Julia Kristeva – Subjectivity as a [Lacanian] process

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The discourse on subjectivity keeps on providing a solid ground to hold the theoretical edifice of PARTICIPATION and its later forms in art and digital technology.

A very rich contribution comes from psychoanalysis (of course) and the formation of the image of the subject.

Lacan, Freud and Foucault lay the base for the discourse, moving back and fort between different centers of gravity ranging between concepts of a single entity subjectivity to a fragmented and socially distributed one.

An interesting work for the purpose to my research comes from Julia Kristeva, a successor of Freud and Lacan that takes their ideas beyond the body towards a view of subjectivity as a process as opposed to a structure.

It is this unresolved and constantly dynamic view of the subject that makes it perfect for this research.

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She emphasizes that subjectivity is PERFORMATIVE as we are in constant quest for stability of an image of ourselves that is whole and unique, balancing out the conflicts ongoing in our body, our conscious and unconscious material, the pressure from society and the environment:

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For Kristeva the problem lies in having a material body that can easily be identified as a whole objective unit, that can be limited and “perimetred” by our sense and our society.

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However at a second deeper glance, this integrity and wholeness of the body is only an illusion that we are condemned to perpetrate continuously as strongly as we can, as we have built a society based on this very lie.

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Responsibility, merit, reward, attribution of wishes, desires, love etc are all structured for a single integral subject that is capable of independent thinking and feeling.

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We jail the single person for a crime, we reward the single body unit with kiss for a good action, we give the oscar statue to the director of the film, when instead the single bodies are only some gravitational centers of a multitude of relations of agency between culture, sensorial systems, environmental chemistry apparatus, coincidence etc etc where the single body is only a node, a little electrical switch placed in a flow of interlinked actions and agents.

As a result of this conflict, we are constantly trying to re-write the world from a multiplayer game to a single man monologue…. loosing pieces, dropping whole systems, denying wishes etc etc

This is the performative component of subjectivity that we see emerging more and more in art and technology. Somehow we have managed to let loose a little and have come to terms with the idea of distributed knowledge, experience, responsibility.

Participatory art and participatory media have worked as a challenge function to this very process of “abject” as Kristeva calls it. With the help of new tools we are slowly moving away of a single man game back to the multiplayer, the interactive, the environmentally sustainable etc etc.

Monte Carlo Simulation

Isn’t this beautiful? I’m allowing myself the aesthetization of market stress test models…

This is a mathematical tool to forecast future outcomes. It is used in finance to run scenarios of where stock/option prices will end when some parameters like interest rates, volatility, currency fluctuations change.

It is probability based, of course and the results follow a normal distribution….

Why do things get in a mangle.

I came across Andrew Pickering watching a youtube clip of a kid in some US university that did an ethnografical research on World of Warcraft. When it comes to technological discourse, gamers never let me down… better sometimes than the academics out there.

“The mangle of practice” is a reflection on science and its epistemological dynamics, but it can quickly become a universal outlook of the relational nature of the world.

Together with the traditional representational function of science as a tool for knowledge creation, Pickering concentrates on the less discussed performative function. This concept is of great interest to me as I am getting more and more accustomed to the intrinsic performative nature of pretty much every human and non human *action*.  The concept of agency that Pickering uses to think about science in a performative way is intended in the same way as K. Hayles in her “post-humanistic” world… where conscious agency and distributed cognition replace the strong segregated modernist subjectivity… or the Jungian model of psyche that we saw at the beginning of this blog.

From agency we derive performance as the underlying energy, the electricity that moves the system…

pp. 6 – 1995 edition

and <<..Science is the business of copying with material agency of responding to adaptation…> as <Knowledge is then “threaded” through the machinic field of science …. [while] the performative idiom can thus include the concerns of the representational idiom…>

Pickering is obviously very much influenced by [second] order cybernetics and its political sciences off-shoots, as he himself states… Latour and Callon, the Actor-Network Theory.

In terms of what concept of subjectivity comes out of this mangle, it is no revolution against individuality,  moving along the same positions of K. Hayles, where the subject must retain control for human identity to be validated. It cannot be otherwise as they are both AMERICANS and we all know how impossible it is to destroy individualism in this country… A Chinese or an Indian might have a different way to get out of the *muddle* using a Batesonian expression, and here there is another opening for tons more of anthropological research on human ontology…

Can we really conceive a strongly distributed subjectivity, where the word “subject” can be effectively deleted or replaced by something more *mangled*, where there’s no real center but occasional migrations of *actants* and forces towards this or that occasional gravitational center?

Pickering as well as Hayles does not really think so yet…

Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium

by L Autogena and J Portway.

