However I have been invited to do a paper in Falmouth in October for a panel on the theme of OOO performance, computation and automatons. I didn’t think it was common knowledge, but Tim has just posted something so HERE you go. Should be a lot of fun, if only to see Tim deliver a presentation at full speed in Falmouth.

Transtechnology Research Public Dialogues 2013:

At the Interlude between Body, Artifact and Discourse

12-14 July 2013, Transtechnology Research, Plymouth University 

Transtechnology Research is pleased to invite paper submissions and panel participation for dialogues at the Interlude between Body/Artifact/Discourse, developed by Transtechnology Research hosted in association with the Cognition Institute Plymouth University, the Plymouth Arts Centre and Peninsula Arts Gallery Plymouth University, UK from the 12th to the 14th July 2013.

This years Transtechnology Research Dialogue builds upon a contemporary challenge to conventional and disciplinary notions of what can be understood as an ‘historical document’ through questioning the necessity of material evidence to understand the world around us, as well as human activity itself within the world. The questioning of the limits of materiality has further implications for how we conceptualise notions of the ‘artifact’, the ‘body’ and ‘discourse’, across the arts, sciences and humanities as we come to terms with a material world that can be seen to coalesce in many ways with the immaterial dimensions of the imagination.

Transtechnology Research is a transdisciplinary research group situated in the Faculty of Arts at Plymouth University. Its constituency is drawn from historians, philosophers, anthropologists, artists and designers and is led from a historical and theoretical perspective with the objective of understanding science and technology as a manifestation of a range of human desires and cultural imperatives. Its aim is to provide a doctoral and post-doctoral environment for researchers who need to undertake academic research informed by their own and others creative practice. Its overarching research project concerns the philosophical aspects of science and technology and the history of popular arts.

[UPDATED - after an illuminating Twitter discussion with Pete Wolfendale and Shane Denson, I've updated the post to include their necessary and helpful contributions. Warning - its 3130 words or so.]

So I’ve been pretty rubbish at blogging lately – you can blame fatigue / Speculations work /  extra research for that and a whole bunch o’ personal stuff – more on that soon.

Anyway – its nice to finally have a spare evening in which I can write about some recent thinking, that probably won’t go anywhere. So I have a couple of essays coming out on Speculative Realism and aesthetics, in which I discuss and interrogate, what I see as the major divide between the “original four” of the 2007 conference – what I call (borrowing Meillassoux’s distinction in that conference) the difference between Demonstration and Description. I am of the view that in order to properly apply SR to other domains of interest (and for me that includes aesthetics and computer science especially) one has to locate this divide both historically and present within them. In my essay for And Another Thing (coming out soon) I briefly show how this division applies in aesthetic terms, and how they potentially divide Kant’s historical legacy, both aesthetic and philosophical in half. In Dublin, I also briefly showed how this may apply to Computer Science too (for me, the two histories are both intertwined philosophically);

In the first instance there is ‘Demonstration’ the primacy of epistemological ‘fact’ or ‘knowledge‘: that a passive, inert material reality can be epistemologically demonstrated  and known through the formal, inferential properties of thought and an extrinsic principle of the fact, so that thought becomes radically divorced from a non-anthropomorphic being. This position is shared both by Meillassoux and Ray Brassier through their joint commitment to explain the truth of reality rationally using the skeptical tools of correlated thought. For Meillassoux it is absolutely clear that reality must only be thought, not taken as given (otherwise it is simply correlated). Instead of appealing to the givenness of laws or predictability of reasonable conjecture, correlative thought must be demonstrated to achieve knowledge of the absolute contingency of everything, where the only law is absolute lawlessness. Similarly as much Brassier would like to cut himself off from Speculative Realism, he too is implicated into Demonstration just as much as Meillassoux. Brassier’s recent development of Wilfrid Sellars‘ work, is at once helpful and a startling extension to his work in Nihil Unbound; he adopts most of Sellars’ rejections including his Myth of the Given, in which knowledge is to be gained from self-analysis of the meta-lingustic functioning of language games. From this, Brassier follows Sellars’ gung ho synoptic project into fusing the inorganic manifest intentional image-function with the visionless, natural non-anthropomorphic scientific image-function. This, it seems, gives Brassier the leverage to develop Sellars’ absolute processes inherent in cognitive behaviour, as a reconciliation of both images. The crucial, ‘demonstrative’ point, is that this can only be done by rigorously analysing the normative structure (rule-behaviour) of cognitive order, developed from (and through) its material achievement and development. For Brassier, pragmatic conceptual function rules. Whether through function or fact, both Meillassoux and Brassier believe that reality can only be demonstrated.

