In Oedipus the King the tragic conflict still centres, at least in appearance, on specific concerns: the throne of Thebes and the queen who is both mother and wife. In The Bacchae, by contrast, Dionysus and Pentheus have nothing concrete to fight over. Their rivalry centres on divinity itself: but behind that divinity there lies only violence. To compete for divinity is to compete for a chimera, because the reality of the divine rests in its transcendental absence. It is not the hysterical rivalry of men that will engender gods - only unanimous violence can accomplish that. Insofar as divinity is real, it cannot serve as a prize to be won in a contest. Insofar as it is regarded as a prize, it is merely a phantom that will invariably escape man’s grasp and turn to violence.
Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred
Within the exhibition structure certain discourses are played out, certain positions are put at stake. The exhibition is an empirical object with which to understand artwork, history and the production of knowledge, but also, allows a challenge to be set, arguments to be laid down and battles to be fought. The combat takes place on a number of levels, and is scarred by continually oscillating internal infractions. Claims are made for position, space, attention and meaning. This is true not only of the process of hanging or curating an exhibition, but also of the exhibition itself.
Contested Ground brings these questions to the fore. What claims can an artwork make to a certain ground? What desires are played out when objects ‘touch’ each other in time, circumstance, space and co-incidence? What occurs in the ‘between’ between works of art, and what claims can these works make on that between space? What this amounts to is a political question. The space between beings, the space on which beings rest, the ground they mark out, what is contested, is necessarily engaged with the political. The ground here, what the contestation is over, is more than just topographical, it is ideological, ethical, political, aesthetic, &c. What the ground amounts to then is the structures and formations of systems of thought that define how one makes decisions and about what the decision is made.
What final foundation do these claims use to mediate their battle? Through the procession of the recent history of philosophy the foundation on which we may have once stood has been evacuated. It has been cleared, withdrawn, removed and abolished, according to Heidegger, what now remains is an abyss. Whereas, within what we call foundationalism (the form of thought that supposes that society and/or politics are founded on undeniable, ultimate and immutable principles), the question of being had recourse to a higher fundamental, or transcendent Other (otherwise known as logos, substance, spirit, the absolute, infinity, God, idea &c), post-foundationalism removes this ultimate foundation of Being from the equation, replacing it with the absence of ground. Heidegger withdraws the ground from the metaphysical question, leaving us in an a-byssal position. The ultimate ground of the social on which the political ‘decision’ is made has been removed, however, as Oliver Marchart argues in his recent book Post-Foundational Political Thought, this does not mean the complete removal of all grounds. In fact, post-foundational as opposed to anti-foundational thought, suggests that the foundations for the social are removed and replaced in a processural manner, oscillating continuously, grounding and ungrounding. Marchart accounts for this in an adroit move; utilising the Heideggerian concept of ‘ontological difference’ he posits that the field of politics is conditioned by this difference. At the ontic level, the level of things, he positions politics, as in the day to day running of a state etc. at the ontological level he positions the political, as the question of the nature of politics. This he names political difference.
Marchart’s thesis provides the conditions for a processural movement of ungrounding and grounding to occur temporally. The social sphere is articulated through a process whereby one claim makes the jump from the particular to the universal, instituting itself in a hegemonic procedure. This hegemonic nodal point seeks to ground society, give sense to it, however, as there is an inherent lack within the particular claim to universality that comes from it’s very position as particular, i.e. it cannot speak universally, it ultimately fails. The failure of the nodal point to speak universally, to gain full presence within society and totalise the field of discourse, its inherent lack or constitutive split comes from the political difference Marchart determines.
As he asserts:
[W]hat occurs within the moment of the political […] is the following double-folded movement. On the one hand, the political, as the instituting moment of society, functions as a supplementary ground to the groundless stature of society, yet on the other hand this supplementary ground withdraws in the very moment it institutes the social. As a result, society will always be in search for an ultimate ground, while the maximum that can be achieved will be a fleeting and contingent grounding by way of politics - a plurality of partial grounds.
The ground achieved is necessarily and productively contingent. It is through this contingency and the plurality of partial grounds that the political comes into play within social discourse. If particular subjectivities come into conflict and they can have no claim to a higher principle to mediate their discourse the resulting crisis must make an appeal to a quasi-transcendental ground. A hegemonic operation that instates temporarily one particular claim to fill the position of Master signifier.
The shift to discussion of signification is a pertinent one. We understand the aporias inherent in signification - that there is a constitutive gap between saying and meaning - and that this is a tendency that pertains to all signifying structures. What we must come to terms with is that the inherent and necessary contingency constitutive of the political applies within the sphere of the exhibition. That the political decision based on the contingent relation between the signifier and signified gets taken within the exhibition structure. That the process of viewing art is constituted by the very political paradox, the foundational abyss, the grounding and ungrounding of the sphere that we are discussing.
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