INTERSTICES -
SPACES - IN - BETWEEN:
the hidden arena of actuality
Maria Reinecke
Translated by Moller Hosmer-Dillard http://www.molliehd.com/
Translation of German Lecture "ZWISCHENRÄUME: Die verborgenen Schauplätze der Wirklichkeit"
X. Scenografic-Colloquium DAS, Dortmund 2012Part I
Interstices:
fissures, cracks, openings, gaps, pores. Interstices are everywhere; they are
there without actually being anything. They exist between things, on the
borders; they connect the solid, the tangible, the visible, the measurable, but
they themselves are fleeting, vague, invisible, undefined, empty: empty spaces
and nothing more. So is this all about nothing? Is an occupation with
interspaces as absurd an undertaking as that of the architect described by
Christian Morgenstern in his humorous picket fence poem? Is this endeavor like
taking the interstices from between the fence slats and trying to build a house
out of them?
“What really makes a wheel a wheel?”
asks the legendary Lao-tse, and he determines: it is the empty spaces between
the spokes that essentially constitute the wheel. Without the empty spaces
between no wheel. In this perspective, the interstices in the picket fence even
gain a certain meaning: the fence as well only becomes what it is through the
empty spaces between the slats.
Let us stay with this image: extracting interstices. Modern physicists propose what seems to be a similarly absurd working hypothesis in asking what would happen if we extracted all of the interstices from our planet: only a small, ultra-compact clump of matter would remain, about as big as a golf ball but with the same mass as the entire Earth. We wouldn't do much better; we are composed of 99.9% empty spaces. If one extracted all of the interstices from us, we would dwindle down to mere nanometers.
Let us stay with this image: extracting interstices. Modern physicists propose what seems to be a similarly absurd working hypothesis in asking what would happen if we extracted all of the interstices from our planet: only a small, ultra-compact clump of matter would remain, about as big as a golf ball but with the same mass as the entire Earth. We wouldn't do much better; we are composed of 99.9% empty spaces. If one extracted all of the interstices from us, we would dwindle down to mere nanometers.
These thought experiments refer to
the empty spaces in atomic structures. And once again it is a matter of empty
spaces, this time between the atomic nucleus and the electron shell, which
truly make the atoms what they are. A simple hydrogen atom, for example,
'consists' (not in the sense of mechanical disassembly!) of a nucleus with a positively charged particle, a proton, which
constitutes the atom's mass, and a negatively charged particle, the electron,
which rushes around the nucleus like a charged cloud. In order to illustrate
the dimensions of an atom, let us mentally enlarge the nucleus one billion
times to the size of a needle head: the atom would then have the dimensions of
a soccer field, and the entire space between the nucleus and the electron shell
would be empty. In this example, empty is not nothing: electromagnetic forces
as well as the strong and weak interactions of nuclear energies make sure that
the atomic fabric does not collapse, that the subatomic particles can be
commuted into one another, and that the vacuum between nucleus and electron
shell can be maintained, remaining electrically neutral. Without these basic
physical forces, which include gravity, the atomic structures of the Earth
would actually collapse upon themselves. Only nuclei would remain, pure mass, a
clump as big as a golf ball.
No doubt: the interstices, as well
as what happens within and around them, are clearly of fundamental importance,
and are a prerequisite for everything that exists. Without them, there would be
no activity, no becoming, no growth, no movement, no life. We would not exist,
nor would nature, the world or the universe. The universe itself consists of
75% empty space, and here as well empty is not nothing: gravitational fields,
electromagnetic fields and waves, energy flows of unceasing activity are
coursing through space.
Mollie Hosmer-Dillard http://www.molliehd.com/
Collecting Burdock and Vetiver or In Process, 2009, Oil on canvas 80 x 100 cm *
The modern
interdisciplinary sciences show us a world that is porous through and through,
intricately interconnected, in constant motion and flux. They point to a
comprehensive causal interdependency, an infinite, reciprocally effective
network of relationships in which nothing, no event, is isolated or without
effect upon the whole.
