CS: Alan Sekula’s The Body and the Archive part 1

January 8, 2020September 2, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

Sekula, A. (1986) ‘The Body and the Archive’ In: October 39 p.3064. At: http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/magic/sekula.pdf (Accessed 23/11/2019).

Field, S. (2017) Notes: The Body and the Archive Allan Sekula. WordPress [Blog] At: https://ocasjf.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/notes-the-body-and-the-archive-allan-sekula/ (Accessed 05/01/2020).

Heimans, J. and Timms, H. (2018) New power: how it’s changing the 21st century – and why you need to know. (Kindle) London: Macmillan.

Blatt, Ari J. 2009 ‘The interphototextual dimension of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s L’usage de la photo‘, Word & Image, 25: 1, 46 — 55, 27 – Alain Fleischer, Mummy, mummies (Lagrasse: E ́ ditions Verdier, 2002), pp. 15–16. Translations mine. (Blatt) Available at: https://www.tcd.ie/French/assets/doc/BlattOnErnauxMarie.pdf [Accessed: 24/04/2018]

Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe – with David Tong (2017) In: The Royal Institution. Royal Institute. At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVQfWC_evg (Accessed 05/01/2020).

I looked at this essay during S&O and will look at it again here – Sekula’s essay along with John Tagg’s talk on the filing cabinet both provide plenty of useful references, which, combined with Barad, Lupton and Rubenstein’s thoughts/thesis’, are probably the key sources of information through which I’ll explore at the topic I’ve chosen.

The essay opens with the paradoxical status of photography in bourgeois culture (3)
He quotes a song which ‘plays on the possibility of a technological outpacing of already expanding cultural institutions’. (4) This rings true today (see New Power, (Heimans and Timms, 2018))
You could replace the work photography with digital for the first two pages and it would all sound relevant and fair.
However, by page 6, the veracity of the photography is being discussed, as seen by contemporaries – ‘Only the photograph could begin to claim the legal status of a visual document of ownership’
‘a silence that silences’ (See muteness and photography – ‘Ernaux reminds us, initially ‘all photos are mute’’ (p.73).) Blatt, Ari J.(2009))
(6) ‘the criminal body’ and therefore the ‘social body’ invented
‘a system of representation capable of functioning honorifically and repressively’ (6) how does this work with representationalism and the unpicking of that? There are no entities waiting somewhere to be represented, rather there are emergent intra-active phenomena (Barad, 2007) (criminal and social bodies are made/formed)
again photography can be replaced with digitisation when discussing how portraits are degraded and extended at the same time – see selfies, phone pics
(7) ‘Photography came to establish and delimit the terrain of the other, to define both the generalised look – the typology – and the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology.’ So much to say here – See Azoulay (2019) and photography’s intra-active position/role within a much wider non-linear narrative. See Tagg and ‘fixity’ of the photography and Victorian culture – the desire to catalogue everything according to ordered and identifiable rules, (2011) i.e. the periodic table of elements – a Victorian System compared to today’s quantum fields, a modern system/model of reality which we are informed in most accurate to date and is far more nebulous and difficult to comprehend, no doubt in part due to our Cartesian ‘habit of mind’ which is desperate to label and file everything neatly and ordered (Barad, 2007) as well as being counter-intuitive, shrouded in academic mystery and just really impossibly hard. The Victorian system and hence our dominant one (although this is changing hence the entrenched reaction of a conservative mindset), seems desperately naive in comparison.
(7) See quote about ‘possessive individualism’ which I’ve already inserted into CSA2
(7) Relate photography ‘a means of cultural enlightenment’ and ‘sustained sentimental ties in a nation of migrants’ – compare this to digital tech/culture in today’s culture. Beneath both Carlyle and Aurelias Root’s comments is a dreadful patronising tone however which is surely avoidable. See images ‘of the great’ = ‘moral exemplars’ ??? (Imagine a photograph of any of our current crop of erstwhile leaders providing such?)
Sekula writes of the utilitarian social machine, the Panopticon – think today of social media/ Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff, 2016) (9)
The archived body – ‘begins’ here see page (10) begins is not the right word, becomes visible perhaps.
911) physiognomy and phrenology – ‘surface of the body’ ‘bore the outward signs of the inner character’ – Compare this to Professor Plomins deterministic genetic code thesis which Cummings et al relied upon to justify changes they made to the Education system. Cummings claims that people misunderstood the work and have since retracted their negative comments. However, I think Christakis’ comments on genetic coding is probably more honest – both I suspect, however, show how deep and far-reaching social construction and their associated embedded epigenetic markers can be. Whereas some can see the need for more positive and profound structural changes to take place, there is a mindset which believes we should further entrench these realities which Sekula is talking about that continue today. I was also struck while reading this by the similarities in an article I read today some on FB (I think) which claimed the more bitter and cynical you are, the more likely you are to age quickly and get sick. Lots of scientific data support the thesis – the way it’s been framed, but I am quite cynical indeed and look about fifteen years younger than some of my friends – so I felt a little doubtful – we people seem to enjoy deterministic narratives even today.
(11) borne of ‘attempts to construct a materialist science’ – compare to Barad’s performative/discursive/material emergence of meaning, far more complex and lively but nebulous so hard for people to engage with
Maybe time to revisit Szondi who I discussed in my first reflection about this essay – an early psychometric tester, he defined people by their reactions to faces rather than by the shape of their own faces/heads. Many companies today use much more robust psychometric tests which are extremely powerful but one wonders about the wonderful aspect of chance being eliminated. And so we enter the discussion of AI and how it can be so much more accurate than human power but how much agency do we give it? Currently watching Travelers (Netflix) which explores this in typical pop-culture fashion – first series better than then the rest and lots of references to .
Sekula identified ‘idealist secret lurking a the heart of the putatively materialist sciences’ – how is the AI screening of CVs and psychometric testing any different? And you should see the John Lewis video that you must watch before taking thier tests – madly idealist in quite a scary way, reminded me of Logan’s Run (In HR terms, humans do still get involved: I know this as AI testing identified me as potentially suitable for a well-paid relatively high-status job but my lack of experience ensured I was rejected once a human looked at my CV in one particular application process!) Perhaps I will include some of the resulting descriptions of me, having taken part in this process in my BOW…
TBC

