Power of Material/Politics of Materiality

Publication Series of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at

the Academy of Fine Arts Munich

The publications in this series are the results of the study program
cx centre for interdisciplinary studies, which was inaugurated at the
Academy of Fine Arts Munich in 2011, of its teachings, its researches
and its practice projects. It takes up questions, which are currently
of central artistic, scientific and social relevance, to discuss them
within an interdisciplinary perspective. A major focus herein lies with
the dialogue between scientific and artistic approaches as well as in
the close interconnection of theory and praxis. The program of the
cx is facilitated by the BMBF within the frame of the joined Federal-
State Program for Better Studying Conditions and More Quality in
Teaching.­ Following Politics of Material/Politics of Materiality the
second volume on the topic of Fragile Identities will be published
in 2015.
Power of Material/Politics of Materiality
Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier (Eds.)

diaphanes
 Table of Contents

9 Editor’s Preface

13 Power of Material/Politics of Materiality – an Introduction

Susanne Witzgall

27 New Materialism: The Ontology and Politics of Materialisation
Diana Coole

43 “We need a much better appreciation of the material

structures...”
In Conversation with Diana Coole

48 Text and Texture: On the Materiality of West-Eastern Transfers

in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Marianne von Willemer
Cornelia Ortlieb

59 An Ecology of Materials
Tim Ingold

66 “I was literally sticking my hands into materials”

Max Lamb

75 “Materials are constantly astonishing”

In Conversation with Max Lamb and Tim Ingold

82 Project Class Lamb

88 The Promise of Intelligent Materials

Nicola Stattmann and Thomas Schröpfer in Conversation with
Karianne Fogelberg
100 Material Engagement as Human Creative Process and
Cognitive Life of Things
Colin Renfrew

115 Purpose Unknown

Sofia Hultén

121 “… insights about the afterlives of objects”

In Conversation with Sofia Hultén and Colin Renfrew

127 New Materialists in Contemporary Art

Susanne Witzgall

141 Kassetten, Cassettes
Manfred Pernice

146 Project Class Pernice

153 On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am (V.1.1)

Karen Barad

165 Actually 12 Times Alissa

Discoteca Flaming Star

172 Crisis and Materiality in Art: On the Becoming of Form and

Digitality
Kerstin Stakemeier

185 The (Im)Materiality of Economy
Costas Lapavitsas

192 Sell Everything, Buy Everything, Kill Everything

Anja Kirschner, David Panos

203 “We want to counter such simplifications by way of historicizing

their foundations …”
In Conversation with Anja Kirschner, David Panos and Costas
Lapavitsas

209 Is Marxism a Correlationism?
Diedrich Diederichsen

221 Project Class Baghramian

229 The Authors

235 Photo Credits

239 Colophon
Editor's Preface

An interdisciplinary course of study began at the Academy of Fine

Arts in Munich in 2012, which is sponsored by the German Federal
Ministry for Education and Research as a new teaching format within
the context of the Federal-State Program for Better Studying Condi-
tions and More Quality in Teaching. The program, located at the cx
centre for interdisciplinary studies, which was established for exactly
this purpose, orients itself around changing yearly themes and takes
up central artistic, scholarly, and social discourses of the present
moment. The teaching at cx consists of multi-disciplinary courses,
which include international guest professors from different art forms,
as well as a yearly series of talks and events with speakers and guest
lecturers from multiple disciplines. The program thereby focuses on
a very close connection between theory and practical, project-based
work. An overriding goal of cx is to provide students access to other
scholarly areas, research methods, and ways of thinking that comple-
ment existing artistic education through an expanded theoretical and
interdisciplinary teaching method, as well as to motivate students
towards an interdisciplinary exchange and a specialised, disciplinary-
framed confrontation with central questions of our time.

9
 The book at hand, Power of Material/Politics of Materiality, is the re-
sult of the first year of the cx’s program. It concerns itself with current,
transdisciplinary approaches to a New Materialism and the reconcep-
tion of matter and material associated with it. This publication gathers
the most important lectures and discussions of the eponymous public
program series at the cx, which were updated, further developed
and expanded for the book. It also documents central research find-
ings of the lecturers at cx, as well as the artistic work of the students
in the project classes. The publication brings together the current
reassessment of matter and material phenomenon in art, design and
architecture with cultural and social studies approaches of a New
Materialism for the first time, thus deepening the interdisciplinary
dialogue that began at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 2012
with intense talks, discussions and experimental praxis. In doing so,
the heterogeneity of the thought- and research movements operat-
ing under the mantle of New Materialism, which range from Karen
Barad’s “Agential Realism” to the philosophies of “Speculative Real-
ism” discussed by Diedrich Diederichsen, proved to be an especially
productive source of friction. Our publication therefore aims to trace
an arc that enables discussing these manifold approaches with and
against one another, instead of subordinating or matching one’s own
work to these ways of thinking.

At this point we want to sincerely thank all of the scholars and artists,
who participated in the first year of cx’s program with their lectures
and classes and who, without exception, also agreed to contribute
to this book. A special thanks goes to Karen Barad, who provided
a reworked version of one of her essays for this publication. We
would like to thank the directorship of the Academy of Fine Arts, in
particular Dieter Rehm, Urs Greutmann, Frank Hilger, Karin Kneffel
and Hermann Pitz for their confidence and support in the realisation
of this new interdisciplinary course of study, as well as our commit-
tee members Walter Grasskamp, Carmen und Urs Greutmann, Res
Ingold, Katrin Kinseher, Florian Matzner, Ole Müller, Olaf Nicolai,
Julian Rosefeldt and the respective representatives of the students and
the student council. A special thanks is due to our colleague and ally
at the cx Karianne Fogelberg, who co-organised and co-conceptual-
ised the lecture series Power of Material/Politics of Materiality, upon
which this publication based, as well as the student assistants for the
programme: Constanze Stumpf, Sarah Lehnerer and Johanna Klingler.
Here, we additionally want to thank all of the other people who, in
one way or another, worked on of the organisation of the first year’s
program of cx, among them Tanja Ferg, Thomas Köhler and Andrea
Schulz, as well as the students Alexander Eisfeld, Sally Kotter and
Markus Lutter, who stood by our side assisting during some of the
events. Last but not least, a heartfelt thanks goes out to a number of
heads of workshops of the academy, first of all Bruno Wank from the
bronze workshop, but also to Thierry Boissel, Martin Bosung, Frank
Hilger, Stephan George and Ole Müller for the cooperation with our

10
cx guest professors Max Lamb, Manfred Pernice and Nairy Baghra-
mian. Their work was of central importance to the student’s practical
grappling with the characteristics and momentum of the different
materials.

̌
We also want to thank our intern Katarina Cilić, who transcribed the
discussions, and in this way contributed valuable preparatory work
for the conversations printed in the book. Furthermore, we want to
thank Johanna Klingler for her help with image editing, Felix Kempf
for the first graphic conception of the visual identity of the cx and es-
pecially Yusuf Etiman for the successful graphic design of the publica-
tion at hand, whose different text and image formats posed complex
graphic problems. Nikolaus Schneider and Karl Hoffmann took over
the translations of the English contributions and Textual Bikini the
translations from German to English for the English online version
of this publication. We would like to thank them for their efforts and
diligence with the translation work, which was at times demanding.
Furthermore, we would like to thank Michael Heitz from diaphanes
publications, who quickly became enthusiastic about this publication
and spontaneously and unconventionally embarked on our very tight
schedule, as well as Sabine Schulz and Daniela Voss for the superb
editing and the smooth collaboration. Last but not least a special
thank you is due to the Federal Ministry of Education and Research,
who financed the program of the cx including this publication, as
well as the DLR (German Aerospace Center) as Project Management
Agency and the Bavarian State Ministry for Science, Research and the
Arts for their support during the application period of the project.

11
 1
Power of Material/Politics of Materiality – an Introduction Materialitäten. Herausforderungen
für die Sozial- und Kulturwissen-
Susanne Witzgall schaften, Johannes Gutenberg-Uni-
versity Mainz, 19.10.–20.10.2011;
Immaterial materialities: materiality
and interactivity in art and archi-
tecture, University of Technology
Sydney, 28.11.–30.11.2012; Mate-
rial Matters, University of Delaware,
13.04.–14.04.2012; Ästhetik der
Materialität, HfG Karlsruhe, April to
July 2012; Materialism and World
Politics, yearly conference for vol-
ume 41 of Millennium: Journal of In-
ternational Studies, London School
of Economics and Political Science,
21.10.–22.10. 2012; Intermaterial-
ität, symposium at Bern University
of the Arts, 16.02.–18.02.2012, the
research project of the same name
as well as the resulting publica-
tion Thomas Strässle, Christoph
Kleinschmidt, Johanne Mohs, Das
Zusammenspiel der Materialien in
den Künsten. Theorie – Praktiken –
Perspektiven (Bielefeld: Transcript
2013); Matter Matters. The Social
Sciences Beyond the Linguistic
Turn, Faculty of the Social Sciences,
Lund University, 15.10.–16.10.2012;
The current scientific, artistic, and design interest in the material 10th Triennial for Form and Content:
aspects of our reality is considerable. It is almost as if we have only Materials Revisited, 2011, Museum
recently discovered that we are matter and live amidst matter, materi- Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt;
Materie-Material-Materialität,
als, and materialities – and that these aren’t simply carriers of signs research project of the German-
and meanings, or first come into being through these signs and mean- istisches Institut, Westfälische
Wilhelms University Münster; Fluid
ings, but instead themselves play a role in the generation of meanings Materials, University of Applied Arts
and the constitution of reality. Conferences, research groups, and Vienna, 27.09.–28.09.2013; Material
Intelligence, Kettlers Yard.
exhibitions with titles like Materialities, Intermaterialities; immaterial
2
materialities; Materialism and World Politics, Matter-Material-Mate- Thomas Strässle, Caroline Torra-
Mattenklott, “Einleitung“ [introduc-
riality; Material Matters; Matter Matters; Material Revisited; Material tion], in: Poetiken der Materie. Stoffe
Intelligence or Fluid Materials1 have become increasingly frequent, to und ihre Qualitäten in Literatur,
Kunst und Philosophie (Freiburg
name only a few projects from the last three years. i.Br., Berlin: Rombach, 2005), p. 9.
  3
Sabine Runde, “Der Stoff aus
The new focus on the material that has surged over the last two dem die Werke sind,” in: Materials
decades cuts across vastly different disciplines. This encompasses ap- Revisited (10th Triennial for Form
and Content: Materials Revisited,
proaches that thematise “the appearance, presentation, and contem- Museum for Applied Arts Frankfurt
plation of the material,”2 rediscover the “qualities of materials,”3 or am Main, Klingspor-Museum Of-
describe the “hierarchies and semantics of the materialities,”4 which fenbach), p. 13.
4
includes Monika Wagner and Dietmar Rübel’s predominantly mate- See Sigrid G. Köhler, Martina
rial iconographic-directed art historical perspective.5 This new focus Wagner-Egelhaaf, “Einleitung: Prima
Materia,” in: Sigrid G. Köhler, Jan
on the material finds its expression in an explosion of approaches Christian Metzler, Martina Wagner-
that emerge out of different fields, ranging from the arts, literary Egelhaaf, eds., Prima Materia:
Beiträge zur transdisziplinären Mate-
studies, sociology, anthropology, feminist theory, and the political rialitätsdebatte (Königstein/Taunus:
sciences to human geography and the cognitive sciences. Beyond Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 2004), p. 8.
a simple thematisation of material(ity), these approaches demand a 5
See Monika Wagner, Dietmar
“new understanding of material,”6 a reformulation of matter or an Rübel, eds., Material in Kunst und
Alltag (Hamburger Forschungen
“other conception and use of material”7 which exists “outside of the zur Kunstgeschichte I) (Berlin:
dualism of form and matter, of idea and matter,” and brings among Akademie Verlag, 2002). See also:
Monika Wagner, Das Material der
other things, the momentum and “efficacy”8 of material phenomenon Kunst: Eine andere Geschichte
into account. der Moderne (Munich: C.H. Beck,

13
 2001), Thomas Raff, Die Sprache A New Ontology?
der Materialien: Anleitung zu einer
Ikonologie der Werkstoffe (Münster:
Waxmann, 2008), Barbara Nau- These approaches operate – albeit at the moment primarily in English
mann, Thomas Strässle, Caroline
Torra-Mattenklott, eds., Stoffe, Zur speaking fields – under the name “New Materialism” or “Neo-Mate-
Geschichte der Materialität in Kün- rialism,” a concept developed by the Mexican author, artist, and phi-
sten und Wissenschaften (Zurich:
Reihe Zürcher Hochschulforum, Bd.
losopher Manuel DeLanda and the Italian-Australian philosopher and
37, 2006). feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti in the second half of the 1990s.9
6
Köhler, Wagner-Egelhaaf 2004
According to Dolphijn und van der Tuin, New Materialism is marked
(footnote 4), p. 8. through a “nomadic crossing of territories of nature and sciences,”10
7 which demonstrates the agential character of matter, and shouldn’t be
Franck Hofmann, “Materialver-
wandlungen: Prolegomena zu einer understood as an “add-on,” simply a further (material) facet that a spe-
Theorie ästhetischer Produktivität,” cialised discourse appends. New Materialism doesn’t just assemble
in: Andreas Haus, Franck Hofmann,
Änne Söll, Material im Prozess: an established disciplinary vision of the world, which appears to have
Strategien ästhetischer Produktivität lost traction, with new material weight, but is instead described much
(Berlin: Reimer 2000), p. 23.
more as a new metaphysics or ontology11 that should lead to a com-
8
For example, please see: Rainer pletely new view and conception of the world. The basis for this is
Kazig, Peter Wichart, “Die Neuthe-
matisierung der materiellen Welt in the aforementioned new understanding of matter, which is no longer
der Humangeographie,” in: Berichte considered as something solid and passive that waits for the intellect
zur deutschen Landeskunde, Bd.
83, H.2 (Leipzig 2009), p. 114. or spirit to provide an additional formative force or animating spark,
9
but rather possesses intrinsically self-transformative12 potentials and
See Rick Dolphijn, Iris van der
Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews
regularly finds itself in a state of ongoing metamorphosis and morpho-
& Cartographies (University of genesis.13 Influenced by chaos and complexity theories,14 quantum
Michigan Library, Ann Arbor: Open
Humanities Press, 2012), pp. 19,
theories, and current theories of elementary particle physics – and
38, and 48. referring back to Democritus, Epicurus, and Spinoza up to Deleuze's
10 philosophical concepts that emphasise matter's own productivity15 –
Ibid., p. 100–101.
New Materialists describe matter as self-organised and emergent,16 “as
11
See ibid., p. 13; Diana Coole’s an ongoing play of determinacies,”17 as active principle, or even as
essay “The New Materialism: the
Ontology and Politics of Materi- vibrant matter with “intrinsic vitality.”18 “Matter itself is not a substrate
alization” in this publication, p. 27 or a medium for the flow of desire. Materiality itself is always already
as well as Jane Bennett, Vibrant
Matter: A Political Ecology of Things a desiring dynamism, a reiterative reconfiguring, energised and ener-
(Durham, London: Duke University gizing, enlivened and enlivening,”19 states the American philosopher,
Press, 2010), p. XViii. Jane Ben-
nett speaks of “Vital Materialism” research scientist, and feminist theorist Karen Barad.
instead of “New Materialism” and  
calls her “Vital Materialism” also
“(meta)physics.” see p. XViii. This conception of matter and materiality doesn’t only place the dual-
12
ism of form and matter into question, but in New Materialism, it goes
See also Diana Coole, Samantha
Frost, “Introducing the New
along with the attempt to dissolve other long-standing dichotomies,
Materialism,” in: New Materialisms: such as between mind and the body or culture and nature. As
Ontology, Agency and Politics
(Durham, London: Duke University
DeLanda stressed again recently, it can’t simply be about an avoid-
Press, 2010), p. 9. ance of these dualities, but rather its “reified generalities” must be
13 replaced through “concrete assemblages.” “The duality emerges,”
See DeLanda: “So yes, neo-
materialism is based on the idea DeLanda claims, “when one ignores the zone of overlap and reifies
that matter has morphogenetic the averages.”20 With the help of Deleuze’s concept of assemblage,
capacities of its own and does
not need to be commanded into DeLanda alludes here to the process that Bruno Latour calls “the
generating form.” “Any materialist work of purification”21 and considers a characteristic of the modern.
philosophy must take as its point of
departure the existence of a mate- According to Latour, the modern work of purification divides the
rial world that is independent of world’s fabrics and networks into clearly separated fields of artefacts,
our minds.” Interview with Manuel
DeLanda, in: Dolphijn, van der Tuin people, signs, norms, organisations, texts, hybrids between nature
2012 (footnote 9), p. 43. and culture, and subjects and objects, thus producing sanitised
14
See also Manuel DeLanda, “Ma- entities that are not conceded any mixed forms and middle posi-
terial Complexity,” in: Neil Leach, tions. For New Materialists, on the other hand, the world consists of

14
concrete assemblages,22 of networks or meshworks,23 out of contin- David Turnbull, Chris Williams, eds.,
Digital Tectonics (Chichester: John
gent structures of all kinds of heterogeneous materials, from semiotic Wiley & Sons, 2004), pp. 14–21
and pragmatic elements, from the human and the non-human, from and Coole, Frost 2010 (footnote
12), p. 13.
meanings, actions, and passions. All of the elements, or rather the
15
phenomena, of these assemblages and networks -– from elemen- See also Bennett 2010 (footnote
11), p. Xiii, 21–23; Barbara Bolt, “In-
tary particles to humans or the ozone hole – are closely related and troduction: Toward a “New Material-
partially appear to only unfold their efficacy in this way. Following ism” of the Arts“ in: Estelle Barrett,
Barbara Bolt, Carnal Knowledge:
Barad, matter is “condensations of response-ability.”24 Towards a ’New Materialism’ of the
  Arts (London, New York: I.B. Tauris,
Assemblages and Material-Semiotic Actors 2013), pp. 1–2.

  16
See DeLanda 2004 (footnote
In her conception of “Agential Realism,” Karen Barad refers to the 14), p. 17.

Danish physicist Niels Bohr, defining phenomenon as “ontologically 17

See the contribution by Karen
primitive relations” – “relations without preexisting relata,” by which Barad, “On Touching – the Inhuman
that Therefore I am (v1.1)” in this
she negates the existence of previously existing isolated entities. Ac- publication, p. 153.
cording to Barad, it is through “specific agential intra-actions” that 18
Bennett 2010 (footnote 11),
the “boundaries and properties of the components of phenomena among others Xiii.
become determinate and that particular concepts (that is, particu- 19
“Matter feels, converses, suffers,
lar material articulations of the world) become meaningful.”25 The desires, yearns and remembers,”
concept of intra-action explicitly emphasises a procedure that occurs Interview with Karen Barad, in:
Dolphijn, van der Tuin 2012 (foot-
within phenomena and first materialises and gains relevance through note 9), p. 59.
this – as opposed to interaction, which occurs between phenomena, 20
DeLanda 2012 (footnote 13),
and assumes that entities are already clearly defined and separated. pp. 44–45.
Barad claims that the intra-action of phenomenon and apparatus 21
plays a central role in the determination of their precise qualities and Bruno Latour, We Have Never
Been Modern, trans. Catherine
boundaries in the field of scientific research. It’s not only an object Porter (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
that existed prior to an experiment that is observed in an experiment, sity Press, 1993), p. 11.

but the entanglement and inseparability of the apparatus and the 22

See also Bennett 2010 (footnote
object under examination. Referring to Bohr, Barad explains, “there 11), pp. 20–38 or Manuel DeLanda,
A New Philosophy of Society,
are no things before the measurement, the very act of measurement Assemblage Theory, and Social
produces the determinate boundaries and properties of things.”26 In Complexity (London: Bloomsbury,
2006) as well as Diana Coole’s con-
doing so, she completely turns against an essentialist naturalism, tribution in this publication, p. 27.
which believes that material phenomena must only be discovered 23
See the contribution “An Ecology
through the sciences (as well as the arts) and revealed through their of Materials” by Tim Ingold in this
praxis. She thereby also rejects a pure constructivism that assumes publication, in which Ingold prefers
the term “meshwork” over the term
that these phenomena – as Donna Haraway puts it – result solely from “network,” p. 59.
“our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meaning.”27 Barad fol- 24
See Barad’s contribution to this
lows Haraway in her conviction that phenomenon are simultaneously volume, p. 153.
material and discursive, that they are “material-semiotic”28 actors and 25
are constantly (re)produced through a material-discursive intra-action. Karen Barad, Meeting the
Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics
  and the Entanglement of Matter and
This also ultimately correlates, as I would like to emphasise here, Meaning (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2007), p. 139.
with the views of Bruno Latour and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, who in
26
their investigations of scientific practice and knowledge production – Barad 2012 (footnote 19), p. 62.
even if with another terminology – have observed a similar intercon- 27
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cy-
nection of apparatus and objects of investigation, from human and borgs, and Women: The Reinvention
of Nature (New York: Routledge,
non-human beings, from scientists, previous knowledge, values, 1991), 187.
institutions, systems of signification and objects of research. In his 28
Ibid., p. 200.
essay Do Objects Have a History? Pasteur and Whitehead in a Bath
29
of Lactic Acid,29 Latour analyses, among other things, Pasteur’s final Bruno Latour, “Do Scientific Ob-

15
 jects Have a History: Pasteur and
Whitehead in a Bath of Lactic Acid,”
in: Common Knowledge, Vol.5, no.
1 (1996), pp. 76–91.
30
See Andréa Bellinger, David J.
Krieger, “Einführung in die Akteur-
Netzwerk-Theorie,” in: ANThology:
Ein einführendes Handbuch zur
Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie (Bielefeld:
transcript, 2006), pp. 38-39.
31
Latour, “Do Scientific Objects
Have a History: Pasteur and White-
head in a Bath of Lactic Acid,” in:
Latour 1996 (footnote 29), p. 111.
32
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Towards
a History of Epistemic Things:
Synthesizing Proteins in the Test
Tube (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997), p. 30.
33
Ibid., p. 28.
34
Haraway 1991 (footnote 28),
p. 197.
35
DeLanda 2012 (footnote 13),
p. 39.
16
report about the discovery of an innate enzyme of lactic acid fer-
mentation in 1857. He demonstrates how the enzymes manifest
themselves as actors in test assemblies – Latour speaks of “programs
of action” – and build networks with other human and non-human
actors by means of interactions, transactions, negotiations, and
mediations. The enzymes and their programs of action are themselves
the result of these actions, displacements, and adaptations, insofar
they more or less consist of different elements of these networks30 –
they are (material-semiotic) hybrids. As Latour explains, Pasteur does
not dictate “to the facts how they should speak. He intervenes in
them, he shares with the ferments, which he offers a new chance –
his history, his body, his laboratory, the company of his colleagues.
He neither merely discovers the ferments, nor does he model them.
With this opportunity, everything merges, everything is reciprocally
form and material.”31
According to Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, scientific experimental systems
consist of epistemic things and technical conditions. Epistemic
things – things that pertain to the “endeavour of knowledge”32 within
scientific systems, the things that should be researched – are initially
located in a condition of vagueness and precariousness, of provision-
ality and indefiniteness. For (re)defining it and giving it a new shape,
or rather producing it, the appropriate technical conditions (instru-
ments, recording apparatus, model organisms...) are required. In do-
ing so he emphasises, similar to Karen Barad and Bruno Latour, the
“indissoluble amalgamation” of apparatus (technical conditions) and
objects of enquiry (epistemic things). According to Rheinberger, in
their combination they co-generate “the material entities and con-
cepts they come to embody.”33
Representatives of New Materialism – among whom we can definitely
count Braidotti, DeLanda, Barad, Latour, and Rheinberger – thus
describe matter and material phenomenon as actors that participate
in the (re)configuration of the entanglements of assemblages and
networks of reality, as well as epistemic processes. But they also em-
phasise – often equally based on the concepts of assemblage, net-
works, or meshwork – that matter and materiality are hybrid phenom-
enon and also consist of immaterial and semantic components. New
Materialists pledge allegiance to a “real world”34 in the vein of Donna
Haraway, but refuse any form of essentialism. Manuel DeLanda also
believes in the existence of a material world that exists independent
of our consciousness, yet at the same time considers “all objective
entities” as “products of a historical process,” which means, accord-
ing to DeLanda, that their identity is “synthesized or produced as part
of cosmological, geological, biological, or social history.”35
Entanglements of Minds, Bodies, and Things
Over the course of the last two decades, the materialism described
here has brought the materiality of human (and non-human) bod-
 36
ies to the forefront once again. Above all, science and technology Corinna Bath, Yvonne Bauer,
Bettina Bock von Wülfingen, An-
researchers, as well as gender studies and feminist theorists criticise gelika Saupe, Jutta Weber, “Ma-
the status of the body as “passive object of knowledge or matter terialität denken: Positionen und
Werkzeuge,” in: Materialität denken.
and appropriated resource,” and define it – again, mostly in another Studien zur technologischen
reference to Haraway and Latour’s network theories – as a “situated Verkörperung – hybride Artefakte,
posthumane Körper (Bielefeld:
actor”36 that constantly alters and relocates itself in the synergies of transcript 2005), p. 19 and 21.
materiality and meaning, of matter and discourse. “Embodiment” is 37
See Sigrid Schmitz, Nina Degle,
the buzzword that’s often used in this context. Even if it takes on37 “Embodying – ein dynamischer
the most iridescent meanings according to each discipline, the term Ansatz für Körper und Geschlecht
emphasises the long neglected role of bodily materialities, ranging in Bewegung,” in: Nina Degele
et al., eds., Gendered Bodies in
from social actions to cognitive processes. It equally cuts across the Motion (Opladen, Farmington
humanities and natural sciences and led to a fundamental paradigm Hills, Michigan: Budrich UniPress,
2010), p. 13. Schmitz and Degele
shift in robotic, artificial intelligence, and the cognitive sciences, themselves suggest to replace the
for example. While artificial intelligence research has long inves- term embodiments with embodying
to emphasise more the dynamic of
tigated mental processes as computational power, today more and material(ity). See Ibid., p. 14.
more researchers emphasise “the importance of the construction of 38
Jutta Weber, “Die Produktion
embodied agents and artefacts and deem simulation limited to the des Unerwarteten: Materialität und
computer insufficient to create truly flexible and intelligent artefacts. Körperpolitik in der Künstlichen
Intelligenz,” in: Corinna Bath et al.,
According to the new logic, agents and artefacts should interact with Materialität denken, Studien zur
their ‘real’ environment in order to become intelligent,”38 explains technologischen Verkörperung – hy-
bride Artefakte, posthumane Körper
media theorist and technology researcher Jutta Weber. This also (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005), p. 71.
complies with new convictions in the cognitive sciences: that an 39
See Shaun Gallagher, ”Interpreta-
organism’s cognitive processes cannot be understood as detached tions of embodied cognition,”
from its physical condition and its situational embeddedness in the in: Wolfgang Tschacher, Claudia
environment and its interaction with it – that one has to assume an Bergomi eds., The Implications
of Embodiment: Cognition and
embodied cognition. Communication (Exeter: Imprint
  Academic 2011), p. 59–60.

According to Shaun Gallagher, the concept of so-called “embodied 40

Andy Clark, David Chalmers,
cognition” is by no means established or clear-cut. It encompasses “The extended mind,” in: Analysis
58, 1 (1998), pp. 7–19.
minimal solutions of an embodiment of thought and spirit in the
physiological structure of the brain up to radically embodied ap-
proaches that not only assume that bodily actions and processes
shape and participate in the constitution of consciousness and
cognition in a comprehensive manner, but rather that through close
interweaving with the body and its surroundings, cognition is dis-
tributed across the brain, the body, and environment.39 This blurring
of the conventional boundaries between the inside and outside of a
cognitive system led to a relevant philosophical debate that became
prominent at the end of the 1990s through an essay by Andy Clark
and David Chalmers entitled “Extended Mind Thesis” (EMT).40 The
extended mind thesis, [which supposes] the expansion of the spirit
beyond the limits of the body, inspired among others, the British
archaeologist Colin Renfrew and neuroscientist Lambros Malafouris’
“material engagement theory” (MET), which led to a swing from the
research of the social lives of things to the research of the “cogni-
tive lives of things.” On one hand, this relates to the well-known and
much debated “parity principle” of EMT that considers processes of
the outer world, which are functionally similar to cognitive processes
within the brain, as elements of cognitive processes. By contrast, it
also requires a detailed analysis of the special emergent qualities

17
 41
Lambros Malafouris, Colin Ren-
frew, “The Cognitive Life of Things:
Archaeology, Material Engagement
and the Extended Mind,” in: The
Cognitive Life of Things: Recast-
ing the Boundaries of the Mind
(Cambridge: McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research, 2010),
p. 7.
42
Ibid., p. 8.
43
Ibid., p. 9.
44
See Diana Coole’s contribution to
this volume, p. 27.
45
Barad 2012 (footnote 25), p. 135.
46
Coole, Frost 2010 (footnote 12),
p. 2.
47
According to Jane Bennett, for
example, it is ”the image of a dead
or throroughly instrumentalized
matter” which “feeds human hubris
and our earth destroying fantasies
of conquest and consumption.”
Bennett 2010 (footnote 11), p. iX.
48
Jacques Rancière, “A Politics
of Aesthetic Indetermination,”
An Interview with Frank Ruda &
Jan Voelker, in: Everything Is in
Everything: Jacques Rancière
Between Intellectual Emancipation
and Aesthetic Education? (Zürich,
Pasadena: JRP Rignier, Art Center
Graduate Press 2012), p. 99.
18
of the brain’s interfaces and, for example, the artefacts involved in
these processes. It doesn’t take an identity from the outside and inner
cognitive elements, but rather a synergy of them: “a constitutive in-
tertwining of brains, bodies, and things that unfolds in real time and
space.”41 The fundamental thesis of MET, that human cognitive, as
well as emotional constitution and processes “literally, comprise ele-
ments in their surrounding environment”42 has radical consequences
according to Renfrew and Malafouris, and not only for the discipline
of archaeology. It implies that earlier ways of thinking didn’t just ex-
press themselves in material culture, but rather “can also be seen as
partly constituted by material culture” and qualifying material culture
as an “analytic object for cognitive archaeology.”43
The full spectrum of approaches connected with New Materialism
is, of course, far from exhausted here. However, it should already be
clear in this provisional summary why there has been talk for several
years of a “material turn” – or a “materialist turn” as Diana Coole
writes44 – that extends across disciplines, and what fundamental
materialistic sweeping changes the “new understanding of materials”
and “reformulation of matter” mentioned at the opening of this essay
have accomplished. An exhaustion of linguistic and (social) construc-
tivist approaches of the past is frequently cited as a reason for this
sweeping turnaround, ever more frequently considered inadequate to
describe, understand, and recognise contemporary society. For exam-
ple, Karen Barad speaks of a “representationalist trap” of the social
constructivist approaches, a “geometrical optics of reflection where,
much like the infinite play of images between two facing mirrors, the
epistemological gets bounced back and forth, but nothing more is
seen.”45 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost refer to pressing ecologi-
cal, demographic, geographical, and economic challenges faced by
contemporary society for which pure textual approaches can only
bring little understanding. Instead, they think “foregrounding material
factors and reconfiguring our very understanding of matter are pre-
requisites for any plausible account of coexistence and its conditions
in the twenty-first century.”46 However, it largely appears to not only
be about an adequate description of the world. With its emphasis on
the agential status of matter and the non-anthropocentric, flat ontol-
ogy of its networks and assemblages, New Materialism shakes the
basic tenants of humanism, on which the various exploitations of the
contemporary world are based47 and appears, not least, to demand
normative consequences.
About the focus of this book
The title of this publication, Power of Material/Politics of Material-
ity, also alludes to these normative consequences, in particular the
second half. But in light of New Materialism, a “politics of material-
ity” first clearly expresses itself in the fact that, as actors, material
phenomena can also always “push and reconfigure the partition of
the sensible”48 and that they can take part in “the debate over what
 49
is given sensibly, on what is seen, on the way what is seen is sayable Ibid., p. 10.
and over who can see and say it,”49 and in theses cases – following 50
Elisabeth Strowick, “Materielle
French philosopher Jacques Rancière in his definition of the political Ereignisse. Performanztheoretische
Konzepte von Materialität,” in:
– can be described as political. I would even argue that, according to Köhler, Metzler, Wagner-Egelhaaf
this definition, the re-conception of materiality in New Materialism is 2004 (footnote 4), p. 34.
fundamentally political, since it causes a deep reconfiguration of the 51
Ibid.
sensible. Only in the second step does this re-conception entail real 52
See for example Patrick Joyce,
political demands and ethical consequences. Tony Bennett, eds., Material pow-
  ers: Cultural Studies, History, and
The first half of the title, Power of Material, emphasises the efficacy of the Material Turn (Abingdon, Oxon,
New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 2.
matter and material, and designates what the book is primarily about:
the productivity and momentum of material phenomenon. However,
in this context, power doesn’t mean the dominating rule of something
living or not living, but rather should be understood as a distributed
dynamic process and power insofar as Michel Foucault’s sense of the
term. In the conception of the French post-structuralist’s, power-exist­
ence further performs, as Elisabeth Strowick recently demonstrated
in detail with Foucault’s essay The Lives of Infamous Men (1977),
as “matter event,” it formulates itself “in the language of particles
physics” and acts through this particle or eventfulness as “disparate-
dynamic event.”50 “The topology of power is one of elementary dis-
sipation, a differential meshwork of power relations in which power
continuously shifts, redirects, produces.”51 According to Foucault,
power isn’t only a genuine material issue, but is constantly in flux. It
clusters and swells in material collisions and conglomerations. It has
no specific sources, but rather expresses itself in relationships, power
relations, and operating conditions, and “condenses itself in matter.”52
In this respect, Foucault’s conception of power corresponds outstand-
ingly with New Materialism’s flat ontology and is, in this context, put
forth by other authors. The “Power of Material” in our title analogous­
ly refers not to material as the root of domination, but instead to
dynamic power relations and operating conditions evolving from
artistic and creative –as well as scientific-technical, ecological and
economic – processes and between the individual units of a network
and assemblages made from materials, things, people, meanings, and
signs and they in turn manifest themselves in material and matter.

The decision to speak about the “power of material” rather than the
“power of matter” or the “power of material phenomenon” is due to
the fact that the publication’s contents focus on artistic and creative
debates and interactions with material and material phenomenon,
that in this way advance to material. In fact, this publication pre-
sents one of the first, if also fragmentary, attempts to relate scientific
approaches of New Materialism to approaches in art, design, and
architecture, in which a reconsideration of materials and a reconfigu-
ration of materiality is also taking place. Today, a slew of young artists
come to mind in this context, who emphasise with and in their works
the momentum of matter and material, the cognitive life of things,
or the assemblage-like interweaving of culture and nature, matter
and meaning, mind and body. Additionally, contemporary designers

19
 53
See also Karianne Fogelberg’s
conversation with Nicola Stattmann
and Thomas Schröpfer in this
volume, p. 88.
54
See Barrett, Bolt 2013 (footnote
15), p. 7 and Joshua Simon,
Neomaterialism (Berlin: Sternberg
Press, 2013).
55
Cornelia Ortlieb, Text and Texture:
On the Materiality of West-Eastern
Transfers in Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe and Marianne von Willemer,
p. 51.
56
Ibid., p. 55.
57
Diana Coole, New Materialism:
The Ontology and Politics of Materi-
alisation, p. 33.
20
and architects experiment with smart materials, that seem to display
partially vital qualities, and attempt to take greater account of its
potential and dynamics through another conception and applica-
tion of conventional materials in the development and production
process.53 Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt debate “the relationships
between various bodies that enable art to come into being” in Carnal
Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ of the Arts (2013) while
Joshua Simon’s Neomaterialism (2013) primarily places contempo-
rary art in relation to the comprehensive commodification of things,
which he considers as the materialisation of social relationships.54
This book, on the other hand, not only covers contributions from over
ten different disciplines, it also has a different orientation in regards
to art. In a juxtaposition of artistic and scientific contributions, as
well as the documentation of an interdisciplinary dialogue that took
place between artists and scientists at the academy, the publication
primarily revolves around the question of whether comparable mate-
rial practices and similar materialistic tendencies loom in current
art as they do in the sciences. Indeed, simply posing this question
changes our view of the arts, which is why an interpretation of an
artwork inspired by New Materialism cannot be separated from its
own neomaterialistic orientation.
The Contributions
Cornelia Ortlieb’s contribution elucidates how New Materialism has
also changed the perception of the arts, highlighting from today’s
perspective a re-evaluation of material and materiality and its signifi-
cance in the writing culture and literature of the 18th Century.
Cornelia Ortlieb argues to take the “the material side of literature”55
into consideration and emphasises that writing, as a physical act and
in its encounter with writing surfaces and implements, must always
be considered as a multi-faceted material practice. She explores the
correspondence between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Mari-
anne von Willemer as an example, a cultivated game with “speaking
things” and “allusion-rich texts”56 whose contents relate to each other
and are frequently combined with one another on a direct material
basis. In this way, Cornelia Ortlieb directs our attention to the mate-
rial design of texts and the materiality of its contents, as well as the
processes of transformation, translation, and blending that take place
between matter, signs, and semantics.
Diana Coole’s essay marks the beginning of this publication, which
in its first half gives a far-reaching overview of the central features of
the materialist ontology, its characteristic terminology and special
interest in the body. The British political scientist names possible
reasons for what is commonly called the materialist turn, referring
to lines of thought that it emerges from, and concerns itself with the
topic of agency that is, according to New Materialism “distributed
across a far greater range of entities”57 than previously assumed. The
second half of the essay devotes itself to the normative consequences
 58
of materialist approaches. These initially exist in “a more receptive, Ibid., p. 36.
open sensitivity to the nonhuman”58 and willingness to a recipro- 59
Ibid., p. 37–40.
cal commitment, which in turn, is prerequisite for a cultural ethos 60
Tim Ingold, An Ecology of Materi-
and political change. Beyond that, Coole recommends as “critical als, p. 61.
historical materialism” a “capacious historical materialism” that 61
Ibid., p. 64.
directs its focus not only on an economic level, as orthodox historical
62
materialism has done, but conceives of it more as a stratum between Ibid., p. 65.
micro-levels of “everyday embodied experience” and the macro- 63
“Materials are constantly aston-
levels of “planetary bio- and eco-systems,”59 but to which it continues ishing”. In conversation with Max
to attribute a crucial meaning. In the following conversation Diana Lamb and Tim Ingold, p. 80.

Coole supplements her remarks about a new critical materialism, and

places New Materialism in reference to, among other things, a (non)
subject-centred creativity that lives within the matter itself.
 
The contributions following Cornelia Ortlieb’s essay, by Tim Ingold
and Max Lamb, as well as the conversation between Nicola Statt-
mann and Thomas Schröpfer link New Materialist theories concretely
with the practices of makers and creators – more precisely with those
of designers and architects. A (congenial) interdisciplinary dialogue
about the essence of materials and the engagement with material
qualities and dynamics unwinds between the British designer Max
Lamb and the British social anthropologist Tim Ingold. In a vivid de-
scription of his production practice, Max Lamb at first elucidates how
each of his design objects comes into being through an unmediated
and experimental way of working with materials, thus his designs
develop directly out of the specific conditions and potentials of the
materials he uses. The design practice that Lamb describes finds a di-
rect parallel in Tim Ingold’s subsequent plea for the deconstruction of
the hylemorphic model from which the prevailing notion in Western
thought of making as “imposing form on substance”60 originated. In
relation to the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon and his concept
of individuation, Ingold, among other issues, opts to understand the
production of things “as a growth process” and a convergence of dif-
ferent material and non-material processes, such as the “flow of the
material and the movement and flow of the maker’s consciousness.”61
According to Ingold, a processual understanding of material that
doesn’t just see the material as a static something, but as ”potential
to become something” is crucial, as well as a different understand-
ing of things that are not objects with final forms, but “a gathering
of materials in movement.”62 The concluding conversation with Max
Lamb and Tim Ingold places the approaches of the designer and the
social anthropologist once more in direct reference to one another,
but it also addresses critical questions, like the one about the danger
of a “mystification of the material.”63
 
While Max Lamb usually works with traditional materials as a design-
er, exploiting their potential and following their own momentum, the
beginning of the conversation between the product designer Nicola
Stattmann and the architect Thomas Schröpfer, which was moderated
by Karianne Fogelberg, focuses on new intelligent materials known

21
 64
Colin Renfrew, Material Engage-
ment as Human Creative Process
and the Cognitive Life of Things,
p. 105.
65
“… Insights About the Afterlives
of Object”. In Conversation with
Sofia Hultén and Colin Renfrew,
p. 125.
22
as smart materials, which can dynamically alter themselves according
to environmental conditions and are therefore commonly considered
to have vitalist attributes. According to Stattmann and Schröpfer,
smart materials actually have led to an expansion of the conventional
understanding of materials, yet they couldn’t redeem their promises
in every area of application. Thus, architecture and design today
increasingly hearken back to the intelligence of time-honoured mate-
rials, which are being used in new ways today through sophisticated
design and production processes. 
The multi-faceted reciprocal effect between people and things stands
at the forefront of the three following contributions by the British
archaeologist Colin Renfrew and the Swedish artist Sofia Hultén, the
contents of which refer closely to one another. In accordance with
his aforementioned material engagement theory, Colin Renfrew de-
scribes the history of the cultural evolution of man, as a material en-
gagement, as an involvement with the material world that is insepara-
ble from the development of technical, but also cognitive capacities.
In this way, cognitive archaeology is capable of drawing conclusions
about the way of thinking of a culture from its material remains. Ac-
cording to Renfrew, not only archaeologists of the mind, but also a
number of artists concern themselves with the cognitive life of things.
Renfrew’s contribution spans an arc from archaeological to artistic
practice, both of which he describes as specific forms of material en-
gagement, as “active engagement with the physical world,”64 which
explores among other things the worth and meaning of things, as well
as their usage, which is closely tied to thinking or their after life after
their disposal. Sofia Hultén’s previously unreleased work Purpose
Unknown (2013) deals with exactly this issue and is published here
in the form of an image spread. The artist shows things of unknown
origin and indeterminable use that she found in an old machine
warehouse in Berlin and documented emerging out of darkness on
video. The mysterious objects are clearly recognisable as relics of a
production process that once manufactured things that had social
worth and meaning. Precisely because its exact use remains obscure,
its cognitive charge more clearly comes to light, just as, at the same
moment, it melancholically recedes from view, to make room for
an immediate presence of machine parts and materials – freed from
their clearly defined context of utilization – where forms and material
qualities develop a new dynamic life. The nature of things and what
is “essential about them”65 count among the central driving impulses
in Hultén’s works, as the artist clarifies in the following conversation
with Colin Renfrew.
My own contribution identifies new materialistic tendencies in con-
temporary art, as they also appear in Sofia Hultén’s works in the form
of self-willed things and specific material qualities, and places them
in relation to such tendencies in the cultural and social sciences. By
means of selected artistic case-studies, in particular Sergej Jensen,
Gedi Sibony, Alexandra Bircken and Nina Canell, I suggest that today
 66
new materialism in art can also advocate “comparable conceptions Susanne Witzgall, New Material-
ists in Contemporary Art, p. 129.
of a new understanding of matter and material,” as well as “a recon-
67
figuration of the material world.”66 An affirmative writing about and Karen Barad, On Touching – The
Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v1.1),
description of the artwork, along with the terminology and central p. 158.
topoi of new materialism, serves as a tool with which the material- 68
Ibid.
istic character of the artworks can simultaneously be sharpened and
69
brought forth. Ibid., p. 161.
  70
Ibid., p. 164.
Manfred Pernice conceived of artists’ pages specifically for this
book with photos from different art and everyday contexts that are
combined with textual excerpts from the magazine Evangelischer
Filmbeobachter from 1963. His contribution also takes up recurring
themes in New Materialism: the independence and singular dynamic
of materials and material qualities through a freeing and displacing
of the original sense and context of use, as well as the determination
of phenomenon in intra-action – the overlapping and interlocking
neighbourhoods and interdependencies – with other elements of the
contingent framework between things or materials as well as signs or
texts, between its semiotic and pragmatic components. In his com-
binations of text and image, Pernice knowingly plays with moments
of irritation in which perspectives are shifted and clear legibility is
refused, and bringing to the fore the in-between spaces and recipro-
cal influences within these networks of texts and objects as well as
those materials that appear in the images and texts, objects (cars,
fountains, boxes, boards, mobiles, image, stones, cones), people,
non-people (like horse or dolphin), and social production, market, or
value systems.
 
The contributions from Karen Barad and Discoteca Flaming Star, on
the other hand, touch upon the notion of “embodiment” and deal
with touch, queerness, monstrosity, and matter. In order to inves-
tigate the nature of touch and to describe its physicality, virtuality,
and affectivity, Barad initially descends into the micro-world of
elementary particles. She develops a quantum-field theory of touch
that she describes as “radically queer.” Because according to Barad,
material distinguishes itself in the quantum-field theory through
self-touch – through the interaction of the particle with the surround-
ing electro-magnetic field or virtual particles that it generates and
subsequently annihilates itself – in which it “comes into contact with
the infinite alterity that it is.”67 This is supposedly “polymorphous
perversity raised to an infinite power” and thereby “queer intimacy.”68
On this basis, Barad unfolds a theory of matter in which touch and
sensing are the essence, what constitutes matter and that defines
it as “condensations of response-ability.”69 In accordance with the
quantum-field theory perspective, this concept of matter always
includes alterities, the virtual, uncalculable, and the inhuman and
thus requires that we recognise “our responsibility to the infinitude of
the other,”70 to openly approach alterity and to welcome the stranger,
who runs through oneself as well as all being and non-being. While
Barad develops a clear, normative directive from the “perversity” of

23
 71
Costas Lapavitsas, The (Im)
Materiality of Economy, p. 185.
72
Anja Kirschner, David Panos,
Sell Everything, Buy Everything, Kill
Everything, p. 197.
24
elementary particles, monstrosities remain ambivalent in the work
of the artistic duo Discoteca Flaming Star. The stills from the film
Actually 12 Times Alissa shows image fragments from a performance
in which Cristina Gómez Barrio touches, pushes, and newly arranges
the co-performers who wear texts on their bodies while Wolfgang
Mayer reads from and sings these texts while dressed in drag. The
monstrosity addressed in the songs and recited passages is brokered
and negotiated between concepts and the circling, interacting bodies.
Monster and monstros­ity appear as material-semiotic hybrids, at once
embodied and virtual, located and trapped in un- and non-places.
The contribution from Kerstin Stakemeier, co-editor of this book,
rings in the last thematic section of the publication, which explores,
among other things, the interplay of different kinds of materiality with
its economic pre-conditions in the crisis-ridden capitalist system.
She focuses on contemporary art production and highlights changes
in the production, medial composition and the social roles of art.
According to Stakemeier, art became subject to a different paradigm
through financialised capitalism’s ongoing moment of crisis, which
she discusses with regard to the question of a medium and therefore
also a material specificity. Here the question emerges of how, or
whether in light of such changes, current philosophical debates about
a New Materialism or Speculative Realism can be made productive.
The contributions by Costas Lapavitsas, as well as from Anja Kirscher
and David Panos, which once again directly relate to one another
in form of a closing conversation, follow Kerstin Stakemeier’s essay
insofar as they put the materiality of contemporary economy to the
test. Thus, in his contribution, the economist Costas Lapavitsas sees
today’s fully-developed capitalism as arrived in a second phase of
financialization in which profit inheres “the impression of the im-
material”71 because it is no longer directly bound to production and
instead seems to spring out of pure transactions. In financial capital-
ism, money is also in its essence credit from the central banks, thus
immaterial money that likewise lacks any material foundation. In this
double uncoupling from the material foundation Lapavitsas sees an
important reason for the emergence, as well as the state-sponsored
management of the economic crisis since 2008. On the other hand,
in their artistic contribution – with the help of their films The Last
Days of Jack Sheppard (2009) und Ultimate Substance (2012) – Anja
Kirschner and David Panos interweave considerations on the abstrac-
tion of the value of money in ancient Greece with explanations about
the materiality and immateriality of their own research and manner of
filmic representation. Their thesis, that “the introduction of coinage in
the ancient Greek world effected a profound cognitive shift that was
key to the emergence of western philosophic, scientific and dramatic
traditions”72 doesn’t only recall, with its close connection of material
practice and cognitive development, material engagement theory, but
rather interprets under the influence of the political theorist Alfred
Sohn-Rethel and the British antiquities researcher George Thomson
 73
and Richard Seaford, the “real abstraction” of money as the origin of Ibid., p. 197 and 199.
abstract forms of knowledge or the beginning of the distribution of 74
Diedrich Diederichsen, Is Marx-
“sensual and abstract forms of knowledge.”73 In this way, they clearly ism a Correlationism?, p. 217.
position themselves against a one-sided devaluation of abstract 75
Ibid., p. 219.
values. The closing discussion distinguishes once more between the 76
DeLanda 2012 (footnote 13),
different historical phases of monetary economy and capitalism, p. 40.
dispensing with the myth that through electronic payment systems we
deal with a purely immaterial process.
 
Diedrich Diedrichsen’s contribution constitutes the closing theoretical
accent. His essay connects so-called Speculative Realism and other
object-oriented ontologies with a Marxist-oriented theory of value to
a “deep-rooted materialist theory of exploitation.”74 Diederichsen
sees the contours of a non-correlational theory of exploitation appear-
ing in this idea, and, in this context, poses the question of whether
the “correlationism” so reviled by speculative realist Quentin Meil-
lassoux who is merely interested in the world “as it pertains to the
‘co-reality’ of human consciousness and not for its own sake” results
from that side of the enlightenment “which has also, in the final
analysis, given us the capitalist mode of production.”75 Alfred Sohn-
Rethel also emerges here as an important reference.
 
Three inserts are scattered between the mentioned theoretical and
artistic contributions, which present a selection of student work.
These [projects] come from classes led by Max Lamb, Manfred
Pernice, and Nairy Baghramian during the first yearly programme
of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies on the theme Power of
Material/Politics of Materiality at the Academy of Arts Munich, which
this publication grew out of. The inserts show the students’ intensive
practical grappling with the theme and its further independent crea-
tive development, which from Fall 2012 until Summer 2013 includ-
ed theory events within the school as well as an accompanying and
supplementary public lecture series.
 
Finally, it must be emphasised that this publication neither promises
to be a representative anthology of New Materialism, nor does it
seek to reduce New Materialism to its key elements. The heterogene-
ity of the contributions and essays rather reflects the contemporary
openness of New Materialism and corresponds to our concern to not
preach any new materialist dogmas or essentialisms, which separates
the world into different categories and polarities. Instead, accord-
ing to Manuel DeLanda, it should be “the conceptual and empirical
resources developed by all fields to enrich materialism and prevent it
from becoming a priori.”76

25
 1
New Materialism: I am grateful to the Leverhulme
Trust for funding the three-year
The Ontology and Politics of Materialisation1 research project under whose aegis
Diana Coole this essay was prepared.
2
I have built on and expanded
the current lecture and essay in
“Agentic Capacities and Capacious
Historical Materialism: Thinking with
New Materialisms in the Political
Sciences”, Millennium – Journal
of International Studies vol. 41.3
(2013), pp. 451-469. See also Diana
Coole and Samantha Frost, eds.,
The New Materialisms. Ontology,
Agency, and Politics (Durham NC:
Duke University Press, 2010) and
Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore,
eds., Political Matter. Technosci-
ence, Democracy, and Public Life
(Minneapolis: University of Minne­
sota Press, 2010).

Over the past two or three years there has been much talk in the so-
cial and human sciences about a materialist turn. It is clear that this is
not, however, a complete revolution back to older forms of material-
ism, even if some of their traces are still resonant. The new material-
ists are self-consciously positioning themselves in the wake of an
earlier cultural turn towards linguistic modes of cultural analysis that
included radical forms of constructivism, but also in response to new
challenges and opportunities that are emerging through novel ways of
understanding matter and handling objects.2

My essay has two main parts. The first provides an overview by con-
sidering some of the ways a new materialism is being pursued, the
sources from which it draws inspiration and the kind of vocabulary
that is being used to invoke volatile process of materialisation. This
includes a sketch of the new materialist ontology, with its distinctive
choreography, and some reflections on its significance for analysing
the material realm that embodied social actors inhabit. The second
part ponders a question that is often addressed to new materialists but
that so far does not seem to have been answered very satisfactorily.
This corresponds to the “politics of materiality”, which you reference
in your book and lecture series title. The question here is whether
the New Materialism is only descriptive or also entails a normative
project. If it does have normative ambitions or implications, how
might these be negotiated? Is it feasible, for example, to reconcile a
post-anthropocentric, flat ontology across which agency is distributed
with a project for social transformation?