Formerly, the “eternal” ice in the
Antarctic and the “eternal” mountains were discounted as dead material. Today
we know that within seemingly unchangeable material, highly disturbing
processes take place, visible and invisible, within and between the smallest
cellular structures and down to the molecular and atomic levels, with
unpredictable consequences and repercussions for the entire Earth.
The English mathematician, natural scientist and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947), who was drawn to philosophy through his work in the natural sciences, saw the relationships between inorganic, organic and (in the broadest sense) biological structures as interdependent, and interpreted them as a comprehensively dynamic, organismic process of actuality. Whitehead was the first to call the empty spaces in living structures "interstices" and to accord them a fundamental importance by relating them to physical field theory and the interactions of electromagnetic fields in empty spaces.
The English mathematician, natural scientist and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947), who was drawn to philosophy through his work in the natural sciences, saw the relationships between inorganic, organic and (in the broadest sense) biological structures as interdependent, and interpreted them as a comprehensively dynamic, organismic process of actuality. Whitehead was the first to call the empty spaces in living structures "interstices" and to accord them a fundamental importance by relating them to physical field theory and the interactions of electromagnetic fields in empty spaces.
In his major work Process and Reality (1), published in
1929, Whitehead wrote the still largely overlooked sentence "Life
lurks in the interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices of the
brain." And he did
not mean this metaphorically, but literally.
Whitehead saw the individual living
cell as a complex physical field occupied by molecules, atoms and electrons.
Between the occupied space-time locations there are empty spaces full of
virtual energy. “Empty” means only: free of electrons, protons or any form of
electrical charge. In order for the virtual energy flows in the physical field
of empty space to become actual occurrences, they require the influences of
bordering occupied spaces (molecules, atoms, electrons); because physical
fields only become comprehensible through the influences that affect them.
According to resonances and influences from their surroundings, the virtual
energy flows either do or do not undergo a spontaneous concretization process.
Life acts as a catalyst; it is a quality of empty space that has the creative
function of creating newness, allowing actuality to emerge from potentiality. The
actual processes of life take place in the interstices - according to
Whitehead. Bold thoughts.
Boldness is indeed necessary for researching interstices – Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld also point this out in their book The Evolution of Physics. They stress the fact that, due to the perceptions of modern physics, which no longer address the relationship between bodies but what lies between them, a great mental boldness is required to recognize that "the behavior of the field (in the intermediate spaces, M.R.) could be decisive for the organization and understanding of incidents" (2).
Boldness is indeed necessary for researching interstices – Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld also point this out in their book The Evolution of Physics. They stress the fact that, due to the perceptions of modern physics, which no longer address the relationship between bodies but what lies between them, a great mental boldness is required to recognize that "the behavior of the field (in the intermediate spaces, M.R.) could be decisive for the organization and understanding of incidents" (2).
There seems to be a lack of boldness
in the trends of positivist science. What exactly takes place in the empty
interstices of living organisms is still largely unresearched. It is only
hesitantly that vacuum structures are even seen to have a fundamental
biological importance and are recognized as the actual basis for the
interdisciplinary research of biophysics.
Bele Weitzmann, Begegnung, 1987, Amsterdam, Acrylgemälde
180 x 100 cm.
The human
being is an interstitial creature; it exists between the macro- and
micro-cosmos and forms a kind of interface, a biological data transmission
boundary between material and mind/consciousness. Our bodily cells ultimately
consist of minute elements of inanimate material; a million trillion atoms bustle
in just the tip of a finger; there is constant molecular and cellular exchange
taking place in our bodies: ten million cells die and are recreated every
second. If we zoom into a human body, through the porous skin, we see our
organism as a pulsing, finely interrelated, interdependent system. The organs
function in a web-like interplay; the web is composed of cellular
interrelationships; the individual cells of organelles that are in turn
organized by the cooperation of large and small molecules. If we zoom in
further, we discover atoms within the molecules, and in the atoms are atomic
nuclei, which in turn volatilize into subatomic entities. The following
question is thus of essential importance to us: To what extent and how do
microcosmic processes affect us physically, psychically and mentally? This also
applies to macrocosmic processes: how are we affected by all of the
fluctuations, waves, frequencies, electromagnetic forces, energy and particle
flows and rays that constantly "bombard" us from all sides?