CS & BOW: Research Critique of Barad

November 15, 2019September 4, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Looking for a critique of Barad’s work I have come across this which confirms some of my concerns and questions, although rather more acerbically than I might have done. It begins with the following which made me laugh – humour in an academic paper, good! I do wonder if there is an element of peevishness in the article – will wait and see:

‘In Artful, her collection of critical essays, Smith (2013: 41) reminds us of a childhood game designed to break the boredom of long car journeys – ‘Ten points to the person who can see the Forth Road bridge’ – and points to its direct suitability to the situation of the academic conference: ‘Ten points to the first person who hears someone say the words Walter Benjamin.’ In recent years, it has been possible to play a version of this game substituting ‘Karen Barad’ for ‘Walter Benjamin’. If we add in bonus points for a cluster of terms taken from her book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007) – especially ‘entanglement’, ‘diffraction’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘agential realism’ – then a fine game of ‘Barad Bingo’ can be had far and wide across the humanities and social sciences: from conferences on ruins, animal ethics and informational infrastructures to journal articles on lifelong learning (Edwards, 2010), bullying in schools (S ̄ndergaarda, 2012) and feminist theories of fashion (Parkins, 2008).’ (Hollins, et al, 2017)

Hollin, G, Forysth, I, Giraud, G et al. (1 more author) (2017) (Dis)entangling Barad: Materialisms and ethics. Social Studies of Science, 47 (6). pp. 918-941. ISSN 0306-3127

Click to access Disentangling%20Barad%20-%20version%20for%20repositories.pdf

Will report back with further notes – but good to see some counterpoints

What is it about Barad’s work that appeals to ‘now’ – which the authors admit is pressing today. “What is more, and as evidenced below (Figure 1), the influence of Barad’s work continues to grow, with the above outputs receiving significant year-on-year increases in citation counts. And this brings us to an important point: While Barad’s project spans twenty years, it is evidently of this moment.” (3)

