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The un-Original State
The concept of the beach State describes an intermediate space between two apparently absolute forms, namely, flow (the ocean) and stasis (the continent). The intransigent interaction that takes place between the former and the latter, the water and the rock, movement and stability, fails to breathe life into a perfectly ordered and clear outcome.
Instead, this coming together of opposites conjures up something altogether more accidental, which is neither one nor the other, neither total motion nor complete paralysis. The erosion of the continental shelf by the action of the waves produces a state (State) of things – a beach covered and recovered by sand – that never quite settles because it is always unsettled by itself: by the repetition of its own violent genesis.
A beach State is both difference and fixity overcoming each other. That is, to have stasis, to become still and settled, there must be movement, but to have movement, at all, there must be at least some interruption, somewhere. In this paradoxical interregnum, a proper stasis is failed because it has to be desired and pure motion likewise because it has to turn, occasionally, to look at itself. Knowledge and desire, flow and stasis, the ocean and the continent, never quite meet, are always disrupted, made impossible, by a pre-synthetic deferral.
A beach State is a condition, a fault line, an intermediary zone of uncertainty and temporality, where everything built, Stated and written is done so on the sand of an finite infinite region and where even uncertainty (no stability at all) does not quite describe the situation as it is. For there are many certainties, almost always too many, until they are washed out again, their excess doing this washing, and replacing them with newer ones yet, descended from the latest irreconcilable confrontation between what is always moving and what is always still.
The beach State is the resultant in-between of an irresolvable difference.