Book Review: Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy
Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel, editors, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 1072 pp.
Space & Culture has previously posted on this book, Latour, democracy and the public.This is our second review of this tome: See Tonya Davidson’s review in issue 9.3.
Is a politics of things essential to public life today? In 2005, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, were the Managing Curators of “Making Things Public” an art exhibit held at ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy is the 1072 page catalogue of the exhibit. Lengthy and heavy with political implications, it is comprised of engaging essays and papers written by a number of scholars. I will only discuss a few. There are two distinct yet congruous rubrics throughout the book. The first is an underlying tone of doubt about the efficacy of current western democracy. Based on this doubt, the second rubric creates an impetus for readers to question how they are represented politically and what it means to be ‘public’. This volume takes as its premise that contemporary western democracy is not truly democratic.
So, if current democracy isn’t very democratic, how can we fix it? The book suggests that a more democratic form of government needs to involve going “back to things.” Latour expands on this notion of “Back to Things” in his introduction:
Where matters-of-fact have failed, let’s try what I have called matters-of-concern. What we are trying to register here in this catalog is a huge sea change in our conceptions of science, our grasps of facts, our understanding of objectivity. For too long, objects have been wrongly portrayed as matters-of-fact. This is unfair to science, unfair to objectivity, unfair to experience. They are much more interesting, variegated, uncertain, complicated, far reaching, heterogeneous, risky, historical, local, material and networky than the pathetic version offered for too long by philosophers. Rocks are not simply there to be kicked at, desks to be thumped at. “Facts are facts are facts”? Yes, but they are also a lot of other things in addition (Latour, p.19).
In addition to “matters-of-concern”, going “Back to Things” includes a form of Dingpolitik, which is a German neologism used in this exhibit to suggest a movement away from Realpolitik–a positive, materialist, no-nonsense, interest only, matter-of-fact way of dealing with naked power relations (Latour, 2005, p.14).Latour further defines Dingpolitik as “the degree of realism that is injected when:
a) Politics is no longer limited to humans and incorporates the many issues to which they are attached;
b) Objects become things, that is, when matters of fact give way to their complicated entanglements and become matters of concern;
c) Assembling is no longer done under the already existing globe or dome of some earlier tradition of building virtual parliaments;
d) The inherent limits imposed by speech impairment, cognitive weaknesses and all sorts of handicaps are no longer denied but prostheses are accepted instead;
e) It’s no longer limited to properly speaking parliaments but extended to the many other assemblages in search of a rightful assembly;
f) The assembling is done under the provisional and fragile Phantom Public, which no longer claims to be equivalent to a Body , a Leviathan or a State;
g) And, finally, Dingpolitik may become possible when politics is freed from its obsession with the time of Succession (Latour, 2005, p.41).
Though Latour clearly defines Dingpolitik and its “thingness,” the book goes beyond the concept of thing and invites readers to question all things public and political. For both Latour and Weibel, it is vital that we question existing political assemblies because assemblies promote public debate which in turn makes things more public. They do not provide a concrete answer to what a perfect democracy would look like, but this was not their intention. Rather, it was to create an assembly of disassemblies whereby the public space (ZKM) created a forum of diverse political installations in which the Phantom Public was able to move through the vast array of shopping carts, photographs, paintings, video monitors and the like to allow for reflective discussion and debate (a return to things).
A return to things not only relates to reflective discussion and debate at the public level, but also to a historical period when assemblies were held in the open air and included all shareholders from across the land. Gisli Palsson and Barbara Dölemeyer suggest these open air forums got things done, unlike today where parliamentary democracy has become entwined in red tape. In his essay entitled “Of Althings,” Gisli Palsson notes “in the ninth century, a parliament – al-thing or Alping – was established, the general assembly was often seen as a unique and early form of democratic national government, if not the original one” (Palsson, p. 250). The Alping gathered at Thingvellir “situated at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge separating the North American Plate from the Eurasian Plate” (Palsson, p. 250). The last known gathering was in 1798. These public, open air arenas took various forms but regrettably, as time has elapsed, they have either become private enclosures or been left to ruin.
