Mutable Matter supports Internet Blackout
Source: Sopa Strike
Not only Wikipedia, but many other sites (such as WordPress!) are planning on contributing to an ‘internet blackout’ in protest against the SOPA and PIPA acts. These acts sport a variety of undemocratic elements such as the threat to freedom of speech and expression.
I have not managed to work out the WordPress blackout tool (can’t find my plugins folder!), but consider this site as joining the protest!
Earth Objects and the Politics of Ecology @ Barbican
Image source: Centre for Research Architecture. Image: the cyclone Bhola, Bay of Bengal, 1970.
Another experimental geo-politics themed event in London (thanks, Gail for pointing it out!): ‘Earth Objects and the Politics of Ecology’, a salon by Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecture. The salon is taking place at the Barbican Centre next Saturday, 21 January 2012, from 2-6pm, in the Barbican Art Gallery Events Space (Level 3).
As it looks, the only way to sign up for it is to sign up on facebook. From experience with previous Barbican salons, I’d recommend to just turn up. You also might want to check if you need to pay for the related OMA/Progress exhibition in order to get to the salon (happened to me at the last event & annoying, if you’ve already seen an exhibition).
Geologic Turn Symposium @ University of Michigan
Am currently visiting the University of Michigan, and just came across a poster for a symposium entitled ‘The Geologic Turn – Architecture’s New Alliance’, curated by Etienne Turpin. The opening lecture for the symposium is tomorrow (am so going to attend!), with more talks to follow on 10/11 February. The idea for the symposium is summed up as follows:
‘Recent discourse in the fields of architecture, art, and philosophy suggest the increasing influence of geology with the design disciplines, visual arts, and theoretical humanities. The symposium A Geologic Turn: Architecture’s New Alliance… aims to bring together researchers, scholars, and practitioners whose work is at the centre of this fecund transdisciplinary research trajectory. The objectives of the symposium are: first, to allow new productive connections among current scholarship and practice, and second, to expose the students and faculty of the Taubman College to these new transdisciplanary ideas and projects.’
Other references are made to the Anthropocene and the influence of the debate around this proposed shift on the arts and humanities.
One of the presentations in the symposium is by smudge studio, who, but the way, have some interesting videos and other things up on their Friends of the Pleistocene blog.
Will see what else I can find out!
Yayoi Kusama @ Tate Modern
Image: Stuart Addelsee
Just saw in my art newsletter that the Tate Modern is putting on a Yayoi Kusama exhibition (9 February – 5 June 2012). Am wondering whether it is going to be the same as (or similar to) the exhibition at the Pompidou. I hope there are going to be some related events. Will keep checking back and post things here, if I hear of anything…
In the meantime, here is another Kusama project: Self-obliteration for kids! The installation (see image above) is part of an exhibition entitled: Look now, see forever, which is currently open to intervention at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. If you happen to be in Australia, go and have a look – and don’t forget to bring your domestic otherworldly creatures!
Debate: Global Warming: Does it matter?
Image: Eyeglass View (Flickr)
Normally not a fan of staged debates with a short time-limit, but this one is quite interesting: The Fifth Column’s ‘Global Warming: Does it matter?’ with writer George Monbiot and think tank director Claire Fox.
A dot in the universe – Yayoi Kusama and the link between self and other
Image: the author in her natural environment
A few weeks ago, I went to the Yayoi Kusama retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Londoners are likely to remember her polka-dotted tree coverings along the Southbank, part of the artist’s contribution to the Hayward Gallery’s ‘Walking In My Mind’ exhibition. The Paris retrospective had a very different feel to the Southbank exhibits, even though the infamous ‘dots’ featured in both. I think I agree with the Laura Cumming’s review in the Guardian that the Hayward’s focus was more on ‘immersion’ in wacky metaphorical environments, whereas the Pompidou curators seemed interested in political significance. After all, as the Pompidou exhibition catalogue points out, Kusama and her dots regularly ended up attracting police attention (which was effectively diverted through the use of bribes).
