Schwebezustand — the trembling suspension — is a perceptual and ontological condition in which an object or being simultaneously inhabits more than one state of existence without resolving into either, and without abandoning what it primarily is. It is the simultaneous perception of an entity under two determinations that do not cancel each other, a contact without passage, without destination, without force.

The word already carries this logic before I touch it. In German law, a matter left im Schwebezustand is one where two outcomes hold equal weight until resolved. In physics, a body reaches Schwebezustand when it neither sinks nor rises, suspended by an exact equilibrium of forces. In political language, a nation's status can remain in Schwebezustand for years. What I add is not foreign to the word — it is one more field where the same structure holds: two conditions, unresolved, sharing the same weight. This is not etymological ornament. Following what Reinhart Koselleck called Begriffsgeschichte — the way a concept accumulates layered, coherent meanings across contexts without losing its internal logic — I extend the word into a new field it was already shaped for.

Schwebezustand is not produced by art alone — but without a coherent artistic form it remains only a perception, an anecdote, or a curiosity. Art is the operation that makes the condition legible: it does not create Schwebezustand. It creates the conditions under which Schwebezustand can be perceived, sustained, and examined. It gives duration, form, and necessity to the simultaneity already present. And yet the condition precedes the work. It is discovered, not invented. What art does is make it impossible to look away.

Schwebezustand is held, timeless, unlinear — as a compound-existence entity, it does not "pass", it does not "resolve", it does not "become". A careful reader could feel this suspension and reach, almost intuitively, for familiar concepts: ambiguity, metaphor, metamorphosis, the middle point. The four of them will fail:

Its not ambiguity because this term implies instability — a meaning that wavers, weakens, refuses to settle. A condition that cannot "make up its mind". Schwebezustand is a perceived tremble within two states which have an equal ontological weight.

Its not a metaphor, like this simple transfer of semes — Helena Beristáin's term for it: "In the clear hip of the coast". Neruda, its author, gives the coastline a body. The reader holds both simultaneously — the coast and the hip, but neither the coast nor the hip become the other because this is just a permutation of meaning. A metaphor asks what else a thing can mean. Before Schwebezustand, one can only ask what else a thing can be.

It is not a "middle point" either. Unlike "liminal space", "border", or "in-between" — concepts that imply transit, negotiation, or passage — Schwebezustand occurs within an entity, in its own place, without passage and without destination. You are not standing in a "border", or "in-between" the doorway and your living room. You are trembling between both entities only if someone else is perceiving you as a new trembling entity, and, at the same time, perceiving also your doorway and your living room as usual.

It is also not a metamorphosis. The caterpillar — A — becomes the butterfly — B. The process has a direction because B is already determined before the transformation begins. Remove B, and you do not have an "interrupted metamorphosis". You have no metamorphosis at all — metamorphosis is defined by destination, not movement. A stuck transformation between A and an unknown B is not a "paused metamorphosis". The stuck element is not even a chrysalis. You get a semi-seed, a dry leaf, a capsule that does not announce what it contains — or whether it contains anything at all. It is not trembling in any suspension.

What is an ontological being when two simultaneously perceptible determinations become present within, but without one replacing the other? Metamorphosis: A simply becomes B. Schwebezustand: A remains A while B becomes also perceptible, and the perception is trembling between the two within a third entity.

Accomplices

The condition is ancient; the name is mine. Across many geographies and many centuries — in the Yoruba Egungun mask, worn by a dancer who becomes, literally and ritually, the ancestor while remaining himself; in the Sufi sema, where the whirling body is simultaneously physical dance and spiritual ascent; in the Mexica Coatlicue, standing between therianthropism and anthropomorphism, between architecture and sculpture, between symmetry and doubling; in the Nahua tonal, an animal companion sharing one's fate from birth, still held today by indigenous communities across Mexico and Guatemala; in the recited Buddhist Heart Sutra; and in the Western phenomenological tradition — radically different cosmologies, practices, and philosophical languages produced situations in which a being could not be exhausted by a single, self-contained identity. There is no need to posit a common transmission to recognize the recurrence of this condition. I call it Schwebezustand. They are not precedents for the concept. They are encounters through which the condition becomes visible. These cultures can speak for themselves. Most likely, the reader will find it easier to travel toward these cultures than these cultures would find it to travel toward the reader, before any scholar displays them on the reader's behalf. In Mignolo's terms, this is part of the geopolitics of knowledge — the historical distribution of authority over what counts as knowledge, and who is authorized to produce it.