27
 3
For example, Lund University,
Sweden, hosted a symposium
entitled Matter Matters: the Social
Sciences beyond the Linguistic
Turn during October 2012, while
the following month an international
conference at the London School of
Economics was called Materialism
and World Politics. New research
clusters, such as the University of
Bristol’s Politics and Matter group
situated in a School of Geographical
Sciences, and Politics departments
such as the one at the University of
Kent, have also hosted conferences
on the topic. Meanwhile, ambitious
year-long programmes, such as
Materialism and New Materialism
across the Disciplines, in prepara-
tion at the Humanities Research
Center, Rice University, Texas, as
well as your own cx lecture series
Power of Material/Politics of Mate-
riality in Munich during the winter
term 2012/13, testify to the broad
interest generated by this approach
and the fields of inquiry it is current­
ly opening up.
28
Part 1. The New Materialisms
Interest in new materialist modes of inquiry is currently evident
across a range of disciplines, from political theory or architecture
to geography or anthropology, and in fields ranging from food and
biopolitics to international relations and the visual arts. The most
rarefied philosophical inquiries, developments in the natural sciences
and observations regarding a fast-changing social and ecological fab-
ric are all grist to its mill.3 Because no orthodoxy has (yet) emerged,
the field is exceptionally open. The New Materialisms draw on di-
verse influences and are being developed by representatives from
numerous traditions. These include ancient atomism and modern
vitalism; modern political theorists who are re-interpreting Hobbes,
Spinoza, Marx and Nietzsche; phenomenologists, Deleuzeans, Fou-
cauldians and Derrideans; critical realists, speculative realists and
historical materialists; environmentalists, artists, and systems theorists
espousing complexity or chaos theory.
But just what are the new materialisms? What is at stake here? And
why is this emerging now? It seems to me that two distinctive, albeit
related, lines of inquiry are opening up here. One pertains to an
ontology of becoming, in which the very processes involved in the
materialisation of matter are being re-described; the other focuses on
actual material change – with all the dangers and opportunities this
entails – while remaining faithful to the rhythms of new materialist
ontology.
New Materialist Ontology
Subscribing to a new materialist ontology – one that rejects older
distinctions between the human and nonhuman, materialism and
idealism, or subjects and objects, because it finds them thoroughly
imbricated in one another – is a signature of new materialists. This
commitment is encapsulated by a terminology of vital materialism/
materialist vitalism, or generative immanence/immanent generativity,
which are among the terms being used to summarise the project and
its ontology.
Some of this ontology’s distinctive features are the following:
• This is not about being but becoming: what it invokes is a process,
not a state.
• In this process of materialisation, materiality is recognised as lively,
vibrant, dynamic: matter literally matters itself.
• Crucially, this is not the dead, inert, passive matter of the mechanist,
which relied on an external agent to set it in motion, but a materiality
that contains its own energies and forces of transformation. It is self-
organising, sui generis.
 4
• The source of this lively immanence is variously ascribed to differ- Here I particularly have in mind the
French phenomenologist, Maurice
ence or negativity; cracks or reversals; virtuality or folds; contingency Merleau-Ponty. See in particular
or chance. The point is that these generative forces are not substances The Phenomenology of Perception
(London: Routledge, 1962) and The
or agencies as such, but are fractures or non-coincidences within Visible and the Invisible (Evanston
matter that endows it with contingency; even, with an internal life of IL: Northwestern University Press,
1968).
its own. This is not therefore an ontology of solid matter visualised as
5
an unbroken, meaningless plenitude. The emphasis falls, rather, on See for example, Gilles Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition (London:
the relationality and shifting associations between entities, which are Athlone Press, 1994), Jane Bennett
incessantly engendering new forms within open systems. “A Vitalist Stopover on the way
to a New Materialism”, in: Coole,
Frost 2010 (footnote 2), pp. 47–69.
• This fissuring of and within matter may be ascribed, as it is by phen- Deleuze and Guattari suggest, that
omenologists, to a specifically organic reversibility that defines the “what metal and metallurgy bring
to light is a life proper to matter,
body. As simultaneously touching and touched, the body is both a vital state of matter as such, a
an active, sentient existent and a passive, sensible object. For such material vitalism that doubtless
exists everywhere but is ordinarily
thinkers,4 this corporeal difference marks the evolutionary origin of hidden”. They add evocatively that
capacities for structuring and stylising the perceived world, thereby the “relation between metallurgy
and alchemy reposes” in “the im-
instilling rudimentary yet productive agentic capacities into the very manent power of corporeality in
flesh of the world. all matter, and on the esprit de
corps accompanying it.” In: Gilles
Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand
On the other hand, the difference that subtends material immanence Plateaus (London: Athlone Press,
1988), p. 411.
may be attributed, as it is by Deleuzean vitalists, to a vibrant effer­
6
vescence whereby nomadic propensities are found even within the See Bruno Latour, Reassembling
the Social. An Introduction to Actor-
mineral world.5 Thus the structure of metal turns out to be full of Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford
crystalline spaces that yield a variegated topography of cracks and University Press, 2005).
defects, bringing indeterminacy even to this most seemingly inert
material. In their intimacy with things, artisans may experience a
contingent, even a creative, materiality that is alive with incipient
tendencies which unfold during their encounter with other bodies,
forces and affects to provoke a new alchemy as an encounter with
the materialisation of which the embodied artist is a part.

• Because such processes of immanent materialisation have no out-
side, change has to be generated internally. This is a monist ontology.
Rather than expressing a single substance, however, new materialist
becoming is irreducibly complex, variegated, folded, labyrinthine,
multi-dimensional, multi-scalar. Different parts move with variable
speeds and manifest themselves with variable intensities.

• This account is nonetheless regarded as inimical to older category

distinctions: most notably, between God, Man and Nature, or be-
tween human, animal and mineral. In place of a vertical, hierarchical
classification of Being, this is sometimes presented, for example by
Bruno Latour, as a flat ontology. A flat ontology is one in which hori-
zontal flows, indeterminate assemblages and emergent entities are in
a constant ferment of transition and decay.6

• A new materialist ontology is thus radically non-anthropocentric.

It does not privilege the human species or recognise it as distinctive
in any a priori sense, although it does hold humans responsible for
destructive anthropogenic effects on the environment.

29
 7
This is what I call a capacious • The point here is that entities, structures, bodies, objects, all emerge
materialism in my Millennium article
(2013). as unstable assemblages that are composed of and folded into mani-
8
fold smaller and larger assemblages. These are incessantly being re-
See for example the Journal of
Political Ecologies, available to configured by encounters with other provisional constellations, from
download free at http://jpe.library. the tiniest to the most cosmic. The challenge for the social scientist is
arizona.edu. Also Paul Robbins,
Political Ecology: A Critical Intro-
to trace these densely productive and reversible relationships, or for
duction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). the artist it is to participate in them without aspiring to mastery over
the forces involved.7

• It follows from the choreography of becoming that the evolution of

entities or assemblages proceeds in a non-linear way. Antecedents
are insufficient to predict their emergence. Determinism, causality
and teleology are therefore much derided by new materialists, who
instead emphasise swerves and swarms, chance and the event.

While it is unwise to proceed directly from ontology to politics, the

notion of the event is widely used for understanding occurrences
that would formerly have been explained in terms of their underlying
causes. Thus, for example, a political irruption like the Arab Spring is
sometimes described as an event insofar as it is regarded as unex-
pected, unpredictable: as the creation of something new but whose
repercussions cannot yet be known.

Concern may nevertheless be voiced at this stage. By rendering eve-

rything as flowing and relational; by focusing on flux and the event
rather than on the inertia of congealed structures; by flattening every-
thing into open assemblages or entities, are new materialist accounts
not in danger of losing specificity or critical capacity? Inasmuch
as their task is an empirical one of tracing the dense networks that
produce assemblages, and of catching them in their brief appearing,
does the detail required in heeding all these manifold relationships
not perhaps condemn us to tiny anthropological studies that lack
broader consequence? On the other hand, the insight that every en-
tity has a biography that links its microscopic constituents to distant
cosmological forces seems to overwhelm plausible social scientific
inquiry without widespread collaboration. One of the challenges in
applying new materialist insights will surely, then, be to decide which
levels and flows are important. And this, inevitably, will entail some
preconception of which relationships and phenomena matter most.

Fortunately, most new materialists do acknowledge that, as complex-

ity theories explain, even apparently chaotic or random systems
actually evince deeper patterns of organisation, even if their outcome
is unpredictable. And while entities or assemblages may be unstable
and complex, they do have recognisable boundaries. It is just that
these are porous, permeable, and enmeshed with other systems. This
is why the concept of ecologies, which was initially used by the natu-
ral sciences, is widely used to reference complex, dynamic systems
in which living and nonliving forms of matter interact and matter and
energy are in flux, as for example in urban or political ecologies.8

30
A New Material World

These last challenges are especially relevant for new materialist

attempts at making sense of the unprecedented situation in which
humans are ever more intimately enmeshed with material systems
and objects. In this context, new materialism may be regarded as a
timely response to – or even as an expression of – conditions found
in the twenty-first century. For it is not merely that the imbrication
of humans and matter is being understood in novel ways. After all,
their use of tools and their reliance on natural resources have always
enmeshed human bodies within broader techno- and eco-systems.
But while new materialists insist that the human has always been
imbricated in irreducibly human/non-human systems, they are also
aware that the very materiality of life is being altered, encroached
upon, and endowed with radically transformative capacities in un-
precedented ways.

The invention of new materials resonates here with claims by artists

and designers to a new alchemy. Yet at the same time, the dangers
of our meddling and the limits to human mastery are better appreci-
ated. In the anthropocene – an era in which humans’ manipulation of
matter is imprinted in the very geological fabric of the earth – change
is occurring at an ever faster pace and intensity, with unpredictable
consequences that reveal the fragility and limits of the planet. One
way in which a materialist turn manifests itself here is accordingly in
its concerns about the effects of humans on the broader biophysical
environment and vice versa. From this perspective, the materialist
turn is responding to an urgent need for the social sciences to direct
their critical attention to imminent threats to life itself. This may mean
displacing recent attention to questions of personal identity or group
recognition, or broadening the more linguistic approaches associated
with the cultural turn and radical forms of constructivism, through
new inquiries in which political economy, demography, and the earth
sciences move to the fore, thus providing a more materialist frame-
work for concerns over social justice.

For example, among the planet’s seven billion people currently striv-
ing for better living standards, some two billion suffer from insuf-
ficient calories or nutrition. The proliferation of human flesh means
a further three billion mouths to feed by the century’s end, under
conditions where climate change is putting enormous strains on
food, water and energy supplies. As environments are degraded and
demand exceeds the planet’s carrying capacity, prevailing economic
wisdom is that sustained growth is the solution to sustainability and
global equity. But is it? My own view is that the new materialism
invites critical theorists to response to this highly generalised and
implausible claim through a holistic exploration of the interlocking of
diverse systems, beginning with concrete studies of everyday visceral
existence that bring real material ballast to what are often overly ab-
stract or diffuse studies. In this sense, the task of a new materialism is

31
 nothing less than the tracing of these emergent but potentially deadly
assemblages in all their dense material detail.

The Body

To put some flesh on this rather general account, it is helpful to begin

by asking about its significance for the body – and the body’s signifi-
cance for the new materialism. The body is, unsurprisingly, of great
interest to the latter. Insistence on its visceral, everyday experiences;
its biological needs; its corporeal capacities for perception and
motility; its abilities to wield tools and to transform its environments
aesthetically, add a more material dimension to the recent emphasis
on its performative styles and identities. In the schema of bare life,
that most minimal condition of existing, to which Agamben refers
in Homo Sacer, bodies’ survival – human and animal – might be
considered the normative ground zero for any notion of wellbeing.
A materialist approach will therefore pay attention to how the flesh
is actually being produced and reproduced within numerous bio-,
techno-, and eco-systems, as well as to its own efficacy in changing
such systems.

Fidelity to new materialist ontology means recognising the body as

an assemblage that depends on myriad micro-systems of bacteria,
with its intricate genetic structure also being affected by environ-
mental factors. In this sense the body may be regarding not merely
as a contingent and non-terminal product of evolution, but also as a
permeable entity that interacts with smaller and bigger materialisa-
tions, or even as a nodule through which they flow. For example,
bodies are increasingly being reconstituted through bio-medical
interventions; their abilities are reoriented through interactions with
digital technologies and their capacities are recalibrated by biopoliti-
cal regimes. New modes of biopower imbue governments with un-
precedented abilities to socially engineer human capital and bodily
capacities through intervening in the most intimate and microscopic
details of daily life. Yet routines at this level – from throwing out
trash to using electricity generated by fossil fuels – also have multi-
ple consequences for distant economic, geopolitical and ecological
systems on which biological existence depends. At the same time, a
body’s survival depends on its embeddedness within broader social
structures, in which the objects it routinely handles or consumes are
mainly commodities that have passed through the circuits of global
markets and thus the structural logics of capitalism. Through such
intermediaries its wellbeing is implicated in more distant bio-physical
systems, where ancient geological histories and more recent atmos-
pheric changes affect the viability and distribution of crucial resourc-
es, which are themselves reconfigured by technological assemblages
and mediated by economic systems.

In summary, it is hardly surprising that in this complex, multi-dimen-

sional ecology it no longer seems feasible to distinguish between

32
 9
human and non-human, or even organic and inorganic, entities.9 As See Latour 2005 (footnote 6), Jane
Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham
the meshing of numerous systems across different scales becomes NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
ever more intricate, so the material world increasingly exemplifies 10
Diana Coole, Merleau-Ponty and
the complexity and dynamism described by new materialist ontology. Modern Politics after Posthumanism
(Lanham MD: Rowman and Lit-
tlefield, 2007), Merleau-Ponty 1962
Agency (footnote 4).

Within the choreography of becoming, the nature of agency remains

a vexed issue. New materialists maintain that agency is distributed
across a far greater range of entities than had formerly been imag-
ined. This is particularly salient for political critique or intervention
but it poses the question of just how widely agency is distributed. In
modern Western thinking, theories of agency have generally been
governed by anthropocentric and humanist assumptions, whereby
agency has conventionally been defined not just as a distinctive prop-
erty of humans, but in many cases as the characteristic that defines
them as a distinctive and privileged species thanks to their capacities
for cognition and rationality.

Such views are challenged by phenomenological accounts of corpo-

reality.10 The core insight here is that agency, like subjectivity and ra-
tionality, depends upon and is never entirely separate from corporeal
processes – notably perception – in which it develops. In perception,
the body structures its environment through a practical engagement
with it: it generates meaning in pre-personal, non-cognitive ways that
allow it to pattern and interrogate its milieu, thus introducing contin-
gency, corporeal significance and scope for creative improvisation.

From this point of view agency, like subjectivity, is an abstraction

that conflates a series of processes or abilities that evolve over time
but which are anchored in perception’s ability not just passively
to receive images of external nature, but actively to structure and
respond to a material situation as a field of (co)existence that is one
intercorporeal flesh. It is from this perspective unhelpful to ask who
or what an agent is. Rather, the challenge in any particular context is
to identify diffuse agentic capacities as these emerge hazardously and
provisionally. The same goes for political agency. Its provenance and
development must also be traced, rather than theoretically predicted.
Such views are congruent with new materialist references to distrib-
uted agency, which suggest that far from being uniquely human at-
tributes, agentic capacities may be discerned across a broader range
of entities. But how broad is this range? This will depend in large part
on which capacities are recognised as agentic.

From the phenomenological viewpoint, the primacy of perception

suggests two principal capacities: first, the active potency or efficacy
needed to bring about change; second, the reflexivity for these effects
to matter to their perpetrator, thus endowing the latter with motivation
to act.

33
 11
See Latour 2005 (footnote 6), If the condition for developing such capacities is corporeality, then
p. 72.
this distributes agentic capacities quite widely since it can include
non-human bodies, even though for animals their reflexivity and their
capacity to structure their environment remains limited. More radi-
cal, but challenging, questions arise when agency is also attri­buted
to non-organic entities: a position proposed by Bruno Latour and
implicit in some materialist vitalisms. Latour espouses a notion
of actants in order to ascribe agency to inanimate entities. The key
point here is that actants have efficacy: they make a difference, pro-
duce effects and affects, alter the course of events by their action.
Latour shows them allowing, encouraging, authorising, influencing,
blocking. This may seem intuitively more compelling when agency
is attributed to human/non-human assemblages, but Latour also
ascribes it to things, which he describes as shuddering, muttering
and swarming as they are awakened from their slumbers.11

According to the two criteria mentioned earlier, inanimate objects

might be accorded a weak form of agency inasmuch as they are
efficacious, since they do act on other bodies and they even dem-
onstrate a certain contingency in their material composition that
renders them open systems. Yet I have some hesitation in making this
new materialist move inasmuch as, according to my twofold crite-
ria, inorganic things lack the characteristic of reflexivity that would
make their survival matter to them. In remaining indifferent to the
impact of their efficacy, they lack motivation to change themselves or
the world in order to improve their life chances or enhance wellbe-
ing. Their structural openness renders them amenable to motivated
improvisation in their relationships with animate matter. But lacking
this attribute themselves, it is difficult to see how this insight might
inspire a critical project of social change. From this point of view,
too, non-anthropomorphism makes it difficult to see how humans
can be accorded particular responsibility for rectifying the dangers to
life they cause within the anthropocene.

My own inclination here is to recognise that just as the choreogra-

phy of becoming entails different levels, scales and modalities of
materialisation, so agentic capacities need to be identified as diffuse
but variable characteristics of material entities whose salient quali-
ties will depend on the level in question. Ontologically, a wide
distribution is attuned to entities’ generativity and efficacy, which
in turn circumscribes and enlivens everyday social and ecological
situations. But biologically, evolution requires abilities to adjust and
adapt to this material environment and thus organic matter exhibits
more highly structured capacities. Since these include non-cognitive
abilities to restructure the world, they are shared with nonhuman
bodies. Philosophically, this robs the Human of unique standing and
ability, as well as undermining equations of agency with rationality.
Yet politically, humans do collectively have particular responsibili-
ties that arise from their material domination of nature and which are

34
 12
exemplified by the material damage done to the nonhuman world. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on
Liberation (Harmondsworth: Pen-
Responding in this case does require a more concentrated notion guin, 1969), p. 39.
of political agency, albeit one whose concrete appearing remains
a contingent political project that includes corporeal performances
like gestures and material habits. Coming full circle, this project also
needs to recognise the guidance and recalcitrance, the efficacy and
resilience, of matter, and thus the limits and provenance of human
will.

Part 2. New Materialisms, Ethics and Politics

In light of these last comments, I now want to explore ways in which

new materialist approaches inspire a normative project associated
with ethical or political change. For many of us who have welcomed
a materialist turn after the cultural turn, it is precisely because of the
possibilities it opens up for a more robust critical theory and a trans-
formation of conduct towards matter.

A New Sensibility

I begin, here, by considering suggestions that appreciating the agentic

capacities of the nonhuman and of the complex systems in which
humans are embedded might engender a new sensibility or creativity.
The modern quest to dominate nature has regularly been challenged
by romantic strains of thought and blamed for destruction of the
environment. In response a different ethos or mode of being-in-the-
world, one no longer predicated on instrumental conduct or a will
to mastery, is advocated. Encounters with the natural world, whether
through immediately visceral experiences or in more mediated artis-
tic pursuits, are often commended here as ways to cultivate a more
generous, humble or creative sensibility.

One such example is Herbert Marcuse’s new sensibility, as discussed

in his Essay on Liberation (1969). Developed in the context of the
1970s counter-culture with its insistence on limits to growth, this
seems to have renewed resonance today. Harmonious, erotic, playful
and imaginative, the new sensibility or aesthetic ethos is described by
Marcuse as an attitude of letting-be that he associates with the paci-
fication of nature. This is in turn founded on vital, instinctual needs
associated with Eros, the life force, which is suppressed by consumer
capitalism and modern rationality.

Marcuse privileges artistic activity as a means to re-cultivate an

aesthetic sensibility. This would, he claims, recapture some of art’s
“more primitive ‘technical’ connotations”, such as cooking, cultivat-
ing and growing things, which gives them a form, which gives them a
form that neither violates their matter nor infringes on the sensitivity.12
Activities like gardening, rambling, painting, non-reproductive erotic
pleasures, are valued here as playful, non-instrumental activities that

35
 13
Karl Marx, The Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,
ed. Dirk Struik (NY: International
Publishers, 1964).
14
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second
Sex (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1972) [orig. 1949], p. 471.
15
See Bennett 2010 (footnote 9),
pp. 10, 14, 17, 111.
36
cultivate a closer relationship with the natural world and enhance
appreciation for its immanent forms without consuming, possessing
or commodifying it. Such views resonate with those of Karl Marx in
his 1844 manuscripts.13
I particularly like Simone de Beauvoir’s observation, here, that if
“the Mediterranean Midi lives in a state of joyous filth, it is not only
because water is scarce: love of the flesh and its animality is condu-
cive to toleration of human odour, dirt and even vermin.”14 She goes
on to hymn the merits of activities that might today be associated
with the slow food movement and whose pleasures she distinguishes
from the tedium of housework. A similarly salutary turning away from
mastery is expressed in artistic interactions with materials that follow
their material potential and shapes, rather than simply imposing form
upon them. This is equated with a more receptive, open sensitivity to
the nonhuman and a willingness to engage with it in a more recip-
rocal way. In turn, it paves the way for a new cultural ethos, which
for thinkers like Marcuse is a vital prelude to fundamental political
change that includes more responsible conduct towards the environ-
mental.
A more recent version of such arguments appears in Jane Bennett’s
book, Vibrant Matter (2010), which makes a case for the ethical po-
tential of the new materialism to cultivate a new sensibility. Bennett
subscribes to Latour’s and Deleuze’s more extensive distribution of
agency to things; she hopes our chance encounters with them may
help transform modernity’s attitudes and forms of conduct as these
pertain to matter. “What is needed”, Bennett contends, “is a culti-
vated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces operating
outside and inside the human body”. She associates this with cultivat-
ing respect for nonhuman otherness and agency in order to engender
“a more open-ended comportment” that is also “a more ecological
sensibility”. If “we were more attentive to the indispensible foreign-
ness that we are”, Bennett asks, “would we continue to produce and
consume in the same violently reckless ways?” In this vein she cites
a number of ecological thinkers whom she credits with summoning
“more sustainable, less noxious modes of production and consump-
tion… in the name of a vigorous materiality”.15
But is such an ethical project enough? A more ecological or aesthetic
sensibility certainly looks beguiling, but does it have sufficient effi-
cacy to bring about the sort of profound changes that current material
conditions warrant? Surely what is also needed is the kind of critical
analysis outlined earlier, in which the social structures inhabited by
ethical beings and circumscribed by other material entities are care-
fully analysed and understood. For even those agents who are most
persuaded by vital materialism to adopt a more reciprocal relation-
ship with matter will quickly come up against systemic obstacles that
are biophysical, socioeconomic, and disciplinary; obstacles, moreo-
ver, in whose preservation powerful interests are invested.
 16
This is particularly the case, furthermore, for production and con- See Latour 2005 (footnote 6),
p. 53, 67.
sumption: areas that highlight the extent to which most objects en-
countered in the twenty-first century have not only been made over
by technology but are also commodified: that is, they have passed
through the production system and the exchange process where they
have been subjected to the logic of competitive markets and in many
cases, to the power of advertising. The system that seems most con-
spicuous by its absence from a lot of new materialist (and a fortiori
constructivist) analysis in this regard is political economy.

A New Materialist Critical Theory of the Present

Latour rejects the sociology of society inasmuch as he thinks it

propounds abstract theoretical frameworks that suppress attention to
emergent assemblages. He is especially dismissive of critical sociol-
ogy, particularly in its structuralist form, because for him this epito-
mises a tendency to use reified abstractions, while it also promotes
a conspiracy theory that claims some real, hidden agency is work-
ing behind the scenes. Instead it is crucial, Latour maintains, “not
to conflate all the agencies overtaking the action into some kind of
agency like society, culture or structure.” Rather, action needs to be
approached patiently and meticulously, as a “conglomerate of many
surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled.”16 Of
great importance here is to establish how congealed structures are re-
produced and maintained. I think Latour is right to worry about such
tendencies and that applying his bottom-up approach to rediscover
the empirical details of emergent social structures suggests a fertile
way to invigorate a critically materialist social theory appropriate for
the twenty-first century. But it is also surely necessary to have some
critical perspective that can guide the selection of appropriate levels
and identify the ways power relations not only solidify but also serve
particular interests in existing material conditions.

The approach I commend in response is one I provisionally call a

“capacious historical materialism”. Building on the earlier example
of how bodies might be understood within a dense new material-
ist domain, I suggest that while such an approach would begin with
the most routine, mundane, corporeal experiences of everyday life,
it also needs to examine the way intermediate structures of capital
and governance affect them and the ways these, in turn, affect wider
global and planetary systems. It must also, of course, examine the
way material effects flow up through this hierarchy of levels, too,
such that daily household practices also reproduce the economy and
contribute to environmental problems. The aim of such an approach
is nothing less than a biophysical reckoning of the materialisation of
the present.

Schematically, I am suggesting that three interrelated levels of

analysis be pursued here. Thus micro-level investigations apply to
the existential details of the embodied quotidian; on a meso-level,

37
 17
See for example Marx’s account
of the method of political economy
in Grundrisse, ed. Quintin Hoare
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973),
pp. 100–101.
38
analysis is directed at the social, economic and governance structures
where production, consumption, distribution and the management
of resources and embodied individuals occurs, then a macro-level
pertains to the planetary systems where ‘nature’ resists or eludes
social control and complex eco-systems persist or deteriorate through
contact with lower level materialities. While each level will itself
evince considerable complexity, the task is also to see how these
modalities affect one another. It is therefore both the internal logics
of, and the connections between, these three levels, as well as the
material dimensions internal to each and the kind of agentic capaci-
ties it engenders, that are important for building an understanding of
how the contemporary world works and identifying leverage points
for critical intervention.
This suggests a far broader, more multi-level kind of inquiry than
historical materialism as it developed within Marxism, although it re-
mains indebted to it. This is a materialism that eschews the tendency
to abstraction or to grand narratives of progress but that remains
faithful to the critical attempt at understanding how and where power
is located and its material effects. These, then, are concrete stud-
ies. Here I mean concrete in both a straightforward sense of realist,
visceral and experiential, and in the sense that Marx defines concrete
in opposition to abstract,17 whereby for historical materialists the
concrete includes all the complex historical and conceptual media-
tions that render phenomena actual at any point in time within a
dense field of relationality. What still makes this historical material-
ism a critical theory is that it takes seriously a historical analysis of
the systemic logic and effects of capitalism in a way that progressive
thinkers simply have not done under the cultural turn. My point,
then, is that on the one hand, orthodox historical materialism has
focused too exclusively on the economic level, which now becomes
merely an intermediary level between the micro (everyday embod-
ied life) and the macro (the biophysical system at a planetary level),
although it is still crucial for tracing the flows, circulation and switch-
ing points of matter; and, on the other hand, that under the cultural
turn language and culture have displaced this sort of critical materi-
alism despite a salutary emphasis on embodiment. Inasmuch as an
aim of the new materialism is to challenge the currently hegemonic
system of production and consumption, as Bennett suggests a green
sensibility must, then demystification of organised interests and rei-
fied social structures is a crucial step. I think this can, however, only
be the provisional starting point for a fresh analysis of just how these
structures are reproduced.
Micro-level analysis
It is at the micro-level that the bottom-up materialism I mentioned
earlier summons greater attention to bodies and their needs, in par-
ticular by investigating the empirical details and impacts of their
interlacing with more distant systems and policies. This is where
 18
the small ingredients that comprise or compromise experiences of Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History”, in: Language,
wellbeing proliferate. It is where experiences of deprivation or dys- Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected
function may become problematised and in future galvanise dissent. Essays by Michel Foucault, ed. Don-
ald F. Bouchard (Ithaca NY: Cornell
Describing them breathes life into the stakes of a critical social sci- University Press, 1987), p. 153.
ence or the purported engines of prosperity. A small debate that has
recently interested the British press provides an example of the sort
of phenomena I have in mind. It concerns the education minister’s
argument with architects. Insisting that his job is not to enrich these
professionals but to build schools cost-effectively, he commends nar-
rower corridors and smaller canteens as practical ways to lower costs
by reducing space. Yet his critics point out the negative effects such
diminished public spaces will have on pupil flows and on students’
feelings of wellbeing. Such details populate the everyday experiences
that new materialists try to capture in turning a spotlight on the mani-
fold details of material co-existence, in this case material spaces,
which contribute to the quality of life or insidiously undermine it.
This is but one place where affective life, corporeal experience and
government policy are materially interwoven.

It is also at this micro-level that inputs for the economic machine are
generated. It is here that resources are consumed, wasted, recycled,
thus feeding distant markets while despoiling the earth. It is here, too,
that fit or skilled flesh, agentic capacities and incapacities, human
capital, are nurtured through apparently personal yet socially pre-
scribed practices, habits and routines. It is here that the reproduction
of social systems relies on modes of governmentality that engender
compliant subjectivities. On the one hand it is important, then, to
emphasise the ways matter circulates through the household by way
of consumer durables and natural resources, to see what abundance
or scarcity actually mean here. On the other, it is possible at this level
to investigate how small disciplinary practices operate to produce
and constrain the embodied and desirous individuals who must fuel
the productive system and how public-policy norms affect behaviour
by penetrating the most private realms of family life. This is where
Michel Foucault’s effective history comes into play, where the body
is, as he says, “broken down by rhythms of work, rest, and holidays…
poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws” The
new materialism is indebted to Foucault’s more materialist genealo-
gies, with their emphasis on material practices and the way micro-
power works strategically on bodies to develop and modify their
capacities, especially as he developed them in Discipline and Punish
(1975).18

This is also where a minimum wage, social security cuts, recession,

competitive erosion of a living wage, sovereign debt, translate into
diet, health and despair. It is where pain and pleasure, deprivation
and desire, are made real. It is the material bedrock of higher level
structural or theoretical analyses. This, in short, is where the political
becomes personal as socially-normalised structures of power have
real consequences for the integrity and well-being of bodies. But it

39
 is also where myriad practices of everyday life occur in whose name
prosperity is pursued and through whose inputs higher-level systems
are reproduced or damaged.

The Meso-Level of Socio-Economic Structures and Governance

At an intermediate level, the foremost structure that warrants new

materialist attention is global capitalism in a broad sense. Socio-
economic structures may be recognised here as key switching points
within an overall material-existential topography. They comprise the
conduits and relays through which micro-materialities flow upwards
via the economy to affect natural ecosystems and where inversely,
environmental elements are reconstituted before they flow down to
impact on flesh. In short, it is necessary to investigate the dense me-
diations and flows in both directions, with economic structures and
governance regimes being the pre-eminent mediators between the
matter of everyday life and natural resources.

The pursuit of capital accumulation and profit that companies are

compelled to pursue if they are to remain competitive; the ongoing
penetration of markets into areas where public assets, the commons,
once existed; the mounting difficulty of subsisting without a living
wage to exchange for basic commodities; the ideology of sustained
economic growth whatever the cost; the penetration of advertising
into more and more areas in order to generate more consumption;
the use of credit to expand consumption beyond any ability to pay
off debts; regarding the environment as so many ecological services
that have their price: these are all massively powerful factors that
need to be grasped by new materialists if they are to complete an
audit of material flows and blockages. For the underlying logic of the
capitalist system remains a relentless commodification and privati-
sation of the commons: a process that simply cannot be neglected
inasmuch as new materialists are concerned about the emergence
of objects and their imbrication in complex systems. The need here
is for a renewed political economy that traces the volatile move-
ments of capital and its associated entities, from the microscopic to
the macroscopic, rather than relying on abstract models or analyses.
Yet in this sense, capitalism does remain a powerful actant as Latour
calls agency (2005) with agentic capacities that shape lives and life
chances regardless of individual plans.

The Macro-Level: Geo-, Bio-, Eco-Systems

If I call new materialist criticism a capacious historical materialism, it

is because it does not treat the economy as the sole or even principal
level of analysis. While it pays attention to manifold micro-level phe-
nomena, it also recognises that social structures, in particular those
where consumption and production are concerned, are inseparable
from the broader geopolitical, climatic, geological, ecological, and
demographic systems in which lower levels are nested and on which

40
they rely. This is where the wet and green – or dry and brown – stuff
lies. It is also where accounts of the anthropocene, but also the de-
tailed scientific studies that inform it, are helpful, provided these also
take into account the environmental impacts of economic, demo-
graphic and household systems.

Conclusion

My presentation of the new materialism has covered a lot of ground,

from the most rarefied reaches of generative becoming to the most
visceral details of bodily need. I have suggested that the new ma-
terialism offers a new ontological imaginary, possibilities for a new
sensibility and practical guidance for undertaking a critical social
theory fit for the twenty-first century. Above all, though, the material-
ist turn is an invitation to direct our attention once again to the mate-
rial world, to plunge into its vibrant forms and to think afresh about
the manifold ways we encounter, are affected by, respond to, and are
imbricated with, matter.

41
“We need a much better appreciation of the material
structures …”
In Conversation with Diana Coole [DC]

Audience 1 Describing new materialisms, you emphasized the dy-

namic nature of forms of ‘becoming’ which are gaining more impor-
tance, for instance in us noticing the dynamisms of even mineral struc-
tures. For me as an artist, I still presume myself to be at the centre of
my creativity, and I was wondering if you could say a few more things
about possibilities of creativity, about the dislocations of those dyna-
misms in the field of art.

DC I think clearly the new materialists move away from an older un-
derstanding in which creativity was centred within an individual sub-
ject and seen as some kind of inner expression of the self. But, you
still feel that way and I think perhaps many of us do. Yet discourses
since the 1960s have criticised that sense of selfhood. Not just new
materialists, but also post-structuralists. There is a whole tradition of
thinking that has tried to de-centre the human and the subject. There is
in that sense a certain hiatus between our experiences and the kind of
discourses that we find ourselves using.

Audience 2 Some artists have tried to break with this tradition of an-
thropocentrism of creativity, but listening to you talk I think we are
very far from that, in the reality of our everyday. I also stumbled upon
the fact that if creativity is just a reaction, is there at all the possibility
of social transformation or even of an ethical project? Because if we
as thinking entities are just reacting – then are we not doomed to a
dead end?

43
 DC I think one of the reasons that there is so much actual interest in
trying to describe how even objects matter in a new materialist way, is
to move away from the sense that materials are simply dead or deter-
mined matter, in a way in which they were formerly understood. The
ambition is actually to open matter or materiality itself to creativity, to
suggest that even apparently dense and solid matter has a certain kind
of internal vitality or openness in its structure. The more we understand
about the internal structures of things like metals and minerals, the
more we see potential structures at play within those. I suppose the
most obvious way in which we can do that today is through digital
means. For example my son is a neuroscientist, and what neuroscien-
tists are doing with visual-imaging and the kind of amazing pictures
that they are producing of the brain, are so far removed from that sort
of blob of grey matter that we might once have envisaged. Suddenly
the brain is alive with electricity. Some of those metaphysical and kind
of metaphorical drawings with philosophical aspirations, which come
from the new physics and new biologies, suggest all sorts of ways in
which we can think of matter as a more open process. That gives us
the opportunity to engage with it, more creatively and experimentally.
So the aim is not to say: ‘We are all determined and unfree’, laid down
by microsystems or whatever, but actually to show that these too are
open and interlayered systems with which we have an opportunity to
improvise, to experiment, to engage in a more reciprocal way. After
all, we too are material bodies, not just creative intelligence; we have
an affinity with things.

My own interests are very much invested in environmental problems

which puts the emphasis on difficulties, challenges, crises and dis-
asters we are faced with today. But there is another strand of new
materialisms that look at what is happening with materials and that is
also opening up new materials and new opportunities towards a new
creativity. That sense of a creative spirit, which would also include
new forms of political life, new ways of engaging in collective experi-
ment, is very central today. Some people view upsurges like the Arabic
spring in such a perspective, as a very ‘creative’ mode of politics. This
is obviously a very complex subject and it is hard to pose a judgement
on it, but it is a fact that new ways of being political are invented in
such processes. I certainly think new materialists are very much on
the side of unleashing these forms of creativity. They might start from
matter, but this is precisely because of the kind of porosity of matter
and its potentiality towards open forms. I think we are hoping for new
opportunities there to be creative.

Kerstin Stakemeier I found how you did not simply dismiss Historical
Materialism or Critical Theory, but suggest that there should be an ac-
tualisation of those theories really important. And Deleuze’s and Guat-
tari’s arguments might even serve as complementary in this regard,
for example, where they argue for an understanding of distributed in-
stead of subject-focussed agency. But, in keeping up with a tradition of
Critical Theory you were rather proposing that there was a change of

44
 time that gave rise to this change of agency and uncoupled it from the
subject alone. What would you say brought about this change? When
would you argue was the emergence of new materialism? What are its
historical entrance points?

DC It’s certainly true that Deleuze had a huge impact particularly on

the ontologies and the language that are being used. So I think that’s
definitely a powerful strand, but on the other hand I think there is
a rather different strand in which a lot of Critical Theorists feel that,
although theoretical tendencies like post-structuralism and radical
constructivism are very useful for looking at the way language and
discourses reproduce power relationships, there is still something
missing. I think there is a sense of wanting to go back to much more
concrete, existential material forms. And to develop a new language in
which we talk about matter in a more mediated fashion, but in a way
that also does not reduce matter to significations. In that sense there
is certainly one strand of historical materialists who do not want to
go back to Karl Marx, but who do think perhaps it is time to renew a
critical political economy that pays attention to the 21st century in its
economic specificities, because obviously, the economic system has
changed hugely since industrial capitalism in the mid 19th century. So
it is true that if you push it too far, there are all sorts of disagreements
on that basic philosophical level. But in terms of actually practising a
new materialism we can see this as an invitation to do the kind of more
concrete studies that for example Bruno Latour recommends, begin-
ning with the details of everyday existence and building up from there
to a critical materialism of the present.

Audience 3 You have background in phenomenology and I was won-

dering if you see new materialism as a kind of “phenomenology 2.0”,
or is it actually proposing more the opposite – approaching everything
from within matter and not from within the human being. Because I
perceive the phenomenological approach as one which refers always
to an emergence from the human self.

DC It is true that a lot of new materialists look back to phenomenol-

ogy and it is extraordinary how many of them actually passed through
different strands of late 20th century French thought. They mostly were
hostile to a certain kind of structuralist Marxism, which we see very
much in someone like Latour, but also to phenomenology, which was
widely regarded in its Husserlian or Sartrean forms as being solely
about the human subject and interiority. But the phenomenologist
whom I love, and who has always been really a source of inspiration to
me, is Merleau-Ponty. He developed a very different sense of phenom-
enology, certainly not one that is subject-centred, but rather he always
starts from the body, from perception and from processes that really
decentre the human individual and draws very much on Husserl’s late
work in The Crisis of the European Sciences where he takes seriously
the idea of returning to the things themselves, but he means returning
to their existence which is simultaneously material and meaningful,

45
 1
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense
and Non-Sense (Evanston, Illinois:
Northwestern University Press,
1964), p. 17.
Susanne Witzgall You were suggesting a new materialist critical the-
ory of the present. How can a positive social transformation occur on
the basis of such a new critical theory laying more emphasis on mate-
rial phenomena and flows?
46
always in a process of contingent becoming. I think he means this on
a kind of everyday level: we return to what it means to experience the
world before it has been written over by all these theoretical systems,
by science, by common sense. With Merleau-Ponty we try to watch
the material world in its emergence and as artists we strive to par-
ticipate in this process of becoming. This seems a very Heideggerian
insight to me. In some ways there is a real affinity here with Latour.
He is also saying: “Let us get rid of these rarefied theoretical terms and
models” and let us look and wonder again at how these contingent
and unstable assemblages actually emerge and the kind of agency they
entail to change things. So that’s kind of how I am trying to finesse the
relationship between some different theoretical contributions to the
new materialisms.
I also always liked the way Merleau-Ponty talks about painting. He
looks at painters like Paul Cézanne and suggests that the painter is re-
sponding to a question from the world as much as imposing a certain
style or form onto it. He quotes Cézanne saying: “The landscape thinks
itself in me and I am its consciousness.”1 So I think it is much more that
sense of the subject – the subjective capacities emerging out of experi-
ence and embodied perception, rather than some of the more idealis-
tic forms of phenomenology where all these dynamisms are concen-
trated in the mind only – that allows me to think of phenomenology as
an influence on and manifestation of the new materialism.
DC That’s a really important question and it really goes to the heart of
why I think new materialist social science – and what I’m calling a ca-
pacious or critical historical materialism – is important. Of course we
need to change the world rather than merely understanding it philo-
sophically, but we also need to understand the structural forms and
flows of matter in order to grasp what needs to be changed and where
the weak points are (what systems theorists call “leverage points”).
I think the danger today is twofold. First, there has been a tendency to
associate criticism solely with an analysis of discourses and the power
relations they. This is certainly an important component of critique but
it ignores the equally important impact of material factors in shaping
or constraining what can be said or what sort of policies look plausible
or what sort of politics has resonance. Secondly, there’s a tendency to
focus on moral outrage – directed for example against greedy bankers
or ecologically unsustainable levels of consumption – which is valu-
able as a motivating force for action but in order to direct it effectively,
we need a much better appreciation of the material structures that
encourage such behaviour, for example by understanding the inherent
pro-growth logic of a capitalist economy. Overall, then, I’m not saying
that a better appreciation of the complex flows of matter – from every-
day embodied experience through the global economy to planetary
bio- and eco-systems – will automatically lead to social transforma-
tion. But I do think such knowledge is necessary for understanding the
depth of the material problems we face in the twenty-first century, their
causes, their trajectories and internal logics, and the points at which
effective intervention might be possible through radical change that
must target material systems and practices.

47
 fig. 1
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[A box of mirabelles],
handwriting in box of mirabelles for
Marianne von Willemer, 1819, detail.
Wood, board, paper,
5,2 × 13,5 cm,
Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Museen.

48
 1
Text and Texture: On the Materiality of West-Eastern See also Roland Barthes, Varia-
tions sur l’écriture / Variationen über
Transfers in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and die Schrift, French/German Edition,
Marianne von Willemer trans. Hans-Horst Henschen,
(Mainz: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuch-
Cornelia Ortlieb handlung, 2006), p. 7.
2
For this history of writing and
script see Christoph Türcke, Vom
Kainszeichen zum genetischen
Code. Kritische Theorie der Schrift
(Munich: Beck, 2005).

Because text is generally read in printed form as black letters on white

paper, and increasingly as pixels on ever-smaller screens, one can
forget that reading is first and foremost a physical act, just as every
act of writing is a physical action – a movement or gesture.1 Legible
characters, and consequently varying scripts, are already the imprints
of bodyparts, like footprints in the sand or the impression made by a
hand pressed into soft ground. Even solid materials can be worked
upon with scoring, rasping, and engraving tools, so that their surfaces
incorporate coloured substances and forms. The upright-walking and
tool-making ancestors of today’s man have thus always been able to
write with their bodies to some extent. Likewise, the body has been
a canvas since the beginning, as the oldest Judeo-Christian tradition
testifies: according to the old testament, the mark that Cain bore on
his forehead after the death of his brother indelibly marked him as
an outcast forever. The initiation rituals in many cultures also contain
similar forms of inscription upon the body, whether via applying col-
ours or tearing and cutting lines and patterns into the human form.2

An elaborate adjustment of the body precedes the process of writing

on paper or similar flat surfaces: sitting upright or standing, the writ-
ing head, eye, and hand coordinate in order to produce regular se-
quences, thereby understanding and adopting a range of conventions
such as writing direction, script size, and page layout. According to
Roland Barthes, each writing surface generates and determines its
own individual script while it opposes the writing, scribing, engraving
hand with different forms of resistance, “because the texture of a ma-

49
 3
Barthes 2006 (footnote 1), p. 173. terial (its smoothness or roughness, its hardness or softness, even its
4
See Wolfram Pichler, Ralph Ubl, colour) compels the hand to aggressive and gentle gestures.”3 It’s thus
“Vor dem ersten Strich: Moderne not only the choice of a certain paper format or the decision between
und vormoderne Zeichnungsdis-
positive,” in: ed. Werner Busch, a slip of paper and a notebook, an index card and a diary, a pencil
Oliver Jehle, Carolin Meister, or typewriter that opens the two-dimensional space of writing, but
Randgänge der Zeichnung (Munich:
Wilhelm Fink, 2007), pp. 231–255.
rather, the sensually perceptible properties of the unworked material
5
that enable, while simultaneously delimiting, what should take place
Henry Petroski, The Pencil. A
History of Design and Circumstance
in such a space.4 Writing materials merge with this bodily act – the
(New York: Random House, 1992). craft of doodles, writings, and drawings – and have to be modelled
6 and subjugated to it and despite this materials can often enough reas-
Marianne Bockelkamp, “Objets
matériels”, in: ed. Anne Cadiot and sert their very own resistance.
Christel Haffner, Les manuscrits
des écrivains, (Paris: Hachette lit-
térature, 1993), pp. 88–101. Furthermore, the unworked material carries a historical index: for
7 example, at the end of the 18th century, pencils were established
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Dichtung und Wahrheit. Hamburger as a common, readily available writing implement 5 and, through
Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz, Vol. 10, the discovery of new chemical processes around 1870, it became
4th Ed. (Munich: Beck, 1966), p. 80.
See Martin Stingelin, “Schreiben. easier and less expensive6 to produce black ink, thus, together with
Einleitung,” in: ed. Martin Stingelin the new steel spring, laborious work with unruly goose feathers and
(with the assistance of Davide
Giuiato, Sandro Zanetti) “Mir ekelt self-mixed tinctures of varying degrees of permanence came to an
vor diesem tintenklecksenden Säku- end. New forms of writing accompany these kinds of new artefacts:
lum”. Schreibszenen im Zeitalter der
Manuskripte (Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
unlike the ensemble of inkwell and feather, the pencil, along with the
2004), p. 7–21. pocket-sized “writing calendar” or the handy notepad, allows one
8
Hans Sachs, Eigentliche Be-
to continuously take notes everywhere, without requiring additional
schreibung aller Stände auff Erden, tools or preparation. With the opposition between more fleeting
hoher und nidriger, geistlicher und pencil notations and longer-lasting ink writing a new semantics of
weltlicher, aller Künsten, Handwer-
cken und Händeln (Frankfurt a.M., materiality emerges. Writers themselves have also always reflected
without a publisher, 1568), p. 23. this physical and material dimension; famous expressions like Goe-
9
See Juliane Bardt, Kunst aus the’s song of praise to the “willing” pencil as a tool of inspiration7
Papier: Zur Ikonographie eines and Nietzsche’s typewriter texts show that poetic and epistemological
plastischen Werkmaterials der zeit-
genössischen Kunst (Hildesheim, positions can also be grounded both literally and materially.
Zürich, New York: Olms, 2006);
Lothar Müller, Weiße Magie: Die
Epoche des Papiers (Munich: Apart from this functionalisation, one cannot only argue from an art
Hanser, 2012). historical perspective for a proper material iconography. Above all,
10
“Every writer’s block begins with writing paper should lie in wait, “snow white and smooth,” as Hans
a white page, an empty sheet, a Sachs’ poem about “papyrer” evokes,8 and carry with it an aura of
blank screen.” Thomas Macho,
“Shining: Die weiße Seite,” in: ed.
purity, unspoiledness, and innocence.9 In the form of a white sheet,
Wolfgang Ullrich, Juliane Vogel, patient paper is certainly also the anxiety-evoking trigger of writer’s
Weiß (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2003),
pp. 17–28, here p. 17.
block; the dreaded “writer’s block” has its material equivalent in the
empty page, which digital word processing programs still simulate
and imitate as a white rectangle made of pixels.10 The inevitability
of these materials can also be partially established by the history of
ideas: by virtue of a widespread etymology the Latin “litteratura” –
the entirety of the written, the script, or also specific individual texts
– can be traced back to its Greek forebear “diphtera,” which desig-
nates goat skins as one of the oldest writing materials in the western
cultural sphere.

Apart from this remnant of the material foundation of all writing, the
discourse in literary criticism generally considers another sense of
the term “material.” This means “a configuration of people, actions,

50
 11
and problems” that “are perpetuated through the literary tradition”; Ansgar Nünning, ed., “Art: Stoff,”
in: Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und
“On the one hand, in German, material and motif are differentiated, Kulturtheorie, 3rd expanded and
whereupon [...] material constitutes a combination of subjects, which updated edition (Stuttgart: Metzler,
2004), p. 631.
is furthermore delimited as a pre-literary, abstract given, cut off from
12
the concepts of “form” and “content.”11 This is even more astonish- Ibid.
ing, as the quoted sourcebook adds, because the concept of material 13
The idealistic art theory of the
famously derives from an extra-literary field: “the old French, estoffe 1900s decisively contributed to this
development, especially through
means fabric, cloth, and denotes textiles, however since the 1800s the adoption of Hegel’s Aesthetics,
the term has been transferred to literature because of its graphic qual- which was a seminal text, par-
ity.”12 This literal translation seems natural because the Latin word ticularly for the distinction between
poetry and prose and fosters the
“textus” indeed also means texture or mesh and is commonly applied still-powerful conception of poetry
in other contexts, precisely for textiles and fabric, whereas “text” is as formed language and an interior
art. See Georg Friedrich Wilhelm
generally used to describe a purportedly identical and reproducible Hegel, Ästhetik III, Werke in zwanzig
set of characters without recourse to its material foundation. There- Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and
Karl Markus Michel, (Frankfurt a. M.:
fore literary discourse has for a considerable time generally addressed Suhrkamp, 1970), vol. 15, pp. 15,
this problematic only in the figurative sense and, for specific histori- 224 and 229, and Georg Friedrich
Wilhelm Hegel, Ästhetik II, Werke
cal reasons, disregards or neglects the material side of writing in in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 14, p. 261.
favour of a post-idealist conception of ideas or thoughts in words, all See Cornelia Ortlieb, Poetische Pro-
sa. Beiträge zur modernen Poetik
of which comprise poetry.13 von Baudelaire bis Trakl (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 2001), p. 178.
Nonetheless, in what follows I argue to direct the focus towards 14
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
the material side of literature and simultaneously upon the range of [Eine Schachtel Mirabellen],
Münchener Ausgabe, ed. Karl
transformations that it experiences, what traditional literary scholar- Richter, Vol.11.1.1, (Munich: Hanser,
ship commonly calls texts or subject matter. This kind of transferal 1994), p. 220.
is also not completely or adequately legible without considering its
materials, as the example of some of the poems and items exchanged
in the correspondence between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and
Marianne von Willemer will illustrate.

“Eine Schachtel Mirabellen”: On the alliance of text and thing

The significant difference between the materials of writing and

reading will be clear if a poem is contemplated in two very different
forms. Normally, poems stand before their reader’s eyes in the form of
printed text and, with the aid of their typographic design, can be eas-
ily identified as such: even without rhyming, recognisable, repeating
rhythms or a pre-determined number of syllables, a printed text will
be perceived as a poem when it has a particular alignment and when
the comparatively few black letters and punctuation marks are sur-
rounded by an ample amount of empty white space. Part of Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe’s edition of the untitled poem with the opening
verse “Eine Schachtel Mirabellen,” a box of mirabelles, has appeared
in this form since 1828.14

The “same” text looks completely different if one finds it in handwrit-

ing on the bottom of an artistically handcrafted box, which can still
be seen today in Weimar and was at one time sent between Marianne
von Willemer and Goethe (fig. 1–2). The colouration of the dark-blue
chipboard box, which is decorated with white paper lace, already ref-
erences a classic beauty ideal and, accordingly, the white silhouette

51
 15
See [Johann Wolfgang von]
Goethe, Gedichte in Handschriften:
Fünfzig Gedichte Goethes, ed. Karl
Eibl (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1999). (A
box of mirabelles/Came from south
to north/As the fruit got eaten/Has-
tens to restore/The house it comes
from/Yields no sweet fruits/But an
earnest face/That far and wide/Will
never learn deprivation. April 1819)
fig. 2
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[A box of mirabelles],
handwriting in box of mirabelles for
Marianne von Willemer, 1819.
Wood, board, paper,
5,2 × 13,5 cm,
Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Museen.
52
shows an indeterminate antique scene that resembles friendship al-
legories of the time. Small, dried yellow plums, known as mirabelles,
were found inside the box on its first shipment in April 1819, which
Marianne von Willemer apparently sent Goethe without an accom-
panying note. She received the box back in November of the same
year, now filled with a portrait of Goethe in profile, the waxwork
effigy that Johann Gottfried Schadow made for a model with Goethe’s
head. And only those who pick this gift up get to discover the poem
beneath, glued into the bottom of the box on a specially cut piece
of cardboard in Goethe’s ornamental handwriting: „Eine Schachtel
Mirabellen / Kam von Süden zog nach Norden, / Als die Frucht
gespeist geworden / Eilt sich wieder einzustellen / Das Gehäus woher
es kommen / Bringet keine süßen Früchte / Bringt vielmehr ein ernst
Gesichte / Das im Weiten und im Fernen / Nimmer will Entbehrung
lernen. April 1819“ signed with a horizontal curly bracket, as Goethe
regularly concluded single verses or entire poems in his manu-
scripts.15 The date and bracket are placed exactly in the middle of the
verses, with the descender of the nine also almost calligraphically
designed, as were similar arcs and loops above, which signalled that
these allegedly incidental accompanying verses were executed with
great care. As is often the case with handwriting, one also sees how
the orientation on paper simultaneously opens and also limits the
possibilities of writing; which was obviously a calculated decision
here because there would have been enough space for several other
 16
verses, as well as for salutations and signatures, if the dates reflected This happens within the frame-
work of an entirely unique project
the rules of correspondence. of adopting and surpassing that
likewise stands at the end of a
century old artistic examination of
The conspicuously placed date also gives crucial information: In the pictorial world of the Orient and
April 1819 Goethe announced the publication of West-Eastern Divan, its new beginning under the politi-
cal auspices of the 19th century.
a collection of poems and ballads in which Marianne von Willemer See also Geneviève Lacambre,
played a decisive role. Not only had she composed a number of po- “Vorwort,” in: Gérard-Georges
ems herself that Goethe included in the collection without crediting Lemaire, Orientalismus: Das Bild
des Morgenlandes in der Malerei
them, but to a greater degree, she had, as a dark beauty of indeter- (Potsdam: h. f. ullmann, 2010), p. 7.
minate origin, enabled the entire role play in the first place, in which After the failed siege of Vienna and
the retreat of the Ottomans in 1683,
Goethe masks himself as the poet Hatem and, in dialogue with the the downfall of the Ottoman empire
beloved Suleika, dares to attempt to allow the poetry of the East to sparks a Europe-wide interest in the
region, particularly on travel reports
speak through him as a Western poet.16 Correspondingly, the material and images from the eastern Medi-
side of the undertaking is extremely revealing. The pictorial represen- terranean. See in particular Ibid.,
p. 48. The era of colonisation in the
tation of the Orient in particular can offer a striking, sensual splen- orient also begins in 1815, which
dour that is always denied by language. But despite the date, it’s been Goethe’s Divan project stands on
the threshhold of.
proven that Goethe sent the box with the effigy and poem only seven
17
months later, at a time when the West-Eastern Divan finally appeared Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
West-East Divan: The Poems, with
on the book market. Thus the suspicion remains that this gift, like “Notes and Essays”: Goethe’s
many ambiguous things and signs according to Goethe’s explana- Intercultural Dialogues, trans. Martin
Bidney (Albany: State University of
tion in the book’s appendix, obeyed a genuine oriental pleasure in New York, 2010), p. 229.
puzzles and particularly the secret communication of lovers. Goethe
writes here, “When a lover sends an object of any kind to the be-
loved, the recipient must first name the object, then figure out what
rhymes with it, and lastly choose among the many possible rhymes
that might suit the current situation.”17 Goethe’s poem solved this task
with ease: the most appropriate rhyme with mirabellen is of course
“sich wieder einstellen” [to be restored], because since the short hap-
py weeks of secret love in the summer of 1815, each letter from Mari-
anne von Willemers asks for the return of her beloved friend – in vain,
they wouldn’t see each other again.

