#speculativerealism

[porcileorg]

Sad Mondays #6b i)

Author: Magda Wisniowska – February, 2021.

Spinoza’s Universe Now we need to understand how Spinoza believes God’s causality works to produce a universe. (Beth Lord, Guide to Spinoza’s Ethics, 38)

The first of our diagrams can be found in Beth Lord’s guide to Spinoza’s Ethics, in the short section ‘Spinoza’s Universe.’ It aims to visualise how God’s causality works in the production of the universe, acknowledged by Lord as one of the most impenetrable topics of the Ethics. The topic is difficult for two reasons. First of all, Spinoza wants his lack of precision to reflect the understandable limitations of human knowledge. After all, there is only so much a finite mind can know of an infinite and all-encompassing God. Secondly, his very general account is intended to allow for any future scientific advances. I therefore begin to write this most reluctantly, the abstraction of what I want to present is as appealing to me as it is forbidding to most readers. 

To begin then in the most abstract of fashions, at stake in this section is the relationship between what Spinoza calls ‘God’s attributes' and the ‘modes’ in which our universe is expressed in this attribute. It concerns all the things that follow from any of God’s attributes, the effects of God’s causality when he is considered as one attribute. At this point we do not know what are these consequences of the attribute, these things, and these effects might be. We are only told that they can be eternal or finite, immediate or mediated. So accordingly, what follows from the absolute nature of God’s attributes, is the infinite and eternal thing. This is the effect of God’s causality as one attribute in the ‘immediate infinite mode.’ In turn, what follows from the immediate infinite mode, the modified effect of God’s causality is the ‘mediate infinite mode.’ Finally, we learn that what we find most graspable — all the finite things we know and recognise — come at the very end, as modes by which God's attributes are expressed in ‘a certain and determinate way.’ To offer examples of things produced immediately by God and things produced by mediation, Lord refers to the explanation given by Spinoza in his letter to Georg Hermann Schuller, 

The examples you ask for of the first kind are: in the case of thought, absolutely infinite intellect; in the case of extension, motion and rest. An example of the second kind is the face of the whole universe, which, although varying in infinite ways, yet remains always the same. (Letter 64)

There is plenty to unpack here, not the least beginning with the idea of causality. If in the Ethics, God is presented as the cause of the universe, this would seem to vindicate Kleinherenbrink’s critique: Spinoza’s is indeed a philosophy of interiority as it puts God at the heart of things. But to do so, would be to overlook the fact that for Spinoza, there is only one Substance, one God, one Nature. As Beth Lord makes abundantly clear, Spinoza’s God is not a creator in a Cartesian or even artistic sense. He is not separate from what he creates. God cannot act on something other than God —he cannot create something other than himself — because there is only one God and he encompasses everything (37). God’s causality here is not ‘transitive’ but ‘immanent’ (ibid.). God is the cause of itself and God is the cause of all things the same way he is the cause of itself (Ethics, P25S).

Thus we have to understand that Spinoza’s immanent God is both the cause and the effect of the universe, as the effects of God’s causality remains in God (Lord, 37). God is in the things he causes. As the cause of himself, he is the power of self-actualisation; as the effect of himself, he is also what he has actualised. It is not so much that Spinoza’s is a philosophy of interiority, rather that he presents a universe in which interiority and exteriority have no meaning: God is all things and God is within all things. 

The second idea we have to consider before proceeding, is that of the ‘attribute.’ Once again, Spinoza’s definition is very different from the perhaps more familiar Cartesian one, where it is defined as an essential property of a substance. For Spinoza, the attribute is ‘what the intellect perceives of the substance as constituting its essence’ (Ethics, D4). This does not mean that his definition is in any way subjective, that the attribute has something to do with how any individual intellect might perceive it. Instead, attributes are meant to be the different ways in which substance can be perceived (see Lord, 21).  As Lord argues, we can never perceive pure substance as such. Our sensory experience and thought is not such that would allow us to grasp ‘bare being’ (ibid.). Instead, we perceive being as either a physical body or a thought, an extended thing or a thinking thing.  Potentially however, it is implied that there might be any number of attributes, which we, with our limited human minds, cannot, at this point in time, conceive. 

