About the unfathomable secret of beauty
Sculpture part of Limen (work in progress) porcelain, resin, metals, lichen, moss, twigs
As part of my research for an upcoming piece titled 'Limen', I've been extensively reading Timothy Morton's works.
This morning, while shaping a fragile sculpture, I found myself recalling a passage from 'Magic Death', the last chapter of his book 'Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality'.
“The mysterious quality of artworks is a signal about the mysterious quality of objects in general. Beauty is a secret that we know exists but whose content we don’t know. When we share it with others, it’s as if we are in on the same secret. We look at each other in amazement or with a knowing look. But it’s impossible to specify what this secret is. Only the fact that there is a secret is of any importance. Beauty is based on the raw fact of the secret as such. The contours of the secret are felt like the coolness of a marble surface to a blindfolded person. Throughout this book I have been using the term secret to account for withdrawal. The secret then is simply the objectness of the object: the fact that objects appear, yet they withdraw from appearance, a double-edged quality that means that there is a permanent Rift in the universe, for any object whatsoever, not just sentient beings and certainly not just humans. This Rift happens both within and between objects. Or rather: it becomes impossible to specify whether the Rift is inside or outside an object. The Rift cannot be located ontically, that is, we can’t point to it anywhere on or inside the object. Yet there it is. This Rift accounts for what I call fragility.
Now fragility shouldn’t be confused with the fact that things do break. While this is true, its truth is just a symptom of a deeper ontological fact. In other words, objects don’t exist in time like porcelain dolls on a conveyor belt: when they reach the end, they drop off onto a concrete floor and smash to pieces. No: the object is riven in order to be an object. Time as a succession of instants emanates from objects themselves. That is, linear time as we (and whoever or whatever else) experience it is a product of a certain set of interactions between objects, based on their fragility. We can think of physical analogues quite easily. Time emanates from the decay of a radioactive particle; or from the vibrations of a piezoelectric crystal; or from the massiveness of a planet. In a sense, the radioactive particle, such as the carbon used in carbon dating, provides the best example. All objects are isotopes of themselves, uncanny and unstable doubles. Theories of objects and causation that rely on faceless substances or bundles of qualities have trouble with isotopes—real isotopes, not just figurative ones—precisely for this reason.
Fragility is what explains beauty. Kantian beauty is slightly sad, because it isn’t you. (I indulge here in a little anthropomorphism, since as Jane Bennett argues, this may be a net benefit to our understanding of things.) It’s also a little bit scary because you can’t tell whether it’s pretense or not. It’s the same way with nonhuman and with nonsentient objects. In some sense objects are sad, because they contain kernels of not-themselves, in order to be what they are. Objects just can’t be consistent and coherent at the same time. It seems as if Gödel wrote the rules for existence. Objects could shatter into a million pieces—a million new objects that is—at any moment. Their possibility is predicated on their impossibility.”
Do you find beauty in fragile things?
