Gmail kac attac Jorn—The Natural Order kac attac Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 1:53 PM To: Stefan Kac REREAD) THE NATURAL ORDER Asger Jorn The law of contradistinction Under the name of the Copenhagen Interpretation, Niels Bohr's theory of complementarity has gradually attracted notice the world over and day by day is penetrating more and more to the centre of the complex of problems around modern thought. This preoccupation with the theory of complementarity is so un- avoidable not on scientific but on philosophical grounds, in as much as it appears to be a new philosophical principle which, to put it mildly, is like a bull in a china shop in relation to the philosophical tradition. Really it is something far more dangerous. It is a new factor that either dissolves the possibilities or demands completely new rules of the game, because the theory of complementarity appears to be a law supported by scientific experience. The first reaction has been attempts to repudiate the scientific char- acter and the consequent well-knit legitimacies of the hypothesis. Since the probability of getting around the problem in this way gradually ap- pears to have diminished, a growing mood of panic has begun to spread in philosophical cireles, a panic already latent during the whole modern development of science, where philosophy or the so-called humanities have been on retreat across the board. Today philosophy has shrunk to being the branch of scholarship about the history of philosophy. At a time when the perception of philosophy as a creative activity is about to be given up and where a new ahistorical form of existence is being prepared, where humanity's historical and philosophieal periods have been brought to a close, Bohr's theory appears to be the first sketch for a completely new scientific philosophy, independent of everything which has hitherto been united under the name of philosophy. 134 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere If the foundation of science is the equation, that is, comparisons of uniform dimensions or quantities, and thus above all a doctrine of resem- blance, a doctrine of symmetry, then the doctrine of unity can be charac- terized as central to philosophy, the doctrine of the unity or correlation of things, thoughts and incidents, of their adherence to rules. One could therefore correctly maintain that any legal conclusion is in itself unscien- tific, and is a piece of philosophy even if it rests upon scientific analyses. Law means correlation and what creates panic in philosophy is that Bohr's law is the law of the lack of correlation, a law of incompatibility, a law of separation, an anti-law law or, if you will, an anti-philosophical principle with philosophical consequences, and thus a new unity of op- posites, a doctrine of dissymmetry. The philosophical consequences of the Copenhagen Interpretation are as follows: either one must accept that it is no longer possible to estab- lish a valid philosophy or one must accept the necessity of the simultaneous presence of several complementary or mutually incompatible but equally valid philosophical systems, principles or tendencies. Only the latter conclusion gives philosophy new possibilities for existence. However, if one wishes to go this way on the basis of Bohr's principle, it soon becomes apparent that it leads nowhere. If one neverthe- less wishes to go this way, then it can only happen by a critique of the Copenhagen Interpretation, but as the foundation of this is scientific, a purely philosophical critique can conclude nothing at all. It can only pos- tulate certain lacks, an incompleteness, which must be logical as well as purely experiential. Niels Bohr himself and his collaborators must either clearly prove the incorrectness of the critique and the impossibility of changing or extending the Interpretation in these realms of experience, or they must also realize the possibility of such a change. The concrete demand I pose here is colossal. It is the demand for a third interpretation of the character of light completely independent of the wave theory as well as the particle theory, and thus a third complementary theory of light, a theory of the plastic form of light. When I associate myself with the necessity of the development of such third theory of light, I have two reasons, a logical one which rests on Asger Jorn The Natural Order 135 the assertion that any complementary relationship must always be at least triple and can never be established in a purely duple system. In any two descriptions of a phenomenon, for the description to be sufficient or com- plete a third necessary description is always ignored, which is only to say that the three descriptions form a unit and thus become philosophically accessible. The other reason is founded purely upon my experiences of light and colour, acquired as a painter, even though I base my opinions on the investigation made by the South Jutland painter Philipp Otto Runge around 1800 and reworked by Goethe in his theory of colour. Goethe's demonstration that there are concrete optical characteristics in the essence of light and colour which do not form part of the descrip- tions of light postulated up to that time (Newton) are, in my opinion, valid to this day with regard to both the wave theory and the particle theory. I hope to be able to demonstrate that such a concrete material exists, de- manding its own separate description, without again committing Goethe's error of refuting the correctness of a scientific systemization on an amateur basis. But if a new doctrine of form which could replace the Renaissance's descriptions of form is to have general and scientific validity, I am in agree- ment with Goethe that it must begin with a description of the form of light. In the following text I hope to be able to indicate this possibility without driving up all too many of the blind alleys of the speculative method. The Copenhagen Interpretation. The Silkeborg Interpretation Is it by chance that Bohr's theory is called the Copenhagen Interpretation? Is it by chance that it was postulated in Copenhagen or does it have natural roots in the Scandinavian mentality or pattern of thought? I am posing this quite absurd question because such a causal context will in the future automatically form part of the reflections on the problem of complementarity the world over simply because of the name on the la- bel. The question is then whether one can imagine and construct such a Scandinavian principle of unity. If one can, this means that a specific Scandinavian philosophy exists, something no one had imagined before, and that one can talk of Scandinavian philosophy in the same way that one talks about Greek, German, French, English etc. philosophy. Is there 136 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere a common denominator to, or a more profound connection between, for example, Soren Kierkegaard' situation philosophy and Swedenborg's fundamental principles, to take two of the North's thinkers whose teaching has had a fundamental significance for modern culture? Is this common denominator also valid for Tycho Brahe and can it also include Niels Bohr's philosophical viewpoint? It has been shown to the point of triviality how analytical mathemat- is and geometry has its starting point in Euclid's geometry and in Greek logic, and that all this development is a result of the mentality and life pattern which developed in and with the Greek polis. No one disputes the logic and the experience of this development from this particular and clearly defined environment. Can the same method be used for a Nordic development where the environment is ill-defined and imprecise and the aversion to unity appears to be inborn? To make the question concrete - is there a connection be- tween Existentialism and Bohr' theory of complementarity? The answer must immediately be a clear no, as every attempt to combine Bohr's thesis with any already existent philosophical principle at all has led to a hope- less self-contradiction. The only logical consequence must be that an inductive method can- not be created on the basis of the Copenhagen Interpretation, and, if this is accepted, then the inductive method is completely bankrupt. Several scientists have already taken the consequences of this attitude and agreed that it is no longer possible to form a model or a picture of the modern Weltanschawung. We do not at this moment wish to discuss the rights or wrongs of this postulate. We only want to draw attention to a simple fact and an unavoidable consequence in connection with this principle. From this perception, one can no longer allow oneself to talk about an image of the world' or about "images' on the whole, as according to this postulate they have no scientific relevance. If one then represents this bankruptcy as the 'new scientific image of the world', this can only be stamped as a swindle and a deceit. One could just as well call the lack of an image an image as call a world which no longer exists, which no longer possesses the context that could justify the label 'world;, a world. Asger Jorn The Natural Order 137 Every image is an illusion and thus exists in a complementary relationship to reality. The picture and the world have always been two complementary areas. Even a geometrical figure is an image, a picture, a work of art, a pure illusion, and scientists can no more suspect what hu- manity will be able to imagine in the future than can tram conductors or customs officers. The only thing scientists can establish today is that it is not possible to undertake a description of the most recent scientific experi- ences upon the basis of the classical form of description or even upon the basis of forms of description which have developed on a completely new foundation, apparently independently of the classical form of description. That is all. It is here that the Copenhagen Interpretation begins by setting up an absolutely unforgivable taboo, a completely irrational prohibition, which Werner Heisenberg expresses in this way: "The concepts of classical physics form the language by which we describe the arrangements of our experiments and state the results. We cannot and should not replace these concepts by any others… We must keep in mind this limited range of applicability of the classical concepts while using them, but we cannot and should not try to improve them Only on the basis of this stupid sanctification of the classical inter- pretation of the concepts of elementary physics and geometry does the conclusion automatically follow that the new physics is indescribable be- cause the descriptive form is laid down. The prohibition against meddling with the elementary descriptive forms thus really becomes a prohibition against making a completely new elementary basis of description, a new pictorial form. By the maintenance of this prohibition, the Copenhagen Interpretation blocks the way it has itself scientifically opened up. Here we turn back to the question I asked myself at the beginning of this section. Can an elementary philosophical basis as clear and simple as the classical one and with its roots in Scandinavian thought processes be tound? Is it possible, for example, to describe the relationship between the dimensions in a quite different but just as simple way as Euclid's discursive account? Perhaps this is an idea that only my own personal imagination could reconcile, a vision I myself have discovered and of which only I 138 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere can enjoy the fruits. But I have much pleasure in imagining a connection between Ole Romer's statement of the constant called the speed of light, the characteristically right-angled clash which H.C.Orsted demonstrated existed between electrical and magnetic poles and then Niels Bohr's demonstration of the constant he called the quantum. What do we know about forms today, other than that they are constants? What difference is there between spatial statics and other forms of constants? It amuses me to imagine a world where topology or the so-called analysis situ is united with Kierkegaard's situation philosophy and this again with a plastic world picture which includes and explains all the elements of nature in a unity of time and space in unceasing transformation, where the constants are only metamorphoses. As