“The Wish Not to Be an Image…”
A conversation with Hans Ulrich Reck

REMOTEWORDS: In your book “Mythos Medienkunst” (1) there are “Merksätze zur Kunst (und ihrer Medialität) in Kürze”/Maxims on art (and its mediality) in brief.  The first maxim states: “Image is not art.” Why?

Hans Ulrich Reck:
Because the sphere of the arts includes much more than just visual art. We meanwhile understand art—in thoughtless abridgment and out of habit—almost always as only “visual images”, that is, a specific way of “constructing images”. Although anyone who thought it through would say that theater, literature, poetry, and so on are also arts, at least sometimes. But when we speak of art we meantime, quite automatically and in an overblown way, mean “image construction”.

This background is probably determined by the standpoint that the essence of artistic production is what is closest to fantasy and the imagination. Since the Renaissance there has been a cult of the mind’s thought-inspired creation of images—of ‘concetto’, ‘bozetto’ or ‘disegno’—as the ‘true’ hallmark of ‘true’ artistry, usual since the days of Giorgio Vasari:  masterpieces from the machine room of the art-devising brain.
Therefore this imaginatively anticipatory description of pictures was a feature of ‘true art” already ahead of, and beyond, all further explanations. This is well established and goes in many directions, for instance that it is the artist’s drawings that are considered the decisive aspect. This finds expression in the fact that such drawings have been collected in graphic cabinets since the 17th century, which is so crucial to the formulation of an autonomously valued art sphere.
This is easily comprehensible in its aesthetically normative force, up to a Bruce Nauman who actually worked sculpturally, but whose drawings already contain something essential before any further physical materialization and realization. This is confirmed by the compelling force of the typical West European cult of imaginizing creation; Albrecht Dürer called it the “inwendige Figur” or “internal figuration”. And ever since then we have believed that the essence of art is this kind of pursuit of fantasy and the anticipation of works in the mind.
For which reason we assume that ‘composing images’ is something genuinely authentic and distinctively personal. And is so in contrast to film, which necessitates a large technical apparatus. ‘Composing images’ has always been genuinely creative, and ‘visual art’ stands as a shortened form of this.

When I say “Constructing images is not identical to art” or also “Art is not constructing images”, I mean that it is time to honor once again not only the visually mediated imagination, but the entire body’s insistence on participating in the formative process of the arts. It is time to aesthetically expand our power to think along in tandem with art, because much has to do with its social context and not with static images.
REMOTEWORDS, for example, to me represents nothing that pictures want to do. Naturally you can say that your project was always specifically about script images. It would be in just such a context that an art historian would probably place these, because there are actually exhibitions and publications where the writing itself has become the image. But that is not the essential factor. Which is much more about an intervention in a social technology, an infrastructure, intervention in a communication technique, in a promise of the ubiquitous possibility of viewing, that is, in the complex of the magic of seeing. In this respect we can simply conclude: There are so many images that go increasingly beyond the arts that the criterion ‘art’ as the main medium of image production has been drastically relativized, but also must be further widened and conceptually and theoretically problematized.

Art can no longer justify itself by ‘composing images’, because it is perhaps no more the great authority for image production. And naturally there are many images that no longer correspond to the criteria of ‘art’.

Voilà the brief maxim: “art is not image”, which is where all these reflections end up.

REMOTEWORDS: In this context I would also like to talk about how electronic images behave as opposed to conventional pictures. Vilém Flusser had once noted that we used to go on pilgrimages to pictures, whereas now they follow us everywhere. And that was twenty years ago…

Hans Ulrich Reck: …Yes, how clairvoyant.

REMOTEWORDS: …and especially today where almost everyone is fitted out with a smartphone, iPad and other mobile devices.

