Abstract
Modernism is an endless series of beginnings and valedictions. As a result, we are continually haunted by the demise of the modern, by repeated proclamations of its end, to the point that we wonder whether, from its very inception, it has ever ceased starting over.
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References
Bruno Latour, “Welcome to an Idea?”, Domus, No. 872, July/August 2004, pp. 104–105.
For a discussion of pre-modern versus modern temporality and the implications of their narrative structures, see: Fredric Jameson. “Time and the Concept of Modernity,” Anytime, Cynthia Davidson ed., New York: Anyone Corporation; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp. 208–217.
See: Eugene W. Holland and Ronald Bogue, in: Deleuze: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers 1996, pp. 240–269; and Slavoj Zizek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, New York, NY: Routledge 2004.
Bruno Latour, Pandor’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
B. Latour. We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1993; and B. Latour. “What is Iconoclash? Or is there a World Beyond the Image Wars?” Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2002, pp. 14–37.
Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, translated by Roxanne Lapidus, Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press 1995.
Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik — or How to Make Things Public,” with excerpt from: Jonathan Swift on the Difficulty of Talking with Objects, in: Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 2005. “How different, for instance, to deal with religion if you wait for its slow disappearance in the faraway land of fairies, or if it explodes under your very eyes as what makes people live and die now — now and also tomorrow. What a difference it makes if nature, instead of a huge reservoir of forces and a bottomless repository of waste, turns suddenly into something that interrupts any progression: something to which you cannot appeal and can’t get rid of. ‘Comment s’en débarrasser?’ Ionesco asked during the ‘Glorious Thirties’. It has now become the worry, the Sorge, the souci of almost everyone in all languages. We can get rid of nothing and no one. Ecology has probably ruined forever the time of Succession and has ushered us into the time of Space. Yes, everything is contemporary. Progress and succession, revolution and substitution, neither are part of our operating system any longer.“
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Free Press 1992. See also: Gilles Deleuze, “Repetition and Difference,” and “Repetition for Itself,” in: Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton, New York, NY: Columbia University Press 1994; and Fredric Jameson, “Time and the Concept of Modernity,” Anytime, Cynthia Davidson ed., New York: Anyone Corporation; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1999, pp. 208–217.
Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik.” “Back to things. Back to this fragile and provisional pandemonium: a show, a catalogue. Demon and demos, as I said earlier, have the same etymology. If you follow the first division, you multiply the occasions to differ and to dissemble; if you follow the second division, you multiply the occasions to agree, to compose, to assemble, to share. The difference between the two is as thin as a knife. In both cases the Ding will disband — and so will this exhibit. If the ‘demon of politics’ has taken you over a certain pattern will emerge: too much unity, too much disunity. But if you manage to feel the passage of the „phantom public“ through your actions, another patter will emerge: less claims to unity, less beliefs in disunity.“
Ibid, p. 50.
See the introduction to: Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, “What is Iconoclash? Or is there a World Beyond the Image Wars?” Iconoclash (2002), pp. 14–37.
Serres and Latour, Conversation (1995), pp. 145–146. See also the detailed explanation of the “Counter Copernican Revolution”, in: B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1993), pp. 56–57, 76–79.
Ibid, translators note page 205. A summary of Baal and the Challenger is provided by Roxanne Lapidus. (Serres refers here to the Challenger disaster in 1986 and the ancient Carthaginian practice of enclosing human offerings in gigantic brass statues to the god Baal and incinerating them as human sacrifices, as described by Gustave Flaubert in his novel Salammbô. According to Serres, the immense cost to the respective society in erecting these “statues,” the active role of technical specialists (scientist/priests) in setting the event in motion, and the presence of large groups of onlookers, who witness the events in horror, as well as the repetitive nature of the event replayed again and again on television screens; were actively repeated in Carthage whenever national events seemed to require it. Both events, of high-tech and brass deity statues, were directed toward the heavens and comprised more than simple objects. They played powerful social roles as instruments of technology. The most contentious argument was that denial played a large role in both events. Since the Carthaginians incinerated both animals and children in their statue of Baal, and the parents of the sacrificed children allegedly denied that the cries they heard were those of humans. They would instead protest, “Those are note humans, but animals.” According to Serres, we engage in a similar denial when we say the Challenger explosion was an accident. Such accidents, he insists, are predicable according to the laws of probability. Thus technology and science preserve shadowy areas of archaic violence.) Bruno Latour rejected this allegory.
Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik.”
B. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matter of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, No. 30 (Winter 2004), pp. 225–248.
Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt,” New York Times, October 17, 2004.
Bruno Latour, Realpolitik to Dingpolitik (2005). See also: Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2004). “Our collective matters of concern, are not ruled by any other set of values, opinions, attitudes or principles. There is a hidden continuity and a hidden coherence in what we are attached to. Each object gathers around itself a different assembly of relevant parties, triggers new occasions to passionately differ and dispute. Each object may also offer new ways of achieving closure without having to agree on much else. In other words, matters in dispute — taken as so many issues — bound all of us in ways that map out a public space profoundly different from what is usually recognized under the label of „the political.“ It is this space, this hidden geography that we wish to explore through this catalogue and exhibition. But when it comes down to what is at issue, namely the object of concern that brings them together, not a word is uttered. In a strange way, history is mute just at the moment when the objects of concern should be brought in and made to speak up loudly.“
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Wolf, S.C. (2007). Valedictions of the Modern City. In: Vlay, B., Rajakovics, P., Studen, M. (eds) Uropean Urbanity. Europan 7 and 8. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-68145-9_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-68145-9_17
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