Also in another view, the mirabelles were a meaningful gift that in

turn refers to the soon-to-be released book: the fruit was first found
in Europe in the 16th century, its home is the Orient. Moreover, the
small yellow or reddish-coloured balls look similar to the inedible
fruit of the Ginkgo biloba tree, so much so that they’re described as
long-stemmed mirabelles.

On the other hand, the tree is one of the objects that has a deci-
sive importance for West-Eastern Divan: Goethe’s botanical interest
especially pertained to the tree’s hermaphrodism, which alongside
clearly male and female specimens also spawns those whose biologi-
cal sex is indecipherably dualistic. Also its fan-shaped leaf with the
deep cleft in the centre is in the same way “one and doubled,” as the
famous poem Gingko biloba described it, whose manuscript Goethe
fig. 3
had sent to Marianne von Willemer with two ginko leaves attached to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
it (fig. 3). One can only reliably identify the female trees because of its single-handedly written transcript
of the poem Gingko biloba, with
mirabelle-like fruit and the gift mailed to Marianne revives this eru- Gingko leaves for Marianne von Wil-
dite and gallant game that Goethe had encrypted in the Ginko biloba lemer, Goethe-Museum Düsseldorf.

53
 18
Markus Wallenborn, Frauen.
Dichten. Goethe. Die produktive
Goethe-Rezeption bei Charlotte von
Stein, Marianne von Willemer und
Bettina von Arnim (Tübingen: Walter
de Gruyter, 2006), p. 188.
19
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
West-Easterly Divan, trans. John
Weiss (Boston: Roberts Brothers,
1877), p. 3.
54
poem for the entire collection: Goethe, alias Hatem, is one and dou-
ble, but also the lovers, if Marianne congenially answers as Suleika in
antiphony, and finally the co-joining of eastern and western forms of
literature to form a new entity.
The first gift thus already blends poetic, poetological, and erotic ele-
ments and accordingly, Goethe’s response turned out to be suggestive.
His poem is split into two halves through the end rhyme: the first four
verses with “envelope” rhymes and the last four are separated into
two couplets and connected through the formula “Das Gehäus woher
es kommen,” the house it comes from, the single verse that doesn’t
rhyme. Apparently, the first four verses lightly heralds the return of
the box of mirabelles, fruit and box should move between south and
north, which, expressively and secretively, reference West and East
and thus, subtly allude to other fruits of exchange. In memory of
their last three days together in Heidelberg, Marianne von Willemer
composed two ballads that were focused on the east wind and the
west wind, her “most significant contributions [...] to West-Eastern
Divan.”18 In its allusion to the mirabelle-verse, the opening poem of
the collection also sounds like its programmatic prelude, which gives
orientation to poem’s literal sense: “North and West and South are
splitting/Kingdom’s tremble thrones are flitting/To the country morn-
ing haste/Patriarchal air to taste.”19
The second four verses of the box poem call the writer “serious”
and incapable of deprivation, as does the enclosed portrait with the
moved hair and facial features that a snapshot of such condition cap-
tures: the turned down corners of the mouth confirm the melancholic
tone of the poem. Literally between the memory of a happy exchange
and the poetic self-portrait lies nevertheless the subtext of a single
verse, that with “Das Gehäus woher es kommen”, The house it comes
from also designates the place of earlier happiness: the Willemer’s
home, in which Goethe spent the happiest hours with his lover, now
the place of her solitude as well as the home of the new sender and
his loneliness in unwanted privation.
Moreover, several similar poems with the fruit are cited from the
book Suleika in West-Eastern Divan. Hatem at one point evokes
the “dried, honey sweet-fruits,” which should be given to the lover
Suleika or extols the “fruit on full clustered branches,” which should
fall, like “his songs/amassed” in her “lap.” Goethe responds accord-
ingly with his mirabelle box to the giver’s tender memory of the for-
merly happy, loving union, its fruit and its demise, which is already
implied in the paper figure attached to the lid of the box, because the
couple on the box apparently prepares to make a sacrifice, possibly
to forsake one another. Yet, in the poem Goethe affirmed this connec-
tion between two separated poets, whose symbol was a ginkgo leaf.
Handwriting seems to be particularly well-suited for this complex
message: the meticulously-executed writing also retains the feeling of
the writing hand and its impression – like the wax portrait, the print
 20
material par excellence, which according to sentimental custom is Goethe to Jakob and Marianne
von Willemer, 4.11.1818, Goethe:
laid in the hands of the former mistress, where it palpably warms, Sollst mir ewig Suleika heißen. Goe-
bringing it to life as it were. The equally fragile and stable box is thus thes Briefwechsel mit Marianne und
Jakob Willemer, ed. Hans-Joachim
at the same time gift, vessel, and medium of ambiguous messages Weitz (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1995),
that, without considering their material aspect, remain partially un- p. 75.
intelligible. Filled with two gifts laced with innuendo, the box is also 21
Ibid.
“one and doubled” and enables the indirect contact of two lovers’
writing hands by single-handedly layering texts.

The Materials of Literal Discourse: Speaking Things, Discreet Texts

However, the example of the ambiguous package is also reminis-

cent of the ineluctable doubling of each speech act to the extent
that this form, through insinuation and riddles, plays out the differ-
ence between literal and transferred, thus metaphorical or allegori-
cal discourse in the broadest sense. The same doubling pervades
irresolvable literary descriptions in equal measure, when the text for
example, speaks of the “fruit” of unification, and thereby, in allusion
to the Divan poem, is actually referring to their collective poetry,
but also their correspondence, and naturally, the mirabelles in their
earlier physical-material form and their transformation to letters on a
sheet of paper.

The correspondence between Marianne von Willemer, her husband,

and Goethe, by and large, actually consists of this kind of exchange
of speaking things and allusion-rich texts, often appearing in specific
material forms. This suggests that the dedication of the box filled
with mirabelles can also be taken as response to a previous parcel
that Goethe sent on 4th November 1818 to Jakob and Marianne von
Willemer with the first drafts of the Divan manuscript and the explicit
request that they “please don’t tell anyone” because “it will sadly be
awhile until I can send the whole thing.”20 This confidential delivery
of the manuscript should explicitly trigger a particular memory: “For
you, these leaves may, even if only for a moment, hearken back to
those beautiful days, which remain unforgettable for me; May the
friend relish watching the over-flowing eternal river, also recall the
persistent brooklets that silent, without any sound, always snake
around her.”21 The mention of a large body of water at the idyllic
place of short-lived happiness, the frequently-invoked and drawn
Gerbermühle (tanner mill), seems to refer back to the small, still
brooks that constantly evoke the flowing of ink that the letter-writer
spilled in remembrance of them – if brooks and rivers weren’t already
legible as symbolic condensations of love and time, so that the hus-
band would be indeed attributed to the duration of the strong con-
nection, but the former lover at least had a similar constant presence.

Marianne von Willemer’s response to this letter also shows how

much the relatively new practice of mementos reflects the cor-
respondence of this time, which she begins with two meaningful
sentences written without any salutation: “Your kind letter and its

55
 22
Marianne von Willemer to Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe [second half
of December 1881], ibid., p. 77.
23
Hartmut Böhme, Fetischismus
und Kultur: Eine andere Theorie der
Moderne (Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 2006), p. 17.
24
Christian Begemann, “Ding und
Fetisch: Überlegungen zu Stifters
Dingen,” in: ed. Hartmut Böhme,
Johannes Endres, Der Code der
Leidenschaften: Fetischismus in den
Künsten (München: Wilhelm Fink,
2010), pp. 323–343, here: p. 324.

accompanying leaves transported me back entirely to that time when

fig. 4
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
letter with single-handedly written
poem Du! Schweige künftig nicht
so lange.
17,6 × 11,3 cm (folded),
Freies Deutsches Hochstift,
Frankfurt.
I was so happy, and yes I dare say, bright and youthful. When I envi-
sion being this way now, I wouldn’t like to unjustly compare myself
to a tree from which a beautiful autumn elicits new blossoms; the all-
exhilarating sun adorned me once again with the garland of youth; it
was my last happiness!”22 The return to things amidst an equalisation
of a metaphorical tree and leaves that should be understood literally
confirms the new meaning of such materials in the “saeculum of
things”23 in the “cultural sector” established through “innovative pro-
ductions methods, their commodity form, their social significance
and affective dimension,” and a “mutation of natural things too em-
pirical and ‘objectively’ observed scholarship, which should not bear
any more trace of its beholder.”24
Another poem by Goethe, which in similar blending of literal and
metaphorical speech gallantly refers to a special gift, shows how

56
 25
much the texts that are isolated from one another in correspond- Goethe: [Du! Schweige künftig
nicht so lange], page with handwrit-
ence and volumes of poetry are connected to their material counter- ten poem, 17.6 × 11.3 cm (folded),
parts – the speaking thing. At first glance, the text whisperingly and Inv. Nr. Hs 12413, in: ed. Gerhard
Kölsch, Petra Maisak, “Köstliche
indeterminately states: “Du! Schweige künftig nicht so lange, / Tritt Reste” Andenken an Goethe und
freundlich oft zu mir herein; / Und lass bei jedem frommen Sange die Seinen, Katalog zur Aus-
stellung im Frankfurter Hochstift,
/ Dir Glänzendes zur Seite seyn.”(fig. 4)25 Not only the card with its 1.12.2002–2.2.2003, (Frankfurt
allusion to classic antique borders, but also the calligraphic design a.M: Freies Deutsches Hochstift,
2002,) p. 130. (You! Don’t remain
of the faded brown ink script on delicate pink “gift paper”26 is liter- silent for so long in days to come /
ally visible, especially when the bold snake-like sweep connects the Enter pleasantly often/ With every
text of the poem and the location and resembles a large, inverted S. divine chant or song/ be gleaming
by your side,” followed by the date,
This loop invites to you to tenderly trace it with a finger, as does the signature, and place.)
lightly embossed pattern. Yet the connection of singing and gleaming 26
Ibid.
that the poem appears to evoke also in this case has a definite mate-
27
rial substrate (fig. 5): Goethe sent the card to Marianne von Willemer Goethe to J. v. Willemer,
22.12.1820, in: Sollst mir ewig
along with a small, elaborately beaded bag, with a letter to her hus- Suleika heißen 1995 (footnote 20),
band that explained the reciprocal exchange of the box and enclosed p. 104.
a friendly set of instructions on how to use the “gift.”27 With the 28
Ibid.
advice that the use should be “according to the enclosed note,” the 29
Handbag with glass pearl beads,
letter simultaneously refers to the paper enclosed with the gift, which 11.5 x 19.0 cm in: Kölsch, Maisak
is thus shown to be its essential counterpart.28 The trinket and every- 2002 (footnote 26), p. 129.
day object in the aforementioned box in turn illustrates a very special 30
Goethe 1877 (footnote 19),
handiwork: it is a “pompadour-shaped pouch made from deep-blue p. 115.
silk”29 that was crocheted with red yarn around it, rows of glass beads 31
Cylindrical cardboard box with
were strung in between in white, black, silver, blue, and gold. The lid, aquarelle feather drawing with
four tassels underneath portrayed particular fruits, in particular small naturalistic depiction of a hoopoe
with a garland, 14.3 cm × 11.3 cm,
acorns in silver lamé, the fruit of the, so to speak, archetypal German Inv. Nr. IV-775, in: Kölsch, Masiak
oak tree. The purse served as the case for a further bejewelled piece 2002 (footnote 26), p. 128.

of fabric, an embroidered handkerchief. 32

Goethe 1877 (footnote 19), p. 46.

This gift can also be read as a direct reference back to the West-East-
ern Divan, in which Goethe’s alias Hatem assigns the beloved Suleika
his poetry, that he described as pearls for example with familiar
Oriental metaphors: “Here, then, on my part/Are pearls poetic/Which
the mighty breakers/Rolled in from thy passion/threw upon the bar-
ren/Coast of my life/With art of fingers/Daintily Chosen/Strung upon
precious/Goldsmithery [...] These rain-drops of Allah/In the mod-
est muscle ripened.”30 The gift’s wrapping made this reference even
more explicit: a round box with an aquarelle drawing made with a
feather on its lid, that shows a hoopoe in an ivy wreath, attached to
the side with marbled paper, which contemporaries called “Turkish
marble,” a pattern that gave the artistic design of everyday objects an
oriental appearance (fig. 6).31 The hoopoe already appears in the lyrics
of the Persian poet Hafez, who Goethe identified as an admired role
model, the messenger of love par excellence in West-Eastern Divan’s
The Book of Love: “Hoopoe, said I, forsooth/A famous bird art thou/
Hasten, then, Hoopoe/To the Beloved, hurry/Unto her announcing/I fig. 5
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
belong to her/For thou hast already/Betwixt Solomon/And the Queen glass bead pouch as a gift for
of Sheba/Played the go-between.”32 Marianne von Willemer also Marianne von Willemer.
11,5 × 19,0 cm,
previously materialised this verse in a gift by giving Goethe a walking Freies Deutsches Hochstift,
stick with a carved hoopoe knob for his seventieth birthday in August Frankfurt.

57
 33
The works in the project Zur
Genealogie des Schreibens, which
are documented in a series by the
same name, are a notable excep-
tion. See the publications in the
series entitled Zur Genealogie des
Schreibens, ed. Martin Stingelin,
(München: Wilhelm Fink, 2004).
34
I would like to thank the Klassik
Stiftung Weimar for making the
experience of “sensual culture”
in Weimar possible, especially
the department of research and
education and the work group
led by Andreas Beyer, Johannes
Grave, and Thorsten Valk. See also
ed. Sebastian Böhmer, Christiane
Holm, Veronika Spinner, Thorsten
Valk, Kultur des Sinnlichen, exhib.
cat. (Berlin, Munich: Deutscher
Kunstverlag, 2012).
35
A volume by the same name
develops a theoretical perspective
in media studies: Die Wiederkehr
der Dinge, ed. Friedrich Balke,
Maria Muhle, Antonia von Schöning,
(Berlin: Kadmos, 2012).
36
See Der Souvenir. Erinnerung
in Dingen von der Reliquie zum
Andenken (exhib.cat.), ed. Birgit
Gablowski, Gudrun Körner, Ulrich
Schneider (Köln: Wienand, 2006).
37
Goethe 1877 (footnote 19),
p. 114.
fig. 6
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
present box with hoopoe for
Marianne von Willemer.
Cylindrical board box with lid,
watercoloured pen and ink drawing
with naturalistic depiction
of a hoopoe in a corona of ivy,
14,3 × 11,3 cm,
Freies Deutsches Hochstift,
Frankfurt.
58
1819. Even today this present enjoys a fixed place next to Goethe’s
desk and inspired him to write four hoopoe poems, all of which he
sent to Marianne von Willemer in December 1819, a year before the
ensemble with box, bag, and sheet of poetry.
Conclusion: On the Materiality of Literature
Without the consideration of its material dimension the complex
project of appropriation, antiphonies, translation, and transferal thus
comes only partially in view. While the reverberation of the special
characteristics of handwriting is at least established within the study
of philology, when in the framework of edition projects, “text stages“
are identified, and teleological series of blueprints up until completed
works are formed, their interpretation, apart from such pragmatic
and textually genetic interests is still comparatively rare – this is also
because we generally see text in its final printed form.33 How to
proceed with their so-called addenda is generally solved pragmati-
cally in different institutional contexts. It is customary in museums
and archives for texts on paper to be separated from objects, things,
or matter, even when they’re furnished with writing or grapheme,
as debated here. Publications of correspondence usually relegate
the reference to things, that are generally considered accompanying
material or addenda, to the footnotes, as they are not understood as
more or less independent actors, or actants within a network, but the
commentary as a closed printed unit is only broken in rare cases as
illustrations of objects described in the text. When these objects are
as ephemeral as a handful of sweet fruit, certainly no other possibility
remains to preserve it like text, and therefore the conglomeration of
such things by definition always remains incomplete. In exceptional
cases where objects are preserved and musealised early on – such as
in the Weimar collections of art and collectibles, nature things, every
day objects, souvenirs, and other artefacts – the difference between
the act of looking at a photograph and touching objects with ones
own hand allows itself to be experienced directly.34
The ensemble of “speaking” things and mysterious, secretive, and
suggestive texts thus also offer plenty of occasions and “material”
for considerations about the status of “beloved objects” and the
“return of the thing”35 within the culture of “souvenirs”36 and the
material side of literature, even if falling back on manuscripts and
objects can’t be the norm in the field of literary criticism and studies
due to economic and labour factors. And yet once more, it is a few
perfect Divan verses that show that it’s actually the double-design of
our language that makes such a project of transferal possible with
minimal use of material, when Goethe, as Hatem, invokes the magic
of love and poetry in the condensed image of a textile: “But it keeps
for days/Lasts for years that I still newly fashion/Thousand-fold relay
of thy profuseness/With gay colours of my bliss embroider/Fed me
thousand-threaded/From thee, O Suleika.”37
An Ecology of Materials
Tim Ingold

As an anthropologist and an academic, I am incapable of doing any-

thing with my hands except write and play my cello. Having carried
out ethnographic fieldwork in Lapland, however, I used to be able to
manage a herd of reindeer – though maybe not any more. Because
of the nature of this fieldwork, I became steeped in the traditions of
ecological anthropology – that is, in the study of the relationships
between human beings and their environments, including everything
that makes life possible. But I was also interested in the study of what
is nowadays called material culture. At one time, ecological anthro-
pology and the study of material culture were so closely joined as to
be virtually indistinguishable. But not any more. Indeed it seems that
in recent years, students of ecological anthropology and students of
material culture have been talking increasingly past one another. This
is very odd, given that both ecological anthropologists and students
of material culture are broadly concerned with the material condi-
tions of life – how life is materially possible. Ecologists say that we
are embedded in a web of life comprising our relationships with all
kinds of non-human organisms. Students of material culture say that
we humans are embedded in complicated networks of relationships
between persons and things. So we are all talking about relationships,
webs of life, networks of persons and things, and yet we are speaking
different languages.

It has become popular, these days, to introduce non-humans into the

stories we tell about ourselves. Both ecological anthropologists and
students of material culture have a lot to say about relations between
humans and non-humans. But it turns out that they are referring to
quite different non-humans. For ecological anthropologists, the non-
human includes other animals, plants, the soil, weather and climate,
sunlight, and so on. But students of material culture leave out all of
these, and refer instead to artefacts, pure and simple. Indeed they
claim that any study of human beings must include all the artefacts
with which we surround ourselves, since it is the very fact that we
concern ourselves so much with artefacts that makes us distinctively
human. Actually, that is not entirely true, because many human socie-
ties are not particularly bothered about artefacts, and a lot of non-hu-
mans are very much concerned with things like landscape and place.
So the distinctions often made between humans and non-humans are
not as reliable as they are commonly assumed to be.

59
 1
Saint Augustine, Confessions,
trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1991), p. 230.
60
To my mind, however, this is a symptom of a deeper problem, which
lies in the appeal to the concept of materiality. It seems to me that the
emphasis on materiality, in studies of material culture, is getting in the
way of a properly ecological understanding of the fields of force and
the circulations of materials that make up the web of life. In talking
about networks of relationships between people and objects, the
materials, the forces, the circulations, the energy – all of that which
makes life possible – have somehow been left out. This is the prob-
lem I have been trying to address. Immediately we hit up against a
difficulty. What do scholars, philosophers, even practitioners, actually
mean when they talk about materiality, about the material world?
Looking in the literature for definitions of materiality, I found that writ-
ers who use the word – though they tend to talk in learned ways, as if
everyone already knew what it means – actually have no idea. They
remind me of Saint Augustine who remarked, in his Confessions, that
if you ask him what the time is, he can tell you, but if you were to ask
him “what is time?”, he cannot.1 It’s a bit the same with ‘materiality’.
Suppose I have some stuff about me: it could be stone, metal, brick,
or whatever. Ask me “what material do you have there?”, and I can
tell you. But ask me “what is material?” or “what is the materiality of
that stuff?”, and I am confounded. If you ask an archaeologist, for ex-
ample, what they mean by materiality, you are likely to get two quite
different answers. They will say, on the one hand, that the materiality
of a thing lies in its brute physicality. A rock is a rock is a rock. That’s
it! That’s what the geologist studies: it’s hard; it’s solid; it’s physical.
But then, on the other hand, they will say: “yes, but the reason why
we need a concept like materiality is so that we can understand how
things like rocks, or pieces of wood, are appropriated by human be-
ings within particular social and historical contexts”. So materiality
means at once the hard stuff, in itself, and the way that stuff is turned
to account as means to various kinds of human ends. There is thus
a kind of duplicity in the notion of materiality: in the way it refers at
one moment to the stuff of nature and at the next moment to the way
that stuff is appropriated by people, in society. And in this duplicity,
the concept of materiality seems to reproduce the division between
nature and society – a division which has proved extremely problem-
atic in the social sciences recently and that many of us have been
trying to dismantle. In the notion of materiality, the world is presented
to us both as a physical bedrock of existence and as an externality – a
world ‘out there’ – open to comprehension and appropriation by a
transcendent humanity. The notion of material culture is problematic
for very much the same reason: here’s the material, here’s the culture,
put them together and we get material culture.
This logic of making – of taking a bit of material and taking a bit of
culture, some substance here and some form there, and putting them
together to create an artefact – goes back, of course, to Aristotle. Long
ago, Aristotle argued that if, for example, a sculptor wants to create a
sculpture, then they begin with a lump of marble and, in their head,
an idea of the form they want to create – be it the image of a god or a
 2
of famous character – and then they chip away at the marble until the Aristotle, De Anima, Book 2, trans.
Robert Drew Hicks (Cambridge:
form of the marble comes to match the idea in their head. So it was Cambridge University Press, 1907),
Aristotle who argued that in making a thing, you take a formless lump p. 49.
of material and an immaterial form and you put the two together.2 3
Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation
As the classical Greek word for matter was hyle, and for form was à la lumière des notions de Forme
et d’Information (Grenoble: Editions
morphe, the idea that in making you combine matter and form came Jérôme Millon, 2005).
to be known as the hylomorphic model. This notion of making – of
imposing form on substance – has been around in the western tradi-
tion of thought ever since, and has become in many ways increasingly
dominant.

So I felt that the first thing we have to do is to deconstruct this hylo-

morphic model. In this, I found inspiration in philosophical writings
of Gilbert Simondon. Since they are written in French and are still
largely untranslated, Simondon’s works remain little known outside
his native France, and have not had the impact they deserve. Writ-
ing in the 1960s, Simondon was already arguing strongly against
hylomorphism. He introduced a concept which he called individua-
tion: by this he meant that one should understand the generation of
things – such as artefacts, objects, pieces of furniture – as a process of
growth, as an ontogenetic process.3 When we talk about organisms,
including human beings, we say they grow; that is, they undergo a
process of biological development, and the technical term for that is
ontogenesis. All living organisms undergo ontogenetic development
as they grow from the embryo or unborn foetus to maturity. Simon-
don was arguing that we really need to understand the generation
of the forms of artefacts in the same way, as an ontogenetic process,
in which form emerges out of that process. In order to demonstrate
his point, he chose as an example a kind of making that, on the face
of it, would seem to confirm everything that Aristotle had said about
hylomorphism – about making things by imposing form on matter.
His example was brick-making. Traditionally, in making bricks you
would cast lumps of wet clay into a rectangular wooden box. Now
you would think that this is a simple process of moulding: you have
the mould which is a geometrically regular, rectangular form, you
have the formless raw material (the clay), you stick the clay into the
mould, and the form is thereby imposed on the material. But Simon-
don shows that this is not really what happens at all. For one thing,
you have to prepare the clay: you have to dig it out from the soil,
remove the impurities, and pound it and knead it until it is sufficiently
soft and supple to take to the mould. And for another thing, you have
to build the mould, which is carpentered from a hard wood, usually
beech (it has to be hard to take the pressure). So, Simondon argued,
far from impressing form on material, what is happening is that two
different processes – of making the mould and of preparing the clay
– are brought together at a certain point. Instead of an imposition of
form onto matter, what we actually have is a contraposition of equal
and opposed forces immanent in the clay and the mould, such that
the form of the brick emerges as a kind of transitory equilibration,
which is then held in place because the brick is subsequently fired.

61
 4
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Mas-
sumi (London: Continuum, 2004).
5
Ibid. pp. 450–453.
62
One could carry out exactly the same kind of Simondonian analysis
of Max Lamb’s sand-casting process: he is not simply imposing a form
which he has created in the sand onto the liquid material of the metal
but actually two separate processes are involved: first the preparation
and shaping of the sand, and second all the business of heating up
and liquefying the metal. Then there’s the complicated bodily move-
ment involved in pouring the metal into the mould so that it doesn’t
go all over the place. So it’s far from a simple imposition of form on
matter, and Max’s different projects show this very well.
Now, although Simondon’s work is little known internationally, it has
been taken up very enthusiastically by philosopher Gilles Deleuze
and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari in their book Mille Plateaux (in Eng-
lish, A Thousand Plateaus).4 Here they argue against the hylomorphic
model precisely on the grounds that it starts off from the idea of a
fixed form (that’s the form you allegedly have in your mind) and an
entirely homogeneous raw material. Making, say Deleuze and Guatta-
ri, is not like that5. For one thing, the form is not fixed but varies in all
kinds of ways; for another thing, no material that anybody ever works
with is homogeneous. One of the examples they use – again exempli-
fied by Max in the case of his wooden stool – is splitting wood. When
you take an axe (or a wedge if you are using green-wood techniques)
to split a log, you are not imposing a form on the log. What you are
doing is finding the grain; and then the axe or the wedge will follow
it. The line it follows is one that has already grown into the wood
when it was part of a living tree, as part of its process of growth. Thus
the material you are working with is not formless, nor is it homoge-
neous. It already has lines of growth, it has a grain, and the maker is
not someone who is posing form on material but is rather one who
finds the grain and then bends it to an evolving purpose. This, I think,
is what making is all about: it’s not imposing form on material but
finding the grain of the way the world is becoming and then turning
it this way or that in order to make it match what your own evolving
purpose, as a designer or maker, might be. So Deleuze and Guattari
argue – and I agree – that the artisan, the maker, the craftsperson is a
person who has to follow the material, to follow the way it goes. And
in following it, they are guided by an intuition in action.
But this leads us to another question. What is a material? How can
we say what a material is? That’s a very difficult question to answer. It
is easy to say, “That’s wood, that’s metal, that’s pewter, that’s tin”. But
what are we talking about? What is wood, what is tin, what is copper?
What do we mean when we speak of materials? The scientific chem-
ist, of course, will think of matter in terms of its invariant atomic or
molecular constitution: water is two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen
atom, salt is a sodium atom linked to a chlorine atom: wherever you
have water, or wherever you have salt, you have these atomic combi-
nations. Water is an interesting case in point, however. The molecular
structure could not be simpler, and yet the properties of water – what
water does under different conditions – are still so complex as to defy
 6
full understanding. For example, nobody yet knows why ice is slip- David Pye, The Nature and Art
of Workmanship (Cambridge:
pery. There’s a lot we don’t understand about chemically the simplest Cambridge University Press, 1968),
materials. They remain beyond our comprehension in terms of what p. 47.
they actually do. So the maker is less like a scientific chemist than an
alchemist.

I have noticed, both in my own work and in the work of many col-
leagues, that as we become more interested in materials themselves
and in what they do, we are also beginning to think more like alche-
mists, and to have greater respect for what the alchemists achieved.
They were not so interested in what a material is. They wanted to
know what it does, what happens to a material when you mix it with
other materials, or heat it up, or cool it, or treat it in particular ways.
This is also what a cook wants to know. A cook, experimenting in
the kitchen, puts different ingredients together and looks to see what
happens to them if you heat them or boil them, freeze them or cool
them down. So the maker, working with materials, is like an alche-
mist: he’s interested not in what the materials are but what they do. In
short, materials are what they do. So to define or specify a material is,
in a way, to tell a story, about what happens to it when it is treated in
particular ways. For example, gold is an element in the periodic table,
and the chemist or the scientist would define it as such. But if you
were an alchemist you might say that gold yellows and gleams, that it
shines ever more brightly under running water, and can be hammered
into thin leaf.

In the 1960s the craftsman and furniture designer David Pye proposed
a distinction between what he called the properties and the quali-
ties of materials.6 He argued that the properties of materials are given
in what they are: they have a particular density, weight or tensile
strength, which can be established through careful scientific testing
or experiment. The qualities of materials, by contrast, are ideas in
people’s heads: we ascribe certain qualities to things, but these are
merely products of our imagination. But this only reproduces the
division between mind and matter, which we want to try and get away
from. I think it is better, if we are concerned with the properties of
materials, to think of these properties as belonging to the knowledge
of practitioners that comes from a lifetime of experience of working
with them. And this means that when we talk about the properties of
materials, they are really stories of what happens to them.

In a sense, we could say that materials don’t really exist; rather they
carry on, or perdure, through time. Every material, in a way, is a be-
coming – it’s not an object in itself but a potential to become some-
thing. So to describe a material, I think, is to pose a riddle: it is a rid-
dle that gives the material its voice, and then the answer is discovered
by observation and engagement with what is there. Medieval texts are
full of riddles of this kind. I could make one up for you, and it would
go like this: “I yellow and gleam; I shine ever more brightly under
running water. Hammer me, and I will get thin. What am I?” The

63
 7
Deleuze, Guattari 2004 (footnote answer can be found simply by observing – by looking around in the
4), p. 28, see also p. 604, footnote
83. world and finding what answers to that description. We call it “gold”.
But we don’t need to have that word at all. We know what we are
talking about through observation, through engagement in the world.

So the artisan, the craftsman, the maker, is someone who has to be

ever-observant of the movements of stuff around him, and has to bring
the movement of his or her own conscious awareness into line with
the movements of the surrounding materials. Thus making something
is a mode of questioning and response, in which the maker puts a
question to the material, and the material answers to it; the maker
puts another question, the material answers again, and so on. Each
answers to the other. I use the term correspondence to capture this
mutual responsiveness. In making, the maker follows the material and
that process of following the material is a correspondence between
the flow of the material and the movement and flow of the maker’s
consciousness. One could draw the flow of material as one wavy line,
and the flow of consciousness as another, running roughly parallel.
Correspondence, then, is a matter of bringing these two lines into
agreement. To adopt a musical analogy, it is like two lines of melody
responding to one another in counterpoint.

What I am against is the “freezing” of the flow of materials in the

form of an object, and the freezing of the flow of consciousness in
the form of an image, leading to the idea that making is an interaction
between image and object. For me, making is not about images and
objects at all, but about the coupling of awareness, and of movements
and gestures, with the forces and flows of materials that bring any
work to fruition. The important thing to recognise about these flows is
that they don’t connect things up. To adopt a helpful metaphor from
Deleuze and Guattari,7 imagine a river flowing between its banks. You
can imagine one place A on one side of the river, and another place
B on the other side. And you could build a bridge and cross from A to
B. The flowing water of the river, however, does not go from anywhere
to anywhere else. It just keeps flowing along, between its banks, at
90 degrees to the line between A and B. It goes along, not across. It is
to these flows that we need to attend if we are to understand mak-
ing. Whereas the lines we might draw between objects, or between
objects and persons, are lines that connect – like the line across the
bridge from A to B – the flow-lines of materials and awareness do not
connect but entangle. They comprise not a network but a meshwork.
And to shift from talking about objects and their relations to materials
and their entanglements is equivalent to a shift from a network view
to a meshwork view. I think this meshwork view corresponds very
closely to the ecologists’ idea of the web of life. And it means that we
have to distinguish not only between objects and materials but also
between objects and things.

This word “object” is very problematic: it’s a word that many of us

would like to be able to put to one side. It’s a problem firstly because

64
 8
you think: “where there are objects there must be subjects”, and the Martin Heidegger, “The Thing”, in:
Poetry, Language, Thought, trans.
subject/object dichotomy has raised a host of difficult issues, not least Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper
that of the Cartesian split between mind and body. Most philoso- & Row, 2013), pp. 165–182.
phers are agreed that the dichotomy has to go. But there are many
rival philosophical camps, and each camp, while claiming to have
solved the problem of how to get rid of the dichotomy, accuses its
rivals of merely reproducing it in its discourse. For the onlooker to
these arcane debates, it is all very tiresome. To my mind, however, the
problem with the object, as indeed with the subject, lies not with the
ob- or the sub- but with the -ject. It implies an entity that is already
thrown, already cast, in a fixed and final form. It confronts us, face-to-
face, as a fait accompli. When we talk about materials, on the other
hand, they are always becoming. Everything is something, but being
something is always on the way to becoming something else. Materi-
als, if you will, are substances in becoming.

Thus the move from a focus on objects to a focus on materials is

equivalent to a shift from a philosophy of being to a philosophy of be-
coming. Gatherings of materials in movement are what we call things.
The distinction between objects and things goes back to the philoso-
phy of Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger, the object is “out there”, a
fait accompli: you are “over against” it.8 The thing, by contrast, is to be
understood as a gathering of materials in movement. So to touch or
observe a thing is to bring the movements of our own being (or rather,
becoming) into correspondence with the movements of the materials.

The final point I want to make is that if we think of things in that way –
as gatherings of materials in movement – then we are things too.
People – we – are living organisms, and as organisms, we too are
gatherings of materials in movement. In fact, we are entire ecosys-
tems. I believe that according to the latest studies, 90 per cent of the
cells in the human body belong to various kinds of bacteria – but
that’s another story. As gatherings of materials, people are a bit like
compost heaps. If you were to take the lid off a human being you
would see a writhing mass of activity going on beneath, like the writh-
ing worms in a healthy heap of compost. And the thing about living
bodies, human or non-human, is that they are sustained because
they are continually taking in materials from their surroundings and
discharging into them, in the processes of respiration and metabolism.
Quite simply, to live we have to breathe; we also have to eat, and
to defecate. The organism can only keep on going because of this
continual interchange of substance across its outer membrane or skin.
Quite generally, things perdure – that is they can carry on – because
they leak, because of the interchange of materials across the ever-
emergent surfaces by which they differentiate themselves from the sur-
rounding medium. The bodies of organisms and indeed of other things
leak continually; indeed their lives depend on it. And in my view this
shift of perspective, from stopped-up objects to leaky things, is what
ultimately distinguishes what I want to call an ecology of materials
from mainstream studies of material culture.

65
66
“I was literally sticking my hands into materials”
Max Lamb

My life began in a small place on the South-West coast, a place

called Cornwall where from a very young age I became familiar with
the outdoor world, with nature, with natural materials. When you are
young it is difficult to realise what you have got until you got some-
thing to compare it to. It was only since I left Cornwall and went to
Newcastle to study and now living in London, that I can understand
how my childhood or my upbringing actually have formed me. I am
now running my own studio in London and yes, I am a designer, but I
am also a maker and being a maker is really integral to my practice.

The project with which I graduated from the Royal College of Art in
London in 2006 came about partly as a reaction to everything I have
done before and to the position I was in at the time. Following my
graduation from Newcastle and before coming to the Royal College
I had spent a year working for an interior design studio and that gave
me the feeling of having my hands tied behind my back and conceiv-
ing, thinking, designing work without actually producing. For me this
was very difficult because to develop ideas that are consistent, I re-
ally have to get my hands dirty. I have to involve myself in the materi-
als that I am working with. Thus for my graduation project I set about
to come up with a series of ‘exercises in seating’. The word ‘seating’
was rather irrelevant. It simply served as a subject and allowed me to
focus my aspirations. Yet the result was a series of pieces of furniture,
all of which you could sit on. With every new exercise I was literally
sticking my hands into materials and seeing what happened. Some
projects started with a material in a sort of isolation. At other times
I started with a process, just thinking about the process and what
materials I could bring to it. And at yet other times it was a marriage
of the two.

With the Poly Chair for example (fig. 1) I was trying to challenge mass-
produced furniture, the idea of mass production. I wanted to be the
mass producer myself. I chose to work with expanded polystyrene,
this very low density easily formable, easily manipulated material.
Admittedly quite a disgusting material, but it’s a fun material to work
with and it’s a great way of realising ideas very quickly. So I set my- fig. 1 (opposite page)
Max Lamb, Poly Chair, 2006.
self a very short time frame in which to make furniture and within 20 Low density expanded polystyrene
to 25 minutes I would carve an armchair that would then be coated and polyurethane rubber.

67
 in rubber and would be a finished piece. The rubber that I chose to
use in the process dries in three seconds, so 25 minutes of carving,
five or ten minutes of coating – and the piece is finished. I was able
to produce 16 chairs within an eight-hour day.

In all my work I am trying to understand not necessarily the limita-

tions of the material but what the material can do. For all of the
materials and processes that I chose to work with I came to under-
stand that you are only really able to appreciate the beauty of those
processes in context to the others that exist. And with every single
material there are multiple ways of processing it and working with
it. While for my ‘exercises in seating’ I could only explore a selected
few of all the processes and materials that exist, I still learnt a lot
through that experience.

The last project from the ‘exercises in seating’ was the Pewter Stool
(fig. 2–5) and I elaborate on this project more. We didn’t have access to
the foundry in college and unless you want to take already manipu-
lated steel in extrusions and cut and weld it, it is very difficult to fab-
ricate anything out of metal in any other way. So to take myself out of
the college workshop I visited an aluminium casting foundry. Doing
some work there I very quickly realised that the way I wanted to ex-
plore the material was actually impossible to do within the confines
of the foundry context. There are too many rules and preconceptions
that prevented me from what I wanted to do. And not only that, the
way that foundries work, the type of objects that foundries produce,
is a very inefficient process in that you are using huge amounts of
energy to melt this metal so it does work out well especially when
casting smaller components to produce multiple components.

But I only wanted to produce one thing without making a prototype

or a mould. I just wanted to explore the process of casting without
having to design on the computer first or make a pattern or mould
that would then dictate exactly how that form or that end product
would look like. So for me while the experience of working within the
foundry taught me the fundamental principles of the sand casting pro-
cess, it was really important to eventually take myself away from the
foundry. I now knew that I needed sand, metal and fire… so I chose
the beach. Not just any beach but the one where I grew up, Caerhays
Beach. So this was my sand, this was my foundry. The raw material I
chose was pewter, an alloy of copper, antimony and 92 per cent tin.
Cornwall is famous for its tin mining heritage. A tin mine is just to
reopen after I think about twenty years of being closed. Although this
tin is not from Cornwall itself, that was the kind of romantic notion.
The practical notion was that it has a very low melting point and
for me that was quite important because I was not really supposed
to make a fire on the beach. I was limited to a camping stove and
my mother’s stainless steel saucepan. Pewter melts at 265 degrees
Celsius and I knew that having not worked with molten metal before,
perhaps that was a good place to start.

68
fig. 2–5
Max Lamb, Pewter Stool, 2008.
Pewter stool, produced using a
primitive form of sand-casting.

69
 1
Lamb alludes to Ingold’s assump-
tion that “if moles were endowed
with imaginations as creative as
those of humans, they could have a
material culture. Anthropologically
trained moles, of a philosophical
bent, would doubtless insist that
the materiality of the world is not
culturally constructed but culturally
excavated – not, of course, in the
archaeological sense of recovering
erstwhile detached, solid objects
that have since become buried in
the substance of the earth, but in
the sense that the forms of things
are hollowed out from within rather
than impressed from without.” Tim
Ingold, “Material against material-
ity,” in: Archaeological Dialogues
14, (1) (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), p. 6. (edi-
tors' note)
70
First I had to learn about the material and the process, about its po-
tential and limitations, but also about my own inability to make any-
thing, to carve an accurate mould to start with. I cast various things
such as a cast taken from a limpet shell as we call them, or from a
few different teaspoons, literally just by pressing them into the wet
sand.
Then I started to get a little bit bigger. My first attempt at creating one
of these pieces of seating to go as part of my ‘exercises in seating’
series was still very much shaped by my preconceptions as to what
the material will do and how I can work with the sand. It was a
fairly naïve approach. I obviously had not watched very well at the
foundry. So just by making a positive mould and carving a helix pat-
tern I thought the molten pewter would just happily run around those
channels and cast the shape. Of course it did not, the liquid metal
just fell straight off and I had to start again.
So I went back and realised that I needed to make a container to
control the hot liquid pewter. On my third day on the beach I started
carving the mould directly into the surface of the sand. Into this
mould I poured the molten pewter. Liquid pewter actually behaves
very differently to water or any other liquid when you hold it in a
saucepan. While you know how a saucepan behaves and how it feels
when it is full of hot liquid, molten pewter is slightly denser than wa-
ter so I ended up casting over 5 kilos of pewter in each saucepan. It
is quite an unstable act, but it is one of these things you do not think
about when you set out to start working with a material that you have
not worked with before. Molten metal is very different to solid metal.
Perhaps I am stating the obvious but for me these experiences are
massively important in the development of my work.
Once cast, I had to wait fifteen to twenty minutes for it to cool and
then I could literally just dig away the sand, to excavate – or to
quote Tim Ingold here, as if I was a mole with a philosophical bent
(culturally) burrowing a chair out of a block of material1 – and to then
remove the stool. On the top, having been exposed to the air, you
obtain a very even surface, which is easy to polish. The underside
by contrast obviously is in contact with the sand and takes on the
fingerprint of the sand itself, which I was familiar with from the sand
casting process within the foundry. But by using sand on the beach,
you end up with a much more pronounced and prominent texture.
So that was the final project from my ‘exercises in seating’ and the
end of my Master’s course, that was the end of my realisation of
what I need to do to be a designer and to design well, at least what
I thought was to design well. To me, it comes down to the material,
to an intimate knowledge of the materials that you are to work with.
How as a designer can you design a logical, sensible, functional, pro-
ducible, sellable product, if you don’t understand the material with
which it is going to be made? And of course the process by which it
is going to be made.
A few years later, in 2010, I was invited to work with an Urushi lac-
quer master in Japan. I felt it to be quite unusual to be asked to make
something for somebody who is then going to coat my object in
another material, creating a surface over the material that I use. But
throughout the research I did into Urushi lacquer, I found it strange
that you never really knew what material is being lacquered. It was
always red or black and always glossy. If you are Japanese or very
sensitive, perhaps then you can feel that it is made of wood. To the
untrained Western eye, it could just feel like plastic and I found that
there was a missing link. So since I was to work with Urushi lacquer
I decided that the wood plays the most important role as it provides
the shape, and therefore I turned to wood. Not any wood but wood
in all its glory.

My starting point was a chestnut log from my local park which other-
wise would have rotten away, so they let me take it. My approach to
working with wood refrains from using machines and saws to cut the
wood because by cutting wood you cut through its nature. By using
green woodworking techniques however such as cleaving, the wood
splits and changes its shape where it wants to and how it wants to be
transformed. Thus you come up with wood that still looks like wood
and also has the shape and the feel of wood.

The object I made out of cleft wood was a three-legged stool (fig. 6–8). fig. 6–8
Max Lamb,
Once it was finished I sent it off to Japan, to Wajima, a small province Urushi Lacquer Stool, 2010.
in the West of Japan renowned for its lacquerware to the Urushi mas- Cleft chestnut, urushi lacquer.

71
 ter. The lacquer is applied like paint onto the surface of the wood,
one coat takes about one month to dry and it has about four coats
of lacquers. So this is a four-month process of coating the wood in
liquid resin. The coating cures over time and the end result is a black
wooden stool. Most importantly for me is the fact that the stool looks
like it is made of wood, it just happens to be a different colour. All
the signature of the wood is still there, the signature of the material.

Another process treating the surface of a material, in this case alumi­n-

ium, is anodising. In Anodised Table for Deadgood (2009, fig. 9–10)
actually the anodising itself becomes the material. The aluminium
serves its purpose in its own right, but as a way of finishing it, to
prevent it from oxidising, from changing shape or colour it is being
anodised. Anodising is unique to aluminium and is generally used
for finishing small components, repeatedly the same component over
and over again. Thus they achieve a very high tolerance of surface
finish. So it looks magically perfect, almost acquiring this sort of
plastic quality. The only difference between this and plastic is that it
still looks like metal. Again that is something unique to the anodising
process, it covers the metal with a kind of transparent film. You can
still see the metal below, it is not a reflective or a shiny coating in its
own right. It is just a transparent finish that you can colour or not.

But although it is seemingly industrialised and seemingly perfect,

fig. 9–10
Max Lamb, Anodised Table, 2009.
Anodised aluminium.
the process is still very much operated by hand and the process of
dipping these aluminium components into the tanks of anodising
solution and the dye that gives it the colour is still done by hand.
With this technique I wanted to create a product that is industrialised,
that is producible, that is available in shops rather than in the gallery
context, while retaining this sort of signature of the process, the fact

72
that it is dipped by hand and that it does not have to be perfect. Even
though it is the same person dipping my table and its components
end up being perfect every single time, there is a subtle difference in
the way I asked them to do the dipping, that is to dip slowly. I made
a very simple three-piece table, it is simple on purpose because it is
not about the function of the table neither is it about the aluminium,
although obviously it is a table and it is made of aluminium. So each
of the table’s components was separately dipped by hand. Rather
than being dipped for a consistent amount of time, they were being
dipped slowly and they were being removed from the dye very
slowly. So you get a smooth transition in tone. The area of metal,
which dips into the dye first and exits it last, is obviously darker in
tone. And you can get drips as the dyes are kind of running down, so
it is a process of time in order to achieve this effect on the surface.
What is important to me is to communicate that, yes, the tables are
dipped in a factory and, yes, it is anodised, and it is exactly the same
as with the bicycle hub or the laptop case. It is different in that you
can actually see part of the process of how it has been made. And
then the pieces of aluminium are quite simply slot together and four
bolts are to join the pieces.

Finally and rather in contrast to the previous project, I have worked

quite a lot with stone in the last years since 2007. I produced my very
first project in stone, the Ladycross Sandstone Chair (2007, fig. 11),
named after the Ladycross Quarry in Northumberland. I went back to
where I studied at university for my Bachelor, and found this quarry
in the part of a nature reserve. There have been quarries for 300
years. It is all still very much done by hand. It is a sandstone quarry
and the sandstone is being split from the ground, layer by layer just as
it was laid millions of years ago.

I wanted to work with stone because of its materiality, because it has

such a presence. It is solid, it is durable, it has incredible charac-
ter, which cannot really be controlled. It has been dictated to us by
nature over millions of years. My way of working with stone differs
from the way we understand stone or we see stone today in the urban
landscape, in the architecture that is built with stone, the pavements
that are built with stone, the flooring and the walls that are built with
stone – this cut, often polished or honed surface, this very square
inorganic object. I wanted to work with stone for the sake of working
with stone or even for the sake of stone itself.

It took me actually a couple of days exploring the quarry and discov-

ering a piece of stone. Which in its original state had not yet anything
being done to it, but it already looked like a chair in my eyes. What I
wanted to do is to do as little to it as possible in order to give it some
form or suggestion of function. Having never worked with stone be-
fore, just picking up hammer and chisel, I removed just the smallest
amount of material possible in order for it to be sat up on in a design
context. Then I suppose we could all argue that you could sit upon

73
 the stone before I did anything to it, you can sit on the floor if you
want to. You do not have to have this thing that is fabricated or trans-
formed into a perfect seat surface and in a backrest. But for me the
majority of work that I did to the stone was to remove about twenty
centimetres of stone of its base and give it a flat base just that it is set
upright. And therefore it had this kind of appearance of being a chair.
But without loosing sight of the fact that it is still just a piece of stone.
For me, when people say “It just looks like a rock”, that is the point.

fig. 11
Max Lamb,
Ladycross Sandstone Chair, 2007.
Sandstone, carved from a block by
hammer and chisel.

74
 1
“Materials are constantly astonishing” See Max Lamb, “I was literally
sticking my hands into materials,”
In Conversation with Max Lamb [ML] and Tim Ingold [TI] p. 66 of this publication

Karianne Fogelberg [KF] According to you, Tim, the maker is more

of an alchemist than a chemist, because as an alchemist the maker is
actually looking at what materials can do rather than what materials
are. Would you agree with this description, that you as a maker work
as an alchemist, Max?

ML It is funny that you, Tim, use that terminology because although I

couldn’t credit myself with that term as I don’t consider myself to be an
alchemist, I feel that alchemy plays a big part in what I do; it informs
what I do and dictates how I behave. Without the material I can’t do
anything, so it is really important that I understand the material in order
for me to act.

TI Yes, you once even remarked: “I was literally sticking my hands

into materials and seeing what happened.”1 That is exactly it. You don’t
know what is going to happen exactly, but you just put your hands in
and see… well, we don’t have to use the word alchemy for it, but it is
basically that sort of experimental attitude…

KF At the same time you are both advocating that we should get our
hands dirty even if we are not makers. We are all finding ourselves in
the kitchen cooking and we are all finding ourselves maybe dealing
with some torn pair of trousers. So we are all being exposed to the
resistance of materials or the way materials correspond with us. Would
you, Tim, be interested in engaging students of ecological anthropol-
ogy and of material culture studies to a greater degree with materials
– as designers do for instance?

75
 2
Lars Spuybroek, The Sympathy of
Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of
Design (Rotterdam: V2_Publishing,
NAi Publishers, 2011).
76
TI Absolutely, and that’s what I have been doing with my own stu-
dents in Aberdeen. I have been teaching a course called “The 4 As”
on anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, and one of its key
aspects is that in various kinds of activities students do get their hands
dirty. In the very first week of this course I get them to come back with
a selection of objects they have found lying around and we talk about
them and they inspect them carefully, so as not to break them. And the
next week I say: “Bring back some materials.” So they come back with
bags full of sand and leaf litter and stuff. And then I tell them to get their
hands dirty with these materials. I use sheets of hardboard covered
with wallpaper paste, and then tell them to bring their materials and
do a sort of Jackson Pollock exercise. And you get remarkable artworks.
But then they start thinking: “I have some stuff here, what difference
does it make if I think of it as an object or if I think of it as materials?”
And it is completely different. With materials you say you get your
hands dirty, you are not worried about maintaining things in exactly
their pristine form, but you can break them, you can smash them, you
can throw them around and see what they do, because they become
potential for things.
ML The problem with material already having been transformed into
an object is that you no longer see the material, you see the object. So
you are just there taking into account what it does rather than what it is.
TI That’s exactly it.
ML That’s a similar approach to how we began the sand casting work-
shop at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. Numerous times students
have approached me and said: “Well, do you think I can do this?,”
taking me to be an expert in sand casting or bronze casting, which I’m
not. In fact I have never sand-cast bronze until I started teaching how
to sand-cast bronze. And my answer to the question always is: “I don’t
know, let’s try and see what happens”. Because when you listen to the
rules typically set by a foundry, these preconceptions as to what a ma-
terial can do and how it should be treated and how the process should
be engaged with, or when you read what has been written about it, that
is when you take things for granted. You no longer question. I think it is
incredibly important to question what the material is and why it is, how
it behaves and why it behaves, and therefore, what I can do with it. It is
a sequence that can’t be told to you, you have to discover it.
TI And recognize that knowledge grows out of that experimentation
rather than being given didactically, in advance. There is a lovely book
I was reading recently by the architectural design theorist Lars Spuy-
broek. He is from the Netherlands and the book is called The Sympa-
thy of Things.2 He was arguing that our models for design ought to be
taken from cookery and gardening and not from manufacture. If you
are a cook or a gardener that kind of experimentation with materials
is what you have to do all the time. In the kitchen or in the garden the
principal problem is to prevent everything from running completely
out of control. It is not imposing form or a design on a material; it is
keeping some kind of order amidst the chaos.

ML But then I suppose that’s what design is: it is controlling material.

KF And then again, you are describing in some of your projects how
the material seems almost to suggest itself to a certain form giving pro-
cess. I think it was with regard to your China Granite Project (fig. 1–2)
that you have been quoted saying that you selected the boulders ac-
cording to their qualities and some of them you discarded immediately
because of their shape or the way the granite structure had already
cracked, while others seemed to suggest themselves to being worked
upon. There was one boulder, I seem to remember, that had a seam and
you considered the seam to be a good opportunity to find your way
into the granite. So yes, it is about control of the material but you also
take into consideration the actual properties of the material at hand,
letting yourself be guided by the material.

