Carburetor Dung

In 1894 the Times of London ran a story about horse manure on the capital’s streets. If horse numbers continued to rise, it warned, then as soon as 1950 the streets would be submerged in 9ft of dung. The very thing which made the city function, its horse power, threatened it from within. If left unchecked, unstoppable waves of fecal matter from the city’s horses – so necessary for transportation– would choke and constipate its commercial systems. A new form of urban transport was required to save cities from the swelling, steaming heaps of excrement.

There are two readings of this failed prediction.

The first is optimistic. It’s underwritten by a comforting faith that humans will always be able to come up with technological advances to engineer themselves out of the predicaments they find themselves in. Or, in other words, we needn’t worry too much about our carbon footprints or air-miles because new technologies will emerge soon enough and render our petro-chemical age redundant. Just like the internal-combustion engine replaced horse power so too this will be superseded in due course. Any current anxieties about global warming will seem as quaint in 50 years time as worries about horse manure do now.

The other reading is to recognize the truth: all technology produces shit.

Both horses and motor cars generate by-products relentlessly. These are the redundant but necessary productions of their operations. Their dung. Dead bits of stuff are always left-over, and left behind. All processes of production produce surplus. From the whittlings of working in wood to the chaff of threshing and all the sawdust, stubble, and sump-oil in between; every technology will produce its own surfeits and pass its own stools. These excesses are the non-signifying elements of its processes. They are without meaning because they don’t sit obviously within a system of objects. They are rather the dross which rises to the surface. The swarf.

Making and Matching paper published

I’ve been working on a piece for ages which has now seen the light of day in one form here at the Journal of Art Historiography. It’s about aesthetic judgment in art historical writing. My claim is that a tacit aesthetic judgment is at play in choosing what theoretical model is applied to art – in so far as the model is made to “match” the object.

My feeling is that this has wider implications than art history (although that is an excellent place to test this theory out). Not least, I will argue, in thinking about a tacit aesthetics in systems-theory and the will-to-system. More on this to follow...

Geology and Flat Ontology: Bryant and De Landa

The first of the new systems seminars at Gradcam began last week with a fascinating discussion on De Landa’ s ‘Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Form’ [South Atlantic Quarterly, 96:3]and parts of Bryant's The Democarcy of Objects.

Alan has already posted some initial thoughts here which I'm responding to..

There were 2 elements I found particularly exciting about the reading and discussion; both of which are helpful in thinking through the idea of system as an absolute metaphor; that is a basic form of organization.

1 – Metaphor. De Landa gives the following description of his use of ‘Strata’ and ‘Meshworks’ as forms of organization: “This raises the question of whether some (or most) applications of these terms are purely metaphoric. There is undoubtedly some element of metaphor in such applications, but, the appearance of linguistic analogy notwithstanding, I believe that a deep, objective isomorphism underlies the different instantiations of strata and meshworks.” He invokes a “deeper, objective level” at which isomorphic connections occur.

Alan’s question in regard to this is a pertinent one – does this lead to a circularity of thought in which a deep structure is presupposed in advance of its revelation; ‘can De Landa move from metaphor to real isomorphic systems without too much concern?’ I’m not sure. It seems telling that he claims to ‘believe’ in the deep, objective isomorphisms yet without moving toward providing proof.

The move from metaphor to (ultimately un-provable) isomorphism reminds me of Blumenberg’s talk of Absolute Metaphor (something I’ve mentioned a few times here already) as ‘unable to satisfy the requirement that truth, by definition, be the result of a methodologically secure proceedure of verification.’ (Paradigms for a Metaphorology)  This is also how Don Ihde reads Heidegger’s account of technology (“Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing” – The Question Concerning Technology):

“I have called what Heidegger sometimes calls ‘Epochs of Being’ civilizational givens. These are something like deeply held, dynamic but enduring traditions, historical but nor more easily thrown over than one’s own deepest character or personality.” [Don Ihde, Technis and Praxis, pg. 104ff.]

