So our next speaker is Robin McKay. I'll start with the introduction while they set up the computer. Robin's going to show quite some image material, so his talk is going to be a bit longer, like 40 minutes? We'll see. Okay, we'll see. Which is like... Robin McKay is a philosopher, lecturer, currently at Goldsmiths College in London, and he's also translated...
I think... Can you... Because I have people talking on both sides. So he's currently teaching at Goldsmiths College and translated various works of French philosophy, including Alain Badiou's Number and Numbers, François Lariel's The Concept of Non-Photography, and Quentin Meillassou's book on Malamé, Number and the Siren. And of course he's the editor of Collapse, the rightly famous journal of philosophical research and development. You can buy some issues here. Whose importance, the importance of Collapse, can really not be overestimated. I wanted to ask you because I know that this is going to be recorded
and live streamed and I'm going to get hate emails if I don't ask you when the next collapse is coming out so now I only get hate emails from Robin the world is waiting for an answer I think March it's March but not just via collapse he's responsible for organizing and catalyzing really exciting encounters between artists, musicians, writers, and philosophers beyond the usual trap or the usual way of... We know the encounter between philosophers and artists, just one explaining the other or trying to gain some symbolic value. One example is actually his contributions or his collaborations with Florian Hecker
and also with Reza Negostani. recently they did an opera, can one say that? Was it an opera in New York at the Guggenheim? What was it? What's the official genre? No? Not an opera. Anyhow, this kind of experimental collaborations between artists, musicians and philosophers. Following his long-term interest in minimalism as well as a potential ground for something of elements of a non-correlationist element in art, He takes art as a point of departure to think about some things like classical ontological distinctions, like, for example, the one between primary and secondary qualities of objects, so extension on the one hand, or smell, taste, color, etc.
And beyond that, confronting us with very provocative ideas or thoughts, not just in the context of art, questions like whether artists shouldn't be maybe... But there's no image yet, right? That's coming. No, that's what you say. so I still have like three lines here so whether artists shouldn't be maybe better called engineers of immaterials or maybe whether the category of the object only blocks immaterials so maybe we should refocus our interest when thinking about art so I'm very curious about his talk today which he gave the title Matter, Material, Immaterials Art Philosophy Curating 30 Years After Lyotard whom we already heard something about this morning I don't even remember that title I was actually reading the abstract this morning. I thought, that sounds quite interesting.
I wish I'd been looking at this abstract when I was writing a paper. Okay, thanks a lot, Robin, for coming. I've learned a lot about myself. Thank you. Thanks very much to Armin and Suzanne and everyone here for inviting me. And thanks very much also to the artists who showed us around and showed us their work yesterday. it's really interesting to come and have this kind of strange confrontation between philosophers and artists, each of who don't really know what the other's doing or why they're here and to try and work some kind of communication channel out is this going to work? yes
Okay, shall I start talking and then the presentation can catch up? Okay, I was going to start by talking about Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll invented this concept of the portmanteau word. So a portmanteau word is like a word in which several words are closed up into one. So, for example, brunch is breakfast and lunch. Cyborg is cybernetic organism. One of Lewis Carroll's from Jabberwocky is mimsy, which means flimsy and miserable.
Which, if I didn't have that word, I couldn't describe how I felt this morning. So what I wanted to say was, on the press material for this show, speculations on anonymous materials is all in one word. like this portmanteau. And then underneath that, you have this array of words. So it's like not so much a portmanteau. It's kind of like one of these suitcases where you've stuffed everything in, and you have to jump up and down to get it in and zip it up. And as soon as you open it, everything explodes everywhere. So it's this massive kind of dense concentration of words kind of extracted from contemporary theory and contemporary philosophy. so continuing with the Lewis Carroll theme it's like something of a kind of
philosophers and artists tea party where we have these words on the table and we're not really sure what we're doing with them and who is it who's going to decide what these words mean and what context is this operation happening and why are materials a problem so I'm going to start just talking about materials with two examples both taken from recent, I must be honest, not from scientific journals, but from journalistic reports on scientific journals. The first is about a research and development carried out by the industrial pharmaceutical company Merck in order to develop a new type of drug for insomnia. A neurotransmitter chemical that later would be named orexin
was identified in the late 90s as having an appetite-stimulating effect. So it was earmarked at that time for future research into obesity. A year later, at Stanford, in a colony of narcoleptic dogs who had been kept and bred for several generations in a research facility, scientists finally identified the damaged gene that was responsible for their dynasty of sleepy puppies. The dogs lacked a receptor for orexin. So this discovery opened up a new research path. Rather than aiming to find chemicals that caused the onset of sleep, the aim of a previous generation of sleeping pills, which had only succeeded in doing so, with a kind of sledgehammer effect with just shutting down everything.
