The kind of selfs that we were defining are somehow different in this case. As I said, this is a kind of a self as being an object of construction. it's not really a form of the traditional understanding of intentional estate, self, or even, for example, going a little bit forward, phenomenological self model or phenomenological self. It's basically what I say self and what, you know, for example, Confucianism or ethics call self.
It's just, it's not really that modern understanding of self. It actually can be sometimes translated as a person, but it is really a constructive account of the self. It has nothing to do with that kind of understanding of a self that has an a priori constitutive position, upon which everything is compared and it makes actually a benchmark for intelligibility or for knowledge. Yeah, I think I can largely agree with a lot of things that Riza has said in the ethics part about the self.
So if I understand that correctly, I have some sympathy for this way of looking at it. but I would nevertheless look at it quite differently because I think that these traditional projects, I would reject Socrates and Kant and all of that because I think that those projects presuppose the idea that somehow we are already individuated, even though we construct ourselves, but we also find ourselves as constructed. So, I mean, Kant has this problem famously that he has to bridge what he calls the intelligible character and the empirical character. So, for Kant, it's always a problem, you know, and for Fichte. If Kant and Fichte look into the mirror and they say, this is me, then they have to say, no, that's false.
You know, there's one sense in which it's true and another sense in which it's false. And I wouldn't go down that road at all, which is why I think that a lot of this is based on a conception of true and false belief that I simply wouldn't share. I think that both Plato, Socrates and Kant definitely would hold the position that to have a true belief is to be the owner of that belief. This is what Kant means when he says that the I think must be able to accompany all thoughts. So if you ask me, what do you believe? Then I say, I believe. And that's crucial for Kant. And I think that's a mistake. That's only surface grammar, as it were, in epistemology. Because if I know that it's raining, then I do not thereby believe it.
It's subjectless. So this is where I'm in disagreement with that tradition. So I wouldn't base my ethics on it. But that doesn't mean that there's no common ground. So I can think of a way of saying exactly what RZA has said that is not particularly committed to this idea of an ownership of thoughts. I'm quite interested in the idea of initial hypotheses and so forth. In the following form, consider, for example, that there were some entity arose, and this entity that arose, arose and we trace its origin back and we find that it's an hypothesis. There is a certain sense in which this is true. That is to say, an hypothesis is always by
definition without outcome as yet. But if the hypothesis is inferred from the end, then it's not an hypothesis. It's a deduction. To that extent, I wouldn't agree, I think, that the hypothesis is initial. Moreover, I think the further reasons for that have to do with the fact of in what circumstances hypotheses arise. There's a material specificity, as it were, to the emergence of hypotheses. We may discover, as it were, rocks forming hypotheses, but as yet, I certainly have not. So there is a question, I think, about the level specificity there. And I think the risk is, if we overemphasize the hypothetical element and de-emphasize the constructive, then what we get is an epistemically governed ontology, such that what is known,
in effect, produces what is. And I think that was the source of the problems I was addressing earlier on. I think probably there is a level of misunderstanding between this understanding of hypothesis. And when I say hypothesis, and this is something that we probably talked before, I specifically have a very narrow, conservative, kind of conservative understanding of hypotheses is according to Peirce. And for Peirce, he has different ramifications of different forms of hypotheses. Some of them produce knowledge. Some of them are just manipulative devices that push back the limits of action and understanding
without actually explaining anything, so they do not have a retroactive force. They are quite what they call a manipulative abduction. And these are not really the classical forms of hypothesis. And I think to that extent I completely agree that this is really the prioritization of manipulation over the classical program of hypothesis generation. That's a useful clarification. Maybe, you know, I'm now thinking that there's a sense in which I'm a Buddhist. I love to say this every once in a while. And here's the sense in which I think that I'm a Buddhist. So I don't believe that there's a self. So that's obviously something that the master would have agreed to. Now the question is, of course, what might you mean with it?
And I think that the subject rather than the self, that's what I meant when I said that it's an illusion or the totality of its illusions, consists precisely in constantly reworking, you might want to say constructing, in reworking or working through its illusions. So at every stage, you know, that's like a very common life experience. So at every stage in our lives, we think that we know who we are. Right now, I'm this and that. And so we think that we have found the unitary trait, to speak Laconese, that defines us at this particular moment of our lives. Until we discover that this wasn't quite correct. And then we change the view and we lost one illusion. But only in order to generate another illusion. So I think that we go from illusion to illusion as long as we exist. and it's quite impossible to overcome the illusion unless you become pure knowledge,
which was, of course, the fantasy, the post-Kantian fantasy. So, on one reading, what Schelling's and Hegel's interpretation of Kant's categorical imperative is one, according to which Kant said, get rid of yourself. So, overcome the idea that you are someone. And I think that's something that I would subscribe to, to a certain extent, as what ethics is about. But that's compatible with saying that we're constructing the self. It all depends on how you read constructing. I would say constructing is the generation of the next illusion. And not so much the, you know, finding out who you are in the sense of, now I know what it is that I am. It's more like, now I know again what it is what I'm not.
