedded in environments because they can’t be anywhere else at the same time
o conventional understandings of space and movement are based on the experience of being able to move from one location to another – this understanding acknowledges a separateness between figure and ground that allows the moving bit to relocate itself in space – this ‘separating’ ability is the basis of object-hood, which imbues a thing with existential independence – but this independence gets over-inflated and bestowed as a condition of material reality itself, i.e. material reality has an independence that separates it from the backdrop of space conceived as a blank emptiness, as ‘nothing’ – but when ‘nothingness’ is removed, material reality, or object-ness, immediately gets swallowed into a background of its own kind, therefore losing total independence as it merges back into a sea of materiality and becomes part of sticky existential textures and patterns that are responsible for forming and sustaining it
o in this way it seems to me that ‘separateness’ has the same illusory quality as ‘nothingness’ – separateness is a slither that surrounds a thing and allows mobility within environments – like some kind of invisible lubricant surrounding every distinct thing, contributing to movement in the world – of course a sliver of invisible lubricant between things doesn’t exist, but either way objects are bestowed with an existential power to break boundaries in space, which is an ability to exert freedom from space – but the independence of objects to break boundaries within locations is always within the context that they can’t break out of the backdrop and frame of materiality which in this sense becomes a sea which not only immerses every single THING but is completely self-immersing and pinpointed in the unchanging constancy of ‘now-time’ – which is another slither with an illusory slipperiness
o there is no frame surrounding BIG reality on the outside of which is empty space – there is no elsewhere outside of reality, only somewhere else boundlessly within it – there are no boundaries and divides separating things within reality, these are all infinitesimally intricate parts of its organisational immediacy and its reality as a dynamic, systemic ‘organism’ (dangerously close here to hylozoism!)
o movement is now no longer about the ‘space-between’ (which, as a non-existent slither, has thinned away to join the non-existence of nothing-ness) and is now about the ‘space-against’
o movement is now both changing, sequential, linear, evaporational, conditional, temporary, transitional, transitory, temporal, procedural, etc as well as permanent, present, non-destructive, fixed, unconditional, immoveable, substantive, etc
o the distinction between presence and process is removed by expanding a way of viewing that sees each of these as the other
o this seems to locate and spiral the mechanics of what I am observing more into a location rather than simply across its surface – it’s a burrowing device that peels back a surface never to find ‘nothing’ underneath, but instead finds structural-organic pulsations and integrated patterns of activity and interaction whose idiosyncrasies belie completeness – the productive exchange between the universal particle (the speck of dust) and the idiosyncratic particular
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