ML Yes, I always do. I wouldn’t say that I ever purposely discard a ma-
terial but I definitely select material. In the case of the granite project,
I actually didn’t need to make anything in particular. I was invited to
produce a body of work for an exhibition that was due to happen in
Beijing two weeks later. So I had two weeks to produce something.
That was the first time that I really collaborated with a big quarry with
huge quantities of boulders, almost a mountain full of boulders, and
I had to identify with the material somehow. Having the choice of se-
lection, I began to make sort of sensible decisions as to what each
individual boulder suggested to me, the form of it, the character, the fig. 1–2
Max Lamb, China Granite Project I,
grain. So it is developing this correspondence, as Tim talks about it, stool, 2009.
with the material, and that conversation with the material is incredibly Ein Li-Stein – Chengnanzuang,
Hebei, China.
important. So it is not me imposing myself on this material and telling Granite, cut out alongside a natural
it to do something it doesn’t want to do. It’s sort of listening as well. crack in the block.

77
 3
See Tim Ingolds contribution in It is this reciprocal exchange of me wanting to make something and
this volume, p. 59.
the stone wanting to be made into something.

KF You are teaching at the Royal College of Art in London, Max. What
role does the engagement with materials have in British design educa-
tion?

ML I would say that we are currently witnessing a return to the ac-

tive making and to a physical interaction with the material – and this
goes for the design industry as a whole. I think this trend or rather, this
change of attitude is a reaction to what we have done before. With
computers having become a standard design tool, it seems that the
first enthusiasm about digital processes has given way to the sensation
that we have been deprived of this material connection. Against this
context, a number of practising designers and design students return to
working with the hands – without this being a rule.

Audience 1 Max, you said that you often make things without having
an idea of what the result will be like. Could you refer this to the image
Tim has proposed of the flow-lines of materials3? Tim, would you say
that the idea you have of something you want to produce is like a small
temporal instance where different lines of growth, like the lines of the
development of your skills and the development of the materials, could
merge at some point, so this merging of lines could just for a brief
moment in time materialise your idea? And then again the lines might
actually not become this idea or might change very quickly to become
something else again? Could you both comment on this?

ML I agree with Tim’s observation that every material is a kind of con-

tinuation. So if I adopt Tim’s language and apply it to my objects, they
are still just materials and they continue to change with time. The cop-
per of the Copper Stool (fig. 3–4) for instance, which at first was bright
and glossy when it came out of the electro forming tank, has changed
fig. 3–4 colour since. It has oxidised and now it looks like leather. It has a deep
Max Lamb, Copper Stool, Details, dark brown colour and in my eyes it has matured, it has improved.
2006.
Galvanoformed nanocristalline
When people say: “Can I polish your Copper Stool? Can I polish the
copper. copper?” My answer is: “Of course, but I would not. You know, let it be.”

78
TI Materials are constantly astonishing. You keep noticing how extraor-
dinary they are. Suddenly something is flashing up in front of you, as if
it’s telling you something. I even had the same experience in writing.
If you are writing a book there comes a funny moment. Up to that
moment you are writing what you think needs to be written; but then
you suddenly discover that the book is actually telling you what to
write. This is an inversion. You don’t know quite how it happens, but
it’s a good thing when it does happen, because then you know you’ve
cracked it. But when, for example I am repainting a room in my house,
it always starts off with me in control of the paint, in a pot, which is
still beautifully clean. In the contest of me versus the paint, the score
is one nil in my favour. By the end of it, however, it’s the other way
around. And I stop at the point not when the job is finished but when I
completely lose control and paint is everywhere.

Audience 2 I would like to ask you two questions, one to each of you.
My first one is to Max Lamb. From what you say, I gather that you
approach the materials very innocently. Pewter for instance has been
worked with for millennia, and the same goes for many of the materi-
als that you have used. There must be great quantities of accumulated
knowledge about the qualities of these materials and the way they are
being processed. But you don’t seem to get involved with that. Instead,
you seem to communicate with the material in some sort of isolation.

ML You may be surprised to know that I actually start with quite a lot
of research usually, even with the metal casting. But there is a lot to
be said for trying things out rather than just assuming that you already
know the answer. Of course on a strictly scientific level I know that a
liquid can’t just hold its form but needs to be contained – but I had to
try it. So through the process of pouring the liquid metal over the sand,
I get to see how it travels, how fast it travels and how quick it slows
down and maybe if I had carved this channel even more delicately, the
differential in temperature would have caused the metal to cool down
more quickly… I didn’t pursue that any further, but at least I learnt
something. This childlike naivety in these processes is how we discover
and how we learn. If we just absorb what we are being told, we will
never really know what we know.

TI I agree with everything that Max has been saying. It has been said:
“If you know too much about things, you see your knowledge and
not the things themselves”. If you know the name of every plant, you
recognise the plant and give its Latin name, but you don’t actually see
the plant. The thing is being obscured by the veil of knowledge you
have about it. So there is a certain virtue in being always able to see
the world as if it were for the first time. When I first taught my course
on “The 4 As”, I called my dad, who was a mycologist, a very sober
and empirical scientist, and he bellowed down the phone at me and
said: “Is this a university or a kindergarten?” My answer was: “Well,
actually both.” The whole point about it is to bring a kind of curiosity
that small children have and to reconcile that with the kind of material

79
 knowledge of a 20- or 21-year old. The result of putting those things
together can be remarkable.

Audience 2 Thank you very much. And here is my question to Tim

Ingold: I was surprised to hear that the notion of the imposition of
form on material is still very prevalent in anthropology because as I
understand it, many artists throughout the ages have talked about how,
basically, they are just giving form to something that is already there.
And you actually mentioned the example of the text starting to write
itself or the book starting to impose itself. I wonder about the role of
inspiration? Could the notion of inspiration help to reconcile these ap-
parently disparate ideas: of imposition on the one hand, and growing
out of something on the other?

TI What you say is right about the problem with anthropology. As you
say, artists, sculptors, makers through the ages – not just from our own
society but from many other societies as well – have been telling us
about how the form emerges from the material, about how the form
arises out of the creative process and is not given in advance. But an-
thropologists have been shackled for so long with different versions
of cultural constructionism that they have to suppose somehow that
the cultural forms are being inscribed upon the material world. And
in doing so they have been reproducing an ontology which is flatly
contradicted by the people they have been working with. I think we
are beginning to get out of this, but it’s been a hard-fought struggle and
I don’t think we are completely there yet. When we are there we won’t
any longer need divisions in the subject between people who study
aesthetics and symbolism and people who study ecology. Those divi-
sions, which are still very much present today, will collapse.

But on inspiration… it is difficult to know exactly what inspiration

means. The concept I have been working with is improvisation, try-
ing to show how creative processes generally are improvisatory and
how we need to understand creativity in terms of improvisation rather
than innovation. The point is that one is bringing something into being.
On a recent trip to Argentina I visited the house where the composer
Manuel de Falla lived in his last years, and up on the wall was a quota-
tion, something he had said: “When I compose music I feel as if I am
bringing something into being. It’s like giving birth to a person and you
have to nurture it.” I want to think of making and creativity in terms
of this notion of growth, of continually bringing things into being that
weren’t there before. It is not the novelty that matters, but the vitality,
the carrying on of life.

Audience 3 Listening to you, I find what you say all very convincing,
and yet I see a certain danger in the mystification of the material. I
would even suggest that this access to the material is somehow eso-
teric. Perhaps this comes from the association you were making with
alchemy as a model for working with material. I would like to see some
restrictions in this instance. Could you qualify this further?

80
 4
TI This is an important and serious point. A number of contemporary Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter –
A Political Ecology of Things
authors, such as Jane Bennett4, are seeking to revive a kind of vitalism, (Durham: Duke University Press,
and speak of the intrinsic vitality of materials through reference to such 2010).
philosophers as Henri Bergson. And there is of course a certain danger
of mystification. We have to be careful about it. One way to deal with
it might be to recognise the extent to which our own vocabulary for
talking about things like desires, intentions and feelings actually comes
from close observation of the material world. If you take a word like
intention, for example, you might say: “Look, it is going a bit far to
claim that granite boulders or lumps of clay have intentions.” But then
remember that the word itself is related to things like tension, to tensile
strength, to the twisting of fibres in rope, and you think: “Well, perhaps
it’s not so far-fetched after all.” Perhaps it is perfectly reasonable to say,
for example, that “This rope has the intention to twist in a certain way”,
because you can understand the twist of the rope in terms of the prop-
erties of cellulose, actually in terms of molecular structure. And if we
can talk about the intentions of a rope to twist, then why do we have
to be so worried about using a language for materials that, classically,
we just reserved for human beings? We are used to thinking that there
is a language for talking about human mental states and dispositions
and so on, that we are unique to ourselves or perhaps to ourselves
and some other animals. And yet the language we use is one that has
come from observations of the way stuff behaves under certain circum-
stances. So perhaps we don’t have to be quite so worried about it; we
should in other words be a little more generous in our understanding of
materials than we have tended to be – or perhaps a little less generous
in our understanding of ourselves. Then perhaps we can erode that gap
in the middle that separates us.

81
82
Project Class Lamb
Workshop by Max Lamb in collaboration with the workshop for ore
casting, Academy of Fine Arts Munich, WS 2012/13

fig. 1 and 3
Casting of ore with the assistance
of Bruno Wank, Vincent Mitzev and
Markus Lutter.

fig. 2
Max Lamb casting pewter.

fig. 5
Max Lamb and Krina Königsmann
examine the result of the ore cast.

fig. 4 and 6–10

Works by Markus Rupprecht,
Valerie Christiansen, Rebecca
Grollmann, Simon Kettenberger,
Anna Bischof and Anne Achenbach.

fig. 11
Workshop presentation in the old
boardroom.

83
84
85
86
87
 fig. 1
OMA/AMO, IDEO, Prada Store New
York, USA, 2001, Fitting rooms with
electro-chrome glass doors.

fig. 2
Herzog & de Meuron, 40 Bond
Street, New York, USA, design
2004/2005, realisation 2006/2007,
glass facade with hydrophobic
coating.

88
The Promise of Intelligent Materials
Nicola Stattmann [NS] and Thomas Schröpfer [TS]
in Conversation with Karianne Fogelberg [KF]

KF Only ten years ago intelligent materials were put forward as the
key technology of the 21st century and large amounts of grant money
were invested into their development. What is the situation like today?

TS The interest in these materials has slightly waned for architects. On

the one hand, this is due to the fact that nanomaterials involve a scale
that rarely comes to pass in architecture because it’s barely perceptible.
On the other hand, it’s extremely expensive to use these materials in
construction. Many of these applications gain a foothold in product
design, before they are introduced in architecture – if ever. A well-
known example is the Prada Store in New York (2001) whose fitting
rooms are equipped with electro-chrome glass doors that change from
transparent to opaque when you close them (fig. 1). Similar applications
on a larger-scale haven’t yet been realised in architecture. Additionally,
many smart materials only function in controlled environments that
can’t easily be sustained outdoors. One of the few built examples of the
use of smart materials on the architectural scale is the water and grime
repellent nanocoating of the glass facade of the apartment building 40
Bond Street in New York, which was designed by Herzog & de Meuron
in 2006 (fig. 2). In a two-step process, the raw surface of the glass was
first smoothed and then a hydrophobic layer was applied on top to
repel water and grime, which effectively lowers both water use and
energy expenditure, as well as the costs of cleaning and maintaining

89
 1
Peter Yeadon, “Materialisierungen
der Nanotechnologie in der Archi­
tektur,” in: ed. Thomas Schröpfer,
Material Design: Materialität in
der Architektur (Basel: Birkhäuser,
2011), pp. 137–138.
2
See also Bundesministerium
für Gesundheit, Schlüsseltech-
nologie Nanotechnologie: http://
bmg.gv.at/home/Schwerpunkte/
VerbraucherInnengesundheit/
Nanotechnologie/ and BUND,
Nanomaterialien, at: http://www.
bund.net/themen_und_projekte/
nanotechnologie/nanomaterialien/
(last accessed 6.8.2013).
3
Thomas Schröpfer, Material De-
sign: Materialität in der Architektur
(Basel: Birkhäuser, 2011),
pp. 166–168.
KF Considering the hurdles in applying these new substances, are
there also concerns regarding the potential health risks of intelligent
materials? In some reports there is talk of the “asbestos of the future.”
KFWhere have intelligent materials proven themselves nonetheless?
Where does their application remain promising?
90
the facade.1 Despite obvious advantages, projects like 40 Bond Street
are nonetheless exceptions, mostly because of higher up-front mate-
rial and construction costs. In general, when compared with the auto-
mobile industry, for instance, the adoption of material innovations in
building construction takes place rather slowly.
NS I could not agree more. A lot of time elapses between the initial
development of materials and when the finally reach production. Even
after intensive development work new materials sometimes fail when
implemented. In my office, we worked with a well-known German
kitchen manufacturer to redesign fronts of kitchen appliances with
photochromic pigments or other coatings. The prototypes fabricated
by local manufacturers admittedly looked great and were also pos-
sible to realise, but the coatings weren’t compatible with the products’
durability. The use of abrasives, and even every day wear and tear,
damaged the coatings so much that the project was finally abandoned.
Another manufacturer introduced a non-stick coating for irons on the
market that was supposed to offer lighter and better ironing. However,
this was also abandoned because an iron should last six to ten years
and this coating couldn’t hold up that long. It’s unbelievably difficult to
practically apply these new materials or coatings, and for this reason
businesses and designers frequently turn back to established designs.
NS That’s true. While smart and nanomaterials received nearly unlim-
ited support ten years ago, critical voices prevail today.2 Since then, it’s
become clear that the smallest particles of these functional materials
uncontrollably and incomprehensibly disappear. These micromole-
cules clearly find their way into the environment and the human body.
Meanwhile, funding has begun to focus more intensely on sustainable
materials and resource-efficient production.
TS Intelligent materials are still attractive where visual effects are de-
sired, where their mutability is perceptible – in something like the
aforementioned changing rooms at the Prada Store – or where they
improve the energy consumption of a building and can increase the
life of a product used in construction. For example, dye-sensitized
solar cells have an advantage over conventional photovoltaic-based
solar cells because they already generate electricity with only limited
quantities of light. And photochromic glass darkens itself automati-
cally with exposure to light and may thus cool a building’s interior
without the use of elaborate cooling technology.3 Such applications of
smart materials can improve the energy performance of a building and
can have a lasting influence on architecture.
 4
NS Intelligent materials offer the opportunity to realise electronic func- See www.gerster-techtex.de (last
accessed 5.8.2013)
tions like conducting, measuring, storing, or switching in a very small
5
space and, because of this, are able to forgo additional components. See James Urquhart, Flexible
Lighting is on a Roll, at: http://www.
This is particularly interesting when it comes to miniaturisation and re- rsc.org/chemistryworld/2012/08/
ducing components. For instance, functional fibres can conduct, emit flexible-lighting-roll. See also Mike
Orcutt, Electronic “Skin” Emits Light
light, and incorporate solar energy, as well as store and filter, be anti- When Pressed, at: http://www.tech-
bacterial or self-cleaning. Depending on the requirements, they may be nologyreview.com/news/517271/
knit, woven, or braided as a textile component. Thus, functional fibres electronic-skin-emits-light-when-
pressed/ (last accessed 5.8.2013)
can be used as circuits, heating, light sources, graphics, or sensors. The
firm Gustav Gerster in Biberach an der Riss manufactures functional
textiles with metal or carbon fibres that are partially reminiscent of
delicate lace, but can also take on functions like electrical and thermal
conductivity (fig. 3–4).4 As a flexible textile, they can be used in many
different ways and are integrated, for example, in medical products
like kidney belts or in seat warmers for cars. Applications based on
printed electronics, also known as polytronics (polymer electronics),
are also promising. Similar to the specially-equipped functional fibres,
formerly separate electronic elements may thus be integrated into thin
foils in order to realise flat, light-weight products. At the same time,
the printing process involving functional tints (polymer colours with
integrated functional molecules) makes it possible to produce circuits
and other electronic components. Researchers from Umeå Univer-
sity, Sweden and the Technical University of Denmark have recently
shown that they are now in the position to print flat light sources, like
in newspaper printing, on transparent foil in a continuous process.
These so-called light emitting electrochemical cells (LECs) present a
clear cost-saving alternative to organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs)
and could be used in the future as large, self-luminous foil. Functional
tints, which polytronic applications are based upon, continue to be
further developed – in light of the fact that such applications clearly fig. 3
Gustav Gerster GmbH & Co. KG,
create less e-waste than conventional electronic appliances.5 Innova- heating textile, October 2010,
tions like LECs, as well as OLEDs, enable completely new fields of machine-knit from carbon fibre with
supporting structure.
application or could realise existing systems at a consistent level of
performance with minimal resource expenditure. Intelligent materials fig. 4
Gustav Gerster GmbH & Co. KG,
gain legitimacy through similar developments combined with clever heating textile, April 2010,
applications. flat heating with heating tape.

KF To what extent do intelligent materials question the established

understanding of material as a passive substance that has to be pro-
cessed and brought into form? And what does this mean for designers
and architects?

TS Intelligent materials have unquestionably changed our under-

standing of material. Although adaptive and changing materials are
not completely new in architecture, intelligent materials nonetheless
break from the intention and methods of adaptive materials of earlier
generations. In the past, the use of adaptive materials reflected the
increasingly complex understanding of their behaviour. For example,
carpenters have used construction methods to bend wood for cen-
turies in order to use it for boats, musical instruments, or furniture.

91
 6
Susanne Küchler, Materials and
Design, in: ed. Alison J. Clarke, De-
sign Anthropology: Object Culture in
the 21st Century (Vienna: Springer,
2010), pp. 130–142.
This and similar methods were nonetheless applied to materials before
their installation; the transformation of materials generated a static re-
sult, thus, referring to the initial state of the material. Conversely, intel-
ligent materials react on their own, according to changing conditions
like temperature fluctuation or lighting conditions. Furthermore, this
process is predictable and reversible. This fundamentally expands the
spectrum of material performance. The traditional question “a material
is given, what can it do?” can now be formulated in a radically differ-
ent manner: “which problem do we need to solve – how do we de-
velop a material that can accomplish this task?” Today it’s the dynamic
of material transformation that interests architects.

NS However, that is only true for long-term projects. A new mate-

rial isn’t just developed. But the fact that materials can be conceived
of, and realised for, particular functions has great importance for the
development of innovative, as well as ecological solutions. Here the
industry should be thinking more about the long-term and seize the
opportunities that materials offer to a much greater extent.

KF According to the anthropologist Susanne Küchler, the develop-

ment of intelligent materials animates the world of objects by endow-
ing them with attributes that had previously been reserved for living
things.6 Do smart materials carry living traits in them?

fig. 5
Jannis Hülsen, research project
Xylinum, 2011, stool with skin
grown from bacterium cellulose.

fig. 6
Jannis Hülsen, research project
Xylinum, 2011, detail stool.

92
 7
NS They do exist indeed. Especially in sensory technology, there are See http://www.jannishuelsen.
com/?/work/xylium/ (last accessed
materials that react correspondingly with a desired response to light, 25.9.2013).
heat and moisture. For example, shape memory alloys transform 8
Achim Menges, “Materially
themselves at a certain temperature and expand to a pre-determined Informed Computational Design
shape. The Fraunhofer Institute developed an artificial heart valve that in Ecological Architecture,” in:
ed. Thomas Schröpfer, Ecologi-
isn’t implanted via open heart surgery, but instead is introduced into cal Urban Architecture: Qualitative
the body in a compressed form and there, through the warmth of the Approaches to Sustainability (Basel:
blood, unfolds into its intended shape. In this case materials are em- Birkhäuser, 2012), pp. 60–69.

bedded in the body and perform outstanding, and to some extent even
life-sustaining functions. In doing so, these materials broaden our tra-
ditional understanding of materials. This also pertains to substances
that are generated with microorganisms like bacteria or viruses, on
which – against the background of continually rising material and en-
ergy demands – research interest focuses today, and whose aesthetic
potential designers are already exploring (fig. 5–6).7 In this case, the
boundary between static material and living matter may no longer be
drawn in altogether definite terms. At the same time, the genetic ma-
nipulation of materials and viruses isn’t unproblematic. It poses ethi-
cal questions and the long-term effects of such interventions are also
unknown. As with intelligent materials and nanocoatings, where these
interventions can be justified must be carefully considered.

TS Moreover, traditional materials are equipped with their very own

dynamic – like wood, which expands and contracts under chang-
ing environmental conditions. For their project Responsive Surface
Structure (2007), Achim Menges and Steffen Reichert researched the
hygroscopic characteristics of wood and, based upon that research,
developed a spatial structure using digital simulation and manufactur-
ing techniques (fig. 7–8). Their design uses wood’s inherent moisture-
absorbing properties and the differential surface expansion associated
with it. It ultimately functions as an atmospheric humidity sensor that
is installed on a supporting sub-structure. With this project, the ar-
chitects make use of the dynamic potential of a familiar material like
wood with the help of digital technology.8 Menges and Reichert sub- fig. 7–8
sequently carried this principle over to their plan for a pavilion for the Steffen Reichert and Achim Menges,
Responsive Surface Structure I,
Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, whose skin automatically opens Offenbach University of Art and
and closes depending on the humidity (2010, not yet realised, fig. 9–10). Design, Germany, 2007, details.

93
 fig. 9
Achim Menges, Steffen Reichert
and Scheffler + Partner, Responsive
Surface Structure II, FAZ Pavilion,
Germany, 2010, open structure.

fig. 10
Achim Menges, Steffen Reichert
and Scheffler + Partner, Responsive
Surface Structure II, FAZ Pavilion,
Germany, 2010, closed structure.

KF Does this mean, in light of new types of process technologies, that

traditional materials are interesting again?

NS Absolutely. Today many of the efforts in material research and

fig. 11
PaperFoam bv, foam-moulded
packaging made from paper, 2004.
design are applied towards sustainability. Clever applications, rather
than intelligent materials, are at the centre of attention. Because of
this, attention is also once again directed towards tried and tested
materials. Research considers the relative advantages of materials like
wood, ceramic, and glass in an effort to transfer them to new pro-
duction processes. Conventional materials are, for example, mixed
with bio-plastics in order to make them fit for injection moulding or
to process them into foam. Thus paper, when combined with corn-
starch under heat (popcorn effect) and simultaneously moulded, can
replace plastic packaging that can subsequently be composted (fig. 11).
The automobile supplier Johnson Controls developed interiors for cars
that no longer use polyester fibres, but hemp, kenaf, and other biode-
gradable materials. Developments like these also constitute intelligent

94
 9
materials, insofar as their properties can be specifically applied and See Katrin Pudenz, “Ökoglobes
für Verbesserung des Aluminium-
processed, from different production-line moulding methods to 3-D Bruchdehnungsverhaltens und
geometry. At the moment, Johnsons Controls is also designing a new Leichtbau-Sitzkonzept,” in:
lightweightdesign, at: http://www.
automobile seat that adopts the principle of an innerspring mattress and lightweight-design.de/index.
embeds steel springs in a textile casing or chamber system. Both com- php;do=show/site=lwd/sid=4859
042285200ca924efa9301875086/
ponents can be detached after use and recycled separately as needed, alloc=135/id=16828 or Johnson
as opposed to the traditional foam-moulded seats that are made from Controls Automotive Experience
different materials and components (fig. 12–13).9 The Fly­knit sneaker re- in: na presseportal, news aktuell,
at: http://www.presseportal.de/
leased by Nike in 2012 adopts a similar approach (fig. 14).10 It offers an pm/19526/1476267/the-re3-
alternative to conventional models that, as a general rule, bond togeth- concept-triple-symbiosis-between-
form-function-and-finesse-john-
er many different materials like foam, gel cushioning, eyelets, or imi- son-controls-presents-new (last
tation leather. Whereas Flyknit digitally knit fabric already integrates accessed 6.8.2013).

eyelets for shoelaces and different zones that consist of breathable and 10
See http://nikeinc.com/news/ni-
stabilising structures, only the sole needs to be attached afterwards. ke-flyknit (last accessed 6.8.2013).
The advantages are that there isn’t any waste, the design requires fewer
tools to produce, and the shoe is less environmentally damaging in its
production and waste-disposal.

fig. 12–13
Johnson Controls,
ComfortThin car seat, 2012-2015.

fig. 14
Nike Inc., Flyknit shoe, 2012.

95
 11
See Schröpfer 2011 (footnote
3), p. 164.
12
Nader Tehrani, Justin Fowler,
“Zusammenfügung,” in: Schröpfer
2011 (footnote 3), pp. 54–55.
13
See Schröpfer 2012 (footnote 8),
pp. 14–15.
fig. 15
Kruunenberg Van der Erve
Architecten, Laminata, Leerdam,
Netherlands, 2002, Interior.
fig. 16
Kruunenberg Van der Erve
Architecten, Laminata, Leerdam,
Netherlands, 2002, detail.
96
TS In architecture, traditional materials – the trusted palette of wood,
steel, concrete, glass, and plastic – will remain the basis of the archi-
tectural repertoire, too. New production methods however awaken
new potentialities in these well-known building materials. The appli-
cation of wood today is being further developed, as seen in the emer-
gence of a new generation of material products like high-performance
textiles and lignin adhesives.11 An example of experiments with the
structural properties of glass is Laminata (2000), a house made almost
entirely out of laminated glass by the Dutch architects Kruunenberg
van der Erve. For the project, 13,000 glass panels were used for the in-
ner and outer walls, which vary in thickness from ten up to an astonish-
ing 170 centimetres (fig. 15–16).12 Likewise the possible applications for
concrete are constantly improving and evolving. New forms of produc-
tion, for example, allow geometrically complex structural components
to be made from in-situ concrete, as in the case of the Mercedes-Benz
Museum (2006) designed by UNStudio, for which many double-curved
surfaces were generated from concrete (fig. 17–18).13
Simultaneously, developments in production technologies and digital
fabrication create a plethora of new possibilities in architecture, just
like in the design field. Thus architectural elements can be tailored at
a heretofore unprecedented rate or standard materials can be used in
 14
Tehrani, Fowler 2011 (footnote
12), pp. 56–57.

in customised and complex ways at relatively low costs. For example,

for the wave-shaped facade of the Gantenbein Winery, the Swiss ar-
chitects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler used traditional bricks
(20,000 in total), which were then laid by an industrial robot accord-
ing to pre-programmed parameters – at desired angles, and at clearly fig. 17–18
UNStudio,
defined intervals – in order to precisely correspond to the lighting con- Mercedes-Benz Museum, 2006,
ditions of the Gantenbein’s fermentation room (fig. 19–21).14 outside view and atrium.

97
 KF Can it therefore be said that conventional materials have their own
inherent form of intelligence that designers and architects can make
use of in their designs?

NS Yes, the potential of materials is ultimately developed in connec-

tion with an appropriate design. This pertains to traditional materials
as well as to intelligent materials. Smart materials can offer appropriate
solutions when it comes to reducing components and saving materials.
However, they are far from a universal remedy. Until now they have
proven themselves above all in medical and technical applications
and are barely visible in the realm of consumer goods. This is chang-
ing, however. I think that above all polytronics will influence design –
thereby electronic appliances and systems could become paper-thin
in the future!

TS This pertains to architecture to an even greater degree. Until now,

fig. 19
Gramazio & Kohler, Gantenbein
winery facade, Fläsch, Switzerland,
detail, 2006.
many applications were limited to temporary installations or smaller-
scale projects. If nothing else, this is due to building restrictions that
make it difficult to expand beyond the classic canon of materials. At
the same time, the challenge is to overcome this phase of experimen-
tation. Applications like thermochromic or fluorescent paints, which
have been thus far limited to surfaces, should be further developed
in order to, for example, influence the spatial functions of buildings
in the future. Compared to the initial euphoria, smart materials have

98
not yet changed the appearance of buildings, let alone revolutionised
them. At this point, innovative construction methods have proven to
be much more influential in revealing new and surprising facets of
traditional materials.

NS When materials can react to external influences like temperature,

sound, or electricity, these are indeed fundamentally new properties
that we don’t initially know how to deal with. Designers can play a
key role in translating these unprecedented, innovative materials for
everyday use and making them fit for consumer use.

fig. 20
Gramazio & Kohler, Gantenbein
winery facade, Fläsch, Switzerland,
2006.

fig. 21
Gramazio & Kohler, Gantenbein
winery facade, Fläsch, Switzerland,
2006, industrial robot fabricating
facade elements.

99
 Abb. 1
John Frere, flint handaxe,
drawing 1797. Characteristic tool
of our hominin ancestor Homo
erectus, c. 1 million years ago.

100
Material Engagement as Human Creative Process and
Cognitive Life of Things
Colin Renfrew

The human story, and specifically the story of human cultural evolu-
tion, unfolds in the processes of material engagement – the develop-
ing relationship between the individual human being and the im-
mediate environment, which of course includes other human beings.
This is a creative process, which is also a social process. The material
engagement process involves developing skills and the deployment
of ingenuity and intelligence.

The human story taken in the long term can certainly be addressed
from this perspective, as I shall hope to outline. So too can the story
of the artist, especially in the visual arts, where what is created – the
‘work of art’ – is always the product of doing, of making, of interact-
ing with the material world in such a manner that there is indeed
a material product: the work. For it is the role of the visual artist to
make works – the oeuvre of the artist – through which she or he
communicates with the viewer. It is by the reception of those works
by the viewer that the role of the artist is accomplished. For if no
one else sees the work its creation is merely a private act, a personal
secret, which does not qualify as art.

So the story of art, including that of contemporary art and the con-
temporary artist, can be seen as an issue of material engagement,
which has fundamental parallels with the long-term development of
human cultural evolution. It is this parallel which I hope to explore
further here. It offers, I believe, a basis towards understanding the
“power of material”. It invites also a consideration of the “politics of
materiality”. The perspective seems particularly apposite to the work
of Sofia Hultén, a practising artist who focuses upon the cognitive life
of things, things which people have made and sometime abandoned.
Like the archaeologist she follows their story into dissolution and
fragmentation, and sometimes into a kind of resurrection, which only
the artist (or indeed the archaeologist) can bring about.

101
 1
Wil Roebroeks, Paola Villa, “On
the earliest evidence for habitual
use of fire in Europe,” in: Proceed-
ings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the USA 108 (Washing-
ton, 2011), pp. 5204–5214.
2
Colin Renfrew, Prehistory, the
Making of the Human Mind (Lon-
don: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007),
p. 33.
3
Klaus Schmidt, Göbekli Tepe, a
Stone Age Sanctuary in South-
eastern Anatolia (Berlin: ex oriente
e.V., 2012).
fig. 2
House walls of unbaked mudbrick
at the early farming site of Çatal-
höyük, Turkey, c. 7000 BC. The built
environment.
102
Archaeology and Society – Material Engagement
Animal species other than humans do use things for various pur-
poses – for instance sticks to secure objects out of their reach. Some
modify things to make them more useful – which we may regard
as tools. Among the extinct apes ancestral to ourselves was homo
habilis, which was making stone tools from pebbles two million years
ago. By the time of our ancestor homo erectus a million years ago,
well-shaped flint tools, today known as hand-axes, were produced
(fig. 1). The production of such tools was a tradition passed on from
generation to generation. The inheritance was a cultural one, not a
genetic one. That is to say such a tradition was not inherited geneti-
cally with the ancestral DNA. This was a skill learned long after birth,
and not necessarily from one’s parents. No doubt there were many
skills learned in this way, passed down from generation to generation.
These stone tools are the best evidence for this: they survive to this
day. They document the early and significant interactions with the
material world, which facilitated the development of our ancestors.
The control of fire was another such skill, permitting both warmth
and the cooking of food, something regularly achieved already
400,000 years ago.1
It was however with the emergence of our own species, homo
sapiens, around 200,000 years ago in Africa that the pace of change
quickens. These were accomplished hunters and gatherers, and
they developed many new techniques of manipulating the material
world to their advantage. They used animal skins for clothing; they
developed the use of the bow and arrow. In economic terms, how-
ever, the most significant engagement of humans with the material
world came with their exploitation of plants. They systematic use
of plants, notably cereals in the Near East, led to their domestica-
tion, to agriculture, and to the development of the settled way of
life which the practice of agriculture makes possible. From around
10,000 years ago the development of villages and then of towns oc-
cupied by farmers was part of a population explosion, which Gor-
don Childe termed the “neolithic revolution”.2 The settlements in
which they lived were sometimes constructed of clay, sometimes of
mud bricks, and some are quite well preserved today – for example
the early farming settlement at Çatalhöyük in Turkey, dating from
7,000 BC (fig. 2). These constructions are a palpable example of the
process of material engagement.
It was the engagements between individual humans in society, which
were the most productive in their outcome. The first known monu-
ments have been found at Göbekli Tepe in east Turkey. Dating from
9,000 BC they are circles of upright stones or stelae, sometimes
carved in relief with animals. They are deeply impressive, even today
(fig.3). This was a place of congregation of communities which were
still hunter-gatherers, just at the dawn of agriculture.3 These com-
munities, when they met together, had the manpower to quarry and
erect these large stones. Such cooperative endeavour represents a
new kind of material engagement.

These hunter-gatherer societies were egalitarian societies, without the

distinctions of rank and office which are seen in more complex socie-
ties. The record of prehistory allows the study of their emergence. One
crucial ingredient was the emergence of wealth, and of value – of
objects and materials to which value was attributed. For example the
first gold is seen in Varna in Bulgaria around 4,500 BC. Gold is of
course found in nature, like other elements and minerals. But it has

to be worked by hammering, sometimes with the aid of fire. It was

first worked at the same time that the use of copper was developed –
first the hot working of native copper and then the smelting of copper
form its ores. So the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age were born.
But at their origin in Europe were those early persons of rank who fig. 3
were buried at Varna, around 4,500 BC distinguished by ornaments Upright stelae at Göbekli Tepe,
Eastern Turkey, at the dawn of
of sheet gold. The social history and the material history of human- agriculture c. 9000 BC. The worlds
kind are marked by material engagements of this kind. earliest constructed monuments.

103
 4
Colin Renfrew, “Towards a cogni-
tive archaeology,” in: Colin Renfrew,
Ezra B. W. Zubrow, eds., The An-
cient Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), pp. 3–12,
Colin Renfrew, Cognitive Archaeol-
ogy from Theory to Practice (Third
annual Balzan Lecture), (Firenze:
Olschki, 2012).
fig. 4
Stone weights of the Indus Valley
civilization c. 2000 BC, from Mo-
henjodaro. Early measurement.
fig. 5
The commercial exchange system
of the Old World, developed in
Western Asia by 3000 BC.
104
The Archaeology of Mind
To make sense of all of this we need to have some insight into how
these societies were thinking. Such insights have to be gleaned
from the study of the material remains which – for times before the
invention of writing (first seen around 3,000 BC in Mesopotamia and
Egypt) – are all we have to go on. This is the concern of cognitive
archaeology – the archaeology of mind.4 Of course, with the devel-
opment of writing, the storage of information becomes much easier.
And when the script has been deciphered that information can be
accessed by the epigrapher today.
For earlier, prehistoric times, however, it is still possible to investi-
gate how people were thinking. In different parts of the world they
were perfectly able to align their monuments on the rising of the
midsummer sun – in Early Dynastic Egypt, at Stonehenge in neolithic
England, in the early civilisations of the New World. That gives some
indications of their thought and of their astronomical competence.
In the Indus Valley civilisation around 2,000 BC stone cubes were
carefully worked (fig. 4). And when these are weighed today we can
see that their weights, in modern terms, are multiples of a specific
unit of weight. This must mean that they had developed a system of
the measurement of mass, which could be used in practical ways
for handling commodities – whether the commodity was wheat or
gold dust. Out of these systematic procedures there developed the
commercial systems of the Old World, where goods and commodi-
ties were exchanged on a vast scale (fig. 5). These were the product of
new ways of dealing with the things in the world. Measure of mass,
like those of length and of time, allowed human societies to struc-
ture their interactions in the world. All of these instances of measure
represent new kinds of carefully structured engagement with the
material world, and engagement that is socially oriented.
Another branch of cognitive archaeology is the archaeology of ritual
and of religion. This is a vast field, where the iconography of the
sculptures and paintings of the communities in question open the
way to some understanding of their belief systems. The earliest dei-
ties – representations of supernatural beings – can be recognised in
the first state societies at the time of the emergence of the first cites.
value measure
commodity
exchange
 5
These systems of belief are accessible to us, at least partly, precisely Colin Renfrew, Figuring It Out.
The Parallel Visions of Artists and
because elements of belief became embodied in material represen- Archaeologists (London: Thames
tations, in what we may call the divine art of the specific religions. and Hudson, 2005).
Without the images we today would know much less of these early
societies. And without the images, the concepts or divine beings
worshipped would have been difficult to formulate.

The Materiality of Archaeology and of Art

The archaeologist is also an active fieldworker, not merely an arm-

chair philosopher contemplating the unfolding millennia of human
prehistory from a sedentary position. We archaeologists have crea-
tive lives of our own: we dig! And the processes of archaeological
excavation involve many practices: of excavation, of recording, of
photography, of conservation and also of display, museum display.
Many of these have their parallels in the practice of the contemporary
artist.5 The artist of today is not simply painting a canvas to be hung
on the wall or shaping a sculpture to be set on a plinth. The English
sculptor Richard Long undertakes lengthy walks across the landscape,
sometimes pausing to shape a line or a circle in that landscape, using
the available materials. Andy Goldsworthy uses specific features of
the natural world to create arresting forms, which are recorded in
his photographs. Mark Dion sometimes mimics the practices of the
biologist or the archaeologist to focus upon aspects of the material
world. Sofia Hultén, as noted below, accelerates the processes of
natural destruction and then reverses them in unexpected ways.

The materiality of archaeology

substance matter texture mass roughness

moisture liquid warmth cold
smell vapour taste richness savour decay
crackle thud clatter splash tinkle resonate
dark bright radiant obscure subtle colourful
order linear circular parallel orthogonal

The materiality of archaeology is emphasised in figure 6. These are

some of the sensual experiences and awarenesses, which we experi-
ence undergo in the processes of fieldwork. Some of them are very
active experiences, while we are digging or surveying or sampling or
drawing or measuring or recording. They are experiences of outdoors,
in the field, in the wind and weather. They are faced in different
environments: in baking deserts, in the frozen Arctic, or indeed
underwater. For many archaeological fieldworkers these are indeed
the practical attractions of archaeology as active engagement with the
physical world. These experiences also involve interactions with the
residents in what to us are remote parts of the world, in foreign coun-
fig. 6
tries and in foreign languages, eating unfamiliar foods and encounter- Aspects of the materiality of
ing unfamiliar customs. archaeology.

105

fig. 7
Successive strata in the deep
sounding of the settlement mound
at Sitagroi, North Greece (Rangin-
grod graduated in 50 cm lengths).
fig. 8
Reconstruction of the chamber
tomb at Quanterness, Orkney,
c. 3500 BC (by Alec Daykin).
106
The materiality of these encounters is exemplified by my own excava-
tions in North Greece and the prehistoric settlement mound of Sita-
groi. This is a ‘tell’ mound, formed by the weathering and eventual
collapse of the buildings of one village, and their renewal by the
importation of wood and of clay for the walls. Successive periods of
abandonment and decay and then renewal of these buildings leads,
over the millennia, to a rise in the ground level, so that in the end a
settlement mound is formed, that may rise to several metres above
the original ground level. The archaeologist who is interested in the
sequence of occupation digs a systematic trench down through the
successive strata of soil, thereby revealing a stratigraphy of succes-
sive occupations. Figure 7 shows the successive strata at the settlement
mound of Sitagroi with the ranging rod graduate in 50 cm lengths. Al-
together we dug through more than ten metres of deposit. In digging
down through these strata, with the broken pottery and fragmented
animal bones, you see the truth of the saying “dust to dust, ashes to
ashes”. For that is what you find.
Such mounds can rise to remarkable height. Bulgarian colleagues
conducted a major excavation at the settlement mound of Karanovo,
which covers a time range from about 6,000 BC to 3,000 BC. Their
section through these accumulated deposits looks like a natural cliff.
But it is a careful archaeological excavation through the accumulated
deposits of millennia of occupation.
Another example is offered by excavations at the prehistoric chamber
tomb of Quanterness which I excavated on the Mainland of Orkney
(North Scotland). This was a wonderfully constructed tomb, made
of the local Orcadian sandstone around 3,500 BC (fig. 8). The main
chamber had collapsed, and when cleared it allowed us to enter the
side chambers, some of which were still standing with the corbelled
roof preserved. It was possible to crawl in and stand upright in a
burial chamber, which had stood undisturbed for more than four
thousand years (fig. 10)!

In one of the side chambers we excavated with care the deposits on

the floor of the chamber (fig. 9). These were subtly different shades of
brown colour, where the natural soil had patinated the fragments of
human bone, which had lain there undisturbed over the millennia.
As an archaeologist you develop an eye for fine distinctions of colour
and of texture and the subtle variations have an interest, sometimes a
fascination which you can experience again in the work of contem-
porary painters who are seriously interested in the properties of the fig. 9
Floor deposits in side chamber at
paint as material, such as Jean Dubuffet or Antoni Tàpies. Quanterness, around 3.500 B.C.
(scale graduated in 10cm lengths).
The chambers were covered by a cairn of stone, the naturally avail- fig. 10
able local building material. This we investigated by means of a well- Well-preserved side chamber of the
chambered tomb at Quanterness,
organised rectangular trench opened down the side of the mound, around 3.500 B.C. (scale graduated
cutting through the turf covering and carefully removing the soil to in 10cm lengths).

107
 expose and clear the stones (fig. 11). Later the same year, back at the
University of Southampton, where I then worked, I was impressed by
the exhibition in the University art gallery, of a single line of stones by
the sculptor Richard Long, simply entitled Chalk Stone Line. He had
lain out on the floor of the galley, a well-ordered line of chalk lumps
which he had obtained locally and brought into the gallery (fig. 12).
That simple, careful layout was the work. There was no more to it
than that. Yet the very simplicity of the work was immensely arresting.
And it certainly reminded me of my reaction to our excavation trench
cut into the cairn of Orcadian sandstone which covered the chamber
tomb at Quanterness.

That was my first introduction to the work of Richard Long, an artist

whose work I have come to know and appreciate greatly. The mate-
riality of the stone exposed in the excavation trench at Quanterness
had sensitised me to the comparable materiality of the chalk line set
out by Richard Long. You certainly do not need to be an archaeolo-
gist to value and appreciate Long’s work. But there is no doubt that
my experiences as an archaeologist, some of which are undoubtedly
aesthetic experiences, had made me already receptive to the experi-
ences which Richard Long was communicating through his work.

The Traumatology of Sofia Hultén

fig. 11
Cutting at Quanterness to expose
the outer surface of the stone cairn.
For the archaeologist the stuff with which we are mainly concerned is
the things which people have made: the artefacts. These may be stone
tools, like the hand-axes of the palaeolithic period. Or they may be
the broken pots and stone tools of the neolithic, or the daggers and
metal artefacts of the bronze and iron ages. But in general we are

108
 6
concerned with objects, discarded and often broken objects, and Lambros Malafouris, Colin
Renfrew (eds.), The Cognitive
the rubbish of yesterday. It is this, which we classify, and analyse. It Life of Things (Cambridge:
is these, which we painstakingly recover from our excavations. It is McDonald Institute, 2010).
these which we catalogue and display in museums.

It is from these artefacts that we learn about the technology and the
social life of past societies. And it is with these artefacts that we can
conduct the archaeology of mind, mentioned above. By contextual
analysis we can hope to learn what was valued at the time in ques-
tion. And form those artefacts with symbolic meaning to their makers
we can hope, again by contextual analysis, to infer something of that
meaning. A polished jade axe of the neolithic period found in an
archaeological context, may allow inferences about the status of its
owner.

There is therefore a whole field of research, which may be indicated

as “The Cognitive Life of Things”.6 Individual artefacts do have lives
of their own. A bronze dagger, for instance, is the end product of
a metallurgical process which involves mining, smelting, alloying
and casting of the bronze, followed by annealing, sharpening an
polishing by the smith. It is then sold or exchanged to the warrior
who uses it – both for eating and for fighting – for a lifetime. It may
be given or exchanged during its use-life, and if necessary repaired
and given a new hilt and a new sheath. At the death of the owner
it may be buried with him, later stolen by tomb robbers and given
fig. 12
a new lease of life. It then finds a ‘final’ resting place in the earth. Richard Long,
After two thousand years it may be excavated by the archaeologist, Chalk Stone Line, 1979,
chalkstone boulders.
or by looters who sell it to a corrupt dealer, from whom it passes to a University Gallery,
private collector who bequeaths it to a museum. Here it is conserved, University of Southampton.

109
 7
Michael Thompson, Rubbish The-
ory. The Creation and Destruction
of Value (Oxford: Oxford University
press, 1979).
8
William Rathje, Cullen Murphy,
Rubbish! The Archaeology of
Garbage (New York: Harper Collins,
1992).
fig. 13
Sofia Hultén, Analysis of the content
of my kitchen drawer, 2002.
Photography, 30 × 30 cm, 4 pages
text, focus upon the mundane.
photographed studied and published. Successive archaeologists com-
pare and issue its typology, and archaeological scientists sample it to
determine the source of its constituent metals.
But it is not just archaeologists who are concerned with the cognitive
lives of things. Any collector of artefacts – be they coins or stamps,
paintings, sculptures, motorcars, antiques or musical instruments –
partakes in the cognitive life of the things collected. Artists such as
Mark Dion, Lothar Baumgarten or Susan Hiller have focussed upon
the particularities of collecting. And the further histories of artefacts,
of things, after they are discarded are also a preoccupation. Thomp-
son’s Rubbish Theory 7 discusses how value is assigned or diminished
when things are treated as rubbish or as collectible. And the archae-
ologist Bill Rathje masterminded the Tucson Garbage Project.8

110
 9
Sofia Hultén, John Peter Nilsson,
Moderna museets vänner skulptur-
pris 2011. K.A. Linds hedesrpris:
Sofia Hultén (Stockholm: Moderna
museets vänner, 2011).
10
Jennifer Allen, Sofia Hultén:
http://www.sofiahulten.de/daten/
jennifer.html (last accessed
17.7.2013).

This is one of the areas where the sculptures and video works of
Sofia Hultén have explored new ground.9 In Analysis of the contents
of my kitchen drawer (2002, fig. 13) she focuses upon the mundane
and the everyday. This focus she takes to an extreme in Past Particles
(2010), where over one thousand small objects from a found toolbox
are individually recorded on video. As the critic Jennifer Allen terms
it “Hultén’s work reflects the strange reality of objects somewhere
between the commodity and the trash can, sometimes after use and
yet before complete extinction”.10 This is a world which the archae-
ologist knows well. Yet she takes this further, with the deliberate
destruction and then recomposition of objects, for instance in Arti-
ficial Conglomerate (2010) – in this case natural rocks – or Mutual
Annihilation (2010) where a chest of drawers is first restored and then
deliberately distressed. In Auflösung (2008) (figs. 14–15), objects are
collected, shredded and then, in this dissolved state, replaced on the
spot where each was found. This is an activity, an exploration which
fig. 14–15
seems to go beyond the preoccupations and activities of the archae- Sofia Hultén,
ologist, leading to an imaginative world which is the special realm of Auflösung, video stills, 2008.
HD video transferred to PAL DVD
the practising artist. Yet it is nonetheless a material engagement with loop, 5 minutes. Bicycle, before and
the world, as well as a disquieting commentary upon it. after dissolution.

111

fig. 16
Excavations at Kavos on Keros,
2007.
fig. 17
Deliberately fragmented sculptures
of marble in the Special Deposit
South at Kavos (scale measured in
1cm lengths), c. 2.500 B.C.,
intentionally broken into pieces.
112
As it happens, by what is perhaps a strange coincidence, I have my-
self, as an archaeologist, come upon a remarkable case of the care-
ful production of beautiful, well finished objects, followed by the
deliberate destruction. Then, following that deliberate breakage and
fragmentation, there is an episode of careful recovery and curation,
and next of the transportation of some of the fragments to a central
place, and of their carful deposition there. All of this seems to us
today as bizarre an inexplicable as the activities of Sofia Hultén
when undertaking the creation of her work Auflösung. For I have
recently completed the excavation of a site on the island of Keros in
of fragmented marble sculptures of the human figure which were the
Cycladic islands of Greece, dating from 2,500 BC (figs. 16) where we
find groups of broken pottery of broken marble bowls and carefully
deposited there, over several centuries. As we have studied them it
has become clear that these things were deliberately broken before
the time of their deposition. Moreover the breakage did not take
place on Keros: only a few fragments of each marble figure were
found there. It is clear that they were broken on other islands, in
the villages in which they were made. These were objects of ritual
use, objects with a use life. And at the end of that use life they were
deliberately broken. A portion of the resulting broken, fragmentary
material was then taken on a sea voyage to the central symbolic and
ritual location on the island of Keros (fig. 17–19). There these things,
along with comparable bundles of broken material from the villages
of the other Cycladic islands, were deposited.
fig. 18
Marble bowl fragments recovered
from the surface at Kavos on Keros
in 1963. (scale measured in 1cm
lengths).

fig. 19
Heads of sculptures of marble from
the Special Deposit South at Kavos
on Keros, (scale measured in 1cm
lengths), c. 2.500 B.C..

113
 11
Colin Renfrew, “Thraumatology,”
in: Colin Renfrew, Christos Doumas,
Lila Marangou, Giorgos Gavalas
(eds.), Keros, Dhaskalio Kavos, the
investigations of 1987–88 (Cam-
bridge: McDonald Institute, 2007),
pp. 405–428.
12
Selina Ting, “Interview: Sofia
Hultén,” in: InitiArt Magazine 1
(November 2010): http://www.
initiartmagazine.com/interview.
php?IVarchive=30 (last accessed
17.7.2013).

In the field of archaeology, the study of deliberate breakage is now

termed “thraumatology”11 – from the Greek thrausma, a fragment. The
Keros case is a good example, and there are plenty of other instances
in the Classical world and beyond of the deliberate breakage of sym-
bolically significant materials, often for ritual purposes. The work of
Sofia Hultén offers a fresh field of what we may regard as contem-
porary thraumatology.12 The guitar in her remarkable work Fuck it up
and start again (2001, fig. 20), smashed and then refitted several times,
represents a quintessential thraumatological exercise, with episodes
of repeated fragmentation followed by restoration and curation. This
is a ritual which the prehistoric Cycladic islanders of four thousand
years ago would have understood!

fig. 20
Sofia Hultén, Fuck it up and start
again, guitar 2001.
VD 7 min. loop, guitar smashed and
repaired seven times.
Fragmentation and curation.

114
Purpose Unknown
Sofia Hultén

115
 fig. 1–11
Sofia Hultén, Purpose Unknown,
video stills 2013
Single-channel video, 5:40 min.
Objects with uncertain provenance
and utility found in a used machine
storage hall in Berlin and recorded
on video.

116
117
118
119
120
“... insights about the afterlives of objects”
In Conversation with Sofia Hultén [SH] and Colin Renfrew [CR]

SH I am actually very interested to hear more about the cognitive ar-

chaeology approach, which you were talking about.

CR For me cognitive archaeology is an issue of trying to recover the

thoughts and the ideas of people who have not reported them in writ-
ing, in words. So it is particularly applicable to prehistoric times, but
it can equally apply to more recent times, when you are making infer-
ences about peoples’ thought processes which don’t arise from their
own expressions in a verbal form. It is often possible to say a great
deal about people through this approach. Indeed, that example that
I showed of the Indus Valley weights, these little cubes, which we re-
gard as weights from the Indus Valley civilisation now: there is no writ-
ten evidence that this is what they actually were. So the archaeologist
that found them decided that he would weigh them. We have a mod-
ern concept of weighing. We can put those objects on the scales and
say how many grams there are. And when the archaeologist did that,
it turned out that the weight in grams of these cubes were multiples of
one and the same unit and that could be demonstrated rather simply
– by a simple mathematical analysis, with a statistical component. So
it is possible then to say that these people must have been deliber-
ately constructing these stone cubes so that they should be multiples
of a particular unit and that unit was clearly the unit they were using.

121
 1
Colin Renfrew is referring to Sofia
Hultén's work Mutual Annihilation
from 2008, in which the artist is re-
storing an old battered dresser in its
assumed original condition to then,
in a second step, furnish it with
similar traces of usage and wear
marks again. (editors' note).
2
Colin Renfrew is referring to Sofia
Hulténs work On a Fixed Centre
(2011), in which the walls of a used
skip are turned inside out. (editors'
note).
Kerstin Stakemeier [KS] In relation to both of your talks, I thought that
the notions of value and commodity in relation to materiality was re-
vealing. Not least because you also brought the notion of entropy into
the discussion, which shifts the relation of commodity and value….
122
So just by observing and working with these stone cubes we were
able to reconstruct quite a lot about the thought processes of these
people. Although that does not give you the entire thought processes,
of course, it does not tell you why they were making these weights,
although for us it is very obvious, that it was convenient for them to
be able to manipulate materials in terms of quantity. They could weigh
gold dust, for instance, or they could weigh rice grains. And it is very
likely that the reasons for doing this was to be able to systematically
say that this much of gold may be equivalent in value to that much rice
or that much wheat. So the notion of value is introduced and in the
diagram that I showed, the notion of the commodity form was intro-
duced. So here is an example where just by studying these cubes and
having the good idea of weighing them, you can begin to investigate
a whole structure of thought, which is not initially obvious. So that
would be an example of cognitive archaeology.
CR That is very interesting, to ask oneself: “At what point does an ob-
ject, does an artefact become rubbish?” And much of Sofia’s work has
been involved with such things, mainly found objects, some of them
started off as rubbish, but then were rescued from being rubbish, some
were shredded in this terrifying destroying machine, which seemed to
be signifying the end of the world, the end of everything. The concept
of rubbish is I think implicit in much of your work. And it’s very in-
triguing, how you created this wonderful new chest of drawers1 from
something that was almost rubbish, only to then distress it to use the
appropriate word, reduced it back to a state of being nearly rubbish
yet again. The notion of value, that something is valued or no longer
valued or re-valued, has a very interesting interplay here.
SH Paradoxically I have to treat these things as very valuable or I can-
not treat them at all. One the one hand I cannot begin with the notion
that these decaying objects are rubbish. On the other hand I began
to work with materials like this, because it gave me a great deal of
freedom. If they were not valued by others, then I could treat them as I
wish. Also there was a notion of mass, of scale, I could work with large
amounts of material if only it was devalued…
CR But your skip2 … you described you had to negotiate very carefully
that what you were working with was not rubbish to start with and
then you transformed it into a work of art, which no doubt has major
commercial value by the way of consequence.
SH It had major commercial value before. (laughing) I find this ex-
change value idea very interesting, because there is this constantly
shifting perception of value. And for me I have to act as if it is unimpor-
tant, as if it doesn’t exist. When I am making my work it is all about the
fact that things are released from their constraints and that also I am re-
leased from the constraints they have… they serve a different purpose.