Hans Ulrich Reck: Yes, we are the ones being observed by pictures as well as by their fabrication and distribution technologies, which have become the actual techniques of manipulating, forming and also controlling our body, mind and soul. That is quite irrefutable. We can no longer even imagine all the data ascertainments being permanently projected at us: a kind of panoptic compilation. Biographies are being increasingly compiled also on our normal business and everyday life for official police purposes. We used to call that being ID’d and registered and would have protested, but today this is not only normal but emphatically desired, libidinously colonized by all-consuming man, who till now was the last drastic figure in an artificial transformation of anthropology. There is nothing we do that is not observed, measured, registered and archived. A generating knowledge that takes on a life of its own, not to mention the cameras in public space. Remarkably, most, or at least too many, of the people no longer react with a feeling of violation but with positive, existentially fulfilling approval. I am being watched, therefore I am. That is the new symptom of the digital feel of existence, a singularly welcome external control system as a paradoxical autonomy scheme.
The images accompany us; they practically harass us, perhaps even smother us. And against the background of Flusser’s writings, Dieter Kamper has even spoken of a “pictures prison”. Of images that hold us prisoner. A radicalization which 15 years ago I would have thought was apocalyptically exaggerated, like a metaphor to designate a problem. But in the meantime it has become empiricist and analytically describable.
Not to mention that increasingly more people are willingly assimilated into ‘image construction’ (or in my way of speaking, are willingly imprisoned) for the purpose of fashioning themselves. Permanent image pressure is the rule. If as an ethnologist we shift the perspective a bit, we can say that we are here dealing with a society that reveres systematic lunacy and does so in a quite self-evident manner. Characterized by a picture-mad delirium.

Why do we submit to such pressure and such effort? Why do we expose ourselves to them? What kind of an existential form is this in which you want to be constantly assured of yourself?
Generationally, this would mean eluding pictures, but also means that there still is ‘external factuality’, something existential that is not picture. When I observe this today, I see—to speak cautiously—that most people are no longer looking for this something or need it.

REMOTEWORDS: In this context I wonder if there can still be a presumption that pictures can be assimilated into art. Does the image still have a chance in art?

Hans Ulrich Reck: Indeed it is getting ever more difficult. If we say art has not only to do with the givens and the possible, but that it processes the impossible, then this must very well mean that pictorial effects can only be artistically reflected via some kind of iconoclasm. That is, via a war on images: a denial of, or breaking of, images. Naturally not in the sense, for instance, of Islamic or of previous genuinely Christian terror, but as real work on the problem of images.

Let’s take the important example of Pop Art. It has been increasingly overlooked (since, for art’s claim, this is irrelevant) that Pop Art, by means of its strategy of duplication and irritation, had always had an iconoclastic twist to it. Which soon appeared fixated, so a case-by-case attempt was made to expand further, for example in the form of a reversal, of a ‘détournement’ or ‘détour’ as the Situationists called it. Or with Michael Schirner who for decades has repeatedly addressed the power of pictures in our head, whereby well-known photographs are only set down and used as descriptive indexes. This too is a relevant engagement with the phenomenon of the picture from the position of a radical skepticism of appearances and presences, that is, of pictoriality in the pure sense of a visual attendant.

I believe that art has the important mission to reflect on this and not simply serve visual needs.

REMOTEWORDS: What picture has most recently fascinated you?

Hans Ulrich Reck: That’s difficult to say, because my thinking has long ago shifted to a different kind of visualization of artistic projects or acts. What interests me with artists is in fact their thinking and how it behaves distinctly from their work. Which only succeeds dynamically, that is, in the relationship to actions and not via representations. To me those are the preliminary models and maquettes that you tinker with in order to describe something in a variable way. Image is then something that tags along in the communication about a problem, but not in the sense of an evident image that would be engraved within me.

REMOTEWORDS: We are writing your REMOTEWORDS statement on the Haus für electronische Künste in Basel. In “The Myth of Media Art” you speak of “the sober definition of its media-art character also applies to its production technologies.” But this is only second best.  You suggest somewhat jokingly that would be the same as speaking of “oil art” instead of landscape painting. Is there even such a thing as electronic art?

Hans Ulrich Reck: I had already pointed this discussion out in my work “Kunst als Medientheorie“ (2) Among others, the question was: What if the technical feature of art is made into a character trait? If, for instance, electronic control on a digital basis is declared to be a generic term. That leads to a series of questions as to whether art can or should be so described. I think not.
We should rank the technical tests of an art-induced aesthetic transformation of the lifeworld together with an art that subscribes to technical utopias. That is, programmatically uses and continues what the aesthetic Constructivism of the 1920s in all of Europe had tried, which engages with technical media because these—in contrast to the long marginalized artists’s efforts—lead to the center of society and make themselves felt in the production, not only in the circulatory sphere of symbols or even of an art-approachable social habitus of ‘intimate’ cultural connoisseurship and demonstration. We would have once emphatically said: “Art in the production.” Thus: think of factories as an art principle. Achieving mechanized life with compositional means. There ‘composing images’ as such vanishes in a natural way. The essence of electronic art would be a comparable artistic reflection of the electronic mass media. Along with Alexander Kluge, I would still say: “You can only fight products with products.” Not with discourse.

