Author: john mcgowan

Retirement

I will be 67 in July. Most college professors (at least on my campus and among the ones I know elsewhere) do not retire that young. Seriously thinking about retirement at 70—and often taking a year or two past that to pull the trigger—seems the norm.

I make a very good salary and have a research fund that pays for books and travel to conferences. My students—god bless their cheerful hearts and inquiring minds—still seem to buy what I have to offer, even though I feel embarrassingly ancient as I stand before them. I can avoid almost all the tedious committee work in my department and around the university because I am not a “player” anymore. I cannot avoid the increasingly onerous paperwork, the endless forms and surveys required of us.

So why retire? My job is not terribly difficult, and often very rewarding. I still love the students (without reservation)—and my colleagues (in suitable doses).

For starters, I am tired. I don’t work anywhere near as hard as I did fifteen, even ten, years ago. I feel like I was a .290 lifetime hitter, with a few peak years at .310, and now I am batting .230. It’s time to hang up my spikes, even though the club would keep me on indefinitely as a veteran presence. He used to be something, so we tolerate him hanging around. Giving less than my best feels cheapening, even fraudulent. Better to walk away.

The tiredness manifests itself in various ways. In the past, I was constantly changing the courses I taught, the books I had students read. In the past five years, I have found myself stumped as to what to teach—and have resorted to recycling old standards.

When I had a year at the National Humanities Center two years back, I discovered that I didn’t want to write scholarly prose anymore. I simply wasn’t going to do the homework necessary. As any reader of this blog knows, it is hardly that I lack a continuing interest in intellectual questions. But I am no longer willing to make myself acquainted with the vast literature—some of it awfully good—out there on any given topic. I want to pursue my own lines of thought through writing, but I don’t want to bother to engage with the ongoing scholarly dialogue on my chosen interests. In short, my scholarly career was obviously at an end—and it felt fraudulent to continue to draw a salary while not doing that part of my job.

So much for all the negative reasons. Luckily, there are also positive ones. The Covid-19 shutdown has made those all the more obvious. Time is not hanging heavy on my hands—or on Jane’s. Even isolated from all our friends, the days aren’t long enough to do every thing we want to do. I am reading, writing, exercising, listening to music, tending to the daily chores of life; the need to finish out the semester on Zoom only distracts from all the things I want to be doing.

When I look back at my career as a professor, and at the life that Jane and I lived/created over the past thirty-plus years, I am astounded at how much we did. I can’t imagine how we did it. I want to say that the books wrote themselves; I certainly don’t see how it was possible, amidst everything else, to have put in the time and effort necessary to write them. It’s as if someone else did it—or as if I wasn’t present to my own life.

That’s the overwhelming feeling—no regrets at all, but a sense of having missed my own life. Was I even there? Getting through each day, with its piled up responsibilities and commitments, was the priority. There was no larger plan, no overall strategy. Just survival, putting one foot in front of the other, dealing with each day and its demands.

I loved every minute of being a parent—and am blessed with an ongoing good relationship to Kiernan and Siobhan (in such sharp contrast to my relationship to my parents). But it went by too fast—and they (I know) felt slighted at times in favor of all the other things I was also doing during those years.

That’s no way to live (really!). The virus shutdown has slowed Jane and me down—and it’s wonderful. We still have plenty to do, still have eyes too big for our stomachs. But all the sense of urgency is gone. We do the things we do out of pleasure, with all the pressure taken off. If something does not get done, so be it. It’s glorious. We should have retired years ago. The work world is crazy and crazy-making, with its absurd norms of productivity and ritualized scenes of public humiliation called “evaluation” (annual reports, promotion and tenure, and all the rest).

I will admit to a fundamental selfishness as well. A sense that it’s not my responsibility any more. I fought the good fight while employed—and lost most of my fights (for interdisciplinary curricula, for support of collaborative work, for expanded notions of what should “count” for promotion, for UNC to face up to its racist past and to the unspeakable Republicans who are ruining our state). Now I feel OK just washing my hands of it all.

I am going to spend my time in the ways I wish. Others will have to carry on the fight. I am tired of it in every possible way one can be tired. Enough. I have other—and I hope better—things to do. Certainly more sane things, ones that don’t pull me into the orbit of the crazies. (It is the relentless energy of those right-wing thugs, the way they work every angle and never let an opportunity to do harm pass them by, that amazes, frightens, and exhausts me. Yes, I hate to let them win, but nothing I have done to date has kept them from winning and now, like Thoreau, I feel—at least at times—that I have other matters to attend to.)