I, in order to satisfy such an irrational desire for logic on the basis of such extravagant wishes, am forced into criticizing the Copenhagen Interpretation, I have decided that I will modestly make do with calling my perception, which is above all a kind of corroboration of the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Silkeborg Interpretation. The rules of the game Against the postulation of Bohr and Heisenberg, I set the following state- ment of the scientist C.D. Darlington, quoted by John Dewey in his book Reconstruction in Philosophy: 'Scientific discovery is often carelessly looked upon as the creation of some new knowledge which can be added to the great body of old knowledge. This is true of the strictly trivial discover- ies. It is not true of the fundamental discoveries, such as those of the laws of mechanics, of chemical combinations, of evolution on which scientific advance ultimately depends. These always entail the destruction or disin- tegration of old knowledge before the new can be created.' Niels Bohr has done neither one thing nor the other. He has done a third thing, created a both-and. This solution may perhaps be of interim value because the problem is thereby pushed to one side and given time to mature, but it can never be a definitive solution. It is nothing other than an agreement to ignore a set of crucial problems which are gradually forcing themselves more and more upon the attention. Asger Jorn The Natural Order 139 Einstein based his statements upon the classical definition of the con- cept of the experiment as an experience that could be expressed, communi- cated and understood. Bohr's scientific experiences went against Einstein's rational perception to the degree that Einstein felt himself forced to come out with the purely sentimental-religious argument that God did not play dice. However, with these new experiences the concept of play is irrevo- cably introduced into natural science. Interestingly enough, at precisely the same time Johan Huizinga was demonstrating on a purely humanistic basis the fundamental significance of play to human cultural life with the book Homo Ludens. At the turn of the century, the Norwegian-American author Thorstein Veblen had demonstrated with great irony that play is the foundation of every system of social hierarchy in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. The consequences of the opposition between the ideas of Einstein and Bohr will not, to my mind, be fathomed before the basic concepts of classical physics and mathematics have been interpreted in a new way which makes it possible either to discard them completely or to integrate them into a new context with the world that opens up with the new physical experiences. Incidentally, the Copenhagen Interpretation, with its taboo, has been completely unable to stem the semantic disintegration taking place everywhere, something which is so obvious that even an old politician like Stalin was clear that something was wrong. The classical world picture belongs with the classical form of language and will vanish with it. Thoughts, words and actions Why do the Latin peoples think and express themselves far more rapidly and more precisely than others, and why do Englishmen only listen to a man who finds it difficult to express himself and whose thoughts move forwards with a boring long-windedness? Because the Latin peoples think exactly as they speak and because the starting point of their thoughts is the word. From a Latin or classical perception there exist no thoughts for which there are no words, as each thought has in a subtle way arisen as words. The characteristic of a thought is that it can be expressed. That it 140 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere can be expressed is to say that it can be understood by others, that it is a social reality, and, as language is an accepted fellowship, that only com- municated thoughts exist. Only the socialized thought exists in the Latin perception as thought, because only that thought which is expressed so that it is understood by others exists. However, this is not a definition of the activity of thought itself at all, but only of socialized thinking. From this it must be logically concluded that in the classical meaning no individual thinking exists. Therefore in the classical cultures each new word, each new concept, is a direct attack on the social unity of society itself, based as this is precisely upon the absolute meaning and context of concepts. This explains why Socrates and all creative Greek philosophers were 'enemies of society' because of their new ideas. Any identification between thought and expression, their union in what we call a concept, is the standardization or rationalization of thought, the abolition of its variability as far as meaning is concerned. A concept can only have one meaning if it is to be understood, so that it can thus enter into intellectual communication, intellectual fellowship in dialogue. Therefore the identification of thought with word is nothing other than the standardization of thought, the maintenance of one uniquely permit- ted way of thought, of a particular set of meanings. He who does not follow these rules of the game, or at least allows it to appear that he does not, is simply not taken into account. He does not exist. The advantage of this systemization is that it gives a swift and very clear process of thought and expression and that the rules of this game can be learned by anyone who has sufficient aptitude. This is called classical education. However, it also prevents anyone who knows the combinatory possibilities of all the ex- pressions (which is invariably the case as, after centuries of philosophizing, all the possibilities of the game have been revealed) having the possibility of setting out one single original thought, one single new idea, on the basis of the conceptual system. If one demands such a creative originality, then one has to begin to play with the concepts themselves. If one says to a man, you are a hero, whilst at the same time thinking that he is a prat, then one is apparently thinking the opposite of what one is saying. In reality, one means the opposite of what one is saying, for it is Asger Jorn The Natural Order 141 not easy to explain what one has said as anything other than the expres- sion of a thought, which thus must have had a reason, an ulterior thought, which is not the thought that the man is a prat, but that it is advantageous to say something else. One can thus think one's own thoughts without saying anything, or even whilst simultaneously saying a third thing. It is maintained that one can only think in words, but it is difficult to say how words and thoughts are connected. One can easily read a text aloud without hitting upon a single thought that is expressed in the text, just as one can act without thinking about what one is doing, or think without putting one's thoughts into action. It is this powerful play of possibilities which represents the individual creator and separates his being from all others. In order to orchestrate people in a social harmony, it is necessary to agree mutually, at least, to give up one or more of these characteristics. The more characteristics that are given up, the more the human being's individuality is abolished. Such a socialization of humanity produces dif- ferent cultural types according to which individual characteristics have to be renounced in order to have the right to be a member of the society. Seen in this perspective, Scandinavian socialization appears to be based upon the socialization of the thought, Latin socialization upon the socialization of the word and that of the Slavs upon the socialization of the action. By so- cialization should be understood that which all the members of the society are theoretically agreed upon and perceive as common property. The possible and the actual One cannot answer anything that cannot be posed as a question, but it is surprising how much one cannot express in a concrete question. All posed questions are simply conditioned by the words we have available to form questions: what, where, whom, how, why, when. All of these questions can be starting points for a philosophical principle and can be interpreted in various ways, but the question still remains the same. The starting point is still the same. If, as far as elementary physics is concerned, one thus retains these classical interpretations, then these concepts are not an isolated area pempheral to the conceptual area of modern physics but its foundation. 112 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere The most hotly discussed concept today, which sooner or later wil demand an unequivocal solution, is the interpretation of the concept of actuality. What is the Copenhagen Interpretation of the actual? There the actual is placed in opposition to the possible and it is stressed that the transformation from the possible to the actual takes place with a leap. What then is the possible according to the theory of relativity? The pos- sible can be arranged in two opposing groups of possibilities. One is called the past, which contains all the events we know (at least in principle) and about which we have been able to hear (in principle). In the same way, we postulate by the concept of 'future' all events we could influence (in principle) and which we could attempt to change or prevent (in principle). In classical theory one postulates the future and the past as separated by an infinitesimally short interval of time we call now, the present, or the instant. In the theory of relativity we have come to understand that this is not so. Future and past are separated by an interval of time which exists, the length of which is dependent upon the distance between the observed phenomenon and the obseryer. At any given point in time, the observer can find himself unable to recognize and influence a phenomenon taking place at a distant point in the period separating two clearly specified moments. One of these is the moment when a light signal has to be triggered at the point of the event in order to reach the observer at the instant of observation. The other is the instant when a light signal sent by the observer at the instant of observa- tion reaches the place of the event. All events which take place between these two specific times can be called 'simultaneous' or contemporaneous, actual or timeless. As past and future according to the Copenhagen Interpretation are the possible, thus the present must be the actual. Here, without knowing it, the Copenhagen Interpretation is completely in agreement with dialectical materialism. There is just the difference that dialectical materialism asserts that every- thing is simultaneous or actual and that the actual is the same as the objec- tive, whilst the objective in reality, like all experience, belongs to the past. That the positivists identify actuality with future, and therefore have to give the observer (the influencer) an unequivocal role in the process, is 143 another error, which Niels Bohr attempts to avoid by simply cutting out the observer as an influencing element, to make him one with the condi- tons of the observations, with the instrument, without however managing to free himself from positivism. The Marxist perception that everything is actuality was already for- mulated by Engels in the perception that everything is process. This per- ception was made even more precise by Lenin in his definition of matter as that which is given to us by our senses. As we cannot sense latent energy, only kinetic energy, this is really to say that this is a statement that all energy is kinetic, that mass and energy are the same. In Marxist terminol- ogy, drawing attention to the contrast between latent and kinetic energy is called formalism, which one could well say is correct. But as an object is just a formal thing or a form, this dialectical materialism works completely without objects. The misunderstanding of the Copenhagen Interpretation is to drag around with it the classical identification of object and actuality instead of using the two concepts as opposites and acknowledging that three and not two complementary elements exist, namely the objective, the actual and the subjective or, to put it another way, object, instrument and ob- server. What in