REASON IS INCONSOLABLE
independently of language. Although the inferentialist premium on discursive
practices privileges the game of giving and asking for reasons, this game is not only or
exclusively realized in specifically linguistic discourse. The category of discursive practice is broader than that of linguistic practice. This is to say that reasoning understood
as the unfolding of discursive commitments, entitlements, and incompatibilities, is
not confined to the medium of explicitly self-conscious theoretical discourse, which
unfolds in and through language. Not every rational discursive practice operates in
this specifically linguistic medium. Artists think, and some artists think as rigorously
as any theoretician, albeit in and through a nonlinguistic medium.
Where noise is concerned, an artist like Mattin is engaged in thinking through
the implications of the commitment to the ideal of “free improvisation.” In the
course of working out these implications, he has discovered an incompatibility
between what is implied by the norm of free improvisation and the conventions
governing its actual practice. So he has undertaken a series of experiments designed
to test the limits of what is allowable within those conventions and in doing so he
seeks to expose the latent contradiction between the norm and the practice. I see
Mattin as someone engaged in an eminently rational cognitive practice, in which
self-consciously linguistic theorizing is just one element deployed alongside other,
nonlinguistic elements: sonic, gestural, verbal, visual, and so forth. His performances frequently bring all these elements into play. And the fact that the rational
reconstruction of the complexity of assertions implicit in these performances is
often retrospective in no way compromises their discursive rigor: the rationality of
a discursive practice is always retrospectively constructed. This is what it means to
say that thinking takes time; the rationality implicit in a discursive practice—where
“rationality” is understood as the intersubjective elaboration of discursive commitments, entitlements, and incompatibilities—is never immediately accessible to its
participants at any single stage of its unfolding.
Moreover, Mattin’s work is characterized by its self-consciousness (I mean
this in the sense of cognitive awareness) about the status of artistic practice in late
capitalist society and, in this regard, it explicitly addresses issues such as the nature
of abstraction and the content of emancipation. Thus he is doing more than merely
testing the conditions and limitations of a specific artistic medium—“noise” and/
or “free improvisation”—he is exposing the ways in which specific artistic practices
are implicated in broader social and discursive contexts. And the “philosophical”
tenor of his interrogation of his chosen medium has been generated in and through
his practical engagement with it: it is not an extraneous imposition. In interrogating
the limitations of a specific artistic practice, he has been compelled to investigate
whether and how these limitations may be conditioned by the nexus of other practices in which it is enveloped. Thus the engagement with universality follows from
unpacking the logic of a specific practice.
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Suprematist Ontology and the
Ultra Deep Field Problem:
Operations of the Concept
Iain Hamilton Grant
It took fourteen billion years to produce this image, for time to present its insuperably
partial self-portrait:
Figure 1: The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF)1
The image raises many questions concerning the character of time, the emergence
of order, and the imageability of creation. It presents the early universe approximately one billion years after the big bang, yet was taken in 2004. The Hubble Ultra
Deep Field (HUDF) is the name of the image, not of what it images. It images
time through space because the farther into the universe imaging reaches, the deeper
into time it descends. For all the marveling we might do concerning science, or what
knowing makes, the image does not, of course, present the inexistence antecedent to
the “imaged” infant universe or that inexistence antecedent to the universe’s emergence. The first inexistence is merely that of the billion years missing from the image,
which is, to that extent, a deep field problem. Yet this is merely a relative inexistence.
The ultra-deep field problem, which the HUDF does not image, involves not only
the relative inexistence that fringes the existent image, concept or entity, but the
absolute inexistence entailed when the deep field problem is acknowledged. Only this
1
This image “should offer new insights into what types of objects reheated the cold, dark universe
about one billion years after the big bang, when stars first started to shine, about thirteen billion
years ago.” See www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2004/mar/HQ_04086_Hubble_UDF.html.
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warrants the qualification “ultra-deep field,” since it exceeds depth in the direction
of the depthless, exceeds any existent in the direction of inexistence.