Given that a certain neurotransmitter is instrumental in keeping the brain awake, then it might be more effective to block its reception. But it's how this research was then pursued that I think is the interesting thing. Merck have a computer-controlled chemical scan of a library. They have a library of three million compounds, compounds which themselves are byproducts of previous research. So a sample of each of these compounds is introduced in turn into a cellular soup derived from human cells which act as a kind of surrogate of the human brain. An agent is added then which reacts to orexin, which will glow if it's present. The process is filmed automatically of each of these three million compounds
being put into the dish with the agent and filmed, and then the ones which fail to light up can then be reduced down to a few for further testing. Once this has happened, and they've identified the most effective one, then there's a whole other story, of course, which is to do with how they decide what color pill they're going to use, what shape the pill should be. And finally, I mean, it's up against the FDA at the moment, but presumably, finally, we get to the stage of creating a kind of homogenous... I don't think that's the Merck one, but that's a similar facility. and then so eventually we get to this stage of actually making pills and creating this kind of
homogenous material which I think we all admit is kind of lovely to have this bottle full of these identical homogenous pills which have this this magical effect especially for those of us who suffer from insomnia which seems to be everybody I know. So the second story then concerns it's a more general story to do with a similar technique in material science which is called high throughput computational design and which is expected to replace trial and error techniques of developing new materials. It combines the resources of massive computing power and a growing knowledge of how the desired material properties, say hardness, conductivity, color refraction, etc., can be
attributed to quantum level characteristics of matter. So what's called the Materials Project at Berkeley, tellingly was formally called the Materials Genome Project, is able to swiftly scan a database of tens of thousands of inorganic materials. So once they've identified the quantum or atomic level arrangements that give rise to a certain desired property, what they call its fundamental descriptor, scientists can then access, search, screen and compare the entire database for candidate materials. And the material scientists now kind of talk of a new golden age of material design where massive computing power has been given, given us greater power to turn raw material into technology than we've ever had before.
And this is a slide of a screening for light-absorbing materials for use in photovoltaic applications. So these examples, just to say, a material is no longer an obstinate, opaque, natural stuff that, within the context of human projects, appeals to us to be formed according to a project at hand. Materials are coded structures which are already the product of an immaterial manipulation and production before they even enter the domain of manufacturing. The total abstract combinatorial space of possible energetic quantum configurations is made available like a huge memory to be scanned and selected according to our requirements, as is the interior neural space of the brain,
so that rather than being the subject that masters the materials or the destined recipient of a message carried by the materials, humans also appear as complexes of coded, structured matter designed by nobody. How about the electronic cigarette? Here the pleasure in the inhaling of the smoke of a burning tobacco plant, a ritual act emerging from a whole series of biological and cultural contingencies, is analysed into its component parts and re-synthesised using multiple inorganic materials. The interesting thing here, I think, is how these materials are also freighted with meaning, with sense. The synthetic process, for the first time,
also splinters apart the organic whole of the act and the meaning of smoking. The neuroactive agent, nicotine and its addiction, is separated from the act of burning a plant. The aesthetic and, maybe say, spiritual act itself of smoking, with its component of sacrificial potency, is decoupled from its fatal medical consequences. So this technological innovation is also a major cultural event. It's a sudden splitting, de-unification of an organic act, each component of which can now be enjoyed or used through the use of separate technologies of simulation. But of course, cultural habit isn't so easy to break and continues to be satisfied by repackaging these bizarre materials
into this remarkable skeuomorph with a sugary, nicotine-laden glycol water vapour taking the place of burning plant smoke. These examples, and there are many more, of course, I could have chosen, should show clearly enough that the question of materials has changed register. And, of course, artists are coming to grips with this because artists use the materials that are available to them. And philosophy also, I think, is trying to understand this new materiality. And here we are, we say materials, and we present materials in a gallery, and we talk about materials. I don't understand what we're doing or what that means. So often in order to attempt some understanding of the present,
it's useful to step outside of it. So in order to address my stupefaction regarding the present conjunctions of philosophy and art, I want to turn back to a 1985 exhibition whose traces recently come to seem more and more interesting to me not least because they seem to describe very well this type of materiality that I've used these examples to illustrate. My acquaintance with Les Ais-Materiaux this exhibition staged by design theorist Thierry Chaput and philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard at the Centre Beaubourg in Paris in 1985 is very recent. In fact, it occurred during the project that Armin was talking about with Florian, and he introduced me to this. And since then, I've discovered I'm not the only one who's