Thus far electronic art would be an art that sees a difference in, and by way of, the transformation of electronic mass media. To be seen in a whole series of works by the group “Knowbotic Research” which has exemplarily been around since the mid 1990s. Here art is not produced superficially or in reference to a claim that can only materialize in the field of art.

Thus, “electronic art” as a generic term can suggest a completely wrong reception if this concept should misjudge the actual quality that exists in a specific engagement with the technization of our lifeworld. All that artists bring about can no longer be described in such categories. ‘Electronic art’ as a label is just as unsuitable as ‘media art’. They are ridiculous terms that, at best, are a technical justification of a certain initial phase. But one that is long over.

Electronic art as a label only means an historical reception of art—just like you go to a museum and look at pictures that have congealed into ‘art’—that are basically no longer visually present but have become testimony to a conceptual abstraction.

REMOTEWORDS: If art is not images, what is it then?

Hans Ulrich Reck: If ‘art’ is something ontological, that is, fundamental, then in the sense that it proves itself in difference and does not correspond to preliminary fixed expectations. Art must not let itself be subject to rules for supplying anything predetermined.
This means, art today must articulate itself in another way; much more is required of it. The following questions, among others, come to the fore:  Where is this demand present?  How is it received? How do people work away at it? What efforts do they take on in order to still be artists?
It cannot be the case that you only compose images in the sense of a visual presence or fetish, waiting for the next grant or preparing the next catalogue. It is also not fulfilled by occasionally—or once again—traveling to Africa under the pretense of social activity, particularly with children, in the name of establishing art, only to wish it noted as the next biographical item in your CV. I consider that obscene in the perception of the serious and engaged projects that also exist, whose activities can be substantial and perhaps thus also interesting to art, because no art intention is behind them and no artwork, nor any vain catalogue, is to be produced.

We could formulate this by looking back at the challenge of realism within the framework of a Bert Brechtian discussion in the 1920s: How do you portray social reality when it cannot become or be an image, but first becomes perceptible in a functional analysis via an apparatus-based re-montage?

This is what art must work at. It seems interesting to me when theater, performance, experimental literature, architecture and situationist intervention in urban space begins to move.

That would inspire me to continue to think about how we can escape from this iconophilia, this stupid image construction as a mass phenomenon. Much of the existing pictures, also and even of ‘art’, are the effects or the collateral damage of a dictatorial mass-iconophilia, of a manipulating self-compulsion to become images, to make themselves into pictures and to prove themselves as such. These are new social conditions of domination accompanied by illnesses, such as anorexia and bulimia. Which appear, in all jeopardy and self-endangerment, as the last creditable bastions of an unfortunately self-destructive defense, of a denial and repelling of the wish not to be, or be turned into, an image.

1.) Hans Ulrich Reck, Mythos Medienkunst, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2002.
2.) Hans Ulrich Reck, Kunst als Medientheorie. Vom Zeichen zur Handlung, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich, 2003.

„Vom Wunsch, nicht Bild zu sein …“
Ein Gespräch mit Hans Ulrich Reck

REMOTEWORDS: What comes to mind when you read Vilém Flusser’s “Warum zweifle ich?” (“Why do I doubt?”) spread over three university roofs in the São Paulo metropolis of 20 million inhabitants?

Hans Ulrich Reck: Flusser here poses the fundamental philosophical question per se. Viewed from an existential philosophical standpoint, humanity has been cast into a mode that allows nothing else but to call in question and to doubt. The famous Socratic virtue in the sense that all fixed dogmas are to be dismissed. But totalizing doubt must naturally be directed at doubt itself. It does not make much sense to doubt everything. An abridged form of the argument’s dialectic could look something like this: All dogmas are to be called into question. But since doubt can likewise become dogmatic, doubt must also be directed at itself, thus impeding ‘normal’ doubt. A new approach with a sophisticated technique that generates paradox must be repeatedly ventured. However, doubting doubt must — at some time or other — be suspended, because in a permanent state of doubt, you can neither think, nor act, nor live —especially not in such a diverse and heterogeneous city like São Paulo.

REMOTEWORDS: What do you associate with Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” on the roof of a private home in an upper middle-class neighborhood in Essen?