Image source: Yayoi Kusama
I have to explain that I saw the Kusama retrospective in the middle of finishing an article on Bakhtin’s ‘cosmic terror’, preparing a lecture on materiality and space, and reading Simone Weil’s ‘Gravity and Grace’ alongside Žižek’s ‘Welcome to the desert of the real’, so, to me, the exhibition arrived as an amazing sensual illustration of this slightly peculiar mix of theorists. On the other hand, the mix is perhaps not so peculiar, when one considers the central question that is addressed by Bakhtin, Weil, Žižek and ‘theorists of matter’: how do or should you see yourself in relation to everything else – and why does it matter?
Image source: Yayoi Kusama
A starting point for Kusama, Bakhtin, Weil and ‘matter theorist’ Karen Barad is to think about the limits of bodily boundaries. Interestingly, all of them end up making a connection to the cosmic. Karen Barad, for instance, talks about ‘meeting the universe half-way’: ‘We are of the universe – there is no inside, no outside. There is only intra-acting from within and as part of the world in its becoming.’ Basically, Karen Barad does not see bodies as defined or contained against an equally defined environment, but as intra-related with everything else (emphasis on everything). The boundaries, that seem so clearly to exist, are produced – not merely by the limited human sensory apparatus or understanding, but by matter itself. For her, this process, this generativity of matter which we are implicated in, is literally universal. To realise this intra-connectivity entails responsibility – and choices about what we do with it. As she writes:
‘Meeting each moment, being alive to the possibilities of becoming, is an ethical call, an invitation that is written into the very matter of all being and becoming.’
So, accepting oneself as part of the universe means rising to meet this ethical responsibility.
The artist in her studio (image: Shawn Mortensen)
For Bakhtin, it matters, too, how we see ourselves in relation to the universe and everything that it stands for. Most people, he suggests, are fearful of thinking of themselves as part of the universe, or even of their wider immediate environments. Rather, they choose to cling to what he terms ‘small reality’ – a false idyllic space where they are protected from the inhumanity of ‘great reality’: potential meaninglessness, sudden changes, terror, violence. In order to maintain this ‘small reality’, these people choose to cling to false promises – be they of a religious or political nature – which, in turn, empower the wrong kind of people. (Régis Debray wrote a cheeky book on this subject, whose title translates as ‘On the good use of catastrophes’.) Bakhtin suggests that, if people aim to ward themselves against the instrumentalisation of the terror of ‘great reality’, they need to find a way of coming to terms with it and to ‘humanise’ the potentially scary relations. For Bakhtin, the best way of negotiating ‘great reality’ is through our body: to realise its open-ness to the world. This strategy, however, is not only about the self, about one’s own protection: it is about being a part of humanity as a whole, about being willing to see the bigger picture against ‘small’ interests, and about being willing to sacrifice one’s stability and (physical) integrity for the greater humanity.
Image source: Yayoi Kusama
Simone Weil follows a very similar goal. She, too, tries to persuade us to ‘identify ourselves with the universe itself’. And, like Bakthin, she argues against the pursuit of a ‘small reality’ where we try to protect ourselves against arbitrary events. As she writes: ‘we must prefer hell to an imaginary paradise’ (returning to the ‘Matrix’ theme of the red and blue pill from the previous post…). For Weil, to feel the universe, the world, is important in at least two ways. The first resembles Bakhtin’s focus on protection: identifying with the universe has nothing to do with turning people into passive matter, but, on the contrary, with warding ourselves against being ‘reduced to matter’. The one thing we do not wish to become by what happens to us, according to Weil, is ‘mere matter’ – to not be interested in actively shaping one’s life, to be interested only in ‘means’ such as money or power. Weil thinks a lot in terms of good and evil, and, to identify with the universe is a form of protection from evil. Evil, in her view, can destroy only ‘tangible’ things. In order to maintain the ‘good’, she proposes to focus on intangible things, and to tie the ones we want to protect, such as our most precious thoughts, to the ‘perpetual exchange of matter’, and particularly to two things, which she believes cannot be taken away from any living human being: respiration and the perception of space. The second way, in which an identification with the universe is important, has to do with others: to understand others not as parts of the same universe but as another conception of the universe (or prisons surrounded by universes, but that’s another story), be they other people or nation states. If we see others as such, it makes it difficult to wish to become the ‘master’ of the one universe, to become involved in power struggles. But this vision is also about ethical relating: how do we interact with another conception of the universe? Could it be understood as the same, but different world? Would we take responsibility for destroying such a world? Wouldn’t we destroy ourselves – wholly?