Yet, in complete opposition, there is ‘Description’: the primacy of ontological realities in their own right. For this side reality is composed of fundamental entities, objects, things, forces and powers which are ontologically no different in kind than the epistemological limits of cognition and, moreover, they exist in their own right. This is an intrinsic principle of the thing. The correlated relationship between thinking and being is radicalised into entity-specific things, with substantial essence on the side of individual objects (Harman, Levi Bryant), a second empiricism of networked actants (Bruno Latour) or the panpsychist, vitalist dynamism of active matter on the other (Iain Hamilton Grant, Steven Shaviro). For Harman, as we know – the in-itself is not a primordial lump, nor a product of human understanding, but a mezzanine of entities, which can only be described. But this description is not all there is, for other entities are defined by their own logics of descriptions and this is the OOO gamble, as it were – how do other entities, including humans describe? Grant on the other hand, does not locate his metaphysics in bodies, or individuals but in Nature – and moreover the irreducible products of nature as its own history. Both Harman and Grant have noted (in The Speculative Turn and elsewhere) that the inanimate world is the crucial orientation which they both share – not direct access through epistemological knowledge, but (in Grant) through a thinking of a single ground upon which thinking is a product (knowledge for Grant is for the most part, a possible contingent product of Nature itself). Both Harman and Grant agree on at least showing that the ontological primacy of reality, in its own right, is metaphysically prior to the theories of the knowledge of the natural sciences, and thus not handmaiden to it. Reality can only be described.

We all know this division of course, even if its only second-hand. What is important here is the utter incompatible nature of both orientations, precisely insofar as correlationism was a pre-synthesis of both. No middle way is possible, because correlationism was that middle way. Like a Hegelian dialectic stuck in reverse gear, Speculative Realism ‘fractures’ the correlate into these two halves and only these two. Fuse both Demonstration and Description together and you arrive back at correlationism; that the world cannot be known directly, and only be internally related by human thought. Speculative Realism, then, simply is this incompatible splintering, this fracture, and its existence emerges from this rejection. Demonstration argues that the correlate can fruitfully prove or deduce knowledge of itself and the world, whilst Description argues that the human correlate never fully deduces anything, and is no different in kind from anything else. Once the correlate is rejected, there is no middle way to stake a claim apart from these two broad orientations of ‘what is’; either reality must be epistemologically demonstrated or reality must be described in terms of real ontological variance. Once once side is chosen, the other recedes from view.

However to simply leave this distinction as it is, only delivers half of a development. For a while now, I’ve been trying to understand and develop a second axis which can account for the differences between Meillassoux and Brassier’s Demonstrative side but equally account for the differences between Harman and Grant’s Descriptive side in equal measure and application. Such a division would go some way into understanding how such a fourfold could arise and mould into four very different orientations. I sincerely doubt that what I’ve come with with, ‘sticks’ so to speak, yet I cannot apply anything else which equally matches. So, feel free to shoot me down, should the model fail to preach what needs to be preached.

So critically the first axis, which one could sufficiently call the ‘Kantian’ or the ‘decorrelationist axis’ is relatively simple: either a Speculative Realist chooses the primacy of knowledge to deduce inert material reality, or one simply chooses the primacy of inanimate ontological reality, given to us but also metaphysically present to start off with. This division is located horizontally, with Meillassoux and Brassier on the top and Harman and Grant on the bottom. Is there another axis which reveals a different pairing no matter how tenuous and faint? I believe there is.

This second axis could be called the ‘context of application’ axis ’Modal’ Axis- although I have no finalised name for it at present. It’s basically using two well known divisions in Analytic Philosophy of language and philosophies of logic: the division between Extentionality and Intensionality – but one could easily apply a distinction between Facticity and Ground, and the basic split still holds.

A crucial caveat is needed though: their application here only stands to illuminate or pick out various philosophical regularities I see in the philosopher’s respective work – what I’m not attempting to do is say that ‘x’ philosopher is making an intensional truth-value, or functional context, a commitment to semantic use, a logic proposition, or whatever. I’m only using the general differences between the two principles so as to pick out tensions between the SR fourfold as I see it. So I’m well aware in advance that hardly any of the SR four explicitly define themselves as extensional or intensional language philosophers – and to say so, would negate the purpose of establishing a first axis anyway. Rather I’m adding the principles of extensional and intensional principles to the division of Demonstration and Description, so as to give us a stable system in which one can pair off and divide different types of arguments and claims. What I am not doing is to fit or locate extensionality and intensionality as either Demonstration and Description, as this would be appealing to their respective Analytic uses once more (extension is typically used to refer to objects as referents: i.e. description – whilst intension is used to gain knowledge about the necessary reasons for meanings i.e. Demonstration) – to apply them in this narrowly analytic way is to arrive back at the realism/antirealism distinction again. What is crucial is that this axis is perpendicular to the Kantian one and not the same, even if it has been historically treated as the same. This way is more fun too.

Moving on quickly, I believe that what Meillassoux and Harman share in their philosophies is a joint development of extentionality. What is extenstionality? It basically refers to a set of principles upon which all objects or entities are equal if they have the same external properties. If you can describe one object by a set of external principles, i.e. extend them, (Robert is the only person on the street who is 29 years of age), then if you can apply this set of qualities to another set of objects (‘Robert’ and ‘the only person on the street who is 29 years old’) then each object is equal by definition. When one says ‘wallet’, the extensional principle simply requires that a history of all wallets satisfy this definition.  The main point here is that extensionality is defined by applying a set of principles upon which a given object or entity can satisfy those principles, as in when and how they are applied – and the consistency of the philosophy is this application. Also both share a primacy of the fact as application towards a reality prior to reasonable ground: Meillassoux starts from contingent facts to arrive at the demonstration of absolute knowledge, as opposed (and similar in kind) to Harman who starts from describing actual contingent objects without locating a prior ground for their own existence (i.e. it could be said that individual discrete objects are their own reason, without a prior ground – which again is extensional).