Susanne Witzgall Within your idea of “material engagement theory”

there can be no prior concept, like, for example, weight or value, with-
out the existence of the phenomenon and of its material experience,
right? This produces an interesting parallel to Sofia’s strategies in that
she works preferably with devalued objects as a distinct phenomenon
and as a raw already existing material to from there develop new con-
cepts and ideas out of her engagement with them.

CR That is broadly correct, I think. There can be no prior concept for

things or properties in the world, such as weight or length, without the
personal experience and material engagement of each individual. The
matter is a little different for social constructs such as value, which
the philosopher John Searle would call an „institutional fact“. Yet the
high value of a commodity such as gold is indeed predicated upon the
pre-existence of gold and on the material experience (by the person
recognising its value) of some object made of it. The parallel with So-
fia's work is valid. She does indeed often work with devalued objects,
and it is through her engagement with them that they develop new
histories, new meanings and new value.

Audience 1 This is very interesting, both of you share a common stage,

but in many ways you are at the very opposite ends. From a cogent
archaeological standpoint you are really interested in interpreting an
object’s materiality as it relates to groups, societies, tribes or nations.
And if you should come across a piece that in fact relates only to a sin-
gle person, it would be quite confusing and perhaps not decipherable.
And you, on the other hand, take objects and experience them in an
extremely personal and individuated perspective, which is a contra-
diction to the “material engagement” you share the stage with.

SH This is a very good point. My work is indeed solitary in that way.

I am the one who is doing this. Although I am often asked why I am
present in my works. For me it was always this feeling that I am the one
who has to do it. There wasn’t a question that I could pass that job on
to somebody else. So my objects can be experienced in a social way,
as I am interacting with the objects, instead of letting someone else
perform with them – but they do not deal with social issues in a stricter
sense. They bring into being a social life of things, carve it out from the
lives they may have had.

CR Partly what you say is clearly entirely correct and yet not entirely
so. Archaeology is very keen to follow up the individual, when it is
possible to do so. And an example of that would of course be some-
thing like Greek vase painting, where Greek vase painters signed with
their names and so you know that is a work of this or that painter,
Exekias or what ever it may be. And there are attempts also, sometimes

123
 quite successful attempts, to study sculptures from pre-historic times.
For example those Cycladic sculptures I showed one or two of, there
have been attempts to divide those into categories and to assign one
set of sculptures to one sculptor and there is other work trying to look
at the individual in prehistory. But it is true that this is a very difficult
thing to do quite often. Sofia’s work has interest in making us look in
new ways at what happens to objects and to the life histories of ob-
jects. I think the general theme of her work is dealing with the life his-
tories of objects and how the life histories can become complicated.

And of course every artist does work that is unique in that sense. For
example Richard Long whose work I showed few examples of, and
whom I greatly admire. A Line Made by Walking is a totally individual
work and yet I think, as Longs works resonate in the public under-
standing, it makes us think in new ways about his own major enterpris-
es of walking in the world. He likes to take great walks and he leaves
indications of what he has done, where he passed by, how his routes
materialized. And so the notion of the human in the landscape is actu-
ally enriched by what he has done, just in the same way, I can well
imagine, the corpus of Sofia’s work, if she continues in the direction
we are are looking at now, enriches our understanding of the afterlives
of objects when they already have had a first life of successful use.
These works now themselves have an afterlife, the skip [in On a Fixed
Centre, editors’ note], for example, has a very reshaped afterlife. Now
I can see that, as we have the opportunity of seeing these works medi-
tating upon them, they may come together to give us insights about
the afterlives of objects, just as the work of Richard Long has given us
insights about walking in the landscape. So I think as an artistic strand
of work develops its own lineage, its resonance may alter, it may be
interpreted differently and I think some of our predictions may prove
to be invalidated and need to be reascribed.

KS At the same time, what you Colin have, in a previous conversation,

called “involuntary art” relation to archeological findings, and what
your art Sofia as a ‘making voluntary’ of material findings is, has in
common that it both turns towards art, because it becomes defunct. It
once had a use value but because that is discarded it now, it becomes
art, which it wouldn’t have been before.

SH I presume we both share a curiosity about things, which we cannot

know for certain and potentially I am assuming you share my frustra-
tion with that fact, but also with the notion of the accidental, which I
find interesting. You spoke about accidental artworks and it struck me
at one point in the process of making these pieces that I rely on the
accidental gesture and that I am in the process of often making explicit
the accidental gesture or to denote it, to make it visible, deliberate…
by reproducing it.

124
CR One of the things that first made me think about art in relation
to archaeology, was exactly this sense of mystery of the difficulty of
finding an interpretation, an explanation. When you are looking at the
world of archaeology there is the need to work very hard to come to
some understanding of what you are looking at. And I have to say that
was and is my experience of contemporary art. To the viewer it starts
off as something of an enigma, which the viewer has to resolve for
himself. There is a sense of expiration of the contemporary artwork just
as a sense of expiration of the archaeological record.

SH I absolutely share this feeling that is part of the joy of experiencing

work that you do not already know. It may take a certain amount of
work to acquire knowledge about a new piece of art or an artist’s work,
and the part of that hard work of finding out about an artist’s work is
in itself very valuable. It brings you closer to its processes than a piece
which I can understand immediately does.

CR That is why I called my book Figuring it out, which is about the

archaeological record and its relation to contemporary art. And I think
it is the similarity in those positions that led me to giving the book that
title. You have the archaeological record and you have the obligation
of using various methods to reconstruct some history. And in the con-
temporary art gallery you have to also face the work and ask yourself:
“Well, what the hell is all this about?” There is a strong analogy in
those two situations.

SH Quite right. This is also part of the process with which I make my
work. It is also part of the impetus that makes me want to make some-
thing. I gather things, which I then have in the studio for a long time
and I am itching to find out what they are all about, to get inside them,
to get to grips with them. Finding out what is essential about them.

CR And I am sure it is that particular sense of a problem, which charac-

terizes much of your work and which will go on to characterize it and
will make it, as it is indeed, becoming a very coherent body of work.

Audience 2 But what if you treated all art collections as rubbish,

which materials would remain for the archaeologist of the future?

CR Well there are two questions there. I think one is, what is contin-
ued to be valued and the other is what in the very long term might
remain in the material sense? And that is a technical question – it is a
technical question as to how well videos can be conserved. Or indeed,
if you are talking about abstract expressionist work, Jackson Pollock
for instance, artists who did not use very good quality materials for
their works. These artworks perhaps have a very short future and only
photographs of the actual objects will remain. But as to the broader
question – if we fill the museums with artworks, which artworks will
be highly valued in a centuries time is an interesting question.

125
 SH It is actually one, which you should think a lot about at the be-
ginning of a work, when you choose your materials. The artist Eva
Hesse, for example, used latex, which she knew would disintegrate
very quickly and now her work often has to be completely remade,
reconfigured. So she left behind a process of working and a process
of thought or we have some fantastic photographs of her making her
work. So I guess, also as things become increasingly digital, we will be
looking at reference libraries rather than at physical ones. Then again,
there was an interesting documentary about the Finnish nation’s at-
tempt to bury its nuclear waste in this regard. Thinking about the ma-
teriality of things which remain… They considered duration in how to
produce a warning, which might last 20.000 years. That is very inter-
esting, when you start to think about the life span of a work in such a
longue durée, … which brings us back to the beginning.

CR … to the passing of the centuries and the millennia… that’s right.

126
 1
New Materialists in Contemporary Art Rachel Jones, “Making Matter,” in:
Material Intelligence, online exhib.
Susanne Witzgall cat. Kettlers Yard, Cambridge 2009,
see also http://www.kettlesyard.
co.uk/exhibitions/mi_catalogue/
essay_jones.html (last accessed
20.9.2013).
2
Melanie Bono, ed., New Alchemy.
Contemporary Art after Beuys,
exhib.cat. (Cologne: LWL Landes-
museum für Kunst- und Kulturge-
schichte Münster, 2010), p. 17.
3
“They also share an approach
to material experience as a way
of thinking and communicating
that actively avoids or downplays
language, often pointing to its
inadequacy and essentially abstract
nature.” See Elizabeth Fisher,
“Material Intelligence” in: Material
Intelligence (footnote 1), as well
as Patrizia Dander, Julienne Lorz,
“Sculptural Acts,” in: ed. Patrizia
Dander, Julienne Lorz, Sculptural
Acts, exhib.cat. (Munich: Haus der
Kunst, 2012), p. 20.
4
Holger Kube Ventura, Anna Goetz,
in: Arte Essenziale, brief exhib.guide
(Frankfurter Kunstverein 2012), no
page number.
5
Julia Höner, “On the Obstinacy of
Things in Art,” in: The Stubborn Life
of Things, exhib.cat. (Düsseldorf:
The art world today appears to be populated with vital matter, ener- KAI 10 / Arthena Foundation, 2013),
getic materials and capricious things that coexist with humans in a pp. 17–24.

non-hierarchical entanglement. Materials advance [to the position 6

Anselm Franke, “Beyond the
of] valued co-actors1 with their own creative powers2 and epistemic Return of the Repressed,” in: ed.
Anselm Franke, Sabine Folie,
qualities that challenge the dominance of language.3 The presenta- Animism, Modernity Through the
tion of pure matter is interpreted as proof of an artistic concentration Looking Glass, exhib.cat. Generali
Foundation, Vienna (Berlin: Buch-
on the essential4 and things are granted their own stubbornness.5 handlung Walther König, 2012), p.
Furthermore, the curator Anselm Franke has proclaimed a “mobiliz- 169. Furthermore, Franke claims
an expanded “understanding of
ing [of] the term animism” since 2010, whereby not least things are animism in the sense of a primacy
conceded agency and “[a]ll the notorious, dichotomous oppositions of a soul or an irreducible life.”
See Anselm Franke, Irene Albers,
of the standard dualist metaphysics“ – in other words the binary op- “Einleitung,” in: ed. Anselm Franke,
positions between human/animal, human/machine, culture/nature, Irene Albers, Animismus. Revisionen
signs/things, mind/matter, life/non-life – should be questioned.6 Caro- der Moderne (Zürich: diaphanes,
2012), p. 11.
line Christov Bakargiev’s concept for the recent documenta 13 also 7
was about a breaking open of this dualism, when she proposes, for Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev “The
Dance was very frenetic, lively,
example, to see the world from the (non-anthropocentric) perspective rattling, clanging, rolling, contorted
of a meteorite and highlights the “intra-action with materials, objects, and lasted for a long time,” in:
documenta (13) catalog 1/3: The
other animals, and their perceptions“7 as a thematic focal point. The Book of Books (Ostfildern: Hatje
network theories of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, which date Cantz, 2012), p. 34.
back to the 1980s, frequently serve as curatorial theories of reference, 8
For an explanation of Karen Ba-
which in documenta 13 went hand in hand with a reference to Karen rad’s concept of intra-action see the
introduction to this volume, p. 13.
Barad’s Agential Realism first introduced at the end of the 1990s
9
– keyword “Intra-action”8 (!) – or with the emergent philosophical Graham Harman contributed a
publication to documenta 13’s 100
discourse about a “Speculative Realism”9 originating with Quentin Notes – 100 Thoughts and Florian
Meillassoux or Graham Harman. Hecker’s performance Speculative

127
 fig. 1
Sergej Jensen, Japonaise II, 2009
acrylic on linen, 121 × 98 cm.

128
The rhetoric imbued with matter and material – and the first refer- Solution at documenta 13 explicitly
referred to a concept of Quentin
ences to the theories of writers like Haraway, Latour, Barad10, Meil- Meillassoux, to only name two
lassoux, or Harman, which are sold as a current, cross-disciplinary examples. See Graham Harman,
The Third Table / Der Dritte Tisch,
“New Materialism”11 – suggest comparable conceptions of a new documenta 13: 100 Notes – 100
understanding of matter and material in current contemporary art, Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100
Gedanken, No. 85 (Ostfildern: Hatje
and also presume a reconfiguration of the material world similar to Cantz, 2012) and Chimerizations
the New Materialism prevalent in the humanities and social sciences. and Speculative Solution, http://
These will be considered in what follows as selected case studies of d13.documenta.de/#/de/pro-
gramme/die-programmein-kassel/
works by Sergej Jensen, Gedi Sibony, Alexandra Bircken, and Nina einige-von-teilnehmerinnen-und-
Canell. This is not simply about revealing the materialist core of ar- teilnehmern-der-documenta-13-ini-
tierte-kunstwerke-und-programme/
tistic practices and works, but about activating and yielding material- chimerizations-and-speculative-so-
istic character through an analysis with the terminologies and ideas lutions/ (last accessed 13.10.2013).

of New Materialism because, as an epistemic object,12 the artwork 10

During the writing of this text,
doesn’t lose its undefined state and vagueness until its intra-action Antennae Journal sent out a Call for
Papers with the theme “Multi-spe-
with hypotheses, meanings, contexts, and interpretations. cies Intra-Actions.” It refers to Karen
Barad’s concept of “intra-action”
and aims to overcome “anthropo-
Productive Matter and Dynamic Material centric” and “humanistic” types
of artistic practice and aesthetics.
Contributions were requested out of
In his Japonaise Series (2008/10, fig.1) the Danish artist Sergej Jensen the related fields of “New Material-
works on linen or jute canvases – almost blindly from the back of the ism,” “New Feminist Materialism,”
“Multi-Species Ethnography,”
canvas – with dark acrylic paint. The abstract traces of paint on the “Post-Humanism,” and “Object
surface vary depending on the meeting and interaction of the quali- Oriented Ontology.”
ties of the support and painting materials, the porosity and thickness 11
See Rick Dolphijn, Iris van der
of cloth, the viscosity of acrylic paint, and the painting tools and Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews
painterly gestures used. In other works, Jensen drips, sprays, and & Cartographies (Ann Arbor: Open
Humanities Press, University of
coats oil or chlorine bleach on textile that reacts [to these materials], Michigan Library, 2012), especially
sucking through its threads, bleaching out delicate stripes, and leaves p. 93.

behind indefinable garlands and stains – sometimes combined with 12

I refer here to Hans-Jörg
watery gouache (fig. 2), in which the applied substances unravel like Rheinberger, Toward a History of
Epistemic Things. Synthesizing
a colour chromatography in linen.13 Furthermore, Jensen uses fabric Proteins in the Test Tube (Palo
with stains, holes, rips, and other traces of use that have inscribed Alto, California, Stanford University
Press, 1997), pp. 28–29. Rhein-
themselves through the earlier, eventful history of the material, berger himself describes writing as
referring to its prior life, which Jensen exposes with minimal artistic an experimental system that gives
thoughts a “material constitution”
interventions. In the work African Market (2008, fig. 3), for example, and indeed “enables the new to
Jensen unfolds a cut burlap bag from the German postal service that come forth.” See Hans-Jörg Rhein-
berger, “On the Art of Exploring the
had served as the base for a display of goods at an African market,14 Unknown” in: Peter Friese, Guido
and thus presents it with all of its material-semiotic traces and char- Boulboullé, Susanne Witzgall, eds.,
acteristics, which had developed in the intra-action with the other Say it isn’t so. Art Trains its Sights
on the Natural Sciences, exhib.cat.
human and non-human elements of the original context in which Weserburg, Museum für Moderne
it appeared and was used – or in the words of Gilles Deleuze and Kunst, Bremen (Heidelberg: Kehrer,
2007), p. 90.
Félix Guattari, its earlier “territorial assemblage.”15 In many of his
13
wall works, Sergej Jensen grants the support and painting materials Compare to Untitled (2001),
Untitled (2002), New Day Rising
inherent agency and a vital, individual dynamic. He gives them space (2003), New Day Rising II (2004),
to develop and be independent, recognising them as co-actors in Bad Dream (2004), Sunny Garden
(2005), J (2006), The Actress & the
the process of artistic creation. That Jensen admits a subject status to Minister (2006).
his works and considers them with anthropomorphic attributes and, 14
See also Susanne Pfeffer, “Sergej
at the same time, emphasises that he withdraws himself personally Jensen’s Cinema of Titles,” in:
in relation to the materials that he uses – or tries “to not make too Sergej Jensen, ed. Galerie Neu,
Berlin; White Cube, London; Anton
much of an effort, or at least not with too much of myself”16 – ap- Kern Gallery, New York (Berlin:
pears as a consequence of this notion and usage of materials that is Distanz, 2011), p. 11.

129
 15
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, directed against the conventional opposition between a matter to-
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, be-worked-upon or a passive object and the forming mind or active
London: University of Minnesota subject. Herein his practice connects, amongst others, with the work
Press, 1987), p. 312.
of the New York artist Gedi Sibony, also born in 1973, who limits his
16
See also the remarks of Heidi sculptural arrangements made from found, mostly low-grade materi-
Zuckerman Jacobson, “Show me
yourself,” in: ibid., p. 8, where she
als – similar to Sergej Jensen’s African Market – to minimal artistic
refers to a conversation with Sergej interventions (fig. 4). Sibony characterises previously used materials
Jensen on July 29, 2010.
like already-used cardboard, foils, plywood, carpet or textiles as by
17
Philippe Vergne, “A Conversation no means “helpless,” but rather “human”.17 By his own admission,
with Gedi Sibony,” in: Gedi Sibony, Sibony looks for materials or things “that have a pureness of intention
exhib.cat., Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen,
FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, or directness” and avoids positing possible signs that could be “elimi-
Contemporary Art Museum St. nating this whole world of potential.” However, with the potential of
Louis (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2009),
p. 42. materials and things, he seems to mean an impulse inherent to them,
18 which expands and develops throughout his work, “just the way that
Ibid., pp. 42-43.
it’s going to take to spend the rest of its life.” According to Sibony,
19
This is how Bennett defines “What I like best is the work that is left the way it is and can live out
it, who took over the concept of
“actant” from Bruno Latour. See its years without having anything imposed on it. If I turn the carpet
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A over and it has a few pieces of tape on it, I have a personal empathy
Political Ecology of Things (Durham,
London: Duke University Press,
with it, that it is a proud and glowing owner of its qualities, and that
2010), p. viii. their open emotional presence can engage with other things.”18 Such
20
Ibid., p 21.
assertions correspond with the crude aesthetic of his minimalistic
21
sculptures, in which everything symbolic and narrative is repressed
“Matter feels, converses, suffers,
desires, yearns and remembers.
and an energetic power appears to unfold precisely in its fragile
Interview with Karen Barad,” in: provisionality.
Dolphijn, van der Tuin 2012 (foot-
note 11), pp. 54–55.
Moreover, they correspond with the notion of “thing-power” that Jane
Bennett developed in her “vital materialism” in relation to, among
others, Spinoza’s concept of conative bodies and that each body – or
each living or non-living matter – allows “an ‘active impulsion’ or
trending tendency to persist”.19 According to Bennett, an “actant,”
the human or non-human “source of action” doesn’t ever operate
alone, but rather always “in collaboration, cooperation, or interactive
interference of many bodies and forces.”20

Appealing again to Spinoza as well as to Deleuze and Guattari, she

interprets any kind of body (thing, matter, material), as “affective
bodies,” which, embedded in alliances and assemblages – similar to
Sibony’s alliance between carpet and tape, for example – affects and
is affected. Thereby, two fundamental aspects are already named that
manifest themselves in Sibony and Jensen’s works and statements,
as well as frequently emerge among scholarly representatives of
New Materialism in its different variants: the concept of a productive
matter, of a productive material, an agency of things and their close
relationship to an affectivity, a possibility to react to other bodies
and materialities. “Agency is not held, it is not a property of persons
or things; rather, agency is an enactment, a matter of possibilities
for reconfiguring entanglements,” Karen Barad explains and adds in
other places: “agency is about response-ability, about the possibilities
of mutual response [ ...].”21

130
fig. 2
Sergej Jensen, Bad Dream, 2004
Gouache, bleach on linen,
65 × 60 cm.

fig. 3
Sergej Jensen, African Market, 2008
sewn fabrics, 310 × 240 cm.

fig. 4
Gedi Sibony, The Circumstance,
the Illusion and Light Absorbed as
Light, 2007.
Wood, cardboard, paint, plastic,
tape, dimensions variable.

131
 22
Bennett 2010 (footnote 19), p. 23.
23
See Tim Ingold’s contribution to
this volume, p. 59.
24
Alexandra Bircken, White
Tube.de, http://www.whitetube.
de/2012/05/09/alexandra-bircken/,
0:15-0:22 (last accessed 13.10.13).
25
See also Anna Grande, “Re-
flections on the group of works
‘Diagramme’ (‘Charts’),” in: ed.
Nicolaus Schafhausen, Florian
Waldvogel, Alexandra Bircken,
exhib.cat.,Ursula Blickle Stiftung,
Kraichtal-Unteröwisheim (London:
Koenig Books, 2008), p. 80.
26
...who borrows the concept from
Serres.
27
See Michel Serres, The Parasite
(Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2007), p. 227.
fig. 5
Alexandra Bircken,
Diagramm (Chart), 2007.
Wood, mortar, copper, brass, steel,
leather, wool, wire, dried tangerines,
peach pits stones, pigment, detail,
225.5 × 168 × 74 cm.
132
Assemblage and Agency
In these new materialistic concepts, resonances and intra-actions
of different actors develop collective entanglements, networks, or
meshworks and are at the same time embedded in and made possible
by them. In recourse to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assem-
blage, which has also left its traces in the network theories of Donna
Haraway and Bruno Latour and currently has proven extendable to
the ideas of the artist and philosopher Manuel de Landa, the femi-
nist theorist Rosi Braidotti, the political scientist Jane Bennett or the
social anthropologist Tim Ingold – hence, to materialistic approaches
to largely different disciplines – those entanglements, networks,
or meshworks are defined as dynamic, ever-fluctuating mixture of
culture and nature, of semiotic and material things, as “ad hoc group-
ings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts”22 or as an
“ecology of materials.”23
Many works by the artist Alexandra Bircken, who originally studied
fashion design and therefore claims a special affinity for textures and
materials and also skills specific to the craft24, are already literally
entanglements and meshworks that contain painted, crocheted,
and cloth sections. Also, on a more profound level, her concatena-
tions and networks of small artefacts, discarded objects, and natural
materials resemble the assemblage and network theories of New
Materialism. The work Diagramm (Chart) from 2007 (fig. 5) suggest –
first of all through its title, as well as its strong wooden frame and the
primarily vertical objects stretched therein – a systematic order and
categorisation. Rather than a binary sorting of organic and mineral,
worked and unworked materials, Bircken instead presents an anti-
dualistic network of branches, wooden slats, mortar, crocheted flocks
of wool, scraps of leather, dried tangerines and plum cores ostensibly
just individuated from a welter of grout, that immediately afterwards
appear to be embroiled in seemingly alchemical processes of trans-
formation.25 So the grout, with carved ornaments and gestural traces
of workmanship, encroaches upon the wood and the tangerine, en-
gendering hybrids between natural and made, between pure material
and symbolic character.
They can be compared to what Michael Serres calls “quasi-objects”
which reappear in Bruno Latour’s “actor network theory,”26 of which
“we don’t know whether they are beings or relations, tatters of beings
or end of relations.”27 – quasi-objects are transmitters, situated in
transit, being and emerging in circulation, exchange, and interaction
with other elements, beings, or relations of a network.
This interdependency is realised in Alexandra Bircken’s Diagramme
(Charts) or the related Units through the deliberate addition and
combination of elements that potentially involve further artistic han-
dling of the materials or in neighbouring references make particular
material meanings and qualities first visible. “Every single ingredient
 28
See Alexandra Bircken, Units,
Stedelijkmuseum Amsterdam:
http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=DyF7SXwaBZ4, Min 2:45
(last accessed 29.9.13). Further-
more, she defines a unit as entity
that emerges from within and, in this
way, imparts a territorial determina-
tion to its structure, which Deleuze
makes use of for assemblage. Ibid.
min. 3:37–3:51.
29
Bircken 2012 (footnote 24), from
min. 2:34 (last accessed 29.9.13).

gives out a kind of energy [...]28 Bircken explains, therefore emphasis-

ing the potential for action possessed by singular interfering materi-
als. Bircken also refers to the intrinsic energy of things and materials
woven into interweavings, networks and entanglements in regard to
her work Chariot (2012, fig. 6–7) – a cartlike meshwork of branches,
bicycle frames and a skateboard, connecting hair and hay samples,
container lids, detached bits of rubber tires, charcoal, and other
everyday and organic materials. It’s not about the personal mean-
ing of things, but about the energy that resides within then, the artist fig. 6–7
Alexandra Bircken,
explains.29 Like Jensen or Gibony, Bircken uses modest, often used, Chariot, 2012, details.
materials for such works. The artist frees them from the original con- Skateboard, bicycle frame, screws,
branches, mortar binding, hair,
ventional context of use and, precisely through their embeddedness dried grass, fabric, rubber, wire,
in new assemblages and meshworks, illustrates that materials and coal, copper-plated fruit peels,
potatos, wash cloth, latex, kevlar,
things also possess an active potential beyond the social utilisation brushwood, can lids, fireworks,
strategies of humans. scissors, 230 × 160 × 190 cm.

133
 30
Andréa Bellinger, David J.
Krieger, “Einführung in die Akteur-
Netzwerk-Theorie,” in: ed., Andréa
Bellinger, David J. Krieger, Antholo-
gy – Ein einführendes Handbuch zur
Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie (Bielefeld:
transcript, 2006), p. 37.
31
Rheinberger 1997 (footnote 12),
p. 225.
32
Karen Barad, “Agential Realism:
How material-discursive practices
matter,” in: Meeting the Universe
Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Mean-
ing (Durham: Duke University Press
Books, 2007), p. 170 (emphasis
taken from the original).
fig. 8
Nina Canell,
Another Ode to Outer Ends, 2011.
Bucket, water, cement, glass, ultra-
sound, wood, 40 × 200 × 250 cm.
134
Apparatus and Material Actors
For the theorists of New Materialism, matter and material in the form
of material apparatus and objects of investigation – beyond a subject
that acts and perceives alone – play an active role in constituting
knowledge in epistemic scientific processes. For example Latour
deems an object of investigation an “actor” or “actant” and consid-
ers, like Bellinger and Krieger do, laboratory tests as systems that
challenge all of their participating actors, so to speak, “to demon-
strate performance through testing.30 These performances become
visible in how the actor affects other actors, how it changes them,
transforms them, or brings them into being and plays a role in the
construction of knowledge about it. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger indeed
speaks in opposition to Latour in reference to objects of investiga-
tion and apparatus, not of “actors,” at any rate, but of “resistance,
resilience, recalcitrance“ of materials whereby scientists have to deal
with the “configuring and reconfiguring“31 of the things that are their
interest of research. Finally, Karen Barad always considers matter as
“agential and interactive,” whether in the form of apparatus or as ob-
ject of investigation, which appear as inextricably enmeshed in one
another in the epistemic process. She thereby defines an apparatus
as “material-discursive practices – causal intra-actions through which
matter is iteratively and differentially articulated.”32
 33
An agential materiality of “experimental systems,” to deliberately use See footnote 12. An extensive
description of Nina Canell’s work
a concept from Rheinberger33, as well as the articulation and “perfor- as an “experimental system” in the
mance” of material phenomena appears in the work of Nina Canell. sense of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
can be found in Susanne Witzgall,
Many of the Swedish artist’s installations seem like experimental “Material Experiments. ‘Phenom-
structures themselves in which materials and apparatus in a state of eno-technology’ in the Art of the
New Materialists,” in: ed., Michael
reactive reciprocity let matter take place and articulate itself. Material Schwab, Experimental Systems. Fu-
actors influence other material actors, changing and transforming ture Knowledge in Artistic Research
them, thus putting their particularities on display. For example, in (Leuven: Leuven University Press,
2013), pp. 41-54.
Another Ode to Outer Ends (2010, fig. 8) a tone generator activates 34
water in a bowl, transferring vibrations in order for steam to rise. This See Ludwig Seyfarth, “Good Vi-
brations,” artnet (29.4.2011) http://
steam precipitates on cement dust scattered on a floorboard, where www.artnet.de/magazine/gallery-
it leaves traces of solidification and agglutination, dissolution and weekend-berlin-nina-canell-bei-
konrad-fischer-und-wien-lukatsch/
over-writing. (last accessed 29.9.13).
35
As in Into the Eyes as Ends
In other works, sonic waves in a certain frequency influence a potted of Hair, for example. See Dieter
plant34, electric and electro-magnetic signals turn into noises or in- Roelstraete, “Nina Canell Plus Elec-
tricity,” in: Nina Canell: To Let Stay
struments35, a rotating motion transforms into a vibration, a vibration Projecting As a Bit of Branch On A
into a noise, and a noise into light.36 Canell also interprets the spread- Log By Not Chopping It Off, exhib.
cat. Museum Moderner Kunst Stif-
ing sonic wave or particles (radiation) as a manifestation of matter. At tung Ludwig Wien (Köln: Buchhand-
any rate she defines “radiance as a sculptural, relational component lung Walter König, 2010), p. 73.
“ and refers to the chemist and spiritualist Sir William Crookes (1832- 36
For example Anatomy of Dirt
1919), who designated a fourth state of matter besides solid, liquid, in Quiet Water (2008), see “Nina
Canell, Walking on Non-Top
and gas: “radiant”.37 Hill,” www.barbarawien.de/gal-
lery/1010200824122008.html (last
Canell’s spare assemblages comprising wires, neon lights, used accessed 29.9.13).

objects, technical implements, and materials in different phases of 37

Caoimhín Mac Gilla Léith, “Small
aggregation aim to make visible energy flows or the transformation Gestures, High Voltage,” in: ed.
Melanie Bono, Annette Hans,
process of material and matter or – to use the words of Karen Barad Evaporation Essays: On the Sculp-
– to show “substance in its intra-active becoming,” “phenomena in ture of Nina Canell (Berlin: Distanz,
2009), p. 37.
their ongoing materialisation.”38 In doing so it adheres to the char-
38
acter of a model, a “material generaliti[y]”39 – as Rheinberger calls Barad 2007 (footnote 32), p. 151.
a model – in which “a process or a reaction can be studied”40. For 39
Rheinberger 1997 (footnote 12),
the most part, models are “to a certain extent and in some respects, p. 109.
standardized, reduced, purified, isolated, contracted, and monofunc- 40
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Experi-
tionalised entities,41 that vicariously stand for substances, reactions, mentalsysteme und epistemische
Dinge. Eine Geschichte der
systems or organisms that are less readily available, transportable, or Proteinsynthese im Reagenzglas
manipulable. In this respect, Canell’s arrangements clearly show their (Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp 2006),
p. 134. Before quoted as Rhein-
model character precisely in their very reduced construction and berger 1997 (footnote 12) but in
deliberate simplicity, which examines dynamic configurations of ma- this case, I would like to quote the
terialities with the simplest materials and most rudimentary transfor- phrase in a new English translation,
because in the later German-lan-
mation processes. As a model, they clearly stand as representatives of guage edition Rheinberger defines
the general process of material interaction – whether of a geological, his terms more precisely than in the
English-language edition book.
thermodynamic, or even mental form42 – as well as their epistemic
41
dimensions. Rheinberger 1997 (footnote 12),
p. 109.
42
New and old materialisms See Roelstraete 2010 (footnote
35), p. 71. According to Barad,
material intra-action is always
The subtle feel for the qualities of materials and surface textures, that material-discursive intra-action. She
claims that “the material and the
raw aesthetic of modest materials – sometimes marked by traces of discursive are mutually implicated
use – as well as the repression of narrative and semiotic character in the dynamics of intra-activity,”

135
 which is why she doesn’t distin-
guish between matter and meaning,
but rather understands both as
reciprocal articulations. This seems
to correspond with Canell’s view of
“materials as a form of externalised
thinking, or as a laborious exter-
nalization of thought as such.” See
Barad 2007 (footnote 32), p. 152.
(emphasis taken from the original)
43
“My work doesn’t point outside of
itself to metaphor or to symbols – to
language to meaning. Often people
asked what is the meaning of this
sculpture. I can’t understand that
question,” Karla Black talks about
her exhibition at the 54th Venice
Biennale. See http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=0maPSIkh0sM, min
1:31 (last accessed 29.9.13).
44
“First and foremost, I want to
place the experience of material
above language as a way of learn-
ing and understanding the world.”
Heike Munder in conversation with
Karla Black, in: Annette Hans, ed.,
Karla Black, exhib.cat. (Zürich: Mi-
gros Museum für Gegenwartskunst,
2010), p. 182.
45
Barad 2007 (footnote 32), p. 132.
136
found in the selected examples from the work of Jensen, Gibony,
Bircken, and Canell can also be found in other, primarily sculptural,
contemporary positions. Among them is Scottish artist Karla Black,
whose work assumes a two-fold significance when considered within
the context of New Materialism in contemporary art as it’s discussed
here.
Her work, which hovers between form and formlessness, is made
from layers and accumulations of powdery coloured pigments, loose
gypsum or tons of chalk particles, baggy bundles of paper, heaps of
cellophane and such unusual materials as hand cream, lip gloss, or
eye makeup, incisively emphasises the haptics and materiality of the
materials she used, often leaving them in a raw “between” state, as if
they were captured in the process of becoming. Additionally, Black
firmly resists the notion of a pure symbolic meaning and emblem-
atic legibility in her work: “My work doesn’t point outside of itself
to metaphor or to symbols– to language, to meaning. Often people
asked what is the meaning of this sculpture. I can’t understand that
question,”43 the artist stresses in an interview on the occasion of her
exhibition at the 54th Venice Biennial. One could certainly reply
that, to some extent, the materials Black uses can be unequivocally
read as feminine or that her installations evoke the set pieces of land-
scapes like table mountains, clouds, ocean breakers, barren land,
plant pollen, or rain, and therefore certainly suggest a symbolic rep-
resentation. Nevertheless, one doesn’t get very far with iconographic
interpretation or semiotic analysis in Karla Black’s work. Instead,
Black argues for a material experience as opposed to an approach
dominated by language44 – and not only in relation to her own work.
In doing so, she touches upon a central tenet of the New Materialists
in the cultural and social sciences, who argue that language in the
last decades “has been granted too much power”.45
Nevertheless, the examples mentioned here should in no way propa-
gate a relatively consistent group of New Materialists in contempo-
rary art that exhibit stringent conceptual and formal similarities in
relation to materials. Examples of a New Materialism in contempo-
rary art materialise in completely different qualities and aesthetic
forms, and can be spotted [in works like] Pierre Huyghe’s installation
Untilled (2012) at documenta 13 or in Daria Martin’s film work Soft
Materials (2004) that use other artistic media and methods and both
are fundamentally construed as more narrative. In retrospect, the
work Untilled (fig. 9–10), proved to be a perfect example of the central
conceptual cornerstone of documenta 13. In an overgrown compost-
ing area of the baroque Karlsaue park – a place that in its self is in a
virtual state of development and decomposition that finds itself in the
transition between culture (the waste of cultivated plants, the baroque
manicuring of the park) and nature (decomposition, rank growth), the
viewer encounters multi-faceted hybrids, and actors, that combine to
multi-layered assemblages: the white dog “human” with the rose-
coloured leg that, as an animal who is called a human carries an
artificial physical adornment and freely roams the terrain; the female
nude with a beehive instead of a head, its inhabitants scattered
throughout the vicinity buzzing; selected plants – at once natural
herbs and cultural assets – that produce intoxicating substances and
can generate a shift in perception and an expansion of conscious-
ness in humans. They all generate networks that in turn become hubs
in further networks. The beehive replaces the brain in the sculpture
as a swarm intelligence, the bees in turn pollinate the blossoms of
foxglove, deadly nightshade, and angel’s trumpets, whose crop not
only have cultural and symbolic implications, but also intoxicate the
human mind as a drug – and so forth. Humans, animals, discourses
and symbols, artefacts and vegetation mix in this work into a dense
underbrush of reciprocal exertion of influences, metamorphoses, and
material-discursive intra-actions.

On the other hand, Soft Materials by Daria Martin (fig. 11–13) refers to
the theory of embodied and situated cognition, which is especially
central in the field of cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence
research. It attributes a central importance to the materiality of the
body and its environment in the development of cognitive capacities
and led to a radical rethinking in robotics away from the focus on the
computer-supported simulation of the brain as the central organ of fig. 9–10
Pierre Huyghe, Untilled,
control and its attendant abstraction of the body and towards a use of installation at documenta 13, 2012,
the robotic body’s intelligence and continuous interactive adaption installation shot and detail.

137
 fig. 11–12
Daria Martin,
Soft Materials, 2004, filmstills.
Film, 16 mm, 10:30 min.

138
 46
– connected to learning processes – between system and environ- See Anselm Franke, “Daria Mar-
tin,” in: Franke, Folie 2012 (footnote
ment (situatedness). Daria Martin’s film is shot in a laboratory for 6), p. 127.
“body-based artificial intelligence”46 and shows via impressive, tactile 47
Karla Black speaks of a “pre-
images the contact and interaction between dancing bodies and object type state”, see Munder
robotic apparatus, between human skin and synthetic sensors or pol- 2010 (footnote. 44), p. 177.
ished metal, as well as the associated embodied learning processes 48
Robert Morris, “Anti-Form,” in:
of man and machine. The themes of assemblage, or of embodiment, Robert Morris, ed., Continuous
Project Altered Daily: The Writings
two central topoi of New Materialism – present themselves in these of Robert Morris, October Books
works, corresponding to the media used here, as more performa- (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT
tive, representational, and descriptive, than in the works by Jensen, Press, 1993), p. 43. First published
in: Artforum, Vol. 6, No. 8 (April
Sibony, Bircken, Canell, and Black discussed. The latter, on the other 1968), pp. 33-35.
hand, rely on an abstract exposure of material qualities and material 49
Ibid, p. 45
dynamics associated with a reduction of form up until a “pre-objec-
50
tivity”.47 Regarding George Bataille’s
notion of “formlessness” and its
bearing on art see Yve-Alain Bois,
Just as New Materialism in the humanities and cultural sciences, the Rosalind Krauss, Formless. A User’s
Guide (New York: Zone Books,
diagnosis of New Materialism in contemporary art did not appear 1997).
without preconditions. Above all, the post-minimalist art of the 1960s 51
See Morris 1993 (footnote 49),
and beginning of the 1970s delivered countless examples, which p. 41.
emphasised the qualities and singular dynamic of matter and material
and alongside Arte Povera must especially be named as forebears
and historic references for artworks from Jensen to Black – with all
yet undifferentiated differences. Post-Minimalist art often presents
unworked matter and material, allowing them to flow uncontrolled,
to expand themselves and to collapse. Robert Morris pleaded for the
recognition of “inherent tendencies and properties”48 of matter in his
well-known text Anti-Form and by contrast degraded the preservation
of form, which he described as “functioning Idealism.”49

His work Threadwaste with Mirrors and Richard Serra’s Splashing

Series, both created in 1968, are by now two iconic examples of an
anti-formal art or art of formlessness50 at the end of the 1960s, that
completely bet on the dissolution of fixed contours, the pure physical
sculptural presence of matter and its inherent powers and direction of
movement. It’s significant that the formulation of the concept of anti-
form and its manifestation in artistic work and exhibitions took place
in 1968, the highpoint of the North American student movement and
the 1960s civil rights movement. It accordingly turned against an art
world construed as the consumption of goods and behaved anarchis-
tically towards a capitalist society, its rigid rules and restrictions asso-
ciated, among other things on an aesthetic level, with form and clear
shapes. Along with a deliberate delimitation of minimal art and its
artificial ordering of repetitive modules without inherent relation to
“physicality of the existing units,”51 the art of anti-form nonetheless
also seemed to draw its inspiration from the natural sciences. At that
time, the extremely popular concept of entropy, along with the know-
ledge of quantum electrodynamics, which explained the electromag-
netic interaction between charged particles, promoted an image of a
dynamic and energetic matter that was also propagated in the arts.

139
 52
“The notion of the univocity of
Being or single matter positions
difference as a verb or process of
becoming at the heart of the mat-
ter,” interview with Rosi Braidotti,
in: Dolphijn, van der Tuin 2012
(footnote 11), p. 20.
53
Ibid, p. 21.
fig. 13
Daria Martin,
Soft Materials, 2004, filmstill.
Film, 16 mm, 10:30 min.
140
It is not a coincidence that the artistic materialism of the 1968s cor-
responds with what Rosi Braidotti called the “theoretico-political
consensus” of the post-1968s thinkers, who demanded loyalty to
historical materialism, as well as its critical actualisation and turned
the term “materialistic” into a necessity and a banality.52 However,
this supposedly changed in the time that followed, as the linguistic
branch of Post-structuralism called for an ever-stronger hegemonic
position, developing no later than the 1990s into a “fully-fledged
deconstructive project”53 through psychoanalysis and semiotics.
However, the current New Materialism or neo-materialism directs
itself precisely against the dominance of this linguistic paradigm
and is based instead on a renewed reading of neglected materialis-
tic currents in the history of philosophy, among other things. New
Materialism is partially not so new at all and nonetheless it has both
a completely new qualitative orientation and insistent presence in
the sciences as well as the arts, which justifies speaking of a New
Materialism in the sciences and arts–a New Materialism that, as
we’ve attempted to show here, follows similar topoi and ideas in both
fields. Reasons for the formations of this New Materialism in contem-
porary art, similarly as in 1968, have to be looked for in an intimate
interplay, a transformation and circulation of discourses inherent to
art and the humanities, science – including computational complex-
ity theory, current theoretical physical sciences or ones inspired by
cognition science – concepts of a self-organising dynamic-energetic
matter and embodied intelligence, as well as socio-critical tenden-
cies, in which capitalist, as well as ecological exploitation are once
again being tested.
Kassetten, Cassettes
Manfred Pernice

1.
The Man and the Automobile (176)
(L’homme devant l’automobile)

The car not only offers an increase in the human capacity for mobility, it’s also good and bad for other pur-
poses. This French short film loosely links a few of them together: the need for parking, collisions that trigger
a brimming flood of discourse, the strange custom to drive cars in “sports” competitions until they break,
and much more.

The horse with the flying tail F (481)

A film for horse lovers–and those who will become one. The star is a young horse raised to be a tournament
champion. Disney’s camera people quite vividly observed this development and documented what appeared
interesting to them. As long as it’s showing the development of the horse, it’s a good film. Unfortunately, the
film declines as it reports from the tournaments (also in Germany). Here, the information fell victim to brev-
ity. Aficionados of the sport would hear the names of well-known riders and horses whizz past, but even
only as much as the memories were awakened.

– Brunnenschale Kolmar, 2005

– K+K (König und Königin), 2012/Düsseldorf
– pezzo 7, BbreilandKoop.com, 2012 / AKG NYC
– nolle_prophylaxe, Tschajka, 2012
– «anexos»LOCAL’, 2013/modern institute
– texts from: Evangelischer Filmbeobachter, 1963, Evangelischer Presseverband für Bayern in München

141
 2.
Five Miles to Midnight (6)
(Le couteau dans la plaie)

Lisa (Sophia Loren) suffers under the egocentric and extortative ways of her husband (Anthony Perkins).
She wants to break up with him. In this endeavour, coincidence seems to come to her aid. Robert flies to
Casablanca. The plane crashes. All of the passengers were dead— except for Robert. After a few days, after
the funeral for him had already taken place, Robert appears again onscreen. Before the flight he’d taken
out an insurance policy that she should cash in now. She resists committing this fraud to no avail. But he
forces her to do it. When Lisa has money she wants to leave him. He imposes his will upon her once again
and demands that she accompanies him to South America. Otherwise he would turn her in to the police for
insurance fraud. This hopelessness drives her crazy. On the way to the border she murders him. She runs
over Robert’s body with her car three times and throws the dead body in the river. She is ready for the insane
mental asylum.

142
– nolle_prophylaxe, Tschajka 2012

143
 – Artemisstr., Berlin

144
3.
Modern Ice Age (F) (188)
(Moderne Eiszeit)

Frozen food is in high fashion and is becoming increasingly important. This film is practically an advertise-
ment that opts to make the advantages and quality as massively accessible as possible for the consumer. This
happens with a substantial expenditure of buzzwords, under which factual information suffers. Everything
is positive, everything is good, everything is fantastic and clearly functions perfectly, from the preparation of
“deep freezing” to the refrigeration chains to retailers and households. It should also be noted: some firm
names are visible too frequently and plainly. The cinematic design is standard German industrial short film
confection. Colourful short film about the production, marketing, and importance of frozen food. Education
according to German short film scheme. Possible from 14.

4.
Le Doulos (346)
(original French version)

Since treason in their own ranks can only be punished by death according to the special hoodlum code of
honour and all evidence suggests that gangster Cilien snitched on his friend Maurice, Cilien’s life seems to
not be worth a penny anymore. And indeed, as the misunderstanding clears up, the disaster has already
progressed too much. In relentless consequence both (and a number of others) find death.

But the the ideational perspective of the work, suggests a careful consideration. It is served as entertainment
without identifiable socio-critical or detailed documentarian ambitions. Considered in this light, the ending
scenes’ inevitable logic is plenty neutral compensation for the preceding quantum of murder and homicide,
as well as the other beautiful things. We do not need to discourage from a visit due to the subsequent ending
and good cinematic form and could let the matter rest with strong reservations, but for adolescents neither
the topic, nor its grim execution is suitable.

5.
Undated (43)
(Ohne Datum)

“Maybe a film for the audience of tomorrow, but finally one that has substance, one which can be built
upon!” A Stuttgart critic claimed about the new Domnick film Ohne Datum. Another wrote: “Still, in the
thicket of dark metaphors and pseudo-literary idioms, I couldn’t recognise more than the distinctive footwear
of a leading actor, who (how good!) only had to show his legs.” A third decided that Ohne Datum was
a “documentary film, that gets under the skin.” A Munich critic with commonsense, on the other hand,
warned “No path continues here!” Domnick tried to be tricky and went the other way. He stylised, reduced,
formed, was endeavouring and experimental. Certainly this is one way to come to grips with a border-
line situation. The path only has to remain recognisable. The remains of clarity, of conceivability--even of
fragmentary conditions--has to remain. Domnick dissolved everything: place, time and also the individual;
since one only sees the man’s hands and feet. The man wanders around. Predominantly at the beach and
in a big city, which is only recognised with some difficulty as London. Why at the beach? This seems pretty
clear: Because of the attractive bleakness. Dull and empty, this is how his future presents itself. Trickling sand
as a metaphor of passing life. Well, this is well-known. One has seen this often. And insufficient authority in
the mastery of the intellectual background can already be seen: the worn symbol, in a context fraught with
meaning, emerges as dangerously close to triviality.

145
 fig. 1–3
Discussion of the works with
Manfred Pernice at the proba-
tionary installation of the
Trüllerwanne, vestibule of the
Academy of Fine Arts Munich,
WS 2012/13.

fig. 4
Leaflet for the installation
Trüllerwanne, 2013, frontside.

fig. 5–10
Trüllerwanne
at the end of year exhibition
of the Academy of Fine Arts
Munich 2013, details.

146
Project Class Pernice
Working on the Trüllerwanne during Manfred Pernice’s guest
professorship, Academy of Fine Arts Munich, winter term 2012/2013

A device for demonstration made of wood and synthetic boxes,

which is variable in height and bordure and flexibly de-installable and
installable in several versions. Within its frame objects made of di-
verse materials are presented. Depending on the arrangement differ-
ent concentrations, serializations, stackings and (un)orderly patterns
appear, as well as complex relations between the singular objects.

Together with the guest professor Manfred Pernice nine students have
designed and realized a 5 × 4m device of demonstration during winter
term 2012/13. The basic idea rose from an engagement with the omni-
present containers surrounding us and the idea to present several con-
tainers within one main container and to display this within a space
that itself functions as a container. This flexibly convertible working
device enables a variable positioning of the objects, to try out different
combinations and to investigate their conjoint effects in relation to one
another. Not only the singularly produced artworks are used for this but
also randomly available or accrued everyday vessels are included. In the
process of arranging not only a “consistent” or final solution is sought,
but ever new impacts and constellations are tested and discussed. By
way of the repeatedly combinable relations of the different containers on
the demonstration device also the question how space in itself is to be
understood, partitioned, limited or broken open arises.

Specifically due to their varied materialities the different containers

require consistently new approaches and interpretations, through which
new lines, structures, interplays and correlations are yielding. In this pro-
cess visual, contentual and material-oriented qualities come into being.
Through the vicinities of the objects amongst each other their materiali-
ties can become visible at once. It is only in relation to one another that
those qualities become more or less articulate, presented and perceiva-
ble in its form. The ambivalent relation of control and loss of control, the
relation of the singularity to the other components of these networks, or
assemblages, in which things and persons are embedded, are mirrored
in multiple regards in our works. And also in the working processes of
the group mutual transfers of control and influence take place.

Uli Ball,
Valerie Nora Christiansen, Pernilla Henrikson, Paul Kotter,

Georgios Koumanidis, Sophia Mainka, Matthias Numberger,
Matthias Trager, Raphael Weilguni

147
148
149
150
151
152
On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v1.1) Preliminary Note: This paper is
a slightly revised version of the
Karen Barad original paper “On Touching – The
Inhuman that Therefore I Am,”
which was published in differences
23:3 (2012, p. 206-223). That paper
unfortunately included errors result-
ing from a misreading my proof cor-
rections. I am thankful that Susanne
Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier has
provided an opportunity for this arti-
cle to be printed in its correct form.
It also includes minor revisions to
reset the introduction of the paper
since it is now being published in a
different forum and no longer intro-
duces a journal special issue, which
was the original context.
1
The title of my essay here
expresses my virtual engagements
and entanglements with Jacques
Derrida. I am indebted to Astrid
Schrader and Vicki Kirby for putting
me in touch with Derrida through
their marvellous materialist readings
of his work.
2
Touch has been an object of study
for centuries, going back at least
to Aristotle’s momentous work on
this topic. Part of what is at stake
in this essay, is joining with other
feminist and postcolonial theorists
in troubling the notion of touch as
an innocent form of engagement
and also, by implication, troubling
its positioning in the history of
philosophy as a mutually consent-
ing act between individuals, free
When two hands touch, there is a sensuality of the flesh, an exchange of culture, history, and politics.
of warmth, a feeling of pressure, of presence, a proximity of other- The literature on this is extensive.
See, for example, Sara Ahmed,
ness that brings the other nearly as close as oneself.1 Perhaps closer. Jackie Stacey, Thinking through the
And if the two hands belong to one person, might this not enliven an Skin (London: Routledge, 2001),
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/
uncanny sense of the otherness of the self, a literal holding oneself La Fontera: The New Mestiza
at a distance in the sensation of contact, the greeting of the stranger (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987),
Anna Ball, “Impossible Intimacies:
within? So much happens in a touch: an infinity of others – other be- Towards a Visual Politics of ‘Touch’
ings, other spaces, other times – are aroused. at the Israeli- Palestinian Border,”
in: Journal for Cultural Research,
16:2–3 (2012), pp. 175–195. Erin
When two hands touch, how close are they? What is the measure of Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense,
closeness? Which disciplinary knowledge formations, political par- Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press,
ties, religious and cultural traditions, infectious disease authorities, 2006), Laura Marks, The Skin of the
immigration officials, and policy makers do not have a stake in, if not Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodi-
ment, and the Senses (Durham, NC:
a measured answer to, this question? When touch is at issue, nearly Duke University Press, 2000), Maria
everyone’s hair stands on end. I can barely touch on even a few Puig de la Bellacasa, “Touching
Technologies, Touching Visions: The
aspects of touch here, at most offering the barest suggestion of what it Reclaiming of Sensorial Experience
might mean to approach, to dare to come in contact with, this infinite and the Politics of Speculative
Thinking,” in: Subjectivity 28 (2009),
finitude. Many voices speak here in the interstices, a cacophony of pp. 297–315.
always already reiteratively intra-acting stories. These are entangled
tales. Each is diffractively threaded through and enfolded in the other.
Is that not in the nature of touching? Is touching not by its very nature
always already an involution, invitation, invisitation, wanted or un-
wanted, of the stranger within? 2

153
 3
I have in mind here the set of I am struck by the intimacy of feminist science studies’ engagement
articles published in the special
issue of differences 23:3 (2012) in with science. Immersion, entanglement, visual hapticity, ciliated
which this present essay was first sense, the synesthetic force of perceiving-feeling, contact, affective
published. With respect to my essay
in that volume, unfortunately, impor- ecology, involution, sensory attunement, arousal, response, inter­
tant edits made at the proof stage species signalling, affectively charged multisensory dance, and
were not properly incorporated
into the printed version. I therefore
re-membering are just a few of the sensuous practices and figurations
consider this paper (v1.1) to be the at play in feminist science studies.3 Feminist science studies distin-
official version of the paper. Karen
Barad, “On Touching – The Inhuman
guishes itself in two intra-related ways: First and foremost, for all the
that Therefore I am,” in: Differences: varied approaches, foci, and philosophical commitments that go by
A Journal of Feminist Cultural Stud- this name, for all its diversity and because of all its diversity, it is a
ies, 23:3 (2012), pp. 206-223.
richly inventive endeavour committed to helping make a more just
4
The Science & Justice Training world. Second, and relatedly, it distinguishes itself by its commitment
Program for graduate students at
UCSC has been designed to foster to be in the science, not to presume to be above or outside of it. In
collaborative endeavours that other words, feminist science studies engages with the science no
train students to “do ethics at the
lab bench”. For more details, see less than with the laboratory workers, modellers, theorists, techni-
PLOS Biology. Science & Justice cians, and technologies. Indeed, the approach I find most intriguing,
Research Center (Collaboration
Group), “Experiments in Collabora- fruitful, grounded, rigorous, and delightful is when feminist science
tion: Interdisciplinary Graduate studies is of the science, materially immersed in and inseparable
Education in Science and Justice,”
PLOS Biology, 11:7 (2013), available
from it. Like good bench scientists, indeed the kinds of scientists-for-
online at: http://www.plosbiology. justice feminists hope to train, mentor, and foster, feminist science
org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371
%2Fjournal.pbio.1001619
studies practitioners work the equipment, theoretical and experimen-
(last accessed, 1.6.2014). tal, without any illusion of clean hands and unapologetically express
5
Which is not to say that some
their enthusiasm and amazement for the world and the possibilities
theorists do not operate as if theo- of cultivating just relationships among the world’s diverse ways of
rizing is a lofty enterprise that lifts being/becoming.4
the theorist above it all. My point
here is that theorizing is as much
a material practice as other kinds Theorizing, a form of experimenting, is about being in touch. What
of practices, like experimenting, to
which it is often counterposed. keeps theories alive and lively is being responsible and responsive to
6 the world’s patternings and murmurings.
The allusion to the making of
spacetime through leaps, that is,
through quantum dis/continuities, Doing theory requires being open to the world’s aliveness, allowing
is discussed in more detail in Karen
Barad, “Quantum Entanglements oneself to be lured by curiosity, surprise, and wonder. Theories are
and Hauntological Relations of not mere metaphysical pronouncements on the world from some
Inheritance: Dis/continuities,
SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-
presumed position of exteriority.5 Theories are living and breathing re-
to-Come.” In: Derrida Today, 3.2 configurings of the world. The world theorises as well as experiments
(2010), pp. 240–268. In that essay
I explain my use of the slash to
with itself. Figuring, reconfiguring. Animate and (so-called) inani-
denote a dis/continuity – a cutting mate creatures do not merely embody mathematical theories; they
together-apart – of the terms in play do mathematics. But life, whether organic or inorganic, animate or
(in the indeterminacy marked by
their superposition). inanimate, is not an unfolding algorithm. Electrons, molecules, brit-
tlestars, jellyfish, coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids,
snowflakes, and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps
here and there, or rather, making here and there from leaps, shifting
familiarly patterned practices, testing the waters of what might yet
be/have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with
their very being.6 Thought experiments are material matters.