2 – Geological Organisation. De Landa’s discussion proposes forms of organization which can on the one hand accommodate non-linear, non-predictable complexity and on the other transfer across different orders (psychic, social, “natural”) without relying on (i) consciousness/ volition or (ii) ‘life’ as organizing principles.

As Alan mentions the model of Hierarchies and Networks seems them as organizational forms which emerge from geological processes. This proposal for a geological mode of organization suggests a 3^rd alternative to the 2 classical modes:

(i) Social/ Intentional. From this volition/ will emerges as consciousness in the humanist tradition. The best example of this is forms of communicative rationality as theorized by Habermas and intersubjectivity as an intentional horizon in the phenomenological tradition. This is an anthropomorphic model of organization. It is, arguably, unsatisfactory in that it anthropomorphizes organizational process (as volitional, intentional etc.).

(ii) Biological/ Life. From this organization is attributed to an animating life-force. This is what Habermas recognized in Luhmann’s systems theory (which emerges in his later work and comes from Maturana/ Varela et al)– namely that it is meta-biological in its attribution of forms of auto-poetic organization to an animating (and irrational) life force. This is a biological model of organization. It is, arguably, unsatisfactory in that it makes organizational process “alive.”

Both Norbert Weiner (from a Cybernetic perspective) and, more recently, Ray Brassier (from a eliminative materialist perspective) have warned against such neo-vitalism as a first principle:

Weiner: “It will not do to state categorically that the processes of reproduction in the machine and in the living being have nothing in common.” [Norbert Weiner: God and Golem Inc. pg. 47]

Brassier:  “I’m not interested in proposing a philosophy of life or anti-life, but in querying the inflation of “life” into a master-category in contemporary philosophy, not just by overt vitalists, but also by phenomenologists, critical theorists, and enactivists.” [Interview at After Nature blog]

Hence:

(iii) Geological – whereby complexity is understood through the organization of “unformed and unstructured matter-energy flows.” (pg. 510). The attractiveness of the organization of  matter-energy flows as an isomorphic process is that (unlike Luhmann) it offers a model of non-linear complexity, organization and emergence which is both compatible with material and which doesn’t prioritize either consciousness or forms of life. In other words, this gives us what Bryant calls a ‘flat ontology.’ It allows us to talk about lava flows, storm clouds, oil prices, rioting crowds, ants, ice-floes, viruses and nervous-systems in exactly the same terms.

Latour interview available

Delighted to say that the Latour interview is now available (and getting a bit of attention):

http://societyandspace.com/2012/10/11/bruno-latour-and-francis-halsall-on-art-and-inquiry/

I went into the conversation from the position of thinking of Latour's work in relation to aesthetics and how his ideas may be applicable to art practices. It was, alas, too brief a conversation to unpack a lot of what is mentioned.
I was especially fascinated by the idea of "metaphor as an aesthetics of proof" which resonates with both Hans Blumenberg's claim for absolute metaphors that are "unable to satisfy the requirement that truth, by definition, be the result of a methodologically secure proceedure of verification" (Paradigms for a Metaphorology) and one of Ian Bogost's opening claims in Alien Phenomenology that some elements of metaphysical speculation are unverifiable.

Little Trapdoors

This is a text I was invited to write to accompany the show: a yellow rose by the artists
Owen Boss // Colin Martin // Tom O’Dea
 

Its on at: Freemasons’ Hall 

17 Molesworth Street Dublin 2
August 9th – August 24th, 2012

(opening 9th August at 6pm)

There are more details here.

The artists have used a short story by Borges as their starting point and I was responding in part to this and in part to the spaces of the Freemasons' Hall as well as their own works.

