Arche-fossil is a series of drawings presented in the exhibition «The Rest and the Gesture», a project which seeks to strengthen the contemporary reception of the World Heritage Site of Palaeolithic Art of the Côa Valley, held at The Côa Museum. Apparently separated, there exists a reunifying invisible line from stone to paper, from the engravings to the drawings, as if the engravings had freed themselves from the pre-cinematic stone and began moving, as if expanding its protocinematic essence.
Technics was the first stage of humans. At times, technics and nature intersect – and thresholds are always superimposition zones, and not of opposition – as in so many other times technics intersects the notion of human. This indefinite area is the territory of art. The first carved stones, the first engraved walls may not be intelligible, but manage to be read in its originary technics.
And it may have been, in a chain of successive releases, or individuations, that the hand released the word (Leroi-Gourhan, 1964). The bipedal gait that freed the hands, releasing the handhold, constitutes the first technical momentum – and the impetus for art. For the freed hand calls itself tools. The Fine Arts reveals this double mediation to be still technical and already speech.This is the ancestral lesson engraved on the walls of the Côa Valley that I revisit, working it as a primary site for the reterritorialization of art. Not purely instrumental or entirely subjective, artistic creation is yet produced by a body onto a surface of inscription – a body that has learned to perform in order to sign. The gesture exists in its eternal contemporaneity and the rest is the utmost archaic remainder – of the un-contemporaneity of gesture.
As a process departing from the existent into remainder the archaic return is inseparable from all three drawings – arche-fossil (1), the domain of the distressing mineral alienation (2) and I’m what is forced to overcome itself until infinity (3). It is known that the notion of arche-fossil is a proposal by Quentin Meillassoux, aiming at decentring the excessive weight of a certain image of man in history, an anthropocentrism he called correlationism.
All that is inscribed in correlationism sought this control, since it apprehends the world and its historical events, phenomena and objects, in a table of concepts that encompasses either the establishment of a recognized repertoire or the creation of shared universe of meaning, subjected to ideology or other forms of establishing a consensus.
Establishing an ambitious project that goes beyond the reason of post-Kantian metaphysics, Meillassoux seeks to eliminate the «gene» of control from metaphysics through a philosophy of contingency. Quentin Meillassoux builds a speculation around the impossibility of verifying the totality of the phenomena that constitute the Universe by either natural human perception or through mechanisms. This because, for the French philosopher, concepts are always static categories. Concepts, the bare unit of philosophy, are unable to contain reality, which will always be fluid and imponderable.
As for correlationism, the main critique in After Finitude (Après la Finitude, 2008), it is established as a circular program that dominated post-Kantian philosophy, and that built an incarcerating metaphysical circle around man. At the heart of this delimitation, thought exists in such completeness that it prevents any contamination of that which is unknown. Meillassoux wants to establish the absence of thought because, he asserts, thought is not coextensive with being.
We are attacking logic when designing a world without thought, essentially disassociated if we think it or not, a blow that transgresses science and metaphysics: «The sense of desolation and abandonment which modern science instils in humanity’s conception of itself and of the cosmos has no more fundamental cause than this: it consists in the thought of thought’s contingency for the world, and the recognition that thought has become able to think a world that can dispense with thought, a world that is essentially unaffected by whether or not anyone thinks it.» (Meillassoux 2008, 187)
The existence of fossils, preceding humans by millions of years, thus exhibits the immense human frailty. Through this encounter, and these drawings are an attempt, contemporaneity becomes archaic revealing itself as contingent and inconclusive.
The archaic that was thus buried beneath the efforts of instituting an arché as unit of becoming, by the absolute need of being, is brought up in physical act of drawing (as inscription).
References:
Leroi-Gourhan, A. [1964] 1990. O Gesto e a Palavra. Vol.1. Técnica e Linguagem. trad. V. Gonçalves. Lisboa: Edições 70.
Harman, G. 2010. “Grant, Bruno, and Radical Philosophy”. In Speculative Turn: Controversial Materialism and Realism. Trad J. Golb e R. Wolin, pp.21-40. Melbourne: Re.Press.
Meillassoux, Q. 2008. After Finitude: an Esssay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trad. R. Brassier. London: Continuum.
* Graham Harman summarizes it as follows: “For correlationism as well as idealism, the object is not a mysterious residue lying behind its manifestation to humans. If I claim to think of an object beyond thought, then I am thinking it, and thereby turn it into a correlate of thought in spite of myself. Hence the object is nothing more than its accessibility to humans.” (Harman 2010, 22); contrast with Quentin Meillassoux “By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” (Meillassoux 2008, 13)
