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). (more…)

The Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Rancière, trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Verso, 2006, 106 pp.

In The Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Rancière polemically addresses what he views to be a widespread trend of anti-individualism in the past and present canons of social, political, and philosophical thought. Crucially for Rancière, this trend of anti-individualism is part of “the hatred of democracy,” a specific rationality that he claims is as old as democracy itself. He contends that the hatred of democracy is a rationality of ressentiment that identifies the “limitless desire of individuals” as the symptom of democratic excess (p. 1).

Historically speaking, there have been two interrelated critiques of democracy: the first, classical challenge – beginning with Plato – asserts that democracy as a government of the people by the people must be limited in order to reconcile itself with the will of aristocratic legislators, or the government of experts. The second, modern critique – beginning under the pressures of the drafting of the American constitution and carrying on to Marx in the nineteenth century – picks up immediately where the ancients leave off: that is, “the moderns” contend that since democracy cannot survive without “the government of the best,” that is, without its elites, democracy also cannot exist without the preservation of private property (p. 2). At least since Marx’s analysis of the hidden core of private property contained in the republican constitution, these critiques have made possible an argument in favour of significantly limiting the scope and reach of democracy; that is, reducing it to something else, such as oligarchy (with democratic aspirations perhaps). The problem from this perspective, then, would not seem to be that there is not enough democracy but rather the reverse: that democracy itself has become overburdening and excessive, and something to be guarded against. Democracy has become the elephant in the room of theories of government and politics, so to speak.

Following this discussion of the ancient and modern attempts to limit democracy, Rancière frames the book around what he calls the “new hatred of democracy” – a hatred that recombines both elements of democratic critique outlined above but in novel ways. Rancière’s polemic challenges his readers to reject the critique of democracy outright because such critiques consistently define democracy so as “to confine it within limits” (p. 2) seeking to control the so-called “evil quite simply called democratic life” (p. 4). These are strategies of critique or containment that have the effect of doing away with democracy as a politics. He warns:

This thesis of the new hatred of democracy can be succinctly put: there is only one good democracy, the one that ‘represses’ the catastrophe of democratic civilization (p. 4).

(more…)

Liberty City is inspired by New York, but not beholden to it. While there are many parallels, Liberty exists in its own universe and rightfully so. Many open-world games have cities that feel as if they existed only from the moment you first turned on your console, but Liberty City looks lived in. It’s an old city and each block has its own vibe and its own history. Drive around Liberty City and you’ll be able to identify each individual block. Though Liberty is filled with brownstones and a myriad of similar brick buildings, you can tell one from the other, just as you can in New York. Go to an affluent neighborhood and the street is likely to be newly paved, the pedestrians better dressed, the cops more plentiful. But head to Dukes or Bohan and you’ll find streets nearly stripped of asphalt, homeless people wandering about aimlessly and criminals preying on the weak. [Grand Theft Auto IV Review: This is the American Dream]

[T]he real star of the game is the city itself. It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York. From Brooklyn (called Broker), through Queens (Dukes), the Bronx (Bohan), Manhattan (Algonquin) and an urban slice of New Jersey (Alderney), the game’s streets and alleys ooze a stylized yet unmistakable authenticity. (Staten Island is left out however.) The game does not try to represent anything close to every street in the city, but the overall proportions, textures, geography, sights and sounds are spot-on … [L]ike millions of other players I will happily spend untold hours cruising Liberty City’s bridges and byways, hitting the clubs, grooving to the radio and running from the cops. Even when the real New York City is right outside. [Grand Theft Auto IV: Dystopian Liberty City]

It’s important to stress though that we never limited ourselves in keeping faithful to the real city … It’s a distilled, exaggerated New York, a caricature of a city and not a brick for brick recreation. We exaggerated the best and worst bits, twisted the real city to suit our needs and left out whatever we felt wasn’t necessary … I keep seeing game worlds of sprawling futuristic metropolis or whatever and the first thing that occurs to me is where the hell do people buy milk, where do they get a cup of coffee? It’s too easy to get lost in the aesthetics of something and forget to think in those terms. How does it work? How do these people live their lives? Where do they eat? Where do they work? How do they get home? Where do they park their cars? When you start thinking along those lines it gets easier to work on something of this scale. It’s emulating life so you have to imagine living in the world you are making … You’ll see branding for oil companies on barrels, gas stations and gas attendants clothing and then when you visit some of the more industrial areas of the map you’ll see the same branding on industrial facilities. We even created history in the branding with older variations on old painted ads fading on the side of old buildings. You’ll see virtual artists advertised outside galleries, see some of their work through the window and then see other examples in some of the homes you’ll get inside. Tiny businesses, dry cleaners for example will have a store on a certain street, and you will see their van driving around the area. There are stickers, graffiti, posters, signage, billboards, adds on the internet, phone numbers to call, company cars and vans, products, tv shows, films, radio shows, theatres, fashion, jewelry, food, drink, sweets, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, businesses, perfume, institutions, law firms, banks, credit cards, garages, warehouses, car dealers, city services, shops, airlines, travel agents, sports teams and brands, the list goes on and on. And they are referenced and cross-referenced in as many ways as we can over as many types of media and situations as we can think of. [GTA IV: Building a Brave New World]

All images from Rockstar Games: Grand Theft Auto IV.

Update 13.05.08 - Liberty City vs. New York City: A photoset showing the similarities between Grand Theft Auto 4 and real life

- Anne

Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City
An exhibition critically exploring the evolving relationship between ubiquitous/pervasive computing and urban architecture.

The Architectural League of New York invites architects, artists, designers, technologists, engineers, urbanists, or teams thereof, to submit qualifications for an exhibition that will critically explore the evolving relationship between ubiquitous/pervasive computing and urban architecture. The League will commission five to seven teams to develop urban interventions–to be installed in and around New York City in spring 2009–that will imagine alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it. Commissioned projects will receive support ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.

Possible topic areas include: Privacy, Security, and Dataveillance // Social Space // Environment // Advocacy

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: June 27, 2008

**

Conflux 2008
The art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space.

Participants in Conflux share an interest in psychogeography. Projects range from interpretations of the classical approach developed by the Situationists to emerging artistic, conceptual, and technology-based practices. At Conflux, participants, along with attendees and the public, put these investigations into action on the city streets. The city becomes a playground, a laboratory and a space for the development of new networks and communities. Only events that take place in the New York City area are eligible. They may be outdoors or in a venue you provide.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: May 31, 2008

- Anne

Photo by hswapnil

The annual Tulip Festival began on Friday and runs until May 19th.

In the fall of 1945, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands presented Ottawa with 100,000 tulip bulbs. The gift was given in appreciation of the safe haven that members of Holland’s exiled royal family received during the Second World War in Ottawa and in recognition of the role which Canadian troops played in the liberation of the Netherlands … In 2002, the Festival celebrated its 50th Anniversary dedicated to its founder, Malak Karsh, having expanded to an event showcasing over 3 million tulips throughout Canada’s Capital Region.

The festival also includes Celebridée, “A Celebration of Ideas,” and this year’s speakers include Salman Rushdie, James Howard Kunstler and Jared Diamond, as well as talks about everything from dark matter to lost gardens.

Photo by andrewomerknapp

UPDATE 07/04/08

Pruned: The Machinic Landscape of Tulips

- Anne