The fact that I am deeply ashamed of UNC plays a role in my decision to retire. I have given over 25 years of my life to this institution—and for most of those years, even as I fought those losing battles, I felt UNC had a fundamentally good heart, that it usually did the right thing when it came to the big issues. I may have been very naïve about that—but our wonderful students, my conscientious colleagues, and an approachable administration that listened to (even when it ignored) advice made me love this place. I was given the freedom to do what I believed in during the time I directed the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. More generally, UNC was good to me and Jane, giving us scope to pursue out interests, and paying us generously. We met (this is no exaggeration) hundreds of people—students, colleagues, alumni—during our years at UNC who inspired us in one way or another.

My work with interesting and committed donors contributed to my general sense of well-being. But then the university’s response to the athletic scandal of fake classes, its failure to address forthrightly the racial legacy represented by Silent Sam, and its supine self-prostration before a Board of Governors determined to destroy public higher education made me want to walk away. I made my public howls of protest, for which my fellow faculty thanked me and to which the administration turned a cold shoulder. I had had enough.

I hope that UNC is on a better path now. The current chancellor does understand how damaged the Carolina community has been by the events of the past eight years—and is trying to fix that damage. I wish him luck. But I am relieved to be walking away. I don’t want to be part of that effort. It’s been too discouraging to watch the lack of courage and honesty that got us to our current state.

So I retreat into a more private space. Writing my blog, riding my bike, seeing friends and traveling. Jane and I will become grandparents in the next few weeks, with our granddaughter in DC with her parents. I am committed to helping my daughter-in-law keep her theater company, We Happy Few, afloat—and thriving. We will also help with child care. Return trips to Italy, Cornwall, and New Zealand are highest on the travel list.

Inevitably, I will become involved in some kind of political work. I refuse (mostly) to give money to campaigns any more. (I end up donating to down-ballot races when I get a direct appeal from a friend involved in that campaign.) Contributions to the national races just seems like abetting a corrupt system. And I hate the way I get blackmailed into giving because the other side is spending so much. Instead, I give the money I used to throw at Democratic presidential and Senate candidates to local charities that I know are doing good work. Maybe I will also work for that kind of charity instead of for a more directly political cause. I would like to find something I believe in and that seems effective to throw myself into. The theater company has that appeal.

And this blog. It is strangely comforting to write posts that feel addressed to an audience out there, even if I know only a tiny few (ten or twelve maybe) are on the receiving end. The pressure of an imagined audience puts a little spine into the writing. But the knowledge that there isn’t really an audience (or certainly not a judging one) gives me the sense that I can write whatever I like, ramble, digress, indulge myself. It’s the perfect form for me, not utterly solipsistic, but relieved of any need to please an audience. I can just write to please myself—and let anyone who wishes listen in.

That’s the thing about writers. They always write far more than any reader could ever possibly read. Writing, a matter of so much pain and angst for many academics, is an addiction like any other for those of us who can’t stop pouring the words out. The blog will abide. It is pure pleasure, completely divorced from any sense of obligation or responsibility, just another indulgence in what I intend to be a blissful retirement in which I do the things I want to do. No more, no less.

Joseph North Seven—Two Problems

I see two substantial problems with the line of inquiry I have been pursuing in this thread.

Problem # 1: A significant movement in the arts since at least 1860 hates tying art to “meaning.” In various forms, the argument is made (or the position taken) that the arts should not deal in meanings, but in the creation of brute things, or an event, or an experience. Meaning is perceived as ethereal, non-material, as something other than the work, something that gets substituted for the work. William Gass’s “six regularly scheduled trains out of the text” is my favorite explication of this stance against meaning. But there is Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” and the New Critics’ “heresy of paraphrase” and any number of other versions. Jeff Nealon offers his own diatribe against meaning in his forthcoming book on the performative, wanting to shift the focus from meaning onto force, working from Austin and Derrida.

For starters, I want to endorse the pluralism of artistic practice. So I certainly wouldn’t want to impose some kind of straight-jacket of meaning on the arts—or think that I could set up a theoretical account of “art” that would encompass everything that artists do. Such a theoretical account would be vacuous if sufficiently general to cover the whole field. All the interest would lie in the specifics that the theory would leave untouched. If all works engaged meaning, that would tell us nothing about our judgments that some works are enlivening and others not.

More consequential, I think, is the question of whether there are purely perceptual objects. That is, when I see the Ellsworth Kelly canvases, am I having a particularly intense perceptual experience that has no meaning at all? It is just a sensual experience—thus referring back to the etymology of the word “aesthetic.” Within my catch-phrase, “every thing is necessarily some thing,” the transcendental blackmail is to say that I judge the Kelly paintings as “art.” I know that some things exist (and are created) to offer sensual sensations—and such things are called “art.”