What I want to consider here is the idea of causality in the attribute of extension — how God’s causality works to produce extended things or physical bodies. As I have already noted, there are different ways in which we can perceive the essence of substance as the extended thing or physical body. There is the finite and infinite way, the immediate and mediated. If we perceive physicality immediately, as in, most directly, taking into account the infinity of the attribute, then, as Spinoza says in his letter to Schuller, we perceive it as motion and rest. In its immediate infinite mode, this is what the body comes down to: nothing more than activity and its lack.  In terms of an interiority that isn’t, we can say that infinite motion and rest are caused by the attribute of extension’s infinite nature, meaning, infinite extended being includes, causes and expresses itself as these infinitely variable fluctuations of activity (see Lord, 39). 

On the other hand, if we perceive infinite physicality in its mediated mode, then we encounter something else, we confront what follows from the infinite immediate mode.  In Spinoza’s letter to Schuller, this is the universe’s ‘face,’ the face as it were, of God. Again it is worth noting that this example differs from the one Kleinherenbrink used to dismiss certain interpretations of Deleuze, which present him as a philosopher who sees reality as one continually flowing process. For Kleinherenbrink, this philosophy of interiority is like a tablecloth with its ‘sharp twists and folds’ (32). As he says, ‘discrete things’ might seem to be here and there, ‘but it is actually tablecloth all the way down’ (ibid.). But how often do we come across a tablecloth just lying on its own? A tablecloth always covers something, a table, a surface, a plane. Whatever folds and bumps we perceive on the fabric are the result of what we do not see, what the tablecloth hides. This is not the case with Spinoza’s face of God. The expressions that animate its features belong to the face. We cannot separate the face and its expression.  

For me, Spinoza’s face of God is Deleuze and Guattari’s Abstract Machine. One only needs to compare the two descriptions. This is Spinoza’s in a later section of the Ethics. He writes, 

And if we proceed in this way to infinity, we shall easily conceive that the whole of nature is one individual, whose parts, that is, all bodies, vary in infinite ways, without any change of the whole individual. (IIL7S) 

As Beth Lord explains, each individual in Spinoza’s universe is made up from other individuals and in turn, forms further individuals, in a series of ever increasing complexity. So for her, 

…multiple cells and microorganisms make up a fish; multiple fishes, plants, stones and water make up a river; multiple rivers, mountains and land make up the earth; multiple planets make up the universe, and so on. (40)

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari repeat Spinoza’s description almost word for word. They write,

Thus each individual is an infinite multiplicity, and the whole of Nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individuated multiplicities. The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine, abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations. (254)

An individual for Deleuze, is an infinite multiplicity, just as the whole of Nature is an infinite multiplicity. This ever expanding collection of individual multiplicities is the Abstract Machine, abstract, real, and individual. God is the cause of this Machine but not in Kleinherenbrink’s sense of relations being internal to the one term, individual modes reducible to the one substance. The Machine is the face of God, the one countenance with an infinite variety of expressions. No matter how these might change, the face remains one and the same. Even Kleinherenbrink begins his critique of interiority by acknowledging Deleuze’s ontological equality of all entities, whether these are ‘physical, chemical, fictive, organic and digital,’ to call them a machine. ‘Everything is a machine’ (2). In a Thousand Plateaus, these are Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Memories of a Spinozist,’ the machinic memories of the face of God. 

Here is the first diagram, following Beth Lord. 

