brogan bunt

The theme of human ignorance and illusion:

In his Theogony, a cosmological account of the universe and the Greek gods, Hesiod writes of living as a shepherd in the mountains and learning the story of the world from the Daughters of Zeus (the Muses of Olympus). Their first words to him are:

Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things.¹

Hesiod is in no position to perceive the cosmological truth himself. The Muses regard him as a low, morally reproachable and merely appetitive being. He lives, but without any capacity to lift himself from the ignorance of sensate life. The Muses know the truth, yet they can always lie and dissimulate just as well as communicate the genuine nature of things. Humanity then inhabits a space that is removed from the truth, that is beneath it – inferior to it – and characterised by the blindness of ordinary perception. Any access to the truth is only available via the whim of the gods, and there is no certainty that the truth obtained is truth as such or only illusion.

Hesiod’s cosmology comes from 700BC, but the essential contours of its epistemological vision remain relevant today.

So what is the everyday? Leaving aside the long tradition of theoretical inquiry into the nature of the everyday, there would seem to be a need for some simple effort at definition, whilst also, of course, acknowledging the notion’s resistance to definition.

The everyday is anything that you wouldn’t be bothered photographing, that you wouldn’t even think to point a camera at, or to describe in a story to a friend. You might instead refer to it negatively, as in saying that “I have done nothing all morning.” In other words, nothing worth mentioning, just the usual. Just that which can be assumed, that which we have in common.

The everyday does not take shape as a significant event. It is not the assassination of a president or revolutionary struggle in the streets of Cairo. It is not anything that warrants a place on an historical timeline. Of course, within the texture of historical events, the everyday can also appear – as the banal, as dead time, as the intrusion, weight or surprise of normalacy.

The everyday is also not a family birthday party. It is not a trip to Europe. It is not your first day at school. It is the ordinary time between, or at times within, those special events. It is the time where you spend most of your time. It is the background time that enables special events to gain their distinctive identity.

In geological terms, the everyday can be likened to sedimentation and to weathering. It is not the cataclysmic event – the volcano or the earthquake – but instead the slow, imperceptible laying down or wearing away of deposits.

The everyday affects the structure of cities, of homes, of bodies, but never takes the form of a visionary plan or a blueprint. The everyday is linked to micro-level decisions (what Certeau calls “tactics”). It has emergent properties, but these are never directly highlighted or reflected upon. When emergence takes shape as an event, it is always beyond the contours of the everyday.

The everyday appears in league with the habitual, but the repetition this entails, however apparently secure and seamless, is always imperfect, always subject to the exigencies of particular moments of performance. The everyday, despite its predictable character, is never a space of absolute determination. It undoes the absolute less by explicitly resisting it than by setting it in place, setting it in motion.

The everyday is the unremarkable dimension of life, yet it is life precisely, and in this sense remarkable – even if there is no adequate way of making this apparent, even if the everyday is bound to a contract with blindness.

Let’s also begin by listing four key issues and points of access:

1. questioning the autonomy of art: this relates to the tradition of avant-garde efforts to re-integrate art within life, to question its notional autonomy (as theorised, for instance, within, Kantian aesthetics). Start typically with Dada and Russian Constructivism, leap ahead to Situationism, Cage, Kaprow, etc. Also worth drawing in Benjamin, Adorno and Burger (The Theory of the Avant-garde). May also be worth sketch a more general context – the notion of aesthetics in Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750), denoting a form of non-intellectual judgement. Aesthetics designates the problematic sphere of sensory experience – fundamental to human life and yet awkward to intellectualise. Here aesthetic theory gains an affinity with efforts to theorise the terrain of everyday life. Both forms of theory describe a field vital experience resistent to abstract conceptualisation. Ben Highmore emphasises this correlation when he draws upon the notion of the aesthetic as a means of exploring fundamental features of the everyday.
2. alienation and the problem of conceiving the everyday: this is a more general, less specifically art focused, tradition of debate. The first volume of Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life draws heavily upon the Marxist notion of alienation. Alienation is a complex concept. At one level it denotes a form of misrecognition, in which aspects of labour and lived experience are detached from genuine interests. In this guise, it appears as a kind of ideological Plato’s cave in which the capitalist subject inhabits a realm of shadows and is unable to properly recognise authentic material relations and interests. However, alienation also represents the nagging awareness that this is the case – the dreamer’s sense that they are dreaming, their nagging sense of emptiness, futility and fragmentation. Lefebvre acknowledges the force of alienation but insists that the only true terrain of existence is within the everyday. There is nothing outside the cave. There is no alternative site of true experience. Apart from whatever revolutionary (non-everyday) dimensions of social change that can be wrought, there is a need to somehow re-imagine and rework the conditions of actual existence. The problem then is of how to re-interpret the everyday – how to think and perceive it. All efforts to render the everyday statistically, or in terms of some particular political, cultural or sociological lens, end up missing the opaque, discursively silent character of the everyday. In later volumes of the Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre drops the concern with alienation. The problem is no longer conceived in terms of the standard opposition between truth and illusion, but in terms of the need to evolve effective means of thinking the real, inherently resistive and intractable nature of the everyday.
3. representing the everyday: art then emerges as a specific means of engaging with the everyday – initially of making it visible. One of the main techniques, for instance, is the Russian Constructivist notion of ostranenie (defamiliarisation or ‘making strange’) (Shklovsky). The photographic work of Rodchenko provides a classic example, with its disorienting angles, dynamic compositions and foreshortened scales. It is interesting to note that ostranenie bears a close resemblance to the very phenomenon it sets out to resist. The Marxist notion of Entfremdung (alienation) can also be translated as estrangement. So the alienation that holds people in systematic thrall becomes, within the sphere of art, the means of enabling a transformation of perception. Many other strategies, of course, of representing the everyday emerge. The work of Georges Perec, for instance, provides a whole catalogue of alternative possibilities – from the flat and idiosyncratic observation of An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris to the subtle mediation of personal and popular dimensions of memory in Je Me Souviens. Perec employs methods of wayward ethnographic fieldwork and mobilises all kinds of literary constraints and devices to facilitate often indirect means of insight into the all too present, all too invisible aspects of the everyday. The paradoxical issue here is of discovering effective means to represent the unrepresentable.
4. intervention – modeling sociability: we move from the problem of representation to that of intervention. Linking back to the avant-garde effort to re-integrate art within life – or to use art as a means of reinventing life, or life as a means of revitalising art – the issue here, in the same instant, is to transform both art and life. The twin Situationist strategies, for instance, of the derive and detournement are not about representation, but about transforming experience itself. They take emblematic form in the practice of psychogeography, in which absurd rules for navigating urban space enable a radical re-appropriation and re-articulation of the contours and possibilities of urban cultural experience. It is these kinds of strategies, but with much less sense of cynical antagonism and revolutionary hope, that inform 90s relational aesthetic and current social-practice based art. In his description of relational aesthetics, Bourriaud positions this practice as a means of relocating contemporary informational-networked forms of production within art, removing them from their directly technological context and turning them to the task of imagining and projecting new models of sociability.

So let’s begin with a very meagerly annotated reading list. Some of the annotations, I’m afraid, will be very brief indeed. I will make no effort to distinguish between different disciplines or even between critical and literary sources.

1. Bakhtin, Mikhail 1993 Rabelais and His World Indiana University Press, Bloomington
   Originally published in 1941, this work represents a veiled critique of Stalinism. It examines how popular medieval traditions of carnival – as evident in the work of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantegruel (16th century) – worked to resist the dominant power of the Church. Rather than directly resisting this power, carnival demonstrates strategies of inversion, parody and material, bodily humour, manifesting an alternative, experientially grounded, profoundly playful, creative and participatory, conception of life. The underlying suggestion, applied in the modern context, is that regimes of autocratic state power can never entirely dominate popular culture.
2. Voloshinov, Valentin 1973 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Harvard University Press.
   Written in the 1920s, Voloshinov’s work is relevant in terms of his argument against Ferdinand Saussure’s concept of language as an abstract, synchronic system. Instead language is conceived as a material social process, embodying aspects of class struggle. This can be likened to notions of the way in which everyday life, although shaped by conditions of power and ideology, acts as a terrain of micro-level contestation and tactical resistance (see, for instance, Certeau). Some critics argue that Volushinov was a nom de plume for Mikhail Bakhtin.

More soon.