but under the illusion that I'm on the way of finding who I really am. But there's no one there. No one is at home on this level. I just want to repeat that. Yeah, Matteo. What I wanted to repeat is that you're all invited to ask questions. The short version of my question is especially for Reza. What's the relation between self-actualization and anonymous materials? The long version is like precisely the history of the notion of self-actualization, but I
want to cut it short. It may be taken just Kant and the definition of organicity in Kant, the organician basin. And the way, for example, Deleuze tried to destroy completely the unity of this organism. Deleuze said, the enemy is the organism. But for me, especially Cyclonopedia, was quite an interesting experiment also for his visionary language because it was the attempt to explode the notion of organism that also Deleuze was criticizing to the limit of the universe with the visionary language, with a kind of also experiment, yeah, putting dirty hands, let's say, into the different strata of ontology that you tried to describe. And also it's connected to a kind of dark side of this anonymous
material that probably this exhibition is like only tangent. I don't know if you have an answer for this, because it's like going back to something you were working a few years ago, while today probably you're more interested in, yeah, focusing on normativity and ethics. but I think the two different dimensions can fit in each other. Okay, probably I have to give a very disappointing answer. I kind of understand this project of self-realization, and this is something that we talked about before, and what Marcus was saying. I think it's kind of a very interesting understanding of self. the self is not, as I said, it doesn't have a foundation.
It's basically a vague modality, and it's a vague modality by virtue of its illusions. And then the manipulation, it allows you to strip away these illusions by way of arriving at new forms of illusion. That's what makes it really hypothetical and a device for manipulation. And that's also what a project of self-realization is in a sense of, for example, new Confucianism. But so this is that answer. The second one is that you see the problem with cyclonopedia is basically the very and this is as I said it's a work of a fiction it shouldn't be taken to overextend its fictional resources the philosophical resources but the problem is that once you say
say that anonymous materials and complicity, and complicity is coming from a Johan Malfatti de Montegrio who was Beethoven's doctor and one of the first inspirations of Deleuze. The notion of complicity is understanding that there is no teamwork because there is There's no commonality between different, for example, participation of material instances or constructive vectors, but nevertheless they follow a common task, like criminals, basically. Different syndicates do participate without actually having any commonality. This is a very understanding, allows for an understanding of a different form of universality
that is not grounded on commonalities. Now, the problem that it creates, once you say everything anonymous material, very metaphorically, is this idea that you say that, for example, oil is a sentient entity, and then you try to explain everything according to it. It's basically, you have a weak form of panpsychism by virtue that you have extended, over-stretched the levels of continuity. This is the myth of the young person who came up with this bad account of continuity. And that bad account of continuity between different estrata of materiality gave him the illusion that there is actually
a integral mind, that everything thinks. And then only later onward, during his later life, he tried to estratify this continuity to different multivalent forms of continuity that are actually asymptotically discontinuous, that allows you to make distinction, but also it requires you to not overextend, as I said, the conceptual resources of one to another. Okay, I have a question to you. when I was a student in semantic anthropology,
I was told that to speak of a heuristic device was probably the beginning of a difficult situation. And I wanted to ask you a question, and I have to go through a process in order not to get super nervous about talking to philosophers. You mentioned in the beginning that I have... No, no, no, it's very quick, it's very quick, I promise you, Amen. You said at one point that the idea of a universe is effectively provincial. The universe is a province, which is a fantastic idea. It's a partial portrait of the whole thing. At the moment, I look after 70,000 partial portraits of the universe. I've taken over an ethnographic museum. So I've taken over residues of philosophical, epistemological, ontological concepts.
They are sitting there in stores. they're looked after they are matter they are there even if we decide to give them a particular interpretation a particular classification they remain there and they continue to remain there we can't repatriate them immediately even that would require a classification one of the most interesting philosophers and if you like activists in anthropology was Bateson And he spoke about recursion, and he spoke about recursivity. And that's one of the ways that we can, at the moment, work with this collection of matter. And you spoke about to withdraw, and I never really understood what you meant by to withdraw,
which isn't the same as withdrawal. And I think it somehow means to be able, that the artifact can, in a strangely anthropomorphic way, remain aloof. so my question is in a way what do we do with this stuff this stuff that doesn't come out of this stuff that belongs to other provinces of universe in the kind of multi-perspectivism of Eduardo so how do we what do we do can you provide here today because you mentioned quite interestingly this question of the engineer, the artisan, the producer, the craftsman in the old language. What do
we do about providing arguments for these material artifacts that are the dross of new ideas that have accumulated now, that we have wanted to accumulate over so many centuries? Well, first of all, I agree with most of the things that Eduardo does and says. So that's not a coincidence that you come up with this name. So, you know, we have recently had quite a few discussions about, you know, related material. And I think that, you know, deep similarities between what he's doing and what I'm doing. But I didn't know of his work before. So I presented a version of this ontology at some point in Porto Alegre at a conference where he was also present.
And then he said, well, you know, what you're doing is precisely, you know, indigenous thinking. So what you are saying is what people in the Amazon are thinking. And this was not the only occasion where people in very different contexts, because at some point I usually draw diagrams. And I've often heard that these diagrams look like anthropological artifacts. And obviously that's part of what Eduardo does, symmetric anthropology, because of course they are. I think of every philosophical book that's written or every scientific discovery, as adding to the stock of anthropological data. So it's not like we are outside of this process. So the question is, what do you do with it?
