Tim Morton’s stormed in, highlighting the sneering menace of ‘going meta’. Firstly, I’ll cite two agreeable texts, that I want to cover before I launch into where I think the aesthetic issue creeps in.

Heres Graham from the last chapter of Guerilla Metaphysics; he sets up the strategy for why philosophy should, not so much oppose critique but supersede it;

‘In one sense, critical thinking deserves praise for acting as a corrosive fluid on dogmatic tradition, and our educational institutions must encourage this skill at the introductory level. But at a later stage it easily becomes counterproductive, for there is a sense in which the great thinkers are always far more childlike and gullible, far more involved with some mesmerising central idea than all of the wary, uncommitted, replaceable critics….To be a critic is to eat the world, leaving no seed left over to blossom in the spring.’ Graham Harman Guerrilla Metaphysics p238

Graham has long advocated the philosophical style of fascination rather than critique. A more constructive style of thinking, than merely draining the dregs of human critique; surprise rather than systematic thinking, unexpected contingency rather than meta-analysis. It is no surprise then, that OOO and Morton’s words resonate profoundly with Latour’s Compositionist Manifesto. A paper so unmistakably clear in its intent, you’ll be shocked that a thinker can say such obvious things directly without feeling it necessary to add complex, esoteric babble.

“Even though the word “composition” is a bit too long and windy, what is nice is that it underlines that things have to be put together (Latin componere) while retaining their heterogeneity. Also, it is connected with composure; it has a clear root in art, painting, music, theater, dance, and thus is associated with choreography and scenography; it is not too far from “compromise” and “compromising” retaining with it a certain diplomatic and prudential flavor. Speaking of flavor, it carries with it the pungent but ecologically correct smell of “compost”, itself due to the active “de-composition” of many invisible agents… Above all, a composition can fail and thus retain what is most important in the notion of constructivism (a label which I could have used as well, had it not been already taken by art history). It thus draws attention away from the irrelevant difference between what is constructed and what is not constructed, toward the crucial difference between what is well or badly constructed, well or badly composed. What is to be composed may, at any point, be decomposed.” Bruno Latour,  A Compositionist Manifesto p3

If Graham’s OOO privileges the unexpected in objects, then Latour’s hetrogenious offering establishes the ethical praxis of composite functionality. Both echo the exploration of the common or universal, that of building the composite whilst understanding the relative, heterogeneous basis of composition itself, namely, the grouping together of units that never form ‘the whole’ but a revisable unit.

Latour is helpful in this regard as he aims the compositionist manifesto squarely at critique and then, at nature. There is ‘no’ world beyond the horizon, but composed things directly before us.

This is precisely the point where compositionism wishes to take over: what is the successor of nature? Of course, no human, no atom, no virus, no organism has ever resided “in” nature understood as res extensa…No composition has ever been so fiercely decomposed. Bruno Latour,  A Compositionist Manifesto p6

‘To be sure, critique did a wonderful job of debunking prejudices, enlightening nations, prodding minds, but, as I have argued elsewhere, it “ran out of steam” because it was predicated on the discovery of a true world of realities lying behind a veil of appearances.’ Bruno Latour,  A Compositionist Manifesto p4

For Latour, the functionality part emerges from having the right tools to compose the necessary composites. Nothing is given. Building a piece of work, whether theory, art, poetry, video games, movies or overthrowing political regimes, they take a huge amount of work to compose and perhaps more work to keep together. This is the same with a Fine Art undergraduate canvas than it is starting a guerilla revolution, or cleaning a skyscraper’s windows.

‘The thirst for the Common World is what there is of communism in compositionism, with this small but crucial difference that it has to be slowly composed instead of being taken for granted and imposed on all. Everything happens as if the human race was on the move again, expelled from one utopia, that of economics, and in search of another, that of ecology.’ Bruno Latour,  A Compositionist Manifesto p13-14

Heidegger was partly right of course, when he suggested that the work of art ‘sets’ up a World from the Earth and keeps it there. But of course, this is not a human fixation of ‘World’, nor is it specific to great works of idealistic art. Art does give the rather easy exemplification of composition, but it has only become fashionable in the last 30 – 40 years to abandon compostional ‘unity’ in favour of systems and context. For, what we would term the “relationalists”, composition itself is an uninteresting relic of yesteryear that festers away once critique has eaten the gristle away from the carcass. The artwork must be composed so as to exist and relate in a system of process. By contrast the occlusion of unity and units is forgotten in the relativist stripping of audience.

There is a fundamental difference between ‘unity’ and ‘unit’. Unity of course is vital to the formalists, this is when composition actually mattered. The Modernist sensibility offered the methodology of composing the work in such a way that the work itself had a ‘unity of composition’. The Modernist debacle that followed occurred when the formalists took critique too seriously. Progress has a lot to answer for. The ‘great idealist race’ of Greenbergian formalism need not be confined to the land where artists were too stupid to still believe in essence, but rescued into a compositional awareness of intimacy and absorption.

Like Latour says, the Modern sensibility has to be decomposed in order to be recomposed. This is true of aesthetics no less than philosophy.