Confronting Meillassoux’s
Theory With the Reality of
the Middle East Through
Visual Art
An Exploration of Hyper Chaos, the Great Outdoors and
Divinology
Corine van Emmerik
10373837
Research Master Art Studies
University of Amsterdam
Supervisor: Miriam van Rijsingen
Second Reader: Patricia Pisters
8th of August 2017
Cover image: Ala Ebtekar, ‘Fantastic voyage,’ from the ‘Tunnel in Sky’ series, 2014. Acrylic and archival pigment on found poster in light box, 105 x 69 x 69 cm. Courtesy of Gallery Paule Anglim, San Fransisco.
Table of Contents
Introduction 7
1 Meillassoux’s Toolbox 12
2 Hyper Chaos
23
3 The Great Outdoors 39
4 Divinology 54
Conclusion 74
Bibliography 77
Introduction
For the past five years, the Middle East has been subjected to a gulf of revolutions. The majority of the countries in the region saw social movements taking the streets. Some protests turned into major uprisings, namely the Arab Spring, for example in Tunisia and Egypt. For a long time, the West perceived the Middle East as an island of despotism; the Arab world seemed immune to democratization. The optimism that followed from the Arab Spring soon turned to pessimism since the transition to democracy was in fact a superficial perspective on the events that were going on, isolated from the overall conditions. After the revolutions, authoritarianism and Islamic extremism were on the rise, transforming the Arab Spring into an Arab Winter.
Experts tend to compare revolutionary movements like the Arab Spring with other
revolutions from the recent past. Structures and systems are distilled from previous revolts, such as the revolution in Eastern Europe, and applied to the Middle East. Attempts to make predictions based on these distilled structures fail due to the exceptional situation and context in this region. An accumulation of social problems, despotic regimes, and patrimonial states account for the
instigation of the revolts. Especially now, the region is fragmented and a heart of conflict, causing many injustices and deaths that will stand in the way of stability for a long time. However, in the war-like situation, there is an uncertain, yet open future that is most poignant in the Middle East. The fact 1
that conflict reigns over the region makes it possible that almost literally anything can happen: it leaves space open for potentialities and speculation about the future. I believe that thinking in possibilities and taking them into consideration would be relevant in order to look at the situation with a different lens, because a radical alternative is needed in rethinking the conflict. Possibilities and speculations are of vital importance in order to move forward. So how can the future of the Middle East be imagined? Political science seems to have arrived at an impasse, and therefore new analyses are needed.
Usually, scholarship aims to identify laws and causalities and eradicate contingency, as happened in the failed analysis of the Arab Spring. However, if we look from the perspective of contingency, rather than causalities and laws, it might offer new insights into the conflictual situation in the Middle East and its path forward. Contingency can be used as a critical component of political and cultural understanding and in doing so bring to the fore alternative possibilities or possible futures that can advise resolutions for the present. French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux 2
articulated a theory of contingency that intuitively brought the situation in the Middle East to mind.
Achcar, Gilbert. “What Happened to the Arab Spring?” Amsterdam Center for Middle Eastern Studies 1
(ACMES). 2 Mar. 2017, Amsterdam, Spui25.
Hutchison, Emma. "Unsettling Stories: Jeanette Winterson and the Cultivation of Political Contingency." Global 2
Meillassoux is one of the main representatives of the new philosophical movement
Speculative Realism and dedicated his first book to the notion of contingency. Like the rest of the
Speculative Realists, he refutes the correlationist idea that there is no reality that is not mediated by consciousness. He argues that consciousness can know a reality independent of itself and claims that the natural sciences gave several instances of knowledge of a material reality that exists before human life, such as fossils. Consequently, Meillassoux establishes a form of materialism that can make sense of this knowledge and argues for the need to absolutize facticity as a necessity.
Consequently, facticity, or contingency, becomes absolute. He also uses the term ‘Hyper Chaos’ for this contingent reality. What stems from Meillassoux’s theory of contingency is a speculation on 3
what the fact of Hyper Chaos can teach us. He comes to the idea of a ‘World to come’ that is
dominated by justice, meaning mercy to the living and the dead, and redeemed through the power of a ‘future God’ that might bring hope for the now.
Intuitively, Meillassoux’s concept of hyper chaos resonates perfectly with the saturation in the Middle East, where realities change from one day to another and the path towards the future is contingent. His thoughts on a world to come dominated by justice relates to the Middle East, since all there is left is hope for what is to come, hope for justice. However, Meillassoux’s theory seems far removed from reality. How can his abstract philosophy relate to the changing realities in the Middle East? Politics and religion are important factors in the region and the conflicts that are currently playing out. Is it possible to connect Meillassoux’s theory to these aspects? Is there an ethics to be found in his philosophy that might help to analyze the situation. Is it possible to make use of Meillassoux’s theory? Using a mutual encounter between his philosophy and the current conflictual situation in the Middle East, I want to bridge the gap that exists between Meillassoux’s abstract philosophy and the reality in the Middle East to see if they might be compatible, which insights it brings forth and which questions may arise. This mutual encounter implies that there is a possibility of direct reciprocal change and advancement. I will not attempt to investigate the source of the conflict, nor to find solutions; this is not the starting point of this research. It is rather an attempt to connect two seemingly different aspects, a theory and a real-world situation, that are not self-evident.
Visual art is a medium that can capture the contingencies of the conflict. It provides a holistic understanding of the conflict and its situated and grounded ‘possible futures.’ Artists from the region address topics that go beyond the clichés of the current situation, they pick up on contingencies and provide different ways of understanding. Therefore, I will limit my scope of research to artworks that deal with the situation in the Middle East, made by artist form the Middle East. These artistic renderings of the conflict and particularly its possible futures provide a reflexive way of
understanding the present situation and can inform current actions. Here, artistic practice shows its 4
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Continuum, 2008. 3
Print.
Demos, T. J. The Migrant Image : The Art And Politics Of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham: Duke 4
radical role in imagining alternatives that can potentially produce affects. Especially in a conflict 5
situation like in the Middle East, contingency can help us understand political dilemmas and recognizes that political ideas and social structures are dynamic and fluid rather than static and fixed. Confronting Meillassoux’s theory to these contemporary artworks, also allows us to read the 6
artworks through Meillassoux’s theory and vice versa. Therefore, visual art is the medium of choice to envision the situation and provide a testing ground for the applicability of Meillassoux’s theory. Imagination in art plays a major role in conceiving possible futures or “Worlds to come” as Meillassoux formulates, and can be seen as active considerations of possibilities. Moreover, incorporating alternative futures will help to identify critical and decisive factors in the conflict. By 7
mapping out the future and possible worlds through art and construct political realities of the past, present, and future, we can understand our own situation better in a way that can influence and advise our acting in the now. However, as one of the only speculative realist, he stays close to the natural sciences, logic, and mathematics and does not seem to open doors to fields such as art and politics, apart from a small essay on Mallarmé’s poems. Fellow speculative realist Graham Harman 8
describes Meillassoux’s theory as a ‘philosophy in the making,’ and therefore makes his theory so incredibly suitable to analyze the situation in the Middle East. As a relatively novel theory, there is space for interpretation, stimulating insights and exchanges form both sides. Thus, to confront Meillassoux’s theory with the political reality and future of the Middle East as articulated in the art, will not only engender a better understanding of the conflict and its future and in exchange Meillassoux theory, but above all put his theory to the test.
