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Dear Simon,
The group wishes to report:
You asked about solidarity. One way of forging solidarity is to attempt
to sing together. We remember A Song to the Tin in Oxford,
in which you convened singers and instruments, music and audience. The
event spoke to (sang to?) your research interests in the dialogic, the
Anthropocenic, and the acknowledgement of more-than-humans in your project.
The male voices – evincing the legacy of a folk tradition, and definitely
not those of ‘pure’ boys of the choir schools nearby – generated the
opportunity to join in. An alternative community of male voices? The
tin singing? Some of us did manage to synchronise with the chorus. There
was also quite a lot of foot tapping and nodding along. It did a good
job of expanding the restricted gestural repertoires so common in academic
settings at the University of Oxford. And left us with lots of questions
about how and when we admit human and non-human others into our work.
Pride of the moor we sing unto thee,
In thanks for the treasure you’ve given so free;
And should we have need to come find you again,
We’ll call and we’ll listen for the cry of the tin.
Some years ago, several of us began to be interested in the work of
the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and how to rethink a fundamental tenet
of sociology – the social as a sphere. We were introduced to Sloterdijk’s
thought by the cultural theorist Celia Lury. German sociology had already
digested and expelled many of Sloterdijk’s original writings and so
there was some ‘temporal drag’, as Elizabeth Freeman would call it,
to this encounter. For example, a German colleague told us that, in
2011, it was actually quite embarrassing to be citing Sloterdijk. Yet
we suggest to you that his proposal of spherology provides a productive
framework with which all of us can think beyond the characterisation
of society as a single bounded sphere. This formulation is beloved of
Durkheimian sociology, but is also evident in much art making, even
when more-than-humans are included. The affective attunement which might
be a property of atmo-spheres allows us a different way into the thinking/feeling
of solidarity.
When there is a conflation of the society with the network, it is tempting
to equate technological relations with social relations. In 2001, the
sociologist Andreas Wittel coined the term ‘network sociality’ to describe
the condition of information-based social relations. This was a time
of macro theories of the global information age; a time when relying
on terms such as community or Gemeinschaft was seen to be insufficient.
Such words could not capture the effects of technological change, including
individualisation and the dominance of intense yet ephemeral links.
What else, apart from network sociality, could adequately describe the
phenomenon of speed dating? (No Twitter yet, this is 2001!)
Within these eight minutes participants have to exchange information,
not narratives. ‘What do you do for a living? Where are you from? What
is the most exciting thing you’ve ever done? What do you do in your
spare time?’...It is an exchange of data rather than a romantic date.
(Wittel, 2001, 68)
Sloterdijk’s theory of living-in-spheres-of-shared-air offers an alternative
way of imagining how sociality is forged. By proposing ‘social foam’
as the descriptor of the social world, he encourages us to focus on
shared walls, fragility of boundaries between cells and contagiousness.
Imagine actual bath foam here and all the possibilities of bubble making
and destruction. Gone is the image of point to point communication and
its associated impulse that a network is mappable. Rather a different
possibility of co-mingling is proposed, and with it a formulation of
living in the same air qualities. Air is the condition for speaking,
as well as singing. Speed dating might be seen as an exchange of enthusiasms
and disappointments transmitted through an affective atmosphere. If
the social is now foam, we pay attention to how bubbles touch and blend
with each other. Which burst and become co-mingled with the gases of
others?
What happens if we approach worlds not as the dead or reeling effects
of distant systems but as lived affects with tempos, sensory knowledges,
orientations, transmutations, habits, rogue force fields? What might
we do with the proliferation of little worlds of all kinds that form
up around conditions, practices, manias, pacings, scenes of absorption,
styles of living, forms of attachment (or detachment) identities and
imaginaries, or some publically circulating strategy for self-transformation?
(Stewart, 201, 446)
Kathleen Stewart knows the stakes. If we believe in the foamy shared
scenes of lived affects we probably do different kind of solidarities.
Less speed dating and more International Parade of the Politically
Depressed, to reference an action by the art-academic group Feel
Tank Chicago. Who marched in bathrobes. We are not connected by information
but attunements.
Having written this, we don’t want to suggest the social must always
be a ‘problem’ for art in the same way as it might be for sociology.