That knowledge sets me up to view the Kelly paintings in the right spirit. Art “means” sensual activation in a certain contemplative mode, without asking for anything further in the way of communication or purpose. Without that identification of this thing as “art,” I would be disoriented, not knowing how to process or judge what I am seeing. There must be some kind of “determination” (in Hegel’s sense of that term) in order for there to be understanding—and understanding guides perception. This is the prison-house of language approach; no perception absent the categories supplied by language. We must make a judgment about what something is before we can know how to view it.

Do I believe this? I don’t know. I certainly am attracted to the artists who want to get out from under meaning, who want to get to some kind of “innocent” or “primitive” sensual/perceptual experience. But that effort to sidestep all mediation does also seem doomed to failure. Modern art, especially, seems enthralled by constant efforts to do what is impossible. As Clement Greenberg insisted and as Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” wittily alerts us, modern art’s moves seem to announce continually: “this is a work of art.” The rest, how we are to judge it etc., follows from that opening declaration. In Latour’s language (borrowed in this case from Whitehead), modern art seems to think (at least in many cases) that the first move has to be to guard against “category mistake.” The art needs to alert us that we are in the “mode” of aesthetics so that we know how to perceive it.

In a somewhat similar fashion (at least in the ballpark of similar concerns), much modern art tries to move things from one category to another. “Alienation” (Brecht) or “defamiliarization” (Russian formalists) point to techniques that attempt to lead the viewer to see things differently, often by shifting the category in which that thing is placed. A thing’s significance, its relation to the viewer is altered, if it is judged as an instance of this rather than that category. Pushing against habitual (or received) categorizations is often the explicit goal.

One might object that this is an awfully attenuated concept of meaning. The riposte would be: to change the viewer’s relation to some thing, to have him see that thing “as” this rather than that (back to Wittgenstein), is to change the thing’s meaning, since meaning is constituted through relationships. We don’t need the thing to be conveying an elaborate message; the thing doesn’t need to be a “sign” of something or other; we just need to the thing to be a different thing, taken up in a different mode, for “meaning” to come into play.

Still, there seems something intuitively correct about saying that the Kelly paintings have no meaning. They just are. In a world “where the trail of the human serpent is over all” (William James), there can be a fierce hunger for reality, for some brute facts. Paradoxical, of course, that these brute facts would be fashioned by human hands. But a desire to confront “the thing itself,” divested of all meaning, makes sense to me. Even if it is impossible to actually achieve.

Problem Number Two: The Humanities

Here’s a definition of the humanities that I like:

The humanities study the meaning-making practices of human culture(s), past and present, focusing on interpretation and critical evaluation, with a special interest in particular instances and, thus, an ineliminable focus on the singular, the eccentric, the subjective.
–Helen Small, The Value of the Humanities (OUP, 2014), p. 6.

DIGRESSION: Small goes “meta” in her definition, which I think is a mistake. Yes, the humanities ponder “meaning-making practices”—as these Joseph North posts do—but they also, more significantly in my view, also engage with first-order meanings per se, and aim to contribute to the stock of such meanings. Because the real stakes, it seems to me, are always on the level of the first-order meanings. The “meta” reflections are “academic” in the negative sense of that word if not motivated by a commitment to particular first-order commitments. What commitment, what value, drives my speculations here? Most generally, a refutation of individualistic models of creation, of significance, of social relations. Our entanglement with others–our ongoing and inescapable vulnerability and precarity (to use Judith Butler’s terms or indebtedness (to use David Graeber’s terms) has direct political consequences in my view.

So what’s the problem? I don’t know how to think about the belatedness that this definition establishes for the humanities. “The meaning-making practices” must come first—and then the humanities study them. The object/subject split here is too drastic. I’d want to say something more Latour-like: meaning emerges as the humanities take up various cultural phenomena. Or, to go back to my thoughts about close readings, the humanities “actualize” (even “realize”) their objects of study, creating meanings that were not evident before. The idea (as with Kant’s claim that one example of “genius/orginality” spurs the originality of others) is that meanings produce meanings; of the making of meanings, there is no end. Meanings proliferate. No word is final—but (in fact) occasions the production of more words. Bakhtin seems the best guide here, with his sense of how every word calls forth an answering word. That also means that we are always already immersed in a field of meanings–Kenneth Burke’s ongoing conversation. So belatedness just comes with the territory.

Still, the problem is whether there is a distinction between the arts and the humanities. As just described, the humanities could be seen as the same as the arts; it is just that the artist works with paint, and the humanist works with cultural meanings.