Despite the recent emergence of speculative realism, there are many publications on the movement due to increasing interest in academia. There are various theoretical explorations on Meillassoux’s theory of contingency that include the critique of his fellow Speculative Realists. Especially Graham Harman, who wrote a book on Meillassoux, considers Meillassoux’s theory a
Philosophy in the making and provides an extensive critique. Moreover, Peter Gratton wrote a comprehensive discussion of Meillassoux and the other speculative realists and also published a dictionary on Meillassoux's philosophy. Another key publication is the book ‘the Speculative Turn’
wherein multiple critiques are bundled from authors including Alberto Toscano, Adrian Johnston, and Martin Hägglund. One of the main critiques is Meillassoux’s disregard for space and time. Hägglund brings Meillassoux’s theory in contact with a radical atheism that might be indispensable for a materialist analysis of social struggle and can, therefore, be useful in testing Meillassoux’s theory in its confrontation with the conflict in the Middle East. He grounds Meillassoux’s contingency in time and space and therefore makes it more workable, because these two components are essential in
Demos 2013, p 20. 5
Hutchison 2008, p 358. 6
Black, Jeremy. Other Pasts, Different Presents, Alternative Futures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2015. Print. 7
Meillassoux, Quentin. The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé's Coup De Dés. Trans. Robin 8
analyzing conflict. Meillassoux enters the conversation by grounding his theory in time in his book
Time Without Becoming but still disregards the notion of space.
Ray Brassier critiqued Meillassoux’s theory in his book Nihil Unbound wherein he tackles the absolute state of contingency. He concluded that it is unclear how the referent ‘absolute
contingency' could ever be 'rendered intelligible in anything other than a purely conceptual register,’ which expresses the desire of the opening up of contingency to reality. Slavoj Žižek also takes the problem of reality and offers a critique in his book Mythology, Madness and Laughter and can be considered as one of the few attempts to concretize and politicize Meillassoux’s philosophy. Furthermore, Žižek deals with the contingency of reality in his 2006 book The parallax view that can be used as additional literature on the notion of contingency and provides a direction on where to locate agency in the web of contingency. Thus, a more concrete application of Meillassoux’s theory is desired from the theoretical and philosophical discussion on his theory, and this thesis will serve as an attempt.
Since his theory is logically and mathematically funded, it is hard to test Meillassoux’s theory
as is to the situation. Intuition, therefore, plays an important part in connecting his theory with
practice. Deleuze describes intuition in his famous book A Thousand Plateaus, as ‘an evaluation of internal variables of enunciation about the aggregate of the circumstances.’ Intuition for Deleuze has 9
a certain method of precision to it, providing us precise ways of knowing. Reading Meillassoux in 10
an intuitive manner, provided me with the openness and freedom to interpret his theory without completely losing connection to the meaning and goals of this theory.
Rather than using concepts, connoting certain rigidness, I prefer to employ tools picked from the conceptual make-up of Meillassoux’s theory. Brian Massumi introduces the concept of the
toolbox in his translator’s foreword in A Thousand Plateaus. The toolbox can be seen as a
philosophical theory, and the tool within this box are the concepts that are made available in different fields of research. Employing tools, rather than concepts, allows to lift a dynamism out the theory 11
entirely and incarnate it in a foreign medium, whether an artwork or politics. The chapters in this 12
thesis should, therefore, be seen as the use of tools deducted from Meillassoux’s theory. Deleuze’s use of the toolbox is part of his philosophy of “pragmatics.” The goal of this philosophy is ‘the invention of concepts that do not add up to a system of belief or an architecture of propositions that you either enter or you don't, but instead pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand envelops an energy of prying.’ Thus, this thesis will be a “toolbox” consisting of multiple “tools” 13
coming from Meillassoux’s theory to confront this theory, as a pragmatization as Deleuze would say,
Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Félix, and Massumi, Brian. A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 9
London: Athlone, 1988. Print.
Grosz, Elizabeth. "Bergson, Deleuze and the Becoming of Unbecoming." Parallax 11.2 (2005): 4-5. Web. 10
Colombat, André Pierre. "A Thousand Trails to Work with Deleuze." SubStance 20.3 (1991): 10. Web. 11
Deleuze 1988, p xv. 12
Ibidem. 13
to the situation in the Middle East through the medium of visual art. Tools are an invention of concept that have much more freedom and are packed with potential. Using the tools to tackle the reality of the Middle East, does not only changes its subject of operation but by employing it, the tool itself is changed as well. By experimenting, a new light is shed on the tool and might and offers new insight into the nature and usability of that tool.
From Meillassoux’s theory, I (intuitively) distilled three tools that I believe are useful to tackle the artworks that deal with the current conflict. Meillassoux’s toolbox consists of: Hyper Chaos, The Great Outdoors, and Divinology. The first chapter will explain further what these tools, lifted out of
Meillassoux’s philosophy, exactly entail and how they can be employed to operate on the chosen artworks that connect to the specific tool. The second chapter deals with hyper chaos, where time plays an important role, and the arche-fossil is discussed. Above all, hyper chaos provides a new lens to analyze the political chaos where the artworks allude to. Chapter three revolves around the
great outdoors as a tool to explore the possibilities and imagined futures that art envisions for the
Middle East. Moreover, mathematics is the instrument that can excess the great outdoors, according to Meillassoux, and might provide a new perspective on geometrical art in Islamic art traditions. The final chapter, divinology, also has a religious touch to it. Meillassoux sets up a theory of the divine
inexistence, a divinology, where there might be a God to come on a World to come. Since
Meillassoux’s divinology is almost a theology on its own, I will discuss the divine inexistence more at length than the other chapters due to its complex and extensive nature. I will investigate the link between Meillassoux’s “religion” and Islam through art and what it can teach us about both religion and the artworks.
Thus, the conflict in the Middle East seems to be characterized by contingency. Visual arts have the ability to capture this contingency and its possible futures. The purpose of this thesis is to
confront philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s theory of contingency with the reality and the future of the conflict in the Middle East as articulated in art and put it to the test to identify human creative agency in the contingent web of ‘Hyper Chaos’ that typifies the Middle East. By bringing
Meillassoux’s theory down to the political reality and futures of the Middle East and consequently back to the theoretical universe, I hope to engender a better understanding and new insights into the conflict in the Middle East, its future and its implications for Europe, such as the migrant crisis.
