How We Share Indeterminacy: A determinate force for aesthetic separation and aesthetic action

MODES OF AESTHETIC THINKING WITH INDETERMINCACY

Mode One: “Measuring” the Playful Surfaces of Determinate Indeterminacy

The introductory remarks have shown that the indeterminacy of knowledge and action has become a constitutive dimension of modern and contemporary self- and world-relations: categories of determination no longer remain stable but enter a reflexive state of fluctuation. It is the distinctive achievement of the German philosopher Gerhard Gamm to have clarified this dimension through decades of sustained philosophical work. He analyzed the twentieth century – which built on the fundamental relativizations of the nineteenth – as a decisive turning point in which indeterminacy is no longer treated as a deficit of reason but as a structural condition shaping science, politics, art, and technology. By tracing indeterminacy across heterogeneous fields and traditions, Gamm shows that modern thinking has “escaped its categories” and can no longer rely on the promise of final determination (cf. Gamm 1994-2009). His work thus offers a systematic perspective in which indeterminacy appears not as an exception but as a pervasive feature of modern life, embedded within the logic of determinacy itself – and as a productive point of departure for aesthetic reflection on rationality, agency, and technological culture. Indeterminacy is therefore not a romanticized category but is theoretically clarified as a form of negativity within Gamm’s project of elevating – instead of derogating – the indeterminate, so that it is not based on a self-sufficient concept of knowledge (cf. Hetzel 2009, 11). So, indeterminacy acquires a contour: It has a function, a place and a structure and shapes important aspects of knowledge. It does not occur without limits, but in a specific way and under specific conditions. Aesthetic thinking thus engages as well with these determinate indeterminacies: with tensions between meaning and non-meaning, form and transgression, decision and openness, through which perception, meaning, and judgment are set in motion in the first place. Any general fixation fails:

“Indeterminacy can be demonstrated by the failure of all anthropological attempts to define the essence of human beings, by the antinomic structures of moral principles, and by the difficulties that arise for the natural sciences (even in the fundamental reflections of individual disciplines) from the fundamental indeterminacy of their objects” (Gamm 2000, 7; transl. by E.T).

Taking up Gamm’s first point concerning and demonstrating the failure of all – including colonial and essentialist – attempts to define a human essence or unique selling proposition, I would briefly like to reflect on a central thesis by the acclaimed Egyptologist Jan Assmann: “Human beings are the animals that have to live with the knowledge of their death, and culture is the world they create so they can live with that knowledge” (Assmann 2005, III). While death itself marks a clearly defined demarcation line, the knowledge of death is, in Assmann’s account, not knowledge of an event but a culturally mediated surplus – one that is meant to distinguish humans from other living beings precisely because it engages ritually, symbolically, and virtually with the indeterminacy of biological finitude. This knowledge thus remains fundamentally ambivalent like Assmann writes in Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt: “At the center of this surplus, divine, alienating, and thus problematic knowledge stands death” (ibid. 3). Assmann’s decisive contribution lies in showing that the knowledge of death is not a natural given but a cultural practice through which societies relationally respond to the indeterminacy of finitude. With Gamm, however, one could argue that although Assmann conceives indeterminacy relationally, he ultimately reinscribes it culture-theoretically by presupposing a bearer and a center. Indeterminacy thereby becomes a property rather than a historically meandering structural condition. Although categories have become increasingly fluid, Gamm does not respond – unlike contemporary currents of new materialism – by dissolving them altogether. Instead, he radicalizes categorical thinking through reflexive refractions and recalibrations of phenomenological and scientistic categories in the spirit of productive negativity. In the mirror of biotechnology and information technology, the human appears, on the one hand, reductively as a cybernetic circuit and, on the other, nostalgically cloaked in phenomenological appeals to bodily, affective, and supposedly “original” self-experience (cf. Gamm 2004, 15–40). Gamm further mobilizes classical philosophical figures that define the human through its difference from animals – whether in terms of rationality, political life, or freedom – such as Aristotle’s zoon politikon or Plato’s featherless bipeds, along with the well-known moments of their subversion, as when Diogenes the Cynic presents a plucked rooster in the Academy declaring: “Here is Plato’s man”. For Gamm, the problem with all such attempts arises because

“(…) the fractal, disintegrating center of the human being is enclosed in a fatal positivity, thereby identifying it as something, transforming it once again into a thing, negating its qualitative openness and, in this assignment of an “objective” criterion, ultimately also intending to decide on its claim to existence” (ibid. 52).

It is probably no coincidence that Gamm finds what he is looking for in literature, where humans appear as fractal beings and are clearly not something that is and remains something, or can be identified as something at all. Quoting the Dutch writer Cees Noteboom, the definition sheet remains not anyway but versatile in turning, unresolved between vanity or a subtle technical measure against gloom: ‘Human beings are gloomy animals that comb themselves.’ What characterizes this alternative from a positively identifying discourse – and especially, aesthetic thinking – and what distinguishes it from an undifferentiated “anyhow”? Aesthetic theorist Dieter Mersch identifies two fundamental steps that define what it means to think in, with, and through art:

“First, the aesthetic dimension and its medium are not based on the grammar of discourse, even if the medium of the aesthetic is language, as in the case of literature. Correspondingly, signification is not formed primarily by way of the “is” or “as” but above all through the practices of conjunction and disjunction, as expressed through the particles “and,” “or,” “both … and,” “not only … but also” as its very medium etc.” (Mersch 2019, 230).

Let us get straight in medias artes and try to make this perspective – with indeterminacy in the form of conjunctions and disjunctions – on literary stage clearer. In his novel Flesh, which won the 2025 Booker Prize, David Szalay gives his taciturn protagonist István a single, endlessly repeated response: “Okay”. The word surfaces hundreds of times, flattening moments that would seem to demand judgment or emotion. When his best friend proposes that the fifteen-year-old sleep with his girlfriend, István finds it “okay”. Life with his mother on the prefabricated housing estate of a small Hungarian town is “quite okay” too. He says “okay” again when a neighbor nearly thirty years his senior seduces him, initiating a passionate affair. Even after he pushes her husband down a staircase during a scuffle – an act that leads to three years in juvenile detention and a further five as a soldier in the Iraq War – István’s verdict scarcely changes. Speaking to a dream therapist, he can muster little more about prison or the front line than that it was “actually quite okay”. After emigrating to London, the former decorated soldier takes work as a poorly paid bouncer, until a chain of coincidences elevates him to bodyguard and personal chauffeur to the billionaire couple Mr. and Mrs. Nyman. His guarded, enigmatic presence soon begins to fascinate the billionaire’s bored wife, Helen Nyman. Right in the middle of Flesh, in Chapter 5, we witness the following scene:

One day when he’s driving her somewhere, she tells him to stop.
He pulls over.
“Switch off the engine,” she says.
He does.
“Come and sit in the back with me,” she says.
“Why?” he asks.
“Because I want you to,” she says.
He gets out of the car and gets in again in the back.
It feels strange to be in the back, to see the world from that
position. To see his own empty seat in the front.
“Yes?” he says.
“You know I’ve got the hots for you, don’t you,” she says.
The directness of it does surprise him.
“Yeah?” he says.
“Yeah?” she imitates, pitching her voice very low, and making
him sound like some sort of idiot.
He smiles at her.
“Yeah,” she says.
“Okay,” he says, after quite a long silence.
“Why don’t you kiss me?” she says.
“I’m not sure that would be such a good idea,” he says.
“That’s a really annoying thing to say.”
“Still.”
They just sit there for a few seconds.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Don’t say that.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t say that,” she says again.
“Okay.”
“Take me home,” she says.
“Okay,” he says.
He drives her home in silence.
Soon after that they start having sex together, usually when
her husband is out of London. (Szalay 2025, 139p.)