That doesn’t seem right to me: i.e. that the humanities are the same as the arts, just working with a different material. The humanities do seem intensely meaning focused. Their bread and butter is the elaboration of meaning—far beyond acts of mere categorization. If the humanities entail getting you to see something “as” this rather than that, or in shifting an object from one “mode” into another, those alterations of how something is judged/understood require much more than simply changing the label from “painting” to “property.” The relationships involved are entanglements that the humanist tries to trace in all their complexity.

Maybe that’s one place of difference. The humanist complicates, bringing more and more things into dialogue with the object of study, almost always adding to the “context” that is deemed to constitute the meanings of the “text.” But the arts are often (hardly always, but certainly sometimes) drawn to abstraction, to the intensification of our encounter with a thing by focusing on it, by taking it out of context in order to make it “stand out.”

The arts (again, in some instances) are interested in “singularity”—as part of that effort to get to the “thing itself,” its singular integrity, its being stripped of meanings piled onto it by its relations. Escape from family (all those relations!) Conatus? And maybe that’s why the humanist’s accounts of the artist’s work can so often be processed by the artist as a betrayal. The humanist will pull the art work back into the circle of relations, will even dare to “explain” how and why the art work came to be what it is. Those six trains out of the work that Gass deplores. The humanist just can’t let things be. She must pile more words on top of those things.

In short, the humanities cannot help but trade in meanings. But it is not so obvious that the arts must do the same. Certainly lots of modern artists have desired to side-step meaning altogether. So an account of the arts that insists “the aesthetic” is the “mode” attuned to meaning can seem like foisting the priorities of the humanities upon the arts—or an attempt to claim the arts and the humanities are (basically) the same. I find myself unable to untangle this knot. I am, it seems, overly susceptible to Merleau-Ponty’s pronouncement that “we are condemned to meaning” and thus keep pulling everything back into processes that produce meaning.

Joseph North Six–Latour and Aesthetic Judgment

Clearly, Joseph North’s book has been left pretty far behind at this point. But I will keep the heading in order to indicate that the thread, however tenuous, is still being pursued. There will be a seventh post on this track—and then a stop.

In Latour, the different modes constitute different quasi-objects and quasi-subjects. Perhaps the “quasi” is meant to indicate that both objects and subjects under-determine their identities because nothing becomes a “thing” except through the relations in which it is entangled and the “paths” it traverses or the “scripts” to which it contributes. The solidity of “thingness” is only a momentary achievement—or, perhaps, embalming. There is more than a little here of Deluezean vitalism, of “flows” or energies taking form, but only briefly before dissolving back again into motion.

Many years ago I formulated the phrase: “nothing is necessarily anything, but every thing is necessarily some thing.” I have never quite dared to use this potted metaphysics in print, although I do think I have used the phrase “metaphysical egalitarianism.” The idea—very Latour—is to grant all the components of “a situation” or of a network equal status as contributors to how that situation is judged—or to what that network is seen to produce.

At the same time, the first statement points to the fact that the judgment, the act of naming, will take place. We will refer to the product of the network; we will describe what we take to be the situation. Coming into the network, no component is pre-determined to play any specific role; its possibilities are not infinite, not completely unconstrained, but they are plural, more than the “one” of “necessity.” The “existent” will become “some thing” through its acting and being acted upon in the network—and the full ensemble of relations will constitute the “situation,” or the “state of affairs” the inquirer encounters. (Latour’s use of the word “Inquiry” in his title comes straight from Pearce and Dewey; it is not a term as dear to James as to those two other pragmatists.)

To return to the aesthetic object, it is fairly easy to fit Van Gogh’s Sunflowers into Latour’s model. The painting has its existence as a painting by virtue of a whole set of institutions, traditions, canons of evaluation, methods of reproduction and circulation, that are complicated, but can be traced. It “subsists” as an art object in and through these relationships. But it also exists as a legal object through a different set of relationships—those of property, provenance, copyright, plagiarism, inheritance etc. It just a obviously exists in an economic mode: the art market, the auction houses, the thousands of objects on which it is reproduced for sale in museum gift shops etc. And we can also imagine it in Latour’s “political” mode, being taken up in ways meant to reinforce or to dismantle the formation of a “we,” of a community united around common goals/aspirations/values, or as a weapon wielded to undermine a “we” that is experienced as oppressive, exclusive, or unjust.

My worry, just to repeat from last time, is that, no matter what the mode, there is still a recognizable object: the painting Sunflowers by the man we know as Vincent Van Gogh. I don’t see how we get ontological pluralism here; there is one object. That object can be “taken up” in various ways. Multiple modes does not, as far as I can tell, yield multiple objects. Yes, the painting has to be constituted as “an economic object.” But there is still a stubborn persistence across modes. I don’t know if we have to identify the source of that persistence as “substance.” But I guess I do believe that there is a material presence there: a thing to be perceived, handled, “taken up.”

