For those who are interested, here is an unedited draft copy of my talk at The Matter of Contradiction: Ungrounding the Object conference in Limousin, France next Saturday. This is my first foray into how machine-oriented ontology might talk about art, so be kind. I realize there are a lot of points here that need to be fleshed out and developed, and I’m still struggling to fully articulate certain claims I’m after. I begin by taking on what I refer to “expressivism”, or the thesis that art expresses something (theories differ as to what it expresses) or that art has a meaning. From there I try to establish that an artwork is not so much about something, but is something. An artwork is a genuine entity and actor that circulates throughout the world, that is every bit as real as a cat, quark, or rock, and that acts on the world around it. Finally, I try to address a deadlock that I believe emerges between expressivist theories of art and object-oriented theories of art, arguing that works are sense-making machines that act on contexts. Above all, I’m interested in preserving the singularity of art, avoiding its erasure in meaning and criticism, and in emphasizing the actual practice of artists over and above critics and viewers.
As is the case with most of my work, my aim is not to exclude but include and expand. I don’t wish to undermine current forms of criticism such as the new historicisms, Marxist criticism, deconstruction, formalism, structuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, eco-criticism, etc. I think all of these approaches provide us with valuable insights. What I want, instead, is theoretical humility. Emphasis on the point that artworks cannot be reduced to their contexts– a very Derridean point as I observe in the article –helps us to see that an interpretation is not something that gets at the true meaning of a work, but is rather a machinic coupling that strives to produce a machine that functions with respect to the world. In my view, criticism is not so much about the work, as about activating the work as a machine with reference to the present. Good criticism not only transforms the work but is transformed by the work. Bad criticism simply subordinates the work to a pre-existing theoretical framework as yet another case in a species/individual relation. A criticism is the formation of a machine that strives to act on the present and transform it through the assistance of the work.
Sadly, I was unable to get to the points I really wanted to discuss with respect to art and the nonhuman. If there’s something profoundly wrong with Heidegger’s thesis that art is an expression of a world, it is that art opens us on to worlds beyond our own lived artworld. If there’s a reason for the persistent animosity towards art throughout history, then this is because art interrupts. Art can open us to worlds not only of others who live very different lives than many of us (Tony Morrison, for example), but also to nonhuman worlds unlike ours at all. Art can allude to the world of dogs, quantum particles, colors, shapes, different places in history, the life of insects, etc. Far from confirming and expressing the worldhood of our world, art perpetually challenges that familiar life-world and calls it into question. This is the reason that every reactionary social order has called for careful regulation of art or that it be banished altogether. As a genuine entity that acts on our life-worlds, art is dangerous.
There’s not much I can do to revise the talk at this point as I have to prepare my talk for Dundee in Scotland the following week and pull together my reader’s report for a dissertation committee I’m sitting on there. At any rate, I would like to publish this as an article at some point, so constructive criticism would be helpful. Anyway, here’s the talk: bryantlimosine.
September 2, 2012 at 1:26 am
Levi: the ideas you outline here are long overdue in an artworld consumed by meaning – meaning as the basis of a value structure that ultimately supports an elite consumership. A refocus on the art object itself, by a criticism of ‘humility’ (beautifully put), that no longer thinks the object in terms of ‘what it means for me’ but in terms of what is it, here and now, with me, is – from this artist’s point of view – an exceptional contribution to the dialogue about the nature and purpose of art criticism, and breathes life into the possibility of a truly democratic art making and viewing experience.
September 2, 2012 at 2:06 am
Wow, huge thanks Jeff. This is just what I hear all you guys saying so I feel it’s kinda trivial.
September 2, 2012 at 3:00 am
Yes. I was trying to articulate a pale piece of this general thesis at The Inhuman Turn in Milwaukee in April (in response to comments on intention). Looking forward to hearing what folks have to say on this topic at SLSA later this month . . . given our culture I bet there will be a number of references to this piece.
September 2, 2012 at 3:43 am
Hi Levi, as the manager of a wood shop that crates and ships art, I can say without a doubt that the singularity of any artwork makes it the object of hysteria. Managing this hysteria and becoming embroiled in how the art was made (and therefore what kind of care it needs) amounts to the same process. It never gets boring, that’s for sure. Good luck with your reading!
September 2, 2012 at 5:54 am
Thanks for this piece. About meaning and art, i (humbly) think that you can find interesting ideas in the field of semiotics, in the works of Fernande de Saint-Martin and Louis Marin, for example.
L. Jégou, finishing a doctoral thesis on cartography esthetics.
September 2, 2012 at 6:11 am
So many good things here, Levi… but I like it that instead of the subjective approach you are approaching powers of art as, in your terms – a “difference engine”. Instead of a respresentational aesthetic ala Santyana or Paterian followers you offer an aesthtic of powers and movement, of the dynamic object expressing its virtual proper being in its local manifestion (medium). You’re on the right track…
…art explores what a medium can do.
Thus, rather than asking of a work “what does it mean?”, we should instead ask “what does it invent through and with its medium?”
