[Reader-list] Making Things Public

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

Making Things Public
Exhibition. ZKM
Curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel
http://makingthingspublic.zkm.de/

PUBLIC TEXT
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No Politics Please

Contrary to Aristotles’ assertion, man does not seem to be a political 
animal. To assemble in order to form a Body Politic is not a natural and 
universal reflex. Before renewing the ways to practice politics in our 
climates, it’s important to fathom the complexity of other types of 
assembling. It’s not only the case that people might disagree on which 
position to take inside their representative assemblies, not only that 
they might contest the right of this or that person to represent their 
will, not only that they wish to modify the institutional setting of 
politics, it’s also
that people disagree on what it is to assemble, or even on the very 
necessity of assembling. If for several centuries Europeans had the 
feeling that they were enlightened enough to welcome the whole humanity 
inside their own definition of politics, they had not considered the 
many dissembling ways of assembling. To represent, to argue, to dissent, 
to be a citizen, might not offer that much of a common ground. Entire 
empires have survived without isolating politics as a specific sphere of 
activity. There might be atmospheres of democracy even in the absence of 
the European based types of institutions. So, before imagining any 
possible renewal of the conditions for democracy, it’s very important to 
realize under which conditions some of the concepts taken to be at the 
foundation of political assemblies are allowed to travel and to be 
translated. The first lesson is not to rush into expanding politics 
everywhere.

The Puzzle of Composite Bodies

In spite of centuries of social theory, of economics, of psychology, the 
problem remains intact: when we assemble, how is it possible to form a 
collective person, a corporate body, a super-organism, a being that is 
sometimes more, and sometimes less, than the sum of its parts? This 
problem of composition is not theoretical but also artistic: through 
which devices and visual tricks, through which original medium, with 
which metaphors, in which language can you produce the simultaneous 
presence of those that are assembled and of the new bizarre
entity that is generated out of the assembling? Since the early fable of 
the members and the stomach all the way to the modern notion of 
organization, through the powerful myth of the invisible hand, this 
problem of composition has been shifted to biological metaphors. There 
exist, we are told, a body politic. But it’s also possible to stress 
another tradition, the pragmatic one, that considers the political 
assembly not as a body, but rather as a phantom, that is, as a shifting 
and barely visible tracing of the unintended consequences of collective 
action. What if politics was made of a multitude of issues, much like a 
digital image is made of pixels? The phantom public would look a lot 
different from the body politic. It’s fascinating to see that new media 
can try to tackle again the same question as those of early engravers 
and natural philosophers, but that in all the cases the artistic 
solution possesses the same degree of complexity as the very political 
assembling that they try to represent.

The Good and the Bad Government

Politics is even more tellingly visible in the famous fresco painted by 
Lorenzetti in Siena's city hall. Many scholars have deciphered for us 
the complex meaning of the emblems representing the Good and the Bad 
Government, and have traced their complex genealogy. But what is most 
striking for a contemporary eye is the massive presence of cities, 
landscapes, animals, merchants, dancers, and the ubiquitous rendering of 
light and space. The Bad Government is not simply illustrated by the 
devilish figure of Discordia, but also through the dark light, the 
destructed city, the ravaged landscape, and the suffocating people. The 
Good Government is not simply personified by the various emblems of Virtue
and Concordia, but also through the transparency of light, its well-kept 
architecture, its well-tended landscape, its diversity of animals, the 
ease of its commercial relations, its thriving arts. Far from being 
simply a décor for the emblems, the fresco requests us to become 
attentive to a subtle ecology of Good and Bad Government. And modern 
visitors, attuned to the new issues of bad air, hazy lights, destroyed 
ecosystems, ruined architecture, abandoned industry, and delocalized 
trades are certainly ready to include in their definition of politics a 
whole new ecology loaded with things. Where has political philosophy 
turned its distracted gaze while so many objects were drawn under its 
very nose?

 From Objects to Things

What is a thing? First of all an assembly. There is some danger in 
resurrecting the oldest etymology in many languages especially the 
European ones of the word for ‘thing’ meaning a gathering around a 
disputed state of affairs. This etymology has been used and abused, 
especially by Heidegger, in order to strike an opposition with ‘object’, 
that is, what is thrown out of any human group, what is the dream of 
scientific mastery. And yet, once we reopen the question of composition 
and representation, once we bring the cosmos back into politics, there 
is some wisdom in rejuvenating the old meaning for things. Yes, politics 
is also Dingpolitik, not because it goes back to its archaic foundation 
against the
movement of modern life, but precisely for the opposite reason: because 
the ‘objects’ that had been thrown out of assemblies by the tradition of 
political philosophy are now back inside them. There is thus a crucial 
interest in shifting the centre of gravity of politics from an assembly 
of people, to an assembly of matters of concern. After all, the 
prestigious word Res-publica includes the word ‘res’, thing, in its very 
definition and the pragmatic tradition has centered around ‘pragmata’, 
that is, things again. Whether in Latin or in Greek, the same question 
is raised: what would politics look like if it becomes a politics of things?