[laurenlevatocoyne-blog]

Increasingly my work is about seepage, porous boundaries, our physical entanglements. This is underneath the environment I’m working on back in the home studio. . . . . #artgrad2020 #laurenlevatocoyne #newmaterialism #speculativerealism #oof #paintersofinstagram @cranbrookpainting @cranbrook_art (at Ferndale, Michigan) https://www.instagram.com/p/B-AY26XFDqg/?igshid=1ekhr2kbqdq4a

[mrkylerose]

Current reading. #reading #shortstories #inspiration #speculativefiction #speculativerealism #scifi #fantasy #magicalrealism #georgesaunders #kellylink #tobiassbuckell #fiction #shortstorycollections (at Brooklyn, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxu_GGagmWa/?igshid=l5pc7pqqdq7o

[airshipnotebooks]

Cool Instagram Post from Rob Petrie (@robpetriedesignarts)

The Currituck lighthouse is under some construction. So, inspired by a recent post by @claudio_patane , I thought of three speculative lighthouses that might provide support temporarily for their ailing sister. . . . #corollanc #outerbanks #lighthouse #illustrations #speculativerealism #watercolour #lighthousedesign #archsketch #archisketch #archdaily #justforfun ------ Original Post: https://www.instagram.com/p/BUs1Ygylj_4/

[etoiberion]

Later in the twentieth century, writers such as Gabriel García Márquez developed a writing that incorporated elements of magic and paradox. In magic realist narratives, causality departs from purely mechanical functioning, in part to resist the seeming inevitability of imperialist “reality,” in part to give voice to unspeakable things, or things that are almost impossible to speak according to imperialist ideology. Realist Magic argues that reality itself is not mechanical or linear when it comes to causality. Indeed, causality is a secretive affair, yet out in the open—an open secret. Causality is mysterious, in the original sense of the Greek mysteria, which means things that are unspeakable or secret. Mysteria is a neuter plural noun derived from muein, to close or shut. Mystery thus suggests a rich and ambiguous range of terms: secret, enclosed, withdrawn, unspeakable. [...] Things are encrypted. But the difference between standard encryption and the encryption of objects is that this is an unbreakable encryption. “Nature loves to hide” (Heraclitus).

Timothy Morton, Realist Magic Objects, Ontology, Causality

[span-arch]

Bauhaus Dessau Museum Competition Stairwell. SPAN Matias del Campo & Sandra Manninger. #museum #stair #bauhaus #dessau #hyperbole #rgb #architecture #colorscheme #architizer #archdaily #archinect #designboom #design #speculativerealism #speculation (at Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau)

[mathieubetard]

#illustration #abstract #abstractart #psychedelic #flowerpower #robbottin #art #contemporaryart #blur #overlay #artofinstagram #hifructose #heavymetal #deepweb #sleep #unknowing #color #blob #nothing #speculativerealism — view on Instagram http://bit.ly/2FbPOk3

[porcileorg]

Sad Mondays #13

Author: Magda Wisniowska – January, 2021.

Becomings-animal plunge into becomings-molecular. This raises all kinds of questions. (Thousand Plateaus, 272)

Like Deleuze and Guattari, we must begin at the end. ‘All becomings are already molecular’ they write  (ibid), including becoming-animal, and as we discussed last time, as well as  becoming-woman (see Sad Monday 12, part I and II). Becoming-woman is merely the first step towards becoming molecular that all becomings begin with and pass through. Becoming-woman is this first step because, in our world, man is ‘the molar entity par excellence’ (292), the standard on which the majority is based, and becoming-woman is the dismantling of this standard. But in the end, the woman we become is not a molar entity (that would only substitute one standard for another). Instead we become woman by entering a proximity and emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest (275). This is the zone of a ‘microfemininity’ which produces in us ‘a molecular woman’ (ibid.).

They are right to say that this raises all kinds of questions — but surely, the first must be, what are these molecules of which they speak?  What is a molecular woman, in contrast to a non-molecular one? A woman reduced to particles? And here even the least scientific of us think of bodies composed of, if not molecules exactly, then certainly atoms, held together by their different chemical bonds: atoms floating around in constant movement, electrons spinning, eventually bumping into other atoms, attracted or repelled, and at rest when a favourable bond is formed, electrons shared or transferred. This is how Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of consistency, their plane of nature, sounds like. As we know already, on this plane, 

There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds. (266)