Kusama’s dotted room under UV light
All of these positions were with me when I entered Yayoi Kusama’s retrospective. The exhibition started with a room of her early paintings, which already seemed to address ‘the dissolution of her own image and individuality in the infinity of a cosmic landscape’. We learn that Kusama’s work emanates from a child hood experience of ‘losing’ her body at the family’s kitchen table, when she felt her body and the whole room being invaded and ‘obliterated’ by the red flower pattern of the dinner table cloth. Having lost the boundaries with her environment in this way, Kusama proceeds to experiment with the limits of bodily boundaries. Her ‘Infinity Nets’, for instance, a series of paintings showing a seemingly infinite number or small loops, could be seen as a means to explore the human/machine boundary. Kusama herself describes these paintings as being ‘without beginning, end, or centre’. Sometimes stretching over several walls, these paintings have often been described as ‘inhuman’, in the sense that no one human could have produced them. Apparently, Kusama sometimes painted several days on end, at least once ending up in hospital from the consequences of her caffeine-fuelled sleeplessness (or paint-smell overdose?). At the same time, these paintings, this overabundance of loops or dots, can be experienced as very child-like. Yet child-like does not necessarily entail a ‘humanising’ of experience, at least not for adults. As Lynn Zelevansky points out, comparing Kusama’s work to that of Yoshitomo Nara, children can be perceived as living partly in another world, too. Like the Kusama-as-machine, they are ‘boundary creatures’. On the other hand, through combining the playful shapes with machine-like repetition, Kusama also seems to ask how we should envision infinity: as a pleasant ‘surpassing’ of time (to use Weil’s words) or as endless sterility?
Kusama and her penis-covered furniture
Either way, the subject of infinity addresses the limits of human experience. In his essay ‘dot, dot, dot.’, psychoanalyst Gérard Wajcman draws attention to two further boundaries in the work of Kusama: those of gender and the organic/inorganic. Pointing to the artist’s placement of dots, he proposes that not only do they cover men, women and objects equally, but also appear to multiply without touching. As he phrases it: ‘the dots don’t fuck’ – or don’t need to. Similarly, Kusama appears to contest the distinction between living and non-living by making inanimate objects sprout a ‘forest of penises’. Comparing her tactic with the case of Freud’s ‘little Hans’, who distinguishes between the living and non-living by means of their capacity for ‘making wee-wee’, Wajcman half-jokingly concludes that Kusama truly fails to make that cut. For him, she also addresses this particular cut when she ‘vaporises’ the body in works such as ‘Narcissus Garden’, a field of 1500 chromed plastic orbs, each reflecting the body of the person standing amongst them. More so, Kusama’s artworks seem to ask how the spectators view themselves not only within the artwork, but in relation to their environment: do they feel what it is like to be ‘a dot in the universe’ – vaporised into a infinite number of (meaningless?) particles or isolated planets, do they feel paranoid about being looked at from hundreds of mirrors – or do they bask in the feeling of being infinitely reflected and looked at? Here, Hegel’s term ‘bad infinity’ (used by Žižek) comes to mind as a perfect description, though not in the original meaning.
Yayoi Kusama: Narcissus Garden
Different responses to infinity seem increasingly enabled in Kusama’s Fireflies on the Water Infinity Room. When stepping into this installation – comprised of a dark mirrored room, black floor covered in water, with a passageway in between, and a seemingly infinite number of little coloured lightbulbs – one really gets a sense of what it means to be a ‘dot in the universe’. I experienced a loss of gravity, as if I was hovering in and staring straight into the universe, like a suitless (boundary-less?) astronaut dumped out of a space vessel. How to make sense of such a human/universe encounter? And why might Kusama think it is important to have such experiences? Wajcman proposes that Kusama’s work is as much about others as it is about herself: that her works seek to create spaces where all of humanity could (or should?) live, to create spaces where, according to the artist herself, she is able to save people from their ‘sad, outcast’ existences. Wajcman suggests that by outcasts, Kusama thinks less of the mentally ill, homosexuals or other ‘social outcasts’ who are explicitly addressed or participate in her works, but a ‘humanity reduced to dots, to counters, to non-being’. As he concludes, for him, Kusama invents the world we are missing/the world we need.