By default, Meillassoux gets his extentionality by Badiou’s axiomatic endorsement of set theory (ZFC axiomatic set theory is defined by extension tout court), but there are other portions of his philosophy which encompass extensionality – for instance the application of possible worlds beyond this one, on account of absolute contingency applying to them, even if they nonexistent at present. This would be a demonstrative extensionality, (or Extensional Demonstration) driven by what can be known – and insofar as this is epistemological, this is about whether infinite worlds can be known or realized. Extensionality also plays a major part in Meillassoux’s anti-constructive, ex nihilo, anti-reason, ‘post-metaphysics – metaphysics’ – because like Badiou, there is no reason for how groupings of sets or worlds are brought together in certain principles, and thus they are always subject to change. In Meillassoux’s strange but intriguing cosmic history of contingent ‘jumps’ – there is no reason for matter, nor life, nor thought, nor God – only extensions of the absolute.

On first glance, Harman’s object oriented philosophy doesn’t correspond to this at all. Harman’s philosophy is weird on this basis. If it is an Extensional Description, then how would it differ? The key here would perhaps be how Harman uses the tools of extension to pinpoint the description of objects, speculating on their hidden reality outside of knowledge. First off, we can clearly see that extension is used to denote that objects are equal and must be accounted for. Objects, in themselves aren’t extensional sets of course, but the crucial point is how objects are realised at all in this metaphysics, and how such a system accounts for them. One of the classic OOO methods – the Latourian litany – establishes an enumerative procedure which lists various objects one by one in a list, so as to show how each object extends the OOO principles of discreteness, equality and irreducibility. Each object is understood as fitting the definitions (but of course objects are not simply ‘just’ their definitions – they exist in reality whether one pays attention to them or not). Another key aspect is the finiteness of extension for how OOO describes things that exist – all examples are good enough, and entirely equal in application (Although not part of OOO, Garcia is just as happy to apply the extensional nature of his flat ontology to absolutely everything “no matter what”, either existing or non-existing, contradictory or non-contradictory, because it simply exists according to a principle of, “no matter what”). For Harman of course, there must be something deeper in the thing that withdraws from all extensional description, even if we only have access to this particular method – we don’t have any access to a deeper knowledge of the essence of the thing, even if it is necessary (yet the thing is also contingent). Extension in this regard, is the plural equality of access in such a realism: and so all finite extensions are good enough to fail the grasping of discrete objects.

On the flipside though, its becoming increasingly clear that Brassier and Grant also share a similar joint development of Intensionality within the similar split of Demonstration and Description. So what is intenstionality? (not ever to be confused with intentionality) – this is a little harder to explain, but I’ll give it a go. Intensional principles (or nonextenstional principles as they are sometimes referred to) denote similar sets or objects so defined, but the difference here is that such principles require an explanation of the inner, necessary and sufficient reasons for those things, including meanings, properties and reasons. Intensionality refers to the necessary ‘rules’ of the structure which are coterminous with the thing itself. These principles must be sufficient enough to account for all manifestations of the rule (infinite or otherwise), as they are defined and applied; so if an extensional principle of a Bachelor is a list of all bachelors who have ever existed, an intensional principle of a Bachelor would simply be ‘an unmarried man’ – precisely insofar as ‘an unmarried man’ is a sufficient and necessary condition of knowledge that requires both to be the same or operating under the same rules.

So Brassier is clearly a philosopher who can be located in the Intensional Demonstration category without much fuss. For him there must be necessary and sufficient reasons for cognitive structure and representation – and moreover we can demonstrate these structural reasons, using the tools of objective science and nominalist theory, but utilising normative principles. The bankrolling of intensional reasons is what separates Brassier from other post-Hegelian philosophers, as he can escape what would be (in his eyes) the extenstional inadequacy of locating thought as an ex nihilo ”voided animal’, whose genesis is left up to radical contingency or vitalised matter. The birth of manifest representation needs sufficient explanation.  Sellars can provide a nice and sturdy, meta linguistic, post-Hegelian table to stand on for this category -which requires using meta-lingustic function as leverage to a non-linguistic reality in thought. Equally Pete Wolfendale is equally home with the Brandom angle, and the procedural rationalism he endorses (or thats how I read his position(s) anyway). What is possible is only what is normatively possible.

Grant on the other hand has little time for appealing to the genesis of thought as its primary problem, but in equal measure, applies an Intensional Description into metaphysics. Nature is the functional necessary and sufficient reason in-itself outside of human demonstration. What Grant is after is the sufficient conditions upon which such all objects (including thought) are possible from Nature (as I understand it). Such individuals or objects are produced intrinsically from the ground of conditions, which in turn produce that ground (and ground is its production). The necessary sufficient powers that craft such objects (even all aspects of phenomena) are not separable from what they do, but quite simply ‘are’ what they do, as necessary production.