Well, you read it, you interpret it, it's just further... I would like to think of it as just further information. But the premise of all of this is undermining different forms of conceptual imperialism. And I think that the contemporary insistence that goes with the name of science and of nature and the universe is nothing but a hidden form of conceptual and philosophically utterly unwarranted imperialism. That's why I'm attacking there. So that's the reason behind it. So that we get, because what I would like to see is a really global philosophy. I'm also rationalist, universalist philosopher, so I think that there really is just one form of rationality full stop. but to uncover it
we need to understand that in a certain sense there's no such thing as the best or apt scientific description of the universe so we have to give up the idea that there's this extant entity, the universe its totality and then there's a particular language that is the best language to describe that very thing. I reject all of that so that's part of the, I hope this is a legitimate part of answering your question. If I might add something to this. There is a peculiar presumption that should there be an explanation, others are eliminated. Imagine the portrait of things if this were the case.
This would make us, as it were, editors of actuality, where actuality is precisely occurring and then would have to be ungeschehen machen, which Freud is well known for saying is nothing but neurosis. I think the bizarreness of the idea that our ideas, especially once etched in rock or paper or sand or glass or what have you, especially once their artifacts become eliminated in some sense, is precisely an overextension of nothing more than a metaphor. But it's extraordinary the degree to which it holds us prisoner. So, for example, it's common to come across people who understand,
let's say, the existence of an explanation quite simply to demolish any other attempt at it, Whether that's registered as fear, conservatism, preservatism, I don't know. But it's registered as fear that that eliminates. But I think we're required to investigate what that would mean. What would it mean genuinely to eliminate an idea? I mean, I have some sort of thoughts about this. I think Terminator 2 is good on it, for example. There is a complexity in Terminator 2 regarding who is whose progenitor. There is a point where Linda Hamilton says to her son, all of their names, characters, I've completely forgotten, you know, I've always loved you, where the function of always is up for grabs because what's at issue is time travel.
You know, so there are bizarre circumstances such as those illustrated in Terminator which precisely show what it would be like to eliminate an idea once established. What would it take to make that impossible in fact, given the scope of the hypothesis? So more encouragement, not less. I think I agree with an idea that I know from Ian from other contexts, in my own way, but I would say that that's what I wanted to do with the concept of intelligible matter. So the fact that an idea exists is as real and causally implemented as the fact that someone hits a billiard ball.
So in that sense, you know, of course you can just ignore the existence of an idea, but that doesn't undo it. That's why I'm an anti-constructivist in that particular sense. I do not believe that ideas for their existence depend on being actualized by bearers of thinking, which does not mean that ideas had existed had no one brought them into existence. Those are two logically independent claims. It might well be the case that there's a sense in which there are no concepts had no one ever thought concepts, had no one been around. That might be a fair claim, but that doesn't mean that we thereby make it the case that those ideas never existed by starting ignoring them, which is why, you know, that's the sense in which I wanted to defend
historical dialectical materialism, and that's the only sense in which I want to defend that horrible idea. But, you know, Marxists insist, and even Engels is a good philosopher here, because he insists on the fact that if you want to be a good materialist, you have to have a concept of history, otherwise you will not be a good materialist, because then you cannot take account, you cannot give a good account of the existence of ideas, I think. I think that squares with your way of... Exactly. Just a comment, as it were. But exactly so. I mean, whether we call this history chronic, as it were, whether it's chronological or whatever the temporal organization of it, the question of genesis arises, i.e. things have a history, including ideas and so forth.
This history is not, however, limited to idea bearers, because idea bearers themselves have a history. So the causal history of ideas is edgeless to the extent that bottoming it out is not credible, but is edged in the extent that neither can it be extended such that the entire purpose of the cosmos is to generate an idea. Although that's a flattering notion. A question maybe for Reza and Robin, less of a question, more of a sort of wanting to provoke a discussion, especially in the last sort of hour we've heard this term, overextension of conceptual resources.
And this is certainly a contentious issue that comes up in the field of art, especially visual arts, where on the one hand works of art, kind of abjuring, making a definition there, are made. And then they are both explained and an explanatory function is ascribed to the work of art by people in a curatorial position. So I'm just wondering if you see perhaps a way out or a way into this discussion of in what instance is or are conceptual functions overextended, especially in, let's say to make it simpler, in giving an explanatory function to art. or can one give that to something
which engages only in a kind of material abduction a lot of work seem to be engaged almost exclusively in this rather than attempting to provide a model even if it's a heuristic practice or not I don't know whether I I don't know whether I believe that there's such a thing as a work which is without a conceptual component and I think I believe that all artworks make a conceptual proposal or produce some kind of proposition sometimes the artist is able to articulate
the proposition independently but in which case they probably wouldn't make the work but I don't know whether it has any relation to the notion of overextension that Reza was talking about really. Do you think? I really don't know but one thing that is yesterday I was talking to Jan and we didn't finish our conversation is that that at least traditionally understood, art is dealing with a certain patch of the causal fabrics at a certain level of materiality, and that's forms.
And forms have physics. They are basically morphogenetically established causal fabrics. You can even go and explain physically what a form is. is what, you know, run-a-thumb does. It's basically, it's a scalar measure of information that once is geometrically or topologically interpreted, you can account for forms. And forms are basically memories. Forms retain memories of the past and future perturbations. Basically what forms are, Forms are perturbations that are applied over invariances.