interested in going back and looking at this show. So there's something timely, or if you like, untimely about this. The exhibition tried to confront an accelerating cycle in which technological instruments afford us a grasp of matter beyond the human perceptual spectrum, decomposing the material structure of everyday objects into systems of imperceptible structures, which are then recomposed again through the use of automated machine languages into new material organizations, which Lyotard says are always precarious. Now, according to Lyotard, these new developments relativize what has been taken to be a universal relation between materials and subjects, whereby the human subject is the recipient of materials
with which he completes his project. They overturn the notion of matter as something destined for us, addressed to us. There's no stable substance, but only an unstable set of interactions. And materials become, in effect, a type of language. And this disrupts a whole set of apparently stable conceptual polarities, material versus spiritual, material hardware versus software, matter versus form, matter versus state, matter versus energy. so as Liatar argues with these developments we can no longer trust our intuitive allocation of objects and their matter can no longer be understood as a given that correlates naturally with our language derived from our spontaneous interaction with the world new symbolic machineries
whose dense operations we can no longer fathom shape the synthesis of the new immaterials that become a part of our lives and their products confound natural language confronting us with experiences we don't yet have the words to describe. The classic modern, let's say Cartesian conception, sought to expel secondary qualities from matter as pure extension. The sensible reception of these qualities would only be a theatrical effect, says Lyotard, of the body. The body, he says, as a confused speaker, which says soft, warm, blue, heavy. Immaterial science instead grasps these qualities as the effects of relative
disparities between memory systems, contractions. And Liatar refers back to Leibniz and Bergson for this conception. So the human mind, says Liatar, becomes only one of a series of transformers that fleetingly generate immaterials as they extract and contract flows of energy. Even the transformer, he says, that our central nervous system is, can only transcribe and inscribe according to its own rhythm the extractions which come to it. It's a synthesizer among synthesizers and not the destination of matter. So the exhibition tried to create what Leotard calls a dramaturgy of information to stage the uncertainty of this disruptive moment in
the history of matter. Exploring, he says, the chagrin that surrounds the end of the modern age as well as the feeling of jubilation that's connected with the appearance of something new. He sought to use this exhibition to activate this disarray rather than to appease it by exploring the collective cortex constituted by machine memories. It's not a matter of explaining it, Leotard says, but of making sensible this problematic. The exhibition seeks to awaken a sensibility assumed to be present in the public, but deprived of the means of expression. It wishes to make felt the sentiment of the end of an era and the disquiet that's born in the dawn of post-modernity. Equally, he says, it's not a matter
of making apocalyptic pronouncements or of saying that nothing has changed. It's a question of intensifying interrogation and aggravating the uncertainty that it makes way upon the present and the future of humans. So for Lyotard, the historical moment of Les Emeteriaux promises new forms of creativity, even as it heralds the end of the progressive programme of modernity. Henceforth, there will only be a complexification of matter in which energy comes to be reflected without humans necessarily getting any benefit from this, implying, he says, a profound crisis of aesthetics and therefore other contemporary arts. For if we have these at our disposal, these interfaces capable of memorizing in a fashion accessible to us, vibrations naturally beyond our ken, then we are extending our power of differentiation and our memories.
We are delaying reactions which are as yet not under control. We are increasing our mental liberty, our material liberty. And this liberty comes at the price of security, at the price of a counterfinality of technique and what he calls a foreclosure of ends. I find myself wondering whether a lot of recent curatorial work which claims to interrogate materials, objects and things would benefit from an acquaintance with this disquieting effect that immaterials tried to achieve. both in the terms of the concept of immaterials itself but also in terms of exhibition making and I'm not going to talk as a philosopher but as someone who's concerned with presenting philosophy outside academia and in other contexts to a wider audience
Les Immateriaux occupies an interesting place in the history of exhibitions and institutions it's one of the first shows in fact where a theorist or philosopher becomes an exhibition maker One of the team from the Beauvoir talks about philosophy changing its media, inscribing its exigency in another space and with other means than those of the book. Through the exhibition medium, the cultural institution becomes a site where certain reflections of a philosophical order can be grasped. But this proposal itself must also be understood through the emergence of a new context for and new demands upon exhibition making, the cultural space within which Lyotard and his colleagues found it possible to create this exhibition,
which itself was also a work. In 1955, the French government resolved to modernize the famous abattoirs of La Villette on the outskirts of Paris, a late 19th century monument to rational industrial design and centralization. Work began in 1961, with the cost of the project growing from an already relatively large 245 million francs to 110 billion, with a great deal of this ending up who knows where. The new abattoirs and auction market proved instantly obsolete before they were completed. Their conception as a prestigious trophy had ignored the problems of siting a massive centralised facility in an already congested city. when decentralization was proving elsewhere more economically and logistically viable.
