Re: <nettime> Locating ArtScience

On 10 Dec 2017, at 19:58, Gary Hall <[email protected]> wrote:

The mention of Latour in the context of the Anthropocene and its undermining of the human’s ‘natural’ boundaries with the nonhuman brings to mind Graham Harman’s presentation of his work in Prince of Networks. Here Latour is portrayed as having given us ‘the first object-oriented philosophy’, on the grounds there’s ‘no privilege for a unique human subject’ in his thought. We cannot split ‘actants into zones of animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, or subject and object. Every entity is something in its own right…. This holds equally true for neutrinos, fungus, blue whales and Hezbullah militants’. ‘With this single step,’ Harman writes, ‘a total democracy of objects replaces the long tyranny of human beings in philosophy’. He proceeds to quote from Latour’s The Pasteurization of France: ‘But if you missed the galloping freedom of the zebras in the savannah this morning, then so much the worse for you; the zebras will not be sorry you were not there... Things in themselves lack nothing.’

Yet, for all this, the work of both Latour and Harman is shot through with humanism, the consequences of which they do not think through rigorously. After all, the zebras don’t care whether Latour writes about them or not. In themselves they lack nothing - including books by Bruno Latour presumably. So what - or rather who - is Latour writing these books for, containing as they do original philosophical ideas and ontologies that are attributed to him as unique, individual, named, human author or personality, to the exclusion of all other human and nonhuman actors, and published (in the case of Facing Gaia [Polity, 2017]) on a ‘copyright, all rights reserved’ basis with a for-profit press?

Well, I cannot say too much on the inconsistencies of Latour’s publishing politics, quite obviously part of the global reputation machine. Nor do I have to or feel the need to defend him on this point, and for that matter also have my own disagreements with some of his arguments proper (aside from the issue of collusion with copyright / for profit publishing - in the past I have attempted to reach a subtle, balanced, reasonable public position on copyright by uttering the phrase: “Copyright? Fuck it!”).

I wanted to get a better sense of your position as I am not (yet) overly familiar with your work, and I think on your website the last part of the biography does a good job at summarising what is obviously a thoroughly developed position. I’m thinking here particularly of the section Reinventing the Humanities and Posthumanities” Let me quote you from there:

"To decenter the human according to an understanding of subjectivity that perceives the latter as produced by complex meshworks of other humans, nonhumans, non-objects and non-anthropomorphic elements and energies (some of which may be beyond our knowledge), requires us to act differently as theorists from the way in which the majority of those associated with the posthuman, the nonhuman and the Anthropocene, act. We need to displace the humanist concepts that underpin our ideas of the author, the book and copyright, together with their accompanying practices of reading, writing, analysis and critique.”

http://www.garyhall.info (biography - bottom of the page)

So, in this view then we cannot continue copyrighted publishing practices exactly because they reinstate a human subjectivity that is detached from the material and immaterial networks that we are all immersed in and composed of. And this in turn implies that if we want to reach a non-anthorpocentric understanding of ‘ecology’ (and work with that practically) then we need to renounce such confining and detaching practices and instead really embrace the notion of 'the collective’ (in Latours' terms the collective of humans and nonhumans), which collapses not so much the boundaries between man and nature as between ‘society’ and nature.

By and large I think I agree with you on that. However, I still find this idea of Latour to start thinking in terms of ‘the collective’ a very useful one to get rid of the redundant dichotomy of society and nature, and start thinking about larger interconnected networks that produce what we used to call ‘the social’. This is a set of ideas introduced in his Politics of Nature, back in 2004, as a response to the stagnation of ecological (‘green’) politics.

My feeling is that Latour takes a very pragmatic position when it comes to his engagement with politics (one might argue overly pragmatic - he would call it ‘realist'), in that he tacitly accepts that politics is still seen as made by humans, and mostly in the interest of humans. Rather than dreaming about replacing the whole system of human (-centric) politics, he is considering ways in which the nonhuman can be brought into politics - where one suggestion for instance is that humans should become spokespersons for nonhumans who cannot speak for themselves in the arena of human politics. His aim here is to start engaging democratic politics in the ‘progressive composition of the good common world’ (of humans and nonhumans) - and his ultimate aim is to 'preserve the plurality of external relations'.

I could see this as a potentially fruitful strategy for opening up the current frame of human-centric politics, so this is where his thinking for me seems productive.

Similarly, you write, on the one hand, that what is 'most important about the conception of the Anthropocene is that it makes the distinction between "Man" and "Nature" redundant.' Yet on the other, is there a risk of the differentiation between the human and nature being reemployed in your position paper? I’m thinking of the emphasis you place on:

1) the kind of human subjectivity we associate with the arts and with intuition, as well the importance that is placed on a subjective stance. Of course an emphasis on subjectivity doesn’t necessarily have to mean a reinforcement of the human/nature distinction. So I was wondering, could you perhaps say something about how the particular form of subjectivity you have in mind differs from the traditional humanist subjective stance that is associated with the liberal arts and sciences (and which endeavours to keep those boundaries very much intact)? How does the form of subjectivity you are referring to take account of and assume the redundancy of the human’s boundaries with the nonhuman?

