Vibrant Art: A Political Life Beyond the Human
“In a world more scientifically and technically advanced, we are not that much better equipped culturally, philosophically, politically, or spiritually to address … entanglements.”
William Connolly, The Fragility of Things
Humans are not alone in this universe. However, as civilizations rise, diseases spread, and the climate worsens, scientists, scholars, and activists point out that humans often neglect that other beings and matter co-exist with them. Without this intertwined network of humans and non-humans, civilizations—let alone humanity—may not exist nor flourish. As William Connolly argues, “without an evolving cosmos composed of a plethora of interacting, self-organizing systems,” life, let alone the emergence of humanity, is not possible.[1] However, humans largely became desensitized to the volatile intersections of human and non-human systems. While this point can be contested, the logic of economic life is still dominated by a tendency to expand and accumulate with minimal regard to the non-human. Underneath this logic is the assumption that non-humans are subservient to the human will, akin to Adam’s dominion over animals and other beings in Eden. This logic also assumes that non-humans are inanimate and lifeless—that the leaves, metal, a coffee cup, a dead rat, and a pencil cannot exert their own force—a notion we explore later. This brand of anthropocentrism blinds people to the intertwined network of humans and non-humans—and the vitality that these non-humans possess.
A possible root that engenders anthropocentrism is the notion that individuals exist with unique qualities. Under this idea is a “metaphysical presupposition that underlies the belief in political, linguistic, and epistemological form of representationalism.”[2] Representationalism claims that there exist two independent entities: the referent and the reference. Usually, a third entity, a “knower,” is added to depict the one who mediates between the referent and reference. In this system, meaning is created through constant differentiation and convention.[3] Through this mechanism, humans may find the impulse to constantly look for differences and hints of uniqueness that they attribute to their identity. Although meaning is conventional, which provides space for representations to evolve, there exists a relative fixity to representations.[4] For example, the word tree is always mapped to the material tree. Thinking about the human, identity is mapped to and “partly constituted by the array of roles we perform.”[5] We occasionally explain who we are through these roles: as a teacher, pianist, artist, mother, daughter, etc.; and although they are often composite, these “tacit role performances are infused with affective judgment.”[6] They are marked with conventions and expectations that discourage role experimentation and fluidity. These assigned roles take on the guise of a mission waiting to be fulfilled. This expectation imposes a burden on individuals and impels them to be constantly conscious of themselves, forcing them to always take notice of their individual experience. In a sense, these roles are never just about what we do, but they become what we think we are. They help form the image of the human subject as an “I”.
Considering that representational identity is heavily influenced by differentiation and relatively static role assignments, humans often neglect their relationship to other beings, most notably, non-humans. Although post-structuralists contest representationalism (and rightly so), the majority of (Western) epistemology is still so deeply entrenched in representational thinking that it is considered “common sense.”[7] Art may provide a path for us to be more sensitive to the vitality that non-humans possess. However, since art is riddled with representationalism, we must rework how we approach art.
As a representation, art serves as the expression of the “knower.” This does not mean that the artist is always the “knower.” The “knower” is the one that decides what elements in the art can mean. The artist then inscribes this meaning onto the body of material to transform it into art. The art, then, becomes a vessel of meaning. Sometimes, a transcendental signifier such as God reveals meaning to the artist, like in many religious works. For example, there are predetermined rules and symbolisms that the artist follows in works like Gregorian chants and later, cantus firmus. Most music composed during the Middle Ages was a praise to God, and therefore, the churches banned certain dissonant sounds such as the augmented fourth or the devil’s tritone, believing that they offend God. When art slowly strayed from the doctrines of the church, more of these conventions were broken. The expression of the self or the “I” spread as artists explored their individual styles—most notably during Romanticism, a movement in the 19th century that heralds individuality and subjectivity—where the “knower” has primarily shifted from God to the self. However, art as representation not only depicts the self (or God for that matter), but it also gives us an insight into the reality the artist perceives.
In his essay, The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality, Nikolai Chernyshervsky argues that art is a reproduction of an external world. Nevertheless, since a human artist crafts the art, they cannot help but to “pronounce judgment on [the external world], consciously or unconsciously.”[8] Even if the artist strives to encompass multiple viewpoints in his artwork, “he will, in his works, consciously or unconsciously strive to pronounce a living judgment on the phenomena that interest him.”[9] If art is viewed as representation, the discourse about it inevitably centers the artist—in other words, the “I.” If not, the discourse on art revolves around several “Is” which include critics, students, audiences, interpreters, and art clubs among others. Although Chernyshervsky hints that what humans do is always rooted in real life and nature (the vitality of non-humans), his idea of art is still representational and anthropocentric. Underlying his argument is an “I.” This “I” is always perceived as a human agent who creates art by imbuing meaning into an arrangement of materials. Because humans are steeped in representational thinking, especially in the arts, they always wish to decode the meaning that the art represents. However, this decoding is always through the personal lens of the interpreter or artist.