Hans Ulrich Reck: I immediately think of quite a few other places ideally suited for it, for instance the Foreign Office in Berlin. It pains me as a person and is abhorrent to me that my taxes also go to finance wars. It denotes exactly the kind of totalitarian administrative state that — out of overhasty ministration and out of mistrust of the people’s will — when the people are allowed articulation, they threaten to vote mistakenly, for which reason state welfare takes over everything that could turn into a political decision-making process. That is the problem of prescribed obedience as a routine administrative procedure. Thus it should be imperative that every city remember the fact that there is not only a right to civil disobedience but also a duty — an ethical, moral duty — to resist anything that impairs morality, i.e., the precept of basic values. This is an appeal that also fits into a middle-class neighborhood, since civil disobedience is in fact a republican, that is, fundamental civic virtue.

REMOTEWORDS: What does “ON” mean on the roof of an art house that devotes itself exclusively to art of the so-called new media?

Hans Ulrich Reck: “On” — in contrast to “off” — stands for non-stop operation, always on the ball and ready to go. This is, on the one hand, a pretty far-reaching self-projection: we are alert around-the-clock and deal with everything that comes up. Anyone who can claim this for himself is already very brave. But, on the other hand, “On” not only describes the benefits of being online, but also manifests total overload. Once again much too much of the unachievable is expected of people, namely their permanent presence. Brain output is more and more enhanced by drugs in an unrestrained and at the same time desperate way in order to be able to achieve more and more “normal” proficiency. The permanent state of being switched on is exhausting, exhausting up to the breakdown of the individual, and probably also of the social, organism — and naturally including the arts.

REMOTEWORDS: What does “OFF LIMITS FOR GOOGLE“ mean on the roof of Berlin’s Academy of Arts, fifty meters from the Brandenburg Gate?

Hans Ulrich Reck: That’s a somewhat devious phrase because the expression is not followed by an exclamation point. If it is meant propositionally, then it describes the problem of boundless assimilation. Such mega tendencies have always existed in civilizations. To collect and classify all knowledge in one place has, since the Old Babylonian period, been the civilizing power assurance of the elite in citadels. Monopolizing such structures is, above all, increasingly prompted by the fact that ever more people contribute to it, that is, shadow regimes not secretly but quite publicly. There are discussions, to be sure, but at totally irrelevant off-the-track sites, homeopathic collateral treatments for the folk psyche (according to the motto: I don’t want my house shown). The kind of centralization of such archives of knowledge, this practice of scanning in whole world libraries, has for long marked an omnipotence fantasy that is typical for the citadel-based autocratic elite. This fits in very well with the view of the Brandenburg Gate as a symbol of an autocratic state decoupled from society, the Pariser Platz as a no-go zone and a public high security area.

REMOTEWORDS: What could “CLICK HERE“, a ‘screen-design fake’, a non-functioning link mean — installed on the roof of a museum in Estonia, a country that guarantees its citizens a right to internet access?

Hans Ulrich Reck: I am inherently mistrustful; I don’t click only because someone tells me to. Why should I; I don’t at all know what will happen. You have to click first before you know whether you want to click, and then it’s too late. I am supposed to confirm something before I have even seen it. That is surely an archaism that I act out for myself in a very personal way. The promise of getting from here to there is certainly interesting but also over­rated. The whole Deleuze-Guattari trend, the proliferating structures, the constructions of the rhizome, the networking, the organless body, the de-hierarchization. That is an intuitive description of a state of being, one that should be read as such, not as the notorious argument evoked from all sides that the occident´s entire knowledge formation is supposedly capable of refurbishing. In a hundred years this will only serve as a document of an ethnography of the present. In this context, it is nonetheless till now not clear what a state-proclaimed basic right to an Internet access will bring or effect.

REMOTEWORDS: What sense does Heinz von Foerster´s seemingly tautological dictum make on
the roof of an isolated art room on the island of Sylt: “I don’t see what I don’t see”
(“ICH SEHE NICHT, WAS ICH NICHT SEHE”)?

Hans Ulrich Reck: On the semantics between text and site I can say nothing, for I was never on Sylt. Foerster’s sentence sounds at first trivial, but isn’t tautological, since there is a “something” that is reported on. An object that is present but eludes our perception. It is an expression of something that constantly accompanies us, a kind of irritant. There must be something there, but I can’t see it. In this respect this something is something other than nothing, other than an absentee. It would be the point at which you could refute something or oneself. In reference to such propositions, this would be evidence of the rationality of a theory, namely because of its power to refute, that is, falsification. You must set up things in such a way that you know that something could be seen that you can’t see. That would actually be a methodological expression of a starting point, of a doubt. That is, doubt as an activity that we talked about at the beginning.

