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.

Legacies of Duchamp

Friday 22 June 4pm – 4.45pm
 
Lecture Room, IMMA at NCH, Earlsfort Terrace

Francis Halsall, course co-ordinator of MA ACW, traces the multiple legacies of Marcel Duchamp in contemporary art practice and theory. Halsall will unpack the main elements at stake in Duchamp’s practice such as: the readymade, appropriation, intervention, anti-art and identity. The impetus for this discussion is Duchamps’s Rotereleifs/ Optic Disks, 1953, as featured in the exhibition Time out of Mind.

Booking is essential.

Free tickets are available online at www.imma.ie/talksandlectures

21st Century Body symposium, London

Very happy to be involved in this which looks like a very interesting event called

The 21^st Century Body Symposium

Daryll Forde Seminar Room, Bloomsbury campus, University College London
18th May, 2012, 9am to 6pm, followed by a drinks reception

Here is my abstract for a paper called Irritating Social Systems: Luhmann and the Body - which has simplified the complexity of Luhmann's position for the sake of legibility. I'll unpack his position in more detail in the paper.

Keywords:     

Niklas Luhmann

Body

2nd Order Cybernetics

Transcendental Philosophy

Social Systems

According to Niklas Luhmann the body seems to almost disappear in modernity. He applies the observations of 2nd order cybernetics to a sociological analysis of social systems. Modern society, he argues, is a system comprised of a number of operatively closed and functionally distinct sub-systems such as economics, science, law, the mass-media and so on. Each system is autonomous and observes the world in its own terms via its internal communications.

Thus, Luhmann’s sociology is generally characterised as a post-human one. That is, one in which the basic unit is not the embodied human subject but rather instances of impersonal communication.

In this paper I challenge this. Having introduced Luhmann’s theory, I then discuss two aspects of relevant to thinking about The 21st Century Body.

(i) I explore how ‘to be human in the 21st century’ means to have ones body fully embedded within (and perhaps subordinate to) complex social systems of communication and control. For Luhmann the human is, after all, just another system (a ‘psychic system’) alongside many others. This would appear to render the embodied human subject redundant in two significant ways. On the one hand it is redundant as the focus of sociological analysis (in other words if we want to understand how society works we must look at its systems and not its bodies.) And on the other hand this seems to negate the possibility of a bio-politics grounded in the agency of such an embodied human subject.

(ii) Against this apparently bleak assessment I argue that the body still has a significant function in social systems. My claim is that the body has the ability to migrate between different systems. Take, for example, the simple act of walking into a shop to buy a packet of cigarettes. This requires a complex negotiation of different systems such as: the economic system (in the transaction); the mass media system (in the advertisments for tobacco I may have seen and perhaps use to inform my choice); the legal system (given the legal status of tobacco) and so on. In all of these negotiations my body not a neutral agent of impersonal communication; it is, after all, my body that the cigarettes will probably damage. Rather, my body engages in, observes and is observed by, different systems at different times.

My conclusion, then, is that the body has a transcendent status in social systems that is important. That is, the body can migrate between social systems and irritate them. In doing so the body can disrupt the hygiene of the apparently impersonal operations of social systems with its gleeful, messy corporality

More Picasso on the Radio

Another radio appearance on Newstalk

Transformative States and Distinct Images: Discussion on Nancy

Transformative States and Distinct Images
A discussion on the occasion of Emmanuel Rohss’ show at The Joinery
Lead by Francis Halsall and Declan Long in collaboration with MA ACW (NCAD)
 2:00 – 3:30pm, Fri. 13th April 2012
 
The Joinery, Arbour Hill, Dublin
 All are welcome
This discussion uses Jean-Luc Nancy’s text “The Image – The Distinct” as a starting point for a conversation about the contemporary status of The Image in relation to aesthetics, objects and The Sacred.

The text is available to read in advance. For a copy email: halsallf@ncad.ie
“Art is necessary and is not a diversion or entertainment. Art marks the distinctive traits of the absenting of truth, by which it is the truth absolutely. But this is also the sense in which it is itself disquieting, and can be threatening; because it conceals its very being from signification or from definition, but also because it can threaten itself and destroy in itself the images of itself that have been deposited in a signifying code and in an assured beauty. That is why there is a history of art, and so many jolts and upheavals in this history; because art cannot be a religious observance (not of itself or anything else), and because it is always taken back up into the distinction of what remains separate and irreconcilable.”

Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Image – The Distinct’