Yayoi Kusama ‘Fireflies on the Water’ Infinity Room
Here, an interesting link ties ‘saving oneself’ with ‘saving humanity’ (self/other boundary): how does my view of myself in relation to my environment impact on greater society? This is the place, where, for me, Žižek comes in and his critique of mass individualism, particularly the individual’s excessive focus on the body. It relates to the tension between two opposite poles that, for me, is expressed in Kusama’s work. As Wajcman put it: is Kusama’s work the ultimate self-obsession – to see oneself at the centre of, and infinitely reflected in, the universe – or is it the ultimate selflessness – about becoming (part of) the universe by recognising the ‘pointlessness’ of a focus only on oneself? This opposition is also expressed by Simone Weil and Slavoj Zizek. To use Weil’s words:
‘Two tendencies with opposite extremes: to destroy the self for the sake of the universe, or to destroy the universe for the sake of the self. He who has not been able to become nothing runs the risk of reaching a moment when everything other than himself ceases to exist.’
What if, as Zizek asks, being ‘really alive’ entails addressing something bigger than our own ‘good time’? What if it means addressing the wider dimensions of life and of the world, and both being humbled by it and wishing to take up a greater cause?
Image source: Yayoi Kusama
Kusama’s work has been accused of being narcissistic rather than being about teaching others how to be a mere dot amongst others, particularly, because of its spectacular and at times pornographic nature. Not only do critics take into account the appearance of her work, but also Kusama’s knack for drawing media attention. Having been exposed to all the different aspects of her work (apart from her writing, which I have just started to delve into), I cannot but view it as an offer of choice – it is up to you how you want to take on her work. You can contemplate the universe or your own reflection in her work – or do both at the same time: to become lost in the dots while filming yourself in the process of it. Like most people, I left the exhibition in a state of extreme happiness. Unlike to be expected from photos of Kusama’s work, I did not feel that this was because of ‘intoxication’ from the bright colours and wacky shapes, but from having had the chance to experiment with being a dot in the universe.
Event: New maps for an island planet
Image: Ackroyd and Harvey, Lost Souls, 2007
Another event I am very excited about: ‘New maps for an island planet’. It is a book launch and panel in relation with the ‘Interdependence Day’ project. The evening will involve ‘discussion about the creation of new maps for navigating the complex challenges presented by global economic and ecological crises’.
The panel, moderated by Quentin Cooper, will consist of geographer Doreen Massey, architect Carolyn Steel and writer Andrew Simms. The poet Lemn Sissay will also perform at this event.
The book that is being launched at this event is called ‘ATLAS: Geography, Architecture and Change in an Interdependent World’, edited by Renata Tyszczuk, Joe Smith, Nigel Clark and Melissa Butcher. I also have a ‘map’ in this publication and will participate, alongside other people who have contributed to the ATLAS, in the Open Book session taking place after the panel. In this session, I will run my ‘Mutation’project.
Date: Tuesday, 13 March 2012
Time: 6:30 pm
Place: London, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre
Tickets: £10, £5 concessions (you can book here)
The flyer/poster can be downloaded here.
Workshop: Terra Infirma – Experimenting with geo-political practices
Image: ‘Land Marks’ by Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla
Terra Infirma – Experimenting with geo-political practices
Friday, 27 January 2012, The Arts Catalyst, 50-54 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1M 5PS
What does the ‘geo’ in ‘geo-politics’ actually do?
In this workshop we would like participants to imagine how geo-politics could be thought differently. As a starting point, we have taken the contrast between the ‘biopolitical’ and the ‘geopolitical’. Whereas the ‘bio(s)’ in biopolitics does a lot of conceptual and ‘practical’ work against a rising importance of biological life for politics, by comparison, the ‘ge(o)’ in geopolitics seems to form a mere stage set for human politics. Could the ‘geo’ potentially play another role in relation to political practices?
Particularly with the arrival of ‘planetary issues’ connected to climate change and resource shortages, topics such as natural disasters, ‘land grabbing’, atmospheric data and geo-engineering are showing a growing presence in the political arena. Not only do these issues highlight the dependence of humans on a certain physical stability of our planet, but also the limits of dealing with this interdependence, whether it is in terms of political practices (e.g. how to deal with ‘naturally transforming territories’) or theoretical applications. These limitations have prompted experiments around how we could re-think the geo-political. The philosopher Michel Serres, for instance, has proposed to rethink geo-political relations through the term ‘Biogée’ (from Greek ‘bios’ – life; ‘gē’ – earth), through which he attempts to re-connect the separated spheres of ‘life’ and ‘earth’ to form a ‘contemporary global state’ (in both senses of the word). Similarly, geographers have started to experiment with the geo-political, from drawing on ‘geophilosophies’ and artistic engagements to establishing a dialogue between human and physical geography.
