A Small Manifesto of In-Between Spaces
Kathrin Röggla

Caught between two stools, as the saying goes, or between people – one way one moment, another way the next. Sometimes also between the lines. That’s where we like to read. It’s part of it. Text is an open thing – it can even be done in administrative language, although there we find something less between the lines and more behind the lines. To uncover something that is not explicitly stated, such as a potential impending threat. Exploring contexts, tracing the contours of the whole, which has a tendency to remain concealed. Between the lines – that’s more the love letter, the literary text, the poetic allusion. That which is unspoken – a constant feature of interpersonal communication, which has just as powerful an impact as what is actually said.

In this regard, the in-between state is also an indication of a caring human tendency. This state recently came to mind as I was thinking about Large Language Models – yes, the famous AI that only knows how to open this in-between space mechanically and pits computed language against human language. The space that this opens up positions humanity against stochasticity, whereby the former is losing more and more ground – it is diminishing – because humans can only be human interpersonally.

Probability calculations don’t open up any between; they’re always fixed in place as frame and heading. And then there is that closed loop: majority thinking heralds the triumph of AI; subsequently, AI entrenches those majorities. So much for the dire situation we currently find ourselves in. In addition to this, that which is always desired and always said is the probability of a language that is always bygone – a thing of the past, in fact – whereas the relationships between people always carry within them an aspect of the future. Moreover, AI delegates linguistic responsibility to a digital majority opinion; it is thus an irresponsible language. The wonder inherent in this automatic resonance has been described often enough – now begins the implementation, integration, policymaking and management at the day-to-day level. “What kind of AI do you use?” is a question we now hear relatives asking each other at their annual get-together, if only to demonstrate that they’re still alive. Of course there are usually different responses to that question, and of course they come quick like a shot. Dead ends in conversation and language at the same time.

In between times – that’s what people used to latch on to when they didn’t know what to do next. When disruption takes over and everything falls into disorder, when the times are out of joint. In between times – that’s when people become ghosts, and the real ghosts lose their way, wandering about and coming to us in a countercurrent, from the opposite direction. While we set off straight ahead, as traffic fatalities of the future so to speak, they simply stumble towards us, having become superfluous. Their job of haunting is no longer possible, too great is the competition from us humans, who have become ghostlike ourselves. In the ghost-human-AI food chain, it is the ghosts who are at the very bottom. In between times, there is also no thought given to the past; one is too busy not understanding what is coming. This in-between space between two great epochs is “weird fiction”, a tale that is often spun in hindsight and presented as particularly interesting. It makes good material for binge-watching. History is discontinuous, as one commentator notes; sometimes it treads water, as the old no longer works and the new is not quite there yet; the tension of an epic lies in the interplay between revealing and concealing. But what do I know about that, being the contemporary that I am.

At any rate, there is currently no escaping the impression that someone who wasn’t there before has suddenly pushed his way in between. And now he’s destroying everything, despite the fact that he himself is produced, manufactured – on the basis of a wish that we must’ve expressed at some point. Someone who finally dares say what is supposedly preoccupying us all. And all of a sudden, he takes over everything – toxic male fiction. And now the latest prank: Trump is selling the in-between space of a millisecond’s head start in knowledge – a decisive advantage for investors and financial actors – in the form of a subscription on Truth Social. So open corruption, too, can be realised through in-between spaces. And it is suspected that the midterms, the between-elections, that interim exam of the American president this November, will – one way or another – be suspended. Already now he is laying the groundwork in his speeches, which build on the myth of the 2020 elections having been stolen.

Interim results on this matter are currently being reported continuously. Everyone loves an interim score. It shows us where we stand, the scoreline there between the teeth, ready to be ground up as a live ticker, and just like that, we know: Oh, a resignation has taken place! Oh, it was a goalkeeping error! Oh… The XXL World Cup was a buzz kill, because the Germans, because the Belgians and the French, because the English were ousted while the others advanced. Although the football World Cup had its credibility issues – not least because of those mandatory hydration breaks – the live ticker went on busily negating the in-between stage, suggesting a constant flow: yet another fiction we employ to advance our view of history. But it’s never the same river we step into – in order to do what? To swim over, perhaps, but to where? To the neighbouring country?

Between two countries lies a river border, that much we’ve realised. Between two countries there are also front lines. There we can already find bird’s nests made of fibre optic cable. Because thanks to radio jamming and the disruption of flight traffic in the Donbas region, drones are equipped with kilometre-long fibre optic cables, which float down from the skies and extend across the landscape after the drones have been shot down. It looks like spiderwebs, like white image interference, which at some point becomes a new resource, and ultimately turns into microplastic. But before that happens, birds pick up the material to build their nests: interim recycling!