THERIANTHROPIC FIGURE, ROCK ART

This is a cosmovision attractor field — societies without contact, without coordination, independently producing comparable structures of thought around multiple or relational existence: double existence treated as a condition of existence, not converged upon from outside. Hegel would place German philosophy at its center — Spirit reaching its "self-consciousness" first among the Germanic peoples, with the Orient and Africa left in what he called the "childhood of the world" — a destination he assumed only the West could reach. Some still try to save the architecture while disowning its foundation — the freedom, kept; the hierarchy, quietly dropped. But there is no center at all, because there was never a destination. Each tradition arrives on its own terms, carrying its own vocabulary, its own cosmology, its own stakes. What convergence exists belongs to the condition itself, not its names.

In the traditions listed above the self is constituted by its relations, being is always already multiple, existence is relational before it is individual. From that ground, simultaneity is not a problem to be solved. It is simply what reality looks like.

The philosophical tradition that runs from Descartes through Locke through Kant placed the individual as the primary unit of reality — a self that exists prior to its relations, prior to the world it then enters. Charles Taylor traced this genealogy of the modern self at length; I only need its consequence. From that starting point, an entity with two simultaneous existences can only appear as a paradox, a contradiction, or a metaphor.

The European scientific tradition that produced Newton and Einstein pursued a powerful impulse: the search for general laws capable of describing reality through a single, universally applicable framework — a Cartesian pulsion, rolling on caterpillar tracks, behaving gently, like a Lego, on the colonial table. That same impulse — reality reduced to what a single framework can administer — is the one that, applied to other peoples' cosmologies, called them "primitive," "superstitious," or "incomplete," for the same reason: they refused to resolve according to the norms of mono-existence. Aníbal Quijano named this operation the coloniality of power. It may not have been only contempt: it may be that they truly could not see another way of existing — what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls epistemicide, a monopoly so complete it forgets it is one. Einstein himself accepted the extraordinary empirical success of quantum mechanics and its statistical formalism, but rejected the claim that its indeterminacy constituted a complete account of physical reality — with Podolsky and Rosen, in 1935, he argued that the theory itself was incomplete; for him, the statistical description pointed toward an underlying structure that the theory did not yet capture. The unresolved condition of the description was therefore, for Einstein, a sign of incompleteness rather than a reality to be preserved as unresolved.

Examples of Schwebezustand

These selected pieces — examples — are where the condition first became transparent to me; they are not assembled evidence to support a theory; they are the ground the theory was extracted from. In some, both perceived entities, trembling in suspension, are intrinsic ontologies — equally verifiable, needing no interpretation, given to the thing itself. In others, one entity is intrinsic and the second is relational: it does not belong to the object on its own, but emerges only through an intervention, and only through the viewer inferring it from that intervention. And in the last one, the nocturnal drawing series related to what I call Dog Visions, the suspension lived only in the act of making it; the finished object holds none of it.

Example one : Mach

Ernst Mach drew himself from the left eye in 1886 — two years before Van Gogh stood at that café terrace, just as quiet, just as unaware. The arc (the upper bone on top of the drawing, no flesh) is the real frontier of his own existence — beyond that bone is the viewer, a relational condition: it exists only where a viewer stands. And this fact vibrates, trembles, between the viewer and the drawing.

ERNST MACH, THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE, 1900

Example two: Van Gogh, Kahlo, Bacon

An Amplified Schwebezustand, as I have decided to call it, is a trembling taken up by markets and repetition, and made louder than the work alone would produce, if any. Galleries, museums, and mainstream art markets know that drama sells: severed ears (Gogh), asylums (Gogh), shattered spines (Kahlo), violent parents (Bacon), betrayals (Kahlo), suicides (Gogh), poverties (Gogh) — repeated in wall texts, documentaries, gift-shop books, until the story installs itself in the room before the viewer does. What is added is volume, but also drama and emotional pornography.

About his painting, Van Gogh wrote to his brother: "On the terrace there are tiny figures of drinkers. [...] The gables of the houses on a street that leads away under the blue sky studded with stars are dark blue or violet, with a green tree." He names shapes and colors — figures, gables, blue, violet, green — nothing more. No identity, no story.

VINCENT VAN GOGH, TERRASSE DU CAFÉ LE SOIR, 1888.

