Elasticity and Instantaneity

…orthogonal slippage must be seen as a process that specifies as precisely as possible, without vectorizing or emphasizing. This slippage must be read as a leap into another dimension, or rather, into another register of images. It would mark the access to a strange domain of the physics of matter, where the latter would offer no resistance to expansion. It is an indeterminate zone, in which action is no longer follwed by reaction, as in the peculiar behavior of a piece of rubber stretched beyond its normal usage but before it breaks. It is a field of experience outside of the ordinary, where things are no longer resolved in terms of a minimizing of tension.
Bernard Cache. Earth Moves. p. 38

He continues a moment later,

Hysteresis is a gap in time of the world through which we perceive pure instantaneity. It is the time of a universal lapping of waves that cannot be represented by a straight line or even a swirl, but only by a surface of variable curvature that is perpetually out of phase. It is the time that we perceive beneath the precariousness of things. It is that fragility of configurations in a state of hysteresis, while any expansion stretches out form and any return releases it; it is thus when any configuration escapes precariousness only in its transition toward a form that is always further expanded. Strictly speaking, the ungraspable is not the obscure or the informal but that which, in the full light of day, can be apprehended only as it is transformed.

Bernard Cache. Earth Moves. p. 39

All emphasis mine.

2 Comments

  1. […] previously, but it takes on new meaning now. Synthesizing what Bernard Cache calls the “interval” between cause and effect into the “architecture of the moment before…” I […]

  2. […] and its destruction. It’s precisely what was significant about the Bernard Cache quotes posted previously – especially these bits… It is an indeterminate zone, in which action is no longer […]


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