There is an image of Deleuze’s thought which fits well with my description of a realm of molecules. This is the commonplace idea of Deleuze as a philosopher who sees reality as ‘a swirling ocean of flows, events, intensities, and processes’ (Kleinherenbrink, 31). As Arjen Kleinherenbrink argues in his book ‘Against Continuity, Gilles Deleuze’s Speculative Realism,’ in this particular interpretation of Deleuzian thought, while the outside world may present itself as consisting of individual and external entities, ontologically however, it consists of an intensive, virtual realm of flows and processes. In other words, ontologically speaking it is our world of unformed molecules in movement. The image Kleinherenbrink uses to explain this interpretation is of a tablecloth (32). The outside world’s apparent discreteness is no different than its twists and folds. There might seem to be things ‘here or there’ but straighten the cloth out a bit and pull it across, and you see that there is nothing other than cloth ‘all the way down’ (ibid.). Not a plan but a plane of consistency.

In these interpretations, becoming-woman would be the smoothing, ironing out of the kinks to see the ontological fabric of life better. Certainly, this cloth metaphor seems pertinent to my description of the zig-zaging of man’s becoming-woman and woman’s becoming-animal as the adoption of a disguise (see Sad Mondays 12, part I and II) . In this process of becoming-molecular, we —both as men and as women— lift the cloth and hide underneath, somewhat like ontological ghosts, intent on becoming one with the matter of our camouflage. 

But to think of Deleuze’s philosophy in this way, as espousing a world of atomic particles that underpins the perception of all matter, is according to Kleinherenbrink, a profound mistake. There is no tablecloth, no separation of realms into actual and virtual, no intensities, no flows and no processes. For a separation into two realms would violate one fundamental Deleuzian principle: no interiority. To posit such a realm behind the world of apparent concrete entities, is to present these entities as representations of that other, more elementary realm. How entities are, in their discreteness, individuality and externality, would be accounted for by something else that allows for their interaction, change and development (ibid. 34). Entities would be nothing in themselves, merely flawed and incomplete manifestations of this other force.

What then is the question of the molecular?

[guariglia]

Just arrived HUMANKIND by @tim303 - meanwhile our beloved author is in Houston, smack in the middle of one of the most epic flood events in recent history. Not to mention, Amazon doing their best here to cause more flooding through their amazing efficiency in packing. #humankind #timothymorton #anthropocene #ooo #speculativerealism #thebeginningoftheend (at South Slope, Brooklyn)

[uhsomeusername22-blog]

Shaviro (2014) - The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism

[imaginationof]

Speculative Realism introduction for the artist and the designer.

[porcileorg]

Ambivalent about Realism

Author: Magda Wisniowska - August, 2020.

Questioning the role of aesthetic practices in speculative realist thought, this short essay examines the philosophical concern with realism through the example of a recent installation by Kalas Liebfried, focusing on its use of ambience.

Contemporary art has been quick to take up speculative realist concerns, the first significant exhibition, “The Real Things,” already taking place in Tate Britain in 2010, only three years after the philosophical movement was first named. By 2013, the entire Documenta (13) was dedicated to restoring the significance to the inanimate object, with no less than 400 hundred of Korbinian Aigner’s drawings of apples on display at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum to bear witness to the object’s trauma. The argument, often rehearsed but less frequently examined, is that the object has suffered long enough as the privileged site of human comprehension, its meaning confined to that bestowed by the human subject. Always the political saviour, art is to take up the speculative realist task of thinking the object’s reality outside of this subjective relation, to somehow reproduce a non-relational reality, untainted by our experience of it.

This sort of speculative realist position is problematic and not just because of the anthropomorphism it often unwittingly displays, in the above case, the attribution of human trauma to the nonhuman actor of the apple. As Suhail Malik argues in his essay, “Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art,” to make speculative realist art is the ultimate destructive gesture, for it would destroy all we currently know of art (Realism Materialism Art, 185).