This question I have already answered a few years ago in the conclusion of the Legacies of Tactical Media network notebook (published in 2011/12 under anti-copyright) - page 52:

"In the era of online commodification of the social and the willing participation of a mass of affective-labour-slaves the question is justified how to undo these organised forms of innocence?

Simply leaving the network behind hardly seems an attractive or sensible approach. (…)

A more effective strategy might be to abandon innocence itself. Embrace your shattered self. Indulge in a lovers’ impurity. Enjoy your co-option, relish your commodification. Play the game of simultaneous singularisation and heterogenesis. Infect the network. Submit knowingly to your perverse subjectivity in order to escape the perversion of subjectivity."

So I am arguing for a perverse subjectivity, one that is entirely cognisant of its own constructed / decentred / fragmented composition, consisting in part of utterly incommensurable flows and processes - to be fully aware of all this and still relish the cult of the subjective to create a locus from where to act rather than not to act at all.

In my understanding such a perverse subjectivity would already assume that the boundaries between the human and nonhuman are drawn arbitrarily, or that they are largely meaningless, etc.. But still cherishing it as a priced possession.

(Perhaps related to this is the desire for ArtScience to ‘find its own “genius” - that what sets it apart from other worthwhile human endeavours’. The way this is phrased seems to suggest it is definitely a human, and not a collective HumanNonhuman, endeavour - albeit the humans in question should be amateurs rather than institutionalized, bureaucratic professionals.)

My point was more that this insistence on the subjective can help to bridge a certain experiential gap where (collectively) we know what is going wrong on a planetary scale and yet cannot translate that into something that is meaningful on a personal level and can spur us into action. The practices formerly know as art can still be helpful here in finding ways to bridge this experiential gap but they need some form of subjectivity as a base from which to act, albeit a dramatically transformed (perverted) one compared to the classical notions of subjectivity you are drumming up here.

2) the singular human - and to my mind all too frequently male and ontology-building - personality such as Bruno Latour or Siegfried Zielinski. As far as your notion of the ‘singular personality’ is concerned, is it the concept of the ‘singular’ that is doing most of the heavy lifting here, in that singularities can be understood as being different from (sovereign, unified, self-identical) individuals?

My hopelessly basic answer to this question would be that you can have a very large number of individuals that have no discernible singularity when it comes to their thinking and behaviour patterns - I don’t want to be arrogant, it’s fine to be quotidian, unremarkable, unspectacular and so on. Yet there are these moment of singularity when something remarkable and altering comes into being, though these are usually the result of a conjunction of a wide range of processes and flows that are much larger than the individual they might be attributed to later on - so the singular personality is a marker, a sign post if you will of such moments of coming into being and transformation (in science, art, engineering, technology, culture) - just to be clear such moments also occur in physical non-human systems of course, but the sentence you referenced was in the context of a discussion of technological transformation.

3) the nonhuman ‘(animal and plant life, minerals, gasses, water, air, and technological infrastructures)' as being precisely different from the human - rather than, say, ‘Nature’ being irreducibly interconnected and intertwined with ‘Man’ in a manner that places both sides of this relation in question. If we want to be consistent with the idea that the human/nature distinction is redundant, do we not need to make an argument that develops more along the lines of, say, each being born out of its relation to the other: of nature and the ‘nonhuman’ (including most obviously minerals, gasses, water and air) already being IN the human? Wouldn’t this bring us closer to being beyond human and nonhuman in science and art, in the sense of your reference to Nietzsche’s beyond good and evil?

Yes, I think that I agree with this - that is also very much in line with what you have been arguing on your biography page discussed earlier.

Moreover, if we wanted to be generous, couldn't we say that it is just such a reworking of the distinction between ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’ that Symbiotica are engaged in?

Yes, if the objective is to reach a deeper understanding of how each (‘human' / ‘nature’) is being born out of its relation to the other ( ’nature’ / ‘human’) then this would be a possibility. However, the explicit aim within this is to turn this insight into a personally meaningful experience, so within that a different type of aesthetic sensibility must also be mobilised (the primary function of art in this constellation), and then from this personal appreciation this experience must be made actionable on a collective level - and with that we are again in the realm of politics.

Hence we need three different modalities of operating to get anywhere in view of the disastrous ecological situation we are facing. This is not a ‘merely academic’ matter, much more a ‘matter of real concern’.

———

Thanks again for these tough questions that I have haphazardly tried to provide an answer to here...

all bests,

Eric

Cheers, Gary
-- 
Gary Hall, http://www.garyhall.info
Professor of Media and Performing Arts, Coventry University
Director of Open Humanities Press: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org 

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