A kaleidoscope of "interstitial" questions emerges, such as: What is the nature of weather sensitivity regarding the bodily electromagnetic fields and the biological effects of electromagnetic fields? Do our ulterior thoughts and desires really have (electrical) effects on people and situations? What is the real relationship between the specific wave spectra of individual organs and cells and the emotional chemicals in our organism? Can we really see and feel a person’s aura? Are there forty thousand genuine brain cells in our hearts...? Questions that are being intensively researched by certain disciplines in scientific fringe areas and in esoteric circles. A flood of information is inundating the media market and can be accessed at the click of a mouse. For interested laymen, it is often not easy to clearly distinguish between substantial educational opportunities and (ideologically) misappropriated material, or just pure humbug.
A kaleidoscope of "interstitial" questions emerges, such as: What is the nature of weather sensitivity regarding the bodily electromagnetic fields and the biological effects of electromagnetic fields? Do our ulterior thoughts and desires really have (electrical) effects on people and situations? What is the real relationship between the specific wave spectra of individual organs and cells and the emotional chemicals in our organism? Can we really see and feel a person’s aura? Are there forty thousand genuine brain cells in our hearts...? Questions that are being intensively researched by certain disciplines in scientific fringe areas and in esoteric circles. A flood of information is inundating the media market and can be accessed at the click of a mouse. For interested laymen, it is often not easy to clearly distinguish between substantial educational opportunities and (ideologically) misappropriated material, or just pure humbug.
As a
metaphor, interstices have long since caught on in the XXI century; they have
even become a signature of our times. The hybrid, the interfering element, the
intermediary has a place in the most various cultural areas. Interstices stand
for the vague, ambiguous, trans-border, transition, border-expanding, as well
as for the unfathomable, unknown, uncanny, beguiling, infectious and dangerous
- according to Bernhard Dotzler and Henning Schmidgen of Humboldt University,
Berlin. (6) Young people use the new digital interstitial worlds as a stimulus
for their iridescent, contrastive fashions, styles and life designs in order to
present themselves and expand their own “I,” writes Michael Meier in his book Neue Menschen (New People). (7) Interstices are the commonly avowed creative free
spaces "for new ideas and meanings in the arts, in architecture,
literature, music, film, dance as well as in psychotherapy and spiritual life
counseling", according to Dariusz Radtke and Hagen Schulz-Forberg, Forum
46. (8)
The interstices are also the
occasion for our meeting here in Dortmund and serve as a metaphor for change
and transition. In an interstitial sense though, the interstices are more than
a metaphor; they do not merely stand for change and transition: they are
the true space-time in which change and transition are able to take place.
Sandra Kühnapfel
Without title or Spaces in-between, Foto 2008, Oslo *
Part II
Intersticial thinking and living
In 1993, when I first discovered the interstices in Whitehead’s Process Philosophy (Process and Reality, Lit.1) as concrete “event spaces” and began trying to implement these thoughts in literature, I still felt somewhat alone with these interstices. No one was interested in the matter. I had no idea then that I was not so alone. Shortly before this time, the Suhrkamp publishing house had published a small book entitled: Aber ich lebe nur von den Zwischenräumen (But I live only from the interstices): a quotation from Peter Handke in conversation with Herbert Gamper. (9)
Handke
also sees the interstices as a metaphor
and initial situation for creative action; moreover, he suggests a hint
of an
interstitial reality in these spaces. He speaks of the inspirational
initial
emptiness, a generative emptiness, and of a vibration in this emptiness
that
makes it possible to communicate at all. He calls the interstices a kind
of
value-vacuum, an opening of emptiness even right in the middle of the
crowds, f.e. when he was walking across the Markus-Place in Venedig;
looking to the ground, he became conscious of the strangely empty spaces
there from which the figures of his stories first emerge; and he
stresses that
there is no greater imaginable moment for sympathy (tenderness/love)
than in this emergence of
emptiness.