I have quoted this scene in full length an exactly as it appears in the original edition in order to foreground a point succinctly articulated by Roddy Doyle, author and Chair of the Booker Prize judges: “I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well” (Doyle 2025). As Doyle continues, this white space becomes an invitation: “It’s as if the author, David Szalay, is inviting the reader to fill the space, to observe – almost to create – the character with him.” He concludes by emphasizing the formal economy of the prose: “The writing is spare and that is its great strength: Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter” (ibid.). Before (re)turning to Mersch’s aesthetic differentiation, it is instructive to bring Wolfgang Iser’s The Act of Reading into the discussion, since Iser offers a particularly precise account of what Doyle gestures toward with his notion of “white spaces” and the reader’s activation “to fill in the space.” Already in his introduction – where it becomes clear that indeterminacy does not exclude a didactic approach, but can in fact render it both pleasurable and crisis-laden – Iser illustrates this dynamic with a deceptively simple example, quoting two lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? (cf. Iser 1987, V)

Mersch’s notions of “conjunction” and “disjunction” are immediately recognizable here – not at the level of determinate semantic units, but solely through the line break and the white space in between the verses. The rhyming structure links “ice cream” and “crisis,” and it is precisely this forced proximity that simultaneously connects and semantically delimits them. What emerges is a structured polysemy that may either trivialize “crisis” or, conversely, intensify the significance of “ice cream.” As Iser formulates this dynamic more generally: “The ‘conflict’ can only be resolved by the emergence of a third dimension, which comes into being through the reader’s continual oscillation between involvement and observation” (Iser 1987, 128).  Let us now both “involve” and “observe” David Szalay’s scene above more closely. The passage can be read as a paradigmatic site of indeterminacy in the sense articulated by both Wolfgang Iser and Dieter Mersch. The seemingly banal “okay” – as will be shown – functions here as a precise catalyst of indeterminacy. On the one hand, the scene between István and Helen is conspicuously deprived of inner psychology and thus radically underdetermined: neither “Yeah” nor “Okay,” nor even physical proximity, is affectively coded. Even perception itself remains oddly neutralized: “It feels strange to be in the back, to see the world from that position.” On the other hand, the scene is densely composed with dialogue fragments, pauses, silences, and repetitions. Indeterminacy is therefore not thematized but enacted. In Iser’s terms, the “Okay” functions as a “blank” – accurately labeled as a Leerstelle in German – as the driving principle of the aesthetic effect. Thus, it’s not an empty openness of meaning, but a guided openness: a perspectival hinge at which the viewpoints of the protagonists and those of the reader intersect and demand decisions from the latter. The apparently indifferent “Okay” becomes a blank space par excellence. István’s “Okay” – so to say – “works”: “The blanks thus work against our normal expectations of dialogue in so far as the focal point is not what is said, but what is unsaid” (Iser 1987, 193). Accordingly, the decisive moment of the scene does not occur in what is spoken, but in the shift of position (front/back), in the silence, in the sitting, in the scarcity of dialogue, that eventually leads to the interruption, which at least gives her a determinacy when she makes a decision: “Take me home.” The unsaid begins to stir and to take shape: “The blank as an empty space between segments enables them to be joined together, thus constituting a field of vision for the wandering viewpoint” (ibid.197). This metaphorical wandering immediately provokes concrete questions: does the indeterminate “Okay” signal agreement or resistance, desire or refusal, decision or passivity? Critical discourse might resolve this ambiguity by appealing to an authorial narrator, who mirrors with his taciturn protagonist the indifference of our present days or sets an exemplary figure for negotiating toxic masculinity. Yet when read through Mersch’s practices of conjunction and disjunction, the text resists such stabilization. The reader is instead compelled – perhaps polemically – to oscillate between incompatible figures: Is István a dog resigned to his fate, a mama’s boy in oversized underpants, or both? Is he merely a victim, or also a strategist? Both manipulated from outside and indifferently selfish? Traumatized or an ambivalent social climber? The text refuses any definitive answer, and it is precisely in this refusal that its aesthetic force resides. In Iser’s sense, Szalay’s text does not generate a conventional face-to-face interaction, but interaction through textual discontinuity – through which by means of this discontinuity, the reader is activated and meaning set in motion. As already emphasized with Mersch, aesthetic thinking operates as a non-propositional act: through showing, pauses, gestures, and discursive interruptions. “Okay” is in this anti-sense not a direct statement, not a determined judgment, not a straight performative gesture. It is a minimal linguistic gesture that first and foremost suspends a single meaning and thus gives room for interpretation. At second glance meaning becomes a configural constellation rather than an intentional (speech) act. “Okay” thus functions as a joint at which discursive continuity is interrupted and redirected – the discursive rule is overturned without any justification.

At this point, Mersch’s second fundamental distinction becomes operative, at which aesthetic thinking diverges from discursive thinking in another direction, that he describes as a “catachrestic leap”: “This distinction rests on the specific modalities of a reflexivity which only arises through – by springing forth from – the conjunctional-disjunctional praxis of composition, and namely the form of its configuration” (Mersch 2019, 232). István’s “Okay,” understood as a gesture of indifference, is therefore not a deficit of communication but an aesthetic quality. He refuses meaning, refuses justification, refuses interiority. His “okay” marks a decision without decision-making awareness. This is precisely where its eeriness resides and the mystery of the text becomes abysmal – where the tense moment of indeterminacy crystallizes. Helen repeatedly attempts to enforce determination: “Because I want you to,” “Why don’t you kiss me?” or “That’s a really annoying thing to say.” She seeks affect, mirroring, resonance. Yet István’s “Okay,” as a catachrestic leap, eludes this entire logic of resonance. The subsequent affair is not explained or motivated; it arises, glides, happens. The “Okay” is thus neither cause nor motive, but a leap away from and beyond instrumental desire. Echoing Adorno’s aporetic formula of a “synthesis without judgment,” Szalay’s scene demonstrates how aesthetic thinking connects without subsuming or defining (Mersch 2019, 219f). It generates meaning without passing judgment, while simultaneously confronting the reader with their own habitual practices of associating and judging. This confrontation extends beyond the entertaining relation between the characters and the reader; furthermore, it might dissolve the comfortable aesthetic distance of the readers itself. The “catachrestic leap” tests and destabilizes the reader’s own mental images, imagination, and power of judgment. Readers become spectators of their internalized logic of prejudice, insinuation, and interpretive self-assurance. Throughout Flesh, stereotypes circulate around the anti-figure István – from a driven sex machine to or an opportunistic inactive man to a sad puppy. After this provocative exaggeration, let us conclude by stating again: With Wolfgang Iser, István’s “okay” appears as a calculated indeterminate void and blank space that compels the reader to produce a dynamic process of meaning; with Dieter Mersch, it emerges as a non-propositional gesture that interrupts meaning and enables an aesthetic event.

