Bruno Latour’s ‘Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy’
Excerpt: In the first two sections of ‘Making Things Public’, Bruno Latour argues there are alternatives to the political structures that serve as the platform in dealing with matters of public concern. He argues that ‘matters of (public) concern’ should be aligned to true concerns of the public, rather than to the multi-faceted interests of politicians. He writes in commemoration of the exhibition with the same name, which celebrates alternate mediums of expression.
In the first two sections of ‘Making Things Public’, Bruno Latour argues there are alternatives to the political structures that serve as the platform in dealing with matters of public concern. He argues that ‘matters of (public) concern’ should be aligned to true concerns of the public, rather than to the multi-faceted interests of politicians. He writes in commemoration of the exhibition with the same name, which celebrates alternate mediums of expression.
An antagonistic string of biases brings Latour’s personal ideas to the nebulous of his arguments. An activist at heart, we get a strong sense of his loyalties and background in the fields of science and technology; the early citing of his first argument on the topic of ‘objects of concern’, is based on a programming paradigm known as ‘object oriented’ software.
This ‘object oriented’ concept forms the pillars for the way Latour sees ‘matters of concern’ – the objects that form these ‘matters’; it is around these objects where specific arrangements of issues and concerns form.
Latour’s use of word-play was initially difficult to grasp. This became less ambiguous when considered diagrammatically illustrating ways in which one could apply relationships of Latour’s objects, issues and concerns to each other via a vehicle of a ‘matter of concern’. i.e.: climate change. There are objects, issues and concerns that share characteristics when grouped for consideration, which, in turn, helped me make sense of how arrangements of matters are formed.
Issues of power in relationship to these aspects of the object are of interest; that power plays a key part in the connectivity of issues and concerns to notions of each other and in a sense represents them objectively; they are awash with the meanings they adopt. The notion of representation can be identified via 3 key areas:
- People
- Assembly
- The topic of concern – the issue
Latour argues that each of these areas identify as ‘representation’; that ‘matters of concern’ cannot exist without consideration of these individually and as a group. Imagining these diagrammatically via a triple venn diagram illustrates the overlap as where the ‘object oriented’ democracy lies.
Latour mentions ‘naked power relations’ early in his essay and this is of consideration when discussing ideas of representation. I see power as a central tenant in his notions of representation as power plays and their meaning define the political arena and influence and control People, the Assembly and the Issue. Power forms strongly around the ‘facts’ that give it the credibility; the facts themselves retain a lot of influence when it comes to understanding and interpreting ideas of representation on objects, issues and concerns.
Considering the divisive issues Latour formulates, there are two sides to what defines an ‘issue’: Side A being the ‘assembly’ where the discussion takes place, Side B being the ‘topic of concern’ brought into the ‘assembly’. This division is relevant to every consideration of ‘matters’. Latour is interested in the ‘who’ and the ‘what’. But, he asks, how does the public express these ‘matters of concern’? He goes on to embellish this idea with the tools of preception the ‘artist’ uses in representing concepts. His example of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s painting, ‘The Effects of the Good Government’, highlights, literally, the dark and light tonality of ‘politics as a whole new ecology loaded with things’.
Latour wants to see alternate forms of public expression when discussing ‘matters of concern’; that politics is not the only way. The breakdown of his argument into areas of Objects and Issues, Representations and Division is of use when discussing Latour’s ideas and the role they play in how he sees the public as a whole and the system that swallows it.
References:
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Image source: The Art Wolf http://www.theartwolf.com/landscapes/ambrogio-lorenzetti-good-government.htm