 

Little Trapdoors

 I’m generally reticent about the over-use of metaphor in aesthetics; particularly when it comes to talking about art. I’d not go so far as to call it a conspiracy but I do resent its hegemony on meaning. Let a yellow rose be a yellow rose. We have a responsibility to not always take out the spray can and stencil unwelcome associations over it. Objects can get left behind in the search for further correspondences and meanings. Oftentimes things don’t have any meaning beyond their particular place and time. Sometimes they are not a proxy and they don’t delegate for anything but themselves. The metaphorical risk is the temptation to move over the object and miss what’s important. But we shouldn’t only look beyond things but into them too. Beautiful things are not merely metaphors that point to their position in chains of meaning but little trapdoors that can be opened up to reveal hermetic dimensions lying within.

We live by metaphors, however. They are always convenient and ready to hand which is what makes them so hard to avoid. They are part of the very system by which our world is made not only meaningful but liveable. For the philosophers Lakoff and Johnson experience is an intricately constructed architecture of associative meanings. “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another,” they argue in Metaphors We Live By. This means that thought itself is metaphorical. Time is like money, it can be wasted or borrowed; words are like conduits or containers, they carry meaning or can be without sense. Consciousness has orientation, we can feel depressed, sink into a coma or be in low or high spirits.

But whilst thinking seems impossible without such associations the networks of metaphor are also inherently hierarchical constructions of sedimented tradition and authority. They thrum with power.

Metaphors produce meanings but they also lock them up. Metaphors work by taking a characteristic of an object as a stand in for its totality. A rose becomes another thing: a jewel, a “gem of the spring, April’s eye.” An act of ventriloquism takes place and the object is dubbed over with another voice. It starts speaking for something other than itself. What, then, happens if one takes a step beyond the threshold of this system once in a while? What would it mean to absent oneself from metaphor for a moment and rub up against the rough hewn surfaces of reality; to luxuriate in the grain of the masonry of the world?

Objects are not secret entities, more often than not they sit there dumbly and unembarrassed in plain view. But, whilst they are not secret they contain secrets; weird little esoteric elements which are concealed to all but those initiates who know how to look in the right places. When meeting an object we can use all our senses to rove its exterior searching for that flange or lip which anticipates a way inside. It’s the edge of a door. A wrinkle in the buckled surface of a thing can suggest a hinge upon which this door pivots and opens.

The classical philosopher-poet Lucretius also believed that the true nature of things (De rerum natura) lay hidden inside them. For him objects have to be opened up for use to peer into their turbid interiors. So:

“And when we knock a stone with a toe, we touch

Just the outer surface of it and the surface colour,

But we do not feel this by our touch, but rather

The hardness of the stone deep down inside.”

(Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, Bk. 4, 265ff.)

The poetry of philosophy crafts these thresholds which open up the unyielding and opaque surfaces of the world. It promises esoteric wisdom and occult knowledge of things as they really are. It offers up invitations to private gatherings of objects behaving in their own way as they are wont to do when we’re not paying particular attention to them.

Poetics (in all its multi-sensory forms) is the magickal art of finding and making these little trapdoors.  No one said this better than Wallace Stevens the poet laureate of “things as they are.” He realised that it is not the world that is alien to us, but us that are aliens in the world: 

“It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.”

Wallace Stevens, Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit

Poetics, then, is about discovering how we as aliens might recognise and grasp the concrete beauty of normal reality by probing beneath its surfaces:

“Beauty is momentary in the mind -

The fitful tracing of a portal;

But in the flesh it is immortal.”

Wallace Stevens, Peter Quince at the Clavier

However, if we are an interloper into what Bruno Latour calls the parliament of things then we shouldn’t be alarmed and treat this as a conspiracy or secret society that we’ve stumbled upon. It is, instead, an opportunity for us to rethink our place in the world. It means we should rise to the challenge in trying to work out the rites and rituals these things perform.

What I’m proposing then, is that there is an aesthetic attitude which is also a poetical-philosophical one. It recognises the significance of Borges’ insight that some things are not, “a mirror of the world, but rather one thing more added to the world.” In other words, it is often unhelpful to think that we are looking at the world as through a glass darkly. Sometimes the metaphor that art (and science for that matter) is a mirror of reality can obscure as much as illuminate. Truth is not limited to sight; it is not something reflected back at us through our own lenses. Instead it is revealed in parts, in different orders, as we move with our whole body through different thresholds into other spaces. The world becomes, then, not a shiny reflection of ourselves, but a tessellated surface composed of an intricate matrix of an infinite number of little trapdoors waiting to be discovered and opened up.