The literary example and its analysis has demonstrated not only the force with which indeterminacy sets a joyful interplay of signifiers in motion – including those that remain underdetermined – but also how carefully calibrated indeterminacy unsettles the stable frame of reference that ordinarily secures the reader’s empirical access to the world within a first-person perspective (cf. Searle 1987). It is precisely this form of certainty – whose efficacy and reliability typically, and perhaps fortunately, recede into an indeterminate background – that aesthetic thinking cracks open, or at least renders certainties visible ex negativo. Very much in the spirit of Gerhard Gamm, philosopher Juliane Rebentisch sharpens this sense of negativity in her survey of Theories of Contemporary Art by emphasizing precisely how aesthetically mobilized indeterminacy “hollows” out our perspective “from within”, thereby rescuing us from reifying modes of thought. At the same time, she introduces a further – and unexpected – point about aesthetic thinking itself:

“The event of indeterminacy is one of negativity that hollows out our determinations from within, as it were, not the reification of the indeterminate as such. This description has a distinctly art-critical point, for against its backdrop, all those artistic productions that translate the enigmatic character of art into a lack of relevance of its elements or into mere obscurity, thus engaging in a self-mystification that ends thinking before it could begin” (Rebentisch 2021, 114).

Rebentisch’s decisive move is to define indeterminacy not as an aesthetic surplus but as an event of negativity. Not every mystery or enigmatic quality of art thinks. Indeterminacy, for Rebentisch, is neither a positive property nor an auratic excess; it is a negative force. Where art exhibits indeterminacy instead of allowing it to operate, it turns into self-mystification and arrests thought. Christoph Menke radicalizes this claim by directing it against aesthetic judgment itself. In his sharp analysis The Aesthetic Critique of Judgment (2010), Menke characterizes an aesthetic event as an experience in which it is not the success of judgment that matters, but its suspension (ibid. 28). When indeterminacy is organized auratically rather than negatively, judgment is not disrupted but stabilized. Against conceptions of judgment as attribution or meaning-determination, Menke insists on aesthetic experience as a forceful event in which judgment fails. Neo Rauch’s painting Amt (2004) exemplifies for Menke this problem: its auratically stabilized ambiguity invites interpretation without jeopardizing the conditions of interpretation. Rather than interrupting judgment, the painting confirms it. Strengthening the sensus communis in a Kantian manner, let us first give precedence to another description of Rauch’s painting (see fig.1). In her essay Neo Rauch: Post-socialist Vision, Collective Memories Annette Hamilton opens with a detailed account of the scene’s figures and its surface’s organization. Here is her detailed description:

“A gigantic snowclad mountain occupies the centre of the pictorial space before a blackened night sky. A socialist-style factory or barracks […] very precise in its apparent perspective, although there is nothing which leads to it. […] From deep underground come men, labouring, tired, carrying assortments of debris: an unexploded mine, […] The largest figure, out of scale with the others, walks up a set of stairs half-buried in snow. […]. Only slowly does the eye come to focus on the central figure in this narrative, the functionary who […] is writing diligently in his ledger, as the men struggle past him. […] Amt means office, official position, appointment: presumably referring to the functionary with the clipboard halfway up the slope. Or is it that all the characters in this dreamlike space are equally ‘functionaries’? […] To dredge up and bring to light these contents of the buried past seems an obligation, but at the same time the sense of it is dwarfed by the simple reality of the natural world, with its harshness, as well as the requirements of organized society places everyone […] in the same painful position”  (Hamilton 2011, 184).

For Hamilton, Rauch’s Office functions as a projection screen for shared historical, social, and psychological memories within a post-socialist context. She characterizes Rauch’s paintings as worlds that are meticulously organized in visual and technical terms, yet withdraw from any real, narrative, or functional legibility. According to Hamilton, this withdrawal is not a failure but a productive tension: the strict, almost classical composition, the static monumentality of the figures, and the precise perspective do not culminate in clarity but run into emptiness. These formal certainties confront an unreadable space of memory – suspended between socialist admiration, administration and nature, labor and life – rendered in the idiom of realist painting. As Hamilton observes, “This imminent decomposition of recognition even while seeming to see a Real lies at the heart of Rauch’s art, giving glimpses of a world which seemingly might be entered, but which repels any such effort” (ibid. 187).

It is precisely this effect, however, that Christoph Menke fundamentally contests. What Hamilton describes as productive withdrawal appears to Menke as an overdetermined staging of mystery. For him, the conspicuously orchestrated arrangement of sealed, interlocking spaces does not interrupt judgment but secures it as a fatal insignificance. The aura of enigma stabilizes interpretation instead of endangering it – and thereby neutralizes the negative force of indeterminacy. Menke’s laconic reaction crystallizes this critique: “Yes, yes, one can see that this is all supposed to be very puzzling” (Menke 2010, 25). Menke’s suspicion that Rauch employs indeterminacy in a highly instrumental manner is corroborated by an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung. As Neo Rauch states: “Unenlightened zones are necessary (…), I have to continually decide at which stage of pushing forward with the painting I will impose the rupture, and posit the regions of disturbance” (cited ibid. 28). One may ask whether Rauch takes Wolfgang Iser’s aesthetic potential of the Leerstelle too literally: as an overly forced empty spot? Does he understand the blank merely in spatial terms?  As something that must be added alongside or between compact zones of fullness and determination within his motifs? And thus, also as something that he can just decide to add from outside? The insertion of which – into what has already been painted – remains entirely at his discretion? As a manageable, supplementary strategy of enigma onto what he has already painted in a figural way? Rauch’s painting seems to be entirely concerned with the receptivity and marking of the incomprehensible – a gesture that leaves Menke obviously “cold.” (cf. ibid. 27). Yet the decisive point, also for Menke, is not this dismissive reaction itself. On the contrary, it is precisely this judgment that ought to be unsettled by the possibility of a painting’s description. Anticipating another pictorial dimension, Menke asks: “And the colors?” He continues: “The coloration of this picture set in black and white does not manage to create a second and different kind of levels of interrelations in tension with the first level of the things, figures, and scenes depicted” (ibid.). Rauch’s handling of color changes nothing; it creates neither distance nor tension within the painting. Only the mysterious objects—such as the bone or the books at the bottom. Color in Rauch’s work lacks what was perhaps the one of the most central ambitions of modern painting: the power to make a difference between what is depicted and how the depiction is staged. In Rauch’s color regime, Menke concludes, there prevails “the logic of mere indifference; hence the avoidance, the cessation of conflict” (ibid. 28). Let us reread Hamilton’s findings through Menke’s conflict-sharpened lens. Hamilton speaks of “brooding mystery and melancholy”, of “dreamlike space”, “narrative invitations” and “collective memories” (Hamilton 2011, 180pp). What the painting produces is complicity, not resistance. The observer is drawn into a shared imaginary, seduced into interpretation, but never forced into a crisis of judgment. Judgment remains active, sovereign, productive – and precisely for that reason, unchallenged. The decisive point can be stated succinctly with Rebentisch and Menke: Rauch’s Amt does not think, because it organizes indeterminacy as a property rather than as an event of negativity. It presents us a multiplicity of aspects but blurs them in indifference and ultimately prevents the discovery of new ones. It may touch the bone of the unconscious, but not the framework of our certainties, judgments, concepts and opinions. It solicits interpretation without interrupting the conditions of interpretation. Its indetermined mystery is visible, nameable, marketable iconic – in short: reified. This may well provoke a kind of effortless amazement, but it thereby tips – not only for Menke – into the very opposite of aesthetic thinking: “A miracle, not a problem; amazement and wonder as the end, not the beginning, of thinking” (Menke 2010, 25).

