Conference paper, Saturday, October 20th, 2007, 6 p.m.
Miguel Hernández – Invisible Peripheries: Spanish Art, Multiculturalism, and Topology
The essential problem of Western theories of the subject is that, ultimately, difference is perfectly defined and delimited, even in hybridization, which is the sum of differences. We could say that this way of thinking about the subject is based on roles –¬ on kinds of otherness – and therefore that the concept of periphery is geo-ethnically defined and codified. What happens is that the map of inter-culturality is represented by Euclidian coordinates. When we speak of periphery we are thinking in topographic terms and it may be necessary to do so topologically, to think of a non-Euclidian space, a space of mental representation that we might call möbian, a space that values the deadlocks, the shadows, the lapses, and the surplus. A space that takes zero as a value.
It is known that the Western system of representation, unlike the Oriental, which values the void, does not include zero and moves from one to less one. It could be said that the consideration of the subject has followed this representation. Modernity considered the One, the hegemonic Eurocentric subject; Postmodernity gave its attention to the Less One in the difference from the One, the Other, privileging the marginal peripheral subject. And “transmodernity” our time, seeking the inter-cultural hybrid, has reached the One plus Other (not one plus one). In contrast, topological thought would value the blind spot, zero degree of identity. And above all, topological would value the presence of time.
It is necessary to think not only in spatial terms but also in temporal terms. Usually, when we think of the Global World (of Global art), we think of it in terms of space. And this is because the Euclidian model of thought is spatial.
If we were to write a history of subjectivity and modern times, we could easily represent them mentally, almost spatially as if on a map. It could be said that in this space Modernity esteemed the time of the One, and based its project upon evolution and the Self’s progress. Postmodernism attended to the minorities and was built up on the time of the Other, that is, the time of the minus one; and what we could call interculturality, the official model of the Global World, has been constructed from the sum of the time of the Other, local time, added to the time of the One, global time. In other words, it is the hybridization of the Other with the Self; that is, the Minus One plus One. It is a perfectly representable equation in the mental map of time. It is a perfect equation, without “fissures”; fixed, visible and, consequently, localizable and controllable.
My concern here is that it would be necessary to introduce a fourth model. A time-space model of identity. That is: a topological model, a model beyond interculturality and hybridity, a discontinuous and antagonistic identity that cannot be added or subtracted, and neither can it, therefore, be represented. It is a movable, changing, multiple and absurd identity. In short it is an antagonistic model of identity in constant conflict.
Furthermore, in an antagonistic time model that values the non re-usable excess and leftover stock, the dead-ends and the errors of time, it seems necessary to break the topographic structure in favor of a topological de-structure: a temporal space that is not Euclidian, but möbian; without an inside, an outside, a near or a far away, where there is no correspondence nor completely rational neighborhoods (at least if we understand reason as a spatialization). This time-space is governed, as Jacques Lacan already mentioned, by another series of correspondences and neighborhoods that suit the psychic time and space better than the geographical and historical ones: a confusing time-space, where before, after and now mix and intercede, a space where the exterior makes up the interior. It is a space that subverts intuition, a scotomic space, with a blind spot; the blind spot of an empty place, of a missing centre, around which all this topological space is configured.
Perhaps we should consider the contemporary subject and its time from the topology, beyond the location and beyond linear time in the time of absence, not in an eternal intemporality, but rather in a multiple and heterogeneous temporality, although not a hybrid one (at least not if by hybrid we mean the sum of the parts). A discontinuous temporality, a heterochrony, or rather, to emphasise the issue of conflict, a dyschrony, an asynchrony impossible to resolve.
Thinking about the periphery in topological terms would abolish the dichotomy between the One and the Other, or between the One plus the Other. It would take into account weaker identities that are antagonistic in themselves without ”fissuring” the intercultural map, revealing the synchronic and the diachronic in the same space, answering the need to introduce temporality in the negotiation of antagonistic and contradictory elements. Only through a möbian pattern of thought will we be able to find new ways of approaching the relationship between centre and periphery Only in this way would it be possible, for example, to be able to in-corporate the work of Spanish artists beyond the fact that they represent neither One nor an Other, to see that in themselves they may be impossibility, blind spot, scotomic discourse. Thus, we should appreciate the “intruder” status of recent Spanish art. This is the only way of overcoming its time lag, and its being out of phrase. To value its scotomic identity, its identity blind spot, its gap or lack in identity: the shadowaste.