Historically, then, the HUDF is of something antecedent to its being imaged. In
other words, the image of the antecedent is consequent upon not only an image-capable
universe (deep field), but also upon the universe (ultra-deep field). As such, the image
is additional with respect to the universe: not merely an image of it but an additional element in it. The HUDF shows that every journey into the past takes place not only in the
future of that past, as is entailed by journeying into it; it also shows that, as a result, this
past is consequent upon the future in which it is made; and that, as a result, the past for
which the infant universe was a future remains a past undisturbed by Hubble’s intrusions.
From this perspective, despite the fact that the universe insuperably antedates its
being imaged, it is not inconceivable that creation itself be imaged, though this entails
the image of the inexistent universe consequent upon that inexistent universe. But the
imaged creation would be the future of the unimaged, its consequent rather than its
reproduction, and would amount to the production or emergence, within that universe,
of its own inexistence. Accordingly, the irreducible remainder of imaged inexistence will
be the existent universe. For the same reason, however, the surd or remainder of a newly
existent universe is precisely its inexistence, from which alone, according to the “Earliest
System Program of German Idealism,” creation can be understood as “emerge[nt] out
of nothingness,”2 that is, historically or temporally. It is this inexistence, the nothingness
or not-being of the universe, which, once there is a universe, is paradoxically ineliminable.
To see this, consider what temporality entails. According to F. W. J. Schelling,
temporality is what is always in excess of what is, because “what is” cannot be reduced
to a thing or an object. He writes: “Everything is temporal, the actuality of which is
exceeded by the essence, or the essence of which contains more than it can contain
in actuality.”3 Essence consists in more than actuality only if everything actual, everything currently active, is emergent. Temporality therefore entails the inactuality from
which being operative must itself emerge if it exceeds actuality. Thus understood,
temporality is temporality only if creation is involved, and creation entails inactuality,
an inexistence consequent upon what is actual that remains irreducible to the inexistence antecedent to the emergence of this actuality. Accordingly, creation is consequent
upon creation, or if creation is at all, it is creation to the nth power.
The “time before the world,” the antecedent of the image of the infant universe
or the HUDF, is therefore both a consequent of the existent universe and irreducible
to the antecedence it conceives. In other words, the concept of creation is itself an
instance of creation, involving the same irreducibility to the conceived as the universe
has to its creation: there is always an irreducible remainder between creation and its
concept, image, or additional element because the latter are instances of the former
and therefore involve their ineliminable inexistence.
After Immanuel Kant,4 philosophers would object here that any attempt to
conceive or to image “nature in its natural state—the time before the world”5 is an
attempt to conceive without concepts, to conceive a preconceptual nature behind
all concepts. Hence they would conclude that any attempt to conceive of what
is without concepts is self-contradictory. The concept of universal inexistence,
such philosophers would argue, merely captures a mourning, in the act of conceiving, for its inability to conceive its own creation, a melancholic Romanticism
bewailing what the concept cannot conceive, or what is “given” in advance of
the concept (“nature in its natural state” and so forth). Rather than pursue the
self-contradiction, it would be better, it might be argued, to abandon the attempt
to conceive of what being is before being conceived. Better not to do ontology at
all and to complete the shift that Kant initiated, according to some, from ontology
to deontology.6 The “space of reasons” that concept-using creatures by definition
occupy, they argue, is insuperable for such creatures which, to that extent, are not
saliently biological.7 To acknowledge that conceivers irrevocably occupy such a
rational space is thus to accept that it is not things that issue rational demands, but
only reason-givings. It is this on which philosophers should concentrate, and thus
“privilege inference over reference,” abstraction over representation, or the norms
entailed in making judgments over (hypothetically) nonrational realities.8 This need
not deny that there are photons before there are speakers, but only that photons issue
2
3
F. W. J. Schelling, Friedrich Hölderlin, and G. W. F. Hegel, “The Earliest Program for a System of
German Idealism,” in Theory As Practice: a Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings,
ed. and trans. Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 72–73.
F. W. J. Schelling, “On the Relation between the Real and the Ideal in Nature, or the Emergence
of the Axioms of Naturephilosophy from the Principles of Gravity and Light” (1806), Schellings
Werke II (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1856–61), 364. (Hereafter Schellings Werke is cited as SW
plus volume number. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Schelling are my own). For
Schelling’s theory of essence (Wesen) or “being operative” (wirksam sein), see his Philosophical
Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and the Objects Connected Therewith (1809), in SW VII,
341–342, 346, 258.