So far, most of the experimentation seems to have taken place in the context of climate change, however, the examples-so-far suggest that other areas of geo-politics could likewise benefit from creative attention to the ‘geo’.
We seek to discuss points and questions emerging from preliminary experimentation with the ‘geopolitical’, including but not limited to the following:
- What (else) could the ‘geo’ in geopolitics do?
- In what ways does the ‘geo’ already surface in ‘geo-politics’?
- What could theories of materiality contribute?
- What kind(s) of dialogue could exist between the bio- and geo-political?
- Dangers of simplistic links between the ‘biopolitical’ and ‘geopolitical’ (e.g. the potential return of social Darwinist interpretations)
- The role of technologies in shaping notions of the ‘geo-political’
- ‘Material interventions’ into geo-politics, e.g. artistic provocations
- What kind of work could the ‘geo’ do, for instance, in policies around climate change/geo-engineering?
- How could the ‘geo’ be embedded in public engagement?
Preliminary programme
In each session, speakers give a short paper or commentary, which will then be discussed with the workshop participants.
10:00 Registration & Tea/Coffee
10:15 Welcome and introductions
10: 30 Session 1 – Theoretical Provocations
Chair: Angela Last
Nigel Clark – ‘When am I?’ Geopolitics and Stratigraphic Uncertainty’
Kathryn Yusoff - ‘Geologic Life or how to get up with dead things’
Joanne Sharp – ‘Displacing geopolitics: imagined geographies from the margins’
Discussion
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Session 2 – Methods & Materials
Chair: Alan Ingram
Nelly Ben Hayoun & Carina Fernley – ‘The Other Volcano’
Angela Last – ‘Public visions across scales – The Mutable Matter project’
Bron Szerszynski – ‘Making Climates’
Discussion
15:00 Tea Break
15:30 Session 3 – Embedding Experimental Geopolitics
Chair: Gail Davies
Andrew Barry - ’Geopolitical fieldwork’
Alan Ingram – ‘Contested visibilities: geopolitics and contemporary art’
Gail Davies (discussant)
Discussion
17:00 Close/Dinner
The workshop is supported by the UCL Department of Geography and an ESRC Fellowship (Grant No. PTA-026-27-2869). We are able to refund reasonable travel costs for attendance at the workshop. Please contact Angela Last angela.last@ucl.ac.uk for more information or to reserve a place.
A poster for the workshop can be downloaded here.
Design, Design Activism and the Democratic Production of Future Social Natures@AAG 2012
Image: ‘Portable garden’ (Maria Kalathaki as part of ‘Mutation’ project by Angela Last)
The preliminary programme for next year’s AAG came out last week. Am currently trying to get the placement of our ‘Ruinations’ session changed, which seems to have got spread over two days, with the discussion of the papers taking place on the Friday before the presentation of the papers on Sunday… Hopefully this can be fixed! Meanwhile, the other session I am participating in (as a presenter), ‘Design, Design Activism and the Democratic Production of Future Social Natures’, does not seem to have attracted such logistical issues. Am very curious about the content and dynamics of this session. So far, the organisers have sent some e-mails round to encourage participants to exchange reading lists, as well as comments we have come across that struck us as central to the debates this session is engaging with.
What the design activism session seeks to bring into dialogue are two lines of inquiry that have been pursued in (and outside) geography: design as a ‘technological fix’ and design with a different utopian drive: as social movement that offers resistance to design as purely materialist and instrumental. The latter is, for example, being discussed in the Open University’s ‘Stitched Up’ research group, which looks at the ‘politics of generosity, sharing, voluntary simplicity, informal provisioning and craft’ and how ‘these practices can potentially contribute to sustainable futures’. I am particularly curious about this session, because it seems to bring people from different fields together. Having done work around tension between technocratic remediation and resistance from a design background (fashion) first, I encountered quite a different sort of discourse when I moved into geography.