1 Meillassoux’s Toolbox
The French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux (1967) already made his impact on the direction of contemporary Continental philosophy at such a young age. Moreover, he helped to inaugurate 14
the new philosophical movement ‘Speculative Realism,’ along side Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Iain Hamilton Grant at Goldsmith’s in London. As Harman’s book title on Meillassoux already 15
suggests is that Meillassoux’s thinking is a philosophy in the making. The outlines of his long-term project are sketched out in two works: his theory is most compete and comprehensive in his first book After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, written in 2008. The second work is
Divine Inexistence, published as excerpts in Harman’s book on Meillassoux and originally stems from
his doctoral dissertation L’Inexistance Divine that was written in 1997 and revised in 2003. Apart 16
from these works, he published multiple essays and articles that are related to the main elements of his book and provide further detailed accounts on these aspects. Only his monograph on Stéphane Mallarmé is a side step from his usual work and the only piece of writing that deals with art. Reading Meillassoux can be quite overwhelming due to the structuring of his system. His language is often formal on a stylistic level, and his writing is closer to traditional rationalism or even the Anglo-American philosophy. Furthermore, contextualizing his philosophy is often obstructed by 17
his overly compact way of writing his theory. Some of these expansions appear in articles written later by Meillassoux, and sometimes offer the precise motivations for certain arguments and their roots in long standing debates in rationalism or empiricism for example. Therefore, using concepts or rather tools from his theory opens up space for potentials. The toolbox consists of three tools that I will introduce: Hyper Chaos, The Great Outdoors, and Divinology. I will instrumentalize this toolbox to tackle the reality of the Middle East as rendered visually in art and investigate where the
politicizability and agency is located.
What brings Meillassoux and the other speculative realist together is their critique of what Meillassoux first termed “correlationism,” stemming from Kant and his categories of understanding. The speculative realists assume that the world does not need to be correlated to humans in order to exist. According to the doctrine of correlationism, there is a correlation between thinking and being. 18
Reality and human beings are like pepper and salt; they are always together. All around us is information, and the human observer acts as a kind of mediator, or receiver, between the input of all
Gratton, Peter, and Paul John. Ennis. The Meillassoux Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Print. p 1. 14
The fact that this conference was held in an art institute might be telling to couple Meillassoux with art. 15
Harman 2015, p viii. 16
Gratton 2015, p 1. 17
Morton , Timothy. Realist Magic : Objects, Ontology, Causality. Open Humanities, 2013. New Metaphysics. 18
that information and the output of knowledge. The world cannot exist without us humans because we are correlated. We only exist as a pair. The outside of us is always and essentially relative to our consciousness, language etc. Objects, beings, event or laws are always correlated to a point of 19
view or subjective access, and this is the thesis of any correlationism, according to Meillassoux. This is also the reason why there is no “Absolute X,” or “Absolute Being” that is separated from the subject. We cannot know the in itself of an object because we cannot distinguish whether the properties of the object belong to the object or the subjective access to the object. 20
What is inherent in correlationism, is the correlationist circle, which for Meillassoux is the foundational principle of philosophy: If we try to think of a world outside human thought, then we cannot escape the fact that we are thinking it, hence no longer outside thought. It is precisely a circle because it does not allow anything to exist outside of this subjective judgment. Thus, when you try 21
to think outside of thought, you are still thinking the unthought, we automatically convert it into a thought and therefore remain trapped in the correlationist circle. Any attempt to represent reality, is in fact, a representation of the perspective of the human observer: the world exists with or without us and its structure is unrelated to how we conceptualize it. Any attempt to escape this circle is 22
doomed to contradiction.’ 23
Correlationism is like coffee; there is a strong and a weak version. What Meillassoux calls “weak correlationism,” is the view that reality exists, is something we can think and is
non-contradictory. However, we cannot know it due to the filters through which we understand reality. 24
Thus, the things in-themselves exists and are not knowable, but at least thinkable. On the other 25
side, there is “strong correlationism” that argues for an impossibility of thinking outside our own being in the world. Or to say it differently: ‘it is unthinkable that the unthinkable be possible.’ They 26
maintain that it is not only illegitimate to know the in-itself, but also the very though of it alone. This is the position that Meillassoux radicalizes into a speculative materialism. The main aim in After
Finitude is to build a materialism that can refute the correlationist circle from within, in its most
simple and simultaneously most difficult form: fighting the argument that we never have access to something apart from that access. We can never know the “in-itself” because we only know what is
Mackay, Robin, ed. Collapse: Unknown Deleuze [+Speculative Realism]. Vol. III. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007. 19
Print. p 409. Ibidem. 20
Beech, Amanda. "Curatorial Futures with the Image: Overcoming Scepticism and Unbinding the 21
Relational." Journal of Visual Art Practice 9.2 (2010): 146. Print.
Pinto, Ana Teixeira. "The Real Deal." Frieze. N.p., 26 May 2013. Web. 23 Apr. 2017. 22
Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), 63, original emphasis. 23
Gratton, Peter. Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. p 32. 24
Harman, Graham. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Print. p 23. 25
Gratton 2014, p 32; Meillassoux 2008, p 4. 26
“for-us.” So when for example in a video game, you roam around and come close to a tree, you 27
see the tree as a pixelated blob. You can’t see the actual tree, the core of the tree, the in-itself because you only see what the game designer made for you like a piece of decoration.
Consequently, correlationism rejects all possible knowledge of an absolute; we are locked up in our representations, like in the video game.
In his reasoning to break out of the correlationist bubble, Meillassoux brings in the argument of ‘facticity.’ Facticity refers to the lack of reason of any reality. It is an impossibility of giving an ultimate ground to the existence of any being. There is neither ultimate cause nor law. This ultimate ungrounding of things, facticity, is also proper to thought. Meillassoux believes that correlationism 28
can be defeated only by the absolutation of facticity. According to Meillassoux, correlation is contingent. We can think of a possibility that is independent of the correlation, and this is the possibility of non-being of the correlation. Drawing on an analogy of death, Meillassoux tries to 29
explain the contingency of correlation: to think of myself as mortal; I have to admit that death doesn’t depend on me thinking about my own death. It is not the case that if I think I am dead, I actually am dead. I would only be able to disappear if I was alive while thinking about my disappearance and make this disappearance a correlate of my access to it. I can’t imagine what it is like to be death, because I am still alive, but this fact does not prove that dead is impossible, unfortunately. So I 30
have to exist in order to make death a correlate of my own subjective access to it. Meillassoux 31
concludes that facticity is an absolute notion: ‘the absolute lack of reason of any reality; or, in other words, the effective ability of every determined entity – event, thing, or law of subjectivity – to appear
and disappear with no reason for its being or non-being. Unreason becomes the attribute of an
absolute time able to destroy and create any determined entity – event, thing or law – without any reason for thus creating and destroying.’ 32
Thus, facticity is necessary, which he calls ‘factuality,’ governed by the ‘Principle of Factuality.’ It is through the principle of factuality that Meillassoux can access a speculative 33
realism, which clearly critiques correlationism and can be seen as the starting point of his theory and the first step into the “Great Outdoors” of realism.
Meillassoux magnifies this aspect of his philosophy in a lecture on the contingency of the laws of nature. Hume is one of many philosophers that thinks about correlation, but one of the few who doubts the necessity of causal relations and in some way can be seen as a “proto-Meillassoux.”