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Concept
4
5
6
7
8
That contemporary philosophy is insuperably “downstream from Kant” is asserted, for example,
by Robert Brandom in his “From German Idealism to American Pragmatism—and Back,” in
Perspectives on Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 1: “Developments over
the past four decades have secured Immanuel Kant’s status as being for contemporary
philosophers what the sea was for Algernon Swinburne: the great, gray mother of us all.”
This is the definition of Romanticism Novalis gives in §31 of his Allgemeine Brouillon, in Gerhard
Schulz, ed., Novalis Werke, 3rd ed. (Munich: Beck, 1987), 455: “The time of universal anarchy—
lawlessness—freedom—nature in its natural state—the time before the world (the state). Pre-world
time provides as it were the dispersed traces of post-world time. […] Chaos is creation fulfilled.
The future world is rational chaos, self-permeating chaos, chaos or .”
As the neo-Hegelian philosopher Brandom claims, for instance, in Tales of the Mighty Dead
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 212.
Examining “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism,” Brandom writes that, insofar as they
occupy the space of reasons, “merely biological beings […] become spiritual beings, undertakers
of commitments” (Tales of the Mighty Dead, 217). He later clarifies this view: “The world consists of
things and their causal relations, and they can only cause and not justify a claim or a belief ”
(Perspectives on Pragmatism, 123–24).
Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 1. Such “non-rational realities” are merely hypothetical in the sense
implied by the famous Hegelian dictum that “what is rational is actual and what is actual is
rational.” See §6 of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S.
Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 28–30.
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IAIN HAMILTON GRANT
rational demands to which reason-exchanging creatures are practically responsive.9
Such rational demands include well-justified scientific fact.
No one can deny that conceptual work is insuperable in all conceiving. But
can it be straightforwardly assumed that the space of reasons is therefore not nature?
Surely to do so relies on an assertion concerning what reason is that, contrary to the
hypothesis, privileges reference over inference, if only in this instance—a realism,
that is, even if only with regard to the concept. This realism tends, interestingly, to
be cashed out in terms of doings, of practices (chiefly the making and justifying of
judgments), rather than by considering the concept to be an “object,” a risk philosophers share, according to Freud, with schizophrenics.10 Yet since concepts issue
only from judgments and do not precede them, the only conceivably real doings are
those of judgment makers. Attention is paid neither to the operations of the concepts
themselves nor to actors other than those that occupy the space of reasons. Insofar as this
position maintains but does not elaborate this restricted realism, it fails to note the
deep field problem: as the HUDF shows, no matter how deep the field, it is fringed
with the inexistence of that field in which all imaging, conceiving, and constructing
are in consequence insuperably partial constituents. A consistent realism concerning the concept, the image, or the additional element therefore entails either
that “reality,” being itself a concept, is a state that cannot be extended beyond the
conceptual or that the concept of reality, if not so restricted, entails conceiving the
inexistence of the concept.
Examining the work of Kazimir Malevich, I will contest the claim that the
concept—this abstract entity or additional element—is not part of the universe in
which conceiving arises. For it is hard to see how a concept, an image, or an abstract
element may be added to a world if a world were not some field in which thoughts,
images, and abstract elements occur. In consequence, the insuperability of the conceptual does not entail the abandonment of nature for norms, nor a naturalization of
normativity or, what amounts to the same thing, the normativization of nature.11 And
so I deny, secondly, that the insuperability of conceiving licenses the abandonment
of ontology: if conceiving arises, it does so (a) in a universe and, (b) consequently
upon the inexistence that the concept shares with the universe that arises and in
which that concept itself arises. The realism at issue concerns the operations, the
distributions of antecedence and consequence, by means of which alone elements
may be additional.
The Flight Paths of Dust
9
See Brandom’s discussion of the status of photons before there were vocabulary users in
Perspectives on Pragmatism, 125–27.
10 Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious” (1915), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 204.