All this brings me back to “meaning” and “aesthetic judgment.” My intuition (what I am struggling to cash out) is that the aesthetic is particularly focused on “meaning,” where meaning means both how this thing (or this situation) is understood at this moment and what this thing or situation “means” to me in terms of the intensity of my interest, my care, my need for it. That we have a “judge” here does not, I think, doom us to a spectator theory of knowledge. The judgment is produced from the interaction with the thing, from the immersion in the situation to be evaluated. But the judge does stand in a particular location within the network. I do feel it can make sense in certain circumstances for me to feel unworthy of a situation, to feel that the situation is judging me along with my judging the situation. But I find it harder to believe that the situation can itself feel unworthy of me, that a painting (no matter how mediocre) can feel embarrassed by being in the same room as the Van Gogh.

There is also, when it comes to aesthetic judgment, the asymmetry between the artist and audience to consider. Aesthetic judgment for the artist is fully interactive, is a perfect example of Dewey’s insistence that ends emerge through the engagement with means. The artist makes a thousand small judgments as she proceeds in the act of creation—and those judgments are produced by the tensions experienced in her manipulation of her means and her projection of her audience’s reactions. The work produced is never the work imagined at the outset. In fact, if my own writing practice is any indication, at the outset there is a vague sense of ground to be covered, of ideas to be explored, but what is actually going to end up being said on the page is a surprise. I don’t know where my train of thought will go; the act of writing brings those thoughts into existence. The thousand of small judgments produces the final product.

It is different for the audience. It is a cliché by now that the work is completed by its audience. So we don’t have to see that spectator in the art museum as a passive observer—or the painting on the wall as a passive object. And, in fact, it seems that “meaning” is more obviously involved in this interaction than in the work of the painter herself. The painter is trying to create a thing; the relation of those difficulties of creation to “meaning” are not clear-cut or obvious. (That will be the subject of my next—and final—post in this thread.) But the viewer’s judgment is, inevitably I would say, one of value.

Traditionally, this has been said (by Kant and many others) to take the form: is this work beautiful or not? That focus on “beauty” seems a very bad mistake. For one thing, it sets up one standard of value where in fact there are many. It is also leads, surprisingly quickly, to a connection between art and the numinous. Art gets transported away from the ordinary—and is burdened with the expectation that it will somehow provide some special insight into realms of value normally hidden from us. To invest the world we inhabit with meaning, with a vitality or glow, that attracts our interest, our attention, even our care (as in Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi”) is a very different matter than offering us intimations of some all-encompassing, all-explanatory account of it all. Worst of all, is when that art-conveyed message is somehow meant to “redeem” this world, to “save” us from some projected despair of “meaninglessness,” or from the all-too-real fact of suffering.

Instead of beauty, I will settle for intensity and affirmation. (Pater and Nietzsche are certainly lurking in the shadows here.) If art alerts us as to what we might care for, then it is giving us specific instances of experiences, ideas, emotions, human achievement—in short, examples—that make life worth living. Good art energizes; it awakens us (Pater’s metaphor) to what the world has to offer. That’s how a work as dismal as King Lear can be utterly exhilarating to read. To think that a human being was capable of producing such a magnificent work.

Here is where, following William James, I retain a stubborn, irreducible, subjectivism. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink—as every teacher knows. Granting everything Latour has to say about the complicated networks and multiple interactions required to get King Lear into my hands; granting everything Bourdieu has to say about the social determinants of taste; there remains the fact that King Lear speaks to me in ways Hamlet does not. I teach the one almost every year, and have taught the other twice, most recently over twenty years ago. I can’t light up Hamlet for my students because it does not light me up. And even when I feel like my classes on Lear have gone well, I know there are students that the play does not reach. It leaves them cold (a great metaphor in this instance).

To repeat: I think I am on the right path to think that aesthetic judgment is not so much about beauty as it is about meaningfulness. Some thing (and it does not have to be something deemed “a work of art”) is experienced as shot full of meaning. That’s the aesthetic mode. I want (like Dewey in Art and Experience) to make that judgment of meaningfulness mundane. We are not being given some key to the universe, some access to the numinous, by the work of art. We are simply (simply!) able to see, through the work, that our world (at some times and in some ways) is luminous.