Thinking has never been a disembodied or uniquely human activity.

Stepping into the void, opening to possibilities, straying, going out
of bounds, off the beaten path – diverging and touching down again,

154
 7
swerving and returning, not as consecutive moves but as experiments See Schrader on response-ability
as a kind of practice, including
in in/determinacy. Spinning off in any old direction is neither theoriz- laboratory practices, that enables
ing nor viable; it loses the thread, the touch of entangled beings (be) the organism or object of study to
respond. By attending to the fine
coming together-apart. All life forms (including inanimate forms of details of the science, by being
liveliness) do theory. The idea is to do collaborative research, to be in of the science, doing the science
justice, Schrader shows how
touch, in ways that enable response-ability.7 incompatible laboratory findings
(which have been the source of
controversy in the scientific com-
In an important sense, touch is the primary concern of physics. Its munity) can in fact be reconciled by
entire history can be understood as a struggle to articulate what touch paying attention to the kinds and
entails. How do particles sense one another? Through direct contact, degrees of response-ability used
in different laboratory practices.
an ether, action-at-a-distance forces, fields, the exchange of virtual Astrid Schrader, “Responding to
particles? What does the exchange of energy entail? How is a change Pfiesteria piscicida (the Fish Killer):
Phantomatic Ontologies, Indeter-
in motion effected? What is pressure? What is temperature? How minacy, and Responsibility in Toxic
does the eye see? How do lenses work? What are the different kinds Microbiology,” in: Social Studies of
Science, 40.2 (2010). pp. 275–306.
of forces that particles experience? How many kinds are there? What
8
is the nature of measurement?8 Once you start looking at it this way, Measurements are a form of
touching. Heisenberg’s uncer-
you get a dizzying feeling as things shift. This particular take on phys- tainty principle, once seen as the
ics, and its history, entails a torquing, a perturbation from the usual foundational principle of quantum
physics, is at root an expression
storylines, but I submit that it is a fair description and worth consider- of the limits of human knowledge
ing for the ways it opens up new possibilities for thinking about both that result when a particle interacts
with another in the processes of
the nature of physics and of touch. measurement. The uncertainty
principle has now been replaced
Using feminist science studies as a touchstone, I attempt to stay in by the more fundamental notion
of quantum entanglement, which
touch with the material-affective dimensions of doing and engaging is a contemporary expression of
science. Straying from all determinate paths while staying in touch, Bohr’s “indeterminacy principle.”
According to the latter, measure-
in the remainder of this essay I explore the physics of touch in its ments entail touch in the form of
physicality, its virtuality, its affectivity, its e-motion-ality, whereby all intra-actions, not interactions. See
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe
pretense of being able to separate out the affective from the scientific Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
dimensions of touching falls away. Entanglement of Matter and Mean-
ing (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007).
Theorizing Touching/Touching Theorizing

Touch, for a physicist, is but an electromagnetic interaction.

A common explanation for the physics of touching is that one thing

it does not involve is ... well, touching. That is, there is no actual
contact involved. You may think you are touching a coffee mug when
you are about to raise it to your mouth, but your hand is not actu-
ally touching the mug. Sure, you can feel the smooth surface of the
mug’s exterior right where your fingers come into contact with it (or
seem to), but what you are actually sensing, physicists tell us, is the
electromagnetic repulsion between the electrons of the atoms that
make up your fingers and those that make up the mug. (Electrons are
tiny negatively charged particles that surround the nuclei of atoms,
and having the same charges they repel one another, much like
powerful little magnets. As you decrease the distance between them
the repulsive force increases.) Try as you might, you cannot bring two
electrons into direct contact with each other.

155
 9
When there is talk of quantum The reason the desk feels solid, or the cat’s coat feels soft, or we can
physics, and especially when there
is a consideration of its philosophi- (even) hold coffee cups and one another’s hands, is an effect of elec-
cal implications, the theory at issue, tromagnetic repulsion. All we really ever feel is the electromagnetic
though it is usually not specified, is
nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. force, not the other whose touch we seek. Atoms are mostly empty
Quantum field theory goes further, space, and electrons, which lie at the farthest reaches of an atom,
combining the insights of quantum
mechanics, special relativity, and
hinting at its perimeter, cannot bear direct contact. Electromagnetic
classical field theories. The philo- repulsion: negatively charged particles communicating at a distance
sophical implications of quantum push each other away. That is the tale physics usually tells about
field theory are much less explored.
See, for example, Harvey R. Brown, touching. Repulsion at the core of attraction. See how far that story
Rom Harré, Philosophical Founda- gets you with lovers. No wonder the romantic poets had had enough.
tions of Quantum Field Theory (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1990),
Tian Yu Cao, Silvan S. Schweber, The quantum theory of touching is radically different from the classi-
“The Conceptual Foundations and
the Philosophical Aspects of Renor- cal explanation. Actually, it is radically queer, as we will see.
malization Theory,” in: Synthese,
97.1 (1993), pp. 33–108, Paul Teller,
An Interpretive Introduction to Quantum Field Theory: A Virtual Introduction
Quantum Field Theory (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1997). Quantum field theory allows for something radically new in the his-
10
tory of Western physics: the transience of matter’s existence. No
It has been my practice and
my commitment to provide a suf-
longer suspended in eternity, matter is born, lives, and dies. But even
ficiently rich sense of the science more than that, there is a radical deconstruction of identity and of the
that the reader can get a sense of
the workings of the science even if
equation of matter with essence in ways that transcend even the pro-
there is not sufficient time or space found un/doings of (nonrelativistic) quantum mechanics. Quantum
to fully develop it. My in-progress field theory, I will argue below, is a call, an alluring murmur from the
book manuscript, provisionally titled
Infinity, Nothingness, and Justice- insensible within the sensible to radically rework the nature of being
to-Come, provides an in-depth and time. The insights of quantum field theory are crucial, but the
explication. But here I can only offer
a few hints of some key ideas. For philosophical terrain is rugged, slippery, and mostly unexplored.9 The
more details, see Karen Barad, “In/ question is: How to proceed with exquisite care? We will need to be
humanity, Quantum Field Theory,
and the Radical Alterity of the Self.” in and of the science, no way around it. Unfortunately, in the limited
Conference paper given at „Politics space I have here I can only lightly touch, really just barely graze, the
of Care in Technoscience” (York
University, Toronto. 21 April 2012). surface.10

Quantum field theory differs from classical physics not only in its for-
malism, but in its ontology. Classical physics inherits a Democretean
ontology – only particles and the void – with one additional element:
fields.

Particles, fields, and the void are three separate elements in classical
physics, whereas they are intra-related elements in quantum field
theory. To take one instance, according to quantum field theory, par-
ticles are quanta of the fields. For example, the quantum of the elec-
tromagnetic field is a photon, the quantum of a gravitational field is a
graviton, electrons are quanta of an electron field, and so on. Another
feature is that something very profound happens to the relationship
between particles and the void. I will continue to explain how this
relationship is radically rethought in what follows. For now, I simply
note, pace Democritus, that particles no longer take their place in the
void; rather, they are constitutively entangled with it. As for the void,
it is no longer vacuous. It is a living, breathing indeterminacy of non/
being. The vacuum is a jubilant exploration of virtuality, where virtual
particles – whose identifying characteristic is not rapidity (despite the

156
 11
common tale explaining that they are particles that go in and out of For an accessible introduc-
tory treatment of quantum field
the vacuum faster than their existence can be detected) but, rather, in- theory, especially with regard to
determinacy – are having a field day performing experiments in being its understanding of the vacuum
and virtuality, see Karen Barad,
and time. That is, virtuality is a kind of thought experiment the world What Is the Measure of Nothing-
performs. Virtual particles do not traffic in a metaphysics of presence. ness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice,
dOCUMENTA (13), 100 Notes – 100
They do not exist in space and time. They are ghostly non/existences Thoughts, No.99 (Ostfildern: Hatje
that teeter on the edge of the infinitely fine blade between being Cantz, 2012).
and nonbeing. Admittedly, virtuality is difficult to grasp. Indeed, this 12
Cao, Schweber 1993 (footnote 9).
is its very nature. To put it concisely, virtual particles are quantised
indeterminacies-in-action.11

Troubling Matters: Infinities, Perversities, Hauntings

“Physicists [...] took the vacuum as something substantial [...] the

scene of wild activities.” 12 Cao und Schweber

When it comes to quantum field theory, it is not difficult to find trou-

ble. It is not so much that trouble is around every corner; according
to quantum field theory it inhabits us and we inhabit it, or rather,
trouble inhabits everything and nothing – matter and the void.

How does quantum field theory understand the nature of the elec-
tron, or any other particle for that matter? It turns out that even the
simplest particle, a point particle (devoid of structure) like the elec-
tron, causes all kinds of difficulties for quantum field theory. To be
fair, one of the problems is already evident in classical field theory.

Immediately after its discovery in the nineteenth century, physicists

imagined the electron to be a tiny sphere. However, if you think of
an electron as a tiny spherical entity, a little ball, with bits of negative
charge distributed on its surface, and remember that like charges re-
pel one another, then you can see the intractable difficulty that arises
with this model: all the bits of negative charge distributed on the sur-
face of the sphere repel one another, and since there is no positive
(unlike) charge around to mitigate the mutual repulsion each bit feels,
the electron’s own electromagnetic self-energy would be too much to
bear – it would blow itself apart. Such stability issues pointed to the
need for a better understanding of the electron’s structure.

In 1925, the Russian physicist Yakov Il’ich Frenkel offered a different

proposal: the electron is a negatively charged point particle. That is,
the electron has no substructure. In this way, he eliminated the diffi-
culty of the mutual repulsion of bits of charges distributed on the
surface because there were no bits of charge here and there, just a
single point carrying a negative charge. But the attempt to push one
instability away just produced another, for if the electron is a point
particle (and therefore has zero radius), then the self- energy contri-
bution – that is, the interaction of the particle with the surrounding
electromagnetic field that it creates – is infinite. Frenkel believed
that this paradox could only be resolved using quantum theory.

157
 13
Feynman, Richard, QED: The
Strange Theory of Light and
Matter (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1985),
pp.115–116.
14
The “moral fiber” of the theory
and the particles whose behaviours
it purports to explain are widely
questioned in quantum field theory.
To offer a couple of additional
examples, Kaiser takes note of
common references to the “sick-
ness” of quantum field theory and
to the virtual particle as a “naughty
schoolchild.” David Kaiser, Drawing
Theories Apart (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 28–30.
15
See Feynmann 1985 (footnote
13), pp.116–117. According to
quantum field theory, most kinds of
particles have corresponding anti-
particles, that is, particles with the
same mass and opposite charge.
For example, positrons are antimat-
ter electrons. When positrons and
electrons meet, they annihilate
each other, producing photons. The
reverse process can also occur:
photons can turn into positron-
electron pairs (or other kinds of
particle-antiparticle pairs). Real
particle interactions must conserve
energy, but this is not the case for
virtual particle interactions.
16
For example, in addition to
virtual electron-positron pairs, it can
interact with virtual muon-antimuon
pairs, virtual quark-antiquark pairs,
etc. The list of others is long. Ad-
ditionally, there is an infinite number
of ways to intra-act.
158
Not only did the infinities persist when quantum field theory tried to
resolve the problem, they multiplied. Indeed, infinities are now ac-
cepted as an integral part of the theory: marks of self-interaction – the
trace of the inseparability of particle and void. Specifically, the elec-
tron’s self-energy takes the form of an electron exchanging a virtual
photon (the quantum of the electromagnetic field) with itself. Richard
Feynman, one of the key authors of quantum field theory, frames
the difficulty in explicitly moral terms: “Instead of going directly
from one point to another, the electron goes along for a while and
suddenly emits a photon; then (horrors!) it absorbs its own photon.
Perhaps there’s something ‘immoral’ about that, but the electron does
it!”13 Hence, the infinity associated with electron’s self-energy, and
other related infinities, wind up installed in quantum field theory as
intrinsic “perversions.”14
Apparently, touching oneself, or being touched by oneself – the
ambiguity/undecidability/indeterminacy may itself be the key to
the trouble – is not simply troubling but a moral violation, the very
source of all the trouble. The electron is not merely causing trouble
for us; in an important sense it is troubling itself, or rather, its self,
as we will soon see. That is, the very notion of “itself,” of identity, is
radically queered. (Gender trouble for sure, but that isn’t the half of
it.) Then there is the question of whether what is really at issue is not
touching oneself per se but rather the possibility of touch touching
itself. The issue arises in quantum field theory in the following way:
the electron emits a photon that “makes a positron-electron pair,
and – again, if you’ll hold your ‘moral’ objections – the electron and
positron annihilate, creating a new photon that is ultimately absorbed
by the electron”.15
In fact, there is an infinite number of such possibilities, or what
Feynman referred to in his path integral approach to quantum field
theory as an infinite sum over all possible histories: the electron not
only exchanges a virtual photon with itself, it is possible for that
virtual photon to enjoy other intra-actions with itself – for exam-
ple, it can vanish, turning itself into a virtual electron and positron
which subsequently annihilate each other before turning back into a
virtual photon – before it is absorbed by the electron. And so on. This
“and so on” is shorthand for an infinite set of possibilities involving
every possible kind of interaction with every possible kind of virtual
particle it can interact with.16 That is, there is a virtual exploration of
every possibility. And this infinite set of possibilities, or infinite sum
of histories, entails a particle touching itself, and then that touching
touching itself, and so on, ad infinitum. Every level of touch, then,
is itself touched by all possible others. Hence, self-touching is an
encounter with the infinite alterity of the self. Matter is an enfolding,
an involution, it cannot help touching itself, and in this self-touching it
comes in contact with the infinite alterity that it is. Polymorphous per-
versity raised to an infinite power: talk about a queer intimacy! What
is being called into question here is the very nature of the “self,” and
 17
in terms of not just being but also time. That is, in an important sense, There are in actuality more than
two kinds of infinities, but that is a
the self is dispersed/diffracted through time and being. subject for another time. “Bare,”
“undressed,” and “dressed” are
part of the official technical lan-
The “problem” of self-touching, especially self-touching the other, is guage; I am not making up my own
a perversity of quantum field theory that goes far deeper than we can metaphorical terms to help make
this more accessible. In technical
touch on here. The gist of it is this: this perversity that is at the root language, the infinity I am talking
of an unwanted infinity, that threatens the very possibility of calcu- about here refers to the bare param-
lability, gets “renormalised” (obviously – should we expect anything eters in the “Lagrangian” or field
equations.
less?!). How does this happen? Physicists conjectured that there are 18
two different kinds of infinities/perversions involved: one that has to Actually, to put it this way is a bit
of a fudge. The renormalised or re-
do with self-touching, and another that has to do with nakedness. defined parameters (which replace
In particular, there is an infinity associated with the “bare” point the bare ones) are not calculable by
the theory but, rather, are written
particle, that is, with the perverse assumption we started with that in using the experimental values.
there is only an electron – the “undressed,” “bare” electron – and the This gives it the feel of a shell
game no matter how mathemati-
void, each separate from the other.17 Renormalisation is the system- cally sophisticated it is. Once the
atic cancellation of infinities: an intervention based on the idea that renormalised charge and mass are
put into the theory, however, other
the infinities can be understood to cancel one another out. Perver- kinds of quantities can theoretically
sion eliminating perversion. The cancellation idea is this: The infinity be derived and compared with
experiments.
of the “bare” point particle cancels the infinity associated with the
“cloud” of virtual particles; in this way, the “bare” point particle is
“dressed by the vacuum contribution (that is, the cloud of virtual
particles). The “dressed” electron, the physical electron, is thereby
renormalised, that is made “normal” (finite). (I am using technical
language here!) Renormalisation is the mathematical handling/tam-
ing of these infinities. That is, the infinities are “subtracted” from one
another, yielding a finite answer.18 Mathematically speaking, this is
a tour de force. Conceptually, it is a queer theorist’s delight. It shows
that all of matter, matter in its “essence” (of course, that is precisely
what is being troubled here), is a massive overlaying of perversities:
an infinity of infinities.

No doubt, the fact that this subtraction of two infinities can be han-
dled in a systematic way that yields a finite value is no small achieve-
ment, and a very sophisticated mathematical machinery needed to be
developed to make this possible. Nonetheless, whatever the attitude
concerning the legitimacy or illegitimacy of renormalisation (and
physicists have differed in their sense of that), the mathematical op-
eration of subtraction does not effect a conceptual cancellation. The
infinities are not avoided; they must be reckoned with. Philosophi-
cally, as well as mathematically, they need to be taken into account.
Renormalisation is a trace of physics’ ongoing (self-)deconstruction:
it continually finds ways to open itself up to new possibilities, to
iterative re(con)figurings. Perhaps then the resurfacing of infinities is a
sign that the theory is vibrant and alive, not “sick.”

To summarise, quantum field theory radically deconstructs the clas-

sical ontology. Here are a few key points: the starting point ontology
of particles and the void – a foundational reductionist essentialism
– is undone by quantum field theory; the void is not empty, it is an
ongoing play of in/determinacies; physical particles are inseparable

159
 19
This last point refers to the “cut- from the void, in particular they intra-act with the virtual particles of
off” that is part of the renormaliza-
tion procedure. See esp. Barad the void, and are thereby inseparable from it; the infinite plethora of
2012 (footnote 10) and Cao, Schwe- alterities given by the play of quantum in/determinacies are consti-
ber 1993 (footnote 9).
tutive inclusions in a radical un/doing of identity; the perversities/
20
Unfortunately, I do not have suf- infinites of the theory are intrinsic to the theory and must be reck-
ficient space to go into any detail
concerning the mutually reciprocal,
oned with; desire cannot be eliminated from the core of being – it is
mutually constitutive indetermi- threaded through it; and the unknown, the insensible, new realms of
nacy of being and time. A few
summary points might be helpful to
in/determinacy, which have incalculable effects on mattering, need to
the reader. There is no meaningful be acknowledged, or, even better, taken into account.19
binary between being and becom-
ing since time is not given. All
being-becoming is always already All touching entails an infinite alterity, so that touching the other
a superposition of all possible is touching all others, including the “self,” and touching the “self”
histories involving all virtual others,
where “histories” do not happen in entails touching the strangers within. Even the smallest bits of matter
time but, rather, are the indetermi- are an unfathomable multitude. Each “individual” always already
nate ma(r)kings of time. That is, the
infinite alterity of being not merely includes all possible intra-actions with “itself” through all the virtual
includes others contemporaneous others, including those that are non-contemporaneous with “itself.”
and non-contemporaneous with
“its” time but also is always already That is, every finite being is always already threaded through with an
open to remakings of temporality. infinite alterity diffracted through being and time.20 Indeterminacy is
Hence, all matter is always already
a dynamic field of matterings. The
an un/doing of identity that unsettles the very foundations of non/be-
play of quantum in/determina- ing. Together with Derrida, we might then say that “identity [...] can
cies deconstructs not only the
metaphysics of presence and the
only affirm itself as identity to itself by opening itself to the hospitality
metaphysics of individualism but of a difference from itself or of a difference with itself. Condition of
also anything like the possibility of the self, such a difference from and with itself would then be its very
separating them. The indetermina-
cies of being and time are together thing [...] : the stranger at home”21 “Individuals” are infinitely indebt-
undone. ed to all others, where indebtedness is about not a debt that follows
21
Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Palo or results from a transaction but, rather, a debt that is the condition of
Alto, California: Stanford University possibility of giving/receiving. In a chapter of On Touching – Jean-Luc
Press, 1993), p.10.
Nancy titled “To Self-Touch You,” Derrida touches on, and troubles,
22
Jacques Derrida, On Touch- the account Jean-Luc Nancy gives of sense as touching. He remarks
ing—Jean-Luc Nancy (Palo Alto,
California: Stanford University that self-touching “in no way reduce[s] the alterity of the other who
Press, 2005), p. 274. comes to inhabit the self-touching, or at least to haunt it, at least as
23
Haraway writes: “Whom and much as it spectralises any experience of ‘touching the other’ ”. 22
what do I touch when I touch my
dog?” Donna Haraway, When Spe-
cies Meet (Minneapolis: University Ontological indeterminacy, a radical openness, an infinity of possi-
of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 35. bilities, is at the core of mattering. How strange that indeterminacy, in
See in particular her discussion of
Jim’s dog, pp. 5–8.
its infinite openness, is the condition for the possibility of all struc-
tures in their dynamically reconfiguring in/stabilities. Matter in its
iterative materialisation is a dynamic play of in/determinacy. Matter
is never a settled matter. It is always already radically open. Closure
cannot be secured when the conditions of im/possibilities and lived
indeterminacies are integral, not supplementary, to what matter is.

Together with Haraway, we might ask: Whom and what do we touch

when we touch electrons?23 Or, rather, in decentering and decon-
structing the “us” in the very act of touching (touching as intra-
action), we might put the question this way: When electrons meet
each other “halfway,” when they intra-act with one another, when
they touch one another, whom or what do they touch? In addition to
all the various iteratively reconfiguring ways that electrons, indeed
all material “entities,” are entangled relations of becoming, there is

160
 24
also the fact that materiality “itself” is always already touched by and George Greenstein, Arthur
Zajonc, The Quantum Challenge:
touching infinite configurings of other beings and other times. In an Modern Research on the Founda-
important sense, in a breathtakingly intimate sense, touching, sensing, tions of Quantum Mechanics (2nd
ed. Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and
is what matter does, or rather, what matter is: matter is condensations Bartlett, 2005).
of response-ability. Touching is a matter of response. Each of “us” is 25
“Mattering is about the (con-
constituted in response-ability. Each of “us” is constituted as respon­ tingent and temporary) becoming
sible for the other, as being in touch with the other. determinate (and becoming inde-
terminate) of matter and meaning,
without fixity, without closure. The
Justice-to-Come and the Inhumanness of Its Call conditions of possibility of mattering
are also conditions of impossibil-
ity: intra-actions necessarily entail
Clearly, if we take quantum mechanics seriously as making a constitutive exclusions, which
statement about the real world, then the demands it places on constitute an irreducible openness,”
Barad 2010 (footnote 6), p. 254.
our conventional thinking are enormous. Hidden behind the Being accountable for phenomena
discrete and independent objects of the sense world is an entan- necessarily entails taking account
of constitutive exclusions as part
gled realm, in which the simple notions of identity and locality of accounting for the phenomenon.
no longer apply. We may not notice the intimate relationships See Barad 2007 (footnote 8), Barad
2010 (footnote 6).
common to that level of existence, but, regardless of our blind-
26
ness to them, they persist. Events that appear to us as random The inhuman is not the same as
the nonhuman. While the “nonhu-
may, in fact, be correlated with other events occurring elsewhere. man” is differentially (co-)consti-
Behind the indifference of the macroscopic world, “passion at a tuted (together with the “human”)
through particular cuts, I think of the
distance” knits everything together.24 Greenstein und Zajonc inhuman as an infinite intimacy that
touches the very nature of touch,
that which holds open the space
Touch is never pure or innocent. It is inseparable from the field of of the liveliness of indeterminacies
differential relations that constitute it. that bleed through the cuts and
inhabit the between of particular
entanglements.
The infinite touch of nothingness is threaded through all being/be-
coming, a tangible indeterminacy that goes to the heart of matter.
Matter is not only iteratively reconstituted through its various intra-ac-
tions, it is also infinitely and infinitesimally shot through with alterity.
If the serious challenge, the really hard work, seemed to be taking ac-
count of constitutive exclusions, perhaps this awakening to the infin-
ity of constitutive inclusions – the in/determinacy, the virtuality that is
a constitutive part of all finitude – calls us to a new sensibility.25 How
unfathomable is the task of taking account not only of mattering but
of its inseparability from the void, including the infinite abundance
that inhabits and surrounds all being?

For all our concerns with nonhumans as well as humans, there is,
nonetheless, always something that drops out. But what if the point is
not to widen the bounds of inclusion to let everyone and everything
in?

What if it takes sensing the abyss, the edges of the limits of “inclu-
sion” and “exclusion” before the binary of inside/outside, inclusion/
exclusion, mattering/not-mattering can be seriously troubled? What if
it is only in facing the inhuman – the indeterminate non/being non/
becoming of mattering and not mattering – that an ethics committed
to the rupture of indifference can arise?26 What if it is only in the en-
counter with the inhuman – the liminality of no/thingness – in all its
aliveness/liveliness, its conditions of im/possibility, that we can truly

161
 27
Notably, some of the trouble that confront our inhumanity, that is, our actions lacking compassion?
Levinas introduces goes against his
commitment to troubling the notion Perhaps it takes facing the inhuman within us before com-passion –
of the self at the heart of ethics. suffering together with, participating with, feeling with, being moved
See, for example, Butler’s (“Precari-
ous”) discussion of Levinas’ ironic by – can be lived. How would we feel if it is by way of the inhuman
introduction of racialised essential- that we come to feel, to care, to respond?
isms into his philosophy. See Judith
Butler, “Precarious Life and the
Obligations of Cohabitation” (2011), Troubling oneself, or rather, the “self,” is at the root of caring (Oxford
http://www.nobelmuseum.se/sites/ English Dictionary). Levinas makes trouble for the conventional
nobelmuseet.se/files/page_file/
Judith_Butler_NWW2011.pdf (last notions of ethics by starting with, and staying with, this trouble.27
accessed: 01.6.2014). Derrida, citing Levinas, explains, “[R]esponsibility is not initially of
28
Jacques Derrida quoted in Joan myself or for myself” but is “derived from the other”.28 One can also
Kirkby, “‘Remembrance of the hear reverberations of Levinas when the philosopher Alphonso Lingis
Future’: Derrida on Mourning,” in:
Social Semiotics, 16.3 (2006), pp. writes: “Responsibility is coextensive with our sensibility; in our sen-
461–72, here p. 463. sibility we are exposed to the outside, to the world’s being, in such a
29
Alphonso Lingis,The Community way that we are bound to answer for it”. 29
of Those Who Have Nothing in
Common (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press 1994), p. 226. The sense of exposure to the other is crucial and so is the binding
30
obligation that is our vulnerability, our openness, as Lingis reminds
On the need for an ethics of
the insensible see Kathryn Yusoff, us. But what would it mean to acknowledge that responsibility ex-
“Insensible Worlds: Postrelational tends to the insensible as well as the sensible, and that we are always
Ethics, Indeterminacy, and the
(K)nots of Relating,” in: Environment
already opened up to the other from the “inside” as well as the “out­
and Planning D: Society and Space, side”?30 How might we come in contact with or least touch upon an
31, (2013), pp. 208–226.
ethics that is alive to the virtual? This would seem to require, at the
31
Of late, I find myself experiment- very least, being in touch with the infinite in/determinacy at the heart
ing with different narrative registers. of matter, the abundance of nothingness, the infinitude of the void
Increasingly, I find myself drawn
to poetics as a mode of expres- and its in/determinate murmurings, the muted cries, and silence that
sion, not in order to move away speaks of the possibilities of justice-to-come.31
from thinking rigorously but, on
the contrary, to lure ‘us’ toward the
possibilities of engaging the force of Crucially, entanglements of spacetimemattering are threaded through
imagination in its materiality. Francis
Bacon, the man who is credited and inseparable from the infinite alterity of the virtual.
with giving us the scientific method,
concerned himself with these very
issues of touch as the ultimate “Entanglements are relations of obligation – being bound to the
proposition and the effectivity of other – enfolded traces of othering. Othering, the constitution of
the force of imagination. In fact,
he put the question of touch on
an ‘Other,’ entails an indebtedness to the ‘Other,’ who is irreduc-
science’s docket, and the etymol- ibly and materially bound to, threaded through, the ‘self’ – a dif-
ogy of contact can be traced to his
1626 pronouncement: “The Desire
fraction/dispersion of identity. ‘Otherness’ is an entangled relation
of return into the Body; whereupon of difference (différance). Ethicality entails noncoincidence with
followeth that appetite of Contact oneself.
and Conjunction” (Oxford English
Dictionary). The force of imagination
puts us in touch with the possibili- Crucially, there is no getting away from ethics on this account of
ties for sensing the insensible, the
indeterminate, “that which travels mattering. Ethics is an integral part of the diffraction (ongoing dif-
along the edge of being; it is not ferentiating) patterns of worlding, not a superimposing of human
being, but the opening of being
toward-the- world,” Yusoff 2013 values onto the ontology of the world (as if ‘fact’ and ‘value’ were
(footnote 30), p. 220. Or rather, it radically other). The very nature of matter entails an exposure
brings us into an appreciation of,
helps us touch, the imaginings to the Other. Responsibility is not an obligation that the subject
of materiality itself in its ongoing chooses but rather an incarnate relation that precedes the inten-
thought experiments with being/
becoming. tionality of consciousness. Responsibility is not a calculation to
be performed. It is a relation always already integral to the world’s
ongoing intra-active becoming and not-becoming. It is an iterative
(re)opening up to, an enabling of responsiveness. Not through the

162
 32
realisation of some existing possibility, but through the iterative Barad 2010 (footnote 6), p. 265.
reworking of im/possibility, an on-going rupture.”32 33
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The
Murmuring Deep: Reflections on
the Biblical Unconscious (New York:
Ethicality entails hospitality to the stranger threaded through oneself Schocken, 2009), pp. xxi–xxii. This
and through all being and non/being. moving passage, which is very
suggestive in light of the discus-
sion here, speaks to the inherent
I want to conclude this essay by making an attempt at putting “us” inhumanness of the human, albeit
with the human still very much at
more intimately in touch with this infinite alterity that lives in, around, the center of the discussion. Note
and through us, by waking us up to the inhuman that therefore we that the inhuman is being used in
are, to a recognition that it may well be the inhuman, the insensible, different ways by different authors.
Here and in Barad (forthcoming)
the irrational, the unfathomable, and the incalculable that will help I develop a notion of the “queer
us face the depths of what responsibility entails. A cacophony of whis- inhuman.” Karen Barad, “Transma-
terialities: Trans/Matter/Realities
pered screams, gasps, and cries, an infinite multitude of indeterminate and Queer Political Imaginings,”
beings diffracted through different spacetimes, the nothingness, is in: GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and
Gay Studies, 21: 2/3, Special Issue
always already within us, or rather, it lives through us. We cannot on “Queer Inhumanisms,” ed. Mel
shut it out, we cannot control it. We cannot block out the irrationality, Chen Dana Luciano (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2015).
the perversity, the madness we fear, in the hopes of a more orderly
world. But this does not mitigate our responsibility. On the contrary,
it is what makes it possible. Indeterminacy is not a lack, a loss, but an
affirmation, a celebration of the plenitude of nothingness.

I want to come back to Lingis’s diffractive reading of Levinas, as itself

diffractively read through the literary scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zorn-
berg, in her book The Murmuring Deep.

“[T]he murmur is the message: the background hum of life –

desolate, excessive, neither language nor silence – is what links
us to one another. What can be shared, for example, with the dy-
ing? Perhaps Lingis suggests, rather than transmitting clear mean-
ings, the encounter rests on an acknowledgement of an elemental
otherness that is related to our own: ‘We do not relate to the light,
the earth, the air, and the warmth only with our individual sen-
sibility and sensuality. We communicate to one another the light
our eyes know, the ground that sustains our postures, and the
air and the warmth with which we speak. We face one another
as condensations of earth, light, air, and warmth, and orient one
another in the elemental in a primary communication’ [...] .

In an inspired reading of his materials, Frosh cites Žižek and

Lingis, as well as Levinas and Agamben, to suggest that the ulti-
mate communion between people rests in the capacity to draw
on an elemental life that is experienced as inhuman. In this way,
he argues, access to the murmuring deep, the inhuman aspect
of human aliveness, sustains contact with the other. ‘Being ‘in’ a
relationship with another is also a matter of being outside it, shar-
ing in the impersonality that comes from being lived through by
forces that constitute the human subject.’”33

How truly sublime the notion that it is the inhuman – that which
commonly gets associated with humanity’s inhumanity as a lack of

163
 compassion – that may be the very condition of possibility of feeling
the suffering of the other, of literally being in touch with the other, of
feeling the exchange of e-motion in the binding obligations of entan-
glements. That is, perhaps what we must face in thinking responsibil-
ity and justice is the existence of the inhuman as threaded through
and lived through us, as enabling us, and every being/becoming, to
reach out to the insensible otherness that we might otherwise never
touch. The indeterminacy at the heart of being calls out to us to
respond. Living compassionately, sharing in the suffering of the other,
does not require anything like complete understanding (and might,
in fact, necessitate the disruption of this very yearning). Rather, living
compassionately requires recognizing and facing our responsibility to
the infinitude of the other, welcoming the stranger whose very exist-
ence is the possibility of touching and being touched, who gifts us
with both the ability to respond and the longing for justice-to-come.

I would like to thank Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier for

providing a home for a correct version of this essay. Thanks also to
Sophia Roosth, Astrid Schrader, and Elizabeth Weed for inviting a
creative and provocative response to the essays that appeared in the
special issue of differences. I am grateful to Lina Dib, Eva Hayward,
Carla Hustak, Natasha Myers, Sophia Roosth, and Astrid Schrader for
the lively provocations of their essays, which inspired this response. I
am indebted to Fern Feldman for her patient reading and feedback on
the essay, for her remarkable insights, and for the gift of her enthusi-
asm in discussing quantum field theory and other wild ideas over the
years.

164
Actually 12 Times Alissa
Discoteca Flaming Star (Cristina Gómez Barrio & Wolfgang Mayer)

165

fig. 1–6
Discoteca Flaming Star (Cristina
Gómez Barrio & Wolfgang Mayer)
Actually 12 Times Alissa (Film), 2012
videostills, 2-channel video work,
each 18:13 min.
166
In Actually 12 Times Alissa we find ourselves with four co-performers
and the audience in a very cramped space, a private theatre box. The
co-performers bear texts inscribed on their backs: texts that we read,
recite, and sing.
These are stills from a hybrid between a performance for the camera
and a documentation of this performance. Its point of departure is
the queer community, which searches the vicinity for a monster. In
the performance the bodies of the co-performers become carriers of a
fragility implied in the concept of monstrosity that becomes apparent
in a story about the Russian-American writer Ayn Rand, the author of
the novel Atlas Shrugged (1957) and an icon of American liberalism.
The performance refers to Rand’s convictions as both the presence of
and the embodiment of monstrosity.
It is said that monstrous creatures bring back that which is excluded
from public discourse. Wolfgang speaks and sings, performing as a
member of the queer community through Ayn Rand and slowly be-
comes her medium. Cristina moves the bodies of the spectators and
co-performers through the space, using the co-performers as material
from which the texts are read – as a mute part of monstrosity. Another
voice enters the space, Jacques Brel’s song Amsterdam, which extols
the harbor as a cramped, brutal, sexualised, and exuberant space.
In Actually 12 Times Alissa, concepts obtain both a place and a body
that is reconfigured, reread, and resung from different positions.
Monsters are a material-semiotic hybrid that are located in perpetual
negotiation and action. They are embodiments, yet they must equally
contain an element of disembodiment in order to remain monstrous.
In Actually 12 Times Alissa monstrosity is simultaneously embodied
and transported, and remains in the space with us and leaps beyond it.
167
168
169
170
171
172
 1
Crisis and Materiality in Art: Gilbert Simondon, who studied
with George Canguilhem and
On the Becoming of Form and Digitality Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is primarily
Kerstin Stakemeier known outside of France through
his foundational influence on the
work of Gilles Deleuze and Bernard
Stiegler. “On the Mode of Existence
of Technical Objects” was part of
his doctoral thesis and was im-
mediately published in French upon
its completion. Only in recent years
have scattered translations of his
writing begun in German and Eng-
lish. See Arne De Boever, Alex Mur-
ray, Jon Roffe, Ashley Woodward
eds., Gilbert Simondon. Being and
Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2012).
2
Gilbert Simondon, Die Existenz-
weise technischer Objekte (Zürich-
Berlin: diaphanes, 2012).
3
Ibid., p. 109.
4
Gilbert Simondon, On The Mode
of Existence of Technical Objects,
trans. Ninian Mellamphy (Paris: Au-
bier, Edition Montaigne, 1980). See
https://english.duke.edu/uploads/
assets/Simondon_MEOT_part_1.
Against all earlier hopes, the survival of mankind in and after the pdf, p. 4 (last accessed: 9.6.2014).
modern industrial age has turned out not to be automatable. On the
contrary, it entirely depends on the continued active restoration of its
material living conditions. Gilbert Simondon1 describes this connec-
tion between humans and their machines in the 1950s in On the
Mode of Existence of Technical Objects2 as a tragically truncated,
restricted, and limiting way of living for both because, “man’s aliena-
tion vis à vis the machine isn’t only socio-economic, but also has
a psycho-physiological sense; the machine no longer expands the
image of the body, whether for the worker or for those who own the
machine.”3 In machines, humankind’s fatal self-restraint manifests
itself. In humankind, the creation of the machine stabilises itself as
a border of his/her own body. This brings about a relationship of
continued reciprocal curtailment and scarcity. For Simondon, aliena-
tion is therefore not the result of machinery, but rather the outcome
of the continual restraints of its (and therefore also humans’) “margin
of indetermination.” This “margin of indetermination”4 signifies the
expanded potential that still corresponds to each technical object in
its development, an early ambiguity of its possible modes of existing,
an open range of applications that, over the course of its completion
for industrial production, is perpetually narrowed and sharpened. It is
aimed at exactly that function that the object should henceforth fulfil
in the manufacturing process. And to ensure this function, all other
possible modes of existence of this object are systematically exclud-
ed. From Simondon’s perspective, the continued industrial division of
labour is thus not only limited to, as Karl Marx described it, subjects'
abilities to repetitively fulfil the – when seen individually – senseless fig. 1 (opposite page)
Harald Popp,
steps of a procedure, but how this limitation of technical objects also Untitled, Zenit II, B, 2013,
systematically prevents a meaningful physical bond to them. C-Print, 30 × 20 cm.

173
 5
Ibid., p. 3. Machines therefore only appear in the industrialised world as either
6
John Milios, Spyros Lapatsioras, “simple assemblies of material,” “that are quite without true mean-
Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos, A Political ing and that only provide utility,” or it “assumes that these objects
Economy of Contemporary Capital-
ism and Its Crisis: Demystifying are robots that harbour intentions hostile to man.”5 The self-induced
Finance (London: Routledge, 2013). restraint within this system returns as a threat of an non absorbable
7
See Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting
potential, as fear of the machine’s reverberations. In its fear of the ma-
Without Producing (London, New levolent robot, the outsourced “margin of indetermination” of techni-
York: Verso, 2013), Maurizio Laz-
zarato, The Making of the Indebted
cal objects, appears to endanger humankind through a potential in
Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal the machine that she/he no longer comprehends. Therefore, it’s not
Condition (Amsterdam: Semiotext(e) least the limitation on functionality that induces the ongoing crisis-
Interventions, 2011) or Christian
Marazzi, Verbranntes Geld (Zürich, proneness of this functionality. Because through this restriction no
Berlin: diaphanes, 2011). “margin of indetermination” remains that would allow humankind to
8
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of operate with technical objects beyond labour. In labour, humans like
Political Economy, Vol. 3 (London: machines, are rationalised into an irrational relation.
Penguin, 1993), p. 317–375.

In the historical overview, crises of this (self)enforced functionalism

are not the exceptions, but the rule of the modern world. On a global
scale, there has still not been a crisis-free time, and even where
the perspective is restricted to an impossible snippet of the North-
Western, formally industrialised nations, general prosperity as an
ideology itself remains the exception. Crisis is the continual threat to
a norm constructed from its oppression, displacement, and deferral.
The following text is about crisis-proneness as a standard, continuous
form and the material dynamic of our contemporary life, connecting
the present propensity towards New Materialisms and the ongoing
financialised crisis of global capital, which began in 2008.6 Art takes
on a special role in this context. In art, the figure of the restricted and
menacing technology returns in converted form. Because art poses
questions about the “margin of indetermination” of technical objects
anew.

A Digital Now

Global capitalism’s continuous form of financialised crisis that came

to light in 2008 consists not least of a string of materialisations of so-
cial relations. In a way, “crisis” itself is not least a term characterizing
the termination of seemingly frictionless functional social contexts
and processes of mediation, for the visualisation of economic rela-
tions as social ones, and the materialisation of them in their failure.
More broadly, this applies to a crisis that marks the fatal and structur-
al failure of a development in which, since the late 1990s, increasing
attempts were made to emancipate industrial profit margins from
(material) labour through a relocation of industrial resources to the
finance market. Like Costas Lapavitsas and others have shown,7 com-
panies founded their own banks, operated as banks themselves, and
thus financialised their mode of existence, where henceforth material
production was only a minor subdomain.

The figure of the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall”8 as already

envisaged by Karl Marx, is a trend in a progressive technologisation

174
 9
of capitalist production. With this term, Marx identified the process of See Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus
Value (New York: Prometheus, 2000)
the technical intensification of production necessary for profit maxi- p. 419.
misation, which uses human work less and less. Marx also claims that 10
Lapavitsas 2013 (footnote 7).
it is this act of making mechanical production more efficient through
11
machines themselves that leads to capital’s perpetual propensity to- Maurizio Lazzarato, “On the
Californian Utopia / Ideology,” in:
wards crisis, because a surplus value can only be attained though the Diedrich Diederichsen, Anselm
expenditure of human labour.9 It’s indeed this relationship between Franke, eds., The Whole Earth:
labour and profit that was believed to be overcome in financialisa- California and the Disappearance
of the Outside (Berlin: Sternberg
tion through what Lapavitsas calls the ideology of “profiting without Press, 2013), p. 167.
producing.”10 But the notion of what Marx describes as a continu- 12
See Gerald A. Epstein, ed.,
ally expanding and specialising differentiation of labour in industry Finalisation and the World Economy
returns in Simondon, as described earlier, as an expanded theory of (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2005).

psycho-biological alienation, which wasn’t overcome through the 13

See Costas Lapavitsas’ contribu-
financialisation of capital, but only fatally circumvented. tion to this book, p. 185.

The functionalisation of technical objects presented by Simondon

shifted from restricting the functionalist utilisation of people and
machines in industry to an apparent subtraction of people from this
equation. While it needed human and machinic tools prepared to
functions alongside one another in industrial production, the drastic
expansion of the financial markets brought about new “montages
(assemblages) of matter” and a new “robot”: the modern nightmare
of fully-automated production. This vision, according to which
machines conspire against their operators, returned in the bursts of
digitalisation that accompanied financialisation in the 1990s as night-
mare of humans’ exclusion from the “margin of indetermination”
opened in this progression: as a machine whose functional limitation
excludes humans themselves as a dysfunctional “margin of indetermi-
nation.” In the 2000s, the financialised ideology of a fully-digitalised
capital completed this movement to nightmare, in which the disso-
nance between humans’ material lives and the digital functionalism
of their machines, as Maurizio Lazzarato describes them, became
omnipresent material. “During the finical crisis, machines failed to
provide for any measure of self-deregulation (ninety percent of share
price valuations are automatically generated). On the contrary, their
automation often amplified the disequilibrium.”11 The material ramifi-
cations of this digitalised valuation crisis took place amid human life.

Two notions assumed by Marx have therefore returned in the present

in a new form. First and foremost, the continuous financialisation of
capital since the 199012 wasn’t exactly based on an expanded techni-
cisation of production, but on the fundamental digitalisation, not only
of production, but above all its entities of distribution and valuation.
The focus shifted from the production of goods to their mediation.13
The crisis resulting from this mediation cannot be intercepted within
a further intensification of this digitalisation. Instead, the appearances
of digitalization as financialisation produced a social opposition
between the reproduction of material production (the importance
of individual lives) on one hand and the reproduction of (financial-
ised) capital (the digital measure of value) on the other. This contrast

175
 14
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “The
Mind’s We: Morphogenesis and
the Chaosmic Spasm,” in: Arne De
Boever, Warren Neidich, eds., The
Psychopathologies of Cognitive
Capitalism: Part One (Berlin: Archive
Books, 2013), p. 31.
15
See Milios, Lapatsioras, Sotiro-
poulos 2013 (footnote 6).
176
concretely returns in the financialised crisis as a loss of the standard
of value: financialised and material developments brutally clash. The
digital value production and analogue loss of value, robots and hu-
mans, no longer appeared to be confined to the same functional log-
ic. The digital unleashing of automatisation described in the citation
by Lazzarato, compels humans to redefine the “modes of existence of
technical objects.” Digitally carried to the extremes, this functionalism
maximised the psycho-physiological alienation of humankind.
Enduring Crisis
It appears today that the paradigm shift demanded by such a crisis
remains unlocatable – thus the loss of standard retaliates against
the subject herself. Franco “Bifo” Berardi describes our present as a
continual prevention of a necessary paradigm shift. “The paradigm
shift is a general tendency inscribed in the evolution of contents of
knowledge, technology, and social production, but this tendency
is hindered by entangling forms, which act as a form of repetitive
semiotiser generating double binds in the social mind.”14 Currently,
the crisis of humans and their every day life is therefore not least con-
nected to a critical form, within which they possess a function that
is no longer able to be fulfilled. This structure of a present that acts
against itself in crisis, as John Milios argued, can to the same degree
also be ascribed to past crises of an industrialising modernity. Its
functional limitations, which have become antagonistic, also didn’t
resolve themselves, but have been merely shifted through state-
sponsored and economic crisis management.15 Its material discrep-
ancies and frictions carried into the present. Our present is in so far
ultimately a constellation of different historical crises, whose order is
determined by the last crisis, the one of digital financialisation.
In Anja Kirschner and David Panos’ artistic work, this dynamic in-
 16
creasingly finds form from the visual signature of historical moments See also their contribution to this
publication, p. 192.
of crisis. Their productions develop exemplary historical constella-
17
tions by means of their material contemporaneity in our time.16 For Simondon 2012 (footnote 1),
p. 226.
example, The Last Days of Jack Sheppard (2009) appears against the
background of the South Sea Bubble of 1720: the first speculation
bubble of the Early Modern Age. The story of the thief Jack Sheppard
and his ghost-writing autobiographer Daniel Defoe seems as an alle-
gory for the exceedingly contemporary connection of cultural identity
formation and financial speculation. In Ultimate Substance (2012),
a film that explores the development of monetary form and thought
form in Greek antiquity, the contemporaneity of this connection
with the current crisis of the Greek state is more than clear. Digital-
ity is present here as a visible element of the film’s production: as a
greenscreen, in front of which rock samples circle and dancers’ filth-
smeared bodies make mechanistic movements. In this work, digitality
and materiality plunge into and over one another, inseparably bound
in the shared continuing historical power relations.

Indeed, crises appear first and foremost to have an invariably eco-

nomic expression, however their material forms of existence are
cultural, political, ecological, social, and psychological. Both human
and material crises delineate themselves in individuation, as mutat-
ing processes that form societal relations. Therefore a suspension of
the crisis within the economy is inconceivable, only its regulation.
The process by which crisis-prone materialities become clear beyond
their economic mediation could, on the other hand, according to
Simondon, enable another understanding of the technical object and
therein also an understanding of subjects beyond their functionalistic
limitations. “One must treat formation as a special technical opera- fig. 2–3
Anja Kirschner, David Panos,
tion, instead of treating all technical operations as special cases of Ultimate Substance, 2012,
formation that, for their part, are only dimly known through labour.”17 videostill, HDV Video, 34 min.

177
 18
Florian Cramer spoke about this
within the framework of Fragile
Identities, a symposium held by cx
center for interdisciplinary studies
on 10 January 2014. See also
Florian Cramer’s 2013 interview
with neural 44: http://monoskop.
org/images/f/f4/Florian_Cramer_In-
terview_Neural_2013.pdf (last
accessed: 9.6.2014).
19
See here the exhibition Specula-
tions on Anonymous Materials,
curated by Susanne Pfeffer at
Fridericianum in Kassel from 29
September 2013 to 25 Februar
2014.
178
In the financialised crisis of capital, digitalisation materialises itself as
a meta-medium of failed social mediation. In this failure, the traces
of digitalisation gained visibility far beyond the financial sector in
people’s everyday lives. The digital materialised itself beyond the
computer, beyond stock markets, beyond the World Wide Web: in
foreclosed mortgages, in devalued pensions, collapsing banks, and
pawned countries. However, at the same time, this digital forma-
tion led to an actualisation of the connection between humans and
technical objects. This can be seen in how Anonymous, originally a
primarily digital movement, materialised on the streets of large cities
around the world,18 or in the artistic formations of a digital concep-
tualization of humanity. A reversal is taking place in both cases: a dis-
course started to develop humans as an expansion of the body image
of digital technical objects. A process of formation started to fall into
place, one that developed through the perception of both technical
objects and human experience as digital.
In recent years, this connection has brought artistic production to the
forefront, primarily that of younger artists, whose ways of working
mix the digital (mass)cultural identification patterns of humans and
objects, placing their reciprocal interpenetration in the centre.19 It
gave rise to an understanding of materiality in which digital machin-
ery could no longer be confronted by humans as evil robots, but is
instead subsumed into their own body image. The digital again oper-
ates therein as meta-medium, it appears as a structure of materiality
in the object’s DNA, the materials, the (mass)media, the art forms.
Here, with the understanding of social (re)production, the artistic also
shifts, and the specifics of media order themselves anew according to
the stipulations of the digital paradigm.
It therefore requires an understanding of the formation of materiali-
ties, in which they don’t remain in the status of representation of
the crisis, but become indicators of an order of things beyond the
crisis. An artistic becoming of form, which doesn’t start by allegedly
suspending technical operations, but by locating them in the midst of
their own production to significantly expand the “margin of indeter-
mination” of the technical objects and thus their own.
Material Times
Nostalgia, limitations, and conservatism arise where this process re-
formulates itself, not through its topicality, but through an idealisation
of allegedly “simpler” production norms of the past. Past constella-
tions of crises are ultimately stylised as naturalised forms of living
beyond technicity. This tendency not only influenced the trend of mo-
dernity prevalent in contemporary art over the past few years, whose
contemporariness is not discussed through its digital mediations, but
rather as a lost status that needs to be imported to the present. But
this status opens neither perspectives nor spheres of action, only an
apparent stabilisation via forced regression. In moments of crisis the
 20
See also their contribution to this
publication, p. 165.

present decomposes into pasts and futures: it appears as a return of

the repressed, as well as projection back onto seemingly consistent
pre-histories, as visions of future solutions and apocalyptic stages of
disintegration. In the midst of the questionable present lie the crisis
of unsettled pasts. The technologisation was not conciliated through
digitalisation, but rather actualised in its antagonisms.

In Eigentlich 12 Mal Alissa (Actually 12 Times Alissa), a performance

and film installation by the artist collective Discoteca Flaming Star,
it’s indeed this movement of actualisation that enters the present as
fig. 4–5
embodied monstrosity.20 It materialises in language and the body: Discoteca Flaming Star (Cristina
a performer clad in only a fur coat and heavy make-up while who Gómez Barrio & Wolfgang Mayer)
Actually 12 Times Alissa (Film),
speaks about and through the texts of Ayn Rand, a central heroine in 2012, production stills, 2-channel
the wholesale deregulation associated with the North American mod- video work, each 18:13 min.

