iam1969

There is an essay by Wassily Kandinsky (1982) with the peculiar title ‘And’. In it, Kandinsky inquires as to the word that characterizes the twentieth century in contrast to the nineteenth century. His surprising answer is that, while the nineteenth century was dominated by Either or, the twentieth was to be devoted to work on And. Formerly: separation, specialization, efforts at clarity and the calculability of the world; now: simultaneity, multiplicity, uncertainty, the issue of connections, cohesion, experiments with exchange, the excluded middle, synthesis, ambivalence.

The vagueness of And is the theme of the latter world, which is ours. Its farewell to order, its overflowing chaos, its extravagant hope for unity, its helplessness in the face of merely additive growth, its limits and limitlessness, the increasingly illusive borders and the anxiety that they arouse – all that lures and thrills in And. The Either-or does not really terminate in the inconclusiveness, one could even say the undifferentiated mercifulness, of And. If so, then only imperfectly, vaguely and dangerously. Certainly, the irredeemable globality of the world speaks in favor of And. The And even worms its way through the armed borders, but this only makes the dangers general and indefensible.

The global, diffuse and formless character of And is upsetting to many people. The dis-alienation of the alien and the concomitant dis-posession of that which is one’s own, both involuntarily produced by the age of And, are experienced as a threat. Without Either-or, they say, they cannot live and, they add, cannot even conceive of the And. So And is by no means the beginning of paradise on earth. Circumstances of a completely new type are probably beginning here. The world of Either-or in which we think, act and live is becoming false. In one way or another, this is the beginning of conflicts and experiments beyond Either-or. 

From  page 1-3. Beck, U. (1997). The reinvention of politics : rethinking modernity in the global social order. Cambridge, UK