‘Questions are raised, however, about the applicability of concepts originating in the quantum realm and what is lost when they ‘jump scales’ and are used in order to grasp macro-sociological concerns.’ Barad herself actually warns against this kind of simplistic scaling up and claims to avoid analogy (5)Re second-mentioned concern is scaleability – again dealt with by Barad – rather than scaling up, it seems to me she is suggesting implications at micro-level affect out thinking and even though the macro world is govenred by different rules, knowledge about more flexibity and possibility can nevertheless affect us, so not sure about this but I have only read first two chapters so will wait and see: “It does, however, mean that the issue of scale is particularly pertinent for those seeking to draw upon Barad’s work, and worth dwelling on.” (8)
‘Making matter matter, or, in search of lost realness‘ compare section heading to Foster Return fo the Real (6)
‘We conclude the article by arguing that in much of the literature drawing upon Barad there is a focus upon diffraction and entanglement and that this has come at the expense of considerations of complementarity and necessary exclusion. We suggest, however, that it is the radical potential of an ethics of exclusion which is perhaps most vital to those continuing to use Barad’s work.’ (5)

‘Re my own comments on peevishness: ‘Does the process by which ‘matter comes to matter’ in Barad’s thesis matter? When we call upon Barad to help secure an argument, how can we be sure that we are not suffering from a new case of physics envy – of the quantum variety?” (6)

‘There are two entirely concordant consequences to this continuity between physics and social theory. First, Barad’s realism promises to firm up the ‘beneath’, to put it in Foucauldian terms, of knowledge (Lather, 2010) by offering ‘the weight of realism’ as ‘ballast’ against too much postmodernism (Barad, 2007: 43).”Objects, entities and phenomena are demonstrably instantiated in and by material practices, produced performatively in concrete situations and thus – crucially – can anchor political actions. This approach carries distinct ethical implications, on which we focus shortly.’ (8)
‘Despite the obvious utility of diffraction, the section concludes with some thoughts on the possible merits of rescuing reflection.’ (11) see rest of section
I like this criticism:
‘In a recent article, Paxson and Helmreich (2013: 169) argued that:
‘[New materialism] is productive because it can shake thinking away from the certainties of social determinism, as exampled, canonically, in the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge – and because it can show that phenomena emerge in practice. But it is also risky, because new materialist tactics often veer towards universalizing metaphysical claims about the nature of ‘matter’ as such and also, at times, take scientific truth claims about the world at face value – a move that we consider a step backwards for STS.’ (13)
‘The key terms within this passage – intra-action, agential separability, exteriority-within – all indicate that for Barad the separations between words, things, and knowers are real enough but these separations are effects of particular engagements with the world (p. 138). This is the crux of Barad’s agential realism.’ (16) Key for me too – and can be applied to cameras and visual recording systems (some of which do not rely on sight or emulation of sight)
Barad’s understanding of the apparatus, then, is more expansive than in a ‘typical’ methods section, more-than-human in its composition, and emergent through practice. There are clear affinities here with actor-network theory (e.g. Latour, 1987: 162) Something for me to investigate further (17)
‘Perhaps, we might speculate, for theorists whose bread and butter it is to consider the nonhuman and their relations with humans and other nonhumans, Barad’s considerations are neither seismic nor entirely novel.’ (17)
re tools – and thinking about cameras/visualising tools: ‘The stick cannot usefully serve as an instrument of observation if one is intent on observing it. The line between subject and object is not fixed, but once a cut is made (i.e., a particular practice is being enacted), the identification is not arbitrary but in fact materially specified and determined (Barad, 2007: 154-155). (18)
NBNBNB: Not only is cutting a boundary-making practice (p. 148), it is a process over which there is a degree of control. Thus, for Barad, boundaries are not only real but there is a degree of responsibility for their creation, the worlds that are made, and those that are excluded (p. 243). (18)
This emphasis on separability, exteriority and constitutive exclusion is a significant part of what makes Barad’s work distinct and important. It is also the part of Barad’s scholarship that is most frequently lost in the re-telling. (18)
‘The concept of complementarity makes clear that, for Barad, when one apparatus instantiates a particular world another is necessarily excluded.’ (18) (At the risk of sounding slightly belittling and not meaning to, in popular culture, this is explored by Phillip Pullman – pulverized and aneathetised by the BBC)
‘We argue that the ways with which Barad’s approach has been engaged have resulted in an over-emphasis on questions of entanglement. In contrast, we suggest that the ‘radical potential’ of agential realism is in drawing attention to what is excluded from particular entanglements.’ (19)
A useful list of more-than-human writers: ‘Barad’s intra-active conception of the world offers a specific understanding of relationality that goes beyond earlier conceptualizations of hybridity (Haraway, 1992; Latour, 1993), a term which suggests relations shape pre-existing entities (Lorimer, 2015: 24). Yet, aside from offering a neat neologism that makes its difference from interaction explicit, on a superficial level, intra-active conceptions of the world do not appear to be wholly novel. Approaches that have considered the ‘mangle of practice’ (Pickering, 2010) such as posthumanism (Castree and Nash, 2004; Hayles, 1999; Wolfe, 2010), actor-network theory (Latour, 2005; Mol, 2003), non- representational theory (Anderson and Harrison, 2010), vital-materialist approaches (Bennett, 2009), engagements with cosmopolitics (Stengers, 1997, 2010, 2011; also Hinchcliffe et al., 2003), or object-oriented ontology (Bogost, 2011; Harman, 2012), all stress the agency of more-than- human entities and make clear that the human is shaped through encounters with other agencies.’ And add Deborah Lupton to this re Data Selves (2019)
The clearest description of performative for me yet – ‘Barad’s understanding of reality as enacted rather than pre-given similarly troubles pre-defined ethical hierarchies such as human/animal, subject/object, and nature/culture, as a way of thinking about the world.’ (19)
‘Barad could thus be situated as part of a longer lineage of work that has collapsed the ontological and epistemological and turned attention to the performative composition of reality (e.g. Mol, 2002; Star, 1992).’ (I thinkI still need to figure out why this is not constructivist – see the sentence about performative being not entirely or much at all re volition-) (20)