Social Intersections is a new subject running this session exploring notions of art as social practice. Practical creative work is informed by an examination of contemporary relational aesthetic practice and a broad survey of various traditions informing contemporary efforts to re-examine and re-vitalise the relationship between art and everyday life. In preparation for the latter, I have been doing my best to acquaint myself with the standard canon of sociological, cultural-ethnographic, philosophical, literary and art-theoretical readings that reflect on art and everyday life. My aim here in this series of posts is to sketch a rough overview of the field, mapping out key readings, arguments, issues and themes. There will be many blank patches, smudges and distortions, as well as overly thick and whispy thin lines.

I’m on the editorial panel for an upcoming conference, The Second International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections between Art, Science and Culture (22-23 June 2012, Victorian College of the Arts (http://blogs.unsw.edu.au/tiic/), which aims to explore “the theme of ‘interference’ within practices of contemporary image making”. Describing a general cultural context of image proliferation (“pollution”) via “machinic interpretations of the visual and sensorial experience of the world”, it sets out to explore the potential for art to “interfere with the chaotic storms of data visualization and information processing”, “disrupting and critiquing the continual flood of constructed imagery”. The alternative to the “tactic of interference”, the conference call suggests, is that art ends up “merely euologizing contemporary media.”

Here are some very preliminary thoughts.

Firstly, the description of the alternative interests me. Why “eulogizing” and what precisely is being eulogized? Is the eulogy for prior forms of more restricted, humanly based forms of media, which are somehow swamped by the deluge of contemporary image-making, or is the eulogy for the sense of utopian, critical hope once associated with mechanical and electronic image modes of image production and dissemination, or could the eulogy perhaps be for the image itself, as something that can take constitutive form as piece of media, that has not simply been absorbed into intrinsically mediated everyday life? In relation to the latter interpretation, Siegfried Zielinski argues that the concern with media belongs to the last century:

The twenty-first century will not have the same craving for media. As a matter of course, they will be a part of everyday life, like the railways in the nineteenth century or the introduction of electricity into private households in the twentieth. ¹

This idea of relating media to everyday life – of the problem of the everyday, following the tradition of work, for instance, of Baudelaire, Breton, Shklovsky, Lefebvre, Blanchot, Debord, Certeau, Perec, etc., etc. – seems very interesting, particularly because it acknowledges the opacity of media, the awkwardness of critical apprehension:

[W]e swim in it like the fish in the ocean, it is essential for us, and for this reason it is ultimately inaccessible to us. All we can do is make certain cuts across it to gain operational access. ²

This sense of the aporiatic character of media – its intimate necessity and the correlative blindness that this entails – has implications for conceiving interference as some kind of critical-aesthetic tactic of resistance. In what sense can art lay claim to interference? In what sense can it be positioned as a critical-aesthetic tactic? I am thinking, for instance, of how Serres describes interference – in the sense of noise and parasite – as generally constitutive of communication. Interference, for Serres, is not something applied from without to media but is instead fundamental to media itself.³ So then, at the very least, we would need to find means to distinguish between deliberate interference and the interference that is already shaping contemporary image-making. I am not sure that is possible without falling into the trap of envisaging art’s potential to facilitate a neatly privileged critical perspective, to somehow remove itself from the problem of media opacity. The kinds of local level tactics that Certeau envisages in his conception of everyday life – arise within the texture of street-level interaction.⁴ They are a function of the passage of any general productive strategy through the realm of the lived – via idiosyncratic implementation, slight deviation, entropic repetition, etc. Above all, they are distinguished from simply oppositional strategies, which share the same globalising tendencies as the productive forces that they set out to resist. The notion of interference – critical-aesthetic interference – seems to waver between these two poles, between appearing as a strategic perspective and risking its dissolution, its critical opaqueness, as a form of tactical interaction.

The field of operation always remains out of view. Even when apparently visible, operation withdraws. It withdraws by dutifully following and, in following, it charts a plane of performance that can be mapped but never encompassed. No matter how well I know the underlying mechanism, no matter that I built it by hand and shaped all its functions, once it runs it escapes me. It becomes something other. It obeys mutely. It carries my instructions off to another place. Operation is a species of blindness, and I too am bound to this blindness. It is what draws me to articulate systems and then, in the very moment that they gain their curious life, to recognise their disappearance, their transition away from any prospect of adequate comprehension.

[Certeau describes culture as the "oceanic night"¹. This metaphor is apt for the field of operation as well.]

[I am very aware that I am conceiving operation in terms of the romantic language of blindness, otherness and aporia. Is this to devalue and fail to recognise the banality of operation?]