So the facility proved to be totally maladapted to the realities of the industry. Work was discontinued in 1967. The whole thing was demolished amidst great financial scandal. And with this new slaughterhouse and market dynamited and pulverized and a great deal of money, who knows where, La Villette then was dormant for a few years before eventually becoming the site of a polyvalent cultural complex, the City of Science and Industry, including a new National Museum of Science and Technology, the Cité de la Musique, and other cultural attractions. Pompidou, who, along with de Gaulle and Giscard d'Estaing, had presided over this disastrous project, unbowed by scandal, and having lubricated the settlement of May 68,
became president. The neo-Hausmanian zeal of what is being described as a managerial Medici for remodelling and modernising the city continued apace with the brutal raising of the Les Halles area and the construction of, of course, a massively funded cultural centre, the famous building which, instead of the ill-fated slaughterhouse, would eventually take its name. Perhaps mindful of the fate of the meat market, the Minister of Culture at the time proclaimed the Centre Beaubourg as une centrale de la décentralisation, a centre of decentralisation. There's some truth in this because it's an institution which had to figure overweeningly large on the national scene only because France was losing its grip, its power in a globalised world, a decentralised world.
So I think there's the belief that this great powerhouse would reconsolidate some of that power through the cultural realm, indicated, frankly enough, in the title of the opening exhibition, which was originally called Paris, New York, Paris. I think eventually ended up being called just Paris, New York. The Beaubourg, of course, prefigures so many trophy projects we have seen since. It was supposed at once to cement the importance of culture as an internationally recognized asset of French patrimony and to kickstart the regeneration of an old area of Paris into a Cartier-des-Arts, a high-rent location for editorial offices, publishing houses, graphic designers, architects and boutiques, all clustered around the Piano Rogers cultural warehouse. The appearance of the Beauborg is also contemporaneous,
with a certain set of expectations demanded of public exhibition making. The appointment of Pontus Hulton was a symbol of the institution's determination to at least be seen to take seriously the propositions and demands of the broadened field of contemporary art emerging in the 60s within an inherited institutional framework. In Stockholm, Houlton had proved his ability to attract a non-traditional audience through a festive programme of controversial happenings, cross-disciplinary enterprises, across arts, sciences and pop culture and so on. Upon his appointment to the Beaubourg, Houlton speaks enthusiastically of the need to create new institutions. We're probably moving, he says, towards a society where art will play a very large role. While waiting for art to be integrated with life
and penetrate society in its entirety, exchange between artists and the public must take place in museums newly conceived. Such museums would no longer be simply areas for the conservation of works, but places where artists encounter the public and where the public itself can become creative. We must try to open up the museums. So here we find encapsulated, if you like, the articles of faith of a new theorization of the museum and the exhibition, which perhaps have a slightly different and less hopeful resonance today. The faith that the avant-garde dream of the unification of art and life is all but achieved, subject to delivery through natural dynamisms at work in society. The anticipation of an age in which a greater part of the population no longer has to struggle for survival
and thus will reclaim artistic creation from an elite. And the museum's role in helping to break down cultural attitudes and in opening up vertically to new audiences and laterally to non-art disciplines, the space of culture. Halton further sees the space of the museum in terms of urbanism. The museum should be in the form of a city, a system of rooms that communicate and interpenetrate, preserving the chance of losing oneself and reorienting oneself. In the framework of this perpetual mobility and flexibility, in a building where even the director's office is circumscribed by temporary mobile wall panels and whose transparency and porosity extends from the external architecture to the configuration of the inner space and the interaction of audiences,
Halton imagines, for example, the viewer of a Brach collage having the option to press the button to bring down a screen upon which five more collages are mounted. Or not if she doesn't want to. So technology is already anticipated as a prop for the deterritorialized dreams of this new museum. Now, what degree of success was achieved? In a conversation between Houlton and Rogers in 81, Rogers says, I think the Beau Borg has democratized or popularized culture. It gives people of all classes or ages something to do on a Saturday afternoon. You, as a specialist, can go to the museum. Your grandmother can go to the restaurant. And the kids can play in the square. Which Houlton amplifies with, usually a museum is just a museum.
