Making Things Public exhibition. Photo by Franz Wamhof. |
Springboarding off the theoretical conceptions of the public posited by Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, Latour, Cvejić, Popivoda and Vujanović explore the difficulties of performing (in) a political moment, the disappearance of politics and fumbling in the dark, with a fleeting touch upon Latour's co-curated exhibition Making Things Public from 2005 (in the catalogue for which he produced the call-to-arms for an object-oriented democracy, "From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik"). Departing from a public/private divide in favour of recognising politics as located at that place of exception "where experts fail, where ... there is no procedure in place", Latour examines the sensitivities implicit in public and political actions.
"I can name the exact moment when it happened, when I started doing this ephemeral work of building a strange circle whereby you obtain something that is absolutely imposible: to speak in the name of several different people who say different things. And no habit can accomplish that. That's exceptional and if the principle of exception has an ephemeral quality to it, that's also what makes political activities hard."
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