Re: <nettime> Locating ArtScience

[Gary Hall <mail@garyhall.info>]

Dear Eric,

Thanks for the stimulating and thought-provoking text. I’m enjoying the discussion it’s generated. Would you mind if I asked some questions?

 

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?

 

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?

 

(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.)

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?

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?

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?

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 

RECENT:
'The Inhumanist Manifesto':
http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/29/24

'Posthumanities: The Dark Side of "The Dark Side of the Digital"' (with Janneke Adema):
http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0019.201

Pirate Philosophy:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/pirate-philosophy

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