Distributed Objects

Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell

Liana Chua, Mark Elliott, Liana Chua, Mark Elliott

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857457431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Studi museali

One of the most influential anthropological works of the last two decades, Alfred Gell's Art and Agency is a provocative and ambitious work that both challenged and reshaped anthropological understandings of art, agency, creativity and the social. It has become a touchstone in contemporary artifact-based scholarship. This volume brings together leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians and other scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue with Art and Agency, generating a timely re-engagement with the themes, issues and arguments at the heart of Gell's work, which remains salient, and controversial, in the social sciences and humanities. Extending his theory into new territory – from music to literary technology and ontology to technological change – the contributors do not simply take stock, but also provoke, critically reassessing this important work while using it to challenge conceptual and disciplinary boundaries.

CHAPTER 1

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THREADS OF THOUGHT

Reflections on Art and Agency

Susanne Küchler

There can be no doubt that Art and Agency has paved a new direction for anthropological theory by challenging the assumed primacy of the social over the material and cultural. The book presents us with the framework for a theory of the work things do as exponents of thought and as catalysts for imagination and intuition. Rather than merely mirroring how to ‘be in relation’, Alfred Gell shows how things make thinking about thinking possible and shape the way we see connections in the world spontaneously and effortlessly.

In a move that reminds us of Alfred Gell’s work as ethnographer of Melanesia, where all things, even persons, are ‘made’, not ‘born’, it is the manufactured artefact that is foregrounded in Art and Agency. All made things partake of intentional and systematizing thought, and potentially serve as vehicles of knowledge, as threads of thought that bind things and people via things to one another. Associative thought and matters of attachment are welded together here in ways that allow the once peripheral subject of art to emerge as the crux of an anthropological theory that remains concerned with the nature of biographical relations.

Yet beyond its overt concern with thought and thing, there is a perhaps even more fundamental idea to be found in the book that makes Art and Agency pivotal to an anthropology that is bracing itself for the twenty-first century. Returning to an earlier tradition of classical ethnology in which big questions and big answers were preferred over regional ethnographies, Art and Agency prompts us to consider the long-disbanded concept of mankind and the nature of diversity without requiring us to create or invoke a hierarchical order (Meyer 2003). As we are led to discover the nature of relations in the inter-artefactual domain and the intuitive logic guiding our recognition of the relational nature of actions in the world, we realize that anthropology may again have something to contribute to big questions that range from consciousness to the diversity of civilization.

Art and Agency, in fact, signals the onset of an intellectual epoch, one which mirrors in its undoing the upheaval which shook European epistemological and scientific tradition in the late eighteenth century (Lepenies 1978). Then, abstract modelling of empirical data gained through observation and the description of the world in the concrete based on experience became separated in the different institutions of science and the arts. At around the same time, chemistry and poetry, both adept at capturing the connectivity of mind and world at the pre-hermeneutic stage, moved to the fringes of science and the humanities. In the future presaged by Art and Agency, however, the gulf between ‘the horizon of expectation’ and ‘space of experience’, which since the eighteenth century has been a symptom of modernity (Koselleck 2004), is fused together in a magical act of synthesis in which the process of giving form to matter unleashes an intuited apprehension of ‘being in relation’. Where thought and thing stood side by side for centuries, Art and Agency raises the spectre of a renewed sensitivity towards the nature of their interaction and its significance in challenging our understanding of what is social about the form given to thought in invention and innovation.

Reaching beyond our once so neatly domesticated relations with the material world, in which visual knowing was locked into relations of property and effect (Foucault 1994), Gell draws our attention to a long-lost sense for a material aesthetic which works unmoored from the trappings of markets and institutions in a creative lacunae untrammelled by branding (Stafford 2007). We are, perhaps without realizing it, introduced into the conception of a world captured long ago by the seventeenth-century German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whose work on image systems and thought was recalled recently by the art historian Horst Bredekamp (2004) in his book on Leibniz’s ‘window-less monad’, whose internal, relational and transformative logic, one likened to a knotted and folded homunculus, unleashes an energy that surfaces in music, art and mathematics. It is Gell’s genius to have realized for us the relevance of an anthropological theory of art to contemporary sensitivities, by recovering the way images serve as the thread of thought, entangling expectation with experience in ways that root agency not in action, but in imagination.

On Algorithm, Imaging and Intuition

There are many intellectual influences on Art and Agency, some extending outward from the remit of anthropology to mathematics, others taking us back to founding ideas of anthropology. None, however, could be more difficult to trace and yet be more important to unravel the complex intentions behind the book than ideas referenced in what is described obliquely in Art and Agency as the ‘least difference principle’ (Gell 1998: 218). Writing about Marquesan artefacts and addressing the question of the coherence of a corpus of artefacts, Gell identifies constraints that act at the formal level, ‘in the field of possible and legitimate motivic transformations’, allowing visual style to be seen as ‘an autonomous domain in the sense that it is only definable in terms of the relationships between artefacts and other artefacts’ (ibid.: 215–16). The apparent ease with which we recognize the homogeneity and distinctiveness of Marquesan artefacts, without knowing anything about the role these artefacts play in culture or their prevailing interpretation, is reasoned to lie in a structural principle ‘involving the least modification of neighbouring motifs consistent with the establishment of a distinction between them’ (ibid.: 218).

