... this blog is an ongoing investigation into modes of suspension that started as a research project in Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College in 2011 ...

Saturday 6 August 2011

Non-relationship and indifference

Our culture is mainly structured between dichotomist oppositions. In dichotomist model one has A and not A, there is no third. The third is excluded. One can trace a line and that will divide two terms clearly. What Agamben in his lecture "Forms of power" in EGS suggests is to describe the world more like a magnetic field that is bipolar, from pole to pole, where one can never trace a single dividing line. In bipolar model a third is automatically admitted. The third is indifference. It is part of the structure, not a result of the model.

In fact Schelling has suggested that this indifference is the most original dimension that comes before any opposition. Indifference starts a new relationship between the two opposite elements - that is a non-relationship. Indifference is when all dichotomies break. Schelling calls this thing love. Love is a non-relationship. Love is when you reach the point of indifference, as you cannot prescribe properties to love. You can only love when all properties are indifferent. Indifference is usually described in negative terms - as no feeling at all. In Kant‘s model things are described with their counterparts. But in the beginning of the model is a thing with no counterpart. He calls it admiration. It is the point where you perceive the difference. In that sense admiration is the threshold of the system but there is exclusion in the model - that of indifference. Giorgio Colli states that two points are in contact only where there is a void of representation between them. Contact, in that sense, is again a non-relationship.

I wonder whether suspension (or state exception for that matter) in fact acts similarly to indifference in bipolar models - between everyday life and emergency, crisis...

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