The focus of Barbara Dölemeyer’s paper “Thing Site, Tie, Thing Place” continues this public versus private debate from a historical Germanic perspective. Germanic assemblies were “sometimes naturally occurring sites with features such as megaliths, great trees, larger water meadow fields, clearings or springs” (Dölemeyer, p. 260). Later, naturally occurring court and cult sites would often have “trained trees” - trees that were shaped into a special form that would provide a makeshift roof to allow proceedings to continue despite bad weather. Natural shelters then turned into “half-open structures, solid multi-purpose buildings and finally into the courthouses [and parliaments of modern times]” (Dölemeyer, p. 267). Dölemeyer’s point is very clear: as time has elapsed, the public place has become a private enclosure and what was once natural is now unnatural. Political discourse has become shrouded in secrecy behind walls and closed doors that say “do not enter.” It is this exclusionary political practice which makes hidden agendas possible and bureaucratic, and political rhetoric the unintended voice of the masses.
Composing the body politic (assembling the voices of the masses) is itself problematic: How can one assembly represent everyone and everything? Dario Gamboni’s essay “Composing the Body Politic: Composite Images and Political Representation, 1651 – 2004″ delves into this conundrum of transferring individual judgment to a sovereign. He looks at some of the more historically important political images and trends which depict written works, political uprisings, religious and royal figures. In particular, Gamboni takes a critical look at the frontispiece to Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan, a literal depiction of the sovereign as the body politic. Gamboni notes the “torso and arms of the giant are made up of heads only, directed centrifugally as if the generation of the Leviathan being now completed, all wills were contained within his sovereign power” (Gamboni, p. 165). The symbolism incorporated into the frontispiece continues
beyond the community of the citizens assembled as commonwealth, it also represents the decisive moment when multiplicity is replaced with unity, a unity that is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts and therefore bears its own face (Gamboni, p. 165).
This infinitely greater unity provides stability but it comes with a price (the sacrifice of wills) and “the image of Leviathan thus reassures even as it threatens” (Paehlke & Torgerson, 1990, p.5).
Leviathan continues to be a hot topic in Simon Schaffer’s “Seeing Double: How to Make Up a Phantom Body Public.” For Schaffer, “representation in politics and in pictures [the frontispiece of Leviathan for example] fits together…the aim is to show how many different things can be brought together simultaneously and seen as one” (Schaffer, p. 196).
He expands his notion of “seeing double” to incorporate ancient optical devices such as the multiplying glass which was used ingeniously by French priest, Jean-François Nicéron (1613-1646). Nicéron and other priests used the “multiplying glass to manipulate the most important signs of their culture: the Eucharist and the saints, noble descent and Christian victory” (Schaffer, p. 200). Most notable is Nicéron’s portrayal of the French monarchy over the Ottoman Turks. Nicéron constructed an “image of a dozen Turkish rulers surrounding Murad IV, which on inspection through the glass would be transformed into a portrait of Louis XIII” (Schaffer, p. 201). Nicéron commended himself on his remarkable accomplishment by stating the image is
such that several emperors in this picture pay homage to the King, by each contributing some part of him to make his image, just as if they strip themselves bare to honour his triumph…it was as if cloistered optics could make millennial prophecy come true by embodying good order in artful vision (as cited in Schaffer, p. 201).
Whether it is through artful vision or artful discussion, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel make things public by encouraging their readers (and former visitors of their exhibit) to question existing government and democracy. This book is a good read and a disassembly of an assembly: The many different parts compose a whole but not in the sense that the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan did; Latour and Weibel ask us to be a Phantom Public with soul and nerve endings and tell us that we don’t have to be physically seated in parliament to be heard. But we do need to participate whether by voting, activism or some other form of political representation. Moreover, we need to force governments to be accountable publicly in order to promote a sense of exigency to avoid being ‘deaf spectators’. We need to bring democracy “Back to Things”.
Reviewed by Susan Kisilevich, University of Alberta, Canada
- Ondine