Joseph North Five—The Aesthetic (Interactive Version)

My first stab at characterizing the aesthetic gave us a weak version of pluralism. The aesthetic viewed things in a particular dimension, it “saw them as” meaningful, where that term covered their import and their importance. Significance in both senses of the term: what some thing meant or conveyed and how (why?) that thing was of significance or value, worth caring about and for.

Such an understanding leaves the thing itself untroubled. In Nicholas Rescher’s book Pluralism (Oxford UP, 1995), he accepts that there are multiple possible descriptions of a thing, what Wittgenstein calls its “aspects,” but insists there is still only one “reality.” You and I are both seeing the same thing when I marvel at the color patterns in the fire and you worry about the people who might be trapped inside the building. We are both responding to the fire.

I think (I’d have to go back and check the relevant texts carefully) that Richard Rorty, the most notorious anti-realist of late 20^th century philosophy, would still hew to Rescher’s position. Rorty focuses on “redescriptions” as a site of creativity, and as proof that “reality” under-determines the ways that human understand it, utilize it, and can creatively re-script their relations to it. As Nick Gaskill points out in his essay on Rorty, one particularly dominant theme is Rorty’s work is anti-authoritarianism. And that theme extends to “reality.” Rorty writes against the authority that “reality” acquires in more traditional philosophical metaphysics. He denies to “reality” the last word; humans can always—and are constantly—saying new things about the world. And, following Kenneth Burke, we can claim that new things said open up new possible courses of action.

But what if we take a more radically interactive approach? Such an approach is certainly suggested in the pragmatism of James and Dewey. Debates about the “two pragmatisms” (H. O. Mounce’s term) in fact often center around the extent to which pragmatism is “realist.” For Mounce, Rorty is the enemy, and we must return pragmatism to Charles Sanders Peirce’s metaphysical realism. [Howard Mounce, The Two Pragmatisms (Routledge, 1997).] (Peirce, by the end of his life, was very close to a Platonic realist.) This battle then gets fought over the body of Dewey; was Rorty’s radical reading of Dewey accurate or not? And in most of these debate, James (and his radical empiricism) barely figures at all. He is not taken seriously as an epistemologist or an ontologist.

Today, however, James’s radical empiricism has come to seem a fruitful approach to a variety of writers, none more prominent than Bruno Latour. In his recent major tome, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Harvard UP, 2018), Latour offers what we might call radical pluralism. “Modes” is, in fact, a slippery term—and Latour himself often seems unsure just how far he wants to push his ontological claims. There are mountains of books trying to figure out what Spinoza meant by “modes,” although I think it fair to say there is general agreement that his “modes” are secondary to, dependent upon, “substance.”

Latour quite clearly wants to jettison the notion of “substance” altogether. But still the term “mode” is never in and of itself sufficient. It must be a mode of something. And what we get is “an inquiry into modes of existence.” But to what does “existence” refer? The general metaphysical condition (i.e just another name for “reality,” even if that reality is more inchoate, more open to various manipulations, multiple shapings than some other versions of “reality.” It is unclear, since despite the prominence of the term in the title, Latour never explains to us what he means by “existence.”) But he does rely heavily on the term “existents,” and its meaning is quite clear. Latour wants to substitute “subsistence” for “substance”—and refers throughout his book to “existents” (y which he appears to mean “things that subsist.”) There are identifiable things (existents) that subsist. (It seems to me, although Latour only mentions this term once, that he has his own version of Spinoza’s conatus. Latour seems to posit a fundamental drive to subsist, a fundamental energy devoted to subsisting.) In this framework, “a mode of existence [is] a way of being that cannot be substituted for any other and that no other can replace” (268). “A way of being” for what?–presumably for “an existent.”

Where Latour moves toward a more radical, ontological pluralism is in his insistence that to subsist requires change. If there is a fundamental reality in Latour’s recent work, it is the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of ceaseless “flux,” a Jamesian conceit if there ever was one. [“in fact, there is neither real continuity of courses of action nor stability of subjects” (370).] Against the relentless tide of time passing, an existent must exert itself to maintain itself. It must be ever adapting to the novelties that time’s passage throws at it. So are “modes” different strategies of subsistence? Latour doesn’t go that way.

Instead—and here is where a Latour inspired version of “the aesthetic” would dovetail with North’s desire that the aesthetic provide us with images of and models for collectivity—Latour focuses on what “assemblage” of participants (“actants”) must work together to allow an existent to subsist. [The “malign inversion” that elevates a persistent “substance” over the struggle for “subsistence” is malign because it “loses the thread of the means that could have ensured subsistence” (279)] In the case of science, concentrating on “the means of subsistence” requires attention to the procedures, the instruments, the experiments—in short, the whole range of interactions between the scientist and both the “thing” studied and the scientific community. Some existent is only “known” and only continues as an object of scientific discourse when it can be discerned by the procedures/instruments, fit into a causal story that the community (the peer reviewers in the first instance) buys, and remain an object of interest for subsequent inquiries.

