Science, Society, and Becoming. This week's chapter we are reading from Pickerings' book and the chapter we are reading is New Ontologies.
P. 1-2
"In the Magle of Practice (1995) I offered an ontological vision of the world and our place in it, a vision in which human and the non-human are recognized as open-endedly becoming, taking on emergent forms in an intrinsically temporal "dance or agency"." He says that he will try to enrich and extend our visions within this chapter with help from Piet Mondrian and Willem de Kooning, let us start the philosophical journey with Piet Mondrian (I think a list of them both would be helpful):
Piet Mondrian
Geometrical abstracts
Vertical and horizontal grids of solid black lines
Grid filled with primary colours
A dualism of people and things
Split between the painter and his work
Detachment of the painter from the world
There is no tenuous connection of looking at the world
Products of Mondrian's mind
Ontological vision
These abstract paintings make us see the detachment and domination of the human agents' passive and material world.
(Verse, 2023)
Willem de Kooning
See that world and translate it to paint
Abstract in a smeary way
Dense, embodies, material engagement with the world
Do not follow a way to draw
Swirls
Vortices of colour
Chance juxtapositions
Allow to be carried away
Add more paint along the way
Smudging the paint
Back-and-forth movement
This shows that the artist (or anyone else) can not anticipate the result of the painting. It is also more difficult to find an end to the work when you see new possibilities everywhere.
(Meis, 2019)
P. 2-3
By comparing the two there is a clear difference, I will make a table to see if there is anything they share with help from statements and then answer Green for yes or Red for no to see it visually.
Statement | Piet Mondrian | Willem de Kooning |
Detaching from the world | YES | NO |
Engaging with the world | NO | YES |
Domination of the world | YES | NO |
Interplay with humans and non-human | NO | YES |
Author of the work | NO - Because the painting decides for him more than he decides for it | YES |
Discover in the painting | NO | YES |
Thematize time | NO | YES |
Unique trajectory | NO | YES |
Trial and error search process | NO - not in the same meaning | YES |
Stand for an Ontology | YES | YES |
What we can see from this is that there is not one thing that they have in common except the fact that they stand for an ontology. Even though their ontologies are quite the opposite.
I remember in my first year of BA Hons IAD I read about Mondrian, and one thing that I still remember today is a quote from a text about an employee of Mondrian. Mondrian (I believe) had said something along the lines of "he dared to put a diagonal line" which shows how strict it was to follow the horizontal and diagonal lines. Very black-and-white thinking compared to Kooning.
P. 4
We can not see that either of them is the correct way, although as a human you can align with one more than another. We are all different and see things differently. We can change with time as well, Mondrain has done that it has not always been what is listed above. His paintings looked more similar to Koonings when he started. Maybe it is due to historical events that he went the other way, but what historical events? I can only speculate in this question, that it is all our experiences and things happening around us that make us change to the way we currently are. Society influences us more than we think, there is a big pressure to follow the norm and what everyone else does to fit in and be accepted. This applies to many fields and how we live and think as humans. We are "trained" to think like everyone else it starts already in school, everyone works in the same way to reach the same goal, and not much is left to personality and it's easy to be dragged in only to not be left out. So if we go back to Mondrain's painting and everything we had discussed before, that is maybe not the world itself but the result of living in it and becoming. So after all they both may have worked in the way of becoming but one showed the process and one showed the result of the process.
P. 4-5
Martin Heidegger and his essay "The Question Concerning Technology" talks about Kooning and Mondrian. About Mondrian's work, Pickering says "In the mode of "enframing" we humans seek to step outside nature, domination and controlling it, challenging it forth as "standing reserve" for circuits of production and consumption. At the same time, we challenge ourselves as specific kinds of beings, as standing reserve for those same circuits. Heidegger saw enframing as a tremendous danger to humanity, and at the least, we can see that it is obsessive. It would be nice if we had other ways to go on in the world more readily available." I felt that it was important to capture all of that, and the importance of it in my way of thinking as well as the point of it continuing to the example of the text.
P. 5-8
John McPhee - The Control of Nature (1989), (a book that I will add to the list of books to read for my thesis), brings up different cases where humans try to control nature. Pickering will look at the Mississippi River, described as one of the world's greatest rivers. A river that has been creating enormous floodplains by overflowing, "Mississippi where marked by levees formed by natural embankments of sediment deposited on either side of the waterway.". The people who lived around the river had found a way to adapt and live with the periodic flooding. But then European settlers arrived and made fixed towns such as New Orleans (you can see the location on the map HERE,) the river's major seaport. With the fixed towns the process of controlling the river became more important and so the domination of nature started. A process that would turn out to be unsuccessful whatever the humans tried. When humans were raising the leaves the water got higher and so it continued. Now there is a wall all around New Orleans. It is being compared to the walls around middle-aged cities, but their purpose was to keep the humans beyond the walls out.