‘We question the ease with which Barad’s work has ‘jumped’ between diverse scales and urged that attention be paid to frictions between scales, and what may be lost precisely because it is not scalable’ (23) Hayles (1999) seems to answer this when she describes the way we instantiate our movements and actions while we use computers – the technology for these computers often emerge from a range of inte-related sciences and technologies where quantum mechanics plays a significant part – See loc 698 and then Chapter 3 on how information became so important to theorists and scientists via the Macy conferences – how this conversation which informed military and computer sciences and ‘infected’ reality

Hard not to disagree with the following or any other form of information which becomes a holy grail and therefore dogma spouted by dogmatic, excluding followers. ‘Despite seeing a number of potentials in agential realism, however, it is important to caution against uncritically extolling the value of this approach. As Willey (2016: 993) powerfully argues, it is dangerous to position new materialism as a radical break from feminist, postcolonial STS (see also Sundberg, 2014), and uncritically valorizing agential realism can lend strength to this trap.’

BOW & CS Notes: Meeting the Universe Halfway, K.Barad, 2007 (Intro & Chpt. 1)

November 15, 2019September 2, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

This book is vast and complex so I think I might try to make notes as I go. Although there is a risk in reading it that I will be carried away in unhelpful albeit exciting directions, I think it is worth taking because as I move through it I am beginning to have specific ideas about what I’m aiming to explore – and it’s very much linked to ‘seeing’. In DI&C A3 (2019) I began to explore the tendency for photography (both academic and more popular forms) to engage in hierarchical thinking, despite the fact that individuals within it often make great claims about using photography to interrogate society. This results in photography reinforcing rather than dismantling segregation of various forms.

Equipment and output are (perhaps catastrophically?) ‘entangled’ with the history and uses that engendered photography’s invention. I quoted Ariella Azoulay’s blog posts Unlearning the Origins of Photography (2018) which I now see are influenced by the same undoing of a Cartesian mindset that exists in Barad’s writing. I will also need to revisit Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography (2012) as the ‘apparatus’ – i.e. the social and economic machine in which the camera exists seems relevant.

So here are some bullet points notes for now:

Begins with an analysis of Frayn’s play Copenhagen (first performance 1998) (rave reviews and repeated runs across the globe) which she says is beautifully written but flawed – then goes on to say why, effectively lumping it alongside a ‘plethora of popular accounts that have sacrificed rigor (sic) for the sake of accessibility, entertainment, and if one is honest, the chance to garner the authority of science to underwrite one’s favourite view’ (6) I can imagine Frayne taking umbrage with this as it potentially says films such as Marvel’s Into the Spiderverse (2018) for instance which also uses a backdrop of multiple universes and fluid realities for its well-worn but nevertheless entertaining narrative structure are no different to his intellectual production. (I’ve not seen the play but really love Into the Spiderverse, incidentally…)
re the play, ‘we are left wandering aimlessly […with] only an empty feeling that quantum theory is somehow at once a manifestation of the mystery that keeps us alive and a cruel joke that deprives us of life’s meaning’ (17)
However, Neils Bohr, in particular, has called into question ‘an entire tradition in the history of Western metaphysics: the belief that the world is populated with individual things with their own set of determinate properties. The lesson that Bohr takes from quantum physics is very deep and profound: there aren’t little things wandering aimlessly in the void that possess the complete set of properties Newtonian physics assumes’ […] “Which properties become determinate is not governed by the desires or the will of the experimenter but rather by the specificity of the experimental apparatus.”
‘the very nature of intentionality needs to be rethought’ (22) i.e. we can assume nothing in isolation and the network/schema/surrounding landscape in which an intention emerges is always intra-dependent. (I will get to the use of intra-rather than inter shortly)
‘intentions are not pre-existing determinate mental states of individual human beings’ & intentionality “might better be understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman [cameras for instance and the companies that make them] agents, including historically specific sets of material conditions that exceed the traditional notion of the individual’. (23)
‘an entangled state of agencies’ (23)
She avoids analogies – especially between people and particles and I will do well to heed her warning against doing so – reductive and simplistic
is interested in ‘conditions for the possibility of objectivity, the nature of measurement, the nature of nature and meaning making, and the relationship between discursive practices and the material world’ (24) This is where I am having some issues. First of all, because I had to get my head around ‘discursive practices’ as opposed to discursive writing – the latter is a description of a type of writing that flits from one subject to another and is a pejorative term (my writing!) The former is a complex Foucaldian term which is very difficult to comprehend… discourse-related performative actions in human behaviour in which power-relations are played out. The most useful description is as follows:

‘The discursive practice approach is grounded in four insights concerning discourse. One is the affirmation that social realities are linguistically/discursively constructed. The second is the appreciation of the context-bound nature of discourse. The third is the idea of discourse as social action. The fourth is the understanding that meaning is negotiated in interaction, rather than being present once-and-for-all in our utterances.’ From http://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Discursive-practice.pdf

My problem – and this runs throughout the Barad and New Materialism material I’ve read (still reading, still trying to understand and a way to go) is that, while I appreciate that language has been given more attention than material/matter as Barad argues in debates about power – language and verbal action are in my understanding material and that distinction between the two is what prevents people up from valuing digital language (code, digital photography) which they see as non-material and therefore less worthy (in art especially). (See Lupton, 2019, How data came to matter (79)) The other thing is, assemblages and intra-actions which include discursive practices, as well as matter, don’t exist in isolation which is the base of her world view (which also tallies with systemic theories as far as I can see – again, based on very basic knowledge). I am aware I have not yet got the gist of Barad’s arguments about matter so – watch this space – I might get it eventually.

diffractive approach – this suits my way of thinking and I wholeheartedly agree. One of the issues with photography writing in some instances is that it seems to have tunnel vision and excludes all else at times leading to phrases such as ‘photography changes everything’ which I briefly dismantled in DI&CA3. Photography then ends up being seen as a holy grail in some people’s minds when in fact it is one mechanism amongst many that contribute to meaning – and the flat, still, decisive moment kind might just be the most irrelevant and in Elkin’s terms ‘boring’ example of reality out there nowadays. (2011) Again, Lupton’s explanation of a diffractive approach, which refers to Barad, is useful. (29)
‘a diffractive methodology is respectful of the entanglement of ideas and other materials [ideas = materials] in ways that reflexive methodologies are not (29)
agential realism – recognises agents both human and non-human that exists in and acknowledge the real but eschew both anti-realism/constructivism as well as realist insisters “a philosophical framework that […] entails a rethinking of fundamental concepts that support such binary thinking, including the notions of matter, discourse, causality, agency, power, identity, embodiment, objectivity, space, and time’ (26) – See page 48 for more inc. ‘representationalism is so deeply entrenched in Western culture that has taken on a common-sense appeal’ (48) What’s the alternative? Describe/how does photography reinforce this and can it help to critique it, if so how? – performative approaches
central – ‘matter as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations rather than a property of things’ (35)
Bohr: ‘we are part of that nature that we seek to understand’. ‘part of the phenomena we describe’ (26)
NBNBNBNB ‘Performative approaches call into question the basic premises of representationalism’ (28)
‘representationalism in the belief in the ontological distinction between representation and that which they purport to represent’ (46) [I think revisit Rubenstein’s crit of Freid – Failure to Engage for more on this]
‘ther are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities – representations and entities to be represented’ (46)
‘Performative approaches call into question representationalism’s claim that there are representations, on the one hand, and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation on the other, and focus inquiry on the practices or performances of representing’ (49) Knowledge comes from ‘direct material engagement’ (49)
See page 50 for Realism without Representation – where does all this tally with Hoffman’s theory in which our only access to the world is via representation alone. His representation is wholly constructed, it does not accurately describe the real but fulfills our needs for existing within it – therefore it is our real because its the only one we have.
‘Theorists who adopt a performative approach are often quick to point out performativity is not the same as performance, and to merely talk of performance does not make an approach performative’ (60)
Intraction – 33. ‘The neologism signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ – a good deal of photography-related critical theory seems not to recognise this mutuality. ‘the primary ontological unit is not independent objects with independently determinate boundaries and properties but rather what Bohr terms phenomena. ‘The shift from the metaphysics of things to phenomena makes an enormous difference in understanding the nature of science and ontological, epistemological and ethical issues more generally’. (33)
‘realism is often saddled with essentialism’ (55)
‘theorising and experimenting are not about intervening (from outside) but about intra-acting from within, and as part of the phenomena produced’ (56)
builds on ‘Foucault’s critique of representationalism and Bulter’s gender performativity’ – ‘gender is not an attribute of individuals’ (57) This would apply to poverty, class distinction, ‘race’, sexuality – all emerge as ‘a doing’ – performing
‘what is at stake in this dynamic conception of matter is an unsettling of natures presumed fixity and hence an opening up of the possibilities for change’ (64)