September 2, 2012 at 8:01 am
Wittgenstein and Dewey both connect aesthetics with ethics. It seems that your work might be able to claim that the ethical relationship with a work of art is tied to local manifestation, and depends upon the virtual proper beings of the work and the viewer. Context and encounter could be something like spontaneous ethical machinic productions, which could offer a terminological space for thinking about the radical plurality of permissible encounters, characterizations of the work, criticisms, etc. In terms of Derrida’s “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing,” the peasant worldhood and worker worldhood are encounters that include an ethical component. Fleshing out this ethical component might be useful. To choose Heidegger’s or Shapiro’s interpretation is in effect to silence the ethical perspectives established as local manifestations in specific regimes of attraction, historically but more importantly in the present. This in effect also diminishes the virtual proper beings of the artwork itself and the analyzer, Heidegger and Shapiro themselves but also anyone else encountering the work. Bringing the ethical dimension of aesthetics into the discussion also could allow you speak of the violence involved in the debate over meaning. A democratic artworld, a democracy of art objects, can say something about this violence (and the contingency of violence!), opening a view toward aesthetic transformations or regime change.
Anyway, I quite like the essay!
September 2, 2012 at 8:32 am
The value of an artwork is also something to explore. There is an economic aspect to this line of thought, that qua pluripotent virtual proper being the artwork can keep giving, it has potential use value in minimal abundance. No longer is it the sole responsibility of the artist to change the world through the work of art; the viewer must encounter the work and coordinate an impact. This is a democratization of the aesthetic dimension in a present regime of attraction.
This could also lead into the politics of intellectual property, in the sense that the artist and the artwork as deliberately separable (ontologically, no less!) may have de facto implications for policy struggle. Harman’s work on experimental modification — when does Lovecraft’s story in the arctic cease to be Lovecraft’s story? — also has this dimension. If the artist has copyright for 20 years, or 80 years, does this in effect betray the virtual proper being of the artwork? It’s something like slavery perhaps.
September 2, 2012 at 11:50 am
Levi, how do you differentiate, if you do, between objet d′art having/bearing meaning and objects/machines as bearing/transmitting ideas?
If you get a chance to check out TMorton’s talk on ecological awareness as blindness it would be interesting to get your take on his account of coexisting with an aboriginal painting, thanks.
September 3, 2012 at 2:05 am
What first drew me into your MOO was its affiliation with feminist materialism (NFM, you’ve called it). I know you didn’t go into great detail about the dovetail you perceive between MOO and OOO in this particular talk, but I’m curious to know if any of the insights you’ve taken from Bennett, Grosz, etc. might be applied to the aesthetic theory you’re working on. I would think so; when you talk about art opening up worlds beyond our own, I assume that potential beyond our own could also be opened. And that would seem to fit well with some of what NFM discusses.
I really think this linkage between NFM and OOO is one of the most profound and understated aspects of your work. It’s my understanding that some of the NFM’ers don’t like to consider themselves “materialists” (much less object-oriented theorists) because of how the term has historically been used. I think your attempt to find common, but not consensualizing ground could go a long way toward revitalizing dormant trajectories of both feminism and materialism. Hope you write a book about it one day!
September 3, 2012 at 8:59 pm
Could we distinguish between your “an artwork is not so much about something, but is something” and Archibald MacLeish’s conclusion to “Ars Poetica” (1926): “A poem should not mean / But be.” And then I have my own questions: how big is a poem? It’s bigger than the proverbial ink on paper and smaller than everything, i.e., than the entire history of its reception, etc. The shoes that are only part of Van Gogh’s painting, The urinal that is only a part of Duchamp’s Fountain: to what whole do these parts belong? Then you have an artwork.
Here’s “Ars Poetica”:
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown –
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
*
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind –
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
*
A poem should be equal to
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea –
A poem should not mean
But be.
September 4, 2012 at 10:11 am
In your paper you relate art,events and revolutions in terms of interrupting our everyday life and call it into question.I totally agree and this paper is very valuable for understanding better social change….thank you
October 4, 2012 at 8:51 pm
I love Guy Zimmerman’s startling machine-oriented take on theatre as metallurgy . . . “Tragic Drama and the Liturgical Force of Metal.” I’m still processing it . . . so resonant. See excerpt below (and whole talk about 45 minutes into the audio).
http://environmentalcritique.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/identity-immanence-and-inanimate-events/
December 1, 2012 at 2:19 pm
Levi. I returned to your remarks about machine oriented aesthetics lately, looking for a clue to a desire for an object-oriented art criticism. My dilemma rests here: in speaking and writing about ‘art’, are we not simply reasserting an idealist model? Does the term ‘art’ in other words, freight the object with value beyond the simple arbitrary use value of language (convention) that creates a category of thinking about it? Or am I going too far here? It seems every attempt to approach and encounter the art object as real is an encounter with a thought about it, at least at some level. My sense is that asking ‘what is it?’ instead of ‘what does it mean?’ is a good start, and that ‘what is it doing?’ and ‘how does it work?’ can go a bit deeper, but then, still, doesn’t the human exchange about these questions still leave us on the outskirts of a real encounter? Art objects, it seems to me, more than other ‘categories’ of objects, have to capacity to circumvent conventional (human use value) limitations and announce a real status resistant to human categories. Perhaps the word ‘art’ needs to go, and the practice of art criticism needs to relinquish the establishment of ‘value’ as its primary objective. I think an open and de-valued criticism of art would in turn open the object – via the multiplicities of non-hierarchical responses invited – to a fuller and more democratic being (of itself), one that could and would defend successfully against human needs to ‘understand’, ‘nail it down’, to ‘get it’ (kill it, in effect). This seems to entail a revolutionary approach to art, and one that could set a new model for an aesthetics of the object in general.