How to conceive the space of operation? I am thinking of the operation of the Loom subdivision algorithms – their actual running. Can the sphere of operation be conceived in terms of Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole – with the underlying algorithms representing the systematic character of language and their concrete operation representing the sphere of speech (performance)? An important issue, however, is that while Saussure positions parole as essentially derivative of the abstractly constituted and notionally finite linguistic system, more recent theorists have stressed how performance itself works to transform langue. The actual historical process of speech no longer appears entirely subservient to the underlying system. This is evident, for instance, in Certeau’s emphasis on the various complex micro-level tactics of resistance that remove cultural processes of consumption from any simple domination by systems of production (strategic power), distancing consumption from any sense of passive operation – positioning it instead as active, interpretive and resistive.¹ We can also think of Serres notion of parasitical noise, in which the purity of a message is inevitably preyed upon as soon as it ventures within the play of mediation.² Noise, as entropy, as indirection, as material filter undermines the autonomy and constitutive force of any framework of abstract determination. In the case of Certeau, systemicity is upset by the dimension of social praxis. Serres points to more general and more directly material forces. It seems harder to apply Certeau’s conception of resistance to computational operation – where, after all, can we recognise anything like the small, idiosyncratic tactics of human consumption within the whirling space of binary processes? Where is there scope for idioms of freedom and play, except in the sense of a failure of operation (program logic errors, input-output errors, basic technical faults, etc.)? Serres conception of noise seems more relevant, except that my interest is less in stressing all the deviations from proper program operation than of pinpointing a work of operation that obeys all the rules and yet still retains its alien, impenetrable character. Parole (program operation) relates to langue (programmatic system) as an abyss, as something that summons the need for systems and also motions beyond them – motioning precisely through a faultless play of operation. Operation, in this sense, is aporiatic.

[Art apparently draws light from darkness, dispels the clouds of habitual perception and wards off the prospect off a living death. In short, it enlightens. At the same time, however, rather than simply opposing or sublating the figures of darkness, habit and death, art encounters these exterior threats within itself and becomes caught up in their operations. Art discovers its own inner estrangement, which infinitely complicates the hope for enlightenment.]

[My aim is to question the complacent sense of a critical art and to acknowledge the vital/deathly space of the uncritical within art.]

Art is associated with making things visible. The notion of visibility serves here as a metaphor for a work of revealing (Heidegger employs the Greek term, aletheia¹) that can take all manner of sensible and conceptual forms. How are we to make sense of this revealing ? Does it involve tearing away the veils which obscure an underlying truth or, on the contrary, staging the display of truth by fashioning further veils? In some ways there is no need to decide, because even in the form of veiled display, art preserves a sense of unveiling. Even in the guise of dream and illusion it insists upon the possibility of revelatory awakening. The hope that art genuinely entails, particularly within modernity, is of becoming aware, coming into perception and consciousness, coming into vivid lived experience. Within this context, the aletheia of art gains meaning precisely in contrast to its opposite – the habitual character of ordinary experience; the latter’s dimension of blindness, unconsciousness, automation and death.

Consider, for instance, Russian Formalist, Viktor Shklovsky’s, theory of estrangement (ostranenie). Shklovsky associates aesthetic experience with a renewed affective perception of the world. Our ordinary experience of things is disrupted so that it can suddenly appear in a new light. This is in contrast to modes of everyday experience, which he regards as habitual and semi-automatic. For the most part, he argues, we recognise things in terms of their general characteristics – their approximation to generic constructs – rather than in terms of their perceptual specificity and novelty. He contrasts a generic, “algebraic” mode of thought to a perceptively open mode of being. He links algebraic identity, despite its conceptual abstraction, to a sense of nothingness and unconsciousness. Here he quotes from Tolstoy, who relates a story of having cleaned his house and forgotten whether he had dusted the sofa: “[I]f I had in fact dusted the sofa and forgotten that I had done so, i.e., if I had acted unconsciously, then this is tantamount to not having done it at all.” The general lesson that Tolstoy draws from this is that “[I]f the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it’s as if this life had never been.” Shklovsky introduces his notion of ostranenie precisely as an alternative to habitual life: “[A]nd so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.” In its crucial role of renewing perception, of revealing the genuine complexity and potential of the world, art functions then to fight off the ever present risk of unreflective, automatic experience – life abstracted, life as death.²