179
 21
See Theodor W. Adorno, Aes­
thetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-
Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf
Tiedemann (London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2013).
22
See Peter Bürger, Theory of the
Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1984).
23
See Chris Bezzel, Peter Brückner,
Gisela Dischner, Peter Gorsen, Al-
fred Krovoza, Gabriele Ricke, Alfred
Sohn-Rethel, et al., Das Unvermö-
gen der Realität. Beiträge zu einer
anderen materialistischen Ästhetik
(Berlin: Wagenbach, 1974).
24
Peter Gorsen, Transformierte
Alltäglichkeit oder Transzendenz
der Kunst (Ausgewählte Schriften
II) (Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische
Verlagsanstalt, 1981), p. 261.
25
Simondon 2012 (footnote 1),
p. 223.
180
el of capitalism. Rand was the author of Atlas Shrugged (1957), in
which capitalism appears as the ideal of a (natural)force on auto-pilot
that is led by “accomplished” individuals. Her functionalism without
boundaries, the conception of humans and machine counterparts as
pure means to an end re-emerges in the performance not only in the
texts, but also in the spatial setting. In the backroom of a theatre, the
performer reads the quotes from human implements: the backs of
the co-performers, who are pushed towards him through the nar-
row room by a second person. But here the movements are loving,
suited to the bodies. Rand’s literary and political mission of glorifying
an a-social society isn’t repeated, but its aspects return in Discoteca
Flaming Star’s performance as social and literary monstrosity of a past
in the middle of the present, as an inheritance that follows us, whose
spirit subsists in the present and seems to politically persist in the
German crisis politics of the past years.
In many respects, artistic production thus plays a special role in this
context then as well as now. In technical times it operated more as
solution than as a problem. Still, the discussions of the 1970s, which
revolved around books like Theodor Adorno’s posthumously-pub-
lished Aesthetic Theory 21, Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde 22
(1974), or the Das Unvermögen der Realität 23 (1974), published by
Peter Brückner, Gisela Dischner, Peter Gorsen, Alfred Sohn-Rethel,
and others, attempted to assess aesthetic formation as utopian
production in the middle of the social-capitalistic alienation, which
Rand envisioned as ideal: in Adorno it takes the form of attempting
to actualise the modern promise of the emancipation of the subject,
for Bürger it’s the revitalisation of the anti-institutional spirit of the
pre-war avant-garde, while for Gorsen it is an “operative aesthetic”
reaching beyond art. Art emerges here as unalienated labour beyond
industrial production, as its utopian counter-model of a continuous
process of formation.24 A production norm that emerges entirely from
the materiality of its means of production, that was bound firmly to
the limits of artistic mediums, which differentiated it from the techni-
cal means of production. But if one follows Simondon in his under-
standing that alienation doesn’t manifest itself in industrial labour as
alienation from the machine, but also understands it as alienation
with the machine, an “operative” understanding of artistic produc-
tion forms, as Gorsen surmised, in which the process of formation
does not gain autonomy through a demarcation from machinery, but
rather, through a perception of technical objects in the middle of
painting, drawing, and sculpture. “It is,” according to Simondon, “the
work that must be recognised as a stage of technicity, not technic-
ity as a stage of the work because technicity is the ensemble of
which the work is a part of, and not the other way around.”25 Artistic
production thus appears as a materialising activity in which work is
only a piece of it. The “operative” as a standard of production beyond
labour emerged within this context already with Simondon, as the
“invention” of a way that technical objects function, whose use is
 26
transcended in labour as “the carrier and symbol of a relation that Ibid., 228.
we’d like to call trans-individual,”26 which for Simondon is a basis of 27
See Tim Ingold’s contribution
an alternative anthropology.27 to this volume, as well as Muriel
Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the
Philosophy of the Transindividual
Just after the Second World War, in the afterlife of industries, the (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).
modern way of life in art began to noticeably shift. What Bürger 28
See Theodor W. Adorno, “Art and
sought above all, and what is still omnipresent today as a nostal- the Arts,” in: Rolf Tiedemann ed.,
Can One Live After Auschwitz?: a
gic penchant for modernism, was an actualisation of the utopian Philosophical Reader (Redwood
promises of an unalienated labour – whose fulfilment was coupled City: Stanford University Press,
with the underlying non-simultaneity of art as a form of production 2003), p. 368–381.

in the afterlife of technology on one hand and, on the other, with an 29

Juliane Rebentisch, Aesthetics
understanding of this technology as fundamentally less free and more of Installation Art (Berlin: Sternberg
Press, 2012), p. 99.
alienated. However, in post-war art, artistic genres and technical
30
tools joined to become expanded artistic media and the formation See Adorno 2013, (footnote 21),
pp. 81–82.
of art radically mixed with other areas of production. What Juliane
31
Rebentisch characterised as an “aesthetic of installation,” in an Ibid., p. 45.
expansion of the Adornian study of the “fraying”28 of the arts, is, as
she presents, considerably characterised by an “intermediality”29 of
all artistic work. Rebentisch thus characterises a simultaneous present
of different media within artworks, in which the hierarchisation of
artistic genres no longer determine the composition of a work, but
migrate with the hierarchies of the non-originary artistic media in ar-
tistic work: a social synchronisation of art with technical production,
which began to establish itself in the 1960s as “contemporary art.”

The difference between “purposeful” and “autonomous” media

emerges as early as Adorno.30 However, unlike Rebentisch, for Ador-
no both exist within art, under the “aegis” of traditional boundaries
of genre. “The antagonism in the concept of technique as something
determined inner-aesthetically and as something developed exter-
nally to artworks, should not be conceived as absolute. It originated
historically and can pass. In electronics it is already possible to
produce artistically by manipulating means that originated extra-
aesthetically.”31

The electronics that Adorno recognised as a new medium of art in

the 1960s has been complemented through a digital structure since
the 1990s, in which the intermediality that Rebentisch portrays was
reconstructed on a new basis. It’s no longer the manifold specific-
ity of technical media that’s pulled into the artistic and recognised
there that brings art nowadays into proximity of the social everyday
and forms it materialities, but the medium of the digital that has
undergone crisis. Its presentness in artistic media, however, doesn’t
first and foremost follow a visual recognisability, but rather a form
of perception, an expanded image of the body in which, as previ-
ously described, human and machinic materialise themselves both
alongside and in one another. It’s not the obvious digitally animated
artworks that are therefore crucially the “most digital” at their core,
but rather those that trace digitality in the signature of the present,

181
 32
Simondon 2012 (footnote 1), which traverses all forms of production: its recognisability, its repeat-
p. 228.
ability and, above all, determines its social consequences. The digital
crisis of financialisation produces a disparate materiality of techni-
cal innovation, whose connections and mediations were omitted or
discontinued. Not only unconnected presents come into relation with
one another here, but Modernisms and post-Modernisms also mate-
rialise themselves as unredeemed relationships in the present, bound
through a failed standard, the meta-medium of the digital.

As opposed to the industrialised logic of production that Simon-

don describes, from which Adorno and Bürger also depart, and
which continues to be postulated for the industrial synchronicity of
contemporary art, digitalisation as a meta-medium of financialised
production no longer creates a social synthesis of these different
production paradigms in its current crisis. Its ideological position-
ing as a medium of financialisation, that abandonment of industrial
production mentioned at the beginning of this text, created a purely
analytical simultaneity, which calculates every material formation as
asynchronous. The synchronicity of the financial market that Laz-
zarato describes and the synchronicity of industrial production that
Simondon presents exist in radically different temporalities. Today
both are permeated by the digital, but their ideologically dematerial-
ised understanding through financialisation sets them, as described
before, against one another. And again, it is Simondon’s understand-
ing of a materiality of technical objects permeating society that tran-
scends these differentiations by circumventing them, because “the
hierarchical distinction of the manual and the intellectual doesn’t find
any resonation in the world of technical objects.”32 According to this
perspective, industrial and digital (re)production aren’t opposites, but
a gradual displacement. Digitality is an ultimately material phenom-
enon that, as a meta-medium, fundamentally renews, even expands
the “horizon of indetermination” of technical objects and man in
their mediation between one another.

The digitality of the 1990s, described earlier as an angsty vision of an

evil overtaking by self-aware computers, returned in 2008 with the
financialised crisis as the existence of an omnipresent meta-medium.
If the digital was then a foreign world of imitation, not quite decep-
tively genuine, today it is the signature of the world, more real than
its opposite, and more material. The authenticity of the copy is out
of question, but the reality of the original is extremely doubtful at
present. In his photographic arrangements, the photographer Harald
Popp produces incidental idealisations of this social condition’s gen-
eral disparity, in which materialities are indeed ubiquitous, but their
context must be newly established. Popp negotiates the momentous
consequence of media’s digitalisation in 1990s photography and
video art, depriving it of its speculative character. If it was a sensation
of image construction in the 1990s that could ultimately be pro-
duced without print, today the real material impression of this digital

182
construction is distinctive and omnipresent, as explained. Popp’s
work is based on how the digital impacts the present, by which he
builds a digitality of the banal, an exquisite beauty of plastics. Popp
starts from a visual present in which the analogue is derived from
the digital, also in the arts, whether in photography, sculpture, video,
painting, or drawing. The classic and the “new” artistic mediums
connect through the shared social meta-medium. The specificities of
media actualise themselves and their relationships to one another.
The alienation that Simondon described, the delimitation of the
“body schema” through and for machines, is, in Popp and others,
a point of departure for a new corporeality. In his photographs, the
body of objects, like those of people, are equally effects of their
digitisation. They are no longer systemically differentiated from one
another artificial and natural are equally effects of this develop-
ment. Popp therefore conceptualises a body schema in which the
crossover between man and machine is reformulated to depart from
the digitalised machine. According to Popp, the difference between
the two is incremental because human perception and behaviour
is preceded by the digital machinic. The limits of the human body
schema are made productive here as an experience of a disparate
contemporary materiality. However, starting points develop for a new
“margin of indetermination” out of it. Popp fills it with endless se-
quences. He creates digital-photographic image worlds as situations
in which he allows objects to perform digitality. The random things of
the world contend to be digital. Therefore Popp allows digital steps
of a procedure like colouring, converting, moving, mirroring, and
duplicating to run through series of analogue superstructures, whose
photographic peculiarities he systematically unfolds. Popp’s photo-
graphs are limitless, particularised test images, whose sharpness is
digital handiwork and the work that frames and permeates this text
demonstrate this by means of seemingly digital palettes for colour-
ing, as well as spatial comparison: sign systems that Popp produced
analogously. Popp exhumes the digital from analogue objects and
thus pushes their materiality to the forefront, the indicidental nature
of their digital mode of existence

Relieved of the originary task of the image, representation, Popp’s

photographs ultimately recalibrate the observer’s perspective anew.
We are the ones who get adjusted to the analogue digital construc-
tion. Popp’s works are manipulations of a highly-concentrated gaze
– no optical illusions. When an LED-light and a ball balance on the
ceramic nose of a seal in the large-format photo series Untitled RGB
LED, Position 3 (2013), appearing in seven colour levels and photo-
graphed with flash, than the demonstrated effect is the emergence
of the particular complementary colour of the light on the animal,
which was actually white, exceedingly analogue. But the vision that
it offers us remains digital as an image. It is the view that has become
digital, and Popp uses photography to enact this upon us. It doesn’t
need the view into the allegedly “pure” digital of computers in order

183
 to see digitality. Because digitality still lives in the seemingly discard-
ed and out of fashion objects of our environment.

Our current financialised crisis has allowed a flood of materialities to

come to the forefront that erupt from unresolved pasts as well as the
dysfunctional present. This ultimately raises the question of how the
digital production paradigm that was brought about by this crisis, and
in which countless crisis that preceded it resonate, could eventu-
ally be subverted by these materialities. What can cause these New
Materialisms to overcome an ongoing crisis-ridden alienation, to an
expansion of a body schema of humankind that reaches inside the
machines, to a shared media-specificity of humankind and machinery?

fig. 6–12
Harald Popp,
Untitled, RGB LED, Position 3,
2013. C-Print, 52,5 × 78,5 cm.

184
 1
The (Im)Materiality of Economy See Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting
Without Producing (Verso: London
Costas Lapavitsas and New York, 2013).
2
Ibid., e.g. chapter 2.
3
See for example, J. Bellamy
Foster, “The Financialization of Cap-
italism,” in: Monthly Review, vol.
58, no. 11 (New York, 2007), http://
monthlyreview.org/2007/04/01/the-
financialization-of-capitalism (last
accessed 22.4.2014).
4
Gerald A. Epstein, ed., Finan-
cialization and the World Economy
(Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2005).

What is financialisation? This is a question that I discuss in my new

book “Profiting without Producing”1 which I want to outline here
with respect to the relation of financialisation and (im)materiality.
All of us can see that finance has become much more important in
contemporary capitalism than it has been historically, and than it was
three, four decades ago. So, on one level the rise of finance is obvi-
ous but, of course, the rise of finance alone is not financialisation.
We need greater precision, greater accuracy. There are basically two
theoretical approaches in the existing literature on the topic2, and
there is a substantial literature available now, people more and more
discuss financialisation. One strain comes from the orthodox Marxist
tradition and the other from radical economics.

The first approach basically argues that financialisation is a kind of

escape of productive capital from the sphere of production to the
sphere of finance. The sphere of production has become dysfunc-
tional, profitability is low, accumulation is problematic and because
of this situation, capital tries to escape to finance, seeks to make
profits in finance. This is an orthodox Marxist approach, associated
originally with the New Left Review current in the United States.3 The
second approach, in contrast, argues that basically financialisation
is a policy outcome. It is the result of changed government policies
with respect to finance: governments have deregulated the financial
system, finance has grown enormously, and its growth is creating
problems for production. In some ways the second is the opposite of
the first approach.4

What I am arguing is that we need to think both more structurally

and more historically about financialisation. It seems to me that
financialisation represents a historical and structural transformation
of capitalism, which is deeper than either a policy change or simply
the escape of capital from production to finance. Financialisation is
a structural transformation, a historical change and in that way it is
comparable to the rise of finance one hundred years ago. In a way

185
 5
Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
R., 1981), German Original Edition
published 1910.
6
For an excellent critical discussion
see William Lazonick and Mary
O’Sullivan, “Maximizing shareholder
value: a new ideology for corporate
governance,” in: Economy and
Society, 29/1 (London: 2000),
pp. 13–35.
186
we are living through the second wave of financialisation in mature
capitalism. The first took place towards the end of the 19th century,
when the phenomena of finance capital, analysed by Rudolf Hilfer­
ding in Austria and Germany,5 emerged in parallel with the rise of
imperialism. Thus, I would argue that we are witnessing the second
wave of the rise of finance, which is historically comparable to the
first, but also fundamentally different.
There are three characteristic tendencies that define contemporary
financialisation. The first has to do with productive capital, in so far
as large, non-financial, corporate enterprises, whether they are indus-
trial or commercial, have become financialised. The financialisation
of these large industrial and commercial enterprises means, first and
foremost, that they rely on their own resources to finance investment
activities. In other words – and this is a very important point regard-
ing the financialisation of the large conglomerates – it means that
they do not rely heavily on banks, or on the external financial system.
On the contrary they rely mostly on their own resources: big business
today is mostly self-financed. Now, because investment is mostly
self-financed, big businesses have become capable of intervening in
the realm of finance on their own account. They undertake financial
activities to make profits, financial transactions to earn returns in the
sphere of finance, again relatively independently of banks and other
financial institutions. They have become financialised in that way,
that is, they have become financial players, financial agents in their
own right. A further implication of this tendency is that big businesses
have been transformed internally. The prerogatives and concerns of
finance as well as the drive to make financial profits have become
very powerful and dominant in some respects. In short, the financiali-
sation of non-financial enterprises means that they have transformed
themselves, they have become fundamentally differently organised.
“Shareholder value” is the central ideology of this trend. “Sharehold-
er value” is the ideology of big business that captures financialisation
insofar as it reflects the dominant role of the valuation methods of
stock markets within non-financial enterprises.6
The second characteristic tendency of the financialisation of contem-
porary capitalism, I would ague, is related to the first and has to do
with the transformation of banks themselves. Banks are, of course,
capitalist businesses, they aim at making profits. If non-banks, i.e.,
industrial and commercial enterprises, have been transformed and
are more independent of banks, then banks must seek other profit-
making opportunities. Banks must change what they do and, indeed,
banks have changed what they do in two ways. First, banks have
turned to the open markets of finance aiming to make profits not out
of lending and borrowing, but out of transacting in financial assets.
Banks have become players in the big financial markets and make
profits increasingly out of fees, commissions and transacting on their
account. Investment banking has become more and more important
for contemporary banks. Second, and just as important and striking
for contemporary capitalism, is that banks have turned towards
households and towards individuals. Banks have begun to look at the
income and the wealth of households and individual workers as a
profit source, as an area of profit making. This brings me to the third
tendency: the transformation of households and the transformation of
workers and the transformation of everyday life of individuals. Indi-
viduals have become financialised while their livelihood has become
a source of profit for banks. Our economic and broader social life
has become geared to the concerns and the requirements of finance,
particularly formal finance, as contemporary capitalism has been
transformed.

It is common to approach this change through the question of indebt-

edness, arguing that: “Households have become more indebted”.
This is true, households have become more indebted, though not so
much in Germany, to which I will return at a later point, but in the
United States, in the United Kingdom, in France, and in many other
countries. Households have indeed become more indebted, and
that is not simply the result of low wages. It is frequently argued that
wages have not been rising, and thus people have been borrowing
constantly to survive. To some extend this is true, but it cannot be the
structural reason for the turn of ordinary people towards finance, be-
cause if wages do not rise, how are you then going to pay back your
debts? The reasons why indebtedness has been increasing among
households are more complex.

Wages have indeed not been increasing fast, but rising indebtedness
among households has to do with the retreat of public provision
across a range of goods and services that working people rely on.
Housing, education, health, transport, a range of services that used to
be publicly provided to a certain extent are now privately provided,
and this private provision is frequently mediated by the financial
system. The financial system has emerged as a mediating agent for or-
dinary people to satisfy everyday needs and thus the financial system
has been making profits out of people’s incomes, not out of bor-
rowing and lending to businesses alone. But the financialisation of
households is more complex than that still and does not refer simply
to debt. Households have also become financialised with regard to
their own assets, because people save and their savings have become
increasingly financialised. A large part of the funds that have been
directed to the large markets for finance comprises people’s pensions,
insurance policies and so on. The money collected in these ways has
been redirected to the large financial markets, and once again finan-
cial institutions are mediating and making profits. In short, financial
institutions make profits out of people’s debts as well as of people’s
assets. I would argue that this is a characteristic feature of financial-
ised capitalism, it is a new way of making profits, which I suggest that
we call “financial expropriation”.

187
 7
The peculiarities of German vs.
US, Japanese and UK financialisa-
tion are discussed in depth in Lapa-
vitsas 2013 (footnote 1) e.g. chapter
3. These peculiarities underpin the
ongoing crisis of the Eurozone,
on which see Costas Lapavitsas
u.a., Crisis in the Eurozone (Verso:
London, 2012).

This is what I understand by financialisation, and I would argue that

these three trends characterise mature capitalist countries. However,
I am prepared to say that they are variable from country to country –
financialisation exhibits a variety of form. Financialisation in Ger-
many is actually quite different from the way financialisation looks
in France, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.7 In Germany, for
instance, there is less reliance on mortgages to acquire housing and
rental accommodation is more widely used. Therefore, financialisa-
tion of individual income is less pronounced in Germany than it is,
for example, in the United States. And of course this has had a sig-
nificant impact on what has happened in these countries since 2008.
Germany has not had a housing-bubble, unlike the United States and
the United Kingdom, and therefore the state of the German economy
is very different from that of the US and the British economy.

The most prominent differences of forms of financialisation, however,

occur not among developed countries, but between developed and
developing countries. There is financialisation in developing coun-
tries too, but this is a very new development, a new phenomenon.
There is financialisation in Brazil, financialisation in Turkey, financial-
isation in India, financialisation in many middle-income countries. It
is a remarkable phenomenon, and I would argue that it is derivative
of financialisation in mature countries. I suggest that it should be
called “subordinate financialisation”. In other words, newly emerg-
fig. 1 ing capitalist countries are also financializing, but in a derivative
Harald Popp,
Untitled, Gold, 2013-10-26, 2013,
way, a way that follows from the financialisation of mature capitalist
C-Print, 30 × 24 cm. countries.

188
 8
Now, let me turn more specifically to the question of materiality and For a detailed discussion of
financial profit see Lapavitsas 2013
immateriality, particularly of capital, because that is the focus of this (footnote 1), e.g. chapter 6.
book. I want to raise two issues in relation to this question both of 9
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (London:
which arise from financialisation. The first issue has to do with profit. Penguin/NLR, 1976), e.g. chapters
We know that profit is what makes capitalism tick, capitalism without 7–9, Original German Version pub-
lished 1867.
profit makes no sense at all – capitalism is about making profits.
10
Financialisation is also about profit and one way of looking at finan- See Lapavitsas 2013 (footnote 1),
e.g. chapter 6.
cialisation is as the rise of financial profits. However, financial profit
is a very peculiar category, which you will not find in classical politi-
cal economy, you will not find in Marxism and so on. Let us take a
very simple definition: financial profit is profit made out of financial
activities. If you think about it you will see that such profit can have
a variety of forms, it can be profit gained out of lending money, it can
be profit made out of holding equity and receiving dividends from a
company, it can be profit made out of transacting in financial assets.
It is also profit that can be earned by financial institutions, profit
that can be earned by an individual, profit that could be earned by
a manager of a financial institution or a non-financial cooperation,
which could even appears as wages. It is interesting to see that, the
capitalist class today remunerates itself to a large extent in the form
of wages and salaries, and this would basically be financial profit
appearing as someone’s monthly income. Incidentally, one cannot
measure such profit satisfactorily, because it appears in the form of
wages and one cannot distinguish it from regular wages.8

What is interesting here from our perspective is the materiality or

immateriality of financial profit. There is an inherent sense of imma-
teriality to it because this is profit that is not directly earned through
production. The classic analysis of profit in political economy is that
it is basically a flow of value that comes out of production: human
labour is expended, things are produced – goods and services – and
there is an inflow of value, which accrues the owner of the capitalist
process9. So there is an underlying materiality to the values, which
shapes normal profit. However, financial profit is not like that. Finan-
cial profit in the first instance comes purely out of transactions. It is
a difference in money sums and nothing else: one is taking out more
money than the money one has put into a transaction. This difference
could arise in a variety of ways, it could, as I have just explained,
even look like wages.

Nonetheless, if one looks more closely into financial profit one real-
ises that the difference in money sums would arise in basically two
ways. First, it could be associated with fresh flows of surplus value
generated in production, namely it would be a re-division of the prof-
it created in production. This is fairly standard Marxist understanding
of financial profit10. But, crucially, financial profit today could also
be also associated with a second source, namely the re-division of
people’s incomes and people’s monetary wealth more generally. Such
financial profit comes from a zero sum game that is being played in
financial markets. In that game there are net-losers and net-winners,

189
 11
See Lapavitsas 2013 (footnote 1) and financial profit could ultimately come out of ordinary people’s
e.g. chapter 4.
savings and salaries. Financial profit in that sense is not connected to
production, it is not connected to the creation of use values, it is just
a re-division of money stocks available to people.

The latter aspect of financial profit indicates that, in a sense, it is a

very ancient form of profit making, indeed a pre-capitalist form. I
call it “financial expropriation”, other people might prefer to call it
“plundering”. I think that it characterises contemporary capitalism
very specifically – it is a fundamental change in the form and the
substance of profit. It follows immediately that the social stratification
that characterises contemporary capitalism is also different. Capital-
ism is structured by profit making; if the form and substance of profit
changed, then the outlook of social classes would also change. The
new forms of profit have brought significant changes at the highest
levels of social stratification in contemporary capitalism, and they
have fundamental implications for the existence of the middle class
and the working class. The seeming immateriality of the expropriation
of profit through the re-division of incomes results in a new social
materiality.

The second issue I want to raise is perhaps more directly addressed

to the question of materiality and immateriality, and has to do with
money. Money is fundamental to financialisation. When we talk
about financialisation we usually refer to finance, credit, a financial
system and so on, and this is how it should be, of course. However I
would argue that at the foundations of financialisation lies money.11
In Marx’s political economy, credit is a derivative category which
follows from the category of money: one needs first to establish what
money is and then one can establish what credit is and this order, I
would argue, also prevails in reality. Credit is based on money in a
real way: when payment of credit actually takes place, it occurs in
money.

The form of money that is characteristic of financialised capitalism

is an immaterial money par excellence. Modern money is of course
credit money, it is money created by banks and in this respect there
has been nothing particularly novel to the decades of financialisation:
credit money has remained the dominant form of money. Nonethe-
less, the credit-money that is created by banks, which we hold in
our deposits and typically use, actually rests on money created by
central banks. This last form of money is actually very peculiar. It is
a form of credit money created by central banks but it is also backed
by the power of the state. It is a kind of money that rests on the say-so
of the modern state, and it does not get translated into anything, it is
just a legal tender. The money that banks create could certainly be
converted into this money by law; but the money created by central
banks could be converted into nothing, there is neither right nor
obligation to convert it into anything. It is clear that any formal link
between this money and commodity money, any formal link with the

190
 12
production of goods and value, has been cut for decades12. In short, See Lapavitsas 2013 (footnote 1),
e.g. chapter 4.
contemporary money is fundamentally immaterial: it is basically
13
credit money resting on central bank money, which is backed by the See Lapavitsas 2013 (footnote 1),
e.g. chapter 7.
word of the state. The financialisation of contemporary capitalism, to
my mind, would have been unthinkable without the control of this
kind of money by the state, or without the concomitant power that
the central bank has over the monetary system.

This aspect of money has been very important in the crisis that we
have been going through since 2008. What is it that has allowed
the state to deal with the crisis? Well, the state has done basically
two things in the United States, the United Kingdom and also in
Europe. First, it has subsidised banks by driving interest rates close to
zero and keeping them down for years; thus banks can borrow very
cheaply from the state, restore their balance sheets and make profits.
Second, the state has given to banks ample liquidity, i.e., plenty of
state-issued money, to allow banks to continue to operate and avoid
bankruptcy. Both of these fundamental operations would have been
impossible without the control of money and without the creation of
modern money by the state.

This is important for two reasons. First, because it shows that al-
though the ideology of financialised capitalism is neoliberalism13,
i.e., freedom of markets, freedom of commercial transactions, when
it comes to money, which is the most important commodity in
capitalism there is no freedom at all. At the heart of money creation
there is an absolute monopoly by the state over legal tender. That
is, neoliberal policy and neoliberal practice in the economy rests
on the complete negation of markets when it comes to money. State
control over money is what allows neoliberalism to thrive in financial
markets and elsewhere. Second, state control has been deployed
in the interests of financial agents. The central bank commands this
immaterial, inconvertible money and deploys it to serve the interests
of financial operators. The profitability of financial enterprises in the
United States collapsed in 2008 when the crisis truly hit the country.
The main concern of the state at that point was to restore financial
profitability as a means of dealing with the crisis, and it has suc-
ceeded by controlling money, thus driving interest rates down and
providing banks with liquidity.

Disconnecting money from its material foundations has allowed the

state to play this decisive role and has also allowed the financial sys-
tem to survive and grow. If money continued to be directly connect-
ed to production and to have material dimensions – if it was gold for
example, or it was still connected to gold somehow – the link with
the material world of production would not have allowed the state
to manipulate money in that way. It would have been impossible for
the state to have created liquidity in the way in which he has done,
or supported the profitability of financial institutions in the ways in
which it has done.

191
192
 1
Sell Everything, Buy Everything, Kill Everything A Narrative of all the Robberies,
Escapes &C. of Jack Sheppard:
Anja Kirschner, David Panos Giving an Exact Description of the
Manner of his wonderful Escape
from the Castle, attributed to Daniel
Defoe, first published in 1724.

25 March 2011, Palatine Hill, Rome

While walking on the Palatine Hill we are transfixed by a discrete

spectacle – almost a choreography. Archeology students are scattered
across the terrain, measuring the dimensions of buildings, which
presumably once existed, there are remaining outlines of walls in the
grass and they are referring to plans. Insulated by their i-pods against
boredom and onlookers, measuring equipment in hand, they pace
purposefully through the ruins as someone else would through a
house.

At this point we realised that whenever we had dealt with history it

had been primarily through images and texts. It seemed unnecessary,
absurd and esoteric even, to go to an actual site, and take or deduce
information directly from its material remains without any mediation
by written and pictorial representation. What kind of imagination
would be necessary for this? A “material imagination”?

16 November 1724, Tyburn, London

Jack Sheppard, a carpenter’s apprentice turned thief, who achieved

unprecedented celebrity through his frequent and skillful prison
escapes, is about to be hanged on the gallows. A third of the city’s
population has come to watch the execution and now finds itself fig. 1 (opposite page)
listening to Sheppard himself, who uses his last breath to advertise Anja Kirschner, David Panos,
The Last Days of Jack Sheppard,
his supposed autobiographical Narrative1, handing it to it’s publisher, 2009, production still, HDV video,
Applebee, in plain sight of all, before being “turned off”. 56 min.

193
 2
Benedict Seymour, “Notes on the
Last Days of Jacques Sheppard:
Capital Crimes and Paper Claims”,
www.metamute.org/editorial/
articles/notes-last-days-jack-shep-
pard-capital-crimes-and-paper-
claims (last accessed 1.5.2014).
3
Excerpt from the voiceover of “An
Exchange for Fire” (Kirschner and
Panos, 2013) by Clinical Wasteman.
4
Plato, Republic (London: Words-
worth Editions, 1997) pp. xiv–xvi.
194
In an article on our film The Last Days of Jack Sheppard (2009, fig. 1–6),
which deals with the construction of said Narrative and its ghost
writers, Benedict Seymour observes: “There is something rather ‘aes-
thetic’ about this final instant, then. To quote one of the newspapers
of the day, Sheppard was hung up and ‘dangled in the Sheriff’s pic-
ture frame’ for 15 minutes. ‘The sheriff’s picture frame’ makes clear
the tacit connections between artistic and literary representation and
the State’s repressive apparatus. Beyond any Warholian undertones,
the link between execution and celebrity is not just via the strug-
gles over the body of the malefactor, the crowd’s identification with
the victim or the ballad sellers’ narration of their life and times. In
fact, the gallows are aesthetic insofar as it constitutes a crude means
for communicating a message to those that can read Jack’s broken
body.”2
Who is the readership of the body, who of the Narrative?
413 BC, Lavrio, Attika
“20,000 slaves at Lavrio, diggers of the silver that bought the city
state of Athens its warships, fled the mines for the enemy Spartan
camp. The course of the Peloponnesian war turned when the jail-
break choked the money supply. Deprived of labour to extract more
silver, Slaveholder Democracy paid for its navy by spoiling its own
currency, coining new Tetradrachms with a silver coating on a core of
bronze. These were soon called ‘cunning coppers’: cheap tokens with
the face value of solid silver coins, bearing the same stamped image
of Athena's owl.”3
As the coins pass from hand to hand, the silver-coating wears off,
evidencing not only the increased abstraction of monetary value, but
also the slaves' mass flight from the mines. But while both move-
ments continue to coexist the former increasingly extends its domina-
tion over the latter.
In Plato’s Analogy of the Cave (written 360 B.C.) the image of cap-
tives discerning only the shadows of objects by the light of under-
ground fires is appropriated as a metaphor for our limited capacity to
distinguish between a “false” world apprehended through the senses
and a “true” abstract world apprehended by the eternal soul through
the intellect.
According to Plato, to the captives “the truth would be literally noth-
ing but the shadows of the images.”4
fig. 2–4
Anja Kirschner, David Panos,
The Last Days of Jack Sheppard,
2009, videostills, HDV video,
56 min.

195
 5
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (London: 2013, Literally nothing but…
Penguin/NLR, 1976) e.g. chapter
26. Unfortunately the addition of
“so-called” in the German original Think of the archaeology students on the Palatine Hill, Jack on the
was dropped in the English transla-
tion of Marx text. gallows at Tyburn and the slaves in the silvermines of Lavrio, as three
6
scenes, three instances when both immateriality and materiality
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte
Schriften. V, Das Passagenwerk, ed.
encroach on each other, intertwining and wrestling with each other,
Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: producing new dynamics and fresh kills.
Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 273.

Our films to date have in very different ways looked at the dynamic
relationship between the “material” domain of production and the
“immaterial” domain of representation in the context of moments
of systemic crisis. We have constantly returned to the relationship
between the economic, cultural production and culture’s relation to
class power.

We have tried to ground the immaterial in the material, without

reducing either to the other, tracing shifts in the fantasies, fictions,
myths and ideologies produced in moments of crisis, when interde-
pendencies and ruptures reach their greatest visibility.

At the same time we have repeatedly referred to instances of what

Karl Marx named “so-called primitive accumulation”.5 Moments
in which capitalism plunders resources produced outside of itself,
absorbing these ‘free inputs’ to create new property and class rela-
tions, for example in the context of the enclosures of common lands
and British colonial expansion in the 17th and 18th century, or in
the conquest of the American West. But these historical moments
become precursors to what we could still conceive as “primitive ac-
cumulation” in the present.

Whenever we have drawn on historical material in our films, we

have done so in order to open up a long-term perspective on the
present and to reassert historical thinking, while at the same time
stressing historical specificity and distancing ourselves from roman-
tic visions of the past. Walter Benjamin’s concept of “Aktualisierung”
(actualisation)6 has been at the basis of our understanding of the

196
relationship between the past and the present as the sites of ongoing
contestations.

2009, fiction and crisis

Made in 2009, The Last Days of Jack Sheppard is set in the wake
of the ‘South Sea Bubble’ of 1720, a speculative frenzy in the trade
of stocks and shares that culminated in an unprecedented financial
crisis that nearly destroyed the British economy and unleashed a
wave of state violence aimed at disciplining the emerging working
class. The film revolves around the inferred encounter between Jack
Sheppard, and the author and economic essayist Daniel Defoe, who
allegedly ghost-wrote Sheppard’s autobiographical Narrative.

Defoe operated at the intersection between literature and finance.

He is more or less credited with inventing the novel but he was also
active as an investor and economic writer involved in opening up
debates about early financialisation. That Defoe engaged in fiction
and in fictitious capital, was by no means accidental. The value of a
joint stock company was linked to how believable its particular story
was, and how convincingly its speculative claims on some future
value could be relayed to the public. Of course, that is a system in
which we are, even more firmly entrapped today, to the extent that it
can appear that the facts of our existence are entirely dominated by
financial fictions.

2012, real abstraction

Ultimate Substance (2012, fig. 7-12), returns to some of the questions

posed in The Last Days of Jack Sheppard at a more fundamental level
as it departed from the hypothesis that the introduction of coinage in
the ancient Greek world effected a profound cognitive shift that was
fig. 5–6
key to the emergence of western philosophic, scientific and dramatic Anja Kirschner, David Panos,
traditions. Political theorists like Alfred Sohn-Rethel and the British The Last Days of Jack Sheppard,
2009, vitrine with archival material,
classicists George Thompson and Richard Seaford all maintain that installation shot.
the experience of the “real abstraction” of money created a division Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe.

197
 fig. 7–9
Anja Kirschner, David Panos,
Ultimate Substance, 2012,
videostills, HDV video, 34 min.

198
 7
between sensual and abstract forms of knowledge that persists into Richard Seaford, “Coinage,
Metaphysics and Drama: The Mines
the present. of Laurion and the Athenian Polis”,
in: Ultimate Substance, exhib.cat.,
secession, Vienna, n.b.k. Berlin,
In an essay written to accompany Ultimate Substance Seaford cap- Extra City KunsthalAntwerpen,
tures both the apparent simplicity and great complexity of coinage 2012, p. 8.
specifically when he writes: “The first coins were made, about 600
BC, from the electrum that was washed down from mount Tmolos in
great quantities by the river Paktolos, in Lydia. Electrum is a natural
alloy of gold and silver, which occur in varying proportions, with the
result that one piece of electrum can be of greater metallic value than
another that contains less gold. Before the technique of separating
the silver from the gold was discovered, the only way of standard-
izing the value of pieces of electrum (for the purpose of, e.g., paying
mercenaries) was to proclaim that each piece was of the same value.
This was probably the practical necessity that gave rise to the un-
precedented phenomenon of coinage, for it established the principle
that the value of a small, round piece of metal depended not on its
precise metallic content but, rather, on the mark stamped on it by a
state authority. This principle seems obvious to us, but at the time it
was new, and had revolutionary consequences: it allowed pieces of
metal (electrum, gold, silver, and even bronze) to circulate as money
without being weighed and tested for purity at every transaction. All
that was required was collective confidence in their conventional
value (rather than their precise metallic value). For the first time in
history, a substance could have both an inherent value and an imag-
ined (ideal) value that was different from the inherent value. The ideal
value was almost always greater than the inherent value (or the coins
would have been melted down for their inherent value). The metal
was a substance with an abstract (numerical) value (say 1.7 drach-
mas), but when marked with a stamp had a higher abstract value (2
drachmas). But what exactly was the substance that was worth more
than the metal? The question seems to us misconceived, but the at-
tempt to answer it contributed to the emergence of a paradoxical but
revolutionary idea – abstract substance.”7

One thing argued by Sohn-Rethel, Thomson and Seaford, is that the

Pre-Socratic philosophers, many of them coming from exactly those
areas were coinage was spreading most rapidly, started to uncon-
sciously project this idea of “abstract substance” onto the cosmos.
Plato sums up this Pre-Socratic perspective when he posits that be-
hind the physical domain exists a higher-order of reality, an immate-
rial order, the domain of ideas. As Sohn-Rethel argues money is all
too real, but it operates at a level that abstracts all relations between
things, and leads to the emergence of metaphysics.

199
 Narrative material, material narrative

Although The Last Days of Jack Sheppard and Ultimate Substance

both deal with value and abstraction, the material and the immate-
rial, they involved very different formal strategies, relating to the
different stages of abstraction they refer to, to the different historical
forms of social and material synthesis they actualise in relation to our
own present tense.

The Last Days of Jack Sheppard is constructed in a manner similar

to a television play, a dramatic dialogue, a fiction about the produc-
tion of fiction masking as a costume drama. The theatrical sets and
dialogues are put together from fragments of carefully researched
texts, letters, newspaper articles, court documents and popular prints
from the period. Due to the development of the printing press and
a rapidly expanding commercial market in printed matter, there is
a huge amount of material available to draw on. Once the intimate
dynamic established between finance and fiction at the beginning of
the 18th century becomes visible, financial allegories are shooting
up almost everywhere. Well-known texts such as Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver's Travels (1726) revolve around a general uncertainty about
the measure of things and absurd shifts in size and scale (think of Lil-
liput). Within Jack Sheppard’s time everything is shifting, everything is
moving, everything becomes relative.

Ultimate Substance takes a different approach, decidedly less syn-

thetically narrative, and colliding a range of different filmic strategies,
from highly aestheticised “pasolini-esque” tableaus to observational
documentary. Witnessing the material and mental reality of the crises
in Greece, the question arose to what extent we have today internal-
ised abstraction way beyond the domain of the economic and in how
far does that render narrations which present themselves as genuinely
material problematic or even ideological.

Our research for the collisions between this abstraction and its
materialities brought us to Lavriotiki, a mining area 50 miles outside
of Athens, where tens of thousands of slaves had extracted the silver
for the coins that made the Athenian city state rich. Abandoned in
Roman times, the mines of Lavriotiki were re-discovered in the 19th
century making Lavrio the first factory town of the modern Greek
state. In the 1970s the local mining industry was again dismantled.
The factory ruins today house an educational museum on mining
history. Around the factory and throughout the mining areas different
layers of history have been compacted and confused. Tunnels dug
in the 19th century, here intersect with much older ones, where the
chisel marks made by slaves 2,500 years ago are still visible.

Ultimate Substance’s abrupt montaging of different layers of footage

play on the idea of this disrupted, synchronous landscape, and the
physical experience of being in it. Images and words are frequently

200
separated, slipping between different filmic languages and creat-
ing sequences of connections and disconnections. The film’s initial
themes were transformed in the process, with the footage following
its own logic, exploring the historical hypotheses around monetary
and cognitive abstraction without illustrating or necessarily advocat-
ing them, and pushing them into a confrontation with contemporary
and virtual orders of images and the materialisations of failed abstrac-
tion, of rupture and the actual brutalities of its production.

General Equivalence

In Ultimate Substance an “impossible” image recurs – a 3D scan of

a lump of silver ore silently rotates over a layer of green. This image
embodies the role that the digital domain often plays in cancelling
and obscuring labour – with our open-ended images of mining, of
dancers performing gestures and postures of slave labour in the aban-
doned mines of Lavriotiki, hinting at the extraction of the rare earths
that still today form the material backbone of the digital domain. Ul-
timate Substance crescendos in a sequence where all of the elements
are finally brought together, delivering on the potential of the green
screen – bodies, digital ore, and flows of molten metal compounded,
layered and interchangeable. The narration is not, as in Jack Sheppard,
passed on, but it deteriorates and disintegrates while progressing.

In both films, Ultimate Substance and Jack Sheppard digital compos-

iting and green screen techniques are employed to create images that
have a certain exposed artifice, a “flatness” that draws on a Brechtian
tradition of anti-naturalism. In Ultimate Substance the green screen
becomes a sign in itself – a stand-in for abstraction and infinite sub-
stitutability. The unique colour of the greenscreen becomes a symbol
of general equivalence. It has started to become an alternative to fig. 10
the white, neutral space of the white cube as an aesthetic symbol of Anja Kirschner, David Panos,
Ultimate Substance, 2012,
neutrality or nothingness, and regularly turns up on gallery walls and postproduction screenshot,
in recent video work.  HDV video, 34 min.

201
 Noises from Below

Where in Plato the ascent towards true knowledge was posed as an

exit from the cave towards a higher realm of pure concepts, we now
propose a descent into the underground mines, discovering behind
the shadows on the wall the marks of a thousand chisels, a thousand
living bodies coerced to produce the material foundations for the
economic and cultural edifice of the “Western world”. Can you hear
the sound of them chipping away the foundations? Go for a walk in
the ruins. Abstract new lines of flight and actualise them with your
body!

fig. 11
Anja Kirschner, David Panos,
Ultimate Substance, 2012,
installation shot secession
(Wien), HDV video, 34 min.

fig. 12
Anja Kirschner, David Panos,
Ultimate Substance, 2012,
installation shot secession
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin),
HDV video, 34 min.

202
„We want to counter such simplifications by way
of historicizing their foundations …”
In Conversation with Anja Kirschner [AK], David Panos and Costas
Lapavitsas [CL]

Kerstin Stakemeier Anja and David, in your work you have intro-
duced modes of crises or what Marx characterised as the “so-called
primitive accumulation”, paradigmatic shifts in the terms of produc-
tion and property relations, as historical instances in which those ma-
terialisations become overtly present. So, thinking of what Costas has
characterised as the current financialisation of capital, I was wonder-
ing if one could argue that this is one of those moments, a moment not
only of crisis but also of an ideology of a new “primitive accumula-
tion”. And how could you, Costas, relate to an important undercurrent
of Anja’s and David’s work, the way in which the terms of abstraction
have changed in relation to economic systems and their crisis?

CL I would say that what is happening in contemporary capitalism

is not really primitive accumulation. I think this process is closer to
what others have referred to as “plundering” or as “accumulation by
dispossession”. In a similar way, the direct extraction of profit without
the mediation of production, which I have called “financial expropria-
tion” and lies at the core of my understanding of financialisation, is not
a form of primitive accumulation. It is interesting to note that within
financialised capitalism there is a re-emergence of forms of profit and
accumulation that are not directly connected to production. And I
think that phenomenon is very important in relation to the question
of immateriality because profit and all the relations attached to it have
become in a sense more abstract, more detached from production,
more detached from the relations that we normally rely on to think
about capitalism, and which have been prominent in the history of
industrial capitalism. Things are different today and you can see it on
how profit making impacts upon people, and this relates very much to
the historical lines that Anja and David have been discussing. There is
also considerable among developed countries as they are differentially
financialised.

203
 The impact of new forms of profit making on the understanding of
reality vary substantially, say, in the UK, France, and the USA. There
is no uniformity in how people conceptualise their everyday live, the
abstractions they use, the formalisations they deploy to comprehend
their own experience of the rise of finance.

I find these developments within mature capitalism extraordinary and

it is helpful to look at them by taking a step back to the time of the an-
cient Greeks. Financial profit can be usefully understood in the terms
in which Aristotle spoke about profit. Obviously one needs also to
refer to Marx in this connection, but financial profit can be usefully
conceptualised in terms of Aristotelian profit or in the terms of Dem-
osthenes, both of whom were aware of the art of financial transactions
and used abstractions appropriate to their time. I think that we need
to rethink contemporary capital in these terms, including in Europe,
for if we simply rely on the standard conceptual operators that were
developed in the past century we are not going to do very well in un-
derstanding what is happening.

Money, as I have mentioned, is very important in this connection and

to think about coinage and metallic money in the Ancient Greek world
seems very relevant to me. Strictly speaking it was not the Greeks who
invited coinage but the Greeks made it social reality by using it exten-
sively in their own society. That economic category of money and all the
financial and monetary dimensions attached to its functioning played a
key role in the development of abstract thought in Greek antiquity. But
modern money is detached from coinage, from value, from produc-
tion – it rests in the say-so of the state and has become increasingly
detached from any kind of material reality itself. To be more specific,
contemporary money has become increasingly electronic, that is a key
characteristic of financialised capitalism. Cheques, deposit accounts
and other such entities have acquired an electronic form, they have
lost much of their corporeality and materiality; furthermore, entirely
new forms of money have emerged which are only electronic. These
are forms of money associated with payments for transport, payments
for particular goods in particular shops. This type of money is attached
to cards and money is an electronic unit an entry charged on the card
without being created by a bank. Interestingly enough these forms of
money, which are characteristic for financialisation and detached from
corporeality, are growing nowhere as fast as in developing countries.

If you live in London and come from East Africa, one of the easiest
ways of sending money home would be to buy cards associated with
telephones and transmit the units to the country of your origin. The
units transmitted will be used as money locally by individuals but also
by local businesses. Here is a complete overcoming of the materiality
of money, giving to money a form that is global and facilitating ordi-
nary economic activity in developing countries without the interven-
tion of banks, or even of the formal financial system. This is again a
new dimension of financialisation.

204
AK What is interesting to me, when you talk about this new forms of
money, is moving from an analysis of the current situation forward to
how we could think about a possible next step, a progressive step. I
think one of the reasons for engaging with those questions of money,
crisis and primitive accumulation in Jack Sheppard, The Empty Plan
and Ultimate Substance was to get a clearer perspective on the histori-
cal development of those forms of speculative or ideal value, the way
credit has been used. I think there is generally in our heads this idea
that money and credit money is always bad and that on the contrary
small time community potato swopping or whatever is happening on
the level of local communities is a wonderful and seemingly unalien-
ated way of exchange that circumvents the alienating effects of money.
We want to counter such simplifications by way of historicizing their
foundations.

So to some extent I think it is important to address ways forward from

“within” the contemporary monetary system, because the great ca-
pacity of the human mind is to think abstractly, and to create fictions
that impact on reality in different respects and on different levels, and
this is not an intrinsically negative or alien to human nature. In all
these cases we have been looking at in our work, what we have seen
emerging whenever economic systems reached new stages of finan-
cial abstraction, are related transformations in the sphere of thought
and culture – the birth of ancient democracy, the birth of tragedy, the
birth of philosophy of logics of mathematics… It all comes out of this.
So therefore this abstraction cannot be such a bad thing (laughing). It
made class mobility possible in a whole new way, made it possible for
people to jump out of being a peasant or a servant to suddenly having
completely different material realities and desiring things and forms
of life that were beautiful and excessive and not least also useless in
some wonderful way. In the various discussions centering on the crisis
in Europe and the US and on how to deal differently with currency
one should be weary of the kind of discourse that romanticizes go-
ing back to small scale, supposedly unalienated community situations,
taking the “evil” power from money and just performing exchange in
a more “unmediated” way that would be “good”. Rather, the logic of
exchange itself has to be questioned, if the system within which it is
taking place is to be transformed.

CL I think it is indeed, as you say, very important to stress the histori-

cal dimension of the role of money and finance. So let me point out
a couple of things, one about finance and the other about money that
might help the discussion. The South Sea Bubble is a very important
historical event, so was the experiment of John Law in the Mississippi
and elsewhere in the North America. In fact, there has been a series of
speculative financial bubbles in the Early Modern Era and they marked
the emergence of capitalism. These bubbles took place in a period in
which the productive sphere of Europe was not dominated by capital.
Capitalism was not the dominant mode of production and the domi-
nant set of economic relations dictating the material life of the people

205
 of Europe. There was, of course, plenty of capitalism in finance al-
ready, and capitalism took incredible speculative forms that impacted
on production, but production was not capitalistic in a decisive way.
It is thus relevant to note that contemporary capitalism, in which pro-
duction is most decidedly capitalist, has produced phenomena in the
sphere of finance, which are almost pre-industrial. This is a typical
aspect of historical retrogression. These forms of profit making, which
are characteristic for contemporary capitalism, have parallels in other
historical moments but they derive form the development of modern
capitalism. It is a most characteristic aspect of historical retrogression
which neither disavows not negates the nature of capitalism nor the
nature of capitalist societies.

The second point I want to make is about money. Money has been
used in many ways historically. It is an economic entity, but it is also a
form of capital in contemporary society and it was a form of capital in
ancient society, when it was actually borrowed or used by merchants.
But money is also a practical implement, it is also a tool, above all, it
is a unit of account, a way of keeping records and thus it is a way of
effecting the transfer commodities across the face of society. Money is
also a very fundamental way of reckoning, of measuring all kinds of
things in society. In those fundamental ways, money is a very useful so-
cial entity, and it has been used by a great range of societies across the
world without necessarily becoming capital. What we witness today,
particularly when crisis hits, or when financialisation simply spreads
and engulfs more and more of individual life, is the attempt of ordi-
nary people to negate the capitalist aspect of contemporary money, to
keep some of its functional and useful dimensions while rejecting the
profit-making aspect. We see this in time-money, in local exchange
trading systems, in labour money, in many forms of communal activity
devised to promote basic economic life by using elementary forms of
money without resorting to its full-blown commercial version. I think
that this is very important, because it shows that people oppose com-
mercialisation, they oppose the role of money in profit making, and
want to retain some independent social content of money.

Related to this development is the way in which the financialised

world at times negates the role of money itself. I mention this because
Marxists often claim that everything in contemporary capitalism has
become increasingly commercialised, and thus money has becoming
more and more powerful and penetrates all aspects of society. Well to
a certain extend this is true of financialised capitalism, and money is
indeed incredibly powerful. But equally, and I stress this, capitalism
itself at times neutralises money. Consider, for instance, the way in
which the internet has blindly and automatically limited the role of
money in contemporary society by creating entire areas of social and
economic intercourse in which money has a marginal role, or even no
role at all. To give an example, money has become much less impor-
tant in the consumption of newspapers and music through the internet.
Clearly, one needs money to access the internet itself, but at the point

206
of consumption several commodities have become practically free,
thus lessening the grip of money over everyday life.

AK I agree with your account, especially where the seemingly non-

linear emergence of older forms of pre-capitalistic or pre-industrial
exploitation are concerned. There is however in me a degree of scepti-
cism about the extent to which the development of the internet and
it’s “sharing” capabilities have really de-commodified exchange. Not
only because the only “things” that can be shared are digital informa-
tion in the broadest sense, and of the costs of access, but also because
we tend to forget about the material substratum of the internet – the
infrastructure and hardware, the vast scale mining operations neces-
sary to unearth the raw material that goes into the manufacturing of
the hardware, and the destruction not just of the lives of the miners,
but also the pollution of entire environments, both at the extraction,
manufacturing and at the decommissioning stages, like the poisonous
factories and tech-graveyards in South-East Asia and Africa. When we
researched for visual references of primitive mining operations for Ulti-
mate Substance, ironically most of the material we found was contem-
porary and came precisely from these kinds of mines in which metals
for computer chips and mobile phones are dug up. That’s why talking
critically about the (im)materiality of the economy right now and un-
derstanding the buried connections (in history, in the way in which we
conceptualise and apply these terms) seems so crucial.

207
 1
Is Marxism a Correlationism? Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism
is a Humanism (New Haven: Yale
Diedrich Diederichsen University Press, 2007).

The title of this text poses what at first appears to be an irritating, if

not completely insane question, that I myself couldn’t have imagined
posing a year ago. For one thing, it’s because one of the important
terms in this question was totally unknown to me, and for another, I
probably would have affirmed it outright had I known what this word
meant.

The question is: Is Marxism a correlationism? The rhetoric of this

formulation – “is x-ism a y-ism” – borrows from the title of a famous
essay by Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (1946).1 In
those days it was also a matter of setting a new philosophical fashion
in relation to a major cornerstone of orientation – to humanism. To-
day the question appears to be reversed: Is Marxism – which is now
the cornerstone, the old orientation – a correlationism? The correla-
tionism isn’t the new fashion, but rather the name of the adversary
that the “new style,” at least a part of the new materialist discourse,
speaks against – but more on that later.

Why does this question present itself? What does it mean? Why does
it interest me? I concern myself here with three complexes that I usu-
ally gravitate towards: questions of the visual arts, questions of fash-
ion and the diagnosis of the present, and questions of philosophy, in
particular aesthetics and other legitimating discourses that philosophy
brings to the fore, which are important in the field of visual art.