See Fred Ritchin’s final chapter After Photography (2010) as a possible intro into finding ways to use digital photography to bring these quantum influenced ideas into the discourse beyond scientific circles.

Think Zizek has critiqued Barad and will need to find it and see what he has to say… Been comparing what I recall of A Systemic View of Life

Azoulay, A. (2018) Ariella Azoulay – Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography. [online blog/forum] At: http://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/authors/10605_ariella_azoulay (Accessed 15/11/2019).

Capra, F. and Luisi, P. L. (2014) The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. (1 edition) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Flusser, V. (2012) Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion Books.

Field, S. (2019) The Democratisation of Form, OCA Digital Image and Culture A3. [Essay]: WordPress. At: https://sjfdiculture.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/assignment-3-democratisation-of-form-submission-1.pdf (Accessed 15/11/2019).

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) Directed by Persichetti, B. et al. Sony.

Frayn, M. (1998) Copenhagen. London: Methuen Drama.

Ritchin, F. (2010) After Photography. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

CS & Bow: Research notes, Daniel Rubinstein, Failure to Engage 2017

October 30, 2019September 2, 2020 ~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

www.danielrubinstein.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Failure-to-Engage.pdf

This article by Daniel Rubinstein confirms my recognition of Freid’s conservativism and does a super job of helping me to more fully comprehend some of the ideas in Barad’s essay. Beneath the argument about theatricality and anti-theatricality, it explores the changing nature of being and knowledge – or ontology and epistemology, as expressed via quantum sciences and philosophies, namely Barad (2003), Lupton (2019), Rovelli (2017), Capra (2014) – leading to what Barad terms “Onto-epistem-ology”[which is] —the study of practices of knowing in being—is probably a better way to think about the kind of understandings that are needed to come to terms with how specific intra-actions matter.” (2003: 829) (See Rovelli and Kant in the previous blog.)

However, Barad argues against what she calls representationalism, which is; “the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent; in particular, that which is represented is held to be independent of all practices of representing. That is, there are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities—representations and entities to be represented” (804) If you can overcome this and see “representationalism as a Cartesian by-product—a particularly inconspicuous consequence of the Cartesian division between “internal” and “external” that breaks along the line of the knowing subject.” (Rouse, 1996: 209, Barad, 2003:805) then the arguments made be Fried begin to disintegrate. As – “it is possible to develop coherent philosophical positions that deny that there are representations on the one hand and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation on the other” (807) relying instead on emergence. And ff you see theatre as a laboratory (not just Growtowski’s but the entire history of it) then perhaps Fried’s entire argument collapses – although I am not sure Rubinstein gets there with this.