Orte und Sätze

REMOTEWORDS: Was fällt Ihnen ein zu Vilém Flussers „Warum zweifle ich?“, verteilt auf drei Universitätsdächer in der 20-Millionen-Metropole São Paulo?

Hans Ulrich Reck: Da stellt Flusser die philosophische Grundfrage schlechthin. Existenzphilosophisch gesehen ist die Menschheit in einen Modus geworfen, der gar nichts anderes ermög­licht als das Nachfragen, das Zweifeln. Die berühmte sokratische Tugend, in dem Sinn, dass alle festgesetzten Dogmen verabschiedet werden. Aber die Totalisierung des Zweifels muss sich natürlich auf den Zweifel selbst richten. Man kann ja sinnvollerweise nicht an allem zweifeln. Die Dialektik des Arguments kann in Kurzform etwa so wiedergegeben werden: An allen Dogmen ist zu zweifeln, aber, da der Zweifel auch dogmatisch werden kann, muss sich der Zweifel auch auf sich selber richten, somit das ‚normale‘ Zweifeln unterbrechen. Man muss immer wieder neu ansetzen mit einer ausgefeilten Technik der Paradoxie-Erzeugung. Das Zweifeln als Zweifeln muss — irgendwann — immer auch suspendiert werden können, weil man mit Zweifeln als permanenten Dauerzustand weder denken noch handeln noch leben kann, besonders nicht in einer so diversen und heterogenen Stadt wie São Paulo.

REMOTEWORDS: Was assoziieren Sie zu Henry David Thoreaus „Ziviler Ungehorsam“ auf dem Dach eines Privathauses in einem gutbürgerlichen Stadtteil von Essen?

Hans Ulrich Reck: Zunächst fallen mir eine ganze Menge anderer Orte ein, die dafür bestens in Frage kämen, zum Beispiel das Auswärtige Amt in Berlin. Es schmerzt mich als Person und ist mir zuwider, dass mit meinen Steuern auch Kriege finanziert werden. Das markiert genau diese Art von totalitärem Verwaltungsstaat, der aus vorauseilender Fürsorge und aus Misstrauen gegen den Willen der Menschen, wenn er sich denn artikulieren darf, falsch zu votieren droht, weshalb man diesen in staatlicher Fürsorge alles abnimmt, was politische Entscheidungsprozesse überhaupt sein könnten. Das ist das Problem von verordnetem Gehorsam als routiniertem Verwaltungsweg. Insofern wäre es in jeder Stadt geboten, sich daran zu erinnern, dass es nicht nur ein Recht gibt auf zivilen Ungehorsam, sondern auch eine Pflicht dazu, eine ethische, moralische Pflicht, sich allem zu widersetzen, was die Sittlichkeit, das Gebot von Grundwerten verletzt. Der Appell passt aber auch in eine bürgerliche Gegend, denn ziviler Ungehorsam ist eigentlich eine republikanische, also eine bürgerliche Grundtugend.

REMOTEWORDS: Was bedeutet „ON“ auf dem Dach eines Kunsthauses, das sich ausschließlich der Kunst mit den sogenannten Neuen Medien widmet?

Hans Ulrich Reck: „ON“ im Unterschied zu „OFF“, also Dauerbetrieb, ständig am Draht, ständig auf Achse. Das ist zunächst eigentlich eine ziemlich weitgehende Selbstdarstellung: Wir sind hier wach, rund um die Uhr und kümmern uns um alles, was anfällt. Wer das noch von sich zu behaupten vermag, ist schon mutig. Aber, andererseits spricht „ON“ nicht nur über die Chancen des „Online-Seins“, sondern zeigt auch eine totale Überforderung. Hier wird den Menschen wieder einmal viel zu viel Unzumutbares zugemutet, im Sinne einer permanenten Präsenz. Die Leistungsfähigkeit des Gehirns wird immer mehr, hemmungslos und zugleich verzweifelt, durch Drogen gesteigert, um immer mehr „normale“ Leistung zu vollziehen. Das permanent Eingeschaltet-Sein-Müssen ist erschöpfend, erschöpfend bis zum Zusammenbruch des individuellen und wahrscheinlich auch des sozialen Organismus, mitsamt der Künste natürlich.

REMOTEWORDS: Was bedeutet „OFF LIMITS FOR GOOGLE“ auf dem Dach der Akademie der Künste Berlin, fünfzig Meter neben dem Brandenburger Tor?

