Marcus Steinweg on Artmap.com

AFFIRMATION OF CONTINGENCY 13TH LECTURE AT THE BIJLMER SPINOZA-FESTIVAL: MAY 14, 2009 BY MARCUS STEINWEG (ABSTRACT)

Art is an opening to contingency. To assert a form means to make chaos precise. The mode of being of art, Castoriadis says, lies in "giving form to chaos". Art is a "window on chaos" by trying to give it a form.2 To give chaos a form means to give form to the formless without neutralizing the intensity of formlessness. The unveiling of chaos tears off the veil of ephemeral evidence. It leads toward the incommensurable. Art and philosophy actually live from the difficulty in identifying the cosmos in chaos, a certain order in disorder, and also the chaos in the cosmos.
Art was never anything other than an agreement with the fragility of its time. Art does not come from a stable situation; it is the experience of the instability of instituted reality. Art exists only as the experience of the porosity of the system of facts.3 Therefore, for art there can be no alliance with the facts, which does not mean, however, that it disputes or misrecognizes their power. But art does not exhaust itself by demonstrating this non-misrecognition through the analytical power which it also has. As long as art does not transgress and transcend its knowing, it is not art. It would be nothing other than a form of self-reassurance of the subject within the web of its critically commentated situation. Only an assertion of form, that evades narcissistic self-reassurance by articulating the fleetingness of factual certainties, succeeds in confronting the universal inconsistency which is the subject's genuine, proper time and its genuine, proper place, for, to be a subject means to transgress the horizon of facts in order to give room to the experience of a primordial tornness, which is the subject’s truth, by asserting a new form. I call this tornness the incommensurability of a life which, as the life of a subject, accelerates beyond its representation as a subject in the field of aesthetic, social, political and cultural evidence. The subject does not articulate this distance only subsequently. It is nothing other than the distance which it articulates toward the authority of facts. It distances itself from the world of the conceptual and aesthetic codes which suggest to it the illusion of a firm identity, while reducing it to its status as object. Resistance to this reduction means lifting oneself up in view of factual reality, opening up to the turbulence of life in its uncontrolled dimension. That is the dimension of chaos which marks the edge of worldly events, the contingency implicit in them.