Mode Two: Indeterminate Spectators Disturb the Distribution of the Sensible

The aesthetic field is deeply contested, not least because in capitalist societies every sphere of life is aestheticized, i.e. formatted for visibility, circulation, and consumption, what eventually also aestheticizes or anesthetizes the individual. Yet the problem reaches beyond political economy into epistemology. Sensory and affective perception is not lacking in meaning but is saturated by it: an overdetermined field of forms, things, appearances combined into real, nuanced or potential significations. This excess constitutes an overwhelming point of departure to which reason mostly responds through reduction and filtering. Metaphorically speaking, this controversial surplus is “swallowed” by the “belly” of conceptual and determining thinking and its ordering regimes. Seen from this perspective, the recurrent “Okay” uttered by the protagonists in Szalay’s Flesh appears in a different light. Rather than signaling indifference, it functions as a defensive gesture: a minimal discursive shield against perceptual and semantic overload. Likewise, artists today are compelled to respond to this dispersed distribution of the sensible. For instance, Gerhard Richter questions himself: “How can I paint today, and above all, what?” (cf. Schneede 2024, 55). Who decides what is seen, touched, heard, valued – what enters perception at all – and what remains invisible? Is it “Tante Lenchen” from Oldenburg, who, in the 1960s, sent Gerhard Richter a parcel once a month to his new address in Düsseldorf? While other aunts might send marmalade or dried sausage, Tante Lenchen sent magazines like Stern, Quick, or Neue Illustrierte – saturated with brightly colored images. Although Socialist propaganda in Dresden was left behind, the fundamental question persisted: How to paint, and what to paint? How to develop an art that would be unheroic and non-ideological? Richter referred to his response as a “new quirk.”

He turned toward the visual world of Tante Lenchen’s magazines, discovering in them the role models of a consumer culture “that everyone consumes because everyone is affected by it” (cf. Rauterberg 2011). He painted these images, enlarged them, altered their details, and immersed them in determined blur. Through this vanishing alienation, the anecdotal is drained from the image. Following Menke, the power of imagination lies not only in inventing, but above all in finding. Richter shifts the emphasis from the result to the process of creation. Philosophically, this entails a turn from what is said to the act of saying itself: not the image as product, but the act of formation. In short: art is process, genesis, and not representation. Richter describes this as the removal of an “excess of unimportant information” (ibid.) and what becomes another experimental stage in his series of photo paintings. Meaning and narrative significance recede, allowing something more elementary to emerge. Whether a roll of toilet paper, a pillow, a chair, or a designer table; everyday objects become, in Richter’s work, worthy of depiction. What may both provoke István’s recurrent “Okay” within the flood of sensuous stimuli and shield him from intrusive meaning can be compared to the function of the color “grey” in Richter’s practice. He does not allow this commonly neglected color to vanish into the “belly” of conceptual thinking as mere colorlessness. Instead, Richter mobilizes grey as a sensuous strategy that eludes the familiar three-step sequence of sensory abundance, conceptual sorting and residual meaning: A roll of toilet paper is presented neither as a packaged commodity nor as an object of everyday use objectified by photographic precision. It takes on a surprisingly aura of light, not bright and shiny, but with its own sensual language (see fig.2). Richter thus counts upon using the absences inherent in a selective and determining sieve-order as the means to express not what he means, but rather what he didn’t want to say. By defining his art in terms of “nothing”, reality, in contrast, becomes for Richter an illusive sieve-order and the search for an indetermined exit strategy:

“Grey to me, was the absence of opinion, nothing, neither/nor. It was also a means of manifesting my own relationship with apparent reality. I didn’t want to say: ‘It is thus and not otherwise.’ and then perhaps I didn’t want anyone to confuse the pictures with reality” (Richter 1993: 70).

Instead of allowing his perception to be filtered through a sieve-order that reduces experience to the fine dust of opinion, or to be subordinated to reality-defining judgments such as “this is that” and “that is this,” Richter bypasses this regime of filtration through the use of grey. Grey suspends the demand for determination and opens the possibility of an autonomous relation to his apparent reality – one that neither affirms nor negates, but withholds judgment and meaning at first glance. It also becomes clear that not only terms and concepts are politically charged, but perception itself. One philosopher who has dealt intensively with the social distribution and division of different aesthetic regimes is Jacques Rancière. In The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2013), he defines aesthetics not as a theory of beauty but as a regime of modern perception: an ordering of what can be seen, heard, and said, and, by implication, of what is rendered as mere noise, marginality, or illegality. In this sense, Rancière’s aesthetics can be read in a Kantian vein – reworked through Foucault – as an analysis of the a priori forms that structure sensory experience and determine what is allowed to appear as meaningful:

“It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” (Rancière 2013, 8).

The significance of aesthetics in modernity is fundamentally the asset that manages or disrupts these properties and possibilities. Editor and translator Gabriel Rockhill explains how Rancière distinguishes the political in times of struggle between enduring genealogies of established ethical (Plato) and representative (Aristotle) regimes and politics understood as a potential aesthetic regime of art:

“The police, to begin with, is defined as an organizational system of coordinates that establishes a distribution of the sensible or a law that divides the community into groups, social positions, and functions” (Rockhill qtd. in Rancière 2013, XIII).

Every law silently divides participation from exclusion. It presupposes an aesthetic partition of visibility and invisibility, audibility and noise, speech and silence. Politics, for Rancière, begins where this distribution of the Polis and police is interrupted – when those without a part insert themselves into the perceptual order and thereby reconfigure the very field of what can appear, be heard, and be said. Rancière’s essence of aesthetic-politics in contrast to aesthetic-policy marks the point of indeterminacy at which perception can no longer be clearly assigned: who is in focus and who remains blurred; what counts as voice rather than noise; action rather than mere behavior; art rather than everyday life representation. Rancière distinguishes the ethical and the representative regimes, both of which condense aesthetic conditions into moral content or into representative form, style, genre, and frame, from aesthetic practice, which operates by displacing those very conditions of appearance. In short: Politics as police reproduces the status-quo of the sensible order; aesthetics as politics of art interrupts it.