What both Grant and Brassier share, that Meillassoux and Harman respectfully do not, is an intensional commitment to function and process, but the Demonstration and Description distinction is crucial to highlight the differences; for Brassier, Sellarsian absolute processes are not processes which can be located ontologically outside of thought, but an ontological discovery about reality through concepts and intrinsic to the conceptual manifest image itself. Grant on the other hand, locates function and process on metaphysical grounds, where Nature and powers simply are, whether manifest or not. If Brassier is wanting to ground the epistemological reasons for facts, then Grant is equally similar (and equally opposing) in that he wants to ground the ontological grounds for existents, which are only described second hand.

I’ve gone on long enough for a blog post – but I’ll sign off with one last outcome which arises from this fourfold. From the structure as I’ve described it – we have found four possible connections and thus four equal possible tensions; (EDis and EDes (Harman and Meillassoux): IDis and IDes (Grant and Brassier): EDes and IDes (Meillassoux and Brassier): EDis and IDis (Harman and Grant). It follows then that there are two – and only two – critically incompatible tensions where no connection is possible whatsoever, if one accepts the dual axis, so defined: (that is EDes and IDis (Meillassoux and Grant) and EDis and IDes (Harman and Brassier)) – and this makes total sense in my eyes. Both sets of confrontations are so opposing that its unclear how any reconciliation is possible (I mean take one look at my awful drawing above: its clear that the philosophies of Wolfendale and Garcia, should never be made to dance). Likewise it explains the incompatibility of Meillassoux and Grant’s positions, the tension of which is never really covered in any great depth: Meillassoux seeks to remove the necessity of sufficient laws by simple epistemological deduction alone, where even matter and the probable possibility of matter, is rid of any intrinsic power to change or produce change. This then, is the complete opposite to Grant who seeks to locate the necessary and sufficient metaphysical reasons for the ontological production and possibility of change.

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Do Objects Have a Politics? Broomberg & Chanarin’s ID-2.

Lets begin with a horrible, troublesome question. Do inanimate objects have a politics? Unpacking this question risk unpacking everything else.

In Autumn last year, the London-based artist duo Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin exhibited their controversial show ‘To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light’, first at Paradise Row, London, and more recently at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg in January of this year. Both exhibitions center around the artist’s historical enquiries into technological photographic developments with Kodak film stock and their entanglements within the South Africa apartheid regime in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The title of the show refers to the coded phrase specifically used by Kodak, which alluded to the creation of a new film stock designed to address the earlier film’s inability to render dark skin. This limitation of the medium produced a narrow light range, which when exposed to white skin – would render black skin completely invisible, save their eyes and teeth. When the confectionary and furniture industry kicked up a fuss on the inability to photograph dark chocolate and black furniture, Kodak were forced to come up with a solution, which indadvertedly manifested itself in the Polaroid ID-2 camera, first marketed in 1965, and ending production in 1973, designed as one mechanism to photograph and construct ID cards. As well as containing a camera head, timer, security laminator, die cutter and a pouch sealer, it also had an additional flash-boost feature. Broomberg explains that the pigment in South-African black skin absorbs roughly 42% more light than typical white skin. The ID-2’s boost feature produces exactly 42% more light, evoking the necessary response that its purpose was to take reliable photographs of black faces – this artifact’s sleek functioning, the artist’s believed, was the predominant mechanism South African authorities used to produce pass-book portraits (or “dompas”) which aided the apartheid regime of racial segregation.

Polaroid withdrew its operation from South Africa in 1977, largely because of the efforts of Caroline Hunter, a young black chemist working for Polaroid who discovered their implicit support for the apartheid and campaigned for a boycott. Broomberg & Chanarin’s show itself focuses on using the ID-2 (both in its “black-flash-boost” and “white settings) to photograph images of South African flora and foliage, rather than South African portraiture. None of this removes the inherent, charged political foundation of the ID-2, as it continued to be used after ’77: As Broomberg explains and claims, quoting him in a corresponding Guardian article: “Anything that comes out of that camera is a political document. If I take a shot of the carpet, that’s a political document.”1

But looking at the artist’s intentions with a dose of criticality, we have to be wary of what aesthetics consequences are claimed here. To say that the operation of the ID-2 is intrinsically political, no matter what it captures, generalises particular nuances about what such an apparatus is, and what our relationship to such an apparatus becomes as a result of what it does. The powerful nature of the subject matter does not license such grand claims that inanimate objects are inherently political or social, yet of course one cannot shirk away from the powerful potency of the artist’s images to foreground ID-2’s operation.