Mackay 2007, p 427. 27 Ibidem, p 428-429. 28 Ibidem, p 430. 29 Beech 2010, p 148. 30 Mackay 2007, p 431. 31 Ibidem, p 431. 32 Ibidem, p 432. 33
Hume questions whether it is necessary that the same effect always follows the same cause. From 34
this question engenders “Hume’s problem:” how can we surely know that laws don't change in the future? His own response is the formulation of two stabilities: experience and the principle of non-contradiction. The former can only say something about the past and present, but not about the future. The latter referring to the impossibility of a contradictory event or being. Leibniz also bases 35
his philosophy on the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason, the latter meaning that everything must have a reason to be as it is, rather than otherwise. But Hume doesn’t agree and argues that such a principle is inaccessible to thought, because we can’t establish the necessity of any fact. 36
Meillassoux accepts the principle of non-contradiction, but rejects sufficient reason. He then presents three solutions from the field of philosophy. First, there is a metaphysical response to Hume's question that tries to prove the existence of a necessary principle that governs the world, for example Leibniz’s perfect God, wherefrom you can deduce that the world must be and remain what it is. Secondly, there is a skeptical response from Hume himself. In a way, he gives up and 37
reformulates the question, moving to a new problem, namely, why are laws necessary and where does our belief in this comes from. He moves the problem from the nature of things to the relation to things. The third solution comes from Kant’s transcendental response, substituting a conditional, 38
indirect proof for an unconditional and direct proof. He does not argue that it is absolutely impossible that causality can all of a sudden cease to govern the world in the future, but says that it is
impossible that such a thing ever manifests, because if the world would be governed by causality, then nothing would have consistency and is therefore not representable. 39
What all of these solutions have in common is that they see the truth of causal necessity as given, and is not questioned on itself. The refutation of the fact that the causal relation is 40
considered as self-evident is the starting point for Meillassoux. He proposes a fourth, speculative option. In this fourth option, he tries to renounce Hume's argument that reason is in unable of proving a priori the necessity of laws, or proving the necessity of correlation, and moves towards a demonstration that reason proves a priori the contingency of laws. In order to deal with the 41
different types of a priori, we need to go to Leibniz who formulated two a priori principles governing reason: the earlier mentioned principle of noncontradiction and the principle of sufficient reason.
Meillassoux, Quentin, and Robin Mackay. "The Contingency of the Laws of Nature." Environment and 34
Planning D: Society and Space 30.2 (2012): 322. Web.p 322. Meillassoux 2012, p 323. 35 Ibidem, p 324. 36 Ibidem. 37 Ibidem. 38 Ibidem, p 325. 39 Ibidem. 40 Ibidem. 41
Hume employs the first kind of a priori and utilizes it as the only necessary principle that governs everything. In this a prior, there is no principle of sufficient reason, because the latter deals with logical necessity, rather than real or natural necessity. Meillassoux derives from this that the 42
principle of noncontradiction is emancipated from the principle of sufficient reason and transmits to us that ‘every thing, law, or world, could effectively change without any reason
—
that a pure chaos, indifferent to causal logic, subtends every reality, whether it be a thing, a law, or a world.’ With this 43shift, Meillassoux chooses the side of ‘a purely intelligible chaos against the illusory fixity of the phenomenon.’ Meillassoux’s “unreason,” so to say, goes against the sufficient reason of Leibniz, 44
because there is no reason for anything to be or to remain as it is. In fact, everything must be able not to be and/or be able to be other than it is. Thus, the solution for Hume’s problem that 45
Meillassoux comes up with is to say that it is impossible to prove the necessity of laws. It is not the case that reason is too limited to come up with proof, but because reason reveals the ‘essential illusory character of such a necessity,’ that is, contingency. We need a kind of necessity that 46
doesn't require a necessary entity, and according to Meillassoux, the only possible option is the necessity of contingency itself. 47
This thought leads Meillassoux to time, or even the root of time. He sees time as the possible becoming of all things. It is a special time that can be seen as a chaos: not limited to anything and liberated from the principle of sufficient reason. Nothing has a reason to be as it is or 48
to be otherwise. What he envisions is a possible passage from one consistent reality to another consistent reality. This is what most consider realism: ‘a belief that there is a world independent of our minds or cultural beliefs.’ So here, Meillassoux radicalizes the strong correlationist position, by 49
radicalizing form the view that we cannot simply say anything about what lies outside thought, to opening up to the “Great outdoors.” His strategy consists of transforming our ignorance of the things-in-themselves, into an absolute knowledge about the things-in-themselves existing without reason and having the ability to change at any time at any moment for no reason whatsoever. He 50
throws away the thought that correlation is the absolute and comes up that the facticity of the
Meillassoux 2012, p 326. 42 Ibidem. 43 Ibidem. 44 Meillassoux 2008, p 60. 45 Meillassoux 2012, p 326. 46 Harman 2015, p 35. 47 Meillassoux 2012, p 327. 48 Gratton 2014, p 31. 49 Harman 2015, p 24. 50
correlate is the absolute. What he ends up with is a “wonderfully bizarre metaphysics” of absolute contingency. 51
What stems form this absolute contingency is what Meillassoux calls a hyper chaos, the absolute contingent state of everything, where nothing is connected with anything else, a doctrine of a hyper-chaotic world. Normally, the absolute refers to stableness, a foundation that never changes. Hyper chaos, on the contrary, seems to be anything but an absolute because nothing seems impossible or unthinkable. Meillassoux himself describes it as:
‘a rather menacing power– something [senseless], and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm . . . It is a Time capable of destroying even becoming itself, by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death.’ (AF 64)
Within the hyper chaos, a world in complete peace is just as likely as our present changing world, and the same goes for a cosmos where dogs reign over humans.
What Meillassoux suggests is a that contemporary philosophers are trapped in the correlationist circle and lost touch with what he calls The Great Outdoors, which is the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers, an outside which was not relative to us and existed in itself ‘regardless of whether we are thinking it or not; that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory—of being entirely elsewhere.’ Alfred Whitehead 52
anticipated many of the themes and arguments of the speculative realist, because he already entered the great outdoors by means of his “free and wild creation of concepts.” Meillassoux in a way does 53
the same with his philosophy by formulating concepts such as ‘Hyper Chaos’ and ‘the Great Outdoors.’ For Meillassoux, the great outdoors is the wilds of the Real that his philosophy tries to access directly after freeing itself from the correlation between thinking and being. It represents everything that philosophy can gain after refuting Kant’s Copernican Revolution. 54
The original term of the great outdoors in the French version of After Finitude is le Grand
Dehors, which translates more something like ‘The Great Outside’ and tickles the mind to think about
it more in terms of a camping trip in the valleys of the Absolute. However, the term The Great 55
Outdoors seems to me a more fitting translation since it implies a “going out the door,” out of the correlationist house into the great unknown wilderness that was not relative to us and going beyond
Harman 2015, p 24. 51
Meillassoux 2008, p 7. 52
Shaviro, Steven. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2014. Print. 53
p 9.
