Link via Rhizome.org; excerpts via MUTE Magazine:
Remnants of Democracy
Thursday, 23 March, 2006 - 11:41
ByAnthony Iles
In their recent blockbuster show and doorstopper book Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel describe a horizontalised network of relations between people and things in which nothing can nor should be exluded from (political) representation. But, argues Anthony Iles, in seeking to universally include the excluded, they fail to allow for the negation of representational politics that such outsiders provoke.
Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy is the second major
exhibition organised by sociologist Bruno Latour at Zentrum für Kunst
und Medientechnologie, (ZKM), Karlsruhe, in collaboration with its
director Peter Weibel. Like the hugely ambitious exhibition Iconoclash,
2003, it is a thematic tour de force of the not-so-new
interdisciplinary museology that has characterised the aftermath of
postmodernism. Both exhibitions described contentious territory in the
arts and sciences and aimed at making methodological interventions
therein. Like many exhibitions organised by academics in recent years,
Making Things Public is a heady mix of new theory, art works and
exhibition design accompanied by a series of events and a programmatic
catalogue with contributors from an array of disciplines. Whilst
attempts to realise theoretical programmes in the space of the museum
undoubtedly feed interdisciplinary collaboration, it is clear from his
introduction to the exhibition catalogue that Latour is
unapologetically making his programme public primarily in the form of a
book. With over one hundred essays and excerpts including new essays by
Isabel Stengers, Peter Galison, Chantal Mouffe, Dario Gamboni and over
one thousand illustrated pages this is a book generative of enough
research points to keep one UK university afloat for several semesters.
One gets the impression that what attracted Latour to curating was the
possibility of making a cross disciplinary encyclopaedic doorstopper
not possible in the context of academic publishing.
The key term for both of the exhibitions Bruno Latour has organised
at ZKM is representation. In Iconoclash, Latour tried to demonstrate
that each attempt to destroy an image or symbol of mediation, each act
of iconoclasm, produced a form of discourse, a material or immaterial
layer to its target. After dubiously 'excluding politics' in
'Iconoclash', Latour and his cabal of writers and academics have
shifted their focus to directly engage with questions of political
representation in Making Things Public. The book and exhibition
consider three forms of representation: scientific, political and
artistic. Scientific representation presents the object of concern by 'describing' it to those gathered around it. Political representation
is formed by the mediators who stand in well or badly for the
interested parties. Artistic representation is concerned (in the
context of this show) with how to represent the sites where people meet
and discuss matters of concern. Autonomists beware, by listing many
forms of representation and so few ways out of them this book's
landscaping of the political amounts to more of an agenda for
democratic renewal than a mapping of the politics to come. [...]
[...]
In January this year, Londoners received an unusual visitor.
Apparently making a homage to the site of the UK's parliament, a
seven-ton Northern Bottle Nosed whale made its way up the Thames to
Westminster and floundered there for an afternoon. Pundits struggled to
understand what the whale’s intentions were, was it trying to get back
to the Atlantic across the land mass of Southern England, was it
injured, confused by military radar, or sick? One commentator of
religious persuasion came close to accurately summarising the heavy
burden this beast carried upstream with him :
'For a few days, the entire city of London shared in the experience
of the suffering remnant, the remnant that has been rejected by human
structures, the remnant that has been forced to wander in the solitary
wilderness, with no support or encouragement from man and his earthly
structures. Instead of acting indifferently, the people of London
sympathised with him; they put aside their schedules and their daily
activities, and they did all they could to help him out.'
The sympathy of Londoners was in great evidence that day, and it was
equal to the whale's fright. The whale could not begin to understand
the gestures of the humans standing in the river’s edge nor could the
humans helpfully interpret those of the whale, the spectacle of human
sympathy and animal suffering did not coincide. The whale's encounter
with the British people and its democratic institutions was, for the
whale, [...] fatal.
Marcel Neundörfer’s On Target urinal has a pressure-sensitive screen
recessed into it — score points by shooting the moving images onscreen.
Not only does this add much-needed entertainment to otherwise dreary
elimination functions, but it also improves aim — if you stay on
target, you’ll avoid splashback and misses. 