11 This last is John McDowell’s favored response to the problem. See especially his “two sorts of
naturalism,” in Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 167–97;
and his responses to Robert Pippin in Reading McDowell on Mind and World, ed. Nicholas H. Smith
(London: Routledge, 2002), 274–77.
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Concept
Malevich’s theory of The World as Non-Objectivity, as its title argues, does not claim
that because nonobjective art abandons imitation and expression, it therefore abandons realism, but rather that the world is nonobjectively.12 Thus the realism Malevich
advocates for nonobjectivism, insofar as this consists in a knowing of what is, is for
him inseparable from the works of science, as he constantly argues, just as some
scientists have argued that the productive element and transformative productions
that “knowing makes” turn physics into art.13 It is not by virtue of their various objects
(stars, paintings, concepts) that the sciences, arts, and philosophy are “realist” in the
sense I wish to spell out, but rather by virtue of the surd-structure, the “irreducible
remainder” or the “time before the world” that the concept of creation entails and
that is entailed in turn if there are additional elements. The concept of creation,
that is, entails that what is created was not. This structure is universal, I will argue,
insofar as, if true even in a single instance, it rules out its non-occurrence.
Three theories underpin the philosophy of nonobjectivity, according to
Malevich’s unpublished writings of the 1920s. The first concerns the theory of the
additional element, the second that of the world as nonobjectivity, and the third, the
theory of the copula. Each entails the other two: To the question “To what is an element additional?” therefore, the answer is—and “of course,” we might say—“the
world”; not, however, the world just as we find it, the world of experience and concrete objects for instance, but the world as it is, as “nonobjectivity.” Just as in any
proposition the copula is that element that combines a subject (such as “a square”)
with a predicate (such as “white”), so too an additional element augments the nonobjective world by means of the copula. What the copula does, therefore, its actions or
operations, how an element is added to a nonobjective world, forms the theory of the
Suprematist copula. Crucially, how the copula operates and in what environments
it operates demonstrate that it is not reducibly a concept or formal device, where
“formal” is understood as not being material. We will address each of the three
theories in turn. Malevich begins his account of creation thus:
Not in vain have little airplanes emerged from the bowels of the Earth [1].
They will not be stopped on Earth by the three-dimensional law [2], they will
fly to the place whence they have come [3], they are the dust of the Earth
12 Kazimir Malevich, The World as Non-Objectivity. Unpublished Writings 1922–25, ed. Troels Andersen,
trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Edmund T. Little (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976).
13 Johann Wilhelm Ritter, “Die Physik als Kunst” [Physics as Art] (1806), in Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse
eines jungen Physikers [Fragments from the Literary Remains of a Young Physicist], ed. Birgit and
Stefan Dietzsch (Hanau: Müller & Kiepenheuer, 1984), 288–320. His account of what “knowing
makes [was das Wissen schafft],” a pun on Wissenschaft, or “science,” occurs at pages 294 and 319.
For a contemporary, albeit more “constructivist” variant, see Isabelle Stengers’s account of science
as the experimental embrace of a risky future in Power and Invention, trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 162–66.
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SUPREMATIST ONTOLOGY AND THE ULTRA DEEP FIELD PROBLEM
which flies off the Earth’s surface, and by this means pulverize the globe [4]
[…] Everything is striving to leave the globe [5], and to make its way further
into space [6], but thanks to the relationship between the elements which
have not yet been discovered, it sits like a tick on the Earth [7].14
The seven points I have singled out clarify the sense of the passage, which concerns
the character of the world as nonobjectivity or demonstrates the problems to which
the category “object” is ontologically prone.
[1] Airplanes do not take off from airports but “emerge” from subterranean
worlds. The scope of the flight is larger than its geographically located points of
departure; and destinations, or its essential operations, to recall Schelling, exceed
the actual flight. The airplane’s natural history thus encompasses the ores from
which its metals were smelted, the formation of these ores over geological timescales and the development of the engine. Accordingly, technology and nature are
not different in kind.