What would the role of aesthetics be in this difficult encounter? For example if we were to read the artist’s images through the lens of W. J. T. Mitchell’s 2005 publication What Do Pictures Want? – it won’t get us very far, not just because Mitchell’s text discusses the animated lives of images only insofar as how they literally, depict and subvert racial stereotypes (as in the chapter Living Color), but because the limitations of picture theory, would only pass through the operation of the ID-2 mechanism as a secondary process onto the reality of the living images themselves. Picture theory becomes limited, when the focus is on the material mechanism which gave birth to it. Broomberg and Chanarin’s exhibited images may be analyzed as uncontrollable living things, that “want” to discriminate, metaphor or not (should one would want to even suggest this), but the more pressing subject matter under consideration is the uncontrollable mechanism of the ID-2 itself, which uncomfortably constructs the show discussed, as well as the political issue at hand. Furthermore, what about all the other uncontrollable mechanisms that take place in the show and in photography in general which are glossed over?: the grained presence of silver-halide crystals in film emulsion, which, when struck by light, release an extra electron from bromide ions, attracting silver ions in turn to create fragile photos? Or how the artists photographed rare Bwtit initiation rituals using Kodak film stock past its expiration date, using archaic chemical processes to salvage one picture.

So, my question is this: what is the clearest method available to us, upon which one can approach the ID-2’s non-humanness without compromising on the difficult subject matter? Moreover in general terms, what would the role of aesthetics be in this method? My haggard suggestion is that rather than understanding the aesthetics of inanimate things through the lens of the social, political or economic system of which it is embedded, the social, political or economic system should be analyzed through the aesthetics of embedded animate and inanimate things. How does one use things in order to do things, not just aesthetically but also ethically? This view is, of course, not new, not least in science and technology studies, and as we will see, there are different, competing methods of how one takes things seriously. But depending on which nuance one sides, such differences potentially affect not only the practices of artists working today, but also such concurrent enquiries into the role of things and the autonomy of material in criticism, art history and contemporary practice.

Thing Nuance

In the classic 1980 article “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” written by Langdon Winner, for the journal Daedalus, one can find a similar set of struggles within a similar set of questions. Of course, Winner muses, “We all know that people have politics, not things,”2 but, nonetheless, he suggests that the standard models of social power unwittingly remove specific fine-grained distinctions within technological things themselves, locating their agency entirely within the realms of human production and the social. The social determination of technology is, in this view, essentially no different from the social determination of welfare, economics, finance or taxation. Winner’s approach “… takes technical artifacts seriously. Rather than insist that we immediately reduce everything to the interplay of social forces, it suggests that we pay attention to the characteristics of technical objects and the meaning of those characteristics.”3

Winner notes two methods for how this may be done. First he cites particular instances where a specific technical device or system becomes a way of settling an issue in a particular community. The second method is perhaps more suitable whereby inherently political technologies, and man-made systems appear to require, or are strongly compatible with political relationships. Such assemblages, he states are “forms of order:” For instance, Winner cites his famous example of two hundred, extraordinary low-hanging overpasses on Long Island, New York, built by Robert Moses, who on evidence of his biographer, deliberately designed them to discourage the presence of buses, the most widely used method of transport for the black community. According to Winner, the overpasses themselves contained an implicit discrimination built directly into the actual thing, designed to socially engineer a decision which favours one privileged class and race, by brute force. It can perhaps be argued that Broomberg and Chanarin’s show is strongly aligned with this second option – how photography as a non-human operational thing itself implicitly discriminates between certain races, in favour of others, and, moreover, how such limiting effects manifest in specific social engineering practices.

But there was a problem in Winner’s analysis, as routinely pointed out in the article’s fallout in science and technology studies. Winner seemed to believe that there was an intrinsic, designed political order to these artifacts, as if the thing’s intention was definitively political through and through. Likewise Broomberg and Chanarin’s aesthetic analysis of the ID-2 holds a similar sway, by suggesting that anything the insipid device spews out must be politically ordered to discriminate. The issue here is mistaking the intentional aspect of the thing as an ontological imperative – Winner justifiably focuses on the things themselves, but their agency is ultimately based on human associations. Evidence for this can be seen in Winner’s association that “certain technologies [are] political phenomena in their own right.”4

And thats just the problem, things as political phenomena – not the thing in its own right, but the thing of human perception and automation. No wonder Winner borrows from Edmund Husserl’s philosophical injunction ‘to the things themselves’ – we are dealing with things on the surface of phenomena: not real independent things, but things bracketed for human understanding and purpose. There are other extensions that argue for the presence of things in critical theory, most notably Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory.” which wants to supplement and invigorate narrative theory and cultural theory. Wherever we turn, we face things: whether they are supporting us, ruining daily tasks for us, getting us to buy more stuff. As Brown suggests, we routinely inject our odd ticks and fascinations into material things, which inject them back into us.