We’ve learned a great deal recently from Martin Savransky’s proposal
that we should pay attention to the mode of existence of the problem,
and its openness to events. So better to begin with events and ponder
how and when they pose problems, rather than the other way around. As
Savransky notes, it is the becoming of problems which set inquiries
into motion. Perhaps this is counter-intuitive in artistic research,
where an event (an artwork?) might be conceived as being led by a problem,
which is itself driven by an inquiry. A Song to the Tin as
an event offers itself up to be inherited, not just as a problem of
the more-than-human-plus-human-in-Anthropocene, but as a singable and
catchy tune and as intervention by human others in an otherwise closed
bubble of academic privilege. And another problem: singing requires
air, and air poses the problem of breathing.
Take a deep breath. With every inhalation, industrially produced
molecules are drawn into your being. Once inhaled, synthetic molecules
may pass through membranes, connect with receptors, nestle in fatty
tissue, mimic a hormone, or modulate gene expression, thereby stimulating
a cascade of further metabolic actions. Breathe in. We cannot help it.
You must breathe to live, like you must drink and eat. There is no choice
in the matter. It is a condition of our being. With each breath we are
recommitting to an ongoing relationship to building materials, consumer
products, oil spills, agricultural pesticides, factories near and far
that all contribute to the emission of these synthetic molecules.
(Michelle Murphy, 2016)
So we are back to the planet, and environment and looping back to
your concern with bringing in non-human others to the Anthropocene.
Yet for Murphy this problem is to be inherited using different supports.
Murphy calls for doing ‘alter-embodiments’ which enable us to be in
solidarity with reproductive and environmental justice, and which recognise
the legacy of capitalist, colonial and racist systems. As we breathe.
And as we sing together. Or maybe we have to shout?
Within the condition
of alterlife the potential for political kinship and alter-relations
comes out of the recognition of your imbrications in the tangle of supports
and harms. (Michelle Murphy, 2016)
…
All of us have found ourselves writing in a tone which partially mimics
(although also takes seriously) the style of the letters which you have
written about the making-thinking of your work, and gathered in your
book Who Else Takes Part?: Admitting the more-than-human into participatory
art (2015). Your letters cite academic sources extensively. They
address specific interlocutors directly. However none of the letters
are signed, or profess ‘Love’, ‘Best Wishes’ or even ‘Yours Sincerely’.
We were wondering if you are ambivalent about these leave-taking performances
of relation, which are so much more specific than the generic ‘Dear’
at the outset. You have set our next inquiry on solidarity into motion.
So here is a final provocation. It is to do with the idea of ‘the relation’
itself and what you call the ‘penchant for relationality’ (ibid, 167).
Our dilemma pertains to a claim that idea of the ‘relation’ itself is
putting a brake on other kinds of knowing about being in the world.
The anthropologist Stefan Helmreich reminded us recently that we may
have become too quick in our habit of thinking relation as assemblage.
He asked us all - do we use relation to stop ourselves thinking about
bodies and substances? Does it foreclose what thinking we can do? Ours
is an opening question, as we haven’t discussed what we, as a group,
would answer.
Best wishes, and good luck,
Nina
Sources:
Freeman, Elizabeth (2010) Time Binds: Queer
Temporalities, Queer Histories, Duke University Press.
Helmreich, Stefan
(2016) Elementary Forms of Elemental Media, Paper given at the Annual
Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Barcelona, September
3rd 2016
Murphy, Michelle (2016) Afterlife: what a body can’t do, Keynote
Address to the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science,
Barcelona, August 31st 2016
Pope, Simon (2015) Who Else Takes Part?:
Admitting the more-than-human into participatory art, University of
Oxford, 2015. www.tinyurl.com/whoelsetakespart. [printed in an edition
of 100]
Savransky, Martin (in press) The Social and Its Problems: On
Problematic Sociology, In Marres, N.; Guggenheim, M. & Wilkie, A. (eds.).
Inventing The Social. London: Mattering Press.
Stewart, Kathleen (2011)
Atmospheric Attunements, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
Vol 29, No 3, 445-453
Wittel, Andreas (2001) Towards Network Sociality,
Theory, Culture and Society Vol 18, No 6, 51-76
Nina Wakeford is a Clarendon Scholar
at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. She has studied fine
art and sociology, and teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London.
She is the co-author of Inventive Methods: The Happening of the
Social (Routledge, 2012).
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