Tabula Non Grata

Seeking to validate Einstein’s theory of general relativity, astrophysicist Arthur Eddington advances his well-known parable of the Two Tables as possible yet divergent ways of processing knowledge. The two tables are differentiated by whether they account for the gravitational bending of light by the sun or not. Table A represents positions of stars based on Newtonian physics without accounting for the bending of light, while Table B represents positions of stars including the gravitational bending of light as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity

Thus, Table A refers to common sense knowledge, a glass of water for example, whereas Table B breaks down the element of water into its scientific constituents with the formula H2O. In other words, the familiar table of everyday life and the same table as described by physics. These two approaches ultimately come to represent the segregated domains of the sciences and humanities. And while Eddington gives credence to the first table, his preference undoubtedly falls for the second scientific table as the true arbiter of reality.

To provide a framework that challenges this double reduction, the concept of a third table has been advanced by Speculative Realist Graham Harman, positing that objects have their own autonomous existence and cannot be reduced to human perception or knowledge. “Tabula Non Grata” takes off from this notion. The term combines Tabula Rasa and Persona non grata, the former to describe the idea of a blank slate with no innate knowledge and the latter the designation of something or someone who has fallen out of favor.

This unwelcome table, while it emphasizes the aspects of the world that are irreducible to human cognition, is occluded by cultural blind spots. As viewers move around the piece, they encounter a whitewashed ruin resting in the midst of a video image that surrounds it like a moat. The structure is the amalgam of a building facade and the fractured shell of a torso, buttressed into an abandoned formation of body and habitat. A place shelled to smithereens and forsaken by a single-minded world order. A vestigial centerpiece skirted by the reflection of its ostensive parts, in the guise of an islet whose submerged mass remains out of reach and whose demonstrable presence obscures the existence of a shunned reality, not allowed to exist but subsisting even as its vital signs recede from perception.