But the art market also handles neurotic concepts like this — identity, narrative, symbol, all constructed on the same surface: "In white, Jesus stands at the center, long hair, surrounded by the Twelve apostles. The obscure presence in the doorway should be Judas, and the lantern is a halo. Crosses everywhere — in the awning, in the street, and far away, almost imperceptible, a suffering horse. The left side is just joy. The dark right is sadness. The empty chairs are an empty past."

This is an Amplified Schwebezustand, an amplified trembling suspension. A primary Schwebezustand consists of simultaneous conditions inherent in the encounter with the work or object. An amplified Schwebezustand, in contrast, is a pre-existing perceptual condition enlarged or distorted by external narratives.

Example three: Found object

FOUND PIECE, BERLIN KREUZBERG, 2026.

Summer 2026, Berlin Kreuzberg. I come across a bollard — one of the thousands in this city. This one, however, carries a history written both with spray paint and with photons. Its shadow has been traced, and in doing so, the passage of time has been honored — or, if that sounds too abstract, the cosmos has been honored.

I took 5 photos distributed in five hours for no reason, as I actually always do, but after seeing the photos, I made a conscious connection: "hey, this is an object of the same nature as my Mandarino Marioneta and my Huge Mobiles, but much larger," I thought. And yes, its modest dimensions reach Giza, Palenque, Chichén Itzá, Xochicalco, Chankillo, observatories, temples to curious humans, to autistic observers, and to the search for coherence.

I take possession of it now just to go deeper into the Trembling Suspension — which in this case consists of four simultaneous existences: it is a bollard, it is a sundial, it is an observatory, it is street art, it is a shadow converted into light, which turns the bollard into shadow — each condition intrinsic, physically present, needing no interpretation. It is a perfect, gentle, all-encompassing street-found object. I put Claude to find out, by making numbers and measures, when the paint was actually sprayed. It was possible to find out. I say no more.

Example four: Huge Mobiles

Two petroleum barrels — a standard unit of measure in the oil industry, and a common object on construction sites — contain steel rods suspended from their top cover. After a single pull, the rods collapse against each other — like a traditional bamboo mobile. The barrels sound by themselves, for a long time, from gravity and heavy steel alone. There is no mechanism, no intervention, no wind. An industrial object producing sound through the most impersonal physical force that exists is perceived as a sounding being — both conditions intrinsic, needing no interpretation. Neither condition cancels the other. The barrels occupy both simultaneously, without resolving. This is a "mother-cell" piece in my catalogue: the first place the pattern showed itself, before it had a name. A work in which the perceptual condition later named Schwebezustand appears in a particularly reduced and unmistakable form.

HUGE MOBILES, TEMIXCO, 1987. PROMPTEDAnalogue F1, color, 35mm, C45, 50mm, f5.6 Temixco, Mexico. A typical low class suburban house, low class, not finished but occupied. Around 16:00. The sun to the left. Photographer seated. The garden was a garden, but now different local plants grow. Two old oil barrels under a tree, with suspended construction rods inside. Prompted reconstruction; no documentation available., NO DOCUMENTATION AVAILABLE.

Example five: Mandarino Marioneta

The same absence of wind appeared much later. A living young mandarin tree is manipulated with a black thread invisible to the camera. When tensed, the tree moves, evoking movements caused by wind. Trees, however, are not "marionettes of the wind" — they are simply trees that move because of wind. In the video, someone invisible moves this mandarin tree from behind the camera, without compromising the slightest part of its ontology as a tree, while adding the ontology of a marionette. Unlike the barrels, the two conditions here are not both intrinsic: the tree is; the marionette is relational — it exists only because a hand pulls a thread the camera cannot see, and only because the viewer infers, from that motion, a puppeteer. There is no detriment to either condition from this asymmetry. Both remain fully present, one given, the other made legible only through intervention. This is also a mother-cell piece — the same logic as in Huge Mobiles, carrying its asymmetry from the first pull of the thread.

SANDOVAL, MANDARINO-MARIONETA, HUITZILAC, 2001 (PROMPTEDCanon, MiniDV from 2001, small camera, handheld, 4:3. Cropped, 90 degree corners, not curved corners. Midday. Video texture. Garden, outside, ca 17:00. Small citrus, kumquat tree about 1.5 meter high, with some fruits visible. The tree about 6 meter away from the camera. Well maintained garden, but not perfect. The tree has a tree ring, with small wild plants in there chaotic, also a bit grass around. The grass in the garden is not homogeneous, different tone of green and yellows. One branch right side of the tree is in gentle movement, but not the rest. The moving branch has to be part of the tree, not distant. You can see the leaves, but a bit movement-blurred, not so much. The camera guy, apart from holding the camera, is pulling the tree with one thin black sewing thread. The geometry of the thread: departs from the center of the frame, taped on the camera lens, very out of focus because it is too near, a bit focus later, to disappear near the tree. No parts of the body of the camera man is visible. Behind, a wall covered with cement and some plants. Behind the wall 2 or 3 huge cold-forest trees, and behind them, more trees like them, in the shadow.; NO DOCUMENTATION AVAILABLE)

