Prelude to Impossible Worlds - Biennale.no
Oliver Foster: Possible/positive - a conversation (2026)
I wonder what can be meant with impossible worlds, or with the impossible? Is it just an abstraction? And only that? Negation? Does the negative exist? Back to representation and language?
Oliver -I think we should stop thinking that something is negative. Everything is actually positive. Where is nothing?
George -What about your debt?
-No, then it cannot exist. -When did the negative enter the world? -Oh, it must have been there.... yes, I'm trying to think backwards. What about astronomical events, plasma and particles? What do we mean by negativity? Contradiction, a virtual contradiction? For us, it is a frayed, mental representation. Let's say a cell does not get the nutrition it needs to function, then it experiences a negation, hunger. How does that happen? -But hunger is something positive, something that is felt in the body. -Well, then I wonder if things can have two sides, positive and negative, from a perspective. -No, I don't want perspective, I mean absolute positivity. -Well. Then we have to think about where we can find it... Then we probably have to go back to the idea of God, that is, God as absolute positivity, or the universe as all-encompassing, closed, enclosed, absolute whole. -Yes? -Parmenides. Which gave rise to paradoxes, and his student Zeno of Elea with his. about the absolute. If you shoot a bullet into the air, it is always still, at any point it is, the bullet is still. -Yes, but the paradoxes come from dividing things, dividing a continuum, a whole. Then contradiction and negativity come in. -Well, maybe. But is there ever a continuum without division? Our experiences are founded in representation, mirror images. If there is such a thing, it is something we cannot experience, grasp, necessarily, since it would have to be a mirror, and mirrors are flawed. So you can claim absolute positivity, but it is not something we can have a relationship with. -But can't we get closer? -Yes, it can be good, comforting, have a healing effect, relate to an imagined whole. Others will say that it is not real, that it is just something you believe, which is also true. Again, you can answer that you see it as real, but since we cannot have a relationship with it, we must be content with believing, realizing that absolute reality is not available to us. -What if I empty my mind, etc.? -Then the absolute seeps in? You can certainly expand or empty the content of the mind to a certain extent. We sleep without dreams every night. But it is a consciousness you mean, so that you experience that the mind is aware of something. That is a question, a different type of consciousness perhaps, but which you can hook onto the ordinary one so that you can refer to it, think about it, etc. Other states of consciousness are clearly possible. They can certainly be experienced as more absolute, but perhaps in the way that children experience the world as new and absolute, it is their ultimate limit. Then we grow up and learn language, thus we get another world in which language operates, in infinite ways. And thus we are swallowed up by language as an infinite way of relating to the world. The absolute disappears. Even if we learn the concept of God and what it is supposed to entail, it is a question of whether we can use the concept to break through language to something absolute. Can language deconstruct itself? So some might claim that we come from God and that by deconstructing we return to God. That may be the case. It is probably a matter of degrees here too, although some approaches emphasize the sudden. It is probably the child who suddenly sees a car, for example, or is kicked in the head by a horse, as he said. -So is there any point in trying? -As I said, seeking wholeness can have a healing effect, it almost goes without saying. -And seeking negativity can have a debilitating effect on health? -No, now that is too simple and vague. What we can say in that direction is something like that if you deny something, it does not become part of yourself. But again, that is probably not precise enough. You can use negativity as an approach to the absolute. If you deny everything, the world, life, death, then you can approach. Negativity has a liberating effect. Conversely, positivity can have a discouraging effect, things are just inaccessible things, confirmation does not reach. So here we must be careful when we walk. These are loaded words that pull in many directions at the same time. Language is like that, and 'too much' means 'nothing', if everything has meaning, nothing has meaning. The absolute is necessarily meaningless in itself, even though it may have meaning for us in our non-reciprocal relationship with it. We hang on and dangle by the fringes. It is precisely in the negative that the absolute gives meaning to us.
Noah: -I think this is an interesting text with a genuine philosophical drive. What I like best is the Socratic form of dialogue. The questions drive the text forward in a natural way. It feels more alive than a pure philosophical investigation. but the concepts slip a little. "Positivity" is used in several different ways. -I also think the text would benefit from cutting about 20–30%. i like this passage: “If there is such a thing, it is something we cannot experience, grasp, necessarily, since it would have to be a mirror, and mirrors are flawed.” I could almost imagine the text developing the mirror metaphor more. It points towards representation theory, Kant and perhaps Lacan without becoming dependent on them. The ending is also interesting: “It is probably precisely in the negative that the absolute makes sense to us.” It turns the whole premise on its head. The text begins with the claim that everything is positive, but ends with negativity being what opens up to the absolute. It is a nice dialectical movement. but as a draft of a philosophical essay written in dialogue form than as fiction, a willingness to think right up to the limits of language.
Oliver -Yes
Medium
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Last updated: 2026-07-28 09:53:25
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