Bowie: More than one, but
less than many. The beginning of a Cracked Actor-Network Theory
David Bowie once claimed
that: “But anything that Western culture has to offer – I’ve put myself through
it.” What happens, then, if we take Bowie at his word? What if the
cracked-actor can be used as a mechanism to consider a general account of the
cultural logic of late capitalism?
In Aircraft Stories,
John Law, the Sociologist and pioneer of Actor-Network Theory gives an account
of the development of a British military aircraft, the TSR2. However, this is
not a mere account of military technology. Instead, Law argues, the aircraft is
used to frame a more general description of the social system of the
“Euro-American world” in the 2nd half of the 20thCentury.
His project is to use the TSR2 to think: “about modernism and its child,
postmodernism – and about how we might think past the limits that these set to
our ways of thinking.”
Law describes his method of
Actor-Network Theory in the following terms:
“Actor-network theory
is a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities and methods of
analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a
continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located.
It assumes that nothing has reality or form outside the enactment of those
relations. Its studies explore and characterise the webs and the practices that
carry them. Like other material-semiotic approaches, the actor-network approach
thus describes the enactment of materially and discursively heterogeneous
relations that produce and reshuffle all kinds of actors including objects,
subjects, human beings, machines, animals, ‘nature’, ideas, organisations,
inequalities, scale and sizes, and geographical arrangements.”
Conceived in these terms,
the TSR2 is an object that can be understood as positioned within a complex set
of networks and relations. It is “a fractionally coherent subject or object is
one that balances between plurality and singularity. It is more than
one, but less than many.”
The proposal, then, is to
consider David Bowie in similar terms; that is, as similarly fractionally
coherent and “more than one, but less than many.” In doing so an account
of the social systems of late capitalism might emerge as the medium and context
within which the identity of David Bowie was framed and constituted.
[These ideas will be explored in an MA Seminar for Art in the Contemporary World lead by Francis Halsall and Vaari Claffey]