They're basically like these forensic fields that things have happened, and then they have put certain traces over certain forms of invariances. Like the memory storage of, for example, like for example, a dent in this book, a fracture, any of these things. of perturbations that are applied to invariances. Now, well again, traditionally understood art works with this specific layer of materiality, mostly. And yes, I think that this is what I was talking to Jan, I don't think that the conceptual resources, not the conceptual resources
in this case, let's put it, manipulability at the level of form cannot be extended to manipulability at other levels. This is, I think, quite obvious. But now the question is that can we have art that have manipulability at other levels without overextending its ambitions? Just a quick comment. Isn't that precisely overextending the function? You know, one thinks of Nietzsche, you know, how far must a philosopher stand from the rest of society in order to form it in his own image, indeed, and so forth. You know, you can't help but think of this. Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is life justified, only as an aesthetic phenomenon, as it were,
only as the overextension of the capacity to manipulate forms at the level of art is it possible to recover, as it were. And I know you were heading in that direction, but it would be worth expanding perhaps. I think the question would be, and again, this is just not derailing your argument, is basically I want to pave the road for at least a conceptual organization of how this works. Basically then art needs models of intervention that actually work on those levels. But can art really make those models? What would it mean to intervene on the level of the material rather than the level of form? To manipulate, to be operating manipulations in the material rather than form?
Forms are, as I said, forms are a very specific level of materiality. They are causally established. They are, they do not have, they do not have, they are not basically dynamic systems. They have invariances and morphogenetic stablized perturbations Distributed over invariances, but once you really go to the atomic scale all you have is just perturbation You do not have really invariances in the sense that you have in forms and that requires a completely different model pluralism Hi. I should have spoken up at the end of Robin.
Robin, this is for you. I should have spoken up at the end of your talk, but I didn't. So now I'm going to. I want to respond to how you ended your talk and ask you a question in response to the question that you finished up with. And correct me if I'm wrong, because it has been about an hour and a half now. And at the end of your talk, you were asking why engineers and, you know, the makers of new materials, you know, aren't brought into exhibitions such as the one that Susanna has organized. And, you know, why artists' ideas are privileged over the ideas of the people who are creating these new materials. And, you know, I would, I can't speak for all the artists in the exhibition, but I can speak for myself and, you know, other artists that I'm in close dialogue with who are in here and not in here. and something that's come up over and over again in many of the discussions over the last like five
years or so around this work with various new materials that I've been involved with is that it's precisely because many of the people making these new technologies and new materials are not addressing the greater ramifications of the things that they're producing you know the impacts of the technologies not just you know like let's say in the bathroom or in your refrigerator but you know socially on our bodies, on politics, on economics, on various other things beyond just their physical properties. And so, you know, like coming from that angle and that position, I would ask you, you know, what is it exactly that you think that engineers can bring, you know, could bring to this discussion
that perhaps I'm not aware of or that, you know, artists that they, you know, what is it that the engineers can tell us that the artist can't? We don't know because they're not here. So I can't speak for them. I think what's interesting what you say is we're discussing what these works can tell us about the materials, but what you're telling me is that the works are in fact propositions or descriptions of the social ramifications of the materials. So they're, in fact, diagrams of the consequences
of the existence of the materials. Is that right? Probably not in all cases. Like I said, I'm definitely not speaking for everyone, included in the exhibition, because some people are more comfortable with taking political stances than others. But in some cases, I don't know if I'd use the word diagram, but I would say response or, you know, a provocation to thought for other people or, like, an invitation to dialogue around some of these things. You know, for instance, you were talking about, like, you know, the white cube as a kind of zone of comfort and, like, what is it about bringing certain materials into the comfort space of the white cube, you know? And actually, I think with many of the works that are under consideration in this exhibition and beyond,
bringing them into the white cube isn't about bringing them into a space of comfort. It's about creating conditions of extreme discomfort by confronting people with these materials that we are very comfortable with in our daily lives, these new materials that engineering has brought us that we don't think twice about. But then when you're confronted with it in large quantities, for instance, the smell of Timur's axe, which is much less potent than it was at the opening, but when you're confronted with that overpowering, noxious, cloying smell, it's a very different experience than perhaps if you just use it once a day in your bathroom. It's almost confronting you with years of use of a material like Axe body wash. So, I don't know. Sorry, I'm rambling now. I'm going to stop talking.