Just as the natural history of the airplane exceeds its flight, point [2] argues
that the flight exceeds the limitations of terrestrial geometry. Yet it also problematizes this: implicit in “geometry” is that it does not measure all dimensions, but
only those of ge, of the Earth. It is a local or ontic science, tied to its object. That
there are other dimensions—and not reducibly spatial ones, as [1] affirms—again
attests to temporality, of what Schelling called the excess of essence over actuality,
of the operation over any local “what is” (“What is the Earth?” “What is flight?”).
The core of the problem of the flight path that absorbs the entire passage is
addressed in point [3], which offers one solution to it, which I will call Trajectory A.
The passage asks whether the flight, as what Malevich will call an “additional element” or “culture of action,” is a line or a curve. Here he asserts that airplanes, and by
extension natural history, “will fly to the place whence they have come,” that is, that
its flight paths are ultimately circular such that origin and end points are identical.
Point [4] thus completes the circuit: flight is from and to dust. From the dust the
flight becomes; the earth, its elements exhausted in this effort, turns to dust in turn,
raising the crucial question of whether first dust (D1) is equal to second (D2), to which
I will return below. Point [5] argues that it is not, and reposes the problem of flight
not in terms of orbits but of striving. If essential operations exceed actuality, then
this amounts to a realism concerning striving that is, for that reason, not restricted
to the airplane or to the Earth. With point [6], therefore, it is not the airplane or
the pilot (interestingly unremarked by Malevich) that strives; rather “everything is
striving” to abandon earth for space. Point [6] therefore opens Trajectory B—that
of the line in the “aerial element.” Striving is a straight line insofar as striving is
considered as such and not in regard to the objects within which it is caught or,
what amounts to the same thing, to the subject whose striving it might be. Yet no
sooner is Trajectory B set against Trajectory A than an animal skepticism rears up
14 Malevich, World as Non-Objectivity, 111–12.
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IAIN HAMILTON GRANT
to recapture striving among objects. The airplane does not leave the Earth but “sits
like a tick” on the planet, locked into its changeless parasitism.
Finally, then, if [3] appears to be confirmed by tick-talk, that is, that the local
holds flight captive, that return is not a habit but a physically insuperable cycle,
our attention is returned to the presupposition of the Earth, the history of which
gives point [1] its force. If the natural history—mineralogy, metallurgy, manufacture, electricity, and combustion—on which the extended flight path is inalienably
dependent, what gives the Earth its ultimacy, what licenses the Earth’s exemption
from this history? What makes it the ground upon which all else occurs and to which,
therefore, the flight paths of dust must invariably return? Malevich’s first indication
of the Earth’s historicity is by way of its future—which turns out to be the future of
dust: “Possibly our globe itself will be pulverized, as once a huge lump was pulverized, creating the globe [8].”15
Is this another cycle? More tick-talk? If the Earth itself emerges from pulverization, from dust, then either this is an eternal cycle, or escape is the rule rather than the
exception. With [8], we are thus returned to the problem first spelled out in [3], namely,
that the place whence all derives is the flight path of dust. Dust is itself emergent from
pulverization, however, once again inculcating a behavioural cycle, like the tick, but
this time holding planetary formation (and everything consequent upon it) prisoner.
The Theory of the Additional Element
The problem raised here is whether antecedent and consequent dust are the same. That
is, is D1=D2? If [3] is true, then D1=D2; if [6], it is false. Only [5] supplies a possible
differentiator for the two trajectories, by raising the theory of action. An act occurs
only if its consequent is not contained in its antecedent, or just when it forges a difference such that, in this instance, D1 D2. Malevich’s fullest account of “action,” and
thus a guide to what is meant by “striving” in nonobjectivity, occurs in his “Theory
of the Additional Element in Painting” (1926):
Under the sign of the additional element is hidden a whole culture of action
which (in painting) can be defined by a typical or characteristic state of straight