At the Beau Borg, you have a whole series of overlapping things to do. And therefore, the area becomes much more active. It's more like a railway station. It's the theory of the flexible magic box, which includes the piazza. Nothing is ever static. And nothing is ever perfect. In the same year, but in slightly more sanguine spirit, interviewed by the New York Times, Houlton says, I wanted, it sounds stupid, to bring art and life together, something like that. Rauschenberg said it better. The museum of the future is to be in the little crack between art and life. It sounded very good at the time. By this time, it was difficult to resist reading this gigantic culture machine, except as a figure and as a microcosm
of the generalized spaces of dynamic circulation according to whose exigencies a new city and a new society were being formed. Spaces whose perpetual motion formed the background to the festive neoconservativism denounced by Parisian philosopher Gilles Chatelet who, writing in the 90s, entertains momentarily a delirious dystopian fantasy. automobile Robinsons on wheels inspired by the president's vision of adapting Paris to the car repurpose Pompidou's pipes to realise Reverend Moon's dream of a system of transcontinental tunnels to serve the dynamic petro-nomadism of the new civil society allowing man to realise one of the oldest
dreams of humanity to drive his family from London to Tokyo without ever encountering a red light yeah sure yeah I'll try Baudrillard of course also had his own massive critique of the Beau Borg which I won't go into the question is of course the man whose name the new cultural centre came to bear What was he gambling with, with Houlton, was that the image of the, as a profile in Art Monthly says in 1977, the ebullient anarchist, behind the ebullient anarchist lies the potentially docile and productive reality of the jeune cadre dynamique.
that is the reassertion of culture as a soft power asset of a nation-state, merely set the stage for the real economic game of installing in the surrounding remodeled streets the aggressive vanguard of today's urbane, precarious networker. So it's in this context, albeit after the departure of Houlton, that Les Immatériaux is conceived. Before Leosard's involvement, the project had been brewing since about 1982 or 3 under various titles, including Nouveaux Materiaux et Création and La Matier dans tous ses états, as an exhibition to be mounted on the theme of new materials and creations by the Centre de Création Industrielle, the Centre for Industrial Creation. Now, the Beaubourg was founded as a collaborative space
of different cultural centres. So, along with the Modern Art Museum, ERCAM, which was the generously funded Electronic Music Institute, ordered directly by Pompidou to bribe Boulez to come back to Paris. Along with those was also the CCI, the Centre for Industrial Creation representing the worlds of design, industry and architecture. The early years of the CCI were marked predominantly by a total failure to integrate happily into the transdisciplinary family. An exhibition on the factory was viciously publicly attacked by ministers. An exhibition on marginal architecture in the US was a subject of controversy because of the inclusion of controversial political texts by Marcuse and Allen Ginsberg. And most tellingly, a film scripted by Henri Lefebvre
about the problems caused by the renewal of the urban fabric of Paris was banned by Robert Bordas, the director of the Beau Borg. The director and the assistant director of the CCI departed soon afterwards, with Bordas himself temporarily taking over the directorship. The CCI was closed down a few years after Les Immateriaux, So as has been suggested, the show can be seen at once as one of the, possibly the only major achievement of the CCI, and also as a hinge in the history of the Pompidou itself, at once effectively the point at which its ideal cross-disciplinary post-museum status was achieved, and the last exhibition in which that ideal would be seriously pursued. So the first full brief, this is before Leotard's involvement,
speaks of a situation in which the passage from an energy-intensive to an information-intensive society presents new modes of perception, new modes of representation. The origin and outcome of production processes, product and raw material, are not straightforwardly distinct anymore. There's a profound modification of the duality between invention and production, and new technologies are creating their own symbolic order and a social order which emerges from it. So the authors at this time find that this process is an acute stage at which it's not yet fixed, and at which what is most widely shared is a kind of perplexity, which is what they want to grasp in the exhibition. And here I just want to say that Maurizio introduced the show earlier, but I think he fell prey to a common misunderstanding of the title of the exhibition.
immaterials has got nothing to do with dematerialization or the disappearance of materials into the spiritual or into the virtual the word immaterials is used to describe new types of materials so they say immaterial materials albeit not immaterial are now preponderant in the flux of exchanges because the passage through the abstract is now obligatory including in the production of heavy industrial materials So every raw material of synthesis can be constructed by computer. We can know all of its properties, even if it doesn't yet exist. Prisoners of the materialism of the Industrial Revolution, they say. Immaterial materials suffer from their invisibility.