And us? What do we do with the interstices? We too need to be bold if we are to take the interstices seriously, and if we want to pour ourselves into them. The concept that not things, but the in-between occurrences are important is foreign to us. As we think, so do we live. We are used to thinking "materially", realistically (res, lat. “the thing“, “the matter”); we define reality as something that we find in fixed, definitely localizable, quantifiable bodies, things, entities, and we orient our lives around this concept. The fundamental subject-object structure of our language, which shapes our entire thinking, makes this obvious. The sentence, e.g. "I see the tree" expresses from beginning to end a static, one-sided relationship between me and the tree: I as the active, seeing subject am separate, independent and distanced in relation to the tree as a purely passive object. To me, it is a thing that has nothing more to do with me, something that I can, at most, use for my own purposes.
Seen from an interstitial point of view, the static subject-object relationship becomes a dynamic, symmetrical causal correlation between me and the tree. The tree does not remain a passive object; instead it actively draws my glance, it shows itself to me in its fullness; it sends out its specific signals, which affect my perceptive apparatus and fundamentally contribute to the fact that I perceive it and how I do so; and this perception leaves traces in my system, changes me. What happens between me and the tree at this place, in this moment, is a piece of reality, enmeshed, integrated and in an infinite network of countless other simultaneous occurrences in the direct vicinity and in the furthest distances: there is perhaps the warm light, the sun, the sum of insects, the scent of the blossoms, the proximity of a forest, highway sounds in the background, approaching clouds, the darkening sky, etc.: vibrations, waves, frequencies, energy flows of every kind enwrap the tree and I, absorb us into an all-embracing causal correlation in which I no longer play the main role as subject.
Actuality
contains the word “to act”; actuality acts, is active, occurs in the in-between
space, between me and all things, between me and others, between me and the
world. Actuality is more and is different than mere reality; it holds another
dimension of experience: alongside the quantitative as-much-as-possible
experience, actual experience strives for intensity, a special form of quality.
Life means experience. We have largely forgotten to perceive occurrences in the
in-between space as actuality, and to live in this actuality, to experience it; we are used to function, we must function. The realities of life must be conquered,
professionally and privately, again and again every day, with uninterrupted
deadlines, duties, obligations. The tyranny of an unheeding and mercilessly
advancing clock is ever at our backs. The timeslot for freedom becomes ever smaller; if we have free time, it
continues along like clockwork; we run from event to event, from the gym to
brunch, from date to date, until at some point we can’t do it anymore. The
connection gets lost, sometimes the sense as well. We find that we have long
lost our feeling of ourselves and of others, that we barely have enough energy
to even breathe. Life has suddenly lost its savor, has become stale. Then we
want to stop the wheel, to halt the mechanical cycle of things; we want to dive
into the moment that is always melting away in front of us, we want to pause,
to truly feel and taste life once more as we did when we were children, when we
still could.
A child still lives in the immediacy
of actuality; she doesn’t yet know of anything to do with the mere sequence of
things. She creates her own world, we say, and she plunges in. The child seems
to dally; she is immersed in that which moves her most deeply at this moment.
A German-Polish friend remembers an
interstitial experience from his childhood: “As a small boy I sometimes had to
walk a couple of kilometers in the dark back home. Often, I stopped on the way
and listened… I felt good in the moment when I stood and paused and forgot
myself… Everything suddenly became so clear, and it was all there, it was only
I that wasn’t there…”
“It was only I that wasn’t there”:
interstitial experience has a passive character; the “I” moves to the
background, lets go, allows itself to be engaged, becomes sensitive, porous,
opens itself to that which is happening inside and around it; it perceives,
senses, feels its actual presence in the often-mentioned here and now: not
meditatively detached, but grounded and sensuously corporal.