Spaulding, Daniel. "INSIDE OUT." Mute. p 1., 20 Oct. 2015. Web. 23 Apr. 2017. 54
Ibidem. 55
the correlation of thinking and being. With this universe in mind, Meillassoux builds up his theory. It is an area that goes on in itself independent of our relation to it, indifferent to our givenness of what it is, a reality in itself regardless whether we are thinking it or not. 56
Related to the great outdoors is what Meillassoux calls “the Rhetoric of the Rich Elsewhere,” which is used as an argument against correlationism for reducing ‘the boundless beauty and
complexity of the world’s experiences to a narrow view of human experience portrayed in so many books of philosophy.’ With this rhetorical argument, Meillassoux opens up a whole field that leaves 57
space to explore this beauty and complexity of this world and beyond, in the open space that is the great outdoors. Mathematics is one of the only tools able to discourse about this great outdoors, according to Meillassoux. It has a relation to the eternal world that exceeds the correlationist 58
paradigm. 59
Part of correlationism is metaphysics as described earlier in the discussion about Hume’s problem, where a God governs the world. However, Meillassoux wants to move beyond this position towards a speculative, non-metaphysical theology, which he calls Divinology and runs parallel to his speculative materialism as a kind of “rational” speculative religion. In this hyper-chaotic world, the 60
laws of nature are contingent and ethics and politics depend on a virtual (a property of contingency) God that might exists in the future. It signifies a ‘divine inexistence,’ meaning the inexistence of a 61
religious God and at the same time the irrefutable possibility of a God yet to come. The Hyper 62
Chaos, in which anything can happen, makes it possible for a new world to emerge, out of nothing,
ex nihilo, with a God that might exist in the future.
Meillassoux’s divinology originates from what he calls “the spectral dilemma,” which appears as a response to ‘terrible deaths’ that one simply cannot accept. The victims of these terrible 63
deaths come back as ‘spectres’ and haunt the living. They make it impossible to achieve an
‘essential mourning’ that would make one to come to terms with what happened. The two ways that
Meillassoux 2008, p 17. 56
Sparrow, Tom. The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 57
2014. Print. p 88.
Arun Jj Saldanha. "Back to the Great Outdoors: Speculative Realism as Philosophy of Science." Cosmos and 58
History : The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5.2 (2009): 318. Web.
McCarthy, Anne C. "The Aesthetics of Contingency in the Shelleyan "universe of Things," Or, "Mont Blanc" 59
without Mont Blanc." Studies in Romanticism 54.3 (2015): 369. Web.
Johnston, Adrian. "Hume’s Revenge: À Dieu, Meillassoux?" The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism 60
and Realism. Ed. Levi R. Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. Melbourne Australia: Re.press, 2011. p 97. Print.
Harman 2015, p 7. 61
Johnston 2012, p 94. 62
Hägglund, Martin. "Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux." The Speculative Turn: Continental 63
Materialism and Realism. Ed. Levi R. Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. Melbourne Australia: Re.press, 2011. p 124. Print.
lead to despair when confronted with spectres is a religious position that affirms the existence of God and the atheist position that denies the existence of God. Then, Meillassoux formulates a way of achieving essential mourning by preserving an essential premise from each of these two paths. On the one hand, there is the religious argument: in order to have hope for justice, you need to have hope for an afterlife, a life beyond death. On the other hand, there is the atheist premise that
Meillassoux retains, that the existence of God forms an obstacle for the existence of justice, because He allowed the terrible deaths to happen and is responsible for it. To solve the spectral dilemma, 64
Meillassoux comes up with a third option that combines ‘the possible resurrection of the death—the religious condition of the resolution—and the inexistence of God—the atheistic condition of the resolution.’ This third option revolves around “the divine inexistence,” namely no God or 65
metaphysical creator of the world. This means that all that remains ‘still in a virtual state in present reality harbors the possibility of a God still to come, become innocent of the disasters in the world, and in which one might anticipate the power to accord spectres something other than their death.’ 66
What Meillassoux means is that there might be no God now, but that doesn't exclude the possibility of a possible God to come. After all, contingency is the provider of speculation on this possibility since everything might come into being, also a possible God who might resurrect the death. Due to the fact that everything is possible from moment to moment, we can’t rule out that there will be this God to come, who raises the dead and provides justice in the world. With this God belongs a possible world, a future World that marks a time where justice reigns for the living and for the dead who will be raised through His power. Justice in this case is not something that prevails in the now, but is always an advent, meaning a coming or arrival, that provides hope for us in this unjust world. However, before the advent of the ex nihilo World of Justice, there were world-67
changing advents, namely those of matter, life and thought.
Meillassoux has little to say about this first world and does not discuss it in much detail in his articles. However, he does state that the material world was not foreshadowed by a previous world and thus appeared ex nihilo via the eternal hyper chaos. The second world of life poses some 68
problems when materialists say that matter provides the conditions for the creation of the organic, while Meillassoux argues against it by stating that the composition of life would break the laws of chance, because they are not the possible cases of matter, but ‘rather the correlate within matter of
Hägglund 2011, p 125. 64
Ibidem. 65
Meillassoux, Q. (2008b). Spectral dilemma. Collapse IV, p 268. 66
Gratton 2014, p 128; Gratton, Peter, and Paul John. Ennis. The Meillassoux Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh 67
UP, 2015. Print. p 21. Gratton 2014, p 132. 68
appearances ex nihilo of vital contents.’ The third world of thought is also difficult to explain, 69
because it is hard to figure out how it appeared. However, thought for Meillassoux has a specific meaning in his philosophy because it refers to the ability of humans to think the contingency of laws and nature. Humans have the ability to reason and come to grips with the creation of Worlds, they are, according to Meillassoux, defined by their access to truth, that is, the eternal contingency of everything. Divinology therefore has a surprising humanist character. 70
The Fourth World, the World of Justice would rise beyond these three previous worlds and could only ‘be that of the rebirth of humans.’ This Fourth World did not yet occur but exists ‘already 71
as an object of hope, of desire of every human qua rational being.’ It is called the World of Justice, 72
because it makes possible the rebirth of humans and universal justice by erasing the injustices of shattered lives. We are related to this World of Justice by hope. We humans are torn between our present contingency and the knowledge of the eternal that provides us with the idea of justice. 73
Thus, in this eschatology Meillassoux argues that not only thinking a possible God characterizes a possible world of justice, but also effects the very world we are living in now by changing our private lives who take this hypothesis serious. He then concludes that ‘the most important for philosophy74
—its final challenge—is not being, but “may-be” [peut-être].’ 75
From this world image that Meillassoux sketches out, three concepts emerge that I will employ as tools to tackle the scenarios and realities of the conflict in the Middle East as visualized in art. The first tool is Hyper Chaos. Intuitively, this term resonates with the situation in the Middle East. This plane of chaos where everything can happen at any time, ruled by contingency, unpredictability, unreason, that can destroy and create every determinate entity, made me think of the bombings, the murders, the destructions and constructions of new territories that are happening at the moment. Ancient monuments are destroyed by bombs and bare hands of IS, and are simultaneously the decor for the establishment of their new state. Laws that were ordering society all of sudden ceased to reign. Time, in this case, indicates the possible becoming of everything, the passage from one reality to another, just as is the conflict. Due to factiality, or contingency, art can capture these realities. The realities of the past, present, and future that are expression of the doctrine of a hyper chaotic world.