No Mediation, No Representation

What has completely modified the divide between objects and things, 
science and politics, is the very development of modern sciences. 
Whereas, for the three last centuries, the great idea was to replace the 
uncertainty of political arenas by the certainty coming out of 
scientific laboratories, there has been recently a tide change. The very 
extension of scientific laboratories to the whole of the human 
activities has made their complex techniques of representation and of 
validation part and parcel of daily life. Scientific practice has become 
the best example of public things. We are now all entangled into the 
sciences. The great advantage
is that we share some of their vocations, of their equipment, of their 
requirements. The down side is that the sciences no longer seat as a 
court of appeal for the vagaries of politics. We are all embarked into 
controversies dealing with indirect and sometimes incomplete proofs. The 
objects of science are still objective, but they have become things, in 
great need of an assembly. Some people see this deep change as dimming 
the hopes of the Enlightenment, others take it as the best occasion to 
redefine what it means to be enlightened by the scientific instrumentarium.

Which Assembly for those Assemblages

If we continue to compare assemblies with one another without being 
limited to those who look like bona fide parliaments, the most 
ubiquitous ones are probably the complex of technological networks 
inside which we find ourselves constantly intertwined. All of us live in 
an artificial landscape generated by the crisscrossing of endless number 
of artifacts each of which has been the result of a plan, a decision, a 
discussion about a certain order of the world. Each object has first 
been a project. The problem is that those assemblages have no assembly 
to represent them. This is the reason why they look like a rather dull, 
mechanical, autonomous force exerting power without anyone exerting 
power. And yet, when looked at more closely, there is not a single 
technology around which, very quickly,you don’t find a swarm of 
different people which have indeed assembled around it to make it come 
into existence. As Diego de Rivera fresco of Ford plants indicate so 
well, even an industrial plant deploys a whole cosmopolitics. What is 
especially important for the comparison between assemblies is that those 
informal and sometimes virtual groups are very well equipped and 
instrumented in order to visualize in advance their projects and their 
plans. Technological networks are extremely rich in drafts, drawings, 
scale models, representation techniques of all sorts. Doesn’t that make 
a lot of sense to bring some of those techniques to bear on politics?

The Parliaments of Nature

It might seem odd at first to consider natural sites just after having 
considered religious assemblies. But if the great Pan is dead, it means 
that natural sites are no longer those peaceful and well ordered 
groupings which could be used as a pattern for public life. On the 
contrary, the more we move into ecological controversies, the more 
important it becomes to consider an ecosystem as a sort of assembly 
without walls inside which many types of ‘speakers’ are allowed to ‘have 
a voice’. Not because we want to imitate the usual parliamentary 
settings, but, on the contrary, because it’s obvious that the 
traditional sites of politics have to move toward the centre of gravity 
of ecology. Ecology is not about a naturalization of politics —as if one 
wanted to ‘treat humans like plants and animals’— but about the 
recognition of the immense complexity of what it is for any entity 
—human or non-human— to have a voice, to take a stand, to be counted, to 
be represented, to be connected with others. From the beginning of 
modern science to the contemporary engineering of rivers, landscape and 
agriculture, it’s clear that the number of speech-apparatus and 
instruments have immensely increased. Without those many mediations, no 
representation would be possible. If we have to live from now on in the 
assemblies of nature, we better be aware of the procedures that make 
them livable or tyrannical.

Follow the Paper Trails

Intellectual technologies are among the most ubiquitous equipment that 
allow people and things to get together inside virtual assemblies. The 
problem is that those techniques are looked down because they are 
associated with the much despised bureaucrats, technocrats and other 
paper-shufflers. File, lists, archives, paper-clips, codes don’t look 
like very promising instrument to make things public. It seems that 
people would prefer to be rid of all this red tape in order to have a 
transparent and direct representation. But since there is no such a 
thing, since politics is always about blind leading blind, we have to 
rely on those tiny paper trails in order to assemble and to gather our 
thoughts as well as the concerned parties. This is especially true, when 
those paper trails are what bring the power of law in the daily 
occurrences where it’s most needed. If you follow the paper trail, you 
soon realize how efficient those prosthesis are. Every file, every 
article of law, every procedure seem to render more opaque and more 
complicated the course of our lives, but it’s also what protect those 
very same lives against arbitrary violence. Files can be changed and 
amended but they can’t be done without. Once again, if there is no 
mediation, there is no representation. Transparency might not be after 
all the ideal of politics.