reality both dialectical materialism and the Copenhagen Interpretation are agreed upon is that instrument and actuality are the same. To instrumentate or to set up an experimental condition is really nothing other than to combine a simultaneity or contemporaneity. Not long ago, Niels Bohr warned against wanting to define more precisely the dividing line between object and subject, as the mobility of this dividing line appears to advance development. The instrumental and the technical are the same and it is in reality actuality that thrusts itself between object and subject, between past and future, between knowledge and influence. Hegel had already observed this strange development, which he called 'Entfremdung, and which Marxists maintain is a capitalist fault that will vanish with the transition to socialism? I myself am of the opinion that it is immensely important to demar- cate the scientific from the technical and the technical from the subjective or human, if we are not to run into the crazy catastrophe, of which this 144 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere conscious blindness had led us to the edge. To clarify and define their relationship to technique is the one and only responsibility scientists have today, and this they fulfill in order not to be the ones with the prime responsibility. Work demands an instrument, a tool. To look demands, if not a mi- croscope, a telescope or a set of spectacles, then at any rate a pair of eyes to look with. But that which one has to look with, one cannot at the same time look at. I have the impression that it is this context that Bohr calls complementarity. Movement is the instrument with which one ascertains positions and positions are the instrument with which one ascertains movement. At any rate, to move or change something one must have the Archimedean point outside of that which is to be moved. Interest, instrument and object The critique of the complementarity principle propounded here is a purely artistic critique, a critique of the Copenhagen Interpretation as a work of art. In common with dialectical materialism, this way of looking at it situates the subjective or interest as the foundation for any observation.. Without interest, no attention. This attention can be compelled by other interests or be a pure and voluntary personal curiosity. From this attitude one can differentiate purely artistically between three forms of interest: 1. artistic or purely human interest, 2. technical, pragmatic, methodical or purely instrumental interest, 3. scientific or purely empirical interest in experiences. From these three complementary forms of interest, actuality or the instru- ment takes on three basically different meanings and purposes. The instrument is neither object nor subject. As modern science has had to demonstrate that the instrument influences the object under observation, that the arrangement itself of the experiment changes the conditions of the object, then this relationship has nothing at all to do with subjectivity, for subjectivity is above all will and wish, and in this case one cannot say that it is the observer's wishes which influence the object, un- less by his interest in observing. As far as the technician is concerned, the Asger Jorn The Natural Order 145 relationship is completely the opposite. He wishes to influence the object with his instrument, to operate, to generate a process. If the instrument cannot influence the object, it is of no use in the technical sense, it has no technical interest. This adversarial condition between the relationship of the scientist and the technician to the instrument is clear and unambigu- ous. This adversarial condition can only be clearly seen from the artist's angle, because he is not interested in the object at all, only in the subiec- tive and in instruments which can serve these subjective interests, which are purely purposeless curiosity, the liberation from tedium. He wishes to play on or with the instruments, and anything at all that he sees or senses is therefore a possible instrument. In principle he cannot accept that the object, 'das Ding an sich', exists at all. Instruments serve only one thing for him, pure subjectivity or 'das Ich an sich. In the artistic sense the instru- ment is thus a means of expanding human activity and interest. From a technical viewpoint, the goal of instrumentalization is the instrument itself and a development identical with a growing instrumen- tation, the cementing of a practical causal relationship. The instrument here is a replacement for human activity and interest, das Ding für mich. In scientific observation, on the other hand, the instrument serves to eliminate the influence of human interests and activities on the objective process. In relation to the causal world of technique or the logical object world of science, the contrasts are so sharp that unalloyed artistic activity has to be perceived as a purely destructive world, whilst the destructive in art has the opposite sign. It is this that I called the aesthetic world in my book Luck and Chance. This is the only one that gives the concept of value any meaning, a world that is deliberately ignored or resisted by all modern philosophers, politicians, economists, sociologists, psychologists, teachers and scientists, and which made C.D. Darlington add to the already quoted text, We need a Ministry of Disturbance, a regulated source of annoyance, a destroyer ot Toutine, an underminer of complacency; or, in other words, a ministry of aesthetic activity. The necessity of this centre for organized "ill-doing' is per- haps above all conditioned by the destructive power of the military having become so widespread that it must be abolished or abolish itself. 146 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere The cultivation or dissolution of personality How is the present, the actual, to be expanded to comprise ever greater ahistorical or eventless periods of time in a simultaneity, so that to an ever greater extent it abolishes the meaning of time? This can happen by cou- pling the events together into ever greater events where the whole of time becomes literally a waiting period, 'en attendant Godot. At the same time the event one is building up becomes more and more monstrous. 'To be educated is to be observant;, a Danish author has stressed recently. He could have added that to educate is to shape, and society's intellectual culture thus consists of shaping people to concentrate their attention upon the same things. To be an artist is to create attention. Therefore a creative artist can only distract people from their forced attention. Only the inattentive per- son can observe and draw attention to something new. Artistic upbring- ing consists in uneducating the people and making them inattentive and instead opening their eyes, ears and other senses. An artist cannot live where he is forced to concentrate his attention upon what any stupid idiot could hit upon, regardless of how educated such behaviour is. He has to leave. I hereby declare that I only acknowledge a land as my fatherland if it consistently refuses to have anything at all to do with powers which own atom bombs. One could call this treason. As it is so, I owe it to my father- land that I accept being called a traitor. For me the event itself, the situation, the living instant in immediate contact with past and future, with what I know, is the only acceptable reality, the artistic and the intelligent reality and the realistic and intelligent art. In the last century, Kierkegaard complained that Christianity was being abolished by its own spread. However, that this was at all possible demonstrates that in Kierkegaard's perception Christianity was not an eternal but a temporal phenomenon. If Kierkegaard identified the instant with the eternal, the present with the divine, then Marxists can safely maintain that socialism is the secular realization of Christianity, of the all embracing and eternal instant, as one of my old Communist comrades recently asserted to me, for what science is helping the technicians to Asger Jorn The Natural Order 147 develop today, what they in fellowship call progress, is the gradual evolu- tion of the present in time and space. Therefore I can today indicate that it is actuality itself, human reality, that is being abolished by the spread of industrialization. This human real- it is no longer valid as quality but only as quantity, as amount. The mis- take in Bohr's terminology lies to an even higher degree than the Marxists in identifying amount with mass, quantity with quality, and calling an amount that represents a determined unit or mass a quantum. The profound and explosive conflict today growing within Commun- ist and Socialist development is based upon the realizations that to an in- creasing degree are bringing to light a problem in relation to which it has hitherto been more or less unnecessary to take a position. However, this development is splitting into two opposite tendencies of a completely new character, towards either a human or an inhuman evolution. Marxism's superiority over all earlier philosophies lies in it being the first attempt to unite the scientific perception of truth with human ethics and norms of action which, to use Hoffding's definition, are a perception of health. If, as Friedell and Nietzsche, one perceives what I would call the aesthetic purely negatively, as the negation of both truth and health, then we will see that the modern philosophical and political struggle is to a greater and greater degree about how far aesthetics or the perception of beauty have any right to exist, about whether there should still be freedom for Loke as well as for Thor. Form and container With the Copenhagen Interpretation's reservation of a place of honour for classical metaphysics and logic and the apparent commencement of à completely new construction by its side, the conflict between the new and the old physics is avoided. It is otherwise with its relationship to materialistic dialectics. Here it is war to the knife, even though Bohr care- fully avoids saying anything concrete, making do with a head-shaking'not understood'. Dialectical materialism has been able to avoid discovering that it has abolished the object because there matter is only perceived and 148 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere acknowledged as substance for processes and not as forms in itself, and thus only in its character of raw material. Hereby arises the peculiar and absurd theory about quality's sudden change into quantity, which, de- spite everything, is immensely effective in a purely technical sense as an explanation. By dividing this dialectical opposition into three complementary forms of observation, the observation of constants or masses which we call qualities (and not like Bohr quanta) and the observation of amounts which we call quantities and finally the observation of changes or processes which we call values or variations, it is possible to acknowledge dialectics and the theory of complementarity as two of three complementary systems of experience, an artistic, a technical and a scientific system. However, this initially presupposes that one recognizes the limited field of dialectics and at the same time goes in for my postulate that in every complementary relationship there must be at least three complementary factors. Even if I have not been able to demonstrate that this is the case in the relationship object-instrument-subject in a sufficiently convincing way, it seems to me that we can, at any rate, request an explanation as to why. When, after this first superficial tour around a number of problems, we turn back to our first problem, we can do so with a more comprehen- sive acquaintanceship with the framework in which I have arranged the knowledge and the elementary experiences I as an artist have had to gather in order to come in contact with the intellectual surroundings in which I live and which to an ever increasing degree are marked by the expressions, language and conceptual world of scientific thought. In his collection of articles Atomphysics and Human Knowledge, Niels Bohr emphasizes that in the never ending striving for harmony between content and form there is reason to remember that 'no content can be represented without a logical framework and that any form, how- ever