Introduction

THIS BOOK EXPLORES some of the implications of and opportunities within the speculative turn in continental philosophy from the perspective of art history. Speculation? Besides its only legitimate domain today, that of finance, is this not a thing of the past, when metaphysicians were used to making unverifiable claims about the nature of God, the World and the Self? From Kant to Wittgenstein, critical philosophy has taught us to remain silent on that of which we cannot speak. Likewise, art history has come a long way in establishing itself as a positive human science independent from its metaphysical beginnings. In both cases, enlightened, self-critical and self-reflective thought has worked hard on closing the door to ontology, on reducing the Ideas of reason to ideology and on limiting the domain of knowledge to phenomenal objects. Speculation, it seems, has not been ...

Gothic Ontology and Sympathy: Moving Away from the Fold

Lars Spuybroek proposes an ‘ill-disciplined’ reading of John Ruskin’s vitalist, anti-classicist theory of Gothic architecture. By discussing three of the six characteristics that Ruskin uses to define the nature of Gothic architecture, namely savageness (a form of rough variation), changefulness (a form of smooth variation), and rigidity (a form of structural activity), Spuybroek develops a Gothic ontology. At the heart of this ontology lies the relation between figures and configurations in which figures are variable and active parts that relate to each other in order to form collaborative entities. The figure-configuration relation transcends the aesthetic opposition between structure and ornament, an opposition that is upheld by Classicism and its varieties. In Gothic architecture, ornament is not ‘added on’ to structure, but rather generates structure by configurational behaviour such as bundling, weaving, and webbing. This flexible form of agency allows the fundamental element of the Gothic, the rib, to create an enormous variety of patterns. As an entity the Gothic rib takes position between the classical atom and the baroque fold, adhering to the discreteness of the former and the flexibility of the latter. Subsequently, Gothic ontology does not differentiate between beauty and workings, conflating both in a realm of sympathy, a concept of interiority based on readings which connect the work of Ruskin to that of Worringer, Lipps and Whitehead.

Speculation, Critique, Constructivism: Notions for Art History

This chapter explores the values of the notions of critique, construction and speculation for the practice of Art History. It argues for an immanently critical and constructive art history in pace of a speculative art history. Beginning with an examination of the distinctions between speculation and critique in Kant’s philosophy, and exploring how these notions have functioned in art history’s ‘scientific image of thought’ in part through an appeal to the post-Kantian philosophy of CS Peirce, the chapter develops a constructive, immanently critical art history through Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. Turning to a single painting by the 15th century painter Jacopo da Negroponte, it indicates some of the features of this constructivist art history, and how it might impact the task of art historical writing.

Space Always Comes After: It Is Good When It Comes After; It Is Good Only When It Comes After

The chapter suggests that the dominant architectural history is too logocentric and not speculative enough. As such, its only merit is to translate a coexistence of becomings into a succession of neat logically necessary types. The case will be made for the role of topology as the antidote to the pernicious typological essentialism. Architecture needs to be free from the ideas of epoch and destiny. Following Brian Massumi’s lead, the speculative aspect relates to the contingently obligatory becoming, an event: “intrepidly future-facing, far-rangingly foretracing.” While it would appear logical that space should precede affordance, in fact the inverse holds true. The degree zero of spatial experience occurs at the level of the unconscious and is proto-subjective and sub-representational. As Hayles put it, consciousness is overrated. In terms of architectural thinking everything begins from the sensible. However, the task of speculative thinking is to go beyond the sensible to the potentials that make sensibility possible. After all, the basic medium of the discipline of architecture, as we see it, is the ‘space of experience’. This spatium, which is not to be confused with the ‘experience of space’, does not pre-exist but subsists as a virtuality. According to Deleuze, the plane of composition - as a work of sensation - is aesthetic: "it is the material that passes into the sensation." Once aesthetics is drawn into the context of production its realm expands to become a dimension of being itself. Both subjects and objects come to be seen as derivative. Consequently, the mereological relationship - which is perfectly suitable for the realm of the extensive - needs to be radically revamped in order to become capable of capturing topological transformations. But what we are advocating is not a formalisable model. Quite the contrary, any technological determinism needs to be kept at bay. What is needed instead is heuristics as a practice of material inference. However disadvantageous this may seem to the architect, it will prove not to be so once we fully grasp the Affective Turn and its implications for the discipline. It might become apparent that it is through habit, rather than attention, and collectivity, rather than individualism, that we find the (royal) road to the understanding of ‘space’, or better still, that we take a (minor) apprenticeship in spatialisation.