According to Malik, ever since Allan Kaprow’s retrospective affirmation of Duchampian ideas, a certain kind of aesthetic experience has been at the forefront of contemporary art. To the question, “what does the artwork mean?”, contemporary art has no answer. Instead the viewer is left to decide the work’s meaning, constrained to some degree by its subject matter, its material organisation, and background information. The viewer is required to respond to the work of art, with the response producing a shift in their system of ideas or values. This transformative process impacts the work as much as the viewer, the object only “brought to life as an artwork” in the viewer’s confrontation with it (ibid.). That the reality of art can only be apprehended by a thinking consciousness, which then necessarily always accompanies it, affirms and reproduces what speculative realists call correlationism. For the correlationist, any account of reality is an account of how a reality is known. Our experience of reality is what constitutes it as such (ibid.).

The correlationism of this kind of aesthetic experience is the reason why contemporary art has to be vague, with artists being described as having an “interest” and exhibitions as “exploring” a topic (ibid. 186); it is also why philosophical accounts, such as those by Rancière, Lyotard, Badiou, or Deleuze, which emphasise the non-conceptual and indeterminate nature of the aesthetic experience, proliferate. The art historical concern with materiality, Krauss’s and Bois’s mobilisation of meaningless matter, would again fall under this correlationist spell. Malik argues that in all these cases, the object is deliberately left obscure in order to make room for the viewer, so that they have sufficient space to be able to construct the work’s meaning. A realism on the other hand, which claims to apprehend the real outside the conditions of subjective experience, must reject the anti-conceptual and experiential. Which leads Malik to conclude that speculative realism, in its rejection of correlationism, indicates the conditions for another, different kind of art. This kind of art cannot be open-ended, questioning and mildly confrontational. It must be an art that apprehends reality rationally, producing a new kind of rational realism.

For Malik, a possible realist art can be found in post-Conceptual instruction pieces by Robert Morris or Sol LeWitt, that despite lending themselves to completion in subjective experience, do not require this experience in order to be known as art. I would like to turn to work by Munich-based artist Kalas Liebfried, whose various installations and performances address speculative realist concerns, especially the need to think outside of correlationism, but also acknowledge the deeply experiential nature of contemporary art and with it, the difficulty of rejecting aesthetic experience. I would like to focus on two recent exhibitions of the artist, the sound piece that was part of the “Iconic Air” installation at Munich’s BBK yearly Tacker event (see installation viewhttps://kalasliebfried.com/iconic-air/), and his performance at the Lenbachhaus, “Ports in Transition.” (see excerpt onhttps://kalasliebfried.com/ports-in-transition/andhttps://vimeo.com/395648614). While the work might seem somewhat familiar in its use of art historical conventions (the installation, the monitor, the projection, the loudspeaker) it is innovative in the way it makes certain philosophical points.

It also must be acknowledged that Tacker, a group exhibition in Munich which includes all the artists shortlisted for the DebütanInnen and Die Ersten Jahre der Professionalität funding programmes is a necessarily flawed exhibition. The artists do not have a choice of space and have only a limited time for set up. Liebfried was assigned a middle room and his installation, “Iconic Air” took up one long wall. It consisted of large video projection, a projector stand, a monitor and a loudspeaker, two theatrically lit canvases, and a number of black rubber exercise balls. Some of the work, such as the paintings, gave a bit of context to the installation; the exercise balls felt like props demarcating the space. Most interesting was the sound piece, experienced across the loudspeaker and a monitor displaying the spoken text.

The text is read aloud by a male voice. The accent is unusual, being British-received pronunciation with an old-fashioned inflection, recalling a BBC newsreader from the 1950s or 60s. The text with its references to space, magnetic fields, and superheated matter, seems scientific, dealing with astrophysics, but there also is a strong human, biological element. The seriousness of voice, as well as its slight pomposity, gives the impression that we are presented with a historical recording from the early days of space exploration. This is further emphasised by the monitor and loudspeaker, which again are old-fashioned, recalling Nam June Paik installations of the same time period. In actuality, the text is far more recent, announcing the first image of a black hole using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the centre of the galaxy M87 in 2019. We do not hear the voice of Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, who was speaking to the press at the time, but that generated by a sophisticated software program. The text is real, the voice is not, but with one other significant modification. Liebfried replaces every single reference to the “black hole” with one to the “self.” So it is not,

If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow.

but instead,

If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect ourselves to create a dark region similar to a spherical shadow.