I don't know if that was even a question or a response. No, I understand what you're saying. I'm just trying to think about my own response and whether I feel any kind of disturbance or any feeling of being overwhelmed by these objects. And I don't, for the most part, think that I do. So I can't speak to what you're saying. I don't find them any more disturbing than going to a supermarket, really, and seeing shelves of thousands of the same product. That, to me, is equally disturbing to what I'm seeing in the gallery. So that's really my question, is what's being provoked? What kind of provocation is being made
by bringing these materials into a different space and reconfiguring and reformatting them if it's not simply to use them to create a proposition which says, which kind of points elsewhere and says I'm telling you this is what's happening. I'm reconfiguring these materials in order to tell you something. So pedagogical in other words. Is the operation purely pedagogical or is there something going on that actually involves the materials themselves? Anyone else? I was just wondering why we talk about provocation now. Is provocation still a kind of valuing term? Or is it just neutral? Well, there's a kind of rhetoric of radicality,
and obviously, which is... What's the word? Which kind of marries in with the bringing in of these philosophical concepts. So there is some kind of idea that there's a provocation, that you're being kind of confronted by something, I hesitate to say sublime, but something overpowering. But it might be, what if this is a way of thinking also about art that is misleading, you know, like valuing the quality of art or the reasoning of art or rating it by its, I don't know, what's the noun of provoking, provocativity, you know, because as far as
I understand Josh, you know, like I think of the wall of this material of the jackets like Patagonia, that's now instead of barber jackets of Marxists. I don't know. So your point was that the engineers or whatever the people who design these materials, they don't think about the wider political and so on. How do you know? There was his argument. a very general comment. I'm sure some of them do. Yeah, okay, but I was just asking where the provocation thing comes from. It might be that you were not provoked, but that doesn't say anything about like... I don't know whether the work is designed
to be provocative, whether the presentation of it is making claims for its provocative nature. There's a really interesting thing that Lyotard writes around the time of where he's talking about the inhuman and his basic contention is that this new wave of material, technologically mediated materials and the position in which they put the human kind of opens up a very deep chasm inside the human where the human, there's this opportunity for the human to somehow he talks about a process of anamnesis. So it's like the remembering of the inhuman within the human.
And then he says, interestingly, there's two types of inhuman. There's this inhuman which is kind of deeply buried inside the human. He talks about the child. He says the distress, the kind of distressed potentiality of the child is the inhuman within the human. And then he says there's another type of inhumanity which is the inhumanity of the system of objects, of cybernetically mediated objects and so on. I was going to talk about it in the talk and then I didn't get round to it. It's interesting in terms of accelerationism because then what he says is, my great mistake, this is in the libidinal economy, my great mistake was to mistake one of them for the other and to think that one could bring the other forth. Whereas in fact, this kind of provocative
confronting you with the system of objects, accelerationism, is completely the other of anamnesis, which would be the disturbing, disquieting conjuring up of the inhuman inside the human against all humanism. Sorry, my point is, which one of these are we doing? This is just a question for anybody, but I was wondering if you guys could talk about maybe a specific shift in artistic production that could be correlated with a shift into realism.
So maybe, for example, maybe like investigation of power, which is like a very stable domain of art. What would that mean? What would an investigation of power, as an example, mean from a realist perspective? Just one piece that comes to mind is Hans Hacker's piece, which is interesting because it's one of the few pieces of institutional critique that actually caused problems and had to be excluded from the institution, which is the piece where he...
Let me remember, it's the real estate piece where he lists the donors to the museum and the tenements which they own and so on. So, you know, that could be like a moment of realism where one is addressing the contingent foundations of the institution within which one's presenting the work. I don't know if that's that. I don't know what you were asking for exactly, but that kind of springs to mind is when you're talking about power. I mean, maybe for our generation, do you guys see any new potential strategies that are opened up?
I also think that one idea that shouldn't play a role anymore is the idea that art ought not to refer. I mean, at some point there was the idea, if art refers to anything, that's already not critical. So to be critical or political or whatever is to make it such that the artwork doesn't refer to anything. But now most of this art refers in very different ways. And there are explicit objects that by themselves refer because you don't want to say that the axe is not the axe. No, it is axe. So the artwork is, among other things, among many other things, also talks about that. Or it talks about particular water labels. It talks about new materials. So in a certain sense, I think it's quite unproblematic now for an artwork to talk about something.
So there's no general suspicion against an artwork talking about something. And I think that's a very minimal and unproblematic sense in which art has become realist now. And it's also fairly unproblematically related to ideology, critique, etc. Because it can just show, well, look, this is how ATMs look. and so in a certain sense one could say that some of Josh's works brings out the essence of the ATM so look this is an ATM now what do you do with it? it's not by itself already an imperative it's not saying don't get your cash from them it's just saying look here you can decide what you want to do with it but here's how those things are. I think that's
a very minimal but fair sense in which realism has become unproblematic But there is a slight danger of like, I ask it in a bit provocative way, isn't there a danger in the way what you too, especially you Robin just said, that we fall back into a kind of understanding of realism that, referring to myself at the beginning of today, like after your talk, Marcus, falling back into an understanding of realism as a kind of social realism. You know, like, a Harkis piece was realistic because it actually had an effect, you know? Or, then you, Marcus, you talked about an idea. Let's remain with this example of institutional critique, you know?