Serpentine Life: The Nature of Movement in Gothic, Mannerism and Baroque

In many ways, movement is a test case for visual art as much as for philosophy: for both, we have to answer the question of whether they create real movement or merely a representation of it. Does the event really take place or is it only an illusion? This is a problem that pertains especially to Mannerism and the baroque, which rely heavily on the vocabulary of force and movement that has invested the field of art since the Renaissance. Although these styles are still dominated by classical figuration, they also introduce all sorts of distortions, deformations, and exaggerations in it. Mannerism and the baroque are attempts, within representation, to present the unrepresentable and to render visible the invisible. As a consequence, stable form is no longer the foundation of the image, but rather the limit of visual evidency. Inseparable from its relation to the formless, extension itself becomes a delimitation of intensity, a participation in the infinite. Yet the question remains: Have these attempts merely produced sensational and metaphorical works of art that are meant to move us by generating an illusion of movement in what is undeniably a stable structure or a framed picture, or are they somehow literally moving in themselves? The second position is held by Gilles Deleuze. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, he develops a deep connection between Bacon and Michelangelo, since Mannerist painting discovered the ‘figural’: the point at which abstract movements or forces are rendered visible within classical figuration such that the organic figurability of sensation is enriched with an inhuman becoming. In his The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze then goes on to show how the baroque introduces movement in classical art by means of infinite folding, such that forms would emerge from and dissolve into folds: ‘[t]he object is manneristic, not essentializing: it becomes an event’. The first position, by contrast, is taken up by Lars Spuybroek in The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design (2011), who contrasts Mannerism and the baroque with the Gothic, arguing that while the former work away from static form to deformation, only the latter directly imitates the vicissitude and variety of living nature and produces movement in its continuous working towards form. For no matter how much we deform the painted figure and render it dynamic, it remains imprisoned within a frame hanging motionless on a wall. And no matter how much we cover a classical structure with lifelike ornament, it remains a lifeless construction. Worse still, each time we produce an image or effect of movement in this way, our experience actually becomes more detached from real movement than attached to it. ‘The Baroque,’ Spuybroek therefore concludes, ‘is merely distorted classicism’. The proposition I put to the test is that, to a certain, to be determined extent, we should differentiate between Mannerism and the baroque in a way analogous to Spuybroek’s distinction between the Gothic and the baroque. For while the Mannerist fine arts certainly do not arrive at the free aggregation of lines of Gothic ornament, as they are based on the (dis)proportional variation of the single human body rather than on configural variation, they also lack, or do not yet succumb to, the continuity and smoothness of the baroque. Whereas the baroque brings all movement back to a spectacular sensuality and physicality, we still find a much more abstract, or inorganic, experience in Mannerism. It is that of the life of the serpentine line, or what William Hogarth would later call the ‘line of grace’.

Attractors and Locked-In Art: Art History as a Complex System

My speculation in this paper is to consider, in short, what if art history is a system? In other words what does it means to think about art through the systems-thinking. To do so would mean understanding both art as a system and how art is also a part of other systems. It is my overall claim that to do so would require a rethinking of particular ideas about art and art history in ways that are both radical and effective. I begin by introducing some key feature of the systems-thinking approach. In short, systems thinking emerged in the mid 20th century along with related theories such as Cybernetics and Information Theory. Recently it expanded to incorporate the developments of 2nd order cybernetics (Bateson) and dynamical systems theory (von Bertalanffy); examples of such developments include the Social Systems Theory of Niklas Luhmann and the use of systems by Bruno Latour and Gilles Deleuze. Whilst often very different these theories share an interest in: self-organizing systems; their behaviour and how they are defined by their interactions with their immediate environment. Systems-theory understands phenomena in terms of the systems of which they are part. A system is constituted by a number of interrelated elements that form a ‘whole’ different from the sum of its individual parts. When applied to art discourse it means considering not only works of art but also art museums, art markets, and art histories as systems that are autonomous, complex, distributed and self-organising. Examples of these types of speculations are offered. I conclude with two key speculations as to what the adoption of the systems-theoretical approach within art history might entail. Firstly, I argue that it is particularly effective in dealing with art after modernism, which is characterised by, amongst other things: non-visual qualities; unstable, or de-materialised physicality and an engagement (often politicised) with the institutional systems of support. By prioritising the systems of support over the individual work of art, or the agency of the individual artist such an approach is not tied by an umbilical cord of vision to an analysis based on traditional art historical categories such as medium, style and iconography. Secondly, I identify a tradition within art historical writing – Podro called it the Critical Historians of Art – that is known in the German tradition as Kunstwissenschaft (the systematic, or rigorous study of art.) I do so both as a means of clarifying what I mean when I say art history; but also as a means of identifying a tradition within art history of self-reflexivity and systematic investigation of methods and limits. From a systems-theoretical perspective it is an interesting question in its own right to ask why model of Kunstwissenschaft has become the dominant mode of historiography (since the 1980s at least). As a discourse it has become, in systems-theoretical terms, ‘locked-in’ (via positive feedback). It is my view that the systems theoretical approach to art discourse places it within the art historical tradition of Kunstwissenschaft, and is not in opposition to it. In summary, it is not my intention to either attack or defend a straw-man, or flimsy stereotype of what art history is. I am rather, seeking a body of work, a canon, or discursive system, with which to engage. Overall my claim is that the systems theoretical approach to art discourse is a continuation of this rich and worthy heritage (of finding historical models to match the art under scrutiny)—not a break from it.