Hans Ulrich Reck: Das ist eine etwas hinterhältige Sache, weil dem Ausdruck kein Ausrufezeichen angehängt ist. Wenn es propositional gemeint ist, dann beschreibt es das Problem des unbegrenzten Einverleibens. Das hat es ja immer gegeben in der Zivilisation, solche Megatendenzen: Alles Wissen klassifikatorisch an einem Ort zu sammeln, ist seit dem alten Babylon die zivilisatorische Machtsicherung von Herrschafts­eliten in Zitadellen. Die Monopolisierung von solchen Strukturen wird zunehmend vor allem davon getragen, dass sich immer mehr Menschen daran beteiligen, also Schattenregime in aller Öffentlichkeit, nicht etwa im Verborgenen. Zwar wird auch diskutiert, aber das sind völlig irrelevante Nebenschauplätze, homöopathische Kollateralbearbeitungen für die Psyche des Volkes (nach dem Motto: Mein Haus will ich nicht zeigen). Die Art der Zentralisierung solcher Wissensarchive, diese Praktik des Scannens von ganzen Weltbibliotheken markiert eine Omnipotenzphantasie, die typisch ist für die autokratischen Eliten von Zitadellen seit langer Zeit. Dazu passt der Blick auf das Brandenburger Tor als Symbol für den selbstherrlichen, von der Gesellschaft abgekoppelten Staat, den Pariser Platz als Sperrgebiet und den öffentlichen Hochsicherheitsbereich sehr gut.

REMOTEWORDS: Was könnte „CLICK HERE“, ein ‚screen-design-fake‘, ein nicht funktionierender Link, bedeuten, installiert auf dem Dach eines Museums in Estland, einem Land, das seinen Bürgern ein Recht auf Internetzugang garantiert?

Hans Ulrich Reck: Ich bin da naturgemäß misstrauisch, ich klicke nicht, nur weil mir das jemand sagt. Warum sollte ich das tun, ich weiß ja nicht, was dann passiert. Man muss ja erst klicken, bevor man überhaupt weiß, ob man klicken will und dann ist es bereits zu spät. Ich soll etwas bestätigen, bevor ich es überhaupt betrachtet habe. Das ist sicherlich ein Archaismus, den ich für mich in persönlicher Weise ausspiele.
Dieses Versprechen, von hier nach dort zu kommen, ist sicherlich interessant, aber auch überschätzt. Die ganzen Deleuze-Guattari-Strömung, die wuchernden Strukturen, die Konstruktionen des Rhizoms, die Vernetzung, der organlose Körper, die Dehierarchisierung. Das ist eine intuitive Zustandsbeschreibung, die man als solche auch lesen sollte, nicht als das notorisch und allseitig beschworene Argument, das angeblich die gesamte Wissensformation des Abendlandes umzubauen vermag. Dies wird in hundert Jahren nur noch als Dokument einer Ethnographie der Gegenwart dienen. In diesem Zusammenhang ist allerdings nach wie vor unausgemacht, was ein staatliches Grundrecht auf Internetzugang bringen und bewirken wird.

REMOTEWORDS: Welchen Sinn macht Heinz von Foersters tautologisch anmutender Ausspruch „Ich sehe nicht, was ich nicht sehe“ auf dem Dach eines einsam gelegenen Kunstraums auf der Insel Sylt?

Hans Ulrich Reck: Zur Semantik von Text und Ort kann ich hier nichts sagen, denn ich war nie auf Sylt. Von Foersters Satz klingt zunächst trivial, ist aber nicht tautologisch, denn es gibt ja ein „Etwas“, über das ausgesagt wird. Ein Gegenstand, der gegenwärtig ist, der sich aber dem Sehen entzieht. Es ist der Ausdruck von etwas, das einen ständig begleitet, als eine Art Irritation. Es muss etwas da sein, aber ich sehe es nicht, insofern ist dieses etwas etwas anderes als ein Nichts, als ein Abwesendes. Es wäre der Punkt, aus dem heraus man etwas oder sich selbst widerlegen könnte. Im Bezug auf solche Propositionen wäre dies Beleg für die Rationalität einer Theorie, nämlich wegen ihrer Kraft zur Widerlegung, also die Falsifikation. Man muss Dinge daraufhin anlegen, dass man weiß, dass etwas gesehen werden könnte, was man nicht sieht. Das wäre tatsächlich eine methodische Äußerung dieses Ausgangspunkt, eines Zweifels. Also des Zweifelns, als einer Tätigkeit, über die wir anfangs ja bereits gesprochen haben.