But it's here that a culture is fashioned through images, sounds, and words. So it's a question, as Lyotard will say repeatedly, of legitimation of these immaterials, allowing them their proper place. But this already means and entails a kind of destabilisation of the human and an admission that we inhabit a culture that is no longer ours, that is no longer human. So what does Leotard, the philosopher, bring to this? I think what they wanted him to bring to it was to trace back these questions to their fundamental roots and to make some of this perplexity felt within the space of the exhibition. he brings two things which are kind of almost spurious theoretical devices which give the appearance of being very rigorous
but I don't really think they are one is that he talks about objects in general and materials being considered as signs and he loosely adapts the theory of the sign according to Harold Laswell which is a matter of who says what to whom in what channel with what effect so then he traces it back to this Sanskrit root of maps which means to make with the hand or to measure or construct and he kind of it's difficult to do in English because all these words are obviously derived from the root in French but he sorts these five different categories materiel as support or surface, the surface of inscription matrix, a code
material, hardware, matter, the reference, and maternity, the origin. And all of these things are always included in material processes. So the outcome in terms of the exhibition itself, and what I want to stress is that in a certain sense, les immateriaux came to consummate the ideological hopes of the Beaubourg, and it certainly took full advantage of the kind of indeterminacy. So the outcome was that there was a massive number of exhibits from industrial design, computer software, choreography, artists. You can see the list of various artists here. The way in which they were displayed was in this maze,
this kind of labyrinth which was constructed from sheets of metallic grey semi-transparent material so one could partially see through the space but not entirely. There was a kind of Byzantine structure that Lyotard created. So you have these five different zones, these five different map zones, each of which is divided up into sites. And one navigates the sites by way of an audio guide, which when you move into the fringes of a different site, you'll begin to hear the soundtrack. and the soundtrack was kind of things like Artaud, readings from Blanchot, the various experimental musics and so on.
So it's this kind of navigation through this labyrinth. And Lyotard wanted to introduce this complete indetermination in the route that a viewer took. It should be a rhizome with no preferred path in a deliberate violation of what he saw as the traditional space-time of the gallery. Recalling Houlton's urbanist conception of the museum, Lyotard also describes it in terms of driving from San Diego to Santa Barbara in a zone of conurbation, where the opposition between centre and periphery disappears, and where one has to retune the radio many times. It's a nebula, he says, where materials are metastable states of energies. The roads, the sidewalks, have no facade. Information circulates through irradiation and invisible interfaces. So we're obviously dealing here with the exhibition itself as a work,
And it's well documented that Lyotard had been very struck by what Daniel Buren said about Documenta, I think which was meant by Buren as a complaint that the exhibition had become the thing that was exhibited. By Lyotard's orders, this kind of structural splintering of the space was also reflected. This is Jack Lang on a virtual bus. was also reflected in the accompanying documentation, where you have an album which lays out the process of conception of the exhibition, and an inventory which gives the reader this set of loose-leaf pages,
which the reader can then reassemble and reconfigure at will. I think I have too much to say here but what I really wanted to get to was what I find interesting is that this show could hardly be judged less than a success in terms of the ideals of the Beau Borg but it was also publicly judged and even by Leotard himself to be something of a failure so it becomes difficult to know whether it should be judged as some kind of high-flown intellectual enterprise which crashed to the ground. Certainly none of them were unaware of the context in which they were working and of Baudrillard's massively withering critique of the Beoborg.
But I think a charitable way to think of it would be to think that, in a sense, it was an enterprise of sabotage. It was an enterprise of implanting into this space of circulation this completely grey, impenetrable, confusing, disorienting space. And Thierry Chaput says, I don't think there's any contradiction in the fact that philosophical discourses change medium. The problems start when one wishes to make it the object of mass consumption. This doesn't go without saying in the framework of a public service. The whole communication, mass, democracy, public service aspect has not been an easy fit with this exhibition. The exhibition medium, the Pompidou Centre, are tools conceived as vehicles for a unique meaning
and to share it through successive capillaries as far as possible. Here, i.e. in Les immateriaux, we do the opposite. One product with multiple meanings confided to the sensibility of individuals. This is rigorously the inverse of traditional communication. In other words, I think one shouldn't write off Les immateriaux as some kind of lamentable symptom of the conditions. It's not just a symptom. Inside this project, there was this self-conscious and quite acute struggle taking place with the conditions under which exhibition-making is possible. And I think that's reflected in the baffled response of the audience. It's a simultaneous success and failure. It's contradictory status as an expensive, technically demanding, trailblazing, postmodern extravaganda of communication
and a sanguine subversion of communication that makes the show interesting and that must feed back into consideration of its conceptual theme. This internal struggle is attested to in Lyotard's writings of the time in which he addresses the question of the inhuman. Do I have to stop now? Okay. Well, what I wanted to say was that, In a sense, I don't think we've moved that far. And I think this strange conjunction of speculative realism and contemporary art, in a sense, kind of responds to the same kind of disquiet that Lyotard wanted to exacerbate,
but which today I think is more repressed, more repressed for its confident disavowal of the postmodern moment. And reading Tristan Garcia's book, Form and Object, which is I guess a kind of pseudo object oriented or quasi speculative realist text you find this expressed very clearly he says our epoch is that of an epidemic of things things possess the structure of a panic this work is born of a feeling that tries to justify this excess of things to concede them without suffering in doing so this is exactly what Lyotard was talking about in terms of legitimating immaterials. But what happens then? Garcia goes on to say, a flat thinking will allow us to orient ourselves.
