Equilibrium / Jindrich Chalupecky Award 2017

Equilibrium Andrea Průchová and Dominik Gajarský The thinness of the radiantly lit fluffs of hair seemed to be in an almost unseemly contrast with the sunbaked asphalt tamped by heavy machines. The shades of pink, red and crimson along with the bluish veins and greyish organ lines brazenly revealed the viscera of the body. The once clearly delimited space between the internal and the external collapsed and gave rise to formlessness; an amoeba which may change its form but does not move forward. It follows the trajectory of a complete collapse into itself, a movement of decline in the loss of form, as the last imprint of the rubber (tire) erases the reminder of the existence of the carcass. “Don‘t look there!” The act of stopping the child before entering the road was even more directive than the child expected. The jerky movement of the mother’s hand on the hood of the jacket induced a stinging, cooling touch of the zipper rider on the child’s neck. The foot which had been put forward glided back and the body which had been slightly bent forward found its state of equilibrium. “What is it”? The uttered present tense challenged the movement of decline by erasing it from the asphalt while challenging formlessness by seeking a possible structure. While the physical movement of the child was stopped by the squeeze of the mother’s hand, its eyes were roving around the blurred square of the open animal. It looked as if someone cut out a piece of a black shaggy carpet, put it on the road and spattered it with fruit jam. *** The encounter with a carcass represents a situation of meeting the foreign in the realm of the expected. On the level of the visual field, a formless body emerges among the elements constituting our familiar environment as an extraneous unit; a scrum of glitches in the perception process giving rise to a new (non)form. The carcass becomes an Intruder penetrating the field of individual perception and cognition, attracting our attention again and again by its indistinctiveness which pesters us and crosses the boundaries of the known. We embrace the new (non)form by our gaze and examine its qualities. We appear in a state of permanent communication, a negotiation of what we see while our gaze is transformed by the seen. It offers new perspectives, arrangement of elements, their stratification in space. Through the gaze, we enter an open communication field which promotes a free associative play of forms. We accept the possibility of the formation of something new and participate in it by involving our curiosity. We literally appear in a state of physiological awakening. On the other hand, the encounter with such an extraneous element represents an equally strong penetration into the social field of the seen; into the field of terms and meanings, the vocabulary of definitions of the surrounding world on whose pages formlessness becomes a foreign word. It represents an Intruder that can endanger the equilibrium of the system. It means a dysfunction which must, in the shortest term possible, find its place within the system, be defined and articulated in our behavior; for instance, in rejecting to look at the carcass and thus touch it by one’s gaze (“Don’t look at it”) or in denying its existence (“Don’t look there!” instead of “Don’t look at it!”). Through our rejection of looking at the carcass, the Intruder is rendered invisible and, as a surprising and unpleasant phenomenon, categorized as an undesirable sight. If that did not happen, the Intruder would remain a (non)form/(non)being in the field of the seen; the foreign which provokes both curiosity and fear of the undefinable and ungraspable. *** A greasy oily film was spread perfectly over every single millimeter of the oval fleshy body. The robust elegance of volume and the perfect symmetry of movement evoked the paradoxical notion of a perfect embrace which is always exclusively a goodbye. It never takes long enough. As soon as it happens, it already disappears. The neural connections of the machine, the fuel hoses, looked downright stupid next to the sensitively flexible scaly body. They were meant to represent a revolutionary convenience of the Ford era; a tool of mobility, a liberating escape from space and time which would wrest humankind from the firm grip of the native heath and enable man to scar this very heath by asphalt highway junctions. However, not even this gliding movement of mankind through the meandering turns could rival the majesty and deliberation of a snake’s body piercing the space, rather changing the newly acquired freedom into a blind dependence on technology and mechanized movement. The neural connection of the social machine, the notion of mobility as progress, looked downright stupid besides the natural movement of the animal body. *** The question of foreignness, the moment of encountering the Intruder, represents a complex problem of biological (field of perception) and social (field of terms and behavior) character; a process interconnecting our practical experience and theoretical reflection. Last but not least, it constitutes an ethical problem. “The Intruder (L’Intrus) enters by force, through surprise or ruse, in any case without the right and without having first been admitted. There must be something of the intrus in the stranger; otherwise, the stranger would lose his strangeness: if he already has the right to enter and remain, if he is awaited and received without any part of him being unexpected or unwelcome, he is no longer the intrus, nor is he any longer the stranger. It is thus neither logically acceptable, nor ethically admissible, to exclude all intrusion in the coming of the stranger, the foreign.“ Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’Intrus,” trans. Susan Hanson, CR: The New Centennial Review 2, no. 3 (2002), 1. The encounter with the foreign is determined by the position of the Subject that relates to the foreign, while a dialectic play between the communication modes of curiosity and systemic appropriation takes place on the backdrop of this process of relating. The encounter with the Intruder taking place within this dialectic is perfectly captured by the movement between the two meanings of the word patřit (Czech for look somewhere and belong to someone). On the level of visual perception, the Intruder is distinguished by the foreignness of the elements that do not belong to the field of expected forms. We examine the foreign with curiosity but leave it its authenticity. On the level of definition and behavior, we give the Intruder a name from our vocabulary, thus ensuring that it will belong to us and not to itself. Curiosity as a way of relating to the foreign is based on getting to know the Intruder through looking (at it) as a form of touching (it). Curiosity as a way towards recognizing something unbelonging somewhere is an invitation to an encounter with a new quality, information and experience. Within the curiosity mode, the penetration of the unknown is seen as a positive act of possible transformation, while still remaining an act of mutual communication. The modus of appropriation as a definition of something belonging somewhere is a second way of relating to the Intruder whom we want to tame by our own terms in a fear of possible change and disturbance of the equilibrium of the system. Here, the tool of touching is not the look but the word and the resulting process is that of assimilation which represents unilateral violent communication. Curiosity stopped by fear of an unnamable situation (looking at a formless carcass of a snake under the hood of a car) is the result of the clash of these two positions of the Subject towards the foreign which are always naturally interconnected in the life of the individual and society. The world is not and cannot be formed by isolated fields of the physiologically perceived and socially communicated. “[The problem of the foreign] is (therefore) what requires thought and, consequently, practice—otherwise the strangeness of the stranger is absorbed before he has crossed the threshold, and strangeness is no longer at stake.“ Ibidem, 2. When writing a common text, we experience the loss of balance that is experienced by a small child whose step towards curiosity can be stopped by a countermovement of the ubiquitous fear of the new and undefinable. This fear, also expressed in the rejection of being surprised by something hidden under the hood of the car (or in the wardrobe or under the bed in the context of one’s home), diverts us and the surrounding society towards terminological appropriation and allows the colonization of the perception and thinking of the Intruder. Regarding the Intruder, we think and act through this text and images since we do not want to get to the point of dislocating the beam of a balance when – first due to rapid assimilation and later due to total absorption – the foreign will no longer exist. We feel a lack of space available for the development of curiosity towards the foreign; which, we are afraid, may lead to a gradual decline of open communication and cognition. We therefore formulate the concept of the “Positive Intruder” and support the position of curiosity which may help restore the balance that is missing. We want to open a situation which will enable a permanent negotiation of forms, meanings, norms and values and which will not follow a preconceived scenario dominated by the fear of a slip of the tongue or the feel of a neologism/nonform. We do not want to possess the “Positive Intruder;” we want to become one.