Statement 26

“Foucault argues that modernism does not consist in an internalizing reversion to the medium but, on the contrary, in an opening of the medium out from itself, to the point where it becomes "beside itself." He thinks that this externalizing "madness" in modem works-this absence d'oeuvre opening to an "outside"-entails a certain blindness that enables a whole art of seeing. Thus modernity doesn't consist in a melancholy purification of the means of representation, turning within to proclaim an enclosed autonomy; on the contrary, it is about untimely forces that announce other new outside possibilities, and so introduce a certain "heteronomy" in mediums.” John Rajchman, Constructions (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999, P. 60)