We cannot move on without discussing the main figurehead for the sociological and political study of non-humans, Bruno Latour. Under the pseudonym of Jim Johnson, Latour cites Winner in passing in the 1988 article, Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer.5 The article is a good introduction to the entire motif of Actor Network Theory in its Latourian deployment: he concentrates on one very humble non- human or actor: an automated door-closer located in the Sociology department at Walla Walla University, Washington. Latour suggests that by way of its associations within a network, such a thing can be followed as a highly moral, highly social actor. The door- closer itself is designed to delegate such human functions, often resists that function, and is need of constant discipline. It slams into peoples faces, discriminates very little and very old visitors from passing through, and by its nature, can’t decide if its a door or a gate. Latour’s break with Winner is the fact that he treats things, or actors as being highly contingent without much order at all – or rather order lies not with things, but their strength exists in networks, alliances, transformations and extensions. The political power of things, does not lie in the things themselves, but in their associations: in principle the ID-2 discriminates against black skin just as well as black furniture and black cats. The automatic door closer discriminates furniture removers, and millionaires with packages in principle. There is no form of order as such: what matters is the networked distribution of the actant, in the specific local arena of other actants, in a specific period of clustering relationships. In Latour’s eyes, Broomberg and Chanarin would be launching an inquiry and tracing a network, yet what does this do to aesthetic practice? Does it make it indistinguishable from science studies? Yes and perhaps no.

Latour’s famous intervention in science studies follows this logic to the end6: scientific truth and fact aren’t deduced by experiment, in order to discover their hidden nature: rather the practices and associations of laboratory workers and their non-human cliental align various actants together into contingent networks of strength, which are never absolute. For instance, its perfectly plausible to overturn Einstein’s theory of General Relativity (say if someone wanted to replace it with Machian Relativity), but the sheer weight of all the actors which have aligned themselves to this one actor, this black box, would discourage most from trying, or inevitably face ridicule: a host of actors stand in their way including historical papers, demonstrative equations, conferences, ingrained institutions and funding bodies, all are stacked up to defend such supposedly matters of fact. In order for an actor to be taken seriously as a fact, it must paradoxically follow a collective, constructive process.

Latour’s criticism of such techniques follow from his refusal to follow Modernities lead in purifying actants into two incompatible realms, as made famous in his 1991 publication We Have Never Been Modern. For Latour, Modernity is defined by a pointless division whereby entities are put into two boxes or two kinds; either they must be actants of nature, an external world made up of facts and reality, or they must be actants of culture, an internal realm composed of arbitrary, human perspectives and metaphors which socially construct. What Latour proposes is a shattering of the anthropocentric view that transcendent human thought is the center of historical, philosophical, aesthetic, social and moral issues, whilst reducing the rest of reality to unknowable ‘material’ worthy of scientific discovery. Reality isn’t simply defined by the work of nature, and neither is conceptual distortion simply defined by the work of thought: there are only actants, and their trials of strength in a relationship: nothing more, nothing less.

THING power

It would be an understatement to suggest that Latour’s inseparability of culture and nature has significant implications for contemporary art practice, not least because Latour himself recently set up a new experimental research program in art and politics (the Sciences Po Ecole des Arts Politiques [SPEAP]) and curated two major and experimental, international art exhibitions: Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art in 2002 and Making Things Public: The Atmospheres of Democracy in 2005 with Peter Weibel, both at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany.

In the co-joining publication, From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik (following Heidegger’s Ding as ‘Thing’), Latour outlines what such an implication could mean for arts practice. Political artworks cannot take place without the public life of things and their uncomfortable histories, that silently take place without us beholding them. Politics is no longer limited to human agency alone. No assembling can be done without non-human assemblers. No associations can be made without non-human relational networks explicitly blurring disciplines after the fact of the thing. The anthropocene may be one dominated by humans, but for Latour, indicative of his recent on Lovelock’s Gaia theory, and the revenge of nature, there is no ‘oneness’ of a romanticized primordial realm unknowable from thought alone. Thought and knowledge must be decentered, from their anthropocentric standpoint – and humans must orient themselves to reality of things: if a pluralistic multiculturalism is no longer anchored as the modern mover of things, then neither should a homogenous mononaturalism do so either. Latour jokingly coins this an object oriented democracy. Releasing objects from the ghosts of human experience Quoting Latour:

“Just go in your head over any set of contemporary issues: the entry of Turkey into the European Union, the Islamic veil in France, the spread of genetically modified organisms in Brazil, the pollution of the river near your home, the breaking down of Greenland’s glaciers, the diminishing return of your pension funds, the closing of your daughter’s factory, the repairs to be made in your apartment, the rise and fall of stock options, the latest beheading by fanatics in Falluja, the last American election. For every one of these objects, you see spewing out of them a different set of passions, indignations, opinions, as well as a different set of interested parties and different ways of carrying out their partial resolution. It’s clear that each object – each issue – generates a different pattern of emotions and disruptions, of disagreements and agreements. There might be no continuity, no coherence in our opinions, but there is a hidden continuity and a hidden coherence in what we are attached to. Each object gathers around itself a different assembly of relevant parties. Each object triggers new occasions to passionately differ and dispute. Each object may also offer new ways of achieving closure without having to agree on much else. In other words, objects – taken as so many issues – bind all of us in ways that map out a public space profoundly different from what is usually recognized under the label of “the political.”7

As they do, artists have answered the call with assertive aplomb – much of it designed to separate their own practice from dominant discussions in the artworld surrounding socially engaged practices focusing on participation and dialogue. In her 2008 essay Things vs Objects in Art Monthly, Rikke Hansen, cites Brown and Latour’s emphasis on non-human things, so as to outline how such a return moves such questions about social engagement on from the power of subjects and of thought more generally. In her view the criticism of Grant Kester, Miwon Kwon, Claire Bishop and especially Nicolas Bourriaud, sideline “the material things that are part of the stage set to begin with or produced from the encounter itself.”8 Artworks grounding in ethical participation never consider how other assembled entities ‘act‘ with as much agency as spectators, communities and viewers. Other critics, such as Ina Blom9, are more interested in how artists uncover the life of things in the public social realm.

