F R I D A Y, 2 6 J U N E 2 0 0 9

The Seductiveness of the Metaxy

The Interval is the metaphysical space between the eternal world of Forms and the
perishable world of perceptible things, between the noumenal and the
phenomenal, between the immanent and the transcendent, between Being and
becoming. It is the mystical medium which enables communication between the
higher and the lower regions of the spirit. It is the eschatological liminal space
between heaven and hell. It is the neutral, morally ambivalent intermediate zone
between good and evil.

When we speak of the metaphysics of the

Interval we are, however, using a term whose primary meaning could not be more
mundanely material. For, the interval is a dead metaphor that originates in the
earthworks of Roman military architecture. The intervallum was literally that which
lay between two lines of stakes (a vallum, or palisaded entrenchment); it was the
space between the ramparts of a legionary camp. In Greek, however, the interval
is abstract from the outset, referring to spatial or temporal relation rather than to
any definite physical space. It is , the metaxy, a substantival use of the
compound adverb/preposition (in the midst of, from between and
together with), used of place (between) and time (between-whiles,
meanwhile). In grammar, is the name for the neuter gender, the class of
declensions that are neither masculine nor feminine. Derived from , the
noun metaxyts ( ) is another term for the diastema (
space between), or interval in music. In the sixth century A.D., the Greek
philosophical scholiasts of the late Roman period, for example Olympiodorus
Philosophus, who wrote commentaries on Plato and Aristotle, coined the term
metaxylogia () to refer to a digression, an intermediate passage within
a text, a temporary lapse from the main subject. The text that follows might
therefore also be named a metaxylogy, in the sense that it is a digression in
between texts arising from the Seductiveness of the Interval exhibition installed
within the space of the Romanian Pavilion at this years Venice Art Biennale, but
also in the sense that it is a discourse, a logos concerning the Interval, or metaxy.

In the singular, does not

occur as such in the extant works of Plato, although Aristotle (Metaphysics, 987b)
reports that his teacher admitted an in-between () class of things, in the
interval between things perceptible to the senses ( ) and the Forms, or
Ideas ( ), knowable by the mind; these are the objects of mathematics,
eternal and immutable like the Forms, but unlike them multiple. The interval is
therefore necessarily a space of multiplicity, participating in both the immutability of
the eternal and the plurality of the temporal. Indeed, it is as a neuter plural (
), referring to intermediate or in-between things, that the metaxy occurs in
Platos Gorgias (468a), where Socrates discovers through dialogue with Polus that
there is a neutral class of things, qualities, states and actions which are neither
good nor bad ( ). While our actions may in themselves be
neutral or intermediate (Socrates gives the examples of sitting, walking, and
running), we always act in pursuit of the good, however. Even evil actions are
committed for the sake of the good; they are evil as a result of their agents
perverted understanding, whereby the Good and the Truth become obnubilated in
the soul. Similarly, in the Neoplatonist philosophy of Plotinus, the metaxy occurs
with the masculine plural definite article: men are (the in-between
ones), in the middle place between gods and beasts (Enneads, III, 8, 10-11). Just
as the earth lies in the middle point of the heavens, so man is suspended between
god and beast, matter and spirit, time and eternity, corruption and perfection. This
position is not, however, one of inertia, but rather one of continual tension: caught
between the lower and upper strata of the cosmic order, man alternately inclines
towards both ( ).
 Whereas for Plotinus man is the interval, the
middle term between lower and higher, between beasts and gods, with a shift of
metaphysical perspective man himself might become the lower term, with a further
interval opening up between him and the gods. Likewise, the earth, instead of
being the middle point, might equally be seen as the lowest point on a vertical
scale at whose pinnacle are situated the heavens. In a dialogue entitled On the
Obsolescence of the Oracles, by Platonist philosopher Plutarch, we learn (the
speaker at this point in the text is Cleombrotus) that there is an interval between
earth and moon ( ). Far from being void, this interval is filled
with air (, (lower) air, as opposed to , the upper air, aether, or
heaven), which, were it removed, would destroy the consociation () of
the universe. The lower air is also the abode of the intermediate race of daimons
( ), whose function is interpretative, hermeneutic, and without whom
man would either be severed from the gods altogether or subject to the confusion
of unmediated contact with them (De defectu oraculorum, 416e-f). According to
Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (De somniis, I, 141), on the other hand, the
daimons of the philosophers are, in fact, the angels of the divine word (
) of Hebrew scripture, intermediaries of the Interval, who convey back and
forth () the exhortations of the Father to His children and the wants of
the children to the Father.