[The notion of estrangement retains a persistent force within modern and contemporary art. However, it can hardly be said to constitute anything like a universal aesthetic principle. Medieval art, for instance, is full of stock types and standard modes of representation. It constantly mingles aspects of recognition and revelatory wonder. Elements of conventional iconography and impersonal craft-based process appear as the vital foundation for spiritual-aesthetic experience. Indeed all manner of traditional and contemporary cultural forms depend upon repetition, recognition and de-individualised craft. Difference and change need not be deliberately deployed. They occur within the grain of repetition itself, within the impossibility of pure repetition. Although popular, typically oral, cultural forms tend to be devalued, they arguably represent a much more nuanced relationship between issue of novelty and continuity, unconscious process and reflective insight, than is found within the modernist conception of aesthetic estrangement. It is finally worth noting that Shklovsky's fear of algebraic experience is very much linked to a negative, modern conception of the habitual - of the apparent unconsciousness and loss it entails. Unconsciousness, loss, absorption within larger iterative patterns can also be regarded more positively as constitutive means of coming into being, of engaging with the ambiguous, evanescent nature of manifestation and identity.]

Andrei Rublev, The Trinity, 1410

[And things become even more wayward after here...]

It is not such a big step from the demand for perceptual revelation to the demand for critical revelation. The Russian Constructivists, for example, regarded perceptual transformation as a crucial basis for revolutionary political transformation. In this manner, the terrain of visibility, of revealing, comes to extend beyond the senses as such to encompass every dimension of experience. The contemporary emphasis on the ‘critical’ potential of art indicates this conception of art’s capacity to prod one awake from the uncritical death of ordinary existence.

The problem, of course, is that the relationship between the blindness of unconscious everyday life and the revelatory critical sphere of art is awkward and complex. The two are not simply opposed. Some obvious examples: Nietzsche’s sense of the coupling of Dionysian and Apollonian tendencies in Greek tragedy; the Surrealists’ concern with dreams, automatic writing and revelation; Georges Bataille’s parodic inversion of the Hegelian dialectic (in which moments of insight becomes indistinguishable from moments of sacrifice and convulsion and in which in which the reflective, meditative serenity of the sun is reinterpreted as an exploding anus); Maurice Blanchot’s notion of an orientation towards blindness within art (art’s impossible concern to render that blindness properly); Jacques Derrida’s efforts to chart the critical aporia within the tradition of western philosophy; and Roland Barthes’s characteristically modern dilemma in the Pleasure of the Text: “So, nothing happens. This nothing has nonetheless to be expressed. How can one express nothing?”

So where is this leading? Towards arguing for an acknowledgment of the place of unconscious process in art. Towards questioning the conventional sense of art as totally oriented towards revelation and insight. More specifically, towards recognising the intimate relation between the dimensions of habitual, unconscious process and dimensions of art-making. More specifically again, to acknowledge the relationship to mechanism – the inhumanity, the alterity of mechanism – within aspects of art-making itself.

[This also necessarily involves re-conceiving the relationship to whatever it is that art is said to provide an insight into. Very often, for instance, art is positioned as a means of reflection on something or other, or revealing it properly so that it can be judged and assessed. This is certainly how much critical technological art is positioned. In this manner, art never dares to risk a genuine relation to technology, which explored more thoroughly has the potential to threaten art's complacent sense of self-identity - precisely because technology inevitably appears as figure of darkness, habit and death. Paradoxically, following Blanchot, what is needed to enable new species of insight is perhaps the risking of insight altogether.]

Loom is based on an overall graphics engine, but it is easy to forget about the engine’s more general capacities when focusing on the details of shape subdivision. At the weekend, for instance, somebody asked if there was any means of scratching back portions of the rendered image. I recalled that I can erase a shape simply by inverting the drawing color. Which set me thinking about drawing a shape multiple times, which is fundamentally, of course, animation with no background redraw. The Loom engine was designed to do precisely this kind of thing, but I hadn’t considered the possibility for ages. So anyway, the image below involves no scratching out, but is the product of a set of iterative drawing cycles with a subtle amount of scaling, This produces a strange sense of motion blur, with stillness and clarity at the center and pronounced blur at the edges.