Expressive Things: Art Theories of Henri Focillon and Meyer Schapiro Reconsidered

The chapter discusses the art theories of Henri Focillon and Meyer Schapiro in order to explore the potential of an art history based on speculative realism. The focus lies on three basic positions in their writings, considered to be productive for the perspective of a speculative art history, as they transcend idealistic and language centered concepts of art history. First, both Focillon and Schapiro consider the artwork as an object with a reality of its own, causing things to happen. Second, both of them hold a relational and processual conception of the artwork: it is considered as a place of negotiation between human action, material and ideas. Thirdly, their materialistic and relational conception of the artwork is associated with a dynamic notion of form. These principals can be related to the speculative realist’s materialist and dynamic conception of the object. Focillon’s and Schapiro’s models may help to pave the way for an art theory that combines production and reception aesthetics, in understanding art as a never accomplished process of negotiation between the poles of artistic activity, material properties, society and the viewer.

The Plasticity of the Real: Speculative Architecture

Von Samsonow argues that architecture can play an important role in the framework of contemporary speculative philosophy as it is founded on geology. Speculative philosophy might engage architecture to rediscover and reintegrate the geo-historical foundations of being as well as of architecture. Contemporary architecture is critizised being largely driven by a feeling of resentment towards the earth. Architecture is of ontological interest because it borrows its key function from geology; from the arrangement of various materials, offering spaces or biotopes. In contemporary architecture however, this function got lost. Whereas old architecture seeks to ground dwelling in the earth and invites our bodies to understand what the earth can be to it, contemporary architecture disregards the body and is fixated on the eye, making architecture an issue of vision. Contemporary architecture is pure pornography; it simulates sensations and affirms the logic of capitalism. It degenerates the original earth to dirt and replaces it with an artificial earth, that is erected upwards in the form of an overground, which forms the anti-thesis to the earth. Von Samsonow calls this the 'takeoff strategy' of contemporary architecture. Because it is driven by a theoretical pre-oedipalization, speculative philosophy may play an important role in the regrounding of contemporary architectures takeoff strategy. To understand this we have to look at Meillassouxs concept of the ancestral object, that gives us the existence of the earth prior to thought and knowledge. Von Samsonow interprets this ancestral object as a symbolic mother, in order to open up the possiblity of thinking the earth in terms of universal generation. From the point of view of the earth itself, it is filled up with objects generated by her; there is no distinction between organic and inorganic or between (natural) generation and (technical) production. Von Samsonow calls the quest for ancestrality the gaia-istic turn in speculative philosophy. This turn has revolutionary potential.

Enduring Habits and Artwares

The essay draws preliminary guidelines for a realist history of art. In this realism, art is considered as taking a part in the habituation-process of an organism to its outer reality. As such, the artwork is operative, as an accessory. Moreover, to follow the terms of the Viennese fin-de-siecle historian Alois Riegl, the artwork possess both a use-value and an age-value: it serves indeed various needs of the organism, but it carries as well a sovereign value registering the work's already gone-through processes of mediating between a wearer and her reality. As such, we are able to return to the Marxist problem of the values of commodities, and to suggest the term of the "artware" as embodying this accessorial character of art, taking a part in the regular and habitual circulation of goods, needs and usages. The works of the artist Sylvie Mas are brought-up in the article as typifying this durational nature of the artware.

Economies of the Wild: Speculations on Constant’s New Babylon and Contemporary Capitalism

What if we approached Constant’s New Babylon not simply as a semi-architectural project firmly rooted in the politics and counter-culture of the early 1960s, but as a wild assemblage of aesthetic and political ideas that we can use to understand the nature of our own time? New Babylon, this article's main argument goes, is an artistic research project purposely working in multiple artistic mediums at the same time; it employs and puts to work the d​istinct forms o​f conceptual and aesthetic knowledge that writing, architectural design and painting can produce to patiently close in on its goal: a radical critique of existing society that takes play and creativity as the principles for political change. A speculative art history dealing with these kind of artistic projects, should use the insights and ideas that art produces to understand the present. This argument is unfolded and illustrated in the articles by performing an comparative analysis of New Babylon and the main features of contemporary capitalism (precarity, flexibility, mobility and communication).