Arguably things have always been a part of art, but in this new sense, ‘making things public’ is not just a theory, but a social practice of making things stand out, making the invisible things socially visible and oddly weird. This renewed democracy of things, the sociality of objects, follows a number of similarly predicated shows which attempt to understand how the agency of units and material ‘things’ shape viewer interactions; from the famous ‘THING: New Sculpture from Los Angeles’, Hammer Museum in 2005; Steven Claydon’s exhibition ‘Strange Things Permit Themselves the Luxury of Occurring’ at the Camden Arts Centre in 2008; and the show ‘Material Intelligence’ at Cambridge’s Kettle’s Yard in 2009.

In Things vs Objects, Hansen, cites the 2007 work Copy Right by Copenhagen artist group Superflex, comprised of 80 mass-produced chairs, crudely cut with cloth ripping edges, and remnant off-cuts strewn across the floor. The design of the chairs closely (but not exactly) follows the patent of the Arne Jakobsen chair, escaping their function and acting on the social network of the space. The actual confrontation with such a political work, lies in how the artist uncovers the inherent power within a non-human network, which is to say that, quoting Hansen, “Power is not inherent in either subjects or objects; instead power is and must always be seen as a relational matter”10. For Hansen especially, the contemporary role of the artist might be located in exposing how the agency of things, like patented chairs, force us into addressing how their associations control, discriminate, and socially discipline, in conjunction with making said things act, as well as understanding how their relational power emanates within and around us. In other words, a political theory presupposes an ontology, one that must first make assumptions about what entities are, what their properties may be and how they compose society. One can find an identical position in Jane Bennett’s 2010 publication Vibrant Matter, which attempts to concretize a political ecology. By vitality Bennett means, “ the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans, but also to act as quasi-agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.”11 A similar position can also be found in Isabelle Stenger’s Cosmopolitics, which operates under similar Latourian lines. This position is sometimes referred to as new materialism: understanding the vital, agency qualities of matter outside of thought.

More recently, Daniel Birnbaum’s review of Documenta 13, in ArtForum, 12 argues that there was a productive conflict between the trauma led artworks focusing on human conflict and reconciliation, together with artworks which explicitly focused on the thinglyness of actants and objects (or as Documenta’s catalogue attests, an expressive call for the “inanimate makers of the world.”) Steven Henry Madoff’s review13 went as far as suggesting that Christov-Bakargiev’s curatorial emphasis on the story of the social through things, lent itself to being the most important exhibition in the 21st Century (it was certainly the most expensive).

The Politics of Concealment

Yet such an aesthetic theory concerning things, need not have its lot with a public Latourian model. The problem with artists making things public, is that at some point they sink back into invisible concealment. In his fourth book Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, the american philosopher Graham Harman, jointly endorses the importance of Latour’s theory of networked actants, for its trailblazing anti-Kantian metaphysical claims, whilst also criticizing its inherent philosophical limits. If Winner’s approach to the politics of things was broadly Husserlian, and Latour’s largely Whiteheadian, Harman’s approach to endorsing a reality of things follows a bizarre Heideggerian turn. What is needed, he thinks, is to preserve Latour’s democracy of things, but install a Heideggerian flavoured critique into it.

The problem as Harman sees it, is that Latour is too much of a relationalist – the reality of actants are so utterly defined by their associations, translations and perturbations, they have nothing left in reserve, and situations, political or otherwise, can only be changed by adding more networks, more associations. Should an artist wish to research a topic, they must negotiate a particular, existing network and align such things into a diminishing structure. An actant is only real for Latour if it plays it’s associations right. Harman argues that this is nothing short of a paradox for a realist position: if an actant’s reality is only defined by its relations in any given instant, how does such a system account for change? If a thing’s context is all it is, how can one permit an agency to it? Change being perhaps the central political and aesthetic aim in any given situation.

Harman’s response, built from his early work on Heidegger’s tool analysis, argues that discrete non-human objects are non-relational from the start. Objects are autonomous from their relations.14 If things are completely defined by their relations, to us and the world, Harman’s objects have autonomy insofar as they withdraw from the world including the social. Just as Heidegger mused that the phenomenological qualities of one’s hammer withdraw from use in the effort of building a hut in the Black Forest, Harman claims that the qualities of all objects withdraw from each other in equal measure. The qualities of a cotton ball’s smell, colour and taste, are not made public for the fire when burned, because fire can only affect its flammable properties. The reality of non-human objects always hide from their networks for Harman: there is always something left in reserve, never fully exhausted, never completely interconnected, never holistic, never fully made public, always concealed from view. All entities are finite, including the entity of thought.