Science, in Latour’s terms, grants us “access” to various existents—and it takes a village to secure such access. But it remains unclear (at least to me) to what extent the “existents” pre-exist these interactions with them. There seems to be some raw material out there, even if Latour is very specific that he wants to banish the reification called Matter (with a capital M). Latour’s commitment to the primary flux is such that he battles against all reifications: Matter, Society, Truth, the Economy. In their stead, he offers processes of assemblage in which “gatherings” (interactions) produce things. It would be better to say “produce states of affairs” (rather than produce things) because things always and only exist in relations. (That’s a major lesson of James’s radical empiricism.)

Thus, things emerge out of the flux, take on solidity as a result of interaction–and gain subsistence, plus any identity they might temporarily possess, in and through their relation to others. Latour is insistent that the path to being is through the detour of otherness; I only become myself through my relations–which are never stable, always unfolding–to others. But (here’s my nagging worry when it comes to science—and I think Latour actually is inconsistent on this score) what then are these existents, with their will to subsist? It seems as if he posits not just an originary flux, but also some existents lurking within the flux. Now we might say those existents are inchoate; he does at times use the term “articulation.” So we could say that existents are articulated, take a specific form, through specific processes of assemblage. And then we could say those specific forms are “modes.” But that would still mean they are “modes of” something more primitive—of a non-solid stuff (substance?) that needs a lot of help to keep subsisting. And that non-solid stuff has a will to subsist. Specific objects emerge from communal processes, but those processes work upon some mysterious stuff called “existents.”

But the aesthetic (to get there at last) may not have science’s handicap. There is little reason to think the aesthetic object pre-exists the act of artistic creation. Certainly, in the kind of common sense view that Latour is at pains to validate against the wrong-headed metaphysics of “the moderns,” that artist works upon her material (words, musical sounds, marble etc.) and shapes it into her art work. The interactive model works perfectly here. The material offers various affordances and resistances. It is hardly, as every artist knows, a passive participant, supine before the artist’s vision. It has its own contributions to make, its own ways of frustrating or enabling the artist’s desires. So this is not the Wittgensteinian interpreter who is seeing or highlighting “an aspect” of the finished thing he contemplates. Rather, it is the very creation of that thing through an interactive process. And it is not just the creation of the art work, but also the creation of this person as “an artist.” You don’t get to assume the identity of artist until you have done the act of making. It is not a pre-existent identity, but an emergent one–and it depends not just on the act of making but also on the community’s recognition of what you have made as a “work of art.”

Such a description immediately raises the question of whether or not there is a strong distinction between the aesthetic as experienced/practiced by the creating artist and the aesthetic as experienced/practiced by the audience. I am going to leave exploring that question to my next post.

Today I just want to finish up by expanding (as Latour would certainly urge us to do) our account of the interactions that characterize the aesthetic. In order for even that basic act of artistic creation to occur, there needs to be much more in place than simply the artist sitting down to work. That act hardly takes place in a vacuum. The artist has been trained in her craft, has received feedback and encouragement (or discouragement) of various forms, has learned something of the tradition of that craft, and has some idea of the possible places for display of her work. Once the work has been created, its subsistence is radically dependent on practices of display—and institutions (museums, schools, theaters etc.) for “showing” works. Roland Barthes, in an epigram I love, said “Literature is what gets taught.” The canon is one way works of written art subsist. A poem is dead, has not succeeded in subsisting, if it never gets read. Similarly, “the art world” is a subject of so much fear and loathing precisely because an art work lives or dies by its ability to negotiate the various intricacies, procedures, and institutions that characterize that “world.”

In short, as Latour is always trying to get us to see, the number of actants involved in the subsistence of any activity and its products is almost always more numerous than we first suppose. And thus the outcome—the artistic work that emerges from this activity—is always shaped by inputs from all of these actants. No wonder artists continually dream of “artistic freedom.” Images of heroic individualism push back against the inevitable entanglement in complicated webs (networks) of relationships that defeat any idea of mastery, of sovereignty over, the field.

The aesthetic, precisely because it entails the creation of new objects, seems particularly suited to serve as an instance of radical pluralism. Its conditions for creation can be specified—and can be seen as distinct from the conditions of existence in other fields (such as science or, to cite some of Latour’s other examples, politics, law, and economics.) Those conditions can be described (Howard Becker’s work is exemplary here, but we can also think of Bourdieu as well). And we can even take a stab at trying to describe the factors that contribute to making judgments about the quality, importance, and/or significance (in all its senses) of aesthetic works. That’s where I want to start in my next post.