useful it has hitherto been, can become too narrow to include new experiences.' The word form can have several different meanings. In this case there can be no doubt that, in its adversarial relationship to the concept of content, the word form means container. Here Bohr does not make the Asger Jorn The Natural Order 149 Marxist mistake expressed in the dogma, 'the only true form is the form of the content, a mistake which, however, becomes true according to the definition of truth and reality given here, and as such makes necessary a supplementary statement that the only actual form is the opposite of the content. When Bohr talks about framework he is talking about actual form not true form. The logical framework for scientific description is the forms of lan- guage. This attitude is also expressed in historical development, as one no longer discerns sharply between formal logic and studies of semantics or even philosophical syntax….; says Bohr. In our discussion we will not regard mathematics as a separate branch of knowledge but rather as a refinement of the common language. The harmony between container and content, between the milk bot- tle and the milk, does not mean that the bottle is made of milk, but that its form holds the milk in place, gathers the milk into a three-dimensional form. Thus milk is given an actual form. If we had wished to give it a true form, an objective form identical with the content, we could have just quick-frozen it. But in our case the milk is framed by a container. This could be of metal, clay, cardboard, glass etc. and thus have its own true content of various characters. Such a container could be used not only for milk but for an endless number of fluids and powders unless a prohibition is made from pure convention against using the container for anything other than one particular form of liquid by the application of a label. The container is an instrument. So are language and the philosophi- cal concepts described. Werner Heisenberg says, the only thing one can say about philosophical concepts like causality, space, time etc. is that they are indispensable instruments for present scientific research,; but to define the limits of their spheres of usefulness is impossible. Here Niels Bohr agrees with Heisenberg, as he says, 'The distinction between object and subject necessary for unambiguous description is up held by the fact that with every communication that contains a reference to ourselves, we, so to speak, insert a new subject which does not appear as an element of the communication's content. It hardly needs stressing that it is precisely this freedom in the choice of the line of demarcation between 150 COSMONAUTS ment in Scandinavia and Elsewhere subject and object which gives room for the phenomena of the manifold- ness of consciousness and the possibilities of human life.' In this form, the postulation does not separate the will of the in- strument from human will and must invariably lead to the blind alley in which Bohr finds himself when he says, 'The problem is how far we can talk about freedom to act in agreement with our possibilities.' No, we have no possibilities of action at all if they have to be identified with our instru- ments, and at a certain point this is the demand of science and in this case of Bohr, as he wishes all actions which cannot be described in words to be reckoned as non-existent. In agreement with Einstein, he calls this a clear logical demand, as the word experiment (which means attempt: A..J.) itself refers to a situation where we can tell others what we have done and what we have learnt. This presupposes in the first place that one cannot or may not do something that one cannot express, that one cannot or may not attempt something that one cannot at the same time express, but it also means that one does not have leave to express oneself artistically, for the artistic is precisely the telling to others what one has done without thereby having learnt anything at all or imparting any experience whatever to others. New consequences mean new logic In his definition of the experiment, Bohr emphasizes that it is not a question of specialized experiments, scientific experiments, but that the definition should have a universal validity. As justification or reason for this demand he produces a new demand, the demand for logic, which Heisenberg has already described as an instrument. In reality, this demand is to the effect that human thinking should be identical with the framework in which it is traditionally organized, and that it is forbidden to take this apparatus to pieces to see how it works in order to make another. However, at the same time, this is what Bohr wants and regards as absolutely necessary when he says, 'It is precisely this impossibility of setting, by observation, a sharp distinction between subject and object that creates the neces- sary latitude for the expression of will; and continues elsewhere, 'As far as the relationship between reason [logic? A.J.] and instinct [the reflex Asger Jorn The Natural Order 151 or unconditioned action without cause? A.J.] is concerned, it is above all decisive to understand that no human thought in the true sense is possible without the use of a conceptual construct based upon a language which each generation has to learn from the beginning again. This utilization of concepts represses to a large extent not just purely instinctive life, but even stands in a distinct complementary adversarial relationship to the display of inherited instincts. If we look with wonder at the superiority in relation to man with which the lowest animal can use the possibilities of nature for the necessities and propagation of life, the most correct explanation is often that for these animals there is no question at all of conscious thought in our sense... The execution of such actions is only possible, when refuge is not taken in conceptual thought. I am of another persuasion and associate myself with those biologists who maintain that the whole of biological development has happened through sparks of conscious thought, and, if this is so, is identified with intelligence and not with conceptual thinking. I assert that a concept is not a thought but a device, an instrument for thinking, and that a complemen- tary form of thought thus exists to the thought that constructs concepts (philosophical thinking) as well as pure quantitative thought (scientific thinking) or calculation, and this is subjective thought, willed thought or wishful thinking. There are thus two possibilities. Either such a purely wishful thinking does not exist, or it exists, but is forbidden on scientific grounds, stamped as abnormal, unhealthy thought. If science has use for a philosophical apparatus in order to undertake its experiments, then it is of course obvious that this apparatus must in perfect condition at the moment it is to be used as an instrument. However, if the apparatus is not good enough, and fortunately Bohr says that it may never be good enough, then it must be improved. But this in itself says that the scientist at the observatory cannot at the same time undertake his observations and enlarge the telescope with which he is to see. If science has thus use for philosophy as an instrument, it must find that which best suits it and protest if it is not good enough. However, if the philosophers on their part are to elaborate a set of meanings with universal validity, they 152 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere must also have standardized their building materials, words. They cannot agree to them being pulled apart and used in a thousand ways meaningless to philosophy. But if the language is not rich enough, then there is only one way in which it can be enriched, through literary and poetic development, the only thing that can enrich and refine the language in itself as language, as expression. However, philosophy is not developed as an instrument for science nor poetry as an instrument for philosophy. Bohr maintains that the logical framework for scientific description is in the forms of language and continues, This attitude is also expressed in historical development, as one no longer discerns sharply between for- mal logic and studies of semantics or even philosophical syntax…. In our discussion we will not regard mathematics as a separate branch of knowl- edge but rather as a refinement of the common language. With this perception, Bohr has consigned the whole of language to one large container in which can be found an orientation from the sedi- ment of daily speech towards refined language, mathematics. This simply means that Bohr accepts that one has use for instinct with which to make philosophy and one also has use for philosophy with which to make sci- ence. However, instinct must be confined and only those drops which philosophy distils in its alembic have the right to exist, and this same situation is necessary' as far as philosophy is concerned. Yet he does not think that the consciousness of society functions in such a way that the drops from the pure test-tube of science are directed straight back into the alembies of the primitive instincts where they act as huge, heaven-sent instruments. The facts show us that it is the instincts which have use for scientific research and keep it going and here only he who works directly with instincts, the artist, has positive power. No compromise is valid here. Dialectical materialism starts from the realistic perception that it is life that determines consciousness and not consciousness that determines life, but forgets that life shapes consciousness by developing it in a dialecti- cal opposition to life, in a continuous protest against the conditions of life, and that an identification of life with consciousness is simply the death of intelligence, is an unconscious reflex. Classical scholars perpetrated an- other misunderstanding in perceiving life as something quite independent Asger Jorn The Natural Order 153 of practical existence. It appears to me that the theory of complementarity could give both a more correct and more effective and, at any rate, a more realistic picture of these conditions. However, if this is the case then we have to avoid, for example, J.P. Jacobsen' Arabesques being perceived either as daily speech' or as another mysterious form of mathematics. Artistic refinement must be accepted as a spiritual development comple- mentary to both the rationalistic development of instruments in daily life and to scientific and logical development. Everyday art does not exist, for art is celebration, and is so even if there is celebration every day and every instant of that day. Art is the phenomenal itself and the phenomenal is the unique. If the word 'phenomenon' can no longer be used in this meaning, then art no longer exists, and neither do the sensory phenomena. Either phenomenal or functional Niels Bohr maintains that it is impossible to distinguish between the be- haviour of material bodies and our observations of it. In order to find a true parallel to this knowledge of the limited validity of the accustomed idealizations that the atomic theory has given us, we must turn to an area of science so far removed from physics as psychology or even to the kind of epistemological problems already posed by thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tze in their efforts to find an expression for the harmony in the great drama of existence in which we are simultaneously actors and spectators. This old situation has, however, completely changed, for a role which is neither that of the actor nor the observer but that of the instrument is growing like lightning. More and more, we are all becoming instruments or functionar- is, and those groups which can really call themselves active players as well as free spectators, whose freedom in one of these areas dominates all their other functions, are becoming less and less in relation to the total popula- tion. What is worse, even the concept that should cover these two groups, that of the elite, is in reality just an expression for the most rigid and re- sponsible and immovable of functionaries who have not the least power, for porer is beauty, grace. In modern society this is replaced by what is called impartiality, which is really no more than scientific control. 