Returning to the Broomberg & Chanarin’s show on the ID-2, we can build a preliminary case for whats going on. The artists are wrong to impose ethical claims on the medium of photography itself, rather the primacy of the medium exist outside of human political engagement. In fact I would argue that the only reason the artists can use the ID-2 to take such stunning imagery consists in the finite, limiting condition of the artifact in itself. Such a limitation of medium, allowed such atrocities to occur, and yet the same essential limits capture such beauty, precisely insofar the object has a deeper agency in-itself than its historically political use. Broomberg & Chanarin’s aesthetic imperative not only exposes the object’s political abuse, but simultaneously uses the same object – in itself to re-write and break those political relations around a new context. The political context does not exhaust the agency of the thing, rather the agency of the thing exceeds its context and thus is always capable of forcing something new into the context of things. Artists are complicit in this activity and rightly so. Thought cannot center its ethics without things.

More recently the videogame and digital media scholar Ian Bogost has used Harman’s work to reinterpret various strands in the history of photography. In his book Alien Phenomenology, Bogost mentions two photographers in particular Garry Winogrand and Stephen Shore – the work of both, he argues, cannot be understood without understanding how the camera itself limits a certain frame of looking. Winogrand use of the tiny Leica rangefinder,15 allowed him to photograph things indiscriminately without stopping for pause or framing, which allows Bogost to make good on16 Winogrand’s famous statement “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” Similarly with Shore, his use of film plates with the lumbering view camera forced him to understand how the camera sees, the mundanity of American life rather than himself. This Bogost argues, allows Shore to be ‘unironic’ to the material, simply cataloging the things in front of him, without pandering to a human perspective.17

1 David Smith, “Racism of early colour photography explored in art exhibition”, Guardian Culture Online, Friday 25 January 2013. Last Accessed 10th February 2013 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/25/racism-colour- photography-exhibition>

2 Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics”, in Daedalus, Vol. 109, No.1 (1980): 122 cf: 121 – 136.

3 ibid, 123.

4 ibid, 123.

5 Jim Johnson (a.k.a. Bruno Latour), “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer”, in Social Problems, Vol. 35, No. 3, Special Issue: The Sociology of Science and Technology (Jun., 1988), 298 – 310.

6 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge: 1987).

7 Bruno Latour, ”From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public”, in Making Things Public, Edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, (MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005), 15.

8 Rikke Hansen, “Things vs. Objects: Rikke Hansen on the public life of things”, In Art Monthly, London, Issue No. 318, July – August 2008. Accessed Online 10th February 2013, <http://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/article/things-v- objects-by-rikke-hansen-jul-aug-2008>

9 Ian Blom, On the Style Site – Art, Sociality, and Media Culture, (Sternberg Press, Berlin: 2007)

10 Hansen, “Things vs Objects.”

11 Jane Bennett. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (Duke: Duke University Press, 2010), viii

12 Daniel Birnbaum, ‘Documenta 13’, ArtForum, October 2012. Accessed Online 10th February 2013, <http:// blog.urbanomic.com/sphaleotas/archives/id_34514/id_34514.htm>

13 Steven Henry Madoff, “Why Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Documenta May Be the Most Important Exhibition of the 21st Century.” Accessed Online 10th February 2013, <http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/811949/why-curator- carolyn-christov-bakargievs-documenta-is-the-most-important-exhibition-of-the-21st-century>

14 Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Repress, Melbourne: 2009) 159. 15 Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology. (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 2012) 47

16 Ibid. 72.

17 Ibid. 48 – 50.

I think he’s spot on of course, but what some readers may not know is that I have a 10,000 word essay on Fried and Harman (yes, another one) yet to be published. So I’ll be brief. This is something I’ll probably speak about tomorrow for the NCAD talk with Francis. The talk yesterday, was linked but not explicitly.

Basically, my opinion is that, like Fried and Greenberg, the artwork is altogether human limits. There isn’t anything innately wrong with Anthropomorphism, in fact we need more of it. What is innately correlationist is anthropocentrism. That the beholder and the artist are only the central limits of ontology and aesthetics. So yes, it isn’t against speculative realism to throw away beholding entirely (in fact I consider this to be impossible), rather beholding may not be a unique human trait or ability.

There is one added ‘Fried’ element that I would argue should be included: the beholder’s experience is not the artwork, as the post-formalist would have it. This sounds contradictory to the above, but it isn’t. Rather for me, I think that the artwork is some sort of determinate mechanism which imposes or infiltrates the beholder, and operationalizes their involvement. And of course in Harman’s system, this creates a brand new object, one that absorbs the two or more objects into a new unified unit.

But the basic point is this, the most illuminating artworks are the anti-literal instances. You can’t escape the correlationist circle by appealing to literal things in a situation, you have to render the implicit morphized traits of a finite entity (human or otherwise) into another. Conviction is asymmetrical.

Anyway, the recorded streamed is video below with a lovely introduction from Paul. The text is HERE.