Example six: My dog in fatal metamorphosis

My dog lives entirely in the present. She does not know she is within a fatal metamorphosis — not because she is unaware of her final destiny B, but because her mode of existence does not include B as a known category. She is within an absolute A — present time. She is not in a process. She is in a condition. And yet I can see both — the A she inhabits completely, and the B, her death, she will reach without knowing it. We have then two perceived simultaneous existences — me, a metamorphosis, and her, just the present. But the Schwebezustand lives in me, not hers. Even if she fully perceives me in Present-Time, she remains, fully and only, in Present-Time too. I am the one trembling between what she is and what she does not know she will become. A Schwebezustand arises just in that tiny, delicate relation between an entity and a perceiver — a relational condition, belonging to me, not to her.

C.S: ABBA THE TIGER. BERLIN, 2022

Example seven: Tent Visions Series

(2025). Ink drawings made at night, in the forest. I follow the gaze of my dog closely, her gestures of attention, her doubtful sharpness at the edge of attack. I draw a real tree at night, and behind it I draw what I think my dog sees. While drawing, I am between the two — in a relational, trembling suspension disappearing the next morning: the drawing cannot hold it.

TENT VISIONS 08, 2025

Example eight: Monas

(2025). An automaton built from crude mechanics — an off-center weight, irregular cams — that captures exactly what a perfect mechanism was designed to eliminate: hesitation, vulnerability, the tremor of a living organism within a mechanism in Trembling Suspension — the mechanism intrinsic, the organism a relational reading.

Example nine: Máquina Latina

(2013). A live pianist performs before an audience while, on screen, a video shows the same person — same clothes, performing similar actions and conveying similar pathos in real time. Neither is more real; the audience in trembling suspension between both.

Example ten: The Body of Ligia

(2007–2020). The dancer is simultaneously a body, a sonic cartography, an instrument, and a dancer. None of these conditions cancel the others — four simultaneous conditions coexisting without hierarchy, all four intrinsic to the body itself. Ligia's bestial nudity struggles for attention, and that too is another form of simultaneous existence, putting the audience in trembling suspension.

Certainly there are specific conditions defining Schwebezustand: both conditions, A and B, remain present; neither condition is symbolic of the other; there are no passages between them; neither condition awaits resolution or is provisional; and the entity does not cease to be what it primarily is. These are the conditions under which I recognize Schwebezustand.

 

Lost Souls

A lost soul is not a biological category. It is a perceptual one. What matters is not whether a being is alive or dead, animate or inanimate, real or represented. What matters is how it is perceived: as an entity that is materially present within a field, while remaining functionally outside that field's organizing logic — present, yet in absolute solitude. This is about a relation between presence and function: Schwebezustand concerns simultaneous existence; meanwhile, a Lost Soul concerns an entity simultaneously within and without any situation's logic.

Films: even here, perceived Lost Souls exist. Both the extras in the film and the real people commuting on a bus, or that biker passing by — they are inside the production, but outside the plot; they play no role, they carry no dramaturgical function. Even if they are an "ontological ground of believability", they exist independently of the ongoing story. If the film needs them to be believed, they do not need the film, or us. They are fully present in the world of that film or that reality, and fully outside its logic — simultaneously, without knowing, without resolving. The spectator perceives them. They perceive nothing back. They are lost souls. They don't know where they are going. They don't have an origin. A Lost Soul is an entity floating between two conditions without knowing anything about it.

A LOST SOUL IN AMORES PERROS CRASH. USED WITHOUT PERMISSION FOR EDUCATIONAL, NON-PROFIT PURPOSES.

In photography. In 1932, Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed a man leaping over a puddle behind the Gare Saint-Lazare. The leap is famous — the geometry celebrated, the reflection perfect, the foot one micron from the water. But there is another figure in the image, standing at the back, facing away, beside the fence, slightly out of focus. He is not inside, nor outside the fenced area. The fence runs through his presence, placing him on neither side. He plays no role — not even yet — in the composition's geometry, no role in the captured action, at least until he becomes one of those truncated columns toward which he seems to be heading. He did not know he was being photographed. His condition is spatial, temporal, and existential, simultaneously — undefined in all three at once, and permanent. The celebrated Bressonian precise moment resolves: the foot lands and it is over. This figure resolves nothing. He is the lost soul. The leap is the subject. He is the double condition, completely alone.