But what can “art” mean under these aesthetic conditions, and how does Rancière’s idea of an aesthetic regime of art emerge within such structures of distribution? And can we imagine an indeterminate spectator in Rancière’s sense; freed from the determinations of the ethical and representative regimes – be conceivable, and furthermore, might such indeterminacy ground an aesthetic community? In the following, I want to elaborate this further in a two-way approach: On the one hand, I show how Rancière descends in his Amsterdam lecture Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2008), descends from his usual theoretical altitude and coarse-grained cartography of the aesthetic, showing his talent for isolating a concrete scene of the past but now but now illuminating for our immediate present. On the other hand, I want to specify my second mode of aesthetic thinking by mobilizing an example of an officially ordered separated aesthetic community drawn formed during an extremely politically determined period, in order to bring the figure of the indeterminate spectator into sharper focus. What concerns Rancière is a persistent misunderstanding of political art. He challenges the widespread belief that art must be more than spectacle – that it should rouse spectators from passivity, activate them as political subjects, and produce direct social effects. This demand for efficacy, which still dominates much of the discourse on political art, remains caught in a false dichotomy. Within the representative regime, art is expected to operate through message, representation, and mediation; within the ethical regime, it is meant to provoke action through immediacy and presence. Despite their differences, both models share the same premise: that art exerts a determinable, calculable effect on its audience. Rancière’s intervention consists in proposing a “third term” of effectiveness, one that exceeds both representational mediation and ethical immediacy. Drawing on Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, he locates this effectiveness in the suspension of causal determination itself: art interrupts the fixed link between cause and effect that structures our categories of understanding. In his own words: “It is precisely this indetermination that Kant conceptualized when he defined the beautiful as ‘what is represented as an object of universal delight apart from any concept’ ” (Rancière 2008, 7). That definition has often been aligned with the old definition of beauty as harmony, but this view dismisses the radical break with the representational logic that is entailed in the ‘apart from any concept’. What enters aesthetic experience is not a message or an intention, but a free appearance. This free appearance, Rancière argues, is produced by a disconnection between two sensoria: the sensorium of fabrication and the sensorium of enjoyment. It is precisely within this gap – between production and reception – that indeterminacy emerges, relocating the political potential of art from what it says to how it appears question the position of the spectator who encounters it.

Let us lower the theoretical altitude and jump again in medias artes. In JE & Nous, the artist collective Urban Encampment exemplifies what Rancière calls aesthetic separation through a radically simple yet effective operation. Statements by homeless people, migrants, and other marginalized individuals from one of the most wretched outskirts of Paris where riots broke out in autumn 2007 are placed in public space not as testimonies, demands, or forms of social documentation tied to predefined identities such as “the poor,” “the proletariat,” or “minorities,” but as aesthetically detached texts. These voices are separated from their habitual socio-political contexts – appeals for help, social statistics or social problems – and cease to function as representations of lack or deficiency. Instead, in Rancière’s reading, they appear as linguistic events without an assigned purpose. In doing so, the work refuses both moral appeal and political instrumentalization. A first-person statement printed on a T-shirt reappears in a video installation, circulating publicly a second time: “I want an empty word that I could fill” (see fig.3). What is at stake here is not a new content, but a shift in the conditions under which something becomes visible and sayable at all. For Rancière, who analyzes this engaged community art work through the lense of its aesthetic potentials, an aesthetic community does not arise through identification but through a shared interruption of perception. The project forms such a community not based on shared conviction, but through a shared indeterminacy regarding who speaks, who belongs, and what is being addressed. Neither the titled “I” nor the “us” stabilizes into a collective subject. The Urban Encampment’ scale model thus appears as a miniature dispositive of aesthetic separation: a place conceived as “extremely useless, fragile, and non-productive”, intensifying distance from representational and ethical models (ibid.; see fig.4). The key to the model lies precisely in the spatial translation of the T-shirt slogan quoted above and a unique cabin that does not accommodate a communal meeting place, but separates individuals and offers them an empty space. Rancière describes this Place of Solitude as follows:

“That place had to be discussed with whoever wanted to discuss it among the inhabitants and put under of the protection of the community. But it would be dedicated to a specific end: solitude, which meant that it would be conceived and implemented as a place that could be occupied only by one person for the sake of lonely contemplation or meditation” (ibid. 2).

Within this suspended social relation, the spectator is neither mobilized nor instructed but rendered indeterminate. It is precisely this indeterminacy that produces a moment of equality, where perception is no longer governed by recognition and politics but emerges as a redistribution of the sensible – of what can be seen, heard, and sensed. One might condense this logic into the statement: “I want an empty room that I can fill.”

In conclusion this does not mean, that the division of the sensible, the aesthetic separation demands isolation. Nor is it a matter of elitism, or withdrawal from politics. Aesthetic separation, in Rancière’s sense, denotes rather the condition for another form of community: a community of equality that arises not from shared purposes, identities, or messages, but from a shared mode of perception. Extraordinary examples also occur in moments when the sensible is not only distributed but its modes of use are prescribed. Let us consider another even more contemporary example: During the highly regulated and politically charged period of the pandemic, a striking counter-formation emerged through an initiative as simple as the LA Getty Museum’s call to recreate artworks at home. Under conditions of isolation, spatial restriction, and discursive overload, an unexpected aesthetic community took shape – one that was not founded on physical proximity or shared ideology, but on playful participation in a common perceptual experiment. Everyday objects saturated with meaning – think emblematically of the demand for toilet paper or protective masks – were detached from their functional and symbolic determinations and reinserted into the space of free appearance. In bedrooms and kitchens, spectators became temporary players, not by mastering meaning but by suspending it. What was otherwise a sign of scarcity, control, and anxiety turned into a medium of aesthetic indeterminacy. In this bounded domestic space, the indeterminate spectator emerged as a free player, engaging in a shared yet decentralized redistribution of the sensible. Precisely because space was limited and discourse highly determined and challenged, aesthetic separation enabled a form of community grounded not in consensus or message, but in the collective experience of uncertainty – demonstrating how, even under conditions of constraint, indeterminacy can become a resource for political and aesthetic imagination. Numerous schools participated in the Getty Museum’s international “Quarantine Challenge”. While the initiative offered students a playful distraction from isolation, it also displaced canonical artworks into new circuits of determining interpretation shaped by indetermined spectators. For example, it sparked a renewed interest in Gerhard Richter’s Toilet Roll (1965): Nearly sixty years after its creation, Richter’s photo-painting is translated back into a framed image-space within digital networks — as demonstrated by reinterpretations produced by students at a secondary school in Bremen (see fig.5). Perhaps you notice that it is not decided which side the toilet paper unrolls from. Indeterminacy is also a departure from the average.

Mode Three: Aesthetic Action as Deliberate Aspectual Irresolution

Let us now shift from the coronavirus-related home schooling back to the usual disciplinary apparatus of the classroom, where a defined scope of action, a structured distribution of roles (teachers and students), and a purposeful interplay of practice and performance form an adequate site for introducing a new conceptual understanding of the aesthetics, as developed convincingly by Florian Klinger in Aesthetic Action (2024). For Klinger, indeterminacy is not an epistemic uncertainty, not simply a mode of not-knowing, and also not a lack of form. Conceptualized by a nuanced aesthetic distinction, it materializes itself rather in a determined performance of indeterminacy that emerges from a deliberately created aspectual irresolution as aesthetic action. This may sound complicated, but Klinger makes his action-theoretical approach understandable with a simple example:

“We may gain intuitive access to this kind of difference, I suggest, by comparing the actions of a young child, a schoolteacher, and an aesthetic performer in drawing chalk lines on a blackboard. The child draws exuberant but illegible lines and, at best, aspirationally performs an action; the child is still being initiated into intentionally fulfilling a concept of any sort. As they are learning how to write on the board, their lines are a manifestation of an incomplete fulfillment of the concept performing a writing exercise. The schoolteacher, for whom this is simply an everyday part of their work, executes an action that intentionally fulfills the concept performing a writing exercise. The concept is determinate, and the teacher knows what they are doing in this fulfillment: they perform a writing exercise. The determinacy of their action lies in such a knowing what they are doing while they are doing it” (Klinger 2024, 1).

