On The MASA

Saâdane Afif, "Untitled (This the Way You & I Measure the World, 2004)“, 2008

By Ina Blom

One of the more inspiring catalogue contributions of late in my view is an essay that seemingly does not deal with art at all but with a renewed conception of politics. The text in question, written by Bruno Latour for the exhibition project “Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy”, proposed that the sober-minded reliance on so-called hard facts known as “Realpolitik” be supplanted by a “Dingpolitik” – that is, a form of politics that would see facts not as simple, une-quivocal truths but as complex things, assemblages of meanings, opinions, theories and actions that would have to be acknowledged for their ability to separate and divide as much as for their ability to form common platforms for seemingly inevitable decisions. The essay played up the fact that in a number of languages (including my own) the word thing is also the word for the political assembly, the place where delegates meet. As assemblages, things could then be seen to make up highly different types of assemblies: disregarding the question of the human vs. non-human form of the “delegates”, they emerge as places of nego-tiation and politics, the very places where sociality itself can be traced. Each assemblage potentially attests to a specific kind of assembly, or, if you will, a particular type of multitude. But, by the same token, an assemblage may also attest to the need or desire for dissembling – of resisting accord, unity, harmony, resemblance. Sidestepping the tendency to always look for simple facts, the challenge raised by the concept of “Dingpolitik” is precisely that of paying attention to the various places of assembling and dissembling.Read more...>