or curved lines. The introduction of new norms, the curved fibrous-shaped
additional element of Cézanne, will make the painter different from that caused
by the sickle formula of Cubism or the straight line of Suprematism. […] After
Futurism comes a new element, the supreme straight, which I have called the
Suprematist additional element of dynamic order, the appropriate milieu for
the airplane, for the aerodynamic structure of planites, aerial Suprematism.16
15 Malevich, World as Non-Objectivity, 112.
16 Malevich, World as Non-Objectivity, 156, 188.
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IAIN HAMILTON GRANT
This further clarifies the character of the problem that gives rise to the tick-cycle,
or to thesis [3] that D1=D2. Like a physicist, Malevich’s construal of “element” is
not an indivisible atomic body, but rather concerns fundamental forces. An element is additional, therefore, when it induces actions of which the field in which it
acts was previously incapable. Thus Cubism’s sickle formula (figure 2B) does not
eliminate but mutates Cézanne’s residual organicism, with its “fibrous lines” that
curl, twist, and knot. With the Suprematist “aerial line,” as in Malevich’s beloved
Schopenhauer,17 everything strives, nothing rests.
sufficient to demonstrate that, even if “the world” were not created, creation is nevertheless effected. Yet it is just this that Malevich disputes, insofar as, across large
timescales, the fact of flight is reducible to orbital dust.
The flight paths of dust bring critical focus to the object as a frame of reference
regarding the temporality of creation. Whether the measure of creation is world, airplane, dust, or tick is irrelevant to the problem. Each entails its perspective accidents
because in each case these objects cannot but remain constant referents.
Hence Malevich’s emphasis on striving, on the actions that form the theory
of the Additional Element: “Everything is striving to leave the globe.” This proposition counters the others: “the airplane is planetary dust,” “the world is rest.”
They can be countered because they concern particular states, so the truth or
falsity of the proposition is timescale dependent: as a simple consequence of the
second law of thermodynamics, the airplane will be dust and the world will be
rest, even if neither is dust or rest now. A key Platonic insight: what can be stated
of anything consisting of time-dependent states is neither true nor false, since it
will have been both.
Figure 2. A: Cézanne’s fibrous curve, B: Cubism’s Sickle-Curve, and C: the Supreme Straight.18
The three propositions at issue run:
It is from that perspective that the flight is minimally different from the earth from
which it emerges. It is the world’s future (the future of what is both “world” and “rest”
in the Russian term “mir”) by means of which its past is first exhibited. The futurability
of the earth—how long it will endure, rather than how long it has endured, being the
true measure, according to Kant,19 of its age—becomes finite just when it is destroyed;
but its destruction—and this is the second point to note from the earlier passage—is
coincident with its creation, just as the airplane will “fly to the place from whence it
has come,” remaining dust, or a tick on the planet’s skin.
Hence the question whether D1=D2 remains unresolved. Implicit in this
account, if from dust to dust is true, is the impossibility of novelty or the nonoccurrence of creation. To claim that there are no actions, therefore, amounts to
the hypothesis that creation has never been, that what is, insofar as it is or even if it
is, always is, so that the world is eternal. The slightest novelty in such a world, the
most meager “additional element,” would eliminate the hypothesis. In the present
context, is a world without flight the same as one with it? Surely the fact of flight is
P1. Everything is striving.
P2. The airplane is dust.
P3. The world is rest.
17 Troels Andersen cites Malevich from his notebooks as saying “On Schopenhauer’s book it says
‘The World as Will and Representation.’ I should have said ‘The World as Non-Objectivity.’”
Accordingly, Andersen’s introduction to The World as Non-Objectivity analyzes the structural
similarities of the two works.
18 Ibid., 118.
19 Immanuel Kant, “The Question whether the Earth is aging, considered from a physical point of
view,” trans. Olaf Reinhardt, in Kant: Natural Science (The Cambridge Edition
of the Works of Immanuel Kant), ed. Eric Watkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012),
165–66.
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Concept
According to P1, an action (striving) is predicated of all things, an action ruled out
if P3 is true, or if “everything” covers the same number of cases as does “world.”
Yet P1 and P3 are notably dissimilar to P2, which is the most concretely objective of
the three. This is because it simply asserts of one object that it is another. Yet in so
doing, the copula, the “is” in the proposition, effects or covers the transit between
what must, if P2 is true, be considered two states of the one object: the airplane state
and the dust state are, accordingly, not different objects but just one.