Interstitial experience is the
realization of my presence in this place, in this expansive moment with an
actual duration. I feel my presence in the actual present. Yes, time is real:
not only subjectively felt, but actually real. This statement may not seem to be
original or enlightening, but becoming conscious of it can be important for our
lives and our ability to experience. The time problem can only be hinted at
here. I think, it is high time that we focus our attention more on the actuality of time and our
living experience within it.
For us, time is naturally and habitually the linear, homogenously progressing
kind of time that is dictated to us by clocks. This supposed measured time is,
however, pure abstraction and refers to something that doesn’t exist.
Mathematical-physical time is at no point actually existent in an apparent
present. The bone-crushing, crippling feeling that sometimes overcomes us as the
result of the linear, undifferentiated progression of time is a product of a
deeply internalized, acquired abstraction, according to Spyridon Koutroufinis, TU Berlin.
(12)
Sometimes we still sense the actual time, when we step out of the
routine daily sequence: on vacation, in the countryside, in nature. Then we
suddenly notice that time thickens, the hours are fuller, our experience is
more intense... no wonder: we are closer to actuality; more deeply inside of
the actual occurrence of nature. We can sense the actual, occurrent time:
expansive moments, heterogeneous droplets of time that overlap one another,
melt into one another, interfuse... Nature is not within time; time is within
nature. Actual time takes place in the actual occurrences, in the
interstices...
How we think of the world makes a difference:
“material- static", as an uninterrupted, mechanical sequence of realities which
we must satisfy, or "interstitial- dynamic", as a living actuality
that takes place in the interstices, allows change, is open to the future, and
holds new freedoms and possibilities for us. These are two different
perceptions that shape our life and living experience; in the end though they
do belong together: a harmonious life will depend on the extent to which we can
create a balance between both. The child must gradually learn to deal with the
conditions and fixed processes of 'reality' and everyday life; we, on the other hand, can
learn to once again discover in its fullness the emergent actuality in between
the mere processes of it; to let it inspire, touch, move, surprise us; to constantly
see, feel, understand, absorb and appreciate our surroundings in new and
different ways: the world, humanity, things, interrelationships – and not least
ourselves.
Let's be bold: now and then, let’s step out of the routine course of
life; let’s make holes in the mechanical gearwork of reality and plunge into
the interstices: into the hidden, adventurous arena of actuality!
Maria Reinecke, 2012
(translated by Mollie Hosmer-Dillard, Oktober 2012)
* COPYRIGHT OWNER
Literature:
(1)
Alfred N. Whitehead, Prozess und Realität, stw
690, Frankfurt a. M. 1987
(2)
Albert Einstein und Leopold Infeld, Die
Evolution der Physik, Rowohlt 1987
(3)
Gerhard Roth, Aus Sicht des Gehirns, Suhrkamp
2003
(4)
Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Irrtum, Berlin 2006
(5)
Joseph LeDoux, Das Netz der Persönlichkeit,
Patmos, 2003
(6)
Bernhard J. Dotzler und Henning Schmidgen, Parasiten
und Sirenen - Zwischenräume als Orte der materiellen Wissensproduktion,
Bielefeld 2008
(7) Michael
Meier, Neue
Menschen, Edition Patrick Frey 2011
(8)
Dariusz Radtke und Hagen Schulz-Forberg, Forum 46, Zwischenräume
II - Text zum Interdisziplinären Salon für Europa, Berlin 2007
(9)
Peter Handke im Gespräch mit Herbert Gamper, Aber
ich lebe nur von den Zwischenräumen, Suhrkamp 1990
(10) Maria Reinecke, Leben in den Zwischenräumen,
Roman, Neuauflage, Palmartpress Berlin, 2012
(11) Ernst Mach, Analyse der Empfindungen, 1886
(12) Spyridon Koutroufinis, Über die Affinität
der Zeitphilosophie Henri Bergsons zum Ammonschen Verständnis von Zeiterleben, Arbeitsskript
(Datum fehlt) TU Berlin
(13) Maria
Reinecke, La Rambla - Barcelona Story, Berlin 2009
.