Today I just want to finish up by expanding (as Latour would certainly urge us to do) our account of the interactions that characterize the aesthetic. In order for even that basic act of artistic creation to occur, there needs to be much more in place than simply the artist sitting down to work. That act hardly takes place in a vacuum. The artist has been trained in her craft, has received feedback and encouragement (or discouragement) of various forms, has learned something of the tradition of that craft, and has some idea of the possible places for display of her work. Once the work has bene created, its subsistence is radically dependent on practices of display—and institutions (museums, schools, theaters etc.) for “showing” works. Roland Barthes, in a epigram I love, said “Literature is what gets taught.” The canon is one way works of written art subsist. A poem is dead, has not succeeded in subsisting, if it never gets read. Similarly, “the art world” is a subject of so much fear and loathing precisely because an art work lives or dies by its ability to negotiate the various intricacies, procedures, and institutions that characterize that “world.”

’t go that way.

Instead—and here is where a Latour inspired version of “the aesthetic” would dovetail with North’s desire that the aesthetic provide us with images of and models for collectivity—Latour focuses on what “assemblage” of participants (“actants”) must work together to allow an existent to subsist. In the case of science, that means thinking about the procedures, the instruments, the experiments—in short, the whole range of interactions between the scientist and both the “thing” studied and the scientific community. Some existent is only “known” and only continues as an object of scientific discourse when it can be discerned by the procedures/instruments, fit into a causal story that the community (the peer reviewers in the first instance) buys, and remain an object of interest for subsequent inquiries. Science, in Latour’s terms, grants us “access” to various existents—and it takes a village to secure such access. But it remains unclear (at least to me) to what extent the “existents” pre-exist these interactions with them. There seems to be some raw material out there, even if Latour is very specific that he wants to banish the reification: Matter (with a capital M). Latour’s commitment to the primary flux is such that he battles against all reifications: Matter, Society, Truth, the Economy. In their stead, he offers processes of assemblage in which “gatherings” (interactions) produce things (probably saying “produce states of affairs” would be better).

Thus, things emerge out of the flux, take on solidity as a result of interaction. But (here’s my nagging worry when it comes to science—and I think Latour actually is inconsistent on this score) what then are these existents, with their will to subsist? It seems as if he posits not just an originary flux, but also some existents lurking within the flux. Now we might say those existents are inchoate; he does at times use the term “articulation.” So we could say that existents are articulated, take a specific form, through specific processes of assemblage. And then we could say those specific forms are “modes.” But that would still mean they are “modes of” something more primitive—of a non-solid stuff (substance?) that needs a lot of help to keep subsisting. And that non-solid stuff has a will to subsist. Specific objects emerge from communal processes, but those processes work upon some mysterious stuff called “existents.”

And it is not just the material the artist works with that is transformed in the process. So is the person doing that work. Her identity as “an artist” only emerges through doing that work–and depends not only on what she produces, but also on how others are willing to view her. We all know people who want to call themselves “writers,” but who do not feel entitled to claim that self-description because the community has not yet bestowed it on them. That identity can only be achieved through the “means” of the others–the material worked on, the community to whom the work is presented.

Today I just want to finish up by expanding (as Latour would certainly urge us to do) our account of the interactions that characterize the aesthetic. In order for even that basic act of artistic creation to occur, there needs to be much more in place than simply the artist sitting down to work. That act hardly takes place in a vacuum. The artist has been trained in her craft, has received feedback and encouragement (or discouragement) of various forms, has learned something of the tradition of that craft, and has some idea of the possible places for display of her work. Once the work has been created, its subsistence is radically dependent on practices of display—and institutions (museums, schools, theaters etc.) for “showing” works. Roland Barthes, in a epigram I love, said “Literature is what gets taught.” The canon is one way works of written art subsist. A poem is dead, has not succeeded in subsisting, if it never gets read. Similarly, “the art world” is a subject of so much fear and loathing precisely because an art work lives or dies by its ability to negotiate the various intricacies, procedures, and institutions that characterize that “world.”

In short, as Latour is always trying to get us to see, the number of actants involved in the subsistence of any activity and its products is almost always more numerous than we first suppose. And thus the outcome—the artistic work that emerges from this activity and “the artist” who also emerges from it—is always shaped by inputs from all of these actants. No wonder artists continually dream of “artistic freedom.” Images of heroic individualism push back against the inevitable entanglement in complicated webs (networks) of relationships that defeat any idea of mastery, of sovereignty over, the field.