154 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere Bohr's anti-artistic position can be established from the following statement, As a more appropriate method of expression, I suggested that the word phenomenon be exclusively used to refer to observations gained under stated circumstances comprising an account of the whole experi- mental arrangement.' If this concept is to replace the simple description of sensory impressions in general and if Bohr' description is not merely to characterize specialized scientific phenomena or more correctly scien- tifically treated phenomena, then phenomena, the world of the senses in itself, will no longer exist. I would therefore suggest that this definition is changed to a phenom- enon is a sensed or observed change. This definition allows us to establish a new perception of the intermediate relationship, to establish the transition between causality and non-causality, a problem that first took on universal significance after the observations of Bohr forced science to give up the belief in absolute relativism, absolute process or absolute actuality. This paradox that the law of causation cannot be given general validity but at the same time cannot be deprived of any validity is really the reason for this new philosophical conflict, and this has also given me the opportunity to introduce the aesthetic, defined in agreement with Baumgarten as sensed or observed changes, as an integral part of human thought or intelligence without doing violence to that artistic autonomy which has hitherto been necessary to all philosophical systems. Pawns, the other players and spectators What Bohr has discovered, or rather the conclusion that Bohr should have reached from his observations, is that conditions and laws are not the same and never can be, that they are complementary opposites. Conditions are set in advance and rules are deduced. If the rules deduced from an ex- periment or a game are identical to those conditions set for the game, then nothing new at all has been experienced, and if they are in harmony with those conditions then anything novel is unimportant. The conditions for an experiment can never be identical to the condi- tions during the experiment and must stand in a complementary adver- sarial relationship to them. The condition of the experiment itself is that it Asger Jorn The Natural Order 155 can either succeed or fail. If this possibility is not present, the experiment cannot be recognized as a true experiment, but must only be perceived as the purely experiment-free repetition of an already undertaken experi- ment. The experimental content of the repetition of an already undertaken experiment has only a purely subjective significance as an experiment for those who were not present at the time, but who have followed the instruc- tions as to how it is to be undertaken, and are not therefore themselves ex- perimenting. The definition of experiment laid down by Bohr and Einstein really excludes any truly new scientific research from the area they call ex- periments and thus does not even cover the purely scientific experiment at all. The fact alone of having proved that an experiment can be repeated is in itself a proof that it is no longer an experiment, and this proof is present when all Bohr's conditions are fulfilled. Thus, if the validity of a scientific experiment is to be recognized, the general condition is that all the conditions which presuppose the pos- sibility of the carrying out of the experiment are known, that the result of the experiment itself has hitherto been unknown, and that, when they are present, it can be repeated under the same conditions. The result of a scientific experiment is the description of the experiment. The separation of laws and conditions, which is the separation be- tween idea and experience, can only happen outside the field of the experi- ment, in the actuality where the game is under way. Dialectics - triolectics. Dynamics and statics What now remains is to give a presentation of the relationship between dialectics and the complementary system. My abilities and my knowledge only permit me to sketch the possibility of such a connection. As I have said before, I cannot nor will not attempt to prove it. In its perception of history, dialectical materialism has, by involving the historical past in the present, celebrated great triumphs. No one can deny that I am the synthesis of my mother and my father. These two per- sons are not possibilities but necessary actualities in my existence in the same way as my four grandparents, my eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, etc. back until in the fourteenth century, when 156 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere I have over a million necessary kin. The whole dialectical apparatus func- tions irreproachably. However, if instead of moving into the past, I follow the family trees of these innumerable forefathers in the direction of the fu- ture, then the whole of the dialectical system dissolves in an impenetrable jungle of accidents. Certainty is lost. What in one direction is determinism is chance seen in the other. But what if one now wishes to force this same dialectical economy to be also valid into the future, then there is no longer anything that can be done, neither as past nor as future, for then the future has become iden- tical with the past and the past identical with the present. This is what happens purely logically if the theory of dialectical materialism is followed up in its present form. That the Soviet Socialist Republics do not do this at all demonstrates their whole evolution and their philosophical silence. How far this break with the principles of dialectical materialism is uncon- scious or a hidden manoeuvre justified on its subjective basis, I will not say. However, the result is the same. We will have to find out for ourselves. Dialectics is based upon a conviction about the endless union of polarizations or two-sided oppositions into syntheses, which then again produce dualities. That there is something correct about the unity of du- ality cannot be explained away as long as the polarity of electricity and magnetism has not been explained away. But if this principle is transferred to politics, and internal national polarization, right and left, is abolished, then a country has to seek its polarization outside itself. That such a po- larization between East and West can be of high dynamic quality for the development of trade on both sides in a sort of naive competition or cold war, there can be no doubt. It is like a football match where both sides are trying to win. However, let us now imagine a whole new type of football field, where, instead of two teams and two goals, there are three teams in play and three goals. Now what would happen when the three teams began to play against each other? It would swiftly be discovered that it is impossible to control which of the two attacking enemies had scored. It would become necessary to invert the rules so that the victory was a negative one, so that it was the team that has defended itself best and had let in the least goals that was the victor. The victory becomes defensive and Asger Jorn The Natural Order 157 not offensive. The game would of course adjust itself accordingly. It would not be an exciting game at all. This is how a third power can neutralize a tension between two powers. Therefore two-sided opponents are always aggressive whilst three-sided ones are defensive. Whether this in itself de- scribes the transition from dialectics to complementarity, I will leave un- said. Whether a three-sided relationship is static or constant is dependent, however, upon whether a rising tension occurs. Then this could perhaps lead to an actual explosion, the possibilities of which are abreacted in a two-sided relationship by the duel's incessant consumption of energy. No political advice whatsoever lies in these observations. I am only trying to discover what happens. Two dialectical oppositions neutralize each other, like positive and negative. Where there are three mutual oppositions, such a synthesis can- not occur. Here we seem to be discovering the philosophical rule of Bohr's complementarity theory. But let us move to the area which has my special interest as an artist, the character of light and colour. One can make a spherical model of every, absolutely every, colour possibility available in Runge's colour ball, with the spectral circle at an oblique angle on the black-white axis, and get all the colours lying in a rectilinear relationship to the centre of this sphere, at the same distance from the centre, to neutralize each other so that they, by mixing together, under all circumstances return to the grey colour in the centre. Here I ask science, how is this possible? Is this not the most perfect mechanical model one could imagine? What is the explanation of this polarity? Can it be a subjective accident with no foundation whatsoever in the order of nature and the physical characteristics of light? If we now regard the three primary colours blue, yellow and red which slide harmoniously over each other in the spectral circle, and place them in a triangular relationship to each other, we will see that even though all three are constant, irreducible colours, then the complementary colour to one is the median proportional colour between the other two, the evenly mixed colour of the other two. It is thus the three primary colours which, in accord with Bohr's definition of complementarity, relate complementarily to each other, whilst what have hitherto been called the complementary 158 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere Ittwia ROD GUL violet RoD ALR Sion GUL FIG. 1. THE SPECTRAL DIALECTIC ROD = RED, BLA = BLUE, Gron = Green, GUL = YELLOW, Hvid = White, Sort = Black. colours relate dialectically and not complementarily to each other, as their synthesis abolishes the colour effect. This observation lies at the root of my whole taxonomy and under any circumstance abolishes the possibility of using both the traditional interpretation and Bohr's interpretation of complementarity' within the world of colours. According to recent information, the Swedes have established that gila tissue has significance as a constant in the nervous system, something that Fridtjof Nansen is said to have indicated as a possibility as early as 1886. By this, they can be said to have in practice abolished the basis for the centuries-old conflict between the advocates of the three colour theory and the complementary colour theory and given a synthesized explanation for them both, in that the visual cells are trichromatic whilst the whole mechanism of sight works in accordance with the system of complemen- tary colours. This shows that in this area there appears to be a connection between complementary statics and dynamic dialectics. But how does this model relate to the optical phenomena themselves? Asger Jorn The Natural Order 159 When we observe nature, everything becomes greyer and greyer the more it spreads out and becomes distanced, whilst the grey in our model is in the centre. Could one imagine an inverted perspective where the things became smaller and smaller the closer they came, and thus an inverted space that would be the spatiality of light? Is our perception of space one- sided, like our perception of past and future and thus oriented? Should the idea of the expansion of the universe be supplemented with another about that same universe in the process of shrinking? I don't know. I only know that just as the Renaissance's perspective picture of the universe does not satisfy us any more and therefore art since Impressionism has sought to base itself upon completely new principles, so it now becomes a question about pictorial art, about how far new perspectives can be outlined for anything at all. Three world pictures 1. The variable entity 2. The process of creation 3. The process of liberation At each corner of the borders of the old Chinese empire stood a stone on which was written World's End'. Society and universe were one, were the world. As it was discovered that there was a world outside Verona, so there arose the problem of the extension of the world that classical culture had chosen for its own, the accepted world, society. However the fission between the two worlds, society and universe, had already been