Giving Hand

The language of extraterrestrials

What does it mean that an arrow is shown here rather than here? Obviously, it cannot mean anything, but at the same time, how can we be sure? The apprehension that this really is part of an alien language; a language understood by persons unknown, is nevertheless very compelling. It is compelling because, whether the formulation of a new kind of language is technically possible or not, this possibility is supposed in the here and now. If we allow ourselves to look in an objective way at what is being demonstrated (For example in The Italians by Cy Twombly pictured above), we are certainly not seeing a part of an alien language, or material toward the development of such a language, but an acceptable materialisation of the possibility of such a development. What is being demonstrated is apparently part of an alien language, but its coherence, as something incoherent, is only valid in a conditional way, as something distant, like the language in dreams that degrades as one awakes. A similar situation evidently confronts the producer of such a work, the possibility of such a language being simultaneously affirmed and denied by the overall culture. As a general observation, the work produced does not attempt to rationalise these contradictory determinations but instead this contradiction is retained.

Coherence is a function of intention. The supposition that there is this alien language is coherent as an apprehension but not as a conscious intention. The work that depends on this coherence therefore depends on intention being divided against itself. The development of a real content, which would obviously have to be intended as such, is for this reason foreclosed. So from its fundamental undecidedness the work is ultimately presented as a faulty solution to a real problem. It remains coherent only at the expense of the development of real content. The concern really seems to be with occupying the position of a real analysis, without making any kind of real analysis, and inevitably, since mere occupation counts as supersession, the prior possibility of an alien language becomes occupied against the development of such a language.

The intimacy hypothesis

(Kurt Schwitters Merzbau c 1924)

The fundamental condition of bourgeois art is the strange idea of intimacy that underwrites the action of private citizens objectifying the alienated aspects of their own consciousnesses in durable works. The circuitous methods of art, i.e. objectification, presuppose, one the one hand, direct intimacy being blocked, while on the other hand the maintenance of a serene faith in this same intimacy with regard to the supposed reception of the object; the moment when the object is at last dug out of the generalised garbage, whether a thousand years or only a few days later. For this reason the most basic presentation of art resembles the style of flirtation, but horribly degraded. In the whoreish posturing of authentic art, which seeks to counteract the poverty of its formulation, the alienation of the object is itself made alienating.

If the members of another society would have been allowed to comment on this state of affairs, they might have reasonably concluded that this idea of intimacy was fundamentally misconceived. Surely one ought to have a single conception of intimacy coherent with respect to any situation, rather than a conception of intimacy internally riven by contradiction. Intimacy, nevertheless, remains everywhere, hypothesised.