'Excerpts from L’Inexistence divine,’ p 184 Meillassoux, Quentin. The Divine Inexistence, p 184, excerpts 69
translated by Graham Harman from the unpublished French manuscript of L’Inexistence divine, as in Harman, Graham. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Print. Henceforth, The Divine Inexistence will be indicated as ‘DI.’
Gratton 2014, pp 136-137. 70 DI, p 189 as in Harman 2015, p 99. 71 Ibidem. 72 Harman 2015, p 100. 73 Gratton 2014, p 141. 74 Ibidem, p 142. 75
It is not a manifestation of something completely new, no; it is rather an intense manifestation of something that was already there, but, as Meillassoux argues, its existence and appearance has been “profoundly denied by the situation" preceding the event. With this in mind, Meillassoux’s 76
contingent events are all of a sudden grounded to what already is, albeit apparent or latent, but denied by the situation.
Culture in a hyper chaos is ‘the sum of, and dynamic between the two modes trough which the mind attempts to transcend the limitations and contingencies of reality.’ These two types of 77
cultural responses both try to realize the conceivable in the possible. In the first mode of thinking, the individual denies the limitations of reality and escapes from it in order to define and create his own possibilities, contingent futures. The area of imagination can provide an ideal world governed by its own order. The second type of thinking tries to overcome the contingencies of reality through not 78
only the creation of an alternative reality but also through the mastery of reality’s mechanisms. What the hyper chaos provides us with is an open space of artistic speculation. And to speculate, is to articulate and enable contingencies. Speculation can then be seen as a bowl where possibilities and probabilities merge as a way of responding to the present. 79
The second tool that stems from Meillassoux’s theory is The Great Outdoors that leaves open a space for speculation and imagination without being fully constrained by Meillassoux’s philosophy. By means of exploring this great outdoors, art can create the unthinkable, a reality that is (yet) outside of us. The great outdoors can be entered through thought, which art expressed in being entirely elsewhere. The “Rich Elsewhere” is reclaimed, where the beauty and complexity of the world’s experiences is harbored in the artwork.
If we follow Meillassoux and take on an anti-correlationist stance, believing that there is a great outdoors, a reality that exists independently outside of the human mind, then we can begin to understand how art performs its own kind of theory and force in excess of all knowledge. We can understand the question of agency better since it teaches us how art unleashes real effects on the world. If we see it as Meillassoux intended, as non-anthropocentric, where humans do not make meaning within the dynamic processes of matter, but were meaning comes from art, as a kind of contingent force that radiates on us. Art actualizes that which is most often unsaid, unheard or out of sight and makes the virtual capacities of matter experimental. This is what the great outdoors is. It 80
might give us a feeling of what art itself is already doing, as a reality in the great outdoors.
Anwer, Megha. "Resisting the event: aesthetics of the non-event in the contemporary South Asian novel." 76
ARIEL 45.4 (2014): 1+. Literature Resource Center. Print.
Mackay, Robin, and Armen Avanessian, eds. #Accelerate#: The Accelerationist Reader. Falmouth, UK: 77
Urbanomic Media, 2014. Print. p 112. Ibidem, pp 112-113.
78
Ibidem, p 527. 79
Jaskey, Jenny. "On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Working Speculatively." Texte Zur Kunst 93 (2014): 80
The third and final tool is Divinology. Meillassoux’s eschatology, the study of what is the final resolution or completion, draws strong parallels with Islamic eschatology. Therefore, this tool allows me to incorporate religious related artworks that deal with, for example the resurrection of the dead and the second coming of God. Meillassoux knits together ‘Greek reason and Judeo-Christian faith with hope in the contingent conditions of hyper chaos that enable future change’ However, Islamic 81
traditions are just as much part of it as Judeo-Christian traditions, as will become clear in the final chapter. Especially the concept of hope is important in Meillassoux’s theory, which proves to be valuable in dealing with the situation in the Middle East. Hope seems to be the only thing that is still standing and keeps a connection with the future in order to see some light at the end of the tunnel, functioning as the motor to keep going. Therefore, hope can point to some kind of agency as well. Art can provide a sense of hope when dealing with visions of the future beyond the terrible deaths of war and conflict.
From his divinology, we can subtract an ethics and politics that depend on a virtual God. Consequently, art that envisions this Fourth World of Justice and the God that reigns over it, has the possibility to form a way of conduct and have a say in the political and this is where potential agency lays. What we can learn from for example the Arab Uprisings is that there is not so much an interest in familiar positions and power relations, but more in wanting to re-write the “political playbook.” Thus, what rests us now is taking Meillassoux’s toolbox of contingency with Hyper Chaos, The Great Outdoors and his Divinology and start to tackle the conflict situation in the Middle East as visualized in art.
Gratton 2015, p 41. 81
2 Hyper Chaos
What was shown in the previous chapter is how Meillassoux critiques correlationism by arguing that there is an absolute exteriority outside of correlation. We can only think our possible non-being, our facticity, due to the fact that we can think the absolute possibility of our no longer being, which remains independent of our thinking, precisely because it consists in the utter destruction of that thinking. This possible non-being of everything, designates a ‘Hyper Chaotic Time.’ We know that things, people, events are able to change without reason, ‘in a perfectly 82
contingent fashion, with a Time capable of destroying every entity, whatever its mode of being.’ 83
While chaos is disorder and randomness, the contingency of hyper chaos is so radical that becoming, disorder, or randomness can be destroyed by it and can even be replaced by order, determinism, and fixity, as Meillassoux claims: ‘things are so contingent in Hyper-chaos, that time is able to destroy even the becoming of things.’ The Chaos Meillassoux envisions is thus equally 84
capable of producing an impeccable order as a frantic disorder, and not just simply the necessity of destruction and disorder. 85
There is a special bond between hyper chaos and Time. Space is articulated as physical time or any other ontic time, such as historical time. Within this world, there are space-times that are bound to determine laws. However, all these space-times are ontic, meaning they are contingent begins that can emerge or seize to exist for no reason. Hyper chaos is this capacity of Time to destroy and create all ontic space-times. Time is generally understood as a becoming, but this 86
becoming is not an absolute; it is just a fact. Becoming and substances are existents, entities, that could be born of perish. Every substance could disappear, but being itself could perish as well. Hyper chaos has the power to create a world where beings are perfectly fixed, where everyone would have the same state and age for an indefinite period or where being would be subjected to incredible unpredictability. Thus, becoming and fixity must both have the ‘eternal possibility to 87
appear and disappear.’ The hyper-chaotic time is thus able to create and destroy even becoming, 88
Meillassoux, Q. (2012). Iteration, reiteration, repetition: a speculative analysis of the meaningless sign. 82
Translated by Robin Mackay. Lecture given at the Freie Universität, Berlin, p 10. Ibidem.