observed, and the recognition that the laws of the universe were different from those of society had been established, even though the tendency to harmonize will always be at work in human consciousness. The belief that the formula for this harmonization has been found is called religion. I do not believe in the pos- sibility of an unambiguous world picture, but the lines of direction given here do permit the conjecture that it is possible to develop three mutually complementary world pictures, providing one keeps them strictly separate. A picture can only be a picture of the process under which the picture came into existence, nothing more. This is true also of a world picture. At 160 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere any rate, this is the reason why I, as an artist, dare postulate that there exist three complementary world pictures which cannot under any cir- cumstances be identified with each other because they occur under three opponent processes, which I will briefly sketch here. You take a lump of clay and shape it plastically into an image without losing any of the clay and without adding new clay. This method is the exact expression of the homeomorphie world picture, the a priori of which is that nothing gets lost and nothing is created, but where everything can be changed. I have the impression that this world picture is the foundation of what is called the wave interpretation. When Heerup entered the Academy's Sculpture Department, he used this method and was immediately thrown out, because he could not reconcile himself to the particle method, which consists of first securing an arbitrary number of small particles and then beginning to place these particles in position, one against the other, a development which is con- ditioned by the number of particles and stops when there are no more. This progressive process of development, the a priori of which is that new quantities can be constantly added, expresses the classical world picture that has to be established before the process begins, as if it were an imagi- nary container or mould into which the molten metal is poured. Finally you can go in the exact opposite direction to the latter as you begin by removing those parts of a given material, for example a rock or a piece of wood, which do not belong in the picture. This comes into exist- ence directly by the breaking down of the material, by the removal of the picture-less material from the pictorial material. Here the image-making is directly identical with destructive action, with pure action, with what we will call radiant action, effect or activity, phenomenal action. These are three different actions of creation. If I have not talked of any specific world picture in the last two cases, it is because the expansive explanation of the universe is in reality a hybrid product where you paste on something here and remove something there. What in my opinion characterizes modern atomic physics is that it has cer- tainly isolated the world picture constructed upon the wave interpretation, but only at the expense of an imprecision which arises through a fusion Asger Jon The Natural Order 161 of the particle and the ray concepts. Only when one decides to set up a complementary description of all three observations, will the three world pictures clearly emerge. That they could emerge simultaneously seems to be excluded, however, as it would hardly be possible to describe a pure par- ticle observation unless on the basis of a mixture of ray and wave descrip- tion. Just as a pure description of the radiation phenomenon presupposes a mixture of wave and particle description, so a fission is conditioned by a fusion, not because of the deficient objectivity of the theory, but because we would otherwise be unable to observe, because there is no place for the observer. I would like to know if I am right about this interpretation. What do we observe? The empirical doctrine of classical physics constructs its proofs on the basis of direct observation. This is no longer possible today. What one uses as a basis for one's conclusions is no longer the sensation of the object itself but signs of the object's behaviour deciphered by measuring instruments, on photographic plates and so on. These signs and not the object itself have become the only criteria for the demonstrability of scientific state- ments. The postulate that matter is what is given to us by our senses is hereby given the coup de grâce, whilst the same thing has happened to the classical perception of reality. IfI stand by an aeroplane and it flies away, then I see it getting small- er and smaller. The classical perception would say that this is imaginary. "In reality, the aeroplane remains the same size. However, if I now set up ten cameras at my side and take photographs with the cameras at regular intervals as the aeroplane distances itself, then I get ten uniform photo- graphic proofs that the aeroplane really got smaller and smaller. This is the reason that the classical perception of actuality is no longer valid, also in daily life. By the perception of actuality here I mean what one can use the word actuality for. The object has not become smaller, but actuality shows something different. I will here ignore the lacking proof that it is the same tier the camera has taken, of the possibility that there could have been aeroplanes of differing sizes and that the various cameras could have pho- tographed different machines. What interests us in this experiment are 162 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere the possibilities for the most comprehensive explanation, the most logical explanation. Anyone can see that this is a problem that plays the greatest role in art, in the sense that it is the perspective problem itself that is at issue. The important thing is to demonstrate that we do not see or sense what is at all, but what happens, that the camera is completely unable to maintain a picture of the object, of what is, only of what happens, of the instant however long or short that is. Our senses do not perceive things, only changes of a quite specific limited kind or form. Complementary semantics. Symptom versus signal If we go back to the modern scientific explanation of the use of observation instruments, we see that, according to Susanne K. Langer (Philosophy in a New Key), they are classified in an explanatory series of three elements, object, sign, subject. In this connection, the object is what the subject is interested in observing. However, when he cannot observe it, he seeks a sensory phenomenon connected with the object which it is possible to observe. If he is sure that these two phenomena always appear together, then he is sure to have found a sure sign that can show him where the object is to be found at any rate. Such a relationship of actuality or simul- taneity between a thing and its associated sensory phenomenon is called a sign relationship. Now it appears that both humans and animals use such sign relationships everywhere. Indeed, we can just as well establish right away that any sensation at all is a sensation not of objects but of signs of these objects' presence. No one has ever seen an object. No one will ever see an object. One only sees light rays in motion and the refraction of these movements and nothing else. This is what we take for objects, because we have always experienced the direct correlation of these two things with each other. As our sensations are paramount in relation to our experi- ences, this is the world of objects we encounter, the construction of sign combinations we will call symptoms in forms or gestalts. This perception forms the logical conclusion of the materialistic postulate that objects exist independently of our sensation of them. This definition of the symptom is different from that of Langer, but has the advantage that it can be expressed logically in detail and form the basis Asger Jorn The Natural Order 163 for an unambiguous definition of the purpose of scientific research, as the revelation of symptoms, as the demonstration of symptomatic relationships. In order for a symptom to be recognized as such, it must be absolutely rue. If the object is not always and under all cireumstances present where the sign appears, then the sign is simply not a symptom. A mistake has been made and the whole thing must be scrapped. This mistake can only be due to the established sign relationship being false or one sign having been exchanged for another. Just as a doctor defines a picture of illness by the combination of several different symptoms, we define our sensory pictures by combining sensory impulses in forms of objects or in images of forces and movements. In contrast to the absolute unambiguity of the symptom, another form of sign combination, the signal, has a dual character which the for- mer has not. If we set up an adversarial relationship between the natural and the artificial, then we are right to call symptoms natural signs and signals artificial signs. This division which, against the background of our definition of the symptom, is, as far as I know, quite new in semantics, and which clashes with other definitions of what is called 'the natural sign', is based upon the clear separation that symptoms in my definition are what one would call objective signs whilst signals in contrast are subjective signs, willed or intentional signs. If this simple arrangement is wrong then a specialist should easily be able to pull it to pieces. If a symptom is a sign relationship that is established by the hand of nature, as one might say, then in order to establish a signal it is necessary to produce a special device, a special instrument for the transmission of the signal. Regarded as a sign instrument, the relationship between the requirements of symptom and signal device is similar to that between the requirement to use only previously found stones to hammer with and the permission to make a specially constructed hammer. As an effect, the ditter- ence is like that between the tracks one leaves when walking and those one makes on purpose to mark the way with a stick. If there can be opposition to this definition of the signal as identical with the artificial sign, then it is be- cause it indeed covers all natural phenomena which have arisen as and ex- dustvely have the function of sensory effects. This is to say that the song and 164 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere dance of the birds as well as the colour, scent and form of the flowers must be perceived as artificial signs or signals. This dissolves the old established adversarial relationship set up between the actual and the concept, or, if you will, the sensual and the 'actual', where everything apart from human ideas is perceived as 'nature' From an actualistic perception, the artificial must naturally have its nature, together with the ideas, under all circumstances. If we set up the symptomatic relationship object-sign-subject, then we can set up the signalistic relationship subject-sign-subject. Whilst symptoms exclusively serve as the orientation of a subject in motion in the objective world, signals serve as a subjective orientation in relation to the movements of another subject, either by indicating as symptoms the presence of the sign-transmitting subject, or by also influencing the sign- receiving subject's movements and changing them. The signal is artistic because it is artificial and free in relation to what is being described. The growling or barking of a dog is a sign that it is aggressive, but is in no way identical with the aggressive action. On the contrary, it is a sign it uses to avoid biting. The sign has become more important than the object. This contrast between action and the sensual sign of the action's potency can- not be established at all on the basis of a traditional philosophical use of language (see Benedetto Croce's aesthetics). With symptoms one can only orient, but with signals one can orient and direct and thus force something to follow one's will. The orientation which the subject can establish through the signal is data about its own state and movements. However, by yet another element the signal can become indicative, as the signal-transmitting subject describes not itself but an object, for example an approaching danger, from which we get the series subject (I) - sign - object - subject (II). Such a form of warning does not need to be directed towards one single subject, but could be a general broadcast. It must be noted that such an indicative signalling appears most often to have an accusatory, provocative or teasing function. Signal versus symbol Apart from this insultative characteristic of the signal transmission, an- other characteristic exists, albeit upon a parasitic basis, which is not in the most proper sense signalistic, but nevertheless is so, as it is what we call a Asger Jorn The Natural Order 165 false signal, a fraud. For example, the equipment of flesh-eating plants has to be perceived in this way. At a more developed stage this trickery repre- sents the ability to lie and to pretend, to play-act. This is possible because, as already mentioned, the observer believes in the correctness of the signal and thus in the presence of an object which is not there. If he doesn't then the effort will be in vain. The observer reacts in this way, allowing himself to be fooled, because from experience he had the concept that where there was an object there was a sign. He has mistaken the signal for a real symptom. His critical sense is not functioning. His reaction to the signal has become a conditioned reflex. This is what happens when a fox allows himself to be enticed away from the ducklings by the apparently wounded mother duck. Allowing oneself to be systematically fooled by such false signals is called conscious logic or symbolization. To symbolize is to say that one per- mits the presence of the object to be replaced with an idea or just a concept 2. The difference between idea and concept is that the idea demands an imaginary signal, whilst this only hampers the concept. Only when any idea about a concrete object in connection with concept a is eliminated has one reached pure symbolism, pure concept. With this is determined not only the difference between symptom and signal but also that between signal and symbol. A word can thus be used as a symptom as well as a signal or a symbol. None of these uses can be dispensed with or identified with each other. The difference between symptom and signal can thus reveal the difference between the natural and the artificial, and it is only by the representation of false signs or symbols that an adversarial relationship can be established between what we call lies and what we call truth. If, as is asserted, it is this ability of man to symbolize that lifts him above the animal world, then this is to say that the one who lies the best lifts himself the most. This may sound eynical, but it is at any rate what mathemat- is and classical philosophy teach us. Placed in correlation to the social requirement for truth it could well give a deal of trouble. When therefore We asserted in the beginning that a symptom should be absolutely true, this only has meaning if at the same time an absolute lie is cultivated, for without this the concept of truth would have no actuality any more. It would have vanished by dissemination. 166 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere New signals What has happened in the relativistic experimental arrangement for the determination of the period of the present is that our sign system has been duplicated and that the two sets of signal systems have been placed in an adversarial relationship to each other so that signals can be exchanged. A dialogue has been established. If we keep to the world of the senses in the artistic signal relationship we have an actor, an instrument (the sign) and an observer or spectator who, just like the scientist, has to collect his observations. In the exchange of the two light signals, the first signal becoming the most primitive form of question and the second the most primitive form of answer. There is no meaning at all in sending a new sign before the answer has arrived. If questions are continually sent out without answers coming in, then in reality it is the same question being repeated constantly, regardless of whether its form changes. Time stands still until contact is made and communication or dialogue is set up. The longer there is between question and answer, the longer time is wasted by having to wait. The interesting part of the relativistic explana- tion is namely what can be scientifically proved - that time can be wasted. This is an enormously important observation for the understanding of the principles of the Marxist economic doctrine, which is based upon the English principle of time is money. Symbol versus symptom If there is a particular reason to perceive the world of the signal as identical with that of art or, to be quite precise, the world of the fine and beautiful arts, it is simply because for humanity the beautiful is when the signalistic becomes art. Let us put it this way, what we will call magic is an intermedi- ate thing between what we call symptoms and what we call signals. Let us first establish that a causal relationship between the symptom and its object has in no way been established. It is not thunder because there is lightning. It has not rained because it is wet everywhere. It is not because one has a fever that one is sick and so on. However, it is quite dif. ferent if one is able to change a movement with the help of signals. This can Asger Jorn The Natural Order 167 only be explained as a causal connection. In order to operate, and thus for technical reasons, the revelation of such possibilities for the establishment of a causal connection is a consequence or a number of consequences or a chain of consequences with the help of another consequence which is the only one that has significance. It is therefore the technician's require- ment from science that it will not only find symptoms, but above all es- tablish causal connections, this in itself being the opposite of a scientific analysis. The establishment of objectively operative causal relationships is technique. The establishment of subjectively operative causal relationships is magic or art, is captivation. Simple-minded thought does not separate these two forms. The belief in an almighty god is the belief in a universally subjective causal relationship. The belief in justice is the belief in a socially subjective causal relationship and so on. That such causal systems are not true does not hamper the fact both that they are actual (if they are not mistaken) and that they function, help or hinder people in doing certain things. That the concept of magic has also been given a non-metaphysical interpretation in this account is a consequence of the remaining interpretations. Our definition simply says that magic is doing what one wants and yet coming well out of it, which one could also call the Faustian perception of art. In the classical view, magic is a pseudo-science constructed from particular concepts and ideas. It is only when one accepts this definition of magic that one can assert that runes, for example, do not have a magical origin. Metaphysical defini- tion is necessary in classical philosophy because it has no place at all for non-conceptual thought, thought without tools, thought that is based only upon the talent of thinking. Instead of magic, one could call this form of thought introductory thought, for it is not completely without context. One could just as well also call it seductive thought or aesthetie thought: one could call it thought tor particular occasions or whatever. But it seems to me to be quite unnec- essary here to describe this phenomenon, as I could never measure myselt with the authorship of Soren Kierkegaard in this region. The dialectical opposite to truth is lie. When Bohr sets up a comple- mentary opposition between truth and clarity, then he has in reality given 168 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere shouted Las sanidhed lidle FIG. 2. THE FIRST TRIOLECTIC Skonhed = Beauty, Legn = Lie, Sundhed = Health, ide = idea, Sandhed = Truth, magi = magic. me the key to the acknowledgment of the triple character of complementa- rity, as imagination or illusion also exists in a complementary relationship to truth as well as to clarity, unless he does not reckon with fantasy as an important psychic activity at all. If the dividing line between the symptomatic and the signalistic represents the opposition between the natural and the artificial, then the dividing line between the symptomatic and the symbolic represents the opposition between the real and the imaginary, and thus that which we call the truth and the mendacious, and is the mechanism itself which al- lows the setting up of an adversarial relationship of truth-lie itself. It is here that the inner structure of modern science is about to fall apart. It is from this point that the sickness today is spreading into all sci- ence, for science has no conditions at all at its disposal for concepts such as actuality, reality, experiment or phenomenon. However, just one concept is to this degree identical with science, in that it fuses with the unambiguity of the concept, and that is truth. If science is not true then it is simply no Asger Jorn The Natural Order 169 more, it has vanished. Any attempt at a scientific approach to philosophy must pass through the control of truth. If science today wishes to appeal to philosophy, it must identify itself or we must identify it if it will not do so itself, and the question, What is truth?' is the same as the question, What is science?' In its modern evolution, science has appropriated truth, has identified itself with truth, but it cannot introduce scientific truth as an unidentified truism into philosophy, and cannot introduce itself into philosophy without examination. What has happened today is that the natural sciences, the classical sciences, are no longer coherent, but have broken down the middle into two opposites. Classical natural science was symptomatic in its criterion of truth. We have clearly shown that the symbol in relation to the symp- tom is the definition of what we call lie, imagination or illusion. Universal approval of imagination is called convention or agreement, and an intel- lectual convention is called a concept. When therefore modern science clings to the demand for the constancy of the concepts, this means that it is demanding belief in the constancy of the imagination, in fixed lies. That this is simply a prohibition against a creative pictorial art we have already demonstrated. But even such a prohibition cannot save the situation, for the constancy of the concepts does not secure unambiguity in the concept of scientific truth, it does not abolish the self-contradiction. Niels Bohr has laid down that it is the purpose of science to increase and order our experiences! This statement, which is very unclear, is surely the reason for the general mobilization in the philosophy camp. That sci- ence gathers and increases our experiences is the very essence of science, but then comes the question of the ordering of these experiences. Here the question then is, do scientists believe that it is a scientific activity to order experiences, do scientists believe that a scientific method is to be found to order anything at all, and do scientists imagine that anything at all can be found which in a direct sense could be called a scientific order? If this is the case then we are in a serious conflict. Keeping order is a police affair, and the only thing that science can pronounce upon is the ascertainment of truths and nothing else. When science puts itself at the service of order, this means that it has to function 170 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere as an authorized lie detector. It is said that the lie detectors which are used in the American forces do not react to Italians. They are too clever at ly- ing. If science really demands participation in controlling the ordering of our experiences, then it is time that we set up Darlington's Ministry for the Destruction of International Understanding and Conformation and, as a focus, set up an institute for advanced lying with training in make- believe for ourselves and others, a central institute for artistic activity. This institute could also be called an institute for new ordering or for creative philosophy or simply the Folk High School, for imagination is just discovering something for oneself. Discovery and invention are two opposing