This is an example of one of the few successful attempts to create an art work by mapping stock market values to the light of stars in a Planetarium. The metaphor of a complex universe of living planets and stars works pretty well.

I like this work very much and it is interesting to me as it does visualize the live and  performative nature of the markets. The brightness of the starts is linked to the value of share prices. their light intensity keeps on varying according to whether the stock gains or looses in value. It is a an effective albeit simplified transposition of the stock market, however it does not take into account the cross fertilization of market entities, the relational paths between stocks / indices / options / currencies and how they keep on influencing each other.

It was shown at Tate Britain in London, UK in 2001

Bruno Latour – International Seminar on Network Theory Keynote

– an actor is not a self contained entity deprived of all actants

– individual action is much too distributed to be defined in terms of interaction —-> consequence of taking seriously the notion of actor / network

– the whole idea of network is that you never have a whole that is superior to its parts (critique of the division individual vs society, society being considered more important)

– a collective phenomenon is not necessarily a social one

Claire Bishop – Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics

I keep on “bumping” into Ms Claire Bishop since the Participation exhibition at the Whitechapel art gallery in Aldgate in London, where I have been living for a while.
She turned that experience into a book: Participation, a collection of theoretical readings about Participatory Art.
This essay comes of great help to me in spelling out the issues i have with art criticism in general and with the way art criticism looks at participatory art or in Bourriad’s words “relational aesthetics”.

In this essay Claire Bishops critiques this very text by N Bourriad defined by many in the art world as “the most influential work of art criticism to appear in the past decade”… and also a “fashionable art-world bestseller (!)”.

Ms Bishops centers many points that I have collected below to serve me as a reference when I argue that the looking at art from the lenses of art criticism has become somehow sterile, and that the fresher look from the point of view of Media Theory might benefit the discourse.

The quality of the relationships in “relational aesthetics” are never examined or called into question. When Bourriaud argues that “encounters are more important than the individuals who compose them,” I sense that this question is (for him) unnecessary; all relations that permit “dialogue” are automatically assumed to be democratic and therefore good. But what does “democracy” really mean in this context? If relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why?

and another v interesting part on the subject of subjectivity

Following Lacan, they argue that subjectivity is not a self- transparent, rational, and pure presence, but is irremediably decentered and incomplete.38 However, surely there is a conflict between a concept of the subject as decentered and the idea of political agency? “Decentering” implies the lack of a unified subject, while “agency” implies a fully present, autonomous subject of political will and self-determination. Laclau argues that this conflict is false, because the subject is neither entirely decentered (which would imply psychosis) nor entirely unified (i.e., the absolute subject). Following Lacan, he argues that we have a failed structural identity, and are therefore dependent on identification in order to proceed.39 Because subjectivity is this process of identification, we are necessarily incomplete entities.

and this is the connecting bit to media theory

It is also seen as a response to the virtual relationships of the Internet and globalization, which on the one hand have prompted a desire for more physical and face-to-face interaction between people, while on the other have inspired artists to adopt a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach and model their own “possible universes” (RA, p. 13). This emphasis on immediacy is familiar to us from the 1960s, recalling the premium placed by performance art on the authenticity of our first-hand encounter with the artist’s body. But Bourriaud is at pains to distance contempo- rary work from that of previous generations.

But the greatest critical point raised by Claire Bishop on Bourriad concerns the switch form utopia to microtopia. She says that Bourriad’s does not raise this issue in his artists… that all this “democratic – community based ideals” are really just Utopia hidden in the new enthusiasms for participatory art which is seen as a way to reactivate democracy at the level of communities through the practice of participation. The problem is that the lack of antagonism and tension in Bouriad’s artists shows that the lenses he is using are themselves utopian and never question the quality of the relationship itself.

She concludes with what I feel is something very true of the art world these days and due to denying that very query on the quality of the relations:

In such a cozy situation, art does not feel the need to defend itself, and it collapses into compensatory (and self-congratulatory) entertainment.

after all we can say that the biggest mistake of Bourriad is contained in his powerful definition, he fails by aesthetizing relations.

Is Economics Performative? Option Theory and the Construction of Derivatives Markets

Interesting article by Donald MacKenzie

looks at financial markets as a performative system. I’m particularly interested in the links to second order cybernetics and Latour:

<What might it mean to say that an area of economics such as option pricing theory is “performative”? At the most general level, the term “performative” involves no specific reference to economics and connotes a general theoretical stance: the postulates that “phenomena only exist in the doing of them” and “they have to be continuously performed to exist at all” (Callon 2004). The performances that are of interest will normally involve acts by human beings, but typically not by unaided human beings: central to the “actor-network theory” developed by Callon and his colleague Bruno Latour is the view that the “actants” involved in the production of phenomena include non-human entities as well as human beings (see Callon 1986 and Latour 1987).>

and by analyzing the way the diffusion of the Black Schoels model improved the overall pricing of the option market he states:

<…These discrepancies suggest that the Black-Scholes-Merton model did more than simply express price patterns that were already there. As I shall argue below, there is reason to think that the use of the model altered price patterns […]That the Black-Scholes-Merton model was not originally a close empirical description of patterns of option prices, and that it was widely used as a guide to trading by participants in options markets raise the intriguing possibility that the model was performative in an especially strong sense: that its use brought about a state of affairs of which it was a good empirical description…>and quoting Latour:

<…Another way of expressing Barnesian performativity is in the idiom of actornetwork theory. As Bruno Latour puts it: “Knowledge . . . does not reside in the face-to-face confrontation of a mind with an object . . . The word ‘reference’ designates the quality of the chain in its entirety . . . Truth-value circulates” (Latour 1999, p. 69, emphases in original deleted). The suggestion that the Black-Scholes- Merton model may have been performative in the Barnesian sense is the conjecture that the use of the model was part of the chain by which its referential character— its fit to “reality”—was secured. That this might be the case is suggested by the way in which the discrepancies between model and market seem to have diminished rapidly in the years after the model’s publication in 1973…>

and concludes:

<…In the societies of high modernity, the generic, and probably also the effective, performativity of economics seems pervasive.23 Callon and Muniesa argue that markets are collective calculation mechanisms, in other words sociotechnical apparatuses that allow a good to be made comparable with other goods, to be evaluated, and a “result”—“a price, a classification, a choice”—produced (Callon and Muniesa 2003, p. 205). Economic practices such as marketing and accounting clearly play constitutive roles in such mechanisms, and economics in the academic, disciplinary sense is increasingly involved too. The financial derivatives market may be an unusually clear case of the generic performativity of economics—today’s huge volumes of derivatives trading would scarcely be possible without the calculative resources that option theory and its many developments provide—but it is surely not unique…>

Some vocabulary

ART 2.0

crowd-sourcing

Web 2.0 has created an “Architecture of participation” (wikipedia web 2.0, quoting Paul Graham and Tim O’Reilly)

Augusto Boal – The Theatre of the oppressed

Abandoning the sometimes elitist and incestuous art world to follow different threads is very often a very refreshing experience.  I came across Boal’s work from a colleague who’s doing her Master Degree thesis on him.

I need to dive deeper into his work and the influences he gathered throughout the years, but this a much more explicit political message of participation as a way to experience the problems of a particular social / cultural context.

Quoting from Wikipedia: <<…Boal was of the opinion that only the oppressed are able to free the oppressed. In Peru, Boal practiced his Forum theatre method, in which spectator replaces actor to determine the solution to a given problem presented by the actor, which can also be a real problem someone in the community is facing…>>

On of the interesting things for me in this message is the link between the concept of distributed cognition (participatory action lead to a form of “networked responsibility / authorship”  for the action itself) and embodiment. The need for the experience to pass through a person’s body to be fully understood, it is a key point for me. I wanted to develop my initial thesis around these very two themes: Distributed cognition and embodiment as identified by K. Hayles in “how we became post human”. Then somehow I have suspended the focus on embodiment as I thought it would be too much work, but also that maybe one can somehow do without it.

I am now thinking that participatory actions cannot really be read without an adequate critical attention to the concept of “learning through the body”.

SCANNING….

The more I read about the endless debate in the art criticism world about this type of participatory art, the more I loose momentum and energy to work at this project.

So today instead of reviewing other people’s ideas and endless literature, I’m going to write about WHAT I THINK.

Bourriaud’s merit to me is to have highlighted a certain shift in society and consequently in contemporary art… This shift is not the radical change that Mr B wants to believe… the move away from the object into the relation is not that clear cut and it would be too simplistic to just visualize the matter in this way, like at first there was a painting, a sculpture… i.e. an identifiable object that a collector could “buy” or “show” whilst suddenly we have a relation, an invite to do something sometimes with somebody.

Art has always been a relation. The object “painting” is itself evocative , a trigger of a bundle of cultural, interpersonal, psychoanalytical relations. The viewer has always been part of its making. It isn’t because few hundred years ago a man made a painting, sold it to a noble man who hanged it in his house and showed it to his guests, that this way of making art is SUBSTANTIALLY DIFFERENT from Tino Seghal’s work of conversing with museum goers… Maybe we can say that the “relationality” of Tino Seghal’s work is highlighted because it is stripped out of the object.

also somebody said this art is made with people, not with objects. I think this has always been true of dance as well… and yet no one defines dance or theater as “relational art”. WHY?

Do we really need these definitions? and if we do… should they lock us up into silos that we need to struggle to come out of?