Being interested in the democratisation of ‘innovation’ and questions of materiality and political agency, I also find the second theme of the session intriguing, which talks about ‘materialising’, e.g. about ‘provid[ing] some kind of material substance to a new progressive politics of the environment’. Naturally (excuse the pun), I am a bit concerned about any claims to ‘materialising’, however I think that there are still a number of debates-to-be-had in the design activism field about materiality and agency, which can benefit both from a design and a geography perspective. As it looks, there are going to be three sessions (and perhaps some post-session chats?), so hopefully plenty of opportunity to exchange perspectives!
Why this critique?
Tzvetan Todorov presenting at the RSA
Ok – haven’t been able to find the first part of this blogpost that I’d written into a notebook or onto some other pieces of paper. But here comes the second attempt… Bascially, during the last few weeks, I have ended up reading a number of authors who engage with the definition of ‘critique’ (and I have just realised that they all happen to be French!). The first one I read was Tzvetan Todorov’s ‘In Defence of Enlightenment’. Currently, the Enlightenment is being blamed or lauded for one thing or another, from disenchantment and the destruction of the environment to freedom of speech and critical thinking (an audio programme on the topic can be found on philosophy bites). Here, Todorov’s book presents, in accessible format, an interesting and thought-provoking position. Through re-engaging with key topics such as autonomy, progress and truth, Todorov seeks to unsettle our preconceived notions of Enlightenment thinking. Ultimately, Todorov seeks to further a more productive engagement with the project of the Enlightenment – and, by extension, our current political/intellectual situation – not necessarily by accepting his interpretations of works, correspondence and events surrounding the birth of the movement, but by inviting debate.
Debate is, for Todorov, what characterises Enlightenment thinking. In his opinion, the movement appears not as unified by ideas, but by method: question everything. As this method or ‘attitude towards the world’, as he puts it, is becoming more and more undermined – from interpretations of critique as inherently destructive and misguided, as furthering a detachment from the sensual reality of the world or as inhibiting care for one’s human or non-human surroundings – what is needed, according to Todorov, is a reminder of the dangers of abandoning certain Enlightenment premises, or rather, the danger of losing the subtleties of certain debates, the majority of which are still going on today. Rather than dismissing certain consequences of Enlightenment thinking as a failure of the whole project, he draws attention to the solidarity between positive and negative effects, as pointed out by thinkers such as Rousseau. As Todorov writes, we need to ‘re-establish Enlightenment thinking in a way that preserves the past heritage while subjecting it to a critical examination, lucidly assessing it in light of its wanted and unwanted consequences’.
A seemingly complete contrast to this argument is presented by Bruno Latour in his search for an alternative to critique. ‘Why do we need an alternative?’ one might ask. In his ‘Compositionist Manifesto’ he contrasts critique, which, to him, constitutes a barbaric, hurtful method aimed at the destruction of a ‘veil’, with ‘composition’, which represents a mending, caring approach and is ‘all about immanence’ rather than a world beyond. This statement may come as a shock to people who believe in the constructiveness of a lot of critical thinking. In fact, the manifesto’s lament that ‘there are enough ruins’ produced by critique has led to the joke that if Latour had been part of the Matrix trilogy, he would have taken the blue pill – or would be seen forcing others to take it (this take on Latour actually made me read Joshua Clover’s BFI series contribution on The Matrix – can recommend the comparison). Latour, however, insists that he is not trying to maintain an illusion, but that everyone else is: by insisting on a separation of society and ‘nature’. How is this an illusion? Here, the definition of the Enlightenment becomes a central element to Latour’s argument. According to his definition of it, the Enlightenment represents a consensus on the construction of a certain reality in which entities which belong to society (= humans) are allowed to speak, whereas entities which remain outside society – classified as ‘nature’ – are not. Through their position outside of society, anything other-than-human is made subject to domination by humans: human scientists not only speak for these entities, but also present their interpretations of them as ‘facts’. Against this division, Latour offers a vision of a world where the social is also made up of formerly natural entitities who contribute to the production of it – and ‘matters of concern’ – in many, often invisible, ways.