The Ring and the Copula
How the copula, the “is” in “the world is rest,” is understood—whether it effects or
eliminates transition—is what is at stake between P1 and P3. If P3, then no transition
takes place, so that P3 is the hypothesis of the eternity of the world, or the non-occurrence of creation. If P1, then not only is there transition, but the transition has consequences for the subject or the “everything,” such that no state is taken as primary
or as the ground of consequent actions, since every state consists in “striving.” P1
is therefore object-eliminating while P3 is transition-eliminating. Malevich’s decision is
evident in a 1916 Suprematist manifesto:
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SUPREMATIST ONTOLOGY AND THE ULTRA DEEP FIELD PROBLEM
I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and got out of the circle of objects,
the horizon ring that has imprisoned the artist and the forms of nature.
This accursed ring, by continually revealing novelty after novelty, leads the
artist away from the aim of destruction. […] Objects have vanished like smoke; to
attain the new artistic culture, art advances toward creation as an end in itself
and towards domination over the forms of nature.20
Thus Malevich opts for P1 over P3 precisely because P2 is both true and false. Several terms
are introduced here that flesh out the theory of the world as nonobjectivity. Firstly, the
“ring of the horizon” imprisons not just the artist but also the forms of nature. As with
nature and technology, neither is art of another kind than nature. If this were not so,
nothing could bond the two and art’s dominion over nature would be inconceivable.
Secondly, while art pursues creation as an end in itself, the artist’s aim is destruction—
in the first instance, of the ring. There thus arises the question of what this ring is, such
that it is capable of binding both artist and nature yet is susceptible of destruction.
The ring or cycle is the universal copula to the extent that it binds all things
(nature and art) insofar as it asserts of one thing that it is another (the airplane is dust;
the world is rest). As binding all things, it consists in continuous novelty as form follows
form; but this continuous sequence of forms thereby destroys all novelty. Thus the
ring is accursed because, insofar as it is restless novelty, the only true novelty—rest—is
impossible, so that, conversely, because it is ceaseless, absolute novelty is absolute rest,
just as the airplane is dust. Rest—mir, or the world—lures the artist from destruction
and art from creation because the cycle returns all forms to ultimate formless indifference. The ring is the horizon, remaining the constant point of reference not merely for
the division of earth from sky, mapping the terrestrial geometry within which aerial
escape is condemned to return, but also thus fixing the coordinates of all transit,
sealing reversible motions into objects and all objects into one world, so that D1=D2.
The ring is accursed because it precisely eternalizes objects—“novelties”—and thus
imprisons the forms of nature in changeless eternity. It is destroyed when objects no
longer circumscribe the capacities of creation, when creation cannot be reduced to
the created. The ring is therefore the form and consequence, the self-identical pattern
of entailments following from the hypothesis of the eternity of objects.
Malevich hates the curve because it welds all differences into a single intuition
of the world, a single horizon. As a partial ring, a curve describes the horizon of
object, apparently guaranteeing particularity but betraying it to another, since limit
states, like outlines, belong both to the limited and the limiting. As such, the curve
endlessly unravels particularity: if the airplane is dust, if all things are just “things,”
then their destiny is not the maintenance but the elimination of particularity. As
such, the ring or the curve, the universal copula that welds all differences into one,
20 Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism,”
trans. John E. Bowlt, in 100 Artists’ Manifestos, ed. Alex Danchev (London: Penguin, 2011), 106–07.
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is transition-eliminating since a cycle, having no end, has neither beginning nor
finality: in consequence, claiming to describe particularity, to outline things, the maximal non-particularity of the curve (the concave interior is externally convex, such
that the single line describes both) entails the deep field inexistence of objects: the
airplane is dust, returns to the earth which was and will be dust again. All is dust.