twisted

shape

It occurs to me, after writing the preceding post (“Objects”), that object-oriented programming (OOP) differs from object-oriented philosophy in one important respect. The objects in OOP are instances of abstract classes. They lack any sense of opaque, materially impenetrable autonomy. They are the product of conceptual design/abstraction. In this sense, OOP subscribes to a Platonic model, with the field of formal classes providing the foundation for any possibility of instanciation whatsoever. Yet Plato’s pure forms precede any labour of deliberate design. They are cast not as human constructs but as real metaphysical entities. Genuine formally constituted reality only become apparent when the philosopher escapes the cave of illusion – in which derivative objects (mere shadows) appear as essential truths – and ascends to the blinding light of properly formal existence. In OOP, however, the realm of formal origin (classes) is itself a space of artifice. It involves writing and invention. The realm of objective, differentiated being (program running) appears as a theatrical construct, but one that is itself based upon practices of fiction (modeling).

If this has any relevance for object-oriented philosophy, it is perhaps to caution against imagining the absolute autonomy of the object. The eidetic character of the object always entails a work of perceptually framed and culturally situated abstraction. In terms of our relationship to real world objects, this abstraction involves, for instance, the recognition of defining qualities and coherent boundaries, as well as positioning the object within the universe of other things – recognising its place within a network of similarities, differences, associations. This is not to say that this perceptual-categorical labour exhausts the field of the real. The real, as an attractor, as something that we can never exhaustively apprehend, has many more dimensions than we can perceive and categorise. But, for me, the notion of the object is inevitably caught up with this problem of delimited perception and cognition. The problem of an object, of an object taking shape for a subject – taking shape within perception, consciousness and language – preserves a vital sense of ambivalence. The object at once exceeds our relation to it and contracts into the form of an object as such. The notion of an object indicates a convenient fiction – it reduces the impenetrable character of the real to ‘objectively given’ things that can be neatly perceived and categorised. To naturalise the object, to position it over and against the awkwardnesses of perception, cognition and cultural relational identity, reduces the object in another sense again. Much better, in my view, to find other means of referring to the patterns, flows and accretions within the real that exist beyond all of our efforts to adequately name and account for them.

I first heard the term ‘object-oriented’ used beyond the context of computer programming in relation to the rhetoric of promoting an on-line learning initiative. Structured as discrete modular bundles, the various learning activities were said to adopt an ‘object-oriented’ approach. The implication is that learning can somehow be assembled from a set of isolated entities – promulgating a kind of Lego-style conception of learning. Not that this may not prove useful in many cases, but it would certainly seem to bracket more holistic approaches. Whereas the latter tend to insist upon bringing things into relation – discovering points of conflict, dialogue and exchange – the former conceives learning in a more discrete, summative fashion. The notion of ‘object-oriented learning’ seemed to me not only naive but also indicative of an impoverished conception of education. Furthermore, it seemed duplicitous – drawing upon the technical language of computer programming to project a dubious symmetry between dimensions of technological and pedagogical novelty.

Perhaps because of this, when I encountered the notion of ‘object-oriented philosophy’, I had a similar sense of misgiving. I am happy to embrace object-oriented programming (OOP) within my software development practice, but suspicious of its wider metaphoric extension, particularly when little effort is to made to explicate its sense within programming. No time to pursue this adequately here, but OOP appears as a reaction to imperative-procedural styles of programming that work to neatly segregate data and algorithms. OOP combines data and algorithms into higher-level abstractions that combine both attributes (data states) and algorithmic processes. These so-called ‘classes’ are then instantiated as actual objects in memory at run-time. The classes are not natural things, but representations of fundamental conceptual units within an overall software process. They are very much artificial constructs – inventions. Confronted with a specific problem, any two programmers are likely to conceive a different OOP solution. Indeed it is quite common for a single programmer to re-conceive, modify and re-articulate their own OOP systems when they return to a given problem. To repeat, OOP programming provides a means of conceiving a process space in terms of a set of modular interactions between logically discrete entities. The various classes extrapolate the essential attributes (data) and capacities (algorithms) of particular entities, as well, very importantly, as establishing protocols for interaction between entities. Classes are explicitly and deliberately simplifications. They act as logical blueprints for the run-time generation of specific objects. The object represents the particular, while the class represents the generative abstraction. Both class and object are conceived as black boxes. The aim is to shape code entities that have predictable public interfaces to predictable but safely autonomous internal attributes and behaviours. Here autonomy has a logical rather than a strictly material-existential dimension. A legal conception of public, private and protected access structures the autonomy of individual classes/objects.