On the one hand, we are confronted with the exuberant yet illegible lines of the child’s hand, and on the other, there is the trained hand of the teacher, capable of executing and fulfilling an exercise. Before introducing Klinger’s third actor – the aesthetic performer – into this classroom scene, I want to recall Vilém Flusser’s thought on the “drilling” and “conditioning” of writing, understood not only pejoratively but as an initial indeterminacy. At first glance, writing appears as the linear progression of characters. It is precisely this alignment in rows, this linear flow, that makes such a strong impression on Flusser: “They make writing seem to express a one-dimensional thinking and so, too, a one-dimensional feeling – desire, judgment, and conduct – a consciousness that was able, through writing, to emerge from the dizzying circles of preliterate consciousness” (Flusser 2011, 7). The teacher’s writing provides orientation: it sets direction, decides among possibilities, and relieves us of the vertigo of all other directions. Yet Flusser’s phrase “dizzying circles” also signals what this linearization leaves behind. With the alphabet, thinking was straightened into lines; in pre-literate cultures, by contrast, thought moved in circles and remained pictorial, what he calls “mythical thinking”. The historical trajectory writing enables is thus a narrowing: the gain of direction coincides with the loss of other and diverse modes of orientation.

“Writing is about setting ideas in lines, for unwritten ideas, left to their own devices, run in circles. This circling of ideas, where any idea can turn back to the previous one, is called mythical thinking in certain contexts. Written signs are quotation marks signaling the onset of linear, directional thinking within mythical thinking. This directional thinking is called logical thinking for reasons still to be discussed. Written signs are quotation marks for logical thinking” (ibid. 6).

With the invention of the alphabet, pictorial thinking was disciplined into symbols. Writing turns inward before outward: diffuse images are translated into discrete signs and addressed to a reader. It is thus political in an original sense, structuring the relation between interiority and the public world. Learning to write marks a cultural and individual transformation. Literacy suppresses associative, image-based thought and subjects thinking to linear order – an effect of form, not content. Alphabetic script straightens circular thought into lines; orthography acts like a corset on speech. As Flusser writes, “Only one who writes lines can think logically, calculate, criticize, pursue knowledge, philosophize – and conduct himself appropriately” (ibid. 7). Writing does not record logical thought – it produces it. Historical consciousness likewise arises through writing, as the world appears as process and causality. This structuring also constrains; because its discipline is constant, it becomes invisible. Here Klinger’s aesthetic performer: Cy Twombly intervenes (see fig.6).

Is the surplus of logical and historical thinking here being painted over, overwritten, undermined, displaced – or merely transferred from the school blackboard into another register, the irrational, through a childlike yet exuberant and illegible gesture of “dizzy lines”? What, then, makes Cy Twombly’s lines a specifically aesthetic act rather than regression, decoration, or expressive excess? Klinger approaches the material from this perspective:

“Perhaps a version of this action can be found in Cy Twombly’s Untitled from 1969: chalk lines are drawn in rows on a dark background, a painting that stages the action of writing on a blackboard. The lines establish the context of teaching and learning through the performance of an exercise – In the sense of exercise that connotes discipline, austerity, and perhaps ascesis – apractice in which the ability to write is affirmed. At the same time, however, the lines present themselves as illegible, a mere physical expression of writing rather than a signified content conveyed by it, manifesting in its looping an exuberance and playfulness that seems properly to pertain not to the teacher but to the learning child” (Klinger 2024, 2).

The crux of Klinger’s aesthetic action lies precisely in the deliberate staging of the crux itself. Cy Twombly’s “chalk lines” simultaneously cross and superimpose two concepts: disciplined and strict writing and the looping movement of a physical gestural trace. They draw out tensions between script and scribble. One can, of course, read this through Flusser’s critical ambivalent lens: Twombly’s erratic, gestural scripts disrupt the smooth surface of literacy, exposing the violence of the line and the suppressed pictorial, bodily dimension of writing and multiple other, maybe mythical, directions. His marks do not abandon writing; but they reveal its conditions and elude the deficit imposed by logical and historical thinking. Yet Klinger draws attention to a more specific tension internal to aesthetic action.

His first claim is that aesthetic action constitutes a distinct kind of human action, irreducible to what he calls historical action, the dominant model in philosophical standard accounts from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx. Historical action is defined by determinacy: agents know what they are doing as they follow a single governing concept, and act mutually within social roles and shared terms. In Aristotelian vocabulary, such action has the form of kinesis – a movement with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Whether successful or not, it remains oriented toward the completion of determinate goals and thereby contributes to the ongoing historical articulation of the human form as an answer: a settled understanding of who we are. Similarly, aesthetic action is – whether one occupies the position of the maker or taker – the action is fully executed and rationally accessible, yet cannot be subsumed under a single action-guiding concept. Twombly’s Untitled stands there as a complete work, but it resists conceptual unification. Second, this means that multiple incompatible action-concepts are not resolved but exhibited in their aspectual competition. Indeterminacy thus becomes the point of the action itself. So, for Klinger, indeterminacy names the form in which aesthetic action stages a crisis of its own conceptual determinability – an effect that dislodges aesthetic performers, makers and takers alike, from the stream of habitual, settled practice: “The thought of aesthetic distinction is the thought of the unsettling of ourselves – of our concepts, of our ways of relating to one another, and indeed of our sense of who we are” (ibid. 7). Thus, the point of aesthetic action lies in unsettling historical action and compelling the disclosure of the human form.

Let us, third, ask what makes Klinger’s approach genuinely refreshing and decisive for our third mode of aesthetic thinking. Whereas classical models of indeterminacy focus on structural blanks in the work or on the effective process of meaning (cf. Iser above), Klinger locates indeterminacy at the level of action itself. Not: “The work is indeterminate, what activates readers,” but: “Here is an action performed, whose concept cannot be fixed.” Indeterminacy is thus no longer primarily hermeneutic or semantic, but action-theoretical: “To act aesthetically is not primarily a matter of what we perceive, believe, feel or imagine – even as all this, to be sure, may be related to aesthetic action in different ways; instead, it is first of all a matter of what we do” (Klinger 2024, 51). Klinger does not abandon perception. He decisively rejects the idea that aesthetic action constitutes the other of rationality (cf. ibid. 27). Aesthetic action can remain rational and justifiable without terminating in conceptual unity. This breaks with romantic indeterminacy, postmodern opacity, and aesthetic mystification (cf. above Mersch/Menke). Indeterminacy remains an immanent possibility of rational action itself – Interactive, socially shared, and recognition-relevant. Aesthetic action thus brings not only concepts, but roles, modes of address, and any social relations into crisis; thus, it is inseparable from the question of who we are: “It does so not by providing answers, resolution, or closure of any sort, but, on the contrary, by unsettling our ways and actualizing our form as question” (Klinger 2025, 53). This makes Klinger’s approach politically connectable without immediately overburdening it with politics. Aesthetic actions do not communicate an alternative order as such; it rather unsettles the historical order. Indeterminacy is therefore not “merely” a space of play, but a moment in which the order of recognition itself becomes destabilized (cf. Honneth vs. Rancière above), making communication conceivable as action that does not reproduce a determined “communitas”. Rather, it opens the possibility for joint action not solely governed by law or predetermined outcomes. But let us recall first the following triad again: Aesthetics belongs to the domain of action, not only to objects, subjects, perception, imagination, and experience; aesthetic action actualizes our human form as a questionable and open form; and for that reason, aesthetic thinking is indispensable for any systematic theory of the human being, affirming aesthetic action as a scope of action of the unclosedness of human form and freedom.