Some quotes below and perhaps an occasional note:

by way of identifying the dualist oppositions and the ideological investments that establish the ontological significance of this text. (44)
Fried is not criticising the work of certain artists, but devising a universal method for distinguishing true art from ‘objecthood’, based on the assumption that (Fried’s) consciousness can distinguish physical reality from art (44) (religiosity)
this rejection leads him to adopt a conception of art that is hierarchical, analytical and traditionalist (45)
contemporary philosophical thought that studies theatricality as part of the logocentric apparatus inherited from the Renaissance (45)
The conception of ‘objecthood’ in contemporary art can be traced to Duchamp’s readymades which he created by selecting, modifying and rectifying mass-produced objects (46)
this opposition between the image and the real has its roots in Platonism, where the sensible world is produced as a copy of the world of ideas, and it is the task of reason to overcome the errors of the copy in order to arrive at the truth (46) Far more simply explained here than in Barad’s essay
The touchstone for this distinction is whether the image declares itself to be an image (the fable of the cave is told as a fable) or whether the image pretends not to be one, disguising itself as an object (47)
Plato’s demand for ‘primary distinction’ between images and models is motivated by the moral need to protect the idea of truth from the dangerous world of simulacra. (47) In CS A2, I argue the shadows on the wall of the attic are the actual real – what looks like the simulacra is just as real as the flesh and blood version watching the slides – although more likely they exist together, both real, both valuable (see Jung – dream world equal to waking world)
The artworks that Fried designates as ‘theatrical’ seem to have a common denominator: they strive to take over the real, to immerse and to overwhelm us by replacing the real with a readymade and truth with simulacrum until we are no longer able to distinguish the artwork from the real, the referent from the sign, and the subject from the object. (48)
Critical opposition to theatricality will not get one very far, as opposition itself is a theatrical requisite (49)

Quote Fried, “The Platonic division of the cave, which is effectively the theatrical division between a real outside and an inside simulating this outside … The thing stands for something else, and it is less than what it represents. In order that it be what it is, there has been a lack of being. What is given to us, insofar as it is not similitude itself, is deficient in force. The theatricality of representation implies this deficiency, this depression. (pp. 68, 71, emphases in original)” (49) See Barad and her refusal of representation being something that acts as a sign for something previous and original. (50)
Here the antinomy to the ‘theatrical cube’ is being revealed not as anti- theatricality, but as an infinite movement of surfaces that continuously self- replicate and morph into each other (50)
If the origin of theatre is in negation, and if its operation is representational, then the deeper reason Fried can speak of a ‘war’ between theatricality and real art becomes clear. (51)
Anti-theatricality, in other words, implies that in order to be meaningful, accessible and ‘true’, the artwork has to inhabit some form of transcendental negation, or excluded middle or some other form of metaphysical ground (51)
by arguing against the dualism of theatricality and for the monism of ‘real’ art, he is unable to move beyond the very dualism he is trying to unsettle as his thought is chained to the common-sense notion that representation is a natural, ordinary, everyday occurrence (52)
The deeper structure of Fried’s argument is that true knowledge can transcend mere appearances and grasp their underlying presence. As Luce Irigaray (1985[1974]) has shown, this framework is based on the notion of a stable subject that comprehends – like Rodin’s Thinker – a world that is also stable and unchanging. (53)
Freid’s description of Caro’s sculptures are ‘performative’ therefore theatrical (53) They are also elitist and come about due to a his privileged and educated position.
according to Fried, the greatest danger: under the auspice of theatre, art loses its spiritual, sensual and theological dimension. When art is stripped of its mystical, spiritual powers, of its direct link with experience through the unmediated connection with life, all that remains is the theatre: a pale re-enactment of the mysteries of the sacrificial ritual. (53) This is a bizarre argument given theatre’s roots are deeply embedded in the spiritual and mystical, and was born out of attempts to commune with the gods (the universe).
Putting the object first will not work because the opposition between art and non-art is itself the product of an ideology that asserts that there is a real world that can be taken up and represented as an image (53) which Barad argues against using quantum knowledge.

Edited 01/09/2009 to correct the spelling of Rubinstein’s name

Barad, K. (2003) ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’ In: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3) pp.801–831. At: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/345321 (Accessed 30/10/2019).

Capra, F. and Luisi, P. L. (2014) The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. (1 edition) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rovelli, C. (2017) Reality is not what it seems: the journey to quantum gravity. London: Penguin

Rubinstein, D. (2017) ‘Failure to Engage: Art Criticism in the Age of Simulacrum’ In: Journal of Visual Culture 16 (1) pp.43–55. At: https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412917690970 (Accessed 30/10/2019).