For Liebfried, this interchangeability between the self and the other, the human and the nonhuman, the terrestrial and the cosmic, is indicative of a common ground. Bringing to mind theories first proposed by Peter Sloterdijk, Liebfried writes of a future in which everything will adopt the dynamic shape of a sphere, the living and non-living fusing together, overcoming the separation of nature and culture. This for him, is an ambient environment in which everything is connected and in constant communication with each other, describing it as a techno-animism or a trans-humanism (see https://kalasliebfried.com/iconic-air/). I however, like to think of his work in more speculative realist terms, as demonstrating the fundamental difficulty of thinking outside of the correlationist bind. In this, the idea of ambience also has a strong part to play.

The image of a black hole lends itself to speculative realist thought. Like Meillassoux’s arche-fossil or Brassier’s death of the sun, it exemplifies a knowledge that we as humans cannot experience. Even the technology used to produce this image only records the effects of the unknown onto the known. Replacing the scientist’s voice with a computer generated one again makes this gesture towards the nonhuman. The other elements of the installation, the video with its clips of fighter jets breaking the sound barrier and beads of sweat gathering on finger tips, the spherical exercise balls dotted around the space, the paintings with their formal abstraction recalling the composite images of telescope and satellite data — all meant to convey this idea of a sphere in which the human and nonhuman merge as one — have speculative realist undertones in that they offer a holistic, planetary perspective. But Liebfried grounds these flights into the cosmic and the digital, firmly within the experiential. By replacing the “black hole” with the “self” he shows that the way science describes the black hole is very much anthropomorphic, its language firmly rooted in the human. Similarly, the most sophisticated and cutting edge digital technology can be used to replicate a historical human voice from the 1950s. Liebfried shows how human history infiltrates technology, the cutting edge becoming first conventional and then very soon outmoded, an object of our nostalgia. And as much as the idea of the sphere is to offer a non-anthropocentric approach, it is one where the non-human merges with the human, as much as the human with the non-human.

His work then, cannot be seen as rejecting contemporary art for its aesthetic qualities in order to pursue an art of rational knowledge. In Malik’s sense, Liebfried’s cannot be described as a realist endeavour. Yet neither does Liebfried’s work seem to demand a return to an aesthetics, which would affirm the position of the viewer, putting the viewer’s conscious experience at the centre of contemporary art. If anything, the interchangeability of the black hole and the self shows the difficulty of making such a rejection, the impossibility of tearing away from the experiential, which will always seek to reassert itself.

What makes Liebfried's work interesting, is his recognition of “ambience” as a means of complicating this perhaps over simplistic opposition between the rational mind and the conscious one. When we listen to Liebfried’s piece, we cannot be unaware of the video projection accompanying it, just at the edge of our peripheral vision. Images of various objects tearing through air — fighter planes, bullets, moths — combined with closeups of spheres — whether of oil droplets penetrating a water meniscus or of loudspeakers vibrating — come and go, without ever fully gaining our attention. The projection’s accompanying sound also invades and interrupts the reading of the text. The words are almost unrecognisable, spilling into one another — “I don’t care” becoming “Iconic air.” Liebfried also uses a similar strategy during his performance at the Lenbachhaus, in which the audience listened to ambient music through headphones, while the performers communicated with each other by walkie-talkie. Static caused by the proximity to a group of loudspeakers further interrupted both the performer’s communications and our experience of listening to the music.

How Leibniz distinguishes between the clear, the confused, the distinct, and the obscure, offers a useful way of thinking this kind of immersive yet peripheral sound. In what seems to the uninitiated as very counter intuitive, Leibniz argues that clear ideas are always also confused, in that ideas are only clear because they are confused (and consequently distinct ones are always obscure). This does not mean that there is some fault on our part, that we do not know the idea adequately and this is why it is confused. To explain, Leibniz gives the example of our perception of the waves at the seashore. The sound we hear is clear — we clearly hear the waves breaking. But obviously we do not hear each individual wave, only the confused noise of one wave merging into another. And yet we also perceive those individual waves, even the sounds of each individual water molecule; we simply do not do so consciously. Those sounds are there, each distinct one, but they are obscure to us. Deleuze would say there is a difference in kind between the clear-confused and obscure-distinct, and it is those little perceptions making up the whole noise that grasp differential relations and singularities. Undifferentiated, they are obscure and not actualised (Difference and Repetition, 213). The threshold of consciousness is determined when these undifferentiated sounds become actualised in apperception (ibid.).