The formal plane of thought cuts short all accumulation. So this formal systematization and organization of things, which alleviates suffering, can be espied in different forms, also in Badiou's recourse to set theory, which allows us to put away the vexatious multiplicity of things. and in Meir's recourse to absolute contingency, which enables philosophy to float free of all worldly contingency and to reduce materiality to the one single predicate of absolute contingency, and to object-oriented philosophy with its declaration that everything is an object. So, this is all to say that I don't want to be too hasty to lay blame on curators for misappropriating philosophical ideas,
because I think the philosophical propositions themselves are also part of a zeitgeist. There's a kind of unconscious conspiracy of mutual comfort. And as wary as we might be of the shortcomings of a communicative public service model, such as that which underwrote Les Immateriaux, I'm more concerned with the danger of a closed circuit between specialised philosophical discourse and an equally specialised contemporary art discourse and practice, which leaves little room for the kind of disquiet that Lyotard was trying to arouse. So, I'll just end with three points.
The first one is, the question of materials is not the question of matter, i.e. of the ultimate constituents of everything. Not only is the question of materials not the question of matter, an ultimate substrate, This question is the question by way of which, by defining practices and knowledges of navigation between different levels of materiality, we can actually shift or even replace this older philosophical question with a new one that's neither simply social constructivist nor philosophical. The second one is, would it not suffice if we agree with Ian that to know is to manufacture and the cooking is the important thing, would it not be a good idea to invite some of the cooks into the banquet hall? Wouldn't it suffice to talk to those who build materials?
For a first thing, to talk to people who build these materials would be to get us out of this theoretical double bind where we make a simplistic argument against scientific reductionism in order to not think about it. No one who makes a new kind of plastic works solely on the level of sub-elementary particles, or as Graham Harman had it, billiard balls. No one who makes advertising simply thinks, these are the four neurons I'm going to target. Practices that work with materials involve a navigation between layers of materiality, which is more complex than that. and so the third question is then an open question for me is about the privileging of contemporary art
why are we privileging contemporary art as the agent of an interrogation into materials have we evaluated the claim that in bringing materials from the world into another room the gallery in reconfiguring them in reformatting them that this allows us some kind a reflexive distance or some purchase on what their materiality is? Isn't there a risk that it simply represents their surfaces to our gaze in a safe environment? And it's this question of the comfortableness of this conjunction that, for me, seems the most pressing concern. And I'll stop there.
Thank you. Yeah, thanks a lot, Robin, for... Well, there are quite many things that are important in your talk, both the account on, or different account of postmodernism and the material, but also the methodological reflection, especially towards the end. But I see so many hands up that... I just want to say that I think it's quite clear that Lyotard at the time was himself extremely upset about the reception of the book on the postmodern condition and trying to fight against it, right?
This show was not in the context of the postmodern, but kind of part of his struggle to escape it, I think. I think it's good that there's a question by Maurizio. Thank you. No, just a point because it's not to take a photograph of the Big Bang, but of something which has happened 30 years ago. And I was present at the moment and I know very well Lerothar was a good friend of mine. We discussed for a long time on the point of immaterial. I know Terry Chaput who unfortunately died after death, but it's not the responsibility of postmodern. But I perfectly agree with the fact
that Lyotard was upset with the interpretation of postmodernism. This is perfectly clear, and the book Différent he wrote was in order to rectify rectifies some interpretation of postmodernism. Also, the postmodern explique aux enfants. It was, he wrote several texts in order to avoid any ambiguity of, say, nouvelle philosophie in postmodernism. Because- I have a whole section about this. Because it's a concern what to be confused with nouveau philosophie or something like this.