83
Meillassoux, Quentin. Time without Becoming. Ed. Anna Longo. N.p.: Mimesis International, 2014. Print. p 25. 84 Meillassoux 2012, p 11. 85 Ibidem, p 16. 86 Ibidem. 87 Meillassoux 2014, p 25. 88
‘producing without reason fixity or movement, repetition or creation.’ The virtual hyper chaos is 89
therefore equated with Time.
However, due to the principle of non-contradiction, it is not possible for two contradictory facts to exist at the same time and therefore implies some sort of temporal succession for the actualizations of these contingencies: one can only emerge after the destruction of the previous one. First there needs to be destruction before there can be an actualization. Hyper chaos, then, is 90
the time ‘within the series of virtual possible contingent acts are actualized and destroyed without a reason.’ Hyper chaotic time actualizes facts, which are unpredictable because of unreason that 91
governs them. It is the idea of time that is completely liberated from metaphysical necessities so that there are no constraints. It opens up a space for a special kind of possibility, which he calls the “peut-être,” the “may-be,” where hyper chaos can produce anything at all at any time. 92
In order to prove hyper chaos, Meillassoux confronts the correlationists with a scientific discourse about a reality that precedes any possibility of correlation. One of the terms he introduces to refer to such a reality is the arche-fossil and by this he means ‘materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event; one that is anterior to terrestrial life.’ This arche-fossil is an ancestral 93
phenomenon that is prior to any correlation and transcends correlational constitution. It is an 94
evidence for a time before man or the human subject. A fossil is a material bearing traces of pre-95
historic life, of something that came into being and later seized to exist, but what Meillassoux calls the arche-fossil is a material bearing the traces of “ancestral” phenomena, meaning a reality existing before life on earth that happened before the emergence of life; it designates an event anterior to terrestrial life and hence anterior to givenness itself. It is an ‘immemorial relic of time’ before the 96
coming of sentient life-forms; a time before man and proves that there existed a material universe predating the appearance of a thinking subject, therefore, correlation. Every being that reveals the 97
absolute and is not a correlate of thought, is an arche-fossil. Moreover, it allows us to ‘know what 98
Meillassoux 2014, p 27. 89 Ibidem, p 43. 90 Ibidem. 91 Ibidem, p 27. 92 Harman 2015, p 11; Meillassoux 2009, p 10. 93 Gratton 2015, pp 26-27. 94
O’Sullivan, Simon. On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-infinite Relation. 95
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print. p 208. Meillassoux 2014, p 13; Meillassoux 2008b, p 20. 96
Gratton 2015, p 31& Leftwich, Patrick. "Culture Is an Arche-Fossil." Przegląd Kulturoznawczy 3 (2016): 121. 97
Web.
Ibidem: p 280. 98
Illustration 1: Abbas Akhavan, ‘Study for a Monument’ (2013–15) Cast bronze, cotton, dimensions variable Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund Installation view: Abbas Akhavan. Photo: Nikolaus Steglich.
there is when we are not.’ This temporal magnitude is so vast that its existence as a knowable fact 99
challenges the doctrine that the correlation of world and mind is necessary. With this argument, Meillassoux proves that being does not need to be thought. 100
He asks how one could give sense to the idea of time preceding the subject, or Dasein, a time where subjectivity emerged if one makes of time, space and the visible world, the strict correlates of this being-in-the-world, this subjectivity? If time correlates to the subject, than it is impossible for something to precede the subject inside time, because this would existed before the subject and only for the subject: a classic case of correlation. A hyper-chaotic time is the answer, 101
according to Meillassoux.
In the installation Study for a Monument (2013-15), Abbas Akhavan presents these ache-fossils. On the ground, white sheets are laid across the floor to showcase bronze plants and species native to the area between and around the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, what is now present-day Iraq. Many of the plants originate from the six volumes of “The Flora of Iraq,” an archive held in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London. In these volumes, over 33.300 species of flora native of Iraq’s lands have been categorized, starting in 1960. Akhavan enlarged the plant pressings and digital images to a human scale, cast them into bronze en charred them. The result is a collection of 102
strange remnants of flowers that seemed to be frozen from different times.
Rather than using bonze as an arche-fossil, since bronze is a human invention, the choice of bronze as main material functioned as a deliberate reference to the time period in which
Mesopotamia was established. In addition, bronze has a political and military symbolization due to its use as a material for weaponry and later on for monuments, referring to wars and power play in the Middle East. However, in this context the material is especially highlighted as a deceiving material that appears permanent, but in reality shifts shape in times of political transition, where it is melted and reformed from one political bust or monument to another. Hence the title, Study for a 103 Monument, referring to what comes next. It was the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue that
instigated the installation and made the artists realize that bronze was part of Hussein’s ephemeral self-mythologizing. The choice of material seems to be a contingency on its own, changing from 104
one reality to another. One of his goals was to show the bronze in this transient, ephemeral and contingent way, reminding the viewer that their reality is only short-term and that anything could happen at any time, as a hyper chaotic state of being.
O’Sullivan 2014, p 208. 99 Gratton 2015, p 121. 100 Meillassoux 2014, p 13. 101
Jackson, Georgina. "The Body in Ruins: Abbas Akhavan’s Study for a Monument." Afterall: A Journal of Art, 102
Context and Enquiry 42.1 (2016): 127. Web.
Islamic Arts Magazine. "Abbas Akhavan – Study for a Monument." Islamic Arts Magazine. N.p., n.d. Web. 103
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. "Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative But a Storm Is 104
The installation traces the history of the plants and the contingencies that they were subjected to, following the succession of destruction and actualization. The ‘cradle of civilizations’ was home to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel, but also to the luxurious 600-room place where Saddam Hussein reconstructed the palace of King Nebuchadnezzar II, ruler of Babylonia, from 605-562 BCE. The palace was built between 1983 and 1987, with the Iran-Iraq 105
war against the backdrop and served a greater ideology to affirm Iraq as the cradle of civilization and remind Iraqi’s that they are the heirs of the great cultures of Babylonia.
After the Gulf War in 1991, Hussein was after the extermination of the people of the
marshlands by draining the land, setting fire to the reeds and executing thousands of residents and rebels. Thousands of Marsh Arabs were displaced. The United Nations declared the loss of the 106
Mesopotamian marshlands as one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters, which continues to deteriorate due to climate change. If we take the hyper chaos as an absolute, as Meillassoux suggests, than we can try to use it as a way to interpret the series of events that changed Iraq. In this light, we should consider the conflict in Iraq as a contingent fact occurring within hyper chaotic time, because that is the absolute reality we live in. The destruction of plants, species and human lives also stem from this hyper chaotic time. Destruction is followed by actualization that keeps on repeating itself. The bronze flowers can then be seen as a testament of these contingent realities, of the destruction brought about by the Hyper Chaos, that brought them into being by letting them re-appear in a different size and matter. As an object of culture, they indicate something that is outside of our thought, outside of correlation. In addition, his installation, as most of his work, is called a study to highlight the fact, according to the artists, that everything has the potential to be something better, different. There is an open-endedness in his work that backs and functions in the same line as Meillassoux’s theory of contingency: everything has the possibility to be otherwise.