If we return to Liebfried’s work, we can see how ambient sound works in a comparable way to the ocean murmur. By definition, ambient sound is not something we focus on. It is ambient, all around, undifferentiated. We hear a noise, but this noise is confused. It is also a sound which we do not really listen to. It is meant to be there in the background, accompanying us in our daily lives, unobtrusively, in elevators, restaurants, shopping malls. And because it is not consciously experienced, ambient sound takes us outside of ourselves. The self of the ambient sound does not yet have the unity of the conscious subject, but is a collective of any number of passive, fragmentary selves of the sensible body. The same argument can be applied to visual perceptions. In the way the images interact with both us, the viewer, and with the surrounding components of the “Iconic Air” installation, Liebfried’s video could be described as an amalgam of peripheral images, mostly stock footage of waves, spheres, particles moving across the screen. Indeed, the entire logic of Liebfried’s work relies on this ambient quality, one element of the installation always intruding, almost unwanted on another.

The question remains of how we choose to understand this kind of ambience. For the phenomenologist, especially a reader of Merleau-Ponty, it recalls the unity found in the reversible self of sensation, a self understood as a constant passage of sensation, one body always contaminated by another. These selves only find unity insofar they slide outside themselves into one another in the midst of perception (see Jonathan Barker, “Resolving the paradox of phenomenology through Kant’s aesthetics: between Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze”). How Liebfried describes the sphere as a common ground between the self and the other, certainly lends itself to such a phenomenological interpretation.

It could also, however, be read more ontologically, as part of speculative realist strategy, one that utilises rather than rejects the experiential quality of art. In order to think that which cannot be experienced, like in this case, the black hole, one can approach the problem rationally. This would be the approach of the scientists working on the project Event Horizon, who by merging telescopic and satellite data are able to produce an image of something that no human eye can see. Nonetheless, as Liebfried’s work shows, science itself is not immune against the anthropomorphic and anthropocentric. Furthermore, those speculative realist accounts which privilege the rational also tend to neglect the irrational or unconsciousness, assigning it to the all-prevalent correlationism structuring our relation to the world. The use of ambience is not so much about giving the unconscious its due, but about producing non-experience. If speculative realism aims to think rationally about a real that cannot be experienced, Liebfried works with what is not experienced in experience. He recognises that the non-experience of ambient sound can bypass the conscious mind to both take us away from ourselves and bring us closer to the outside world, even if this world of non-experience still succumbs to the structures of our perception. For Liebfried ambience demonstrates the ultimate unity of man and the other, gathered together in the form of the sphere. I like to think that the non-experience evoked by ambient sound demonstrates a lack of continuity, what Deleuze would call a difference in kind, not only between that which is experienced and that known, but between thought, the body, the perceived and the conscious. In this fourfold sense, it points to the non-relational to resonate with speculative realism’s pursuit of realism.

[bobbyjgeorge]

A Time For Everything

Timothy Morton is exactly right: "This is the sort of thing that makes you very happy to be Graham's friend. I don't know that many people who can talk like that from index cards. Actually I don't know anyone who can do that, to that level." This is also a perfect introduction to the world of Harman.

[urbanlabglobalcities]

Architecture is not something to be thought or produced for later, like the standard-bearer for a morality. It can only be negotiated live, in its contingency on a situation and its solubility in a set of givens.

François Roche | (Science) Fiction, Ecophysical Apparatus and Skizoid Machines: Animism, Vitalism and Machinism as a way to rearticulate the need to confront the unknown in a contradictory manner || Architectural Design, Ecodux, November-December 2010, Vol. 80, Issue 6, 66