System as non-human yet non-divine transcendental ground

Great conference in Liverpool and it was a pleasure to contribute to Robert Jackson’s thoughtfully convened panel (see his report here). His own paper and Charlie Gere’s were excellent and a good discussion followed involving Levi Bryant who is using Luhmann in his own way in an Object Orientated Ontology context.

This is the rough version of the conclusion to my paper (with quotations included). The first half was a brief introduction to Luhmann, so I’ve left it out here. My main arguments are that System can be thought of as: (i) a non-human but non-divine transcendental ground of the world (ii) a form of intentionality that is non-human; an Alien or Occult Intentionality which is, ultimately, unknowable.

Occult Systems

The process of secularization of modernity comes about from the move to a functionally differentiated society. The functional differentiation of society in modernity leads to a loss of reference grounded in a transcendental reality. As Luhmann says:

“Self-referential autonomy on the level of individual societal subsystems was first established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Previously, the religious positioning of the world occupied this functional site. Perhaps one can say that the reference to God intended in all experience and action functioned as the secret self-reference of the societal system. One said, perhaps, that without god’s help no work could succeed. Societal as well as moral demands were fixed thereby. But the religious semantics was not formulated as society’s self-reference; it was (and still is) formulated as other-reference, as transcendence.” (Social Systems, p. 461)

The function of religion in premodern society was to offer a solution to the problem of observing the indeterminate complexity of the world. The world appears as a meaningless chaos of entropy and utter contingency (that is, it could always be otherwise). However, the religious system, with is binary code of immanence/ transcendence, ensures that this chaos is neg-entropic; this is, is observable and can be meaningful. Tropes such as God and The Sacred thus functioned to deal with the paradox of the unobservable and to: “transform indeterminable into determinable contingency” (Function of Religion, p. 189)

The System of Religion, thus, guaranteed the transcendental conditions of the world. God offered a guarantee of the world as a unity of being. It was a divine absolute that underwrote a totality of relations.

But, as Luhmann argues the world is never graspable as a totality because any observation [Beobachtung] of the world is always partial. The world is an undifferentiated totality; an unmarked state that can only be observed within a system through the marking of differentiation and drawing of distinctions.

Even if everything could be observed this would still occlude the observation of the observation; hence the blind-spot in observation. In theological terms this blind spot was occupied by god – who played the role of a positionless observer that could observe the totality of all relations including their own observation. God was both part of the world and able to observe it.

This function, however, disappears in modernity when society becomes functional differentiated into a number of autonomous and operatively closed sub-systems (such as the money system, the media system, the legal system, the science system and so on) none of which has priority over the other. Hence, in modernity, a transcendental condition of the world is lost. This resonates with similar arguments made by both Lyotard in Postmodern Condition regarding the loss of contextualizing meta-narratives in modernity brought about by the dominant narrative of science; and Husserl’s earlier analysis of the Crisis of the European Sciences which describes the historical erosion of the loss of a transcendental grounding for knowledge.

Luhmann’s account of this is more wry and . He says:

“God is dead’, they said – and meant the last observer cannot be identified.”(Reality of Mass Media, p. 119)

Hence: my first claim that in terms of observation Luhmann seems to be suggesting that the system/environment distinction occupies a place once filled by God; that is as an expression of The Absolute in which the totality of relations in the world are observable from a positionless position.