The flowers give the impression of dead objects in a mass grave or forensic findings, as if the hyper chaos took their lives by inflicting destruction. Due to their enlargement, the plants are estranged. They have the same scale as humans, placing them on equal foot as us. The object now has agency too that isn't confined to just us humans. Therefore, the flowers should be seen in Meillassoux’s non-anthropocentric worldview, where the world is defended from human access and the objects exists on their own. In addition, the fact that we are not alone on this earth or even universe, is highlighted by the fact that the plants were not found in the wild, but in an archive. What we today understand as nature is ‘merely a stand-in for the long-lost natural state that existed pre-civilization.’ In the same line as Meillassoux, the artist emphasizes the correlationist thinking that 107
entrapped us, where nature is thought of as a construction of man, while it exited long before sentient life emerged.
Jackson 2016, p 128. 105
Ibidem, pp 128-129. 106
Basciano, Oliver. "Abbas Akhavan." ArtReview. n.p., Oct. 2016. Web. 9 May 2017. 107
The enlargement and estrangement makes the plants seem as if they have come to exits out of “our” time; the time of human civilization. Connecting this out-of-timeness with the hyper-chaotic time of Meillassoux, leaves us with an artwork that brings us back in touch with what was before, all within the same hyper-chaos. It is as if Akhavan made the specimens re-appear again, as a weird repetition in the hyper chaos, a kind of hyper-chaotic glitch, where they can back out of the here and now and return to the era before human domination. This is the same quality that ache-fossils 108
have as well, it reveals the absolute: hyper chaos or absolute contingency. Confronting Meillassoux’s notion of the arche-fossil with Akhavan’s Study for a Monument, gives the tool another status. The fact that culture and art can also point to something outside of thought without strictly being measured by scientific methods such as radio-carbon dating, stretches Meillassoux’s notion of the arche-fossil to a broader realm where artworks have the ability to play with hyper-chaotic time and can say something about the political. In Meillassoux, the arche-fossil functions as a mere step in his argumentation for hyper chaos. But what Akhavan’s flowers show us is that the (artwork as) arche-fossil acts as a meaningful way to say something about hyper-chaotic time and the political situation it effects.
Simon O’Sullivan also takes up the ache-fossil and argues that contemporary art can be understood as such. Art, then, becomes the evidence of the production of something (the art object) that is ‘irreducible to that correlation.’ As if the object speaks back to its producer, the artist, and I 109
would add the viewer here as well, instead of correlation where the artist makes sense of something by means of art and let the objects speak back. O’Sullivan then argues that the artist ‘blindly produces a proxy form a world hitherto unknown’ from the “Great Outdoors” as Meillassoux would say. He suggests that correlationism was less of a problem for art then for philosophy, since art is something that accesses something that is ‘beyond’ the artist, utilizing contingency and the hyper chaos. Thus, art tends to operate against representation, something that Meillassoux is likewise vividly against. 110
O’Sulivan’s thoughts resonate in the work of Egyptian artist Youssef Limoud, who employs used and broken materials. His installation Maqam started as a reaction to the pictures in the media of destruction and war in Syria. The crisis in Syria acted as ‘a metaphor for the character of today’s troubled times,’ referring to the conflict situation in the Middle East. The installation is contingent, 111
happening in different places at different times, harboring contingent compositions. The images of ruins and destruction raised questions in the artist about sociopolitical circumstances, while thinking about geological facts and the passage of hyper-chaotic time. It brings to mind the main principle 112
Basciano 2016. 108 O’Sullivan 2014, p 282. 109 Ibidem. 110
Graves, Nelson. "Novelty, Historical Consciousness and the Spectacle of Interpretation."IOSR Journal of 111
Humanities and Social Science 22.2 (2017): 05-12. Web. p 248.
Guily, Elsa. "“An Artist Has to Be a Visionary”." Contemporary And. N.p., 23 May 2016. Web. 14 May 2017. 112
Illustration 2: Youssef Limoud, ‘Maqam,’ installation view, Dakar Biennale 2016, courtesy of the artist
that governs hyper chaos is the ‘principle of unreason.’ In a way, the same principle can be found in the war-like state of the Middle East today. Unreason first of all stands in contrast with reason, which is oppressive and equals correlation. Kant considers war irrational as well; as an alienation from the self, others, and the world. In this way, the political situation can therefore be seen as irrational, as it is governed by the principle of unreason and the measurable cost outweigh the measurable benefits. Limoud fits the worldview of Meillassoux in considering our world, especially the Middle East, as chaotic and in constant motion. These statements make his work a fitting site of operation for employing hyper chaos as a tool.
The installation is based on the principles of collage and collecting and was shown in different constellations during different exhibitions and events, such as the Off Biennale Cairo in 2014. The artistic strategy of collage resonates par excellence with the notion of the hyper chaos; showing the different, contingent, realities along each other and creating continently. Dust and recycled materials that were found by the artist comprise the main ingredients of the installation, suggesting a miniature landscape. With elements from nature such as sand, pigments, and wood combined with locally discarded items that are freed from correlation, the artist examines the potential of the creative imagination that is being confronted with a desolate space, asserted by the dissemination of the objects, the arche-fossils of their past, in order to create a wide field of an alternative terrain. From a space where war and destruction dominated, Limoud uses creative imagination to make space for an imaginative future to appear. A “calm after the storm” is created by means of the deliberate serene space set up as a way of suggesting an imaginary future for Syria and the Middle Eastern region at large. Within the serene space, the miniature landscape suggests 113
a speculative metropolis that is the fruit of the Hyper-chaos.
The title of the installation refers to the Arabic word Maqam, which has many meanings in Arabic. First of all, it means home, a place where one feels comfortable. Second, it refers to a shrine where sacred people are buried and where people go to worship, also referring to death. The final meaning connotes to Arabic music scales, a system of melodic modes that convey various narratives and emotions. This narrative element is underlined by the use of sand and soil that resemble the earth. Additionally, the artist used light in the form of little lanterns that together with the soil, create a dialogue between opposites such as heaven and earth, destruction and creation. 114
Limoud affirms the statement that O’Sullivan makes about the artist creating something beyond himself, when he says that an artist has to be a visionary, ‘someone who sees things without looking but senses their materiality.’ He blindly creates a “proxy” of the world that might be, 115
consisting of materials that are contingently destroyed, discarded and contingently chosen to re-appear in the artwork. The maqam, a home, is re-imagined after being destructed by war and conflict, composed of destructed elements and connoting the dead that were destructed with the
Graves 2017, p 248. 113 Guily 2016. 114 Graves 2017, p 248. 115
Illustration 3: Stills from Homesick (2014), Hrair Sarkissian. Two channel video, 11 min, 7min. Inkjet prints (5 images), 150 x 190 cm. Images courtesy of the artist and Kalfayan Galleries, Greece.
