We tend to think of space as a perfect, transparent liquid, a pure medium. This ‘purity’ and ‘perfection’ cashes out in its being amicable to transfer anything whatsoever: forces, movements, waves, this or that distribution of objects, and so on. It would be a scandal if space dared to have a granularity, beyond clean infinite divisibility, a texture or weft and warp that wasn’t of an infinite smoothness. This is why 20th Century physics and 19th Century mathematics were so scandalous. But these hefty and technical refutations of the view of space as the paradigmatically pure and smooth thing tended to relocate the perfect liquid, now understood as symmetries among equations or between speeds or movements or energies. The thought seems to go: there is something pure there, but maybe not where we thought at first. The transparency of structure gives way to the harmony of relations.
What would be the complete inversion of the assumption of the perfect purity of space? This purity is derived from nothing more than space’s assumed infinite passivity, the amicable way in which it is happy to be a medium and allow transfers across it. The inverse of this is to see in space something active. Its texture refracting and scratching at all which it transfers. Some clinamen cutting through, not as an inconvenient accessory, but as that which constitutes spaces in the first place. Movements that no longer merely divide the Whole into left and right, up and down, but that create a before and after. The letter and the pilgrim are transformed by the voyage. This inversion needs to be attempted wherever the absolutely pure and passive is invoked, that is, wherever someone allows themselves to speak of a ‘space’: the political space, the cultural space, the conceptual space, the RGB color space.
Space as active and granular. For example, the distribution of light producing the endless chiaroscuro that makes vision possible, not as that which makes things accessible, but is rather blocked, denied access. The gradient of a shadow belongs neither to an illuminated object nor to revealing light, it is the contribution of space itself acting on both of these things. We already have a model to discuss the activity of spaces and the action they impart on whatever they transfer: resonance.
Resonance is not mere distribution of elements. It is not merely the formula of relations; an object distributing symmetrically a force imparted from another object. The light-beam diffusing through a dusty room reveals the vortexes, imperceptible micro currents, the stuffiness of the air. What are we to do with it, but to clean it out, make it useful, inhabitable? And yet, what are our efforts but to force the space back into passivity, allowing our smooth and habitual movements to pass through it? It seems like our own activity becomes possible only at the cost of the activity of space. But, go on vacation, and see how quickly it reclaims its own rights to produce its own resonances, the interplay of elements that have no right to be there: cracks in the window, things shedding their skin and filling the air with particles and distracting novel smells. It is not merely time that displaces the things in its entropic tendencies, but space, in its always-too-much, in its refracting grains and particles, which, should we remain attentive to it, forces ourselves to resonate with uncanny specks, which are not quite things, but undefined areas, glimmers, blobs. The harmonic texture and grains of the fields we inhabit that we can never quite silence.