Is an artwork realistic only if it produces an effect or there's a provocation and people get, like, there's a censorship or so? or is it realistic in what I call the 20th century realism idea of completely emptying out the gallery and showing what's behind it? You know, this fantasy of we break through the reality and then we find the real, like this awful economic... Yeah, I think that's just not the realism. I think there's a third, there's relaxed social realism, if you like. I'm not sure whether I want the relaxed realism. It's relaxed in the following sense. So there was this social realism where the 19th century discovered that there are laws, you know, material laws to the social realm, which is why they discovered, you know, one of the big discoveries of the 19th century is sociology, which happens in the second
half of it. And then that sociology started by just trying to uncover those laws. Look, there are those laws, interesting, so let's find out what they are. And then they stumbled over all sorts of methodological problems. And they have then been, I think, articulated in that 20th century sense of the real, okay? You can never be quite sure those material laws are somehow deep and far away and mediated and then they always added another level of suspicion to you know there's always another ideology behind the ideology critique and then there's the and everybody's suspicious of everybody else and it's the atmosphere of the cultural revolution in China at some point okay so and I think that that was the 20th century constant you know I'm suspicious of me being suspicious and those games and I think this has just become ridiculous because it you know also there are hundreds of counter arguments against
that. So I think that just broke down. But that doesn't mean that this new form of social realism is the same kind of social realism that you would have in the 19th century. But just by, say, exhibiting the temporally indexed essence of the ATM today, you're a social realist, but that doesn't imply an immediate imperative to action. I think that came out at some point in the discussion that we had with the artist when they said that, first and foremost maybe you know some said this is just neutral. I'm not implying don't do these things, don't buy axe. You know like this is not immediately maybe you know that might be a conclusion but it's not whereas the traditional social realism of the 19th century wanted to say something like
that. Look those are the working conditions in agriculture. Look you don't want that but the axe thing is not I think of the same. Does this make sense? Because often the same things are no longer like surprises. I talked a bit about this with Tobias Madison yesterday. The institutions have changed as well. So it's not just that they can't be provoked like that, but also the public, it's no news to the public that behind this and that institution there's this and that money. So the logic has to change. That was my irritation with provocation. Now we measure art, whether it's provocative. Essentially, we go through, I was more provoked,
so this is a good artwork. I'm oversimplifying. I think I misunderstood the original question, but just one point in reply to what you said is that the offensive thing about the hacker piece was its specificity. is that anyone can make work kind of making a general moral point that there's lots of big money behind art galleries. The crime was the specificity, and I think that would probably still be offensive, naming names. We'll try that. I just wanted to... The question's slightly directed towards Robin,
but really I feel anyone could possibly answer it. But I wanted to pick up from where I thought that Josh's question didn't quite fulfill itself, which was that one of what may be difficult about your request for the engineer's presence is that it implies some sort of insufficiency with the materials or the objects in a mediated state. Everyone who looks at objects, I think, struggles with what Rez slightly touched at,
which is that at an atomic level, they are about preservation. This is a kind of ideology that is sort of rife in museums and rife in conservation. So when it comes back to the materials here, and the materials as they are interpreted through artists, I think possibly the positioning is understanding them not in relation to what they technically could do, what they were called to, or not from this position, but to understand them in their problematic state. So being moved, as Rez says, from one problem to another.
And I think this is possibly an example. It would be in the GCC's work. The image doesn't help you understand the digital technology any better. But it does help you understand what it might be like to be imaged as a problem better. I don't understand the question, but I'll answer the bit that I think I do understand, which is that I'm certainly not suggesting that one could somehow, one ought to somehow replace works of art with explanations of materials. I don't think that but I think in so far as
we are being asked to participate in an interrogation of materials and what materials are that's the reason why I'm wondering why people who create materials aren't involved because they could give us far more information about the registers in which they address the materials, the reasons why the materials are as they are, the kind of factors that go into the production and the conception of materials. And for me, that would be interesting. But I'm not suggesting that somehow artworks
are a failed attempt to scientifically describe materials. Not at all. Yeah. I think, Robin, that there's a completely misunderstanding was never about explaining. I think that the artwork itself are reflecting in a really complex way materiality, totally different also in the way they do that, that the materialism is reflected in speculative realism. It was more about the whole conception was I think
it's interesting that parallel action that in art and in philosophy there's a really intense thinking about materiality and this was this idea of also experimenting are there things in common or are there's more things which are maybe thought differently. And I think that also yesterday and today, I think it brought up a lot of different and new ideas what materials can be. And it was never about explaining the art piece with concepts of philosophy or something, to say, oh, because we are just sharing something
you find in the supermarket, we take philosophy and that's maybe explaining the art. I think that the thinking of material here is really, really complex and I think you really have to get into that deeply in order to understand. This was more common than a question. I have two questions. Wait for the microphone. So there are two more questions. You have... I have five now. I'm not interested in having one. Okay, well now it's work. I wanted to actually bring you to the subject you started at the very beginning of the panel.
you spoke about shaping, reshaping, manipulating the matter as if I understood correctly. Yes, I think you started with that, but that was what the beginning of the panel started with. I was wondering if you could reflect on Joselit writing that I think referred to Seth Price's work when he spoke about the shift from, you know, the classical shaping of a matter, which would be intervention into a physicality of some object in order to shape a sculpture or something like this, into a manipulation that this very presence at price work, like a distribution, like everything that Joselit relates to the decade of picture.
Do you know Joselit's After Art book? Well, there's a basic thesis of the book is that we might, without realizing, have... I hope David doesn't hear that. Turn the cameras off. But the basic idea is that we might have entered into a kind of time or paradigm after art, because art might have lost its ontological or rather epistemological main reason to exist, namely the production of images. Nowadays, everywhere and all over the place and all the time, images are produced. And it's no longer the specificity of art doing that.