Concerning Kooning and Mondrian the engineering architecture of the river and New Orleans, it is Kooning's open-ended becoming with an interplay of the river and the people. Just as there is a "dualist Mondrain-style impulse to impose on the river a detached and timeless human conception of how it should be." I wanna emphasise the "human conception of how it should be", this is a clear statement of how humans try to control things to our benefit and how we see fit for us, in the most, convenient, comfortable, easy way, or at least we think it is the best way for us. In this case, it turned out to be more of a never-ending effort to try to control nature. Even though I think we should not mess with the natural rhythms at all, if we start to make big changes, nature will react and come back differently and that way might be worse than the first "problem" humans want to "solve". I say "problem" and "solve" because there is not a problem to solve, nature has been growing long before we came to be in this place. So the battle with the river is just what humans see as a way that they do not think aligns with them.
So the way to solve the problem of the river fighting back had another cost for the humans, an original cost of $ 68 million, but after the river destroyed the construction a cost of $ 300 million was added. A quote from an engineer was "I hope it works", It leaves me speechless after they have wasted so much money to control nature, they hope it works. That only shows the lack of knowledge or maybe focus on how nature wants to behave in the industry of engineering and architecture. This is why we should work with nature and stop controlling it. Even though there had been plenty of science, involved in the building process it was not enough. Maybe there was too much focus on how to solve the problem and not how to work with it. "Science itself thus appears as a veil, clouding our perception of how things actually are. As Heidegger put it, science is at best in the domain of the "correct" rather than the "true"." This says that science could change the way we see things, maybe rhythm analysis there I discussed HERE could help to understand nature and for a more human-nature collaborative science.
P. 8-9
"Is it possible to draw back the veil and to live in the presence of decentered becoming? If so, what difference might it make?" Yes of course we can, the example is Kooning and how he does it. The difference it would make would be as clear as the difference between Kooning's and Mondrain's paintings. The world or the result would look very different but, (especially in the Mississippi River example). Instead of trying to fight something that will happen sooner or later by nature maybe it is better to change our human ways to avoid destruction and death when the Mississippi River eventually flows into the Atchafalaya River. Preparation for a change in nature when you in this case know what will happen would make a big change to the people, as long as they humans make the first change in the way they handle the river. "We could do it gracefully; we could go with the flow; we could start afresh with a new geography. This would be a different and, I think, better way to live in nature than to do so through the use of grim and desperate projects of domination and control." Humans should just go with nature hand in hand, if we fight nature it will most likely fight us back, and that will most likely be devastating. Maybe that requires a change in society or something bigger. Way back in time humans were travelling and moving around according to the seasons, food accessibility etc. The first people in Sweden were hunting over the summer and moved south during the winter, due to the extreme cold before the ice where melted. (Sweden, 2023) Now humans are more fixed in one location, not as flexible and more reluctant to change (even tho it is in their best interest in this case).
P. 9-12
What I discussed above is what Pickering mentions in the next part of the text. "... it now comes naturally for us to mistake the correct for the true, and why we find it hard to latch onto the world in any other way." Pickering says we have to throw in our lot with Kooning. Of course, everything takes time but he says we should "seek to unite in a counterhegemonic formation." There are still things we should take with us from Mondrain, such as "rational planning or modern science." To be clear we should not go back to how the first people lived on our planet, we can still use what we have in knowledge today. "But we should aim to bolster de Kooning to the extent that the world becomes sufficiently full of explicitly and self-consciously decentered practices and their products that an ontology of becomings becomes the natural ontological attitude, exposing dualist detachment for what it is: just one tactic of being in the world that we have at our disposal." I think this is important to see that there are many ways of being in this world, not only one way of living and doing things.
Some examples are artists and gods, and how they can be examples in the directions of tradition and cultural backgrounds. One example that I like is the Indian god Shiva, "who dances the world into and out of existence, reminding us directly that we live in a symmetric and open-ended relation with nature." as well as Buddhism, "an exploration of how to navigate the flows of becoming." "the trick is to let go of attachments and to be as fluid as the flow. This brings us back to New Orleans." Nature adapts to the surroundings and so have humans over time. (Sweden, 2023) I think this could also be used as a method for research and to support science for a new methodology and a new way of designing. To design with nature in harmony and not interrupt the natural patterns. "We should not mistake our detached representations for the world itself; that representing is instead a navigational device in a world that is always boiling over."