The plastic image of this traffic or

commerce between the world above and that below, which occurs within the ambi-
directional space of the Interval, is, of course, the ladder. Philo of Alexandria, in his
commentary on Jacobs vision of the ladder (Genesis, 28:12), says that
(ladder) is a figurative name for , whose base () is the earth and whose
top () is heaven (De somniis, I, 134). Furthermore, just as the universe is,
figuratively, a ladder, or interval, so too is the soul. Here, the foot of the ladder is
sense perception, corresponding to the earthly element, while the top is the mind,
the nous (), corresponding to the heavenly element (De somniis, I, 146). Like
the angels, the words of God move up and down the entire length of this ladder,
reaching down through the interval to draw the mortal mind upward.
The minds ascent of the ladder is an arduous undertaking, an exertion of the soul
that Philo names ascesis (, exercise, training, practice). The ascent is not
continuous, but rather oscillates, with the practiser/ascetic alternately gaining and
losing height, now wakeful, now asleep, pulled in opposite directions by the better
and the worse (De somniis, I, 150-152). The practisers thus dwell in the interval;
they are midway between extremes ( ). At the topmost
extreme dwell the wise, who have always striven for the heights, and at the
bottommost extreme dwell the wicked, who have ever made dying and corruption
their practice.
Mans condition as one of those-in-between, pulled between good and evil,
inclining now toward base perdition, now toward the transcendent, is conditional
upon his existence within time, within becoming. For those in Hades or Olympus, in
hell or heaven, which exist outside of time, further change is impossible, however.
Yet even at this eschatological level there is an interval, an intermediate state that
is neither good nor evil, wisdom nor wickedness, hell nor heaven, angel nor devil.
According to a mediaeval popular tradition, traces of which can also be found in the
legend of the Voyage of St Brendan, there was a third, neutral faction of angels
during the revolt in Heaven, who were neither for God nor His enemy, Lucifer.
These angels were cast out of Heaven, but rejected by Hell. Instead, they dwell in
the interval between the two eschatological planes, an indeterminate zone that is
neither good nor evil. In the Divina Commedia of Dante, they are to be found in the
vestibule or threshold of Hell, among those who are neither dead nor alive, the
sect of caitiffs, hateful to God and to His enemies (la setta dei cattivi, / a Dio
spiacenti ed a nemici sui Inferno, 3, 62-63).

The interval as threshold is also the

locus of a peculiar, intermediate genre of literature, the or joco-
serium (serious-jesting or jesting-serious -), whose history
is traced by Mikhail Bakhtin in Chapter Four of Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics.
The genre springs from the tradition of the Socratic dialogue, of which, apart from
Xenophon, Plato is the only extant exponent. In itself a discursive form of the
interval, a polyphonic intermediation whereby latent truth and knowledge are
brought to birth by the participating speakers, or ideologues, as Bakhtin names
them, the is an eschatological dialogue on the threshold
(Schwellendialog, or , in Russian) that takes place in the interval
between earth and underworld or between earth and heaven. One of the most
famous classical examples is Senecas Apocolocyntosis (Pumpkinification), a
parodic apotheosis, in which the Emperor Claudius, having given up the ghost via
the back passage, is turned away from the gates of Olympus.

Menippus, Diego Velzquez

The chief protagonist of the serious-jesting eschatological dialogue on the

threshold is, however, Menippus of Gadara, a third-century B.C. Cynic philosopher
of Phoenician origin, who is said to have been the originator of this literary genre,
known also as Menippean Satire, although none of his writings are extant. (In
Lives of Eminent Philosophers (6, 101), Diogenes Laertius reports that Menippus
composed, among other writings, a , or Journey to the Underworld.)
Menippus, as satirical ideologue of the Interval, is the central character in a number
of dialogues by Lucian of Samosata, all of which take place on the threshold
between worlds: for example, the Icaromenippus, in which the Cynic fashions
himself wings and flies to heaven to discover the (less than flattering) truth about
the gods; and the Necyia, possibly inspired by the lost writings of the Gadarene, in
which he descends to Hades to mock at the miserable fate of kings and
millionaires in the afterlife.

The continues as a distinct,

recognisable genre until as late as the seventeenth century, a fine example being
the monumental anthology Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Socraticae Joco-Seriae
(Amphitheatre of Jesting-Serious Socratic Wisdom), published by Caspar
Dornavius in 1619. The Amphitheatrum contains liminal, intermediate texts,
ambiguously situated between high and low, which treat derisory subjects in a
grandiloquent way, or which are simultaneously scholastic and absurd, such as the
Disquisitio Physiologica de Pilis (Physiological Disquisition on Hair) by Joannes
Tardinus, which painstakingly exhausts all the philosophical, theological, historical,
geographical, medical and scientific possibilities of the subject, or the De Peditu
eiusque Speciebus, Crepitu et Visio, Discursus Methodicus, In Theses digestus
(On Farting and its Species, Crackle and Stench, Methodical Discourse, Arranged
in Theses), by the pseudonymous Buldrianus Sclopetarius, a mock philological,
historical, scientific and even musicological tract whose title speaks for itself.

In conclusion, as a space
of tension between two static extremes, it is only the existence of the metaxy that
enables the possibility of ambi-directional movement, thereby creating a medium of
communication. The metaxy can also be ambivalent Bakhtin would say
carnivalesque abolishing and merging hierarchical opposites. And hence the
seductiveness of the metaxylogical.
 (c) Alistair Ian Blyth, Bucharest, 2009
Published in The Seductiveness of the Interval. Romanian Pavilion - 53rd
International Art Exhibition. La Biennale di Venezia 7th June-22nd November 2009
by the Romanian Cultural Institute of Stockholm
15 :1 0
P O S T E D B Y AI B LYT H AT
L A B E L S : BAKH TIN , DAN TE , D E PED ITU EIU SQU E SPEC IEBU S ,
OLYMP IO D OR U S PH IL OSOPH U S , PH IL O OF AL EX AN DR IA , PL ATO ,
P L OTIN U S , TH E SEDU C TIVEN ESS OF TH E IN TERVAL , TO
ME TAX Y , VEN IC E BIEN N AL E