This is perfect too, but it is true that its idea of postmodern age was the idea of a weakening of materiality. And this is the last slide. Could you show? Theatres du non-corps, theater of the not body. But this was typical because it was, as you perfectly know, a reader of Duchamp. And yes, also, it was among Magritte and Duchamp. The idea, the phenomenological idea of the importance of the body,
of the importance of the secondary quality, and so on and so forth. At the same time, it was influenced by this idea of conceptual art coming from Duchamp. The dispositif Duchamp is... So I would not... Again, I agree with the upset of Lyotard and the use of post-modernity. I don't agree on the fact that it was not intended to be the immateriality. and also because of the obvious idea that if you make an exhibition with the title is Lesin Material, one can suspect that you have something to do against the materiality
or the idea that there will be, as I said, a weakening of materiality. But this was the shared idea of digital age when it firstly appeared. it was not a scene now we recognize what was the problem but it was pretty obvious at the epoch to see the thing this way I agree I certainly didn't I'm sorry that I made the remark as if you didn't know what you were talking about you know what you were talking about and you made a very brief comment but I think to conceive of the show as merely being about the dematerialisation of what was previously material is wrong
because from the very start, the question of immaterials was the question of new types of materials, surely. But what's very interesting, and I think Lyotard's being criticised for it among people who've written about the show, was that there seemed to be this over-dependence on Duchamp and on conceptual art, which somehow is a strange, it doesn't quite fit with this other component. So, yeah, I mean, there's lots of different things going on in there. And, I mean, I've been trying to plot a course through Lyotard's writings at the time, and it's just a kind of ferment in that period after the postmodern thing.
So, yeah, I mean, I don't think one can... Obviously, that's what I was trying to say, is that one can't completely determine what this entity was or is. And also, I think you have to allow the liberty for us now. I was not at the show, but I ask you to allow me the liberty to make something of it that I need now. You started with Alice. I will allow myself also to start my question with Alice. as much as I like the mud hatter party. There's another passage which I think might be important for what you said. It's when the fake turtle soup is being tasted. And then Alice concludes, well, so if there is a fake turtle soup,
there must be fake turtles existing. Yeah, right. And my question would be, what would be the difference between synthesizing the matter in order to understand the origin? So I understood that maybe mistakenly, that you have to kind of synthesize that in a way that it was made in universe. And then you have another type of synthesizing when you actually make a fairy turtle soup out of a bull or you make an e-cigarette or something. What's the difference between those two types of synthesizing? Well, one would be attempting to reproduce what's already there and the other one would be analysing in order to isolate properties
which can then be reproduced in other media, I think. If you're asking the difference between what Ian was talking about and what I was talking about. Is that right? I mean, in one case, you learn how to make the cake. In the other case, you get all the ingredients and you do something else with them or you find other ingredients that can replace them in order to make a new kind of cake. But there's synthesis either way. I was wondering how useful and how significant in terms of an artist position would be to synthesize from a different material. How it would be interesting. What's the case? Yeah, I think what I would advocate would be a greater involvement.
I think what I would advocate would be a greater involvement of artists in understanding how these materials are created and engaging with the people who make them. In terms of the question of putting thought to work in an exhibition space, what I was trying to say was, why are we not including the people who create these products? Why are they not interesting to us? But an artist who takes their product and brings them into a gallery is performing something that's seen to be valuable. So I'm all for a kind of collaboration and cooperation.
Okay, well, I did want to take the question back because I think you kind of just answered it. but I'll still ask it again. You asked why do we privilege this exhibition in a sort of inquiry into the value of these materials rather than talking to the engineers, for example, that construct the chemists. As well, not instead of, but yes. Oh, okay. Well, I had a suggestion for why maybe this place could actually be a place where that could be a good place to ask these questions. There's two reasons. First of all, because I think most of the artists that make in creating the work, they actually inevitably sort of go through production processes in which they talk to the engineers that make these materials.
And if you actually talk to the artist, they know that. That's the first case. And the second case is because the reason why the gallery is a privileged place to do this is because thinking about the values or the hierarchies of materials has taken place in galleries before art historically. So maybe that's simply a reason. Maybe because we know of the gallery as a place where we think about materialgerechtigkeit, like wood wants to do this, a brick wants to do that. Maybe because that had happened already, maybe it is also a good place to do it now. Sure, yeah. So I should have formulated the question in form of a question. I'm sorry. I think my question was,
what is this work telling us about these materials as materials? And I'm not demanding that the work does tell us something, but we're here on the pretext that it does. So I'm kind of calling the bluff and asking the question, what are these works telling us about materials? And what do we understand when we're saying materials here? This was the afternoon session of our symposium which I think what I liked about the discussion now that both you ended with some questions and instead of apologising for not having a question we should at one point come to the point
where it's not just Q&A but have a round table I have only questions, no answers Wonderful, so we'll have a short break of roughly let me really be half an hour until 5.30 but please try to be on time because I know several people who need to take the train back to several places so in order we can finish on time later so at 5.30 we start with a talk by Reza Negrestani immediately afterwards there will be a round table thanks a lot Robin