The Movement of The Middle
Words, bread, and wine are between us, beings or relations. We appear to exchange them between us though we are connected at the same table or with the same language. They are breast-fed by the same mother. Parasitic exchange, crossed between the logical and the material, can now be explained… Do we ever eat anything else together than the flesh of the word?
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Mediations, relations – one can make believe one is lost in this fractal cascade… Everything has changed; nothing is constant; the chain has been mutilated beyond all possible recognition of the message. Victory is in the hands of the powers of noise… History in general as it is written or told is a network of bifurcations where parasites move about.
Michel Serres, The Parasite (1982)
The middle is a fold, an anchor, a point of departure. The middle signifies the tipping point between absence and presence, between stability and chaos. But the middle is also an incidence of movement, where objects and concepts are transformed or moved beyond, where a page is being turned or an eye follows its horizon.
Pairs of virtual particles bubble up from space-time at every point. A particle and its antithesis emerge, meet and cancel each other out. The event horizon of the black-hole acts as a middle point between particle and anti-particle, between virtual and absolute. One particle teeters over the precipice, and descends into the deep swell of the black-hole. The other, sitting just as precariously on the brink of space, bounds outwards to escape as baryonic matter.
The middle relates the one to the other, pivoting knowledge around its object, folding theory into practice. We do not move in a straight line from cause to effect, from language to meaning, rather we always sit on an imaginary horizon, which itself moves through a network of possible middles. Language does not relate directly to the world of subjects and objects, instead it lies between them, feeding half the world of one into half the world of the other. The middle is not a barrier or border between: the middle moves, casting real music on a virtual breeze.