It is very interesting to look at the history of science. One example is the rivers of America, an example that shows that it is better to go with the flow and follow nature's rhythms. The dams are mimicking the seasonal heartbeat, so nature and animals can still live there. It is described as a detached domination of nature. There is another example is about drainage and the destruction it can create. It would wipe out entire ecosystems and enormous populations of fish and birds. We should think about what is beneficial for the fish and other wildlife as well. We could work in coherence, not stop what comes naturally because it must work in that way because of some reason. I think that one main thing to take with me from one part of the text, a Geography professor says we should "do what comes naturally". We need to use science differently and have some trial and error too, not only control. He also says "We are not good at figuring out ways to make a complex system in which nature can function." I could not agree more this is something humans need to develop for our futures to exist.
The next example is Cybernetics an example from the nomad science. Pickering describes it as "a form of adaptive engineering based upon open-ended, forward-fooking searches through spaces of possibility that could not be exhaustively foreseen." A sort of adaptive engineering that we might need.
P. 12-13
"We should strive to elaborate, articulate, and assemble these de Kooning-esque traditions that presently live in the margins of culture, with the goal of contesting the hold of Mandarin on our imaginations." So only one way is the way to go, it is important to see many different angles. Pickering mentions the experientialism of the 1960s for inspiration. It is not an easy task to try to shape how such a big part of the world thinks, sees things, and works.
I chose a few words from the text:
Counterhegemonic
Detachment
Manipulate
Domination
Naturally
Wildlife
Control
Nomad
The three chosen ones with verbs:
Counterhegemonic To dismantle, To critique
Naturally To come naturally, To flow, To let go, To be
Nomad To wander, To roam
Going on to our "close your eyes and draw after observing with our eyes open" exercise. We were encouraged to draw more and more different line weights etc. This is my first drawing:
We were asked to draw again but with the three verbs in mind. To dismantle, To flow, and To wander.
Something important to mention is that we did not need to sit down on the spot. I walked around, behind room dividers, observing what others were doing, and seeing things from other perspectives. This together with the words made a pretty good and descriptive drawing of what I did in the room and what I saw.
The next exercise was to take the drawing we did to make movements with them, and to read our drawings like a map or a book. I decided to divide the different patterns into movements that I saw fit for them. The only thing was that it needed to involve a piece of furniture. We all wanted to use chairs.
If you can not see what it says I will list the movements below:
Drag
Drag + sit
Spin with
Walk around and stand on
Crawl under
Spin with chair
Jump in & out + Move around, on under over
Walk in a square around the chair
Step over + Circle the chair in front of me
Run with the chair on the head
This is the final map of how I wanted to move with the chair. See a movie of us practising HERE. See the final video HERE. Some movements were shortened and some were slightly changed, depending on what the others were doing. For the movement Run with the chair on the head I decided that the little dots represent my classmates and to run around them at least one of them before my next movement.
I enjoyed trying to make "sense" of my drawing. Putting actions and words to something many just see as clutter, they do not see the meaning beyond. Have to dig deeper and think outside of dots and lines. I think that represents our course well, the ability to see beyond, not what everyone else sees or understands but to be slightly outside of the box. When I think about it, people tend to be scared to leave the box, it is comfortable and you know everything will be good and fine in there. But when you leave you see the world in a new way, you have acquired the tools to use outside of the box for deeper thinking, questioning, and to see things for what they are and beyond.
All of this can be used to bring new thinking to our field, maybe a change in how we live, move, do things, and maybe eventually how we think. The normal is only normal because we are used to it. If we were born and raised to jump instead of walk, then walking would be a strange thing to us. I sometimes think kids are the latest stage of humans who dare to try things and express themselves without being scared to not be in the norm. But all of that gets trained away because as an adult that is not how we "should behave". I am not saying we don't need discipline and order but maybe a pinch more of the sense of being a child. Do what you feel like doing, try things, experiment, question, and express yourself in more than one way.
References:
Verse, V. A. (2023, October 30). The art of PIET MONDRIAN. https://visionandverse.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-art-of-piet-mondrian.html
Meis, M. (2019, July 4). Willem de Kooning: Acrobat with a Paint Brush. 3 Quarks Daily. https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2019/07/willem-de-kooning-acrobat-with-a-paint-brush.html
The Control of Nature summary and study Guide | SuperSummary. (n.d.). SuperSummary. https://www.supersummary.com/the-control-of-nature/summary/
Sweden, S. T. a. S. (2023, November 5). 1. Stenåldern, ca 14.500 - 3700 år sedan [Video]. SVT Play. https://www.svtplay.se/video/jQ76kE5/historien-om-sverige/1-stenaldern-ca-14-500-3700-ar-sedan?info=visa
Weissman, J. (2007, October 15). Nomads: Space, solitude, science. Fractal Ontology. https://fractalontology.wordpress.com/2007/10/15/nomads-space-solitude-science/
Comments