Despite my sense that a fuller examination of the relationship between OOP and recent philosophical conceptions of object-oriented philosophy is necessary, I have come to recognise that there is an important sense of metaphoric relevance. I am thinking specifically, of course, of Graham Harman’s conception of object-oriented philosophy¹, where he defends the notion of the object from those who would either figure it as entirely projective (ideal-phenomenological) entity, or as a naive macro-level construct (everything is created of smaller things – atoms, particles, quarks), or as an illusion that dissolves before the sense of fundamental relational or dynamic-emergent identity. Harman defends the reality, autonomy and possibility of the object from all of these notable points of philosophical attack. At the most simple level then, Harman and OOP share a fundamental concern to conceive the world in terms of the notion and potential of discrete objects.

I certainly can’t claim to adequately engage with Harman’s ideas, but here, in the midst of trying to understand what he is getting at, I just want to express some provisional, no doubt simple-minded, doubts – if only as a means of clarifying the issues for myself. No time to write this up properly. Just some minimal points.

Is it possible to conceive the object without the necessity of a subject? Without the pairing of subject and object? Wouldn’t it be better to describe the object in other terms to avoid this awkward conceptual and connotative space? Objects, objectivity, etc. This is perhaps intended as a provocation, but not sure that it is a helpful one.

The notion of object suggest the problem of determining boundaries. The stream behind our house is named Byarong Creek. If you tell me to walk down to the creek, I know where to go. I know how to cross it. I know how it increases to a dangerous torrent during rain. But then again, what is the creek precisely? What are its limits. Is it just the obvious banks? Wouldn’t you have to extend outwards (certainly during rain) to include the innumerable little trickles of water that flow off roofs, gutters and leaves and across the ground to flow into the creek ‘proper’? Is the creek the entire catchment area that extends beyond the suburbs up the nearby hillsides to the escarpment? In notionally restricting the creek to just its conventional boundaries, don’t I plainly indicate that objects have a projective status, that they simplify phenomena? Now I know that Harman would acknowledge that all perception of objects simplifies them, that they have a veiled complexity that inevitably withdraws from any notion of fully adequate appearance, but then what is it that enables the objects boundaries to appear, to take coherent shape?

There is also the issue of temporal boundaries. All objects are mortal – although I doubt Harman would agree with this. Let my qualify, all material entities are mortal. They come into existence and pass out of existence again. The plastic keyboard that I am currently typing on is all the time exhaling mildly toxic plastic fumes. It seems utterly autonomous and integral, but is necessarily in a constant relation of exchange with its environment. Once again, its boundaries are not inviolable, and its coming into existence and passage out of coherent existence are demonstration of this wider material relation to the world. The reality of an object can only withdraw so much. This withdrawal is always provisional and contingent. Objects do not appear to me as monads. Here the apparently reductive tendency of the natural sciences to render everything in terms of their underlying constituent features serves an important purpose. It manifests a crucial material terrain of interaction, of the passage beyond dimensions of apparent ore metaphysically determined autonomy.

Then, of course, there is the obvious problem of scale. Objects only appear at specific scales. A grain of sand only appears when you are not looking at the entire beach. Skin only appears as smooth sheath when you are not closely examining the pores. In this sense, objects only gain coherent determination when viewed at specific scales under specific conditions. This is not to say that matter and entities do not exist independently of our perception of them, just that they don’t take shape as coherent objects until the requisite conditions of autonomous coherence are defined and met.

Note to self: need to consider more carefully the relevance of considering object-oriented philosophy in terms of the model of OOP…(read Bogost properly²).

What the hell am I dreaming about? Some ludicrous performance/installation in which two young men crawl about across cushions or mattresses in a paint-spattered gallery space. I try to describe this to an acquaintance but he quickly loses interest. Realising that I am speaking to myself, I turn back, only to discover another set of performance/installations – this time very chummy, lots of people sitting in circles doing something with bits of paper (cards perhaps?). I’m aware that I don’t quite belong and head into another space – this one a bit macabre (living bodies in pools and in cubes). I step outside and am standing on the balcony of an apartment or on the deck of a ship and waves begin to break over the rooftop/gunnels. I can see another huge wave rapidly approaching. There is no hope and I hang on as it crashes all around me. I gain the sense that everything is obliterated. Once it has receded I head into the ships interior looking for loved ones. They are all strangely fine. Some are even dry. But one elderly relative has drowned. There is no possibility of entering her room.

