ABSTRACT
Zeno, the ancient Greek philosopher, once arrived at an interesting conundrum with reference to the principles of Euclidean geometry. As a line is made up of an infinite number of points, he noted, we can readily apprehend that in moving between any two points, it will be necessary first to arrive at the point midway between them. Secondly, to get to that midpoint, it will be necessary first to arrive at the point midway between it and the origin, and similarly, by way of this infinite regression, he argued it would be impossible ever to arrive at one’s destination. Yet, paradoxically, as a result of our ‘being in the world’ – being, that is, in a particular situation – we know that we are able to get somewhere; that whatever are the coercions of geometric rationally – that is, of abstraction, of theory, of the limitations of self-consistent, instrumental represention – we are in actual, experiential fact free. Yet, for the age in which we live, now, it is precisely the limit of the conceptual language of instrumental rationality that stands as the real. The reification of our alienation from emotion (we might say), from sensuous knowledge and the symbolic, existing as
we do in the ‘condition of postmodernity’, subject that is to the reduction of meaning to a play of signifiers, to a series of algorithms formalising relationships in which the only allowable value is that of quantification, are all for Dalibor Vesely the product of this particular mode of representation. But as Vesely observes, pace Zeno, this represention is now divided from its other, and that the paradoxical nature of the condition in which we live is as a result structurally inaccessible to us.