This requires a framework in which indeterminacy functions both as a positive and negative mode of action and a specific mode of judgment. The resources for this are found not in Kant’s theoretical or practical philosophy, but in the “third” Critique of the Power of Judgment, where indeterminacy emerges as the condition of a specific aesthetic reflective judgment rather than a lack of freedom. As Klinger argues, Arendt’s engagement with the Third Critique in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, given in the fall of 1970 at the New School for Social Research in New York, is particularly apt for translating this insight into a pragmatic theory of action, rendering indeterminacy politically and anthropologically productive.

Ordinarily, one links Arendt’s concepts of freedom with “natality” as the capacity to make a beginning or to be a beginning (cf. Arendt 1958, 176-178). Each human introduces a novelty into the world, manifesting this beginning through action in a shared world. How is this theoretically situated?

“Since Kant, making a beginning has been a central concern of this tradition under the concept of rational, self-determined action, and Hegel and Marx understood being a beginning to mean that the acting individual does not have its destiny as an example of a given species, but rather, as a “Gattungswesen”, that gives itself its destiny by producing its concepts together with others in the historical process” (Klinger 2025a, 82; transl. by E.T).

Against readings that reduce freedom to concept-guided or purposive self-determination, Klinger stresses that Arendt situates indeterminacy at the core of freedom: it is not a transitional or incomplete state, but a form that cannot be fully realized to its ends and results, and thus, applies equally to our human form. Indeterminacy is neither a prelude to determination nor its failure, but a mode of actualization defined by remaining negatively open and positively irresolute in the strongest sense of action. A simple example might help to clarify and illustrate this point: Consider a temporary power outage in a neighborhood. Usual routines are interrupted, and no predefined script determines how people should respond. Neighbors gather outside, exchange remarks, improvise small gestures of coordination or support, without immediately agreeing on a common plan or purpose. What matters in this situation is not just the rapid restoration of order through decision or command, but the shared capacity to orient oneself with others under conditions of indeterminacy. Yet, the power outage is not ignored. It is discussed, judged, and responded to. Freedom lies not in resolving indeterminacy or just determining judging causalities but in sustaining a shared orientation. Paraphrasing Klinger, these neighbors do not act toward a determinate end, but engage in action whose purpose is acting together itself: “Its point is strictly to manifest ourselves as ‘worldbuilders’“ (Klinger 2025b, 191). Freedom is enacted through provisional coordination, where judgment and action remain open yet non-arbitrary. Aesthetic reflective judgment is crucial here: unlike general determining and reflective judgment, which produce determinations, its aesthetic variant operates without strict concept, purpose, or interest. As Klinger notes, this absence does not render aesthetic judgment as vague or incomplete. Rather, it marks a specific form of fulfillment in which judgment realizes itself as indeterminate or, as Arendt cites Kant, as a contemplative pleasure:

“Judgment is not practical reason; practical reason ‘reasons’ and tells me what to do and what not to do; it lays down the law… Judgment, on the contrary, arises from ‘a merely contemplative pleasure or inactive delight [untätiges Wohlgefallen]’” (Arendt 1987, 15).

Thus, indeterminacy might not emerge as a weakness of judgment or refusal of responsibility, but as a practiced condition of freedom as an inactive, but still effective delight. Because it can mark a mode of acting with others that preserves plurality without subsuming it under rules, concepts, or ends. As Klinger emphasizes, this is best understood through aesthetic communication: an act shared between sender and receiver, artist and audience, writer and reader. Klinger highlights the difference as follows:

“If nonaesthetic communication fulfills the determinate concepts of this and that (say, using language to the end of asking a question, passing information, giving a description, and so on), then aesthetic communication, according to Kant, is “without concept”– that is, it deploys those determinate concepts in such a way that the result is an indeterminacy” (Klinger 2025b, 193).

For Arendt as well, “without concept” names an indeterminacy that safeguards the non-derivability of judgment from generalities – In the strong sense that, across different registers, she locates this indeterminacy at the core of the political. Yet she does not explicitly articulate a notion of genuinely aesthetic indeterminacy. The indeterminacy of her political judgment remains oriented toward determination, however provisional or contestable the judgment may be. A strictly aesthetic indeterminacy would, for Arendt, appear to mark the end rather than the fulfillment of communication. Nevertheless, as Klinger argues, Arendt’s aesthetic-political judgment provides a framework for an advanced understanding of indeterminacy not as pre-political hesitation or post-political ambiguity, but as a mode of freedom enacted precisely where determination would prematurely foreclose the space of appearance (cf. ibid. 204). According to this, aesthetic communication suspends determinate purposes without collapsing into arbitrariness, transforming ordinary language use by fulfilling – not a particular concept, but the concept of indeterminacy itself. Crucially for Klinger, aesthetic communication is practice, not just theoretical reflection; it belongs to action, not solely to cognitive knowing or judgment. Indeterminacy is not merely thought – it is enacted.

If indeterminacy is to count as a practiced form of aesthetic communication rather than a merely theoretical claim, it must withstand confrontation with concrete, contemporary forms of reception. The following analysis therefore turns to a deliberately challenging case – listening to a seemingly generic pop sample – to test whether and how aesthetic communication can enact conceptual irresolution under conditions that resist canonical aesthetic framing. I focus on Wildfires (2020) by the anonymous British R&B and disco collective SAULT (accessible here). Emerging from the political context of the Black Lives Matter protests and the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, the song appears, at first glance, highly determinate: musically controlled, emotionally focused, and historically situated. Its production and vocal stylings follow the conventions of contemporary R&B; its warm electric bass line, indebted to Motown’s sonic and rhythmic vocabulary, anchors the track in a recognizable lineage of Black musical expression. The restrained groove and intimate vocal delivery evoke mourning rather than agitation.

On first listening, one therefore hardly anticipates – despite subtle but deliberate variations in phrasing – the inconspicuous emergence of the following lyric lines: “We all know it was murder // Murder, murder // Murder.” Semantically, the song might thus be described as protest, lament, or political commentary. Yet this is precisely where its aesthetic action begins. None of these concepts suffices. Wildfires neither simply mobilizes, nor documents, nor ritualizes these conceptual frames in a univocal or unisonous way; instead, it stages their irresolution without resolving them. Crucially, this action does not belong to the creative collective and makers alone. In listening, the taker does not merely receive a finished work, but rahter participates in the continuation and dramaturgy of the aesthetic action. Through repeated listening, what initially appears as a generic track, it transforms into an action that unsettles the taker’s habitual roles – as consumer, political subject, emotional listener, discourse carrier, activist, witness, or socially positioned (un)privileged body – without stabilizing any of them. Furthermore, no single perceptual or semantic direction can be isolated, even in the immediacy of the medium. What persists instead is the simultaneity of determinate yet mutually transforming strands – synchrony without synthesis enacted between producing makers and listening takers. Here, listening itself emerges not primarily as the reception of perceptual input, but as a form of aesthetic action.