And so there's a proliferation, I think, of images, how he calls it. And so the question is how to then think about artistic production after art. Is that somehow? Well, I think it's important what he says about the two strategies and the new formative, for instance, and how you deal with the image that is there already, and how you kind of gain from the populization of an image rather than from the uniqueness of an art world. But I really think that there's a whole questioning of the different economy of images in Jocelyn that is quite difficult to understand without having the... I think, I mean, there's an eternal temptation for philosophers and theorists of art to say what art is, you know, and then to declare its death.
That's the old game. You know, art now is dead. People love to say that since Hegel and earlier. So I think that's a fairly standard move to want to say that. But I think often it hinges on an overgeneralized conception of what the artwork is. So, I mean, my still favorite definition of art is by Kossos. He says art is the definition of art. I think that's still the best definition of art. So, the question, you know, so you say art is the production of images. And then you will get a counter example. What about this? And then, oh, then art is the production of images or this. And then someone shows you another work of art. Ah, and or this. So, you always add a disjunct to your definition. And I think that is art. If you ask me what art is, I would say art is the fact that, you know, that's the cause of the book title,
art after philosophy after art, that the artist always comes up with a counterexample to what art is. So every artwork is a counterexample. So in that sense, you can say, if you want it paradoxically, that every artwork is not an artwork. So there are no artworks in that sense. If you think that there is art and then, you know, this is art and that is art and this is how I identify it. And a lot of those theses, I think, sound like overgeneralized fantasies of what art is and then declaring its death or end or final victory or whatever. I think really all we can do is interpret given works of art and sometimes try to find local similarities that help us to explain a cluster of what a number of artists do. In Joselic, variations of a Hegelian argument about after art,
but rather there's an exhaustion of, or a dead end in the way one has thought about art. He talks about there's a perceptual and a psychological way of thinking about art, and that might have come to an end, which is not completely irrelevant in the context of what we were thinking here today. But I think it's also beyond our expertise, I think. So now there are three questions. Speaking of Joselit, we could mention the network. And I was thinking about the notion of anonymity in all these discussions. And when you brought up the Hake piece, I was thinking about what would have happened if Hake was anonymous in doing the piece.
And having it shown, having all the ramifications of shitting in the place where you eat in a way, and not being identified by that so that he wouldn't have personal ramifications. So the piece would be great still and be this eye-opening thing. But still, he was Hakel. So the notion of anonymity for an artist is difficult. I mean, there's this collective of artists anonymous and blah, blah, blah. And there are certain ways to anonymize yourself, like Pussy Riot, whatever. But still, it doesn't fit in this system in a way. And I wanted to just mention two other things about the materiality and the engineering and blah, blah, blah.
Tobias Vogt wrote an article about Duchamp in Texas for Kunz a couple of years ago, in which he said that the famous bottle thing, I forgot, the bottle dryer, yes, that there were a lot of other authors in doing that, in producing that, that it wasn't industrially made, but like handcrafted more and that it was more a network. And Duchamp just selected the people doing that and showed it and exposed it. And of course, he still put Duchamp as his name on it, still not anonymous. And then one other example, which I have to mention in a way, is Tobias Rehberger built a bridge recently as an artwork.
And I was in an ICE with this Deutsche Bahn magazine, and I kind of saw it, and there was a leaflet in it of the metal lobby, whatever. And it had four pages of this bridge, only out of an engineering perspective. So it was mentioned in one sentence, oh, it was an artwork by Tobias Rehberger, but we had to invent this and this and this and this to make the artwork possible. So this notion of networks seems to be very important by now and connected with the anonymity. I wanted to ask your opinion about it. I'll take a part of that question.
The issue of networks has been touted. I mean, you know, we hear Latour going on a considerable amount about actor network theory, which is what exactly? Actor network theory is the substitution of person for actor network theory. It's the agent fully responsible for whatever action is issued from it. If this is what you want from anonymity, fine. But I don't think it's anonymous in the sense of not having a name. Precisely giving it a name network does that job. So you could easily envisage, for example, you could easily envisage a globally, well actually no, you don't have to envisage it, Stellark being manipulated on one side of the earth by people playing with computers on the other and so forth.
Actor network theory, completely anonymous in the sense of its major producers, completely non-anonymous in terms of its production, in terms of its name. Total anonymity is total elimination. as artists know. Okay. I'm not an artist, I'm not a philosopher. I'm art historian and curator. And as I know, and as long I am working, I know that provocation is not the question anymore in art. But I want to ask the provocative question, is it really going on? And this is really the question about materials, anonymous materials. artists always are asking questions with all the materials they have
and with all the materials we are living with. And so for me it's always the question today, is this connecting philosophers and artists that you're really thinking about materials or is it just for you to find some solution and for the artists to ask questions or what is the thing? One word on provocation I think is crucial. I think that's another overgeneralized claim. I mean, what do you do with Ai Weiwei or Chinese art? You know, it's not like provocation is over, but now what about China? So maybe provocation is over in some parts of the planet. So in some local regions of art history, there might be a sense in which provocation doesn't play a role or whatever,
but I think that's not generally true. you know, as, you know, just take China. So most of the time it works, just take China. Then you have a lot of counter examples, interesting ones. Here's one. Okay, so, but then the other thing about the philosophy and art, I mean, I think that, again, that's my personal model, how to think about this, but I think there's a feedback kind of loop between art and philosophy, and at least in Occidental philosophy, it has begun with Plato, who says, I'm quoting him there's an eternal fight he says between art and philosophy and I think what he meant was something like this so the artist produces an object without necessarily knowing
what it is because in order to be an artist you don't have to be the best interpreter of that artist, remember Socrates and Aion and then the philosopher shows up and says this is what that is and then the philosopher gives an interpretation of this and says what the essence of art is Then the artist comes up with a counter example to that. And I think this feedback is an essential part of the production of new possibilities of thinking about many things, among other things about art and philosophy, etc. And I think that this dialogue is still fortunately going on. And I see what we are doing, among other things, as a part of this particular dialogue. But that was only me. I think that's a very general question.
