INBETWEENESS

"Inbetweenness" yes, but between what or who (when or where) exactly? Between Deleuzian "inbetweenness" and Heideggerian "inbetweenness"?

We are always in-between inbetweenness is the very fact of becoming: life is that which evolves and unfolds between the opposing poles of birth and death in that life is the unwinding way and straight and narrow path towards certain death.

Between a rock and a hard place or between Scylla and Charibdis, a predicament in which avoidance of either of two dangers means exposure to the other. Betwixt and between: not only is it well-nigh impossible to put down in words the meaning of "between" ("at a point or in a region intermediate to two other points in space, times, degrees, etc."), it also triggers a string of baleful connotations that of the ruefully incomplete, the suspended, the undecided and all that is the lesser of two evils. "Between" enjoins the dyad it brings into play the antipodean, the bipolar, the opposotional in short, dialectics.

This is what I like about the inbetween: its implied insistence on going either one way or the other, on choosing, on choice the more irreversible, the better. I hate stalling, and I don't much like doubt. (The philosophy of the in-between has taken on many different guises in recent decades one of them being that of 'nomadology', an utterly bourgeois fiction of longed-after restlessness.) The inbetween is a zone of passage, and hence 'meant' or made for passing through and this passage is what brings us from point alpha (beginning or origin, point of departure or scene of farewell) to point omega (destination or destiny, purpose or end complete), the point of this being that we both depart and arrive at something (though not necessarily, of course, that which we were aiming for). There is only so much romance in the cult of transition, and the inbetween is no place to live if living, indeed, is what we want to do.

Beginnings, endings, and the vast expanse that stretches in-between which can be alternately barren and a boring chore to trudge through, or a sensuous delight of pointless idling. I suppose it all depends on the art, or the art form at hand: we enjoy the in-between of the literary form in ways that are incomparably different from that of film or music; in much contemporary art, the in-between has traditionally (and quite often rather lazily) been construed or theorized as 'process'. Process equals the continuous frustration of our (perfectly normal) desire for the stability of the finished product. The in-between state of process and becoming produces the spectacle of flux and transience, the suspension of solidity that has long been the hallmark of vanguard art an art that is constantly on the move, hence "in between". But in between what (or who) exactly? The artist and her audience?

published in "INBETWEENESS" curated by Dobrila Denegri&Ludovico Pratesi. (catalogue)
(in English and in Italian)
In which way you understand the meaning of the "state in between", intended or as individual or collective experience or as a cultural phenomena?
May.22.2007-June.18.2007 in Ex Carceri del Complesso di San Michele a Ripa, Roma
ISBN 9788877572165
© Hopefulmonster,Torino 2007 Dieter Roelstraete, Ebru Özseçen