To give emphasis on this interpretative claim, a brief engagement with the work of feminist theorist Karen Barad can help to sharpen this point. Trained in particle physics and quantum field theory, Barad develops an account of measurement in which measuring and making are inseparable. Drawing on quantum theory, she argues that phenomena do not pre-exist their observation but emerge through intra-action. As she writes, “complementarity” names “the impossibility of drawing any sharp separation between an independent behavior of atomic objects and their interaction with the measuring instruments” (Barad 2007, 308). Images and representations, accordingly, are “not snapshots of what awaits us but condensations or traces of multiple practices of engagement” (ibid., 53). Applied to music, this means that listening is not secondary to making but constitutes a further site of production. The taker’s listening apparatus – comprising bodies, technologies, spaces, habits, histories, and above all: hearing organs – does not simply decode what the maker has fixed. It actively participates in producing the musical phenomenon as such. Motown is no more a stable object than a Fender bass guitar; both are historical measurements of available musical, technical, and sonic resources. Taking up Barad’s account of measuring-as-making, Wildfires – such as any musical piece – becomes a material-discursive, sonic aesthetic performance in which measuring takes the form of listening to looped, layered, and reworked sonic elements. Wildfires can be listened as indeterminate as any of the music that John Cage wrote, not because of the way that they have been designed or performed, but because at every stage of their construction, they are phenomena that have come into being by virtue of a measurement process. They are musical measurements, assessments, and approximations of a heterogeneous set of available materials and discourses. But music is not a pre-given “object” that later receives “particles” of meaning. Meaning emerges as a specific object of listening through the entanglement of maker and taker. Read through and “listening” with Klinger, Wildfires might thus come into being as a fully executed yet conceptually irresolvable aesthetic action: One that unfolds across the positions of maker and taker alike. Listening does not culminate in resolution or closure, but in a subtle reconfiguration of how we measure, recognize, and question others and ourselves by simultaneously listening in multiple directions. Not as a fixed endpoint of meaning, but as an aesthetic action unfolding, by example, between an instrumental break and a repetitive chorus in Wildfires’s subtle but extraordinarily determined irresolution I or we can care for:

[Instrumental Break]

[Chorus]
But we will never show fear
Even in my eyes
I will always rise
In wildfires
I ain’t never been scared
Even through my tears
I will always care
In wildfires

To conclude with an aesthetic reflective judgement on community and action in everyday life – where wildfires, violence, and solidarity are not fictional motifs but lived realities: indeterminacy is more than a lack of knowledge or a fear of the unknown. When engaged or initially first and foremost perceived, it can take the form of surprise. Surprise, understood as an aesthetic action and gesture in the sense of giving and creating indeterminacy, preserves the capacity to act otherwise – toward oneself and others. Such surprise is undoubtedly risky, especially under conditions shaped by what Rancière calls the calculated and restrictive police. Yet this risk is worth taking, not in the name of duty, but in the name of indeterminacy. In such moments, indeterminacy emerges as a political gesture that interrupts mechanical reactions, short-circuited judgments, and ready-made answers, opening a space of connectedness through care – carried by worry, grief, instability, and indeterminacy itself.

CONTOURS OF INDETERMINACY

A Conclusion for a Gloomy Animal That Still Combs Itself

Tentatively, this essay began with examples drawn from everyday life, tracing the ways in which indeterminacy is not something we can repress, but something we share — between expectation, calculation, and suffering. A threefold commitment was meant to show how different modes of aesthetic thinking constitute a critical practice of indeterminacy. In the first mode, aesthetic thinking appears in a mediating, slightly didactic register: it demonstrates how art works with and transgressively serves indeterminacy. It’s guiding indeterminacy by activating semantic and sensuous processes that offer an alternative to discursive and propositional thought, and by challenging our reflective and determinative powers of judgment and imagination. In the second mode, aesthetic thinking asserts itself within the social field as a reconfiguration of the distribution of the sensible, intervening by means of indeterminacy as a medium of dissensus and thereby separating an aesthetic community from representational and ethically stabilized orders. The third mode takes a further step, presenting aesthetic thinking as a specific form of aesthetic action. Here, the surplus of the aesthetics is no longer located in cognition, perception or political separation, but in a determinate form of indeterminacy as action itself. Aesthetic action suspends not only the unity of intention, concept, and social role, but sets an unsettling communication into motion, holding every determination in suspension and deliberately calling the human form into question. Across all three modes, the aim was not to retreat into an indeterminacy of the mysterious, into sovereign autonomy, or into a surplus of meaning attributed to the singular signifier “art.” Rather, in the spirit of Gerhard Gamm, the focus remained on determinate indeterminacy, always oriented in two directions: downward, toward its connection with life in its historically sedimented form; and upward, toward the sovereign opening of an indeterminacy that tears apart every context and discourse that determines meaning, without retreating the enigmatic indeterminacy into ineffective abstraction (cf. Gamm 2007, p. 33). Applied aesthetic thinking thus appeared as a balancing act – a passage across the tightrope that Gamm anchors at two ends: “What art gains in freedom, it loses in meaning” (ibid., p. 30). Unlike the scientist’s hypothesis, the three modes of thinking did not aim to dissolve indeterminacy like dissolving a given natural or theoretical world into categories. It moved otherwise. It sought suspension rather than reduction and abstraction – replacing the given and its classifications with an indeterminate human form in question that performs a forceful form of freedom, crystallizing, for instance, in Gamm’s literary found footage of “the gloomy animal that combs itself”. Furthermore, aesthetic action shifts the common registers of indeterminacy. What begins as suffering – issuing from an inscrutable source within an indeterminate human form – becomes transformed: rational yet sensuous, pleasing yet resistant, inhabitable yet irresoluted. Its force matches scientific unrest, yet it refuses resolution. Indeterminacy here is no deficit awaiting closure, no preliminary stage on the way toward determination. It is a condition. A persistence of sense without final arrest – not a riddle to be solved, but a field within which aesthetic action installs an opacity one can inhabit in place of the foreign hardness of the given. In this respect, aesthetic engagement accepts an economy distinct from theoretical reasoning, an attitude captured with precision by Hans Blumenberg’s aesthetic reflective judgement on the objet ambigu of Paul Valéry’s aesthetics in general and his Socratic dialogue Eupalinos in particular:

“The interpretation of the work of art will therefore always be satisfied with a solution that is not the dissolution of the given but may leave conscious the indeterminacy of other possibilities, while the scientist’s theoretical hypothesis is burdened with the possibility of other, surpassing solutions, of which none can, however, definitively rule out that their verification may fail” (Blumenberg 2020, 435).

Indeterminacy thus marks neither epistemic weakness nor methodological incompleteness. It names the indeterminate space in which experience becomes shareable precisely because it is not exhausted; where judgment operates without the guarantee of final grounds; where action proceeds without closure; yet remains within form. Aesthetic thinking does not settle the resistance of the world. It displaces it. It relocates it into the domain of an indeterminate human form – where irresolution can be lived with, where opacity may endure, be carried, be continued. Indeterminacy promises no stability. It sustains presence. It guarantees no consensus. It permits attunement. It does not conclude meaning. It keeps meaning in motion – fragile, situated, momentary. Here aesthetic thinking and action reach both its liminal joy and its negative pleasure – perhaps even its justification to draw the enigmatic objet ambigu both, closer and farer, as Paul Valéry’s Aesthetics reminds us:

“Pleasure exists only in the moment and there is nothing more individual, more uncertain, more incommunicable. Men’s judgments concerning it provide no basis for reasoning, for far from analyzing their subject, they merely add an attribute of indeterminateness: to say that an object is beautiful is to make an enigma of it” (Valéry 1964, 49f.).