The plane journey to Gothenburg and back to Leeds was broken by having to change planes at Amsterdam, therefore I had a lot of time to fill and so decided to re-read Adam S. Miller's 'Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Orientated Theology'. I had read it initially some time ago and happened to spot it on my bookshelves just as I was thinking about what to take with me to read. It's a strange book, as it tries to tease out the religious concept of 'grace' from the writings of someone that developed a body of writing focused on how science makes meaning.
Latour was though a life long Catholic and therefore as a Christian his thinking would have been coloured by his Bible readings. He was not trying to argue the importance of Christian beliefs but his arguments do suggest that certain Christian ideas, helped him shape his thoughts. For instance, Matthew 5:5; "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth," and 2 Corinthians 12:9 that states, "He said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness'". After looking at the way that science actually operated in real life situations, Latour had decided that you can never actually be objective, he had then developed the idea that you cannot separate opposites out from each other and that reductionism, or the focusing down on one direction or way of understanding the world was not just wrong, but that it was actually an impossibility. An idea therefore, of power residing in weakness, could have helped him to think about dissolving distinctions between culture and nature or subject and object. By stating that the world is actually an amazing network of interconnections and that everything relies on everything else, Latour suggests that if any one thing pulls itself out of the matrix and acts as if it has power over other things, it will in effect eventually undermine itself, as it would cut the very ties that enable it to be what it is.He also argues that nothing is ever actually a thing, there are simply nodes or centres that are connected to everything else. Although at times there could be a suggestion of an object's separate identity, this could only be a constantly shifting one, one that was in itself determined by all the various connections that thing might have from moment to moment. This is a type of strength through harmony; something that could easily have emerged out of Latour's Christian beliefs, for instance many Christians believe that the unity of believers is built on humility, forgiveness and mutual respect. A unity that is achieved not through uniformity, but by valuing diversity within a common faith. I was also reminded of the Markov blanket concept, whereby, although for the sake of the way they use communication systems it might be useful for humans to be able to nominate a tree as a separate thing, in reality it is an event or aspect of a process. The boundaries of biological systems, from individual cells to trees (or indeed people) can be thought of as the supporters of free energy, or places where that energy meets other forms of energy and where interactions take place that both help to stabilise the entity and to ensure it is in constant communication with all the surrounding energy fields that it depends on for survival. If so, something called a Markov blanket can be used to define its boundaries in a statistical sense, i.e. instead of a solid wall you have a series of probabilities whereby something is and isn't at the same time, called in this instance, the active inference scheme. But Latour goes much further than this, he believes that all things operate in the same way, both organic and non organic and that some things might be processes. I was then reminded of Timothy Morton's 'hyperobjects', which could also be things such as global warming.
Latour looked at the complexity of the everyday and in doing so, he helps us value what is going on right in front of us and Adam S. Miller opens out an argument that 'grace' can be found in Latour's writings by this very fact.
I wrote the note below in a very shaky biro hand whilst flying between Gothenburg and Amsterdam.
"Votives and the Pluriverse"
If we take a point of view that everything is interconnected and that everything is always becoming, in flux, never quite establishing fixed boundaries, then a votive practice that is multi faceted would seem to make sense. The need to create a flow, to establish the conditions of constant fermentation, can be met as a practice evolves out of parallel views. Grace emerges from the fermentation of the multitude. It is embedded in the bustling give and take of objects. A votive always emerges from a complexity. Ceramics allows us to make forms that are collapsing and emerging at the same time and as they do, at some point we can come to a temporary stop and see how this evolving object can now talk to the situation that it emerged from.
My votive making emerges from a complex something that comes out of a conversation. The conversation may well be far too hard to simplify or clarify what is needed, so there has to be a process of finding a line through what is being said. I push back against someone to see what will come out of the dialogue. They then push back at me, often with a statement such as, "It's not like that, its more like..." In this way forms arrive out of the flow, rather than an object being made from a pattern.