The Austrian writer Stefan Schmitzer reads from his book space waste at the Änderungsschreiberei gallery in Cologne; he makes it clear to me that “between” is also an apt description for any kind of rubbish. Objects crushed up against each other, at rubbish tips, falling on top of one another with strange, dull plastic sounds – that in-between noise par excellence, the thud – mark the place where truly no one wants to linger, the in-between space of used-up objects that cease to be goods, and that now even clutter outer space. The question of whether goods must actually be something that can potentially be bought is slowly becoming redundant. After all, do goods still need to be received by anybody? Or has that become irrelevant? Anyone who has read Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Governing knows the answer.

Between heaven and earth: Elon Musk’s space junk. Between heaven and earth: a waterspout on Lake Constance, of a kind not usually seen there. Between heaven and earth: a flock of birds that has lost its bearings and leads us astray too; and no, there is no room between the points of a compass. But down below, yes, almost right at ground level, there is still the intermediate host. Before anything can be transmitted to humans, it takes an awful lot of pigs and chickens and cattle – at least that’s how the viruses see it. Which is why they also have a lively interest in large-scale factory farming, the kind I witnessed in California, in the Valley: thousands of hoofed animals standing in the muck, with no gap between them whatsoever – that’s what I saw on the interstate.

Even between cars there are still gaps – necessary safety gaps – through which children can weave their way and play hide-and-seek. In the novel I’m currently writing, that’s the best place for them to do so. They started doing it on a flat meadow at the edge of the woods, but in the meantime so many cars have been parked on the farmer’s field that the game of hide-and-seek makes a lot of sense there. All you have to do is duck down between all that uniformity. In those gaps between cars, however, quite a bit can get lost. In the end, not all the children reappear either. It’s a game of hide-and-seek that has been taken too far, people will say, and it’s the answer to what is currently playing out between the generations. That’s where the biggest gap opens up. Because after all, we’ve had our time, and they no longer have any left. The generation gap is a constant in every statement the German government issues: all those pension plans, military service plans, climate plans, fossil fuel extension plans – all of it at the expense of the coming generations. Earth Overshoot Day on 1 January! How are young people supposed to stay fit for the future in light of all these bleak prospects and the messy struggle over distribution that began so long ago but now leaves no room for manoeuvre. 

Peace is not the time between two wars – that’s really not something I would like to say. Why don’t we say instead that war is the time between two periods of peace? Those are abstract quantities, they will say, in an age of hybrid wars, of hot-cold wars, of wars that are, in truth, never-ending. We just don’t remember our own present time correctly. Perhaps we also lack the proper language to do so. Or it’s increasingly slipping away from us. Apparently, over the past 25 years, we’ve been speaking 338 fewer words each day – I got that from a report in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of 30 March, front page! Who’s counting? I can’t really figure out what it’s supposed to mean; it must amount to several novels a day that we’re losing – but surely that can’t be right.

How does the language of in-between sound anyway? As punctuation, does the colon open up more “between” than the dash? Surely it’s the punctuation marks we should be using more often, not so much the nouns. Or switching languages: falling into English mid-sentence, switching to Vietnamese, then to German, standing between languages. I don’t speak any of them properly, none of them belong to me – as I read in a text by the Cologne-based artist Anchi Trinh. Perhaps that doesn’t have to be the case, either: standing-between-languages is an increasingly common condition. Easy for me to say, clinging to German as I do.

Between life and death – that’s the state none of us ever wants to find ourselves in. Between Scylla and Charybdis – with us in between, and no way of perceiving what is sung. Between today and tomorrow – no, between life and death, not that: we would only get stuck there; that is paralysis, that is powerlessness, that is the inability to act. We no longer say between today and tomorrow. By then, time has been used up. Accompanying someone in that state can be dangerous, but a person in that state should by no means be left alone. 

This is the end of the text. 

And yet. 

Between the end of one text and the beginning of the next lies a not-insignificant in-between space of possibilities. I would like to fill it with a postscript, as a kind of counterpoint to what has just been written. At the memorial for curator and co-inventor Wulf Herzogenrath, our long-standing Akademie member, and member of the Senate too, we were reminded of the essence of his life: the state of being in-between, as the long-time Kolumba director Stefan Kraus put it in his eulogy, “inter-est”, the passion for mediation, for taking ideas further. It’s what shaped the life’s work of this in-between person, who gave us so much in the visual arts, in music, in Fluxus, as well as in video art. The in-between: the favourite dwelling place of gifts. 

Kathrin Röggla has been a member of the Akademie der Künste, Literature Section, since 2012; from 2015 to 2024 she served as the Akademie’s vice-president.