Some thoughts on rocks and glass

This text was commissioned for the catalogue for the Ireland Glass Biennial 2017

“The rock is the gray particular of man’s life,

The stone from which he rises, up -- and -- ho,

The step to the bleaker depths of his descents ...

The rock is the stern particular of the air,

The mirror of the planets, one by one,

But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist,”

Wallace Stevens, [from] Night’s Hymn of the Rock

In a little book, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, which is as amusing and entertaining as it is audacious and astonishing Graham Cairns-Smith uses the form of a detective story to present his claim that life begins with clay. But rather than a mystical or religious account of how we’ve been fashioned from the earth he offers a modern origin myth based in chemistry and biology. His argument is that the foundations for organic forms of life lie in the reproduction of the inorganic structures of minerals. Crystals, in particular, replicate their structures in a way that offers a clue to how living things might also reproduce and survive. So, the miniature crystals that squirmed within primordial clay were not merely inert, dumb stuff but instead vital, unconscious actors in the still evolving story of life, humans and whatever is coming next. As he puts it: “We have, as it were, identified the organisation responsible for that ‘crime against common-sense’, the origin of life. And it is true that the proposition that our ultimate ancestors were mineral crystals was not widely anticipated.”

This argument is audacious because it is essentially claiming that genetic inheritance is not unique to living organisms but is rather a process that might be shared between all sorts of different materials some of which are often considered to be alive (organisms) and those that are not (minerals.) As Cairns-Smith puts it: “Clay crystals growing [within a piece of sandstone]… have, often, distinctive and elaborate forms - such as the grooved kaolinite vermiforms that were evolving by direct action… and it is not too difficult to imagine circumstances in which simply the shapes and sizes of crystals could have a bearing on their ability to grow quickly, or break up in the right way, or stay in the right place, or survive difficult conditions- or otherwise be a success… just the same as the way in which the parts of plants and animals become optimised through natural selection. The practical difference here between crystal genes and, say, trees or giraffes would be that for crystal genes shapes and sizes are so much more directly specified by the genetic information.”

And it is astonishing because it gives a tentative answer to one of the knottiest problems that scientists and philosophers (along with all the other story-tellers) have spent the history of humanity trying to answer. That is, how is life on earth even possible; what is it; and when did it begin? These questions, of course, come interlaced with what philosophers call “the hard problem of consciousness” whose down-beat name somewhat understates the magnitude and gravity of the problem in question and makes it sound like a tricky weekend crossword puzzle. The question at stake requires the perhaps impossible task of describing and explaining the nature of conscious experience.

Cairns-Smith’s claims have had a mixed reception over the past few decades in part because of the endemic difficulties in working in the gaps between different scientific disciplines (in this case biology and chemistry.) It is also extremely difficult to observe the micro-movements of clay and establish whether it really is self-organising in a way that means it could be considered proto-biological.

However, it is the ambition and challenge of his theory that is more important than any of its specific claims and it’s what I’m interested in here. The aspiration is to explain how the material substrate of the world can give rise to things that can live and reproduce; that is, to explain how stuff can do stuff. It is a way thinking about how disinterested the material world is in the humans that skate about on its surface. It still operates according to its own occult operations. But it also reminds us of the perhaps horrific and monstrous thought that lying buried at the core of all our humanity there is something inhuman, inorganic, indifferent over which we have no control.

The reason that this would be important is because nested within metaphors for describing the relationships of humans with objects are metaphors for thinking about what those humans are. Or to put this another way: a way of thinking about things is also a way of thinking about ourselves.

For example, it is becoming increasingly obvious that in contemporary life objects and people are losing their autonomy. Everything now is seemingly interconnected in networks of communication and control. In what Manuel Castells calls The Network Society which began to appear in the last 3^rd of the 20^th Century the prevalence of systems of telecommunication, computing, transport, and so on mean that humanity is connected across the globe at burgeoning speed. Think about the Internet of Things in which devices communicate with one another and are controlled over networks. Given this it’s easy to believe that just as objects are not autonomous so too we humans are also losing our independence. We are also being subsumed by new technologies, social media and countless other things that we only barely understand but which make almost infinite demands on our attention.

But maybe thinking not only about but also through materials like clay, or glass, gives us another way of thinking about both objects and ourselves. Glass, for instance, might remind us of a world now lived through interfaces and windows; through the pads and screens we constantly interact with. It resonates with a life lived through surface and touch where we swipe right. Or left.

But glass is also a material with its own qualities and its own private secrets. Glass is not the same as clay. Rather than comprised of mineral crystals in fluid,  glass is a super-cooled liquid that is in the constant flux of flow and formation. Through these processes it exhibits its own material and alien agency. Beneath its surfaces small universes roil away at their own glacial pace. In it we might find a way of thinking, once again, about who we are. In its awkward autonomy we might rediscover what it means to be human in these dark, dark times.

Strange Fascination: Bowie and Apophenia

If the ambition of Cracked-Actor-Network-Theory is to use Bowie to explore the conditions of subjectivity in late capitalism, then it must necessarily risk apophenia in its tone and spirit and appear somewhat manic; preposterous even. 

