What shape does a process have? At first this question seems completely incomprehensible. The reason for this is probably very simple: a shape is something we associate with objects, i.e. with something which does not change, which is constant. Yet a process is the complete opposite of this kind of constancy: a process is change, or to be more precise, changing. An object is that which manages to maintain its shape throughout all change. If we perceive an object as something that does not change, then we favor it, as it denies time.
From this stems our fascination with tangible things, such as images of eternal ideas. However, if we perceive the phrase ‘to maintain shape throughout change’ as a description that does not want to eliminate time and the dynamics of shaping, then we come close to something that could be described as ‘the shape of movement’.
A question that wants to discover the shape of a certain process is a question that originates from an ordinary, albeit not entirely comprehensible, experience: we are able to determine whether one process is different from another – we know when a process has begun or ended. But it is not clear how we are able to do so, i.e. how we know this. And we think that as soon as a process has a different shape (or a different appearance), it is some other process. For the only thing that applies to both objects and processes is that they are capable of preserving their identity. And the word ‘shape’ then describes that which gives objects and processes their identity. Shape is something whole: we do not perceive things and their attributes, qualities and values; we perceive shapes – and only through a subsequent analysis do we arrive at their attributes, qualities etc. And we also perceive something like the shapes of movement: we do not perceive a certain sequence of steps in an additive manner, but in the suspense of expectation, sensing haste, precipitation and hesitation, and it is the combination of various rhythms that determines shape – therefore we can recognize a person by his walk without seeing him, a bird by its flight.
A thing that is the subject of external influence resists such influence and at the same time changes, while preserving its identity. A thing is the occurrence of change, its shape is therefore not morphé, but metamorphé – and it is therefore identical to itself in its changing.However, the world is not just objects and processes.
Perhaps objects and processes are just limiting notions, between which lies all that we come into contact with in our experience. Rivers, clouds, waterfalls, the flame of a candle, plants, living beings, language. All of these are thing‐processes, even though we speak of them as though they were objects: we refer to them as nouns, they are substantives. God knows why. The only explanation for this persistent effort to get rid of time, to not see change, to hold on to that which is solid and without movement, is a fear of not having anything to hold on to. Because we can think a process quite well, we have just forgotten that we can do it. We look at the world around us and we see: water and earth are below. However water evaporates and rises up, air and fire are overhead, but fire sometimes falls to the ground: this is not a random list of various things, it is in a certain sense truly everything. This vision encapsulates the ‘world’ as a whole. No more is necessary. In contrast to this a mere list never ends, will never be complete, will always be somehow random. In other words, it will never contain logos. In contrast to this, earth, air, fire and water also represent in this sense certain orderly mutual relationships, by which as ‘elements’ they are joined together, in spite of, or rather thanks to, their polarity: earth versus air, water versus fire, air versus water, above and below. Expressed even more generally: hot (fire) versus cold (air), dry (earth) versus wet (water).
Cold feuds with hot, wet tries to overcome dry, heat dries earth, rain wets it. In a human body there is everything necessary for the creation of a tree, and in a tree there is everything necessary for the creation of a human being. Elements are also forces. Imbalance generates cohesion. Life is a phenomenon of instability and balance, yet it exists as long as it is capable of changing in interaction with its surroundings. Is it something archaic or is it a common experience? These elements or forces are somehow everywhere and in everything, nothing exists without them, nothing exists outside of them. And to express it more forcefully: they give life to all that exists and all that we see. On the whole, there are no more and no fewer of these elements or forces.
They do not decrease or increase, no matter how they feud. If we understand this, then we ‘see’ the whole. And if these elements or forces feud with one another, but in this feuding are constantly equalizing their proportions (because if one thing is predominant here, then another is predominant elsewhere and they counterbalance one another), then we see that the world is not something which stands still, but that it is characterized by the motion of all that it comprises. It is a process, it is happening. It is a process Spin which we constantly have before our eyes – and which we understand because we are able to envisage an image of it. ‘Fire lives through the death of the earth, air lives through the death of fire, water lives through the death of air, earth through the death of water.’ the flame in a lamp ‘lives’ by feeding on oil. From here one can go even further, for fire is already a more dynamic notion, or ‘concept’, a notion which is still conceivable, however “abstract”.
One lives through the death of the other – the world
is like a kindling and a dying down, but this is also at the same time a notional grasp of a principle: the fieriness of all happening. It is something like a principle, as we even see this fieriness in flowing water, which ‘with the swiftness and speed of its change disperses and then comes together again, arrives and then departs’. The dispersed comes together again. This is action, continuation; a river never disperses in such a way as not to come together again, and it does not come together so as to become water which does not flow; there is an equilibrium, but only thanks to a constant movement, only thanks to the fact that this equilibrium is happening, only thanks to the instability of this state of equilibrium. If a river did not flow, it would not be a river, so in order to remain (as the river which we see before us), it must constantly change. If we see before us this image of a river (or image of fire), then we have before us the true shape of the world as a process. The order which we see has the shape of the fieriness of fire. We watch a waterfall and we see the shape of fire. Modern science says that fire is a dissipative structure. It is possible that we need to have a concrete fire before us in order to understand this claim and to see the shape in question. If we perceive shape in such a way, then we understand better that which at times seems inconceivable.
Color, for example, is not color.
Color is not the word ‘color’, color is something else, because unlike geometry, unlike drawing, whose substance is a certain line, outline and form, color is primarily colorfulness. This means a world whose substance is merely shades, nuances, intensities, les valeurs. Not, however, absolute nuances, such as ‘yellow‐brown’ or ‘light blue’ for example, but shades within shades: this light at this hour, here and now, has created this shade – and in the next moment this shade will disappear because it will change. This is colorfulness. The notion of essence, of idea, disappears in shades.
Color as colorfulness is this movement of absent substance – it is the movement of changing. Each morphé is always already metamorphé. The limit of difference is transition and the limit of transition is difference. The limit of diversity is changeability, i.e. movement, and the limit of changeability or movement is diversity – variety, colorfulness. Movement is transformation. And every movement has a certain shape: a stone, whose movement is virtually imperceptible, a cloud, which, before it disappears, exists as something which is transforming. Formation is the self‐description of shape.
Capturing change so that it does not cease to be change, a transition so that it remains transference, means to discover ways of dematerializing matter, and at the same time also the materialization of the intangible. It is almost possible to touch light. Substance becomes movement. A sensitive field reacts to movement. A strange paradox: the technology of new media and sophisticated software facilitates an encounter with archaic elements. Architecture is a sign of influences of force, the body lives on through the elements, without any clear boundary of where one becomes another – nothing that we can identify as an object.
Matter is mass only if its movement slows down extremely, but even then we perceive it rather as energy. The source of morphology is resonance, and for this reason it seems as if an energy field has acquired the ability to empathize. A collision is resonance: two particles collide, move away from one another, and remember the occurrence of the collision. Two people speak to one another, then they go their separate ways, yet altered by what they have said. But this is an infinitely small knot in the network of interactions, each of which changes the form of this network slightly in an unpredictable manner.
Would it be erroneous to claim that the shape of this network is fire? If we want to understand this shape, we have to see it in a differently structured space of the representation of reality (if the word ‘representation’ still has any significance when the depiction of the world has become a moment in a process). Because an organism lives within an organism. Art is an analogon of science, yet we do not know which of these is the model for the other.
Miroslav Petříček, philosopher
This text was written after the author’s encounter
with Federico Díaz in May 2008.