Ontological Turns Within the Visual Arts: Ontic Violence and the Politics of Anticipation
This chapter enters into critical engagement with critics who claim that a stronger focus on alterity and difference lacks the ability to establish kinship relations on a scale that matters in a world in which too many people are experiencing ontological
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Ontological Turns Within the Visual Arts: Ontic Violence and the Politics of Anticipation Martin Thomassen One major concern with “ontological anthropology” is how to think about human life in a global world in which “a kind of life and future that is both beyond the human and constitutive of the human is now in jeopardy” (Kohn 2015, 315; see Tsing 2015; see also Bertelsen and Bendixsen, Chap. 1). A prevalent critique leveled against the ontological turn (Moore 2014) warns against turning anthropology toward ontology on the basis that “it” lacks the ability to establish kinship relations on a scale that matters in a situation in which too many people are experiencing ontological frailty on a limited planet due to heavy anthropogenic impact. Radical alterity—in Moore’s view the most important p re- theoretical assumption held by those who adhere to turning anthropology toward ontology—cuts down the spaces and fails to animate the new possibilities since it convinces people that they do not even share a world. Against such critique, this chapter argues, first, against reducing the ontological turn to a singular (radical) position belonging to a coherent
M. Thomassen (*) Department of Social Anthropology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway © The Author(s) 2016 B.E. Bertelsen, S. Bendixsen (eds.), Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2_9
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school of thought with a unified theoretical framework. I suggest rather that “it” contains a plurality of directions, approaches and claims (see also Law 2012; Pedersen 2012; Remme 2013; Remme Chap. 5). More moderate approaches to ontology see difference as a relation and address it through relations with others (e.g. Strathern 1996; Glissant 1997; Latour 2007; Lien 2012) or make claims about less radical differences (see e.g. Descola 2013). My second argument is subsequently that it is radical relationality that serves the turn best as a pre-theoretical assumption in combination with a relentless focus on processes of becoming (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Remme 2013). The ethnographic basis for my arguments draws on analyses of global contemporary exhibition practices since 1989 within the visual arts. I have chosen Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, France and the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, approaching these as “contact zones” (Clifford 1997) of global encounters. Practicing an anthropology of art within such global spaces makes it all too clear that the anthropology of art has expanded well beyond expertise on “native artifacts” confined to Western institutions to the active interpretation of contemporary art alongside artists, curators, editors, and critics in global spaces of encounter (see Ong 2012). From an anthropological point of view, these exhibition practices can be seen as a distinctive mode of space rupturing and conceptual reconfiguration, juxtaposing modern notions of truth and being with the processes of emergence of truth a
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