The Market Place is a Parliament, too

Most of us have probably never been inside any of our national 
parliaments and if many people vote they rarely penetrate the sphere of 
what is officially called politics. And yet there exist another 
ubiquitous set of rallies in which, without realizing it, we vote, we 
decide, we are influenced, we are voted down, we are coerced, we are 
excited, we are made to be indignant. Those are the immensely powerful 
assemblages making up what is called the economy, although they used to 
be called much more accurately, political economy. And political they 
are indeed in the sense of assembling people and goods in the most 
energetic and conflicting ways. The problem is that they are rarely 
considered as having taken their decisions according to some due 
process. They rather seem to be some autonomous and irresistible set of 
forces roaming the world in the wildest manner. Which they are most of 
the time for those who are submitted to their iron laws. However, some 
of this violence comes also from the fact that they are not taken as 
assemblies and not considered in comparison with the other types of 
assemblies with which they are often in competition. Iron laws, yes, but 
laws nonetheless. So the question is to detect where those laws are made 
up and through which procedure. There is thus an immense interest in 
considering market places as yet another sort of assembly and to detect 
their many techniques of representation. No matter which effort they 
might make to look natural and to escape the domain of politics they are 
fully inside it. So much so that a close inspection of their ways to 
gather, decide, enforce their edicts might go some ways toward enriching 
the usual definitions of politics. Especially because they too look like 
a Dingpolitik, that is, things count dearly in the infinitesimal 
decisions we constantly take about them.

Parliaments too are Complex Technologies

So what about parliaments? What about what people have in mind when they 
talk about the public sphere and the profession of politics? After 
having visited the assembly of assemblies and bade farewell to the 
modernist dream of a one encompassing dome, the physical apparatus of 
government now appears as a stunningly efficient and fragile set of 
techniques. It’s certainly efficient since those techniques are able to 
represent in specific sites the swarm of issues that have been labeled 
political; but they are certainly fragile in the sense that they surely 
cannot claim to represent all the other assemblies of science, religion, 
technology, nature, markets, law to which they are connected. This is 
where the question of Dingpolitik becomes so tricky: parliaments are one 
technology of
representation among many others, and yet they claim to sum up all the 
others. Nothing guarantee that parliaments are relevant for all the 
other assemblies. Democracy is not naturally given. It needs to be 
instrumented. So before parliaments expand, it’s crucial to explore how 
their architecture has evolved, what types of equipment they have 
developed to express voices, what kind of techniques are necessary for 
casting a vote, what sort of qualities they have to endow those they 
designate as their representatives. One is not born a citizen with a 
voice and an opinion. We become able to argue, elect and vote only if we 
are well equipped to do so.

The Obscure Objects of Politics

Political expression is always disappointing. In terms of the transfer 
of exact undistorted information on the social or natural world, we 
could say that it always seems to be totally inadequate : truisms, 
clichés, handshakes, half-truths, half-lies, windy words, repetitions 
mostly, ad nauseam. That is the ordinary, banal, daily, limp, 
tautological character of this form of discourse that shocks the 
brilliant, the upright, the fast, the organized, the lively, the 
informed, the great, the decided. When one says that someone or 
something is ‘political’, one signals above all this fundamental 
disappointment , as if it
were no longer possible to move forwards in a straight line, reasonably, 
quickly, efficiently, but necessary to ‘take into account’, ‘a whole lot 
of’ ‘extra-rational factors’ of which one fails to clearly understand 
all the ins and outs but which form an obscure, soft, heavy, round mass 
that sticks to those with the best intentions and, judging by what they 
say, seems to slow them down. The expression ‘that's political’ means 
first and foremost ‘it doesn't move straight’, ‘it doesn't move fast’; 
it always implies that ‘if only we didn't have this load, we'd achieve 
our goal more directly’.


A New Eloquence

There is no way to expand politics if we are not able to extend the 
equipment that would allow to present the issues that matters, to 
designate the people who may argue about them, to draw the sites where 
they have to be gathered. Eloquence is the word that best designates the 
common ground for what is being at issue and who is to be convinced. 
Eloquence has been somewhat despised because it seemed that there was a 
way to do entirely without it and jump directly into absolute, 
indisputable and incontrovertible proofs. But once the issues that have 
to be brought to bear in the assemblies are as vast as they are remote, 
the proofs of what is said about them are of necessity indirect and 
always mediated through complicated apparatus. This is where a new 
eloquence has to be explored, not the one that would add flowers of 
rhetoric to the hard obvious facts, but one that would learn to vividly 
present anew what it is to argue about matters of concern. This is where 
all of the meanings of representation have to converge, the artistic, 
the political, the technical. Can issues be again eloquently articulated?

New Politic Passions

By definition a thing is what in which we are forced to gather because 
there exist strong conflicts. Politics is not about agreement, cohesion, 
unanimity, sociability, but about practical and sometimes humble ways to 
deal with dissent, sometimes extreme dissent. The atmospheres of 
democracy do not rely only on the cold circuitry of reason but also on 
the violent draughts of passions. But passions too evolve and have to be 
cultivated. They are in many ways habits of thought. They can be 
channeled along different lines. It’s clear from the elements assembled 
in this book —and what is a collective book if not a Thing of some 
sort?— that we have not finished exploring the repertoire of political 
passions. Each time techniques of representation change, so do the 
passions we associate with politics. It’s still uncertain at this point 
how much of the new techniques can renew the vocabulary, procedures and 
feelings necessary for a political life.