activities. Any ordering is an invention. Every systemization is an art. If the meaning of Bohr's statement is that science does not have a purely intrinsic purpose because it cannot continue its research without the results achieved connecting with the public consciousness or, at any rate, with the consciousness of other research results, and that systema- tized development is therefore a necessary precondition for the develop- ment of scientific research, then a very painful controversy will have been removed. Humanity has always had to systematize its experiences quite independently of scientific research in order to be able to act with wisdom, in order to be able to transform its knowledge into something it perceives as wisdom, and this doctrine of wisdom is in reality philosophical activ- ity. This activity has developed quite independently of modern science and has not been equal to constructing a systems theory that harmonizes with the experiences of modern science. However, today a philosophical science is necessary, as any philosophy which is contradicted by scientific experiences is without any actuality, except as an instrument for uphold- ing social peace, order and stagnation, for supporting social actuality and avoiding events. Preserving the conceptual definitions of classical physics also involves preserving classical philosophy and classical forms of society. Or is the order of the factors reversed? Building a new world of concepts parallel to and independent of the old is only possible if one finds a new planet and begins existence in a completely new way. This is perhaps pos- sible today, but we others who still wish to remain on the earth are not interested in having it reduced to a museum. We would rather discover something new for ourselves. Asger Jorn The Natural Order 171 The rules of nature and the laws of society A law must be kept, but a rule has to be followed. A rule is thus a regula- tion of order, but is not itself the order. A rule can be followed in different ways just as one can order in different ways, but within an order all details are fixed. One can ascertain if certain rules are being kept, and rules are thus also a kind of law, although they are not absolutely constant. A law is to be considered absolute in a given situation, but a rule is a law which one decides to follow or not follow, and in a given situation or a particular form of situations is thus still open to choice and decision. Can there be an objective or scientific separation between laws and rules? Such a thing could only be arranged if one called all artificial rules discovered by man laws and only recognized the rules of nature, the rules that nature follows in and outside humanity's existence, independently of human will and impervious to human will, ability and knowledge. Attempts have been made to identify the laws of society with such natural laws, and attempts have been made to give them a divine, absolute charac- ter, all in vain. Today everyone has agreed to perceive all social laws, orders and rules as kinds of contracts which people agree to keep or follow or, at any rate, to behave as if they keep or follow. Herein lies the self-contradiction of modern science. We have already indicated that the lares' of the natural sciences are, without exception, proof of symptomatic sign relationships. When science therefore talks of the laws of mathematies, it also destroys the unambiguity and truth of its statements about laws, for no concept, no mathematical formula is natu- ral. They are all purely artificial rules which can be accepted or rejected at will and their essential artificiality is that if they are rejected, they do not exist at all. The same is the case with words and writing. An unknown writing, an unknown language, has no existence at all, even if its signs ex- ist, unless its rules and meaning are known. This is the contrast between concepts and symptoms. The development of the natural sciences takes place according to certain rules, but nothing makes these rules absolute, nothing makes them natural laws, although this is what science tries to demonstrate. No one can prove that science could not develop according to absolutely different rules. Today science can no longer find out what the 172 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere rules of its game are or even what the game is. Science has therefore lost its raison d'être as the unambiguous criterion of truth and thus as science. The re-erected unambiguity of this concept of truth will be necessary in order to accept science into philosophy. What has brought confusion into the natural sciences is the discovery that one cannot perceive natural symptoms as absolute, that nature does not follow its own lares' with absolute consistency, and that nature is a gambler marked to the highest degree both by chance and by rules of the game of its own, called 'natural laws. However, their absolute infallibility, in which no one believes anymore, takes from them nothing of their abso- lute character of being rules of the game for particular natural phenomena. An answer that is already formulated and given before the question arises and is posed could, if it was a scientific answer, be called a precon- dition, or, where the question is of an ethical nature, is called a defence, and in both cases they take on the character of legality from repeated use. An essential feature of the original Nordic perception of law was that it was not perceived as a mutual agreement, a message, or a forced demand, but as a vow that was absolutely one-sided. Agreement only occurs when belief in the vow is declared. The relationship of trust is thus a relationship between both belief and lares. A law is thus a decision or a prejudice. A defense is the same as a resistance or a defended point of view, a prohibition. One can change a law by force whilst being elevated above the law oneself, and one can in fellowship work out a law that all vow to maintain. But what in reality are perceived as its basic laws are its theoretical a pri- oris, and one can demand of them that they are logical, that they are not self-contradictory, but even where this is achieved one cannot call them scientific, as they are just preconditions for talking about the results of scientific investigations, not for the results in themselves. In nature are found no laws, only rules. In the most advanced circles of modern culture, games theory has al- ready become an instrument with which one prepares oneself to play upon people's credulity. A game is a process the end result of which is unknoten, an experiment. A superior power is one who can make an opponent play Asger Jorn The Natural Order 173 a garne, the result of which he knows, and which is thus not a real game to him. An authority is one whose opposite number knows that he knows the result in advance, but nevertheless agrees to play. A winner is the one who plays the best, and a cheat is one who pretends to be following the rules of the game, but in reality does not. The only player who in the aes- thetic sense could be an artist is the cheat, because his game is, without exception, apparent, and thus is pure sensory effect, pure intuition, a performance. The actor does not play. He plays the role of the player. In the same way, the virtuoso does not play music. He plays Mozart without being Mozart. The artist is the only one that is always conscious of this double game, wherever it is played. An artist never lets himself be fooled by a politician, unless he perceives him as an artist. Inorganic nature does not seem able to play the double game or fool anyone. This is the basis of the relative truth value of the symptom. If truth is symbolic then it cannot at the same time be symptomatic and vice versa. Truth must be indivisible if it is to be a truth. An illusion is also a truth if it is defined as a true illusion. A lie is a form of truth: if its antagonistic relationship to the facts is defined then it is a true picture. To an artist this is obvious, indeed it is even the monitor of his originality. In order to really imagine something, to be able to imagine, one must know precisely what is not imagination. It is in the symbolic area that the artist finds the concepts of truth of the modern scientist so deplorably unscientific and illusory - indeed, improb- ably poor and dilettantish in their illusionism or imagery. Only by handing over the control of universal imagery to creative artists can scientists today have order in the tabernacle. In this way, the artist's stance becomes that of an anti-symbolistic symbolist. If we thus set up a theory about a complementary tripartition of symptom - signal - symbol and identify these with the criteria for truth - beauty - health, meaning by health only balance or legality, then we can construct a triangle similar to the colour triangle, and with this we can work out the dialectically antagonistic relationships. If we perceive the symptomatic relationship as the criterion of truth and set up the lie as the dialectical opponent to truth, then we must main- tain that a lie is half symbolic and half signalistic, that a lie is a hybrid 174 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere magi siqual idle Gillede sy-bol What about ETAICS? FIG. 3. THE SECOND TRIOLECTIC magi = magic, billede = image, ide = idea. product and thus as such more complicated and more interesting than truth. The great mistake of modern culture has been that, in its idealism, it has undervalued the cultural significance of the lie and worn itself out in an eternal hunt for truth, instead of investigating what a lie is. In a peculiar way, this investigation has been a taboo. The reason is the fear of losing those illusions that can make people conform to rules and customs. Nevertheless, at a time when scientific symbolism is stagnating into an irreplaceable implement, it is enormously important to define the mean between signal and symbol called pictorial art. In reality it is this, which, being the opposite of the symptom, places pictorial art in an antagonistic relationship to science. The recognition of this is of fundamental dynamic and dialectical significance for both art and science. In its antagonistic relationship to the symbol, pictorial art is a false symptom produced by signalistic and symbolic effects, and is in this sense pure illusion. The false symptom is a representation of the sensual signs that always describe the Asger Jorn The Natural Order 175 presence of an object without that object being there. It is the life-like picture of an apple on a dish, where in reality there is neither an apple nor a dish, but just a canvas and some paints. Such a picture is not signalistic. Neither is it symbolic but more or less both. In the same way, if we seek the dialectically antagonistic relationship to the signal, then it must be a false signal that is a mixture of symbol and symptom. Such a hybrid product is called an ideal. Ideals are imaginary signals, but are imageless, having nothing to do with the world of sensa- tion, and cannot be produced pictorially. In the sensual sense, they are anti-pictures. Similarly, the dialectical opposition to the symbol is a hybrid prod- uct of symptom and signal called magic. We can thus now polarize these phenomena in relationships where they mutually abolish each other, and establish that symptom and picture are deadly enemies just like signal and ideal and like symbol and magic. In European culture, it looks as if three basic cultural types are being separated out, each of which in itself has a tendency to fall back to one of these antagonistic relationships which, as it were, form the basic tension in the intellectual structure. It is as if the Byzantine-Muscovite culture above all emanates from the opposition symptom-picture, as if the Romano- Latin culture first and foremost stretches between the opposition symbol- magic, and the Nordic culture above all orients itself along the opposition signal-ideal, and that the basic European conflicts are identical with the mutual competition and complementarity of these three orientations. At any rate, it is possible to explain certain conflicts in religious history from this viewpoint. Naturens orden. De divisione Nature (Aarhus: Skandinavisk Institut for Sammenlignende Vandalisme, 1962), pp. 9-58. Translated by Peter Shield.