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Bruno Latour's Introduction to 2005 exhibition: Making things Public'

This is a note to self really but worth sharing, since this 2005 article came to me as a complete surprise and consolidate thoughts I've had spinning around a long time but in inchoate form.

The essay is:

From Realpolitick to Dingpolitick: or How to make things Public Available 

http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/96-MTP-DING.pdf (Accessed 20/11/18)

The linked issues I want to note, perhaps for later use, relate to Latour’s complex presentation of issues of representation (that combine the ideas of political and mimetic representation) and the nature of a true assembly (whether that be a matter of composition or democratic politics).

 

1.     Representation & Assembly:

 

I’ve noted pp. 6, 14, 16 and 25f.

Here are some quotations (no synthesis as yet in this tired old brain):

‘Procedures to authorize and legitimize are important, but it’s only half of what is needed to assemble. The other half lives in the issues themselves, in the matters that matter, in the res that causes a public around it. They need to be represented, authorized, legitimated and brought to bear inside the relevant assembly.

… (6)

2.      Representation

…bring together two very different meanings of the word representation that have been kept separate in theory although they have remained always mixed in practice. (6)

Questions we address are to the three types of representation brought together in this show: political, scientific and artistic. (14)

Then read on.

Politicians sell a problem (re – thing). :

…to the general public under the name of a faithful, transparent and accurate representation. We are asking from representation something it cannot possibly give, namely representation without any re-presentation, without any provisional assertions, without any imperfect proof, without any opaque layers of translations, transmissions, betrayals. Without any complicated machinery of assembly. (16)

Iconoclash

3.      Assembly

To assemble is one thing: to represent to the eyes and ears of those assembled what is at stake is another. An object-oriented democracy should be concerned as much by the procedure to detect the relevant parties as to the methods to bring into the center of the debate the proof of what is to be debated.’ (7)

& note things imply both unity and division around their meaning and application.

The point of reviving this old etymology is that we don’t assemble because we agree, look alike, feel good, are socially compatible or wish to fuse together but because we are brought by divisive matters of concern into some neutral, isolated place in order to come to some sort of provisional makeshift (dis)agreement. (13)

At the centre – the Ding: Heideger-ian ‘gatherings’

If the demos is such a welcome solution, it’s because it also divides into two. A paradox? No, it’s because we are ourselves are so divided by so many contradictory elements that we have to assemble.  (14)

What would a truly contemporary style of assembly look like. / It’s impossible to answer this question without gathering techniques of representation in different types of assemblies. …

One of those attempts is to design not one assembly but rather an assembly of assemblies, so that much like a fair, visitors or readers can compare the different types of representation. (21)

AND NOTE THE Double-edge of composition here – representations and assemblies!!!!

… as if we could abandon for good the task of composition. There must be some alternative to cheap universalism …. (25)

NEEDS WORK!