First on provocation. Without the claim that there's some kind of provocation to thought happening in these works, what do we have left other than a person who has been in the world, has noticed some materials and is bringing them into another space and doing something with them. Surely the whole privilege of contemporary art and the reason why it's highly prized and highly regarded in our society is because we think it offers some kind of provocation to thought that we don't find elsewhere.
Otherwise, what is it that it's doing? It's usually a placebo effect. But I actually wanted to answer this question because I think the provocation may also lie into the fact that the artist nowadays, and you find this, all the works, a lot of works in this exhibition deal with this question. the artist is not the revolutionary subject anymore. So it's more the role model of a neoliberal self. So when you read a job description nowadays,
you find exactly the characterization of the former artist model or the nowadays artist model. So I think this is a question which all the artists have to deal with. There are also others who provoke in another way. They are also still the critical artists of course. But for the very young generation, I think the shift is to get aware of this fact, first of this fact, and then also concerning the materiality, I would say
that things like a 3D printer, for example, and like you mentioned already, the image proliferation changes completely artistic material. Do you want to see it? I do, but give me a minute. All right. This is quite fascinating in various respects. First thing is that I hear an echo in what you just said exactly of what Reza started with, which is the construction hypothesis vis-a-vis the self. So if this is the role of art, then this answers a certain question,
which has been current throughout the last few days. But there is another dimension of the question of the relation of philosophy and arts that has nothing to do, let's say, with a question of the absorption of material of one by the other. That is to say, neither an artist makes work out of ideas, although that happens, nor does a philosopher make work out of materials, although that happens. The materials aren't simply there in advance. One of the things I think that's become quite clear to me over the course, not of the talking about it, but of the exhibition itself,
is precisely the sense of the proliferation, not merely of things, not merely of media, and not merely of matter, actually, but rather there is an executive grammar of objects that appears to me to be an important element here. Why might this be important? Quite simply to answer the question that Timur asked earlier concerning a certain species of realism. What is it that this species of realism consists in? It consists in an invented gestuary, an invented repertoire. So a constructed repertoire. By invented, I don't mean dreamt up out of nothing, incidentally. I mean precisely drawn into existence
from hitherto not having had it and so forth. That invention of repertoires is actually something that philosophy struggles with. The question of what constitutes, for example, a new philosophical problem is one that philosophers wrestle with perennially. Those that don't typically aren't philosophers or shouldn't be read. If a philosopher is a philosopher, they ought to have some sort of response to various sets of problems that for two and a half millennia have besieged us. You know, so I think this question of inventiveness acts as an attractor for philosophy, which is an incredibly powerful one. That is origination, production. It's an incredibly powerful one. And also by means other than the concept.
I think that's crucial, by means other than the concept. So this is not to say there are no concepts in art. It's not to say there is no material in philosophy. Manifestly there is, or you couldn't hear us. you know, equally of course there are concepts in art. It's rather to say that there is something about the invention of repertories that matter hitherto did not have, that takes place in art, that is a powerful attractor for philosophy, which tends, and I'm not making this point sociologically, I mean this philosophically, tends to oscillate around a series of quite determinate points, quite determinate problems, quite determinate sets of solutions. I mean, we have, I thought at the end, everyone could choose five or ten of these concepts and
have a short comment. No, this is a joke. I think it was a perfect, like, Schlusswort, what's the final comment by Ian? Yesterday we had this retreat and had this artist presentation all of a sudden towards the end, I think during Pamela's presentation, who is now I think in the next room because of her baby, we started talking about neurophysiology and evolutionary biology and philosophical topics. I think it's nice that towards the end of today, there was only dedicated officially to philosophical ontological questions, we nevertheless like, unavoidably entered this kind of eternal fight, apparently, between art and... But it was quite peaceful, no? For...
Given that Platon spoke about the war. But anyhow, I think it was a perfect final word. There's one more I'd like to add. It is not irrelevant that I'm wearing a blue shirt. Yeah, okay. That's... That's an insider joke. but thanks a lot for all of you having been here. I lost my bet that we're definitely going to finish earlier because everyone will be too exhausted. We're all exhausted, but nevertheless, thanks for all the questions and the enthusiasm. It was great, I think, for me. Thanks a lot. And really, thanks a lot to the whole team. I forget all the names since you know me by now. But thanks a lot to you, Susanne, Tom, Nina, and especially to the speakers today.