Outside-Inside Culture-Nature Me-Other

Installation, 2021 - River's Magic Garden, CCA- Center of Contemporarry Arts Tbilisi

​

Klein bottle is a topological model of non-orientability of the space and time. Lacan believed that its surface came very close to the Real, and according to Alain Badiou it is the shape of the truth-production process. It is the dialectic between outside and inside, open and closed, depth and surface, subject and object, me and the other, human and spirit. However, it is not an endless deterministic circuit of the unity of the opposites, as there is a discontinuity, a cut in its surface, a cut through which Klein’s bottleneck enters and exits the surface. This is an inevitable hole that creates the beyond of all that is Symbolic and Imaginary, touching on it, and cutting it open. Klein bottle is not a deterministic object that turns the future and the past into an ever-repeating closed circuit, on the contrary it is a way to potentiality of the future. As Lacan notes, I cannot speak of myself in the past, as what I say about the past changes the past itself, I cannot speak about myself in the present, as I who enunciates is always in what I have already enunciated, meaning what I have said about myself has already changed who I am. Therefore, it makes it impossible to catch the moment when I am speaking about myself. The only time in which I can speak of myself is in which “I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming”, future anterior. In future anterior identity is an infinite process of anticipation and nomination of the past that is to come, which changes the past as well as future. The guarantee of its infinitude is the unsymbolizable Real, that which makes narration into a never-ending story. Here Symbolic identification is not an unchangeable object, but a verb that does not stop counting itself as one. Future anterior is not a traumatic apocalypse, as subject finds agency in acting on the future through nomination. Naming earns its meaning through the events and truths that are to come. To speak in Badiouian terms, subject is not tied to the fidelity to the past Event, but is faithful to the Event that will have been in the future. For example, Native Americans give each other names not only based on qualities that they have, or to incentivize the change, but to change the very future anterior, to have such future manifest by the naming, that retroactively will incarnate the naming itself. Naming as prediction takes itself into consideration when telling the future. This is the very cornerstone of the materiality of language or as Claude Lévi-Strauss would say, shamanic effectiveness of the symbols. Therefore, the new naming does not return us to old spirits, but creates new ones that uphold the old ones in a new light. The paradox of the fidelity is therefore in changing. Native Americans can change the name that they have chosen or were given, but just so something never changes. This that never changes is called the Red Road, and naming in becoming is the life force that both transforms and keeps the spirit of the past for the good road that continues, into the future anterior.

 

Text by Vakhtang Gomelauri