Votive forms made of psychic animal body parts
I.e. what your organs might look like if you were inhabiting the soul of an animal
In Gothenburg I had been giving short presentations to medical professionals about the work I had been doing at Pinderfields Hospital. When not having to be doing that, I was free to follow anything else that was happening, and the other much more comprehensive presentations were being given by scientists that were very interesting. I had been reading Craig's book on interoception just before leaving, therefore I could see how important neuroplasticity was to the way our nerves operate and how our body parts are connected through our backbones. I saw two presentations in particular that looked at ways to use stem cell growth to foster the development of new neurons that could reach over divides made during traumatic injury, when a backbone is broken. It was hoped that these new discoveries would lead to a way to repair broken spinal networks and in doing so get limbs moving again.
The patients who were involved were very similar to the group I had met in Wakefield, all had suffered traumatic spinal injuries. However the 'actants' as in Latour's use of the term, also included several non-human creatures, including mice and monkeys and machinery. The images of the injuries were made using powerful electron microscopes, giant sections of backbones were projected on several screens as presenters pointed to newly grown dendritic shaped fibres beginning to spread out into bone substrates. Craig had made me aware of an evolutionary history of the different types of nerve fibres running through the spine and therefore I was not surprised when for instance one presenter pointed to the existence of nerves carrying visual information through adjacent channels. No one mentioned that nerves carrying more emotional information would also have to pass through the backbone's super highway. I was though now beginning to see these presentations as entries into a type of micro world, one that I entered guided by science, that was re-shaping my visual spinal image bank. This caused some sort of oscillation of my being, that also included the mice and monkeys that had given their lives to the research conducted in the many medical laboratories that had been working on these issues. I was being connected via a series of networks that were previously unavailable to myself, but which had already been invisibly shaping my experiences.
Bruno Latour's ideas level the playing field between things. He used the image of a constant fermentation that arises as a physical/chemical/quantum/emotional/psychological and economic mix that is achieved by the constant swelling and current mixing of energy seas. It's an idea that for many would be too disconcerting, people often want some form of certainty and the rise of rightwing philosophies points to this need. You need a certain confidence to ride the waves of uncertainty. An idea of time as a relative thing that operates in different ways as it interacts with small and large scale events, can for some people be very disconcerting, as people are in many ways already dead, as well as not yet born. As an artist I can see how objects effect me, they shape my mind, they penetrate me and I am worked on by them from within. I need to accept this, if not I could have no real belief in the power of the objects I make to effect other people. As you read this post, another non-organic thing enters your mind and as it does it begins to reshape your body. This may only be for a moment, you may well decide that this text is boring and stop reading, but in the short time you were reading, you were being re-shaped. Any perception of rightness is just a temporary "momentary truth", that sits within a larger, ever-changing process of constant becoming. It is a fascinating thing, one that can either be embraced or rejected, and as it is embraced there are wonderful opportunities for becoming immersed in the flow of possibilities.
Grace is normally defined as an acknowledgment that one's well-being is a result of God's undeserved kindness, benevolence, or blessing. Grace is something that reminds us that luck or good fortune is not a product of one's own actions, it is a game of chance. However in a world where there is no God, there can still, it has been speculated, be a form of 'grace'.
This is a way of thinking about the implications of a world where the idea of a deity, sits within or on the same playing field as a game of marbles or a TV set. The wonder is in the everydayness of it all and the fact that you are indeed special. No matter how insignificant you might feel you are, you have existed and still exist as a something. That existence is a complex amalgam of events and physical happenings that has during all the time it has been with us, been rubbing up against other things and in doing this it has in turn, shaped them. You might not be able to see this, you might be too close to the happening that is you to see it, but it is still happening and in that happening you are bathed in the speculative grace of now.
Grace is normally defined as an acknowledgment that one's well-being is a result of God's undeserved kindness, benevolence, or blessing. Grace is something that reminds us that luck or good fortune is not a product of one's own actions, it is a game of chance. However in a world where there is no God, there can still, it has been speculated, be a form of 'grace'.
This is a way of thinking about the implications of a world where the idea of a deity, sits within or on the same playing field as a game of marbles or a TV set. The wonder is in the everydayness of it all and the fact that you are indeed special. No matter how insignificant you might feel you are, you have existed and still exist as a something. That existence is a complex amalgam of events and physical happenings that has during all the time it has been with us, been rubbing up against other things and in doing this it has in turn, shaped them. You might not be able to see this, you might be too close to the happening that is you to see it, but it is still happening and in that happening you are bathed in the speculative grace of now.
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