More Tim Morton

I'm not really that much over/into TIm Morton's work but somehow it seems to be topic of the week.

(1)  Really I was meaning to post on the fact that he touches on the Orientalist dynamic in responding to "contemplative" works, and then this in comparison with our earlier discussions of the East v West and the social.

  

(2) The second aspect relates to me seeming to want to be more contemplative and introspective and less socially-engaged at the moment, while also considering these terms within an East v West paradigm.

I think this is actually what I was getting at with the archive - methodology, as a long winded way of saying that I feel I am at a point where I can't really go further without addressing my own desires within this whole process, and the world at large. One ultimately needs desire to be the engine that drives the machine.

Within this context over-theorising becomes just a strategy in which one seeks "objectivity" to disavow the "subjectivity" of their position. I feel that in social practice this can happen a lot, but the best works don't do this. I think this is what Hirschhorn always does well, and I think you do it well too. Overall though, it's not so much a question of personal history, it is more about recognising one's own personal investment in things, and particularly for me to be a bit more alive to these things. Or to go even further in my case, to maybe in some way acknowledge that one of the things that attracts me to art is that on the whole I find that many artists display a personal investment in the world of a magnitude that I feel is much greater than my own capability. Maybe this is the domain of drive, the desire for desire. Maybe it is even in a way saying that by my actions I am actually some sort of idealist, who really only sees the world as something producing the pleasure of my own thoughts.

(3) Last night I saw an interview with Morton in the Brooklyn Rail and I feel compelled to post on it.

Firstly, I found it interesting that he compares critical practices to Romanticism, which is what we have touched on before especially in Rancierre:

"There's a lot of art that's about revealing the process of production - that is one of the lineages of the Romantic period. It goes back through Benjamin to Wordsworth really - showing the wiring underneath. I think there's a deeper thing here, which is that just noticing how constructed things are really doesn't change things. .... Things are more profound in their relations , as far as I'm concerned, and just showing how things relate is never enough. What we really need are disturbing encounters with discrete entities."

(For example meeting a replicant from blade runner which forces you to confront reality through the anxiety that you yourself may not really be a person, which is by definition 

human self-consciousness. Secondly to not refuse this anxiety but acknowledge it.)

 

And later:

"I think that the dominant way of thinking about art, at the moment, is basically a modulation of a 200-year old way of doing it, which is , basically, critique. I've got to be able to see through my world in order to be outside of reality and see it from the perfect point of view. And the trouble is, according to my view, you can't do that - that's strictly impossible, So these attempts to jump out of it don't end up working so great."

I think this maps pretty directly against Hal Foster's defence of critique against Bruno Latour. For my mind, my hesitation with Morton's approach is it still seems to position the problem of "global warming" on some level of conceptual understanding. I don't understand how global warming is a really a question of ontology or our understanding of it, and not really just a question of political will, which is to say that there are some powerful people invested in global warming and stand to gain from it while others do not. I don't really see how incorporating "hyperobjects" and "meshes" (aren't these just "assemblages", except particularly of human and non-human things as a set of causal relations) really gets us anywhere other than saying that these non-human things also condition us and vice-versa. Isn't that just dialectics 2.0?

Anyway he continues wrt to art making and basically advocates a deeper non-anthropocentric understanding of materiality ( it is anthropocentric to think of paint as a material when it is actually made of plants mixed with eggs etc) which doesn't interest me much and I am doubtful will lead to interesting works.

 

(4) Given that I have raised this question of non-critical methods, I'll just footnote that I really enjoyed this interview of Andrea Fraser and My Barbarian, as well as her classes. She basically distinguishes between negative/critical/deconstructive/reactive practices on the one hand, against constructivist/affirmative/creation-of-worlds approaches on the other. And of course they don't have to be exclusive of each other. Her hesitation is with goody too shoes social practice that is not critical enough, and I do not think anyone really disagrees with that. 

One thing she said was that social practice often very heavily reasserts the framing device; as in some social relations are within-the-frame as relations for being transformed /constructed, while all the back-wiring of the social relations that enable the project are repressed out of the frame, and that in many cases this means the project produces and transforms a whole raft of other unintended social relations, so to keep that in mind. Especially when considering that some work can be read as a poor replacement for social services in a context where, while not conclusively, there is economic evidence to suggest that by way of neo-liberal funding models, contemporary arts has actually directly and indirectly absorbed money that has been cut from social services.