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON, BEHIND THE GARE SAINT-LAZARE, PARIS, 1932.
THE LEAP IS THE SUBJECT. HE IS THE CONDITION.

At Kottbusser Tor in Berlin, a small man in black stands far back in the frame, almost looking at the photographer — not fully, not turned away either. He carries no compositional function, no role in the image's intention. He stands at the same distance from the camera as the cylindrical column beside him — both inert, vertical, indifferent to the square's movement around them. He is not accompanying the column's space; he is its existential shadow, briefly condensed into a figure. The column has no biography. In this frame, they are the same. He will never know he is here. The spectator perceives him; he perceives almost nothing back. And in that almost lies his entire condition. I hope the idea of Lost Soul is understood without a closed definition — that would contradict its own nature. The same for Schwebezustand: there is a reason why neither is included in my Field Lexicon.

C.S. BERLIN KOTTBUSSER TOR.
THE COLUMN HAS NO BIOGRAPHY. HE DOES.
OTHERWISE, IN THIS FRAME, THEY ARE THE SAME.

In conclusion: what I perceive in my dog, for instance, vibrates between her omniscient present and my knowing of her fatal metamorphosis. The perception of my dog — who remains, still, "her" — is therefore in Schwebezustand.

A Lost Soul, on the other hand, is the perception of an entity in absolute solitude. It is not a ghost or something that retains part of past realities — a Lost Soul has no past, no future, no relation to other entities or to us. A Lost Soul lives in the present only if perceived — as the being in this grave.

C.S: CEMETERY OF MOROCOY, SOUTH QUINTANA ROO, MEXICO

The Morocoy grave, here again, is an example of Schwebezustand and Lost Soul tied together: the tombstone traced by finger into wet cement is an illegible certificate of existence, carrying only an intention — that of describing the dead. (Tombstones usually tell us the story of someone who no longer exists, yet lies beneath our feet, in trembling suspension.) Here, that trembling suspension is literal: two identities of the same corpse share equal ontological weight — being illegible, and being buried — vibrating between them without resolving. This illegible writing in Morocoy cemetery, then, not only conserves that trembling suspension but also leads to the perception of a lost soul.

Bibliography

Relational and Multiple Existence Across Traditions

• Miguel A. Bartolomé and Alicia M. Barabas (coords.). Los sueños y los días: Chamanismo y nahualismo en el México actual, vol. 1. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City, 2013.

Modernity, Individualism, and Coloniality

• G.W.F. Hegel. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction. Translated by H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975.

• Teshale Tibebu. Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2011.

• Andrew Buchwalter. "Is Hegel's Philosophy of History Eurocentric?" Proceedings of the Hegel Society of America, vol. 19, 2009, pp. 87–110.

• Charles Taylor. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1989.

• Aníbal Quijano. "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America." Translated by Michael Ennis. Nepantla: Views from South, vol. 1, no. 3, Duke University Press, 2000, pp. 533–580.

• Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Routledge, New York, 2014.

• Walter D. Mignolo. "The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference." In Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, edited by Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui, Duke University Press, Durham, 2008, pp. 225–258.

Physics and Perception

• Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?" Physical Review, vol. 47, 1935, pp. 777–780.

• Ernst Mach. Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen. Gustav Fischer, Jena, 1886. Published in English as The Analysis of Sensations, trans. C. M. Williams, Open Court Publishing, Chicago, 1897.

Rhetoric and Poetics

• Helena Beristáin. Diccionario de Retórica y Poética. Editorial Porrúa, Mexico City, 7th edition, 1995.

• Pablo Neruda. "XIII," in Las piedras del cielo. Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires, 1970.

Psychology

• Karen Horney. The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1937.

On Method: The Word Itself

• Reinhart Koselleck. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1985.

Van Gogh and Visual Sources

• Vincent van Gogh. Letter to Willemien van Gogh, 9 and c. 14 September 1888. In Vincent van Gogh — The Letters, Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING, online critical edition, vangoghletters.org.

• amykakkuri (attributed to Luke Aleisa). "Hidden meanings." Seeing Art (Art 1100 course blog), WordPress.com, November 18, 2015. A popular, non-academic reading — the kind this essay describes, not endorses.