This structural ‘least difference’ principle has hardly been given attention in subsequent readings of Art and Agency, and yet it is here, I want to argue, that we can find a clue to ideas that inspire the reception of the book. The background to the concern with ‘least difference’ points, perhaps unsurprisingly, to a field well known to have had a lasting impact on Gell’s thinking, namely language, and to a trajectory of anthropological thought that can be extended backwards as well as forwards in time, referring to ideas that Gell sensed would resurface in science, for reasons and with implications very different to their original conception (Gell 1996).

Key to the ‘least difference principle’ are motivic transformations, described in Art and Agency as consisting of acts of scaling, proportioning and multiplication. Motifs allow for the multiplicity and manifold relations between artefacts to stand out, providing the eye with a special thing-like tool for thinking. As specially ‘designed’ signs, motifs and their systemic transformation allow us to see relations between things, to trace connections and thus to think about thinking. Motifs support associative thinking and thus provide the tooling for thought that is intuitive and yet also enchained, thereby anchoring thought in artefacts in ways that go beyond their original purpose (cf. Freedberg 1991).

Of importance to Marquesan art is therefore not the individual artwork or motif, but a manifold, whose capacity to combine generative agency with instantaneous recognition reminds one of the observation made long ago by Franz Boas in relation to the homology of phonetic systems (Boas 1966; see also Chafe 2000). Expounding on the importance of not studying American Indian languages from single recordings, but by placing recordings in relation to other recordings made with different people, Boas made the astonishing observation (for the time) that the difference we note among sounds ‘is an effect of perception through a medium of a foreign system of phonetics’, while the phonetic system of each language is limited and fixed (Boas 1966: 14). His further elaborations on the mechanical production of sounds show variations to be relational, with single sounds to be part of a sound complex (ibid.: 19).

The ‘limited variability and the limited number of sound clusters’ that enable ‘the automatic and rapid use of articulations’ (ibid.: 21) remind us of much earlier thoughts on language brought forward by the eighteenth-century German historian and philosopher Gottfried Herder (Herder 2002; Moran and Gode 1986). It is to Herder’s classic writings on ‘Plastik’ that we can trace back the idea, expounded in Boas’s work on Primitive Art, that the algorithm underlying sound production may be taken across different material media in a process of translation, to create in its wake a synergy of cognition and emotion (Boas 1927). This translation of the algorithm underlying sound production in a particular language to actions and movements of the body was seen by Boas to be the result of the formation of ‘virtuosity’, a notion singled out much later by Fred Myers in his analysis of Australian Aboriginal acrylic painting style (Myers 2003). Myers interpreted virtuosity in relation to the distinct geometry underlying the generative production of imagery. Here the algorithm at work is found to govern spatial thinking and pattern making, an argument also developed by Louise Hamby and Diana Young in relation to the patterns on Australian Aboriginal women’s string art, which appear to be associated directly with dialects spoken by distinct Aboriginal groups in Australia (Hamby and Young 2001). Perhaps the most explicit and most succinct analysis of material translation and cultural production being informed by the algorithm of sound production was made by Marie Adams in her work on South-East Asian materials processing, tracing algorithmic connections from the pounding of rice to the beating of drums, to the fermenting of plant substance and to the treatment of the dead (Adams 1977). These ethnographic observations have been supplanted more recently by neuroscience, offering, on the one hand, an explanation grounded in the co-presence of the concept of numbers and of hand movement in the hippocampus responsible for remembering, and on the other hand, an action-related explanation made possible by the discovery of mirror neurons (Butterworth 1999; Gallese 2001).

The ‘least difference’ principle has thus taken us backwards and forwards in time across an ethnographic and historical terrain. This terrain has largely remained oblique to anthropological theory making, perhaps because its description requires, as recognized famously by Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘a proliferation of concepts and a technical language that goes with a constant attention to the properties of the world, alert to the distinctions that can be discerned between them’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 2). The logic of the concrete on which the ‘least difference’ principle is founded was called by Lévi-Strauss ‘the most neglected aspect of the thought of people we call “primitive” ’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 2). Whereas he described the logic based on the objectification of knowledge as a ‘counterfeit’ science, the Melanesianist Aletta Biersack argued in her work on Paiela body-counting for the acute observation of algorithms and their transformative patterns to be a ‘science and among sciences’ (Biersack 1982: 813).