Bowie’s very fluidity in his use of mediums and identities lends itself to being connected to everything that was around him. As he said of himself in the Russell Harty interview (1973): “I find that I’m a person that can take on the guises of different people that I meet. I can switch accents in seconds of meeting somebody—I can adopt their accent. I’ve always found that I collect. I’m a collector. And I’ve always just seemed to collect personalities, ideas.”

Or, a few years later: "Bowie was never meant to be. He's like a Lego kit. I'm convinced I wouldn't like him, because he's too vacuous and undisciplined. There is no definitive David Bowie." (David Bowie on David Bowie, 1976)

So it should come as no surprise to find the Network Society reflected back in him.

Or, in other words, Bowie’s own eclecticism, opportunism and promiscuity will be reflected in a theory that is itself is eclectic, opportunistic and promiscuous. And that both Bowie and our theory capture something of the nature of subjectivity in late capitalism.

Apophenia is the inclination to find patterns and connections in all phenomena regardless of whether they are related or not (what Tyler Viglen calls Spurious Correlations or, when more developed, Conspiracy Theory). 

The ability to observe and create connections is a profoundly human act; consciousness is drawn both to and from pattern. After all, as the phenomenological commonplace observes: consciousness is always consciousness of something. This can be both banal - such as finding faces in clouds or prophecies in tea-leaves – and sublime - such as Stephen Hawking’s description of the universe as a Grand Design in which: “There must be a complete set of laws that, given the state of the universe at a specific time, would specify how the universe would develop from that time forward. These laws should hold everywhere and at all times; otherwise they wouldn’t be laws. There could be no exceptions or miracles. Gods or demons couldn’t intervene in the running of the universe.” (The Grand Design, pg. 137)

Perception rests on observing figure/ ground relationships, and the use of narrative is fundamental for cognition through establishing connections and causes between events. Working between artificial intelligence and psychology, Schankand Abelson claim that narrative systems and “structures called scripts” are essential for the production of “knowledge systems.” Such pattern finding has emerged from an evolutionary wager in which in survival situations the recognition of patterns paid dividends. Better, for example, to assume that a rustle in a patch of grass is a tiger and act accordingly than ignore it and be eaten.

As this project develops further patterns and connections within the Cracked-Actor-Network will be suggested. No doubt some will be spurious.

Cracked-Actor Network Theory: David, Diana and Donald

We'll explore the connection between these three in later posts. In the meantime here is an excerpt from

Simon Reynolds: Shock and Awe (Faber, 2017)

“I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump wrote in The Art of The Deal, explaining the role of bravado in his business dealings. “People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.”

He and co-writer Tony Schwarz coined the concept “truthful hyperbole.” That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it cuts to the essence of how hype works: by making people believe in something that doesn’t exist yet, it magically turns a lie into a reality. As the American saying goes, fake it ‘til you make it.

Bowie’s manager Tony Defries used this technique to break the singer in America: travelling everywhere in a limo, surrounded by bodyguards he didn’t need, Bowie looked like the star he wasn’t yet, until the public and the media started to take the illusion for reality…. Early in his career, Trump grasped that – like a pop star – he was selling an image, a brand.

Bowie and The Network Society

Bowie: The Network Society and Opening Themes (Death; Sex/ Gender; Economics; Love; Medium/ Form; The Future)

The key claim of the Cracked-Actor Network Theory is that Bowie exemplifies the conditions of post-war western society. This was named by Manuel Castells as The Network Society by which he meant those social orders that emerged more or less during Bowie’s adult life. It is characterised by the historical and cultural impact of electronic technologies including the New Media of telecommunication and computation systems and the subsequent primacy of information as a metaphor for communication and organisation.

In this sense Network Society describes the conditions and cultures of late capitalism. Frederic Jameson argues that these conditions are synonymous with both postmodernity and the emergence of “the world system” in which the power of nation states is effaced by global networks of capital and communication where information becomes the primary unit of capitalist exchange. In such cultures power no longer operates according to a disciplinary logic (as Foucault observed of modernity) but rather control where power is distributed across networks (as Deleuze claimed in his famous “postscript” essay).

Subjectivity is similarly understood to be both distributed across different communicative networks and also mediated by them; in other words human identity does not exist a-priori but is in fact constituted by those different networks within which it is situated (such as social media.) Hence, the conditions of the Network Society present radical challenges to the account of autonomous and rational humanity that emerges in the European Enlightenment. As in other accounts of the conditions of subjectivity in late capitalism, such as Posthumanism humans are identified as enmeshed within and reliant upon existing economic, technological and ecological networks that are beyond their control.

Taking this as a starting point we can consider how Bowie’s own persona as “more than one, less than many” mimicked these effects of late capitalism and the Network Society. His multiple identities were also, performatively, contingent upon those conditions he found himself in.

In doing so we can use the following themes to think about both Bowie and human subjectivity in the age of “the world system”:

DEATH; SEX/ GENDER; ECONOMICS; LOVE; MEDIUM (STUDIO); THE FUTURE

[These ideas were first explored in an MA Seminar for Art in the Contemporary World lead by Francis Halsall and Vaari Claffey]