In doing so he also draws a direct parallel between the radical constructivism of his own systems-theoretical approach and certain theological concerns. For example he talks of a “holy trinity” in modernity of God, World, Reality as functional equivalents of Totality, The Absolute or The Real. He states:

“The partner for radical constructivism is therefore not traditional epistemology, but traditional theology… One then easily sees that one still has to distinguish the distinguishing of the distinctions with which observers work and which can be observed in the observations of observers from the indistinct which was once called God and today, if one distinguishes system and environment, is called world, or, if one distinguishes object and cognition reality… This also means that the form of a theory described on the basis of its ability to resolve paradoxes allows for the question about functional equivalents, or, if it presents the paradox of observation as the observer, the question about God,”

And so we return to the question of whether...undifferentiated [differenzlose] (and therefore: paradoxical) concepts are necessary. The traditional concept of God acted as an attracter for and thereby absorbed this question. For some, this may suffice. Without committing ourselves, we wish to present three further concepts that could, very faintly, resemble the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. We will speak of World to designate the unity of the difference between system and environment. We will speak of Reality to designate the unity of the difference between knowledge and object. We will speak of Meaning to designate the unity of the difference between actuality

and possibility. All these concepts are indifferent [differenzlos] in the sense that they include their own negation.”

(Luhmann, Erkenntnis als Konstruktion, 41–2. quoted in Rasch, ‚Luhmann’s Ontology’)

So; system appears as a non-human but non-divine ground for the transcendental. But this is a transcendental that eludes total observation perhaps resonating with Zizek’s discussions of a “Less Than Nothing.”

My second conclusion points to a weirder, occult reading of Luhmann. This runs counter to standard receptions of his work in which he is cast as an arch-instrumentalist and his sociology as a post-modern cynical one.

As already mentioned, neo-cybernetics is a source for systems theory. This is seen particularly in his later work (from the 1980s onwards) when he’s influenced in particular by Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic biology and Maturana and Varela’s evolutionary biology. This lead to the adoption of neo-cybernetic vocabularies in describing the functioning of systems; and Habermas’ celebrated criticism of Luhmann’s systems theory was that it: “effects a shift in thought from metaphysics to metabiology” (Juergen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p 372). For example systems are complex (as opposed to complicated) and non-linear.

In quasi-biological terms, systems are autopoietic (that is self-organising.) For a system to be autopoietic means that its reproduction and perpetuity is sustained by its own internal operations through which it reduces the complexity of its environment.

This means that the operations of a system are not as rational as might have first appeared. They are, for example, not predictable.

One consequence of this is that it is not possible to “steer” society through rational activities; there are limits to human interventions in social systems precisely because systems are autonomous and operatively closed. Hence forms of intersubjectivity grounded in collective rationality become impossible.

Autopoesis (that is self-organization), thus, functions as an animating, first cause in his systems. This is, after all, Habermas’ complaint that Luhmann’s systems theory relies on a principle of irrational “life” as its organizing principle.

Systems, thus, demonstrate a purposiveness but one that is non-rational. It is not available to human reason and is not subject to human steering. In other words it is a form of intentionality that is non-human; an Alien or Occult Intentionality which is, ultimately, unknowable.

Latour and Systems Aesthetics

"FH: Ah agency. Well in just reading you talking about Gaia it seems that if there was any form of agency in relation to your account of what we might call a “democracy of objects” or “thing politics” then that agency would have to come from us understanding ourselves as thoroughly embedded in sorts of networks. Like ants or something perhaps.

BL: "Well, systems and networks have a different sort of feel.

 [...]

 BL "[The emergence of] System was a great moment in trying to reorganise multiplicity. I mean to order the masses of new stuff [that is, the novelty of modernity] one comes up with the idea that you could actually connect boxes and then link them up in a system. In Sociology we see this with Luhmann [and his Systems Theory]. Networks are very, very different metaphors where, I mean by metaphor an aesthetics of proof. The multiplicity of connections in a network, that is the heterogeneity of a connection, is vastly greater than in system."

Bruno Latour in conversation with Francis Halsall

I'm pleased to say that the whole conversation is to be published soon. 

I'm fascinated by this idea of metaphor as an aesthetics of proof and how this is going to relate to Luhmann's own aesthetics; particularly as it pertains to a discussion of the emergence of, as Latour says, the systems of modernity.