I shall present for thirty minutes on a recent research project, in which I take inspiration from the thought of Ray Brassier to attempt a move beyond the spectatorial model of the decentred subject; a model theorised by Rosalind Krauss in the 70’s but still alive and well in contemporary art discours

Klee, Steve

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A Realist Model of SpectatingIntroductionI’m interested in the relationship between art and contemporary philosophy.New interest in the possibility of realism within continental thoughtI’m interested in the work of Ray Brassier and Peter Wolfendale, who attempt to defend the possibility of scientific, objective thought, the notion that science manages to map, and have traction upon the real, as it is. I characterise this objectivity as a decontextualized knowledge, a knowledge not limited to or by a particular experiential perspective, in other words it is a knowledge from no-where.I am excited new realism, and want to ask what consequences it has for art?I’m going to propose a new realist model of spectatingBut before we get there, I want to layout a couple of my presuppositions:In cultural theory, there is an understanding that art-encounters can produce, or shape those people that experience/encounter them – the Roman Circus creates a placid population easy to rule; The sexist advertisement which creates objectifying attitudes in its observers, etc. So, different forms of culture to produce different subjects, or different types of spectator. I take this to be trueAnd my realist ambition is to think an art-encounter, which produces a realist spectator. What I mean by this is that I want to think an encounter, or a spectator model in which the spectator recognised human intelligence; their own included, to be capable of realist, objective thought. This is because I take the foundational proposition of realist philosophy to be an assertion that it is possible for human intelligence to achieve scientific objectivity.However, there is an existing, very powerful theory of art spectatorship, which is premised upon and reproduces the notion that human intelligence is not capable of achieving scientific objectivity. That our belief in objectivity is a self-deceit. This theory is that of the decentred spectator influentially theorised by Rosalind E Krauss in her seminal book called Passages in Modern Sculpture, published in the UK in 1977: for Krauss, it is the encounter with minimal-based art that causes a spectator to be decentred. And the moment of decentring is a recognition of the incapacity of human intelligence, that it’s epistemic reach is necessarily limited. The decentred spectator is a forceful argument that a particular type of art – minimal-based art - creates a spectator who knows themselves to be incapable of objective thought.As an advocate of realism, I want to try and propose a different theory, I want to come-up with an art encounter which prompts the opposite response, an encounter which enables a spectator to understand that they are not epistemically limited.The Decentred SpectatorKrauss dramatically illustrates the decentred spectator byway of an account of Michael Heizer’s monumental earthwork Double Negative, of 1969.[footnoteRef:1]  [1:  Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, op cit, pp 280-81, emphasis added] Krauss’ understanding of Double Negative is tremendously complex and nuanced – really an incredible piece of art theorising. She sees the work as modelling a particular conception of the human condition, in her terminology, what it is to be a self. So, it is a model of the human condition, AND it prompts the spectator to believe in the correctness of this model.The model has two components. It relates to the nature of human EXPERIENCE. To encounter Double Negative is to understand something true about the nature of experience.It is also, however, a model of human knowledge – specifically self-knowledge, but I think Krauss has knowledge per-se in her sights. So, to encounter double negative is ALSO to learn something about human knowledge, its character and capacity.My disagreement with Krauss lies in the way that she links experience to knowledge such that knowledge is presented as limited in the same way that experience is limited. Let’s try and extract this from Krauss text… As we’ve seen, Double Negative consists of two massive trenches one hundred feet long and forty deep, these slots face-off against one another across a ravine. As Krauss notes, the enormous scale of the work requires a spectator to enter it. She compares the feeling of occupying one of these trenches to our common-sense understanding – or model - of self-hood, with one important exception… ‘Because of its enormous size, and its location, the only means of experiencing this work is to be in it – to inhabit it the way we think of ourselves as inhabiting the space of our bodies. Yet the image we have of our own relation to our bodies is that we are centred inside them; we have knowledge of ourselves that places us, so to speak, at our own absolute core; we are wholly transparent to our own consciousness… In this sense the Double Negative does not resemble the picture that we have of the way we inhabit ourselves. For, although it is symmetrical and has a centre (the mid-point of the ravine separating the two slots), the centre is one we cannot occupy.’ [footnoteRef:2] [2:  Ibid, p 280] So, if I can summarise Krauss here: she is saying that the model of self-KNOWLEDGE provided by Double Negative is unlike our habitual one, in that we tend to picture ourselves as centred within the body space. This is disqualified in Heizer’s piece because, Krauss claims, it is impossible for a spectator to EXPERIENTIALLY occupy the centre-point. And, if this summary is correct, she is drawing a conclusion about what self KNOWLEDGE – for me knowledge per-se – is on the basis of an experiential situation. So, lets take the experiential situation first. She draws attention to the way that a spectator cannot physically occupy the centre of the work, she takes this to be an experiential constraint imposed by the piece. And in imposing this the work reveals a truth about experience… Of course, we could, in a helicopter, perhaps, But the impossibility of ‘occupation’ here should be understood as a metaphor for the impossibility of escaping (in experience) an embodied point-of-view – an insight with which I concur: we do always experience from a particular place, a somewhere. In other words, experience is finite/limited: what I mean by this is that experience is a located body-sense-technology – a simulation system - through which we encounter the world. This means that experience is always limited to a particular point of view. As is clear throughout the account, Krauss links this experiential situation to the question of knowledge, specifically self-knowledge, and this is where her position diverges from my own.[footnoteRef:3]  [3:  It is a secure or ‘transparent’ form of ‘centred’ self-knowledge, which is her target.] To be centred is to have knowledge of oneself, a clear objective knowledge of that which you are.If you could experientially occupy the centre of Double Negative then the work would encourage you to think that picture was correct, it would reinforce it.But it is impossible to occupy this centre point. To be unable to experientially occupy the centre of double negative is to realise that clear objective knowledge, of oneself, and knowledge per-se is impossible.The strong inference of her argument is that the gulf separating knowledge from its self-source, i.e. self-knowledge, is the same as that preventing a spectator from experientially encountering the centre-point of Double Negative. The gulf, which shows us the limits of embodied experience, is the same one that prevents us (decentres us) from knowing ourselves. Rational knowledge is finite in the way that experience is finite.Rationality: Objective Knowledge from No-whereThe rest of this paper is dedicated to building a new model of spectatorship. In order to do so I first need to theorise the realist-rationality upon which this figure stands. This requires providing a non-phenomenological account of the relationship between experience and knowledge, one in which epistemic traction is shown to exceed the limits of experience. In a recent paper Peter Wolfendale elegantly laid out the neo-rationalist position, on which I rely.[footnoteRef:4] Let us begin with his neuroscientific description of experience including self-experience. This is understood, following Metzinger, as a complex biological simulation; selfhood is a kind-of feedback loop within it...[footnoteRef:5] Wolfendale asserts that this system evolved to aid the organism to solve certain physical tasks. He gives the example of our ability to simulate the weight of objects, a useful knack when presented with a rock that - if of an appropriate heft - might be moved to get at nourishing grubs. He describes this intuition of weight as a parochial form of know-how; parochial because it is an innate bio-capacity, governed by a particular ‘local’ frame, ‘our evolutionary confinement to the earth’s gravitational field.’[footnoteRef:6] Weight is a ‘problem’ that can be formulated and solved within the realm of experience. And, as Krauss is also aware, this body-knowledge is finite, limited by the particular capacities of a body and the context for which those capacities were intended.  [4:  Peter Wolfendale, The Reformatting of Homo Sapiens, paper delivered at the ‘05 Inhuman Symposium’, [online], [accessed 1 July 2016], available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IpDTUhQA5U]  [5:  From this perspective experience is entirely empirical i.e. the simulation can be identified with neurological ‘correlates’, which provide ‘a true neurobiological description’. Thomas Metzinger, Being No One, op cit, p 303]  [6:  Peter Wolfendale, The Reformatting of Homo Sapiens, op cit, no page number] Wolfendale’s characterisation of rational knowledge, on the other hand, breaks decisively with Krauss in crediting it with an independence from experience. Reason is understood as a technology that supervenes upon biology, ‘an abstract protocol that has been functionally implemented by the techno-linguistic infrastructure of human culture.’[footnoteRef:7]  [7:  Peter Wolfendale, Rationalist Inhumanism (Dictionary Entry), [online], [accessed 1 July 2016], available from: http://www.academia.edu/26697819/Rationalist_Inhumanism_Dictionary_Entry, p 3] The relative autonomy of rational cognition renders it capable of positing and solving problems beyond any parochial conditions. Wolfendale gives the example of mass, which can only be defined rationally via ‘precise inferential norms governing its relation to the concepts of force and acceleration.’ [footnoteRef:8] The conceptualisation of mass, therefore, has ‘enabled us to un-frame our understanding of weight and apply it to other gravitational contexts’.[footnoteRef:9] Therefore, rationality in its grasping of the property mass, is able to give an account of the real that exists beyond our finite phenomenal experience.  [8:  Peter Wolfendale, The Reformatting of Homo Sapiens, op cit, no page number]  [9:  Ibid, no page number] Another register in which ‘un-framing’ is a useful term to think through rationality is with regard to its inherent sociality; it cannot be framed as an activity performed by one entity. We are collectively caught up in, and contribute to, that system of linguistic norms and inferential relations mentioned above. In other words, rationality’s ‘place of enunciation’ is anonymous, a point - logically - between individual entities, i.e. a no-where.[footnoteRef:10] To think ‘from’ this anonymous nowhere is the condition of possibility for rational thought. [10:  ‘I am quite convinced that almost all forms of thinking are things that are distributed processes that we do together. We’re thinking together, right now’ Thomas Metzinger, Ray Brassier in Conversation with Thomas Metzinger, [online], [accessed 1 July 2016], available from: https://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/2015/07/20/ray-brassier-in-conversation-with-thomas-metzinger/, no page number, emphasis in the original] The Nemocentric SpectatorBrassier’s speculation on nemocentric experience holds the key to a spectator model that would act in consort with this account of rationality. Nemocentrism names a specific mental state, which might be induced. Brassier describes it thus: ‘the objectification of experience would generate self-less subjects that understand themselves to be no-one and no-where.’[footnoteRef:11] An ‘objectification’, then, results in the loss of self-hood and contextual positionality, which is to say, a loss of phenomenal experience per-se. I understand objectification here to mean, loosely, a ‘switching off’ of phenomenal experience.  [11:  Ray Brassier, Against an Aesthetics of Noise, interview with Bram Ieven for Transitzone [online], [accessed 1 July 2016], available from: http://ny-web.be/transitzone/against-aesthetics-noise.html, no page number] According to Brassier this can occur in relation to certain forms of art that generate and manipulate ‘difficult’ sensory material. His preferred example is ‘noise’.The noise groups that he likes produce a sound which has a ‘quality’ that stretches (beyond) the bounds of normal phenomenal experience. Brassier hones in on how these groups, unlike ‘conventional’ noise that obliterates detail, maintain, just, the integrity of an array of sounds, a sonic complexity or ‘negentropic overload’, which assaults the spectator with an inassimilable myriad.[footnoteRef:12] His ultimate claim is that this excessive detail or ‘incompressibility of…signal’ scrambles a spectator’s ability to experience... And the resulting phenomenal destitution can be known by that entity which undergoes it.[footnoteRef:13] [12:  Ibid, p64]  [13:  Ray Brassier, Against an Aesthetics of Noise, op cit, no page number] In Metzinger’s terms, outlined above by Wolfendale, it is the bio-simulation-system, the realm of parochial knowledge, which is shutdown. This system maps the body - provides an intuition of its physical limits - positioning it within a location. To lose this is to lose phenomenal awareness of oneself as a located embodied being. This generates knowledge that you are - in fact - no-where. The nemocentric subject inhabits space - undoubtedly - but does not feel a natural and necessary connection to that space, and as such understands her or himself - qua rational being - to be irreducible to, not bound by, that material position. At one and the same time, the notion of being someone is also obliterated; to turn the bio-system off is to lose oneself – to know oneself to be no-one in particular, rather, a socially distributed thinker. What happens here, then, is a fragmentation of the subject into experiential self, and rational self, i.e. an ‘it-self’. The former is momentarily decommissioned, and the latter keeps track of this. (As we have seen this is possible, because, as asserted by Wolfendale, conceptual thought has a relative autonomy from biological experience).ConclusionThe nemocentric spectator-state is therefore a forceful encounter with that part of oneself, the ‘it-self’, responsible for objective rational thought. To be (prompted) beyond phenomenal experience is to fully encounter the anonymity of rational being, to recognise oneself as such a being. As we have seen thinking from this (non) position is the condition of possibility for objective knowledge. In other words, to think in this way, and to recognise oneself - or rather the ‘itself’ - to be doing so, is to be set within and primed to make use of that web of concepts and inferential relations that enable humankind to gain traction on the real.[footnoteRef:14] [14:  For this nemocentric subject to recognise itself as an anonymous, socially distributed thinker is one such (reflexive) tractable insight, an understanding of the nature of rational thought itself. This insight is not gained through Cartesian introspection, but rather by, what we might call, a neo-rationalist exospection.] We can say, then, that recognition of oneself as ‘itself’ is to understand humankind’s capacity for objective thought, including the capacity to construct an objective account of that which humankind is. Nemocentrism is none other than the radical encounter with/recognition of the ability to think objectively, that is, from a position that is no-where. In other words, the nemocentric spectator is a realist alternative to decentring.9

The nemocentric spectator

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