I’ll make no effort to reflect upon the meaning of this dream, except to note that it suggested an idea for an installation. This is not to say that the content of the installation related to the dream, rather that the concept emerged directly after the dream. I should confess that the idea itself is not quite fixed. It begins with three different combinations of hammers and nails. The first combination involves a pile of hammers and a single nail. The second a pile of nails and a single hammer. The third a single nail and a hammer head with no handle (but now, to be honest, I am unsure that this actually was the third combination – whatever the option was seemed much more combinatorially obvious when first conceived). But then rather than separate piles, I think perhaps everything would be better in a box – a box with four hinged lids. Which of course leads to the problem of needing a fourth combination of hammers and nails, or perhaps something else altogether. There could even be four boxes, each with four hinged lids. Or maybe there is just a single box and the view through each lid is somehow completely different – revealing different aspects of the scene (perhaps through different lighting, but I’d like to avoid technological complexity). In any case, I am leaning towards including no hammer handles at all, just single or roughly piled sets of hammer heads.

I must confess that I have been reading Graham Harman’s The Quadruple Object (2010), so the plans for the installation are probably more explicable in terms of reflecting on aspects of ‘tool-being’ and quadruple relations than upon any relations to the original dream.

My mode of practice…

So I determine the set of parameters relevant to the work of subdividing a spline polygon. A new center, for instance, can be calculated at the actual center of the current polygon or the center can be randomised. If randomised, then the value can be constrained within a specific numerical range. Similarly, the control points on a new spline curve can be positioned anywhere along the line between the two anchor points, or even beyond those anchor points, and their rotation can either be manually determined or randomised. These and many other variables provide the basis for specific Boolean and numerical parameters that constitute the combinatory space from which any particular image emerges. Due to the complex interaction between the various values, I can never fully anticipate how the image will look. Each rendered image suggests the potential for further tweaking of the parameters or for more radical alteration (a new subdivision stack). I follow a trajectory of weirdly mechanical curiosity. I make some changes and run the program. Numbers rush by in the console as the various subdivisions occur. Once the calculations are done, the drawing panel appears. I wait a bit longer until the image is actually drawn to the panel, hit ‘s’ for save, and wait again until the image is properly saved (takes a while to write the complex data set to the file). The whole process can take a couple of minutes depending upon the number of subdivisions. And then, as I say, new possibilities suggest themselves. Several hours later, after repeatedly promising myself that this will be the last image, I resist the temptation to follow new combinatory trails and stop. Sometimes I think that I would do better to follow a less peripatetic process and be much more assiduous in keeping notes, but I also know that there will never be a need to return to these permutations – I exhaust them as I play them out. I work for a time on incorporating additional algorithmic features and then play with the algorithms until they drift into repetition. Once the software is finished then I tend to stop playing with it altogether. It never amounts to anything that is simply ‘creatively useful’.

Loom images

At one level academic referencing is a matter of honesty and etiquette. It acknowledges that your work has developed from other work and enables your readers to follow up on specific sources should they be interested. Hardly objectionable in these terms. But referencing is not only about ethics and good behaviour. It is also about tracing and insisting upon a network of intellectual property relations. Furthermore it suggests that the various borrowings (debts) can be adequately accounted for. Only the commonly known escapes the need for a reference. Everything else – everything that is properly owned – must be properly acknowledged. This also implies that everything that is not common currency or an acknowledged source is your own work. So by acknowledging the claims of others, you assert your own scope for originality and your own proprietary claims. But is it possible to fully acknowledge your debts and to establish a clear space of ownership? Wouldn’t the inter-textual character of any written document exceed the capacity for it to ever be adequately referenced (not only at the level of the explicit content, but also at the level of rhetoric and style)? And is writing and the cultural dialogue it entails best thought in terms of the model of property, of ownership?

I ask this because I have just read Michel Serres’ Malfeasance (2010), which includes no references whatsoever. This comes across less as intellectual hubris than as an acknowledgement that everything he writes emerges from a tradition. it is his and it is not his. it is original and it is not original. Explicit references would only downplay the extent of his debt and overestimate his scope for repayment. But, more than this, Serres’ practice opens up the possibility of perceiving writing as something more than an individually owned possession, as something that attracts an author as a necessary fiction, as something that has the potential to manifest other identities and other relations.