Whether anthropologists ever really cared to think much about such allusions to science is a matter for debate. What is clear, however, is that anthropologists ceased to be able to respond to the rigours demanded by the attention to the concrete around the time of Biersack’s research in New Guinea, when language was no longer considered an operative modus of explanatory models of culture making. No longer trained in linguistic theory, ethnographers soon became desensitized to the concept of the manifold, its basis in mathematical thinking and its intersubjectively shared nature. Having lost their theoretical validity, methods such as drawing or diagramming, that once were the whole mark of replicating the science of the concrete, fell out of the remit of teaching. Questions of affinity, once tied to the tracing of the way attachments are secured and predicted in the world in the broad field of magic, became briefly a subfield of kinship, only soon to be displaced by a more generalized concern with questions of distinction.

Looking back, one realizes the speed at which anthropology forgot one of its most coveted ideas in the midst of developments to the contrary. There was computing, which took off in a commercial way in the 1980s, utilizing the same ideas of algorithm and the transformational logic of manifolds to develop the technical language of computer programmes. Few anthropologists ever trained in computing, yet they remained enchanted by their new tool and refrained from asking the questions of a philistine that could have reawakened interest in a subject that was rapidly being sidelined as ‘ethno-mathematics’ (Ascher 1978; 1991). The notable exception to this trend is Ron Eglash, who applied his computing skills to African art with astonishing results, while perhaps not drawing out the theoretical conclusions in ways that could have made inroads into mainstream anthropology (Eglash 1999). While anthropology turned its back on science, new biology and new physics began to be established around ideas that were strikingly akin to the relational paradigm at work in early anthropology. Aided by the increasingly powerful capacity of computing, a notion of self-organization of systems emerged as the dominant working hypothesis in science.

Alfred Gell has remained almost alone among anthropologists in recognizing the potential of artefacts to display sequential processes and transformation in ways that allow for a rethinking of objectification. The notable exception is Bruno Latour (1990, 1994, 2005), whose ‘actor-network’ theory also proceeds from the question of assemblage and the logic of the manifold inherent in acts of assembling. By aligning the material strictly with the cognitive rather than with the social, he allows for assemblage in the domain of the social to be approached from the perspective of the intervention of other kinds of assemblages, most notably of those made to appear in the domain of laboratory science, where ‘non-human’ agents assert their associative capacity.

Like Gell, Latour stresses the analogous constitution of ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’, which ‘appear to be redistributed among the networks and to escape from them only fuzzily as if in dotted lines’ (Latour 1993: 103); and like Gell, who postulates the need for a single encompassing anthropological theory, Latour uses the closure of the separation of Nature and Culture common to science-based and premodern societies to argue for what he calls a ‘symmetrical’ anthropology that abolishes the need for dichotomy (ibid.: 103). Yet where Latour remains concerned with how we build communities of natures and societies in ways that come to inform one another, occupying a retrospective and bird’s eye perspective to track the intersecting of networks of human and non-human actors, Alfred Gell draws up close to recover for us the role of the artificial or ‘manufactured’, to grant us a ‘prospective’ perspective from which to expose the constitution of the social in the making. This move harbours an important idea, albeit one that is not fully developed in Art and Agency, but whose tenuous presence in the text promises to offer a very different conclusion about the nature of what Latour calls the ‘symmetrical’ relation between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Where Latour argues that ‘we have never been modern’, as beneath the dichotomy between nature and culture imposed by politics the lines are as fuzzy as among the peoples that tend to be described by ethnographers, Gell recognizes the challenge posed by modernist artists who drew attention to the relation between art and systematic thought in a manner that was sensitive to ethnographic artefacts with which they surrounded themselves in their studios. Art and Agency puts us on the path to complicating the picture of a symmetrical relation as we begin to discover that it may be grounded not in the nature of social relations, but in the nature of image-based thought capable of systematicity and innovation.

In fact, one might go a step further and argue that Art and Agency draws our attention to the analogical relation between discovery of the manifold in early ethnographic collections and the science of botany, both expressions of the pinnacle of Enlightenment culture and science. Following this further, one realizes that one is challenged to entertain a rather intriguing thought, namely of a symmetry between the role of multiplicity in the Marquesan system of images and the role of the manifold in science and design (cf. Clothier 2008). We are thus led to conclude not that ‘we have never been modern’, but that what we call modern is in fact not our own invention. Where Latour invokes the relevance of ethnography to the analysis of modern science and culture on grounds of the un-systematic, ‘fuzzy’ nature of social life, Gell provokes us to consider the relevance of ethnography to lie in the modernity of what Lévi-Strauss long ago called the ‘science of the concrete’.

Zooming in close on Marquesan artefacts, Gell in fact adopts the perspective of an eighteenth-century botanist who, through drawing and modelling, reflected on the connections that prevail among the composite parts so as to understand what is prototypical and thus generative and reproductive about a plant. Drawing up close to enable us to notice constraints upon composition, he invokes a comparison between Marquesan artefacts and the collections of artificial flowers in glass, wax and silk still preserved at the ...