This new image of the world is not without its discontents and its discussion would exceed the purpose of this post (a useful read in this context is Graham Harman‘s ‘Prince of Networks’). A worry that has been expressed by Latour himself in ‘Why has critique run out of steam?’ is that his argument, that ‘facts’ or anything else are constructed, has been taken up by anyone from climate change deniers to students who do not want to engage with critical theory. Experiencing a sort of vertigo that the ‘sure ground’ has been taken away by the ‘worst possible fellows’, Latour tries to work against this (mis)appropriation (especially regarding the debate around scientific issues), by, as he admits himself, more or less performing the very method of critique he is uncomfortable with. Stating that ‘the question was never to get away from facts but closer to them’ he blames the misfiring of his proposal on the lack of criticality within criticality: that critical thinking does not recognise how it is constructed itself. The remedy he proposes appears to be a breaking with the destructive Enlightenment tradition and to ‘look forward’ and reconstruct a better world – as a ‘commons’ of humans and ‘non-humans’.
In addition, Latour believes that the ‘grand systems’ produced by Enlightenment-influenced thinking prevent us from being able to challenge them. Instead, they need to be broken down into relations between (human and nonhuman) actors, so that we can gain a better sense of how to dismantle potentially unhelpful systems. As he writes in ‘We have never been modern’ (thanks to Gail Davies for the quote):
‘Take some small business owner hesitatingly going after a few shares, some conqueror trembling with fever, some poor scientist tinkering in his lab, a lonely engineer piecing together a few more or less favourable relations of force, some stuttering and fearful politicians; turn the critics loose on them, and what do you get? Capitalism, imperialism, science, technology, and domination. In the first scenario, the actors were trembling; in the second they are not. The actors in the first scenario could be defeated; in the second they no longer can. In the first scenario, the actors were still quite close to the modest work of fragile and modifiable mediations; now they are purified, and they are all equally formidable’.
Another author who writes against the ‘Misadventures of Critical Thinking’ is Jacques Rancière. Like Latour, his ‘critique of critique’ is directed more against ‘melancholic’ writers such as Baudrillard, but is expressed in very different ways. For instance, in contrast to Latour, Rancière evokes the relation between critique and Enlightenment in exactly the opposite way. To Rancière, ‘critical procedures were supposed to be means of arousing awareness and energies for a process of emancipation’. In ‘Hatred of Democracy’, he jokingly sums up the majority of positions arguing against the Enlightenment or Modernism as ‘the Moderns cut off the heads of kings so they could fill up their shopping trolleys at leisure’. To him, the picture that is thus painted and is dangerous in at least two ways: 1) because nothing can apparently be done against both manipulation and the pleasure drive and 2) because the impotence it shows is portrayed as being caused by the failure of critique, thus paving the way for joyful embracings of non- (or post?) criticality. For Rancière, the image of the failure of critique also endangers the struggle for more democracy as a critical project.
Jacques Rancière at UBC
This connection – and rethinking of possibility and political agency – is ever more pertinent today. To come back to Todorov’s view of the Enlightenment, we are dealing with misappropriations or distortions of the Enlightenment ideas. According to him, a key aim of the movement was to ‘reduc[e] the distance between action and its end purpose’, i.e. not to work towards reward of afterlife, but to work for the benefit of humanity on Earth. Todorov critiques that, at this moment in time, we have arrived at the opposite: the ends have become abandoned over sacralised means such as capital. We would act true to the Enlightenment spirit, Todorov proposes, if we ask ourselves, whether we must accept this state. This is exactly the kind of debate that is taking place in all the occupied sites all over the world at the moment. As Open University geographer Doreen Massey, speaking at the Tent University of the London Stock Exchange occupation, put it: so much of what people fought for in the 60s – flexibility, flow, lack of boundaries – has been misappropriated by neo-liberalism. Instead of serving people and their struggle for more equality, it has led to more inequality and the commodification of people themselves e.g. by emphasising their need to be available wherever and whenever, if they want to remain part of the system. Again, Doreen Massey did not merely critique, but offer how we can participate in constructing alternatives: by continuing to look for alternative imaginations to the dominant narrative that is forced upon us (e.g. listeners were pointing to Iceland as a model) and by voicing and sharing them (‘We need an ideological crisis, not just an economic one.’). Thus, against the background of the many Guy Fawkes/V for Vendetta masks in the St Paul’s encampment and in the videos from the world-wide occupations, I would like to conclude that, if critique gains critical mass, one does not have to resort to gunpowder to blow things up.