209
 2
See Diedrich Diederichsen, On Particularly in the debates about art and politics, on one hand,
(Surplus) Value in Art / Mehrwert
und Kunst. Reflections 01 (Berlin, and art and economy on the other, it’s important to me to adopt a
New York, Rotterdam: Sternberg, perspective that combines the constellations of each problematic
Witte De With, 2008), or Diedrich
Diederichsen, Eigenblutdoping.
and to locate a hard and, as it were, material web of reasons and
Selbstverwertung, Künstlerromantik, resistances in the economic situation of artists in general, especially
Partizipation (Cologne: Kiepenheuer 2
& Witsch, 2008).
visual artists, that might explain what is political about contemporary
3
artistic practice in the sense of the politics of its economy, and how
“Anti-Humanismus,” in: Spring- that relates to what comprises that artistic practice economically - for
erin. Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, v.
1/13 (Vienna: 2013). example, certain living and working conditions, a highly-specific
4 type of self-exploitation, but also a highly-specific new production
See Büro Bert, Minimal Club,
Stephan Geene, Renate Lorenz apparatus that harnesses leisure activity, audience mobilisation, and
(eds.), geld – beat – synthetic: Zur eventually self-realisation reflexes as economic resources.2
Abwertung bio/technologischer An-
nahmen (Berlin: b_books, 1996).
5 Two discourses have recently emerged from other discursive fields
at Goldsmiths College in London.
that were already known, or at least underway, in the conversations
6
This was published in 2011 under amongst the art milieu and have left behind a string of debates, cata-
the title Prince and the Wolf by
Zero-Books, a publisher vital to logue texts, exhibitions concepts, and symposiums. They have led
this context. Bruno Latour, Graham to publications by leading theory presses and projects produced by
Harman, Peter Erdélyi, Prince and
the Wolf. Latour and Harman at the
the relevant theory import/export shops. Both discourses share what
LSE (Winchester, Washington: Zero the Austrian art journal Springerin has subsumed under the banner
Books, 2011).
of Anti-Humanism,3 while others call it Post-Humanism. This Anti- or
Post-Humanism is possibly another, perhaps displaced nickname for
what’s explored here under the heading of Power of Material/Politics
of Materiality because it allows the focus to shift towards something
else, namely the matter or the material – but maybe not.

Today’s Anti- or Post-Humanism has nothing to do with an earlier

Post-Humanism that circulated in the 1990s, which referred to a
range of subjects like Artificial Intelligence or the Simulation of
Human Creativity and inspired a number of artistic strategies that
provided one Ars Electronica or another with slogans and was also
frequently criticised, especially by leftist and feminist artists.4 The two
Post-Humanist discourses that I’m referring to are inspired by or as-
sociated, if quite loosely and circuitously, with two very well-known
writers of contemporary philosophy and sociology, namely Alain
Badiou and Bruno Latour. Ever since a very successful conference in
2007,5 they’ve gone by names like “Speculative Realism” or “Object-
oriented Philosophy,” respectively; as a general rule, the first can be
attributed to the Badiou disciple Quentin Meillassoux, the later pri-
marily to Latour. Graham Harman in particular can be credited with
having merged, or at least worked out the commonalities, of these
two schools of thought. Harman staged a kind of summit meeting6 at
the London School of Economics in 2008 (!) in which he himself, as a
representative of Speculative Realism, conversed with Latour in order
to work out or perform the essential differences with his Object-
Oriented Philosophy.

What are the central ideas of both of these schools, what do they
have to do with contemporary art and why in the world would I
want to connect them with Marxism? Bruno Latour’s sociology, often

210
 7
quoted in the art world, can be described for our present purposes, at See Quentin Meillassoux, After
Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity
its core, as a continuation and escalation of constructivist positions. of Contingency (London: Conti­
If constructivist theories take aspects of the world that are regarded as nuum, 2009).
nature and disenchant them by showing that they are man-made and
hence criticisable and changeable, Latour disenchants the human-
ist certainty of this distinction itself and shows the man-made as
co-produced by things or other non-human actors. He argues for the
departure from a subject-oriented, anthropocentric perspective on the
construction of the social – but which remains nevertheless legible
as constructed. In doing so, unfortunately, he sometimes sacrifices
the option of critique, which constructivism made plausible in reality
due to its chances of success (critique could not only criticise the
construction, but also as a distinct construction alter it, cancel it,
correct it), however as a result he gains a retraction of the somewhat
flippant sense that the world is disposable, which constructivism so
readily implies.

Unlike Latour, who as a historian of science originally based his

reflections on concrete laboratory situations, Meillassoux argues in
strictly philosophical terms, in a language rooted exclusively in the
history of philosophy, which he greatly values. His undertakings aim
to do no less than to eradicate a foundational flaw in all philosophy
since Kant, namely the differentiation between a knowable world
from consciousness and a world comprising things in themselves that
philosophical consciousness holds at a distance and whose discus-
sion denounces it as a metaphysical holdover that doesn’t warrant
further attention. Meillassoux calls this position, and all philosophies
that share it, Correlationism, because it’s only interested in the world
as it pertains to the co-reality of human consciousness and not for its
own sake.

In this context, my point of departure, particularly its role as a diag-

nostic of the present, is rather far removed from Meillassoux’s anti-
correlationist position. One who diagnoses the present is an even
more extreme correlationist, because he or she not only takes the
relevance of the world for a/the consciousness of each question and
problem, but also its relevance for a decidedly transient, especially
fleeting consciousness – that of fashion. It is thus paradoxical that
precisely my conviction that something that’s in fashion can never
be entirely without dignity and must always already have a certain
minimal relevance, compels me to engage with a discourse that
wants to expel from the question of truth, not only fashion, but also
every other specific, historic, and otherwise relativising perspective of
an interested consciousness.

Meillassoux takes modern measuring methods used to date fossils or

radiotelescopic techniques as his point of departure.7 Through these
techniques, a sphere becomes accessible in which the conscious-
ness in question, for those for which the world otherwise only exists
through consciousness, didn’t yet exist. Nevertheless, for this world,

211
 8
Ibid., p. 59.
9
Alain Badiou, “Preface,” in: Meil-
lassoux 2008 (footnote 7), vi–viii.
10
This is the starting point for his as
yet unpublished doctoral thesis by
the same name from 1997.
which could not even be differentiated yet into one for consciousness
and one in itself, accurate data can be gathered regarding the Earth,
the solar system, and distant quasar clusters. Meillassoux refers to
objects from this time – former things in themselves, as it were – as
“Archi-Fossils.”8 It was recently reported that around the year 1200
B.C. – identified via the growth rings of ancient cedars –massive
gamma rays, presumably caused by the collision of two dark holes,
struck our solar system and also the earth. But at this time, people
were busy with the death of Richard the Lion Heart and the formation
of guilds or, in the so-called Orient, with firing tiles and decorative
art forms. Yet they also didn’t have the necessary measuring instru-
ments and, above all, the scientific questioning or another form of
concrete curiosity that would have given them a better understanding
of the relevance of gamma-rays, and consequently missed this natural
event entirely. The gamma ray burst was thus not different from the
other things in themselves, inasmuch as its completely revoked
consciousness in those days. However, nowadays something that
was formerly a thing-in-itself is now able to be measured and dated,
therefore things-in-themselves don’t entirely elude measurability and,
therefore, cognition.

Of course, one can argue that the design and specificity of measur-
ing instruments are themselves correlational, but the Meillassoux
school applies the Archi-Fossils and their proven existence less as
an epistemological argument against epistemology and in favour of
ontology, but above all as evidence of a correlational inconsistency
of epistemology and thus as an argument for a reality that is after all
accessible in Meillassoux’s thinking. Even if the concrete how of the
entrance point for his philosophical argumentation at first remains
secondary, there are indications for Meillassoux, as well as for his
teacher Badiou, that this entry must be via mathematics.

The endpoint of Meillassoux’s argument is the claim that the laws of

nature are not necessary at all, rather – as was previously only the
case for scientific hypotheses about nature and the human formula-
tion of natural laws – these laws are contingent and only apply as
long as they apply. The only necessity is the actual contingency of
the laws of nature. Meillassoux thus categorically rejects the three
Kantian options that Badiou summarises9 in his preface to Meillas-
soux’s book After Finitude as “dogmatism, scepticism, and critique.”
Instead, he tackles the adventure of conceiving of a world in which
everything could be different. Meillassoux has worked for years on a
project mythologised by his followers, entitled L’inexistence divine,10
in which he attempts to show that the unprovoked arrival of some-
thing like cognition, suffering, or pleasure is a rational concept and
can therefore be expected in the arrival of other mad things of a
similar nature – like the resurrection of the dead or communism, or
both of them together.

212
 11
“The starship philosophy boldly goes where no man has gone See Alain Badiou, Ben Woodard,
“Interview,” and Slavoj Žižek, Ben
before....” This was my first reaction to reading one of Meillassoux’s Woodard, “Interview,” in: (ed.) Levi
manuscripts and to learning which circles read and admire his work. Bryant, Nick Srnicek, Graham
Harman, The Speculative Turn –
I also remembered something that I had said in a philosophy class Continental Materialism and Real-
in the 11th grade in a class discussion about Kant, when I objected ism, (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), p.
19-20 and 406-415.
to the concept of the thing-in-itself, claiming that it could neverthe-
less be accessed cognitively on LSD. Now, this comparison with my
young self is naturally unfair, Meillassoux went to great lengths to
substantiate his philosophical sensationalism with brilliant arguments
that nonetheless remain speculative – at least that’s the idea. In the
interest of fairness, even one who diagnoses the present should re-
frain from obvious classifications of Meillassoux’s philosophy, based
on success, as well as the intellectual and spiritual needs of young
men affiliated with it, and not only to comply with the principle of
strengthening ones opponent.

If this opponent should even present himself as such: I’m neither

interested in arguing with Meillassoux on his own terrain, that of
metaphysical speculation, nor on the level of his facile, vulgar-
ideology-critical detractors – such as Alexander Galloway, who along
with his colleagues at Critical Inquiry, recently reduced him and his
allies to the function that their categories could potentially play in the
ideological adjustment for neoliberal capitalism – that denounce him
as an escapist and an author of philosophical adventure fiction.

On the other hand, I wonder why people that predominantly come

from the left have so much enthusiasm for a philosophy that seems
to negate a major tenant of leftist thought – the historicity of human
societies – as doubly anthropocentrically limited: as a purely human
and therefore subjective knowledge of a purely human activity. In the
first blogged reactions to Galloway, only its somewhat suspect argu-
mentation was initially rejected, but the elephant in the room, how
one handles one’s own understanding of politics, was nevertheless
avoided. Isolated responses to questions about the politics of Specu-
lative Realism occasionally appeared in blogs, how metaphysics,
which one indeed avowedly practises, can have nothing to do with
politics and both, the political engagement and metaphysical specu-
lation, are disciplines in their own right, which cannot be grouped
together. The attempts to translate into political practice the dialogues
with political philosophers like Žižek or Badiou that Meillassoux
conducts and has conducted in the past, never progress beyond the
identification of highly philosophical disagreements, such as Badiou
and Žižek’s belief, against or with Hegel, in the “contingency of ne-
cessity,” as opposed to Meillassoux’s “necessity of contingency.”11

Awaiting more clear political leitmotifs, the attentive art world is

therefore accustomed to politically orient itself toward authors like
Badiou and Žižek, both philosophers who through their numerous
comments on current affairs like to appear as public intellectuals,
and offer the art world the opportunity to align and connect their

213
 12
The different authors who refer to
Meillassoux use the French techni-
cal term. See Meillassoux 2008
(footnote 7), p. 21.
13
See Ray Brassier, “Genre is
obsolete,” in: Mattin, Anthony Iles
(ed.), Noise & Capitalism (Donostia,
San Sebastián: Arteleku, 2008).
14
Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of
Objects (New York: Open Humani-
ties Press, 2011).
15
Ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.
com (last accessed 03.9.2013).
16
Bryant, Srnicek, Harman 2011
(footnote 11); Bruno Latour, Politics
of Nature: How to Bring the Sci-
ences into Democracy (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2004).
214
perspectives on world politics and current affairs, women’s rights,
films, and the Middle East – which in Žižek’s case change constantly,
while Badiou’s stubbornly persist for millions of years – to Hegel and
to relieve their thinking from some of its abstractness. It’s impossible
to construct such bridges with Meillassoux: we only know that his
father was an important Marxist anthropologist and that he edited a
pro-situationist fanzine in his youth. But who hasn’t done that?
A part of his program is also to change philosophy, and the role of
philosophers, from public intellectual into adventurers, boundary-
pushers, and woodsmen. His term for the world in thing-in-itself
mode or for the afterlife of the correlational world in fact is “Le
Grand Dehors,”12 the great outdoors. Such constructions aren’t
only popular and attractive in a philosophy in search of a purpose
beyond the administration of the conceptual status quo or the sup-
port of aesthetic and cultural studies projects, but also with artists
who don’t directly come from the hegemonic visual arts, but from
its fringes, where irony isn’t compulsory and/or elegant detachment
qua theoretically-informed callousness are on the decline and grand
gestures, pathos, and above all an often nebulous romanticism, arise
from dark drones and jagged black metal sounds. It’s not by chance
that one finds authors of Speculative Realism among the presenters
at Black Metal Theory symposiums, or are, like Ray Brassier amongst
the most important experts on Noise.13
However, there is another side to the new Object-Oriented Philoso-
phies that stems more from Latour and has found a mediator be-
tween itself and hardcore Speculative Realism in the aforementioned
Graham Harman and a diplomatic disseminator in Levi Bryant,
who overtly attempts to Americanise it and make it less dogmatic.14
Both Harman and Bryant have fewer adherents in philosophical and
artistic circles, or at least don’t exclusively draw their supporters from
these circles, but instead emphatically draw from a new, de-roman-
ticised, but still politically-radicalised ecological milieu represented,
for instance, through blogs like Ecology without nature.15 The speak-
ing of non-human things, the moralisation and ethicisation of the
inclusion of the Non-Human that reverberates in book titles and buz-
zwords like “Democracy of Objects” or “Parliament of Things,”16 as
well as the work of trailblazing authors like Donna Haraway, clearly
has more than just philosophical grounds. The precedence of human
or subjective standpoints shouldn’t only be amended because it is
contradictory, illogical, or disproportionate, but also because there
are conflict-based, not to say political grounds, rooted in clashing in-
terests, to readjust and realign ontologies and metaphysics; there are
grounds in the secondary attributes of things, as it were, which make
it necessary to rethink how we consider the primary ones. Marxism
might also have something to say – even beyond the German Ideol-
ogy – about the relationship between politics and ontology that can’t
simply be reduced to its own correlationism, not least in the famous
witticism about the head and the feet: The Marx-ian people that don’t
 17
make their world of their own free will are clearly exposed to differ- Diedrich Diedrichsen, “Time,
Object, Commodity,” in: Texte zur
ent material powers and influences. With an oversimplified audacity, Kunst, Nr. 88, “The Question of
one could say that such political positions are better received and Value” (Berlin, 2012), p. 95–102.
cited more often in the United States, especially among the ecologi-
cal left, while the more adventurous philosophical perspectives of
object-orientation seem to excite rather the French and British com-
munities shaped by Deleuzian thinking and also seem to have made
an impression in the global art world.

I’d like to now make a suggestion to bring together the various strands
that I’ve addressed here: Speculative Realism and Object-oriented
Ontology, the political past of most of the authors and the political
agenda of most readers, and finally the role of visual art. My point of
departure is reflections that I’ve presented elsewhere under the title
“Time, Object, Commodity”17 on the role of labour in the creation
of value in the visual arts. Here, I’ve tried to show that all kinds of
artwork, including the value assigned to them, its discursive presence
and its function in the regimes of attention, derive its value from the
highly-developed collaboration, both formal and informal, of highly
qualified and dramatically underpaid individuals – and that their
overall worth declines in places where these forms of collaborative
labour are less developed and intertwine feebly and less precisely;
where there isn’t a nexus of hipsterdom, collectors’ money, intel-
lectual expertise, and a the administration of attractivity at work. The
classic labour theory of value, which Marx corrected from a value-
critical perspective, can be applied to this collaboration. If the time
required for the necessary education, as well as the requisite informal
educational hours spent in clubs and bars, is included in the calcula-
tion of an average of socially necessary work time and value – then
a plausible relationship between production level, labour time, and
value emerges – along with possibilities to discuss exploitation and
surplus value in the art market with even greater precision.

What is crucial about these reflections in relation to the New Mate-

rialism is, however, a by-product of these ideas. Namely, it appears
that one can abstract even further from the Marxist theory of surplus
value and its application to the art market and the production of
artistic objects and services; one can frame the theory of exploitation
it describes even more generally as production and being produced
per se, as the interaction with matter and material. This can be done
by formulating a theory of surplus value like the one I have just
described, which reflects the interplay of formal and informal, mate-
rial and immaterial labour, as a theory of input/objectification and
reading out for purposes of exchange. Many minds, nodes, beautiful
physical attributes, design modules, address list managers, an artist’s
body, art-historical memes, quanta of knowledge, and trays of white
wine contribute in invisible ways – not to the artworks in general, but
rather to valuable artworks, of objects from which value can be read
out. Exchange value. The punchline of all such abstractions of surplus
value theory, however, must be that such reading out isn’t fair or

215
 adequate: it isn’t necessarily the case that all of the brain power, the
thick smoke of inspiration and the perfumed scent of gallery open-
ings – the social intensity, cooperation, harmony, disharmony, and
all of that – are legible if I acquire an artwork. What is instead legible
is an exchange value whose quantity relates to the magnitude of the
invested quota of smoke and perfume, because this quota determines
an average spectrum within which the price fluctuates.

There are constructions for reading out other than the capitalistic
creation of value that differently distort what is invested, and within
which the concept of labour distances itself further from exclusively
human labour. Media to read in, to store and to read out, which func-
tion differently than capitalist economies. Indexical recording media
like audiotape and film actually enable something to be read out that
can be recognised as what was invested. It resembles in its media
usage, that which it should convey, it mediatises. Mediatisation is
another form of disproportionality as accumulation of value. There
are others too, or rather, others are conceivable. What they all share
is a transformation of time which a material in its broadest sense has
spent with a processing activity in the broadest sense and trans-
formed them into an object, that is socially defined by the fact that it
can be grasped without inherent temporality, that is crystalline and
yields a meaning, that it can be exchanged, played, or eaten. These
transformations share the fact that they produce disproportionalities
and inadequacies. Their transformations are hexes, transformations,
and metamorphoses, not developments with phases that emerge from
one another, as it pertains to production before its utilisation. They
are leaps, as Marx once said. The emergence of illness, deterioration,
and consumption would be a further worthwhile case, which one
could study within the framework of this model. Naturally, in doing
so it would be important to initially think of the transformation as be-
ing free from value, to understand the disproportionality technically
and to evaluate it in specific local instances in order to avoid either
naturalising exploitation or absolutising proportionality.

With this in mind, however, one can imagine another stage beyond
utilisation and mediatisation – which mostly happen for the sake of
commercialisation – in which there is neither media nor a trans-
formative goal like value, recording, or symptom and hence also no
differentiation between material and processors but simply only two
substances that rub against each other because gravity and other
Co-Actants compel them to do so, thus producing oil, gas, or marble.
What we know about this jades most lay people: that it took an
insanely long time before the friction or the gravity-induced pressure
that some landmass exerted upon some organic stratum generated
something that BP could exploit. The subsequent extraction of energy
from oil or other raw material stands in a grotesque disproportion to
the telluric eons it took for these exploited resources to come into be-
ing. This disproportion is a central subject of all ecological economy
and, if one speaks completely innocently and free of ethical under-

216
 18
tones of exploitation, has already spoken, even before the exploita- Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual
and Manual Labor: A Critique of
tion of man through man was prohibited, then one can perhaps argue Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands:
along the following lines: temporal asymmetry between reading in Humanities Press, 1978).
and reading out, between process and crystalline exchange value or
value were the basis for a deep-rooted materialist theory of exploita-
tion that would encompass ecology without an economy diminished
of human political factors, that would be solely reduced to natural
history.

One of the Marxist-inspired positions that speaks of ontology and

politics is Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s discovery, formulated in the 1970s,
that Kantian epistemology – the moment that the correlationist
conspiracy had begun for Meillassoux – is an effect of capitalist
real abstraction; that a relationship exists between the division of
the world into knowable and unknowable parts and the distinction
between manual and intellectual labour.18 Is the object-oriented, eco-
logical reconstruction of the reality – of what lies beyond the reach
of consciousness as something that is only provisionally beyond its
reach but with which we are still very much connected and that we
may even one day reach – undertaken by Meillassoux and Latour to
be understood as an attempt to reverse that division? And what use
might a notion extended to ancestral regions of inappropriateness
and asymmetry between production- and reading out time might
have, between the processuality of production and the form of read-
ing out?

If meanwhile we refer to this disproportionality as exploitation and

present it as comparable, by dint of its asymmetry, to man’s exploita-
tion of man, we are only doing what every garden-variety ecologist
already does. Except that to make condemnation possible – indeed to
allow for an ethical dimension of any kind – man must be introduced
as a victim, despite his egotism (or capitalism as a variant thereof)
which is actually the problem: it’s humanity’s fault. For the most part,
this occurs with regular ecologists in two ways; he either summons
our children, from whom we’ve of course only borrowed the planet,
the universe, and other things. This is a particular heteronormative
variant of correlationism – there must always be some future humans
called our children in order to conceive of a ecological thought.
Otherwise, the ecologist summons Gaia, the earth as a person, a fair
sister as her male guardian Jim Morrison used to call her, thus the
esoteric variation.

Object-oriented Philosophies and ontologies seem to offer a solution

here, in that they seek to grant objects a right to speak, however this
might be perceptible, thus offering them agency and responsibilities.
Ecuador’s new constitution, in which the local nature was granted
constitutional rights and must be listened to, is often cited as an
example. Otherwise there remain the many examples from Latour
and his students, who would like to interpret the activity of objects in
their multi-faceted concatenations and assemblages as speech, as the

217
 19
Bruno Latour, “The Berlin Key or
How to Do Things with Words,” in:
P.M. Graves-Brown, Matter, Materi-
ality and Modern Culture (London:
Routledge, 1991).
218
casting of a vote – the expression of the intentions of things. Thus
the famous Berlin key, which Latour made into a textbook example,19
is nothing other than the expression of a lightly reconstructible design
idea, a human design idea. The Berlin key has two bits and no han-
dle. If one unlocks the front door, one must open it with the anterior
bit and then subsequently push the key completely through the key-
hole. Only then can one close the door again from inside the door,
only then can he or she get the key back from the keyhole. The Berlin
key is an example of an acting object, an object that actually does
a great deal, an intrusive object that is, needless to say, designed. It
does exactly that which its design inscribed upon it.
The criteria I recommend here, that of asymmetry in the processes of
reading in and reading out of time as a precondition of the accumu-
lation of value, would in comparison be one that makes it easier to
at least imagine a non-correlational theory of exploitation presenting
itself on the horizon, which needn’t remain confined within the clas-
sic western-humanist framework of empathy and of suffering, enjoy-
ment, good lives etc., but uses similar noetic detours or crutches like
the notion of ancestrality to conceptualise disproportionalities even
before any, necessarily perspectival, evaluation has taken place. Does
this lead to a kind of cosmically inflated Marxism? Or does it allow
us to engage a line of critical theory that, on the one hand, develops
something prefigured in Sohn-Rethel’s critique of Kant and, on the
other, hearkens back to Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s
concept of instrumental reason, which can also be read as a critique
of correlationism?
Sohn-Rethel could be said to take the critique of correlationism off its
ancestralistic head and stand it on its historical feet by inscribing the
absolutising of a certain a priori within the historical process of the
development of the money economy. The thing-in-itself exists first as
the real abstraction money, which attained a new level of abstract-
ness in the world economy of the 18th century. From Meillassoux’s
perspective, one could object that it’s not a critique of correlationism
if one only replaces a parameter of unknowability through another,
so goes Kant’s philosophical argument, that the things of the external
world first attain a form in consciousness, through a Marxist eco-
nomics. It can only be a matter of historicisation, one would object,
because a critique of correlationism is ultimately a fact of history that
refers to man-made tools of reason such as the radio telescope or the
identification of Archi-Fossils. It’s not the man-made qualities of this
technology that are important, the Meillassouxians could retort in
turn, but the fact that they can reliably communicate with a real-
ity not observed by human beings. This is crucial, not the reasons,
why human consciousness couldn’t recognise something at a certain
point.
At this point, I will leave both sides alone and attempt to pursue
the second question. Does the critique of instrumental reason (as in
 20
Adorno and Horkheimer) not lead straight into a critique of correla- Theodor W. Adorno/Max
Horkheimer, Dialectic of Englight-
tionism? Is not instrumental reason in some parts of the Dialectic of enment (Redwood City: Stanford
Enlightenment20 to be equated with the inability of human thought to University Press, 2004).
avoid lodging itself into perspectival and egotistical subjectivity? Or is 21
Latour, Harman, Erdélyi 2011
it not, at any rate, a small step from the critique that reproaches rea- (footnote 6).
son for being subservient to the problem-solving desires of its owners 22
Graham Harman, The Quadruple
to one that accuses it of only functioning so long as it automatically Object (Winchester: Zero Books,
2012).
regards the existence of what doesn’t appear within its horizon as
worth ignoring? The internal debate in the anything but homogene-
ous scene of object-orientated and speculative thinkers negotiate
this question of time, which is also thanks to the negotiating and
moderating efforts of Graham Harman. As with my other attempts to
translate the vocabulary and problems of one philosophical language
into the medium of another, one can certainly complain that I have
unfairly omitted the social, or else, that unfortunately the social
hasn’t yet vanished completely (depending on one’s position). There
remains, however, the desideratum of a political, non-esoteric, and
non-technocratic philosophy of ecology, which might justify these
translation attempts. Inasmuch as there is not already a tradition of a
philosophy of ecology, it mustn’t take these detours.

For Harman himself, the primary attributes are a crucial point, be-
cause the connectivity of Speculative Realism and Latourian Object-
Orientation effectively depends on it. Latour in turn explained in his
conversation with Harman21 that primary characteristics don’t matter
to him, he doesn’t understand at all why people should bother with
them. Meillassoux’s anti-correlationism, however, practically culmi-
nates in the assertion that something like primary characteristics not
only exist but are also accessible philosophically. Harman proposes
a certain withdrawal of the primary attributes, that according to him
nonetheless exist, and he ultimately would like to integrate these
characteristics philosophically into his update of Heideggers’ “four-
fold” (Geviert), the “quadruple object,”22 into an ontology of objects.

The question in our context, with which I’d like to end here for the
time being, is the following: to what extent is instrumental reason
and the violence that it undisputedly applies to objects across all
schools through adapting, twisting, and murdering it for the sake of
its users, to what extent does this violence direct itself against primary
attributes because it only sees the secondary ones? To what extent is
this violence a product of correlationism or is at least enabled and
vindicated by it, perhaps while we withdraw from the capacity for
pain, suffering, the relevance of the continued existence of objects
in a Gestalt that refers to its unanswerability because of the unattain-
ability of things-in-themselves, not only that of knowledge, but also
ethics? To what extent is correlationism therefore a product of that
aspect of the enlightenment (I am avoiding the word “dialectic” for
diplomatic reasons) which has also, in the final analysis, given us the
capitalist mode of production? Or, is precisely this discovery, which
Alfred Sohn-Rethel indeed already alluded to, a historical datum, an

219
 epiphenomenon of another economic and technological line devel-
opment and consequently not a datum of metaphysics? Would the
thing-in-itself then be something like a superstructural phenomenon
amongst others – and the superstructure of the economy the only
stability? What was possible for me here was to pose this question,
naturally not to answer it.

220
Project Class Baghramian
Final exhibition with daily changing solo presentations within the frame of
Nairy Baghramian’s guest professorship, Academy of Fine Arts Munich, SS2013

221
 fig. 1–11
Works by Kristina Schmidt (1),
Lina Zylla (2–4), Alexandra Gerhold
(5), Pernilla Henrikson (6 and 9),
Johanna Gonschorek (7 and 12),
Louiza Taracha (8), Johanna Klingler
(10) and Ulli Ball (11).

222
The starting point of my work with the students at the Academy of
Fine Arts Munich was my own investment with materials and the
becoming of form – within my artistic practice as well as in discursive
form, in various text contributions and lectures. Within the frame of
the given theme “Power of Material/Politics of Materiality” and within
the limits of the narrow time frame it was crucial to me to open up
interstices of a preferably semiotic manner of working, and to ap-
proximate an artistic production against the backdrop of the so-called
“New Materialism”, to discuss works which the students had previ-
ously created within the surroundings of their respective classes by
reference to their preconceptions.

The knowledge of the potential inherent to the material per se was

in the foreground – however without forgetting the relationship to
the perceiver and her institutional and social conditions and without
letting those premises drift apart. The search for ambivalences and a
potential balance between those poles was based on an art historical
engagement and categorization of the relevance of material, language
and context within the different isms influential today, like Minimal-
ism, Conceptualism or Arte Povera. Resulting from these investments
the student’s choice of materials within their own artistic production
as well as the material and content oriented presentation of their
works was a central issue for me. In a countermove to the concept
of a closing exhibition, more indebted to the idea of the nexus of the
class and the principle of the “Meisterschüler_innen”, autonomous
individual presentations were conceived, workshops, performances
and individual representations which were superimposed into group-
shows.

Nairy Baghramian

223
224
225
226
The authors

Nairy Baghramian is an artist.  Her countless international exhibi-

tions include solo shows at MIT List Visual Arts Centre in Cambridge
(Mass.), Sculpture Center New York, Vancouver Art Gallery, Serpen-
tine Gallery in London (together with Phyllida Barlow), Kunsthalle
Basel, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Kunstverein Aachen, and Kunstverein
Nürnberg. Her work has been featured in several major international
exhibitions including Sculpture Projects Münster (2007), the Berlin Bi-
ennial (2008), the 54th Venice Biennial (2011), the Glasgow Interna-
tional Festival of Visual Art (2011) and Temporary Stedelijk 2, Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam (2011). Baghramian was awarded the 2012 Hec-
tor Kunstpreis, which included an artist publication and an exhibition
at the Kunsthalle Mannheim. Upcoming exhibitions in 2014 will take
place at The Art Institute of Chicago, Serralves Museum, Porto and
Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach.

Karen Barad is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History

of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Barad
holds a doctorate degree in theoretical particle physics, or more spe-
cifically, quantum field theory. Barad held a tenured appointment in a
physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces.
Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Phys-
ics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University
Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy,
science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory. Barad is
currently working on a book project titled Infinity, Nothingness, and
Justice-to-Come. Barad is the Co-Director of the UCSC Science & Jus-
tice Training Program.

Diana Coole is Professor for Political Theory and Social Theory at Birk-
beck College, University of London. She is currently writing a book on
the politics and ethics of the population question, based on a Lever­
hulme Senior Research Fellowship (2010-13). She is an associate editor
of the  eight-volume Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought
(2014). Amongst her latest book publications are Merleau-Ponty and
Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism (2007) and The New Material-
isms. Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010) (co-edited with Samantha
Frost).

229
 Diedrich Diederichsen (*1957 in Hamburg) has been working as an
editor and publisher of music magazines in the 1980 and as a profes-
sor a.o. in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Pasadena, Weimar, Vienna, St. Louis,
Cologne, Los Angeles and Gainesville in the 1990s. Since 2006 he is
Professor for Theory, Praxis and Mediation of Contemporary Art at the
Institut für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften of the Academy of Fine
Arts, Vienna. Among his latest publications are the books Über Pop-
Musik (2014), The Whole Earth – Kalifornien oder das Verschwinden
des Außen (with Anselm Franke, 2013), The Sopranos (2012), Utopia
of Sound (with Constanze Ruhm, 2010), On (Surplus) Value in Art
(2008), Kritik des Auges – Texte zur Kunst (2008) and Eigenblutdoping
– Selbstverwertung, Künstlerromantik, Partizipation (2008).

Discoteca Flaming Star is an interdisciplinary artistic and collabora-

tive performance project by Christina Gómez Barrio and Wolfgang
Mayer. Cristina Gómez Barrio was born 1973 in the Alhambra, Spain.
She studied in Madrid, Munich, Berlin and took part in the Whitney
Independent Study Programme in New York. Gómez Barrio works
with the medium of drawing, studies the colour white in performance,
takes photographs and dreams. Wolfgang Mayer was born in 1967 in
Wertach, Allgäu as the illegitimate child of Bonnie Tyler and Klaus
Kinski. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, at Bar d´O
in New York and with Ron Clark at the Whitney Independent Study
Programme in New York. He works primarily with drawing, shimmer-
ing dust, video and performance. In 1998 Christina Gómez Barrio and
Wolfgang Mayer founded Discoteca Flaming Star. The work of the Ber-
lin-based artists has been shown at numerous venues including Artists
Space, Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, New York; MUMOK, Vienna;
HKW, n.b.k., Basso, KW in Berlin, Ojo Atomico, Centro de Arte 2 de
Mayo, Madrid, WHW, Zagreb, Tate Modern, London, De Appel, Ellen
de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam.

Karianne Fogelberg is a research associate for the theory of design

und architecture at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the
Academy of Fine Arts Munich since 2012. She teaches and writes
about developments in contemporary design and its relations to art
and architecture. Between 2009 and 2012 she taught at the Faculty of
Design at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz. Since 2007 she
has been working as freelance author for AD, Frame, Welt am Sonntag,
Weltkunst and others. Prior to this the design historian with an MA in
History of Design and Material Culture from the Royal College of Art
and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London worked as editor for form
magazine. 

Sofia Hultén (*1972, Stockholm) lives and works in Berlin and has
been a guest professor at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule in 2012.
The works of the Swedish artist have been presented in numerous in-
ternational group exhibitions, amongst them, Kunstverein Frankfurt,
the National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik, the Guangdong Museum
in Guangzhou, the Skulpturenpark Köln, the Moderna Museet Stock-

230
holm, Kunsthalle Glarus, Today Art Museum Beijing and the Ludwig
Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen. Her solo shows include Kün-
stlerhaus Bremen, Ikon Gallery Birmingham, Konrad Fischer Galerie
Düsseldorf and Berlin, Langen Foundation in Neuss and the Kunstver-
ein Braunschweig. Hultén took part in the IASPIS Residency Program
(2007) is a scholarship holder of Stiftung Kunstfonds (2009) and was
awarded the 2011 Moderna Museets Vänners Skulpturpris.

Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of

Aberdeen since 1999. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in
Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social or-
ganisation in the circumpolar North, on evolutionary theory, human-
animal relations, language and tool use, environmental perception
and skilled practice. He is currently exploring issues on the interface
between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture and pleads
for a reunification of theory and praxis. Among his latest publications
is Making (Routledge 2013).  

Anja Kirschner, David Panos (Athens, London) in their joint films and
installations combine moments of the present with historical research-
es and literary sources. In their video installation Ultimate Substance
(2012), which was filmed and realized in Greece, the artists engage
in the relationship between economic and cultural logic. Here, the
silver mining and the coinage in ancient Greece become the starting
point of a filmic reflection of the current financial crisis. Anja Kirsch-
ner and David Panos were awarded the 2011 Jarman Award (UK) and
realized solo exhibitions at a.o. secession, Vienna, Extra City, Antwerp
and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Furthermore their works have been
shown in group exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Lisson Gallery,
London (2013) as well as the Liverpool Biennale (2012) and the British
Art Show 7 (2010/11).

Max Lamb explores materials in unconventional ways. The British de-

signer questions the customary perception of materialities and their
processing. Lamb studied three-dimensional design at the University
of Northumbria and Product Design at the Royal College of Art, Lon-
don. He is running a design studio in the North of London. Amongst
his works are pieces of furniture and objects for labels such as Dead-
good and Makers and Brothers, as well as individual pieces for the
design gallery Libby Sellers in London and Johnson Trading Gallery
in New York. Since 2012 he is teaching at the department of Product
Design at the Royal College of Art.

Costas Lapavitsas is Professor of Economy at the School of Oriental

and African Studies, University of London. He works on the political
economy of money and finance, on the Japanese economy, the history
of economy and economic thought and on the contemporary world
economy. He published several books and countless articles, amongst
them Beyond Market-Driven Development (with M. Noguchi, Rout-
ledge, 2005), Financialisation in Crisis (Brill 2012), Crisis in the Euro-

231
 zone (Verso, 2012). His latest book Profiting without Producing (Verso,
2013), discusses the financialisation of capitalism.

Cornelia Ortlieb studied contemporary German philology, compara-

tive literature and philosophy and since 2011 is a professor for com-
parative literature at the LMU in Munich. She has discussed issues
related to questions of materials and materialities in the arts in several
projects, most prominently in relation to the involvement of materi-
als in the process of writing and several forms of paper work. Her
latest publications on the material side of writing and on the theory
of materiality include Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi und die Philosophie
als Schreibart (2010), Jean Pauls Punktiermanier (2011), Schöpfen und
Schreiben: Weimarer Papierarbeiten (2012), Papierflügel und Federp-
fau. Materialien des Liebeswerbens bei Stéphane Mallarmé (2013).

Manfred Pernice (*1963 in Hildesheim) lives and works in Berlin

where from winter 2012 he has been appointed as professor of sculp-
ture at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He studied at the HBK in
Braunschweig (1984–86) and the UdK in Berlin (1988–94). His works
are internationally represented in museums and collections world-
wide. 2011/2012 they were exhibited u.a. in solo exhibitions at Anton
Kern Gallery, New York, DCA Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee,
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, and in 2013/14 tutti, at the Haus der
Kunst, Munich, was realized.

Colin Renfrew, Prof. Dr. em., was Disney Professor of Archaeology at

the University of Cambridge from 1987 to 2004 and later became the
director of the McDonald Institute for Archeological Research, where
he still researches as a Senior Fellow. One of his two major focuses
of research lies on early European cultural development and is based
on a number of crucial archeological excavations on the culture of
the early Bronze Age in Aegean. The other one is dedicated to the
development of the Material Engagement Theory, which considers the
cognitive as well as physical aspects of human involvement in the ma-
terial world. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, won a number of
international prices and in 1991 was made a Life Peer as Baron Ren-
frew of Kaimsthorn.

Thomas Schröpfer is Professor and Associate Head of Pillar of Archi-

tecture and Sustainable Design at Singapore University of Technology
and Design (SUTD) that was founded in collaboration with Massa-
chusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As a practicing architect he was
also awarded a PhD from Harvard University in 2004 and conducts
research on a.o. the role of material innovation in the process of archi-
tectural design and on sustainable architectonical urban development.
His publications include Material Design: Materialität in der Architek-
tur (Birkhäuser 2011) and Ecological Urban Architecture: Qualitative
Approaches to Sustainability (Birkhäuser 2012). Architecture as a
material practice is reflected in his own scientific research as well as

232
in the projects of Schröpfer + Hee, a Cambridge, Massachusetts and
Singapore-based architectural office of which he is a co-founder.

Kerstin Stakemeier studied political science and art history, in which

she completed her Ph.D. in 2010. She taught a.o. at the Bauhaus Uni-
versity Weimar and the Free University Berlin and was a researcher
at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. Since 2012 she is junior
professor at the cx centre of interdisciplinary studies at the Academy
of Fine Arts Munich. Stakemeier was the initiator of the „Space for
Actualisation“, Hamburg (with Nina Köller, 2007/2008) and realised
exhibitions at a.o. Kunsthaus Bregenz (with Eva Birkenstock, 2010)
and Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (with Anja Kirschner/David Panos, 2011).
In 2012 Painting. The Implicit Horizon (with Avigail Moss) and Anfang
Gut. Alles Gut. Actualisations of the Futurist Opera ‚Victory over the
Sun’ (1913) (with Eva Birkenstock/Nina Köller) were published, her
book Entkunstung. Aktualisierungen einer Abschaffungstendenz fol-
lows in 2014.

Nicola Stattmann has been working with her own design studio in
Frankfurt am Main since 2002. The main focus of her work as a de-
signer and materials-expert lies on the application of new materials
and technologies in the realm of product design. Among her custom-
ers are Adidas, Fissler, Samsung and Volkswagen. In 2011 she and her
brother founded the company Stattmann Neue Möbel, which is based
in the Wesphalian Ascheberg, producing a selected program of furni-
ture produced from sustainable materials. Stattmann holds a diploma
in product design and since 2004 has been a guest professor a.o. at
the Bauhaus University Weimar, the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offen-
bach and the Kunsthochschule Kassel. In publications like Ultra Light
– Super Strong (Birkhäuser 2003) and Unfolded (with Petra Schmidt,
Birkhäuser 2009) she discusses the potentialities of new materials in
product design and with the material paper respectively.

Susanne Witzgall holds a PhD in art history and since 2011 is head of
the cx centre of interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts
Munich funded by the BMBF. From 2003 to 2011 she was an assistant
professor at the Department for Art History at the same institution and
in summer term 2013 a guest lecturer at Newcastle University. From
1995 to 2002 Witzgall worked as a curator for the Deutsches Museum
Bonn and the Deutsches Museum, Munich. She has curated and co-
curated several exhibitions among them Art & Brain II (1997/98), The
Other Face (2002), Say It Isn’t So (2007) and (Re)Designing Nature
(2010/1) and is the editor and author of numerous books and articles
on contemporary art and art and science, including Kunst nach der
Wissenschaft (2003) and New Mobility Regimes in Art and Social Sci-
ences (with Gerlinde Vogl and Sven Kesselring, 2013).

233
Photo Credits

Cover
Detail of the Trüllerwanne with works by Matthias Trager and Uli Ball: Uli Ball, PU-cast, Pol-
yurethane, detail, 2013; Matthias Trager, REL_02 und REL_03, detail, 2013, photo Gregorios
Koumanidis.

Cornelia Ortlieb: Text and Texture: On the Materiality of West-Eastern Transfers in

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Marianne von Willemer
fig. 1: Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Museen: Kg-2008/284 • fig. 2: Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Mu-
seen: Kg-2008/284 • fig. 3: Goethe-Museum Düsseldorf • fig. 4: © Goethe-Haus Frankfurt –
Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurt: Hs 12413, photo Udo zur Megede • fig. 5: © Goethe-
Haus – Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurt: IV-1962-24, photo Udo zur Megede • fig. 6:
© Goethe-Haus – Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurt: IV-775, photo Udo zur Megede.

Max Lamb: “I was literally sticking my hands into materials”

fig. 1: photo Max Lamb • fig. 2–5: photos Jane Lamb and Max Lamb • fig. 6–8: photos Max
Lamb • fig. 9–10: © Max Lamb and Deadgood LTD. • fig. 11: photo Max Lamb.

“Materials are constantly astonishing” In Conversation with Max Lamb and Tim Ingold
fig. 1–4: photos Max Lamb.

Project Class Lamb

fig. 1–11: all photos Sally Kotter • depicted works: fig. 4 (p. 94, bottom): Markus Rupprecht,
Apple, 2012, bronze cast, apple sized • fig. 6 (p. 95, bottom left): Valerie Nora Christiansen,
Untitled, 2012, liquid pewter cast in snow • fig. 7 (p. 95, bottom right): Rebecca Grollmann,
The memory of a drawing, 2013, pewter cast in sand, ca. 28 × 26 cm • fig. 8 (p. 96, top left):
Simon Kettenberger, Untitled, November 2012, pewter, sand cast, ca. 10 × 10 × 7 cm • fig. 9
(p. 96, top right): Anna Bischof, Asch No.3, 2012, bronze cast, 15 × 10 × 7 cm • fig.10 (p. 96,
bottom): Anne Achenbach, Untitled, 2013, bronze, centrifugal casting in sand mould, diameter
12 cm each.

The Promise of Intelligent Materials. Nicola Stattmann and Thomas Schröpfer in

Conversation with Karianne Fogelberg
fig. 1: © IDEO • fig. 2: © Peter Yeadon • fig. 3: © Gustav Gerster GmbH & Co. KG • fig. 4:
© Gustav Gerster GmbH & Co. KG • fig. 5–6: © Jannis Hülsen • fig. 7–8: © Steffen Reichert,
Achim Menges • fig. 9–10: © Achim Menges, Steffen Reichert, Scheffler + Partner • fig. 11: ©
Reinder Groothedde • fig. 12: © Johnson Controls • fig. 13: © Harrison Spinks Ltd. • fig. 14:
© Nike Inc. • fig. 15–16: © Kruunenberg Van der Erve Architecten • fig. 17–18: © UNStudio/
Christian Richters and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014 • fig. 19–21: © Gramazio & Kohler.

Colin Renfrew: Material Engagement as Human Creative Process and Cognitive Life
of Things
fig. 1: from John Frere, “An account of flint weapons discovered at hoxne in Suffolk”, in:
Archaeologia 1800, London: Society of Antiquaries, p. 204f. • fig. 2–4: photos Colin Renfrew

235
 • fig. 5: from Colin Renfrew, Prehistory, the Making of the Human Mind, London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 2007, p. 170 • fig. 6: Colin Renfrew • fig. 7: photo Colin Renfrew • fig. 8: from Colin
Renfrew, Investigations in Orkney, London: Society of Antiquaries, 1979, fig. 32 • fig. 9–12:
photos Colin Renfrew • fig. 13–15: photos Sofia Hultén, Courtesy Konrad Fischer Galerie
© Sofia Hultén and VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2014 • fig. 16–19: photos Cambridge Keros Project
• fig. 20: photos Sofia Hultén, Courtesy Konrad Fischer Galerie © Sofia Hultén and VG Bild-
kunst, Bonn 2014.

Sofia Hultén: Purpose Unknown

fig. 1–12: Courtesy Konrad Fischer Galerie, © Sofia Hultén and VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2014.

Susanne Witzgall: New Materialists in Contemporary Art

fig. 1–3: Courtesy Sergej Jensen and Galerie Neu, Berlin • fig. 4: Courtesy Gedi Sibony
and Greene Naftali, New York • fig. 5: Foto Alex Delfanne, London, Courtesy BQ, Berlin and
Herald St, London • fig. 6 –7: photos Fred Dott, Hamburg, Courtesy BQ, Berlin and Herald St,
London • fig. 8: photo Robin Watkins, Courtesy Nina Canell, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Mother’s
Tankstation, and Galerie Wien Lukatsch • fig. 9 –10: Copyright and Courtesy Pierre Huyghe
© VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2014 • fig. 11–13: Courtesy Daria Martin and Maureen Paley, London.

Manfred Pernice: Kassetten, Cassettes

fig. 1: Brunnenschale Kolmar, storage situation Berlin Weißensee, photo Manfred Pernice,
2006 • fig. 2: Manfred Pernice, K + K, 2012, wood, lacquer, paper, 42 × 170 × 170 cm, Cour-
tesy of the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf • fig. 3: Manfred Pernice, pezzo
7, 2012, wood, vinyl, tape, 25,4 × 168,3 × 113,2 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern
Gallery, New York • fig. 4: nolle_prophylaxe, Tschajka, practise inventory and mobile, de-
tails, photo Manfred Pernice, 2012 • fig. 5: Manfred Pernice, LOCAL 2/2, 2013, wood, lac-
quer, miscellaneous materials, 194 × 284 × 148 cm, installation view, «anexos»LOCAL, The
Modern Institute, Glasgow, Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute, Glasgow • fig. 6:
Artemisstraße, Berlin, photo Manfred Pernice, 2013.

Project Class Pernice

fig. 1–3: photos Georgios Koumanidis • fig. 4: flyer for the installation Trüllerwanne, 2013,
front • fig. 5–10: photos Uli Ball • depicted works: fig. 5 (p. 160, top): foreground, third object
from the left (truncanted paper bag): Pernilla Henrikson, Lichtbehälter, 2013, wax on paper
fibre, foreground, first object from the left: Uli Ball, survival kit, 2013, miscellaneous pack-
aging, foreground, second object from the left: Valerie Nora Christiansen, Untitled, 2013.
ceramics • fig. 6 (p. 160, bottom): fore- and middle ground: Matthias Trager, REL_02 and
REL_03, 2013 (pink reliefs), paraffin casts and Untitled [HYBRID], 2013, brass cast • fig. 7
(p. 161, top): first and second object from the left: Valerie Nora Christiansen, Umfassungen,
2013, ceramics • middle object: Paul Kotter, Gipsiking, 2013, gesso, glass, 48 × 25 × 15cm,
first object from the right: Uli Ball, parts of cast, 2013, gesso, second object from the right:
Matthias Numberger, Sender-Empfänger, 2013, 3D Polymer Print, 19 × 17 × 5 cm • fig. 8
(p. 161, bottom): first object from the left: Uli Ball, Untitled, 2013, concrete, second object
from the left: Valerie Nora Christiansen, Untitled, 2012, liquid pewter cast in snow, first and
second object from the right: Gregorios Koumanidis, Schalen, 1. Versuch, 2013, silicon •
fig. 9 (p. 162, top): object in the foreground: Valerie Nora Christiansen, Untitled, 2012, liquid
pewter cast in snow, first object from the right (yellow hat): Pernilla Henrikson, svamp,
2012, wax in paper fibre • fig. 10 (p. 162, bottom): Uli Ball, oben ohne und Vitrine, 2012,
board, acrylic glass, gold paint, glue, plastic foil.

236
Discoteca Flaming Star: Actually 12 Times Alissa
fig. 1–6: camera Anja Weber.

Kerstin Stakemeier: Crisis and Materiality in Art: on the Becoming of Form and
Digitality
fig. 1: Courtesy Harald Popp and Galerie Karin Günther (Hamburg) • fig. 2–3: Courtesy Anja
Kirschner, David Panos and Hollybush Gardens (London) • fig. 4–5: Courtesy Cristina Gómez
Barrio and Wolfgang Mayer, photo Anja Weber • fig. 6–13: Courtesy Harald Popp and Galerie
Karin Günther (Hamburg).

Costas Lapavitsas: The (Im)Materiality of Economy

fig.1: Courtesy Harald Popp and Galerie Karin Günther (Hamburg).

Anja Kirschner, David Panos: Sell everything, buy everything, kill everything.
fig. 1: photo Alessandra Chila, Courtesy Anja Kirschner, David Panos and Hollybush Gardens
(London) • fig. 2–4: Courtesy Anja Kirschner, David Panos and Hollybush Gardens (London)
• fig. 5–6: photos Stephan Baumann, Courtesy Anja Kirschner, David Panos and Hollybush
Gardens (London) • fig. 7–10: Courtesy Anja Kirschner, David Panos and Hollybush Gardens
(London) • fig. 11: photo Wolfgang Thaler, Courtesy Anja Kirschner, David Panos and Hol-
lybush Gardens (London) • fig. 12: photo Jens Ziehe, Courtesy Anja Kirschner, David Panos
and Hollybush Gardens (London).

Project Class Baghramian

Depicted works: fig. 1 (p. 237): Kristina Schmidt, Untitled (Quadriga), 2013, monotype, oil
paint on paper, ca. 35 × 50 cm • fig. 2 (p. 238, top): Lina Zylla, Untitled, 2013, egg tempera,
charcoal and oil crayon on paper, 33 × 48 cm, photo Lina Zylla • fig. 3 (p. 238, middle): Lina
Zylla, Untitled, 2013, charcoal and oil crayon on paper, 35 × 44 cm, photo Lina Zylla • fig. 4
(p. 238, bottom): Lina Zylla, Untitled, 2013, charcoal and oil crayon on paper, 40 × 60 cm,
photo Lina Zylla • fig. 5 (p. 240, top): Alexandra Gerhold, Untitled, 2013, sculpture made
from plasticine and latex, ca. 5 × 7 cm, photo Alexandra Gerhold • fig. 6 (p. 240, bottom):
Pernilla Henrikson, Untitled, 2012, mixed technique on hand-made laid paper, 11 × 15 cm,
photo Pernilla Henrikson, © Pernilla Henrikson • fig. 7 (p. 241, top left): Johanna Gonschorek,
Untitled, 2013, polystyrene mirror (30 × 20 cm) on textile, photo Johanna Gonschorek • fig. 8
(p. 241, top right): Louiza Taracha, Untitled, 2013, gesso, latex gloves, 60 × 40 × 3 cm, photo
Pernilla Henrikson, © Luiza Taracha • fig. 9 (p. 241, bottom): Pernilla Henrikson, Untitled,
2012, mixed technique on hand made laid paper, 19 × 24 cm, photo Pernilla Henrikson, ©
Pernilla Henrikson • fig. 10 (p. 242, top left): Johanna Klingler, Untitled, 2013, billboards, pa-
per, acrylic and pigment, ca. 170 × 90 × 90cm • fig. 11 (p. 242, top right): Uli Ball, stand, 2013,
wood, iron, lacquer, paper, 123 × 42 × 37 cm • fig. 12 (p. 242, bottom): Johanna Gonschorek,
Untitled, installation view, 2013, 4 min. loop video projection, 2 wooden cupboards, each 44,5
× 41,5 cm and 30 × 30cm, lacquer on canvas 40 × 30cm, photo Johanna Gonschorek.

The copyright for the photographs of the artworks and design objects lies, unless otherwise
stated, with the respective artists. We are thanking all the copyright owners for their kind
allowance of publication. If despite intensive research for the respective copyright owners,
someone should not have been incorporated, the rights will be settled within the usual agree-
ments.

237
This publication is funded from resources of the Federal Ministry for
Education and Research under the grant number 01PL11023. The
responsibility for the content of this publication lies with the authors.
Colophon

Editors
Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier

Translations into English

Textual Bikini (contributions by: the editors (Preface), Susanne
Witzgall, Cornelia Ortlieb, Manfred Pernice, Discoteca Flaming Star,
Kerstin Stakemeier, Diedrich Diederichsen)

Copyediting
diaphanes

Editorial Assistance
Karianne Fogelberg

Transcription of the Conversations

Katarina Čilić

Photo Editing Assistance

Johanna Klingler

Design
Yusuf Etiman

1. Edition
ISBN 978-3-03734-761-4

© diaphanes, Zürich-Berlin 2014

www.diaphanes.net
All rights reserved