Thus, an object’s outline does not individuate it but generalizes it qua object such that
no object, insofar as it is an object, differs from another. At best, objects flicker in
and out of existence; but this, too, is a merely local phenomenon, since this, too, is a
cycle, a being and a not-being of the same thing. The endlessness of the ring therefore
proves, for Malevich, that reality is nonobjective, that is, that the world is “nothing”:
If the world is endless, i.e., has no end, neither a beginning nor a finality, then
the circumstances of the movement of matter are also endless. The facets,
therefore, are endless, if this is correct, [and] it proves that the reality of the
world cannot be expressed, for there is no limit, there is no beginning, there
is no finality, and under this condition there can only be a “nothing.”21
What is there to image in all this dust? If all particularity is eliminated in it, then there
is nothing to image, nor, since an image is part of the world it images, could there
be sufficient differentiation between it and what is not it such that an image might
be possible. In the nonobjective world into which the ring plunges all existents, the
deep field problem is that of the elimination of objects, of particularity, for which
reason it cannot be resolved by representation or expression. But even the proposition
“all is dust” is a differentiator, so the image of dust remains, as the HUDF shows,
too objective. The image is trapped, as in Plato’s Sophist, between “plurality of being
and unlimited not-being,”22 but pointing forward to an inexistence antecedent to
what both is and is not. Hence, once there is existence, ultra-deep field inexistence
(unlimited not-being) arises consequently upon deep field inexistence.
The Operations of the Concept
Thus, in accordance with the post-Kantian philosophical horizon within which he
works, Malevich’s realism is not only inferentially based, but realist concerning all
inferences, all abstract or additional elements. That “everything that exists for us also
exists in the universe”23 does not mean that the universe consists solely in “everything
that exists for us.” Rather, from conceiving the insuperability of the deep field problem,
there derives the ultra-deep field problem of the inexistence of the universe. Inexistence
is ineliminably an element of the universe. Thus, it is due to the operations of the concept
21 Malevich, World as Non-Objectivity, 60.
22 Plato, Sophist, 256e5–6.
23 Ibid., 87.
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that ultra-deep field inexistence is consequent upon deep field inexistence. Since such
an operation has occurred, therefore, it follows that it had not. The transition between
“had not” and “has” is itself therefore the additional element, the action that differentiates the inexistence consequent upon the operation of the concept not only from
the concept itself, but from the inexistence antecedent to what acts.
If, following Kant, the “great, gray mother of us all,” everything is concept,
the concept “concept” is maximally indifferent. This is why Brandom insists that it
is the judgment rather than the concept that is the minimal unit of sense: to say something about something, even if this something is insuperably conceptual, is still to
say something, and from this, various rational commitments flow. Nevertheless, this
acknowledges even as it denies deep field inexistence: rational commitments buttress
concept users against the inexistence from which reason turns. Yet the world of which
the concept is part, when there is a world in which there is a concept, is capable of
differentiation only if the concept’s actuality is not given in that world, but arises.
That the concept is thus operative rather than representative was, in fact, Schelling’s
response to the post-Kantian problem of the insuperability of the concept:
It comes to a point where man must liberate himself not merely from revelation but from everything actual (Wirklich) in order to flee into a complete
desert of all being, where nothing is to be encountered but only the infinite
potency of all being, the sole immediate content of thought in which it
moves only within itself as within its own ether.24
Schelling’s reading of Kant’s lesson does not stop with the straightforwardly idealist
thesis that “all is insuperably concept, so that the concept ‘being’ is, firstly, the only
being there is, and secondly a consequent of conceiving” (in fact Kant expressly denies
this, as does Schelling).25 Rather, thoughts or conceivings are acts or motions, even
if only in “their own ether.” Being consists in motions or acts only if being is creation. But it is by moving in itself that thought discovers the “infinite potency of all
being.” That is, even if being were a mere creature of thought, a concept, it would
be consequent upon an act antecedent to which being was not. Even consequent
being entails that inexistence from which alone its production can be conceived.
Moreover, if thought were this act by which being arose, then thought, too, would
have to emerge from what is not thought, or no act would have taken place. The
consequent inexistence of everything actual follows therefore from chasing down
the movements of thought that are instances of the potencies of being which, since
they are “infinite,” cannot eliminate inexistence once there are concepts at all.
24 F. W. J. Schelling, Grounding of Positive Philosophy, trans. Bruce Matthews (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 2007), 142. (Translation slightly modified.)
25 Kant goes to some lengths to demonstrate that existence cannot be a predicate, from which
arguments Schelling draws the following conclusion: “It is not because there is thinking that
there is being, but because there is being that there is thinking” (Ibid., 203n).
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