My point is not that a person could encompass every single viewpoint—that is impossible—but to understand that the “I” and humans are not the center of meaning. That is the ambitious goal of this work: to explore how we can decenter the “I” in art. Art has long been a tool to spark consciousness and ignite revolutionary changes. By formulating a holistic approach to arts that considers both human and non-human agency, art sensitizes people to marginalized matter (and groups) and to the intertwined network that weaves us to every matter around us. Art becomes free from the artist’s hand and no longer becomes a vessel of representational meaning but a matter of life that affects and changes other matter and meaning.
In exploring this idea, I first set out the issues arising when we view art as a representation: (1) that art’s meaning is predetermined and fixed, (2) that there is no meaning beyond human intervention, and (3) that the “I” is the sole author of any artistic work. Second, I propose an alternative—one that decenters anthropocentrism in art and approaches it as an assemblage of both human and non-human actors. Third, I utilize various artistic examples to illustrate how we can begin to approach art without privileging the “I.” Among the works I examine later are Banksy’s graffiti art, Sophocles’s Antigone, and Filipino National Hero and propagandist Jose Rizal’s revolutionary novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. Finally, I conclude with important implications that this approach has in effecting political change by increasing our sensitivity to the intertwined network of the human and non-human, and consequently, the marginalized matter in that network.
Decentering Anthropocentrism in Art
When I read novels in high school, I aimed to understand the text by decoding its single purpose and meaning. I used to think that a creative work always tackled a theme where the characters and elements in the text represented specific things. However, in doing so, I was assuming that these elements have a predetermined meaning. Their meaning cannot change, remaining confined by the author’s intentions. This is the first problem with perceiving art as representation. Art is always treated as final output—its meaning is determined and cannot change. The discourse around art is nearly always centered around the “I” of the artist. While I do not completely disregard the importance of the artist’s intentions, they are not the sole proprietor of the art’s meaning as thinkers such as Roland Barthes argue. While Barthes thinks that the artwork’s meaning should not be determined by the author, he relegates to the audience this task of making meaning out of the work. As he contends, “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is without history, … he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.”[10] Art’s meaning then is not completely confined by the origin—the artist or the “I,” but its meaning and destination extends beyond the bounds of the artist’s hands.
While I agree that the work’s destination can offer a fuller insight into the work’s meaning and unity, I doubt that this destination (if there is really a destination) can be solely found in the reader. This is the second problem in art as representation. The reader allegedly interprets and discovers a multitude of meaning from the work. In this logic, we assume that without an audience to read the work, meaning does not exist. Barthes perhaps assumes that only the human can “[understand] each word in its duplicity and…[hear] the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him.”[11] I still think that Barthes is right in pointing that a work can change or possibly have multiple meanings sediment for readers through time. However, these meanings still rely on a knower to mediate the process of representing. This process neglects that art has meaning regardless of conscious human intervention. We might think of the feeling that the audience gets when they are moved by music or when they get goosebumps despite not knowing why suggests that the audience is not agential in a strong sense when inscribing meaning. Through time, they may figure out why they got goosebumps, but this does not mean that they are inscribing new meaning to the work. The meaning exists before they realized what that meaning is; hence, the goosebumps. Music moves the body without any human mediating representation. Despite this, we pay little to no attention to the vitality that art has.
Since representationalism relies on a human knower, we tend to neglect bodily responses that might have been affected by non-human elements sans mediation. Therefore, we always ascribe the human “I” as the sole author or agent of the work, when instead, a multitude of human and non-human actors are responsible for the creation of art. This is the third problem with art as representation. One can even argue that the neglect of art’s vitality originates from this idea that only a human agent can be the sole author of a work and its meaning. Looking at musical instruments, the mechanism inside a piano, the technology in filmmaking, the acoustics of a theater—a multiplicity of creative life occurs at these sites that the human body alone cannot produce. Once we understand that art is constituted not only by human but also non-human agencies, then we begin to see that humans are never independent; we are always reliant and entangled to other non-human matter. The problem is that most times, we only recognize our individual significance as humans—that things only happen because of humans, both good and bad. When technology improves, humans take the credit. When the climate worsens, mostly humans are blamed. We neglect to recognize the significance of non-human matter to our existence (and destruction), and in general, every existence in the universe. I am not denying the human’s role in these situations; however, when we start to decenter humans in the creation of art, we can possibly peer into the deep entanglements of the intertwined network of humans and non-humans.
After exploring the surface of issues with art as representationalism, how else can we comprehend art and non-human “life?” It is common to assume that agency is a thing to be possessed and that only humans possess it. This belief prevents us from comprehending the entanglements between humans and non-humans, but most especially, this disables us from seeing the vitality that non-humans possess. To understand this notion, I turn to Jane Bennett’s notion of (non-human) vitality.
Vitality, to Bennett, is “the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.”[12] When you encounter a dead rat or a bunch of litter outside, it repulses you. It exhorts you to react. The seemingly inanimate object “issued a call” even if we do not understand it.[13] At the very least, it provoked certain reactions. This situation suggests to Bennett that the objects exude some sort of power—a power “to animate, to act, and to produce effects dramatic and subtle.”[14]
Non-humans not only exude this power to produce effects in humans and non-humans, but they can also resist. One can look at the life that metals possess. When one holds up metal, it seems fixed and completely passive. However, as Bennett points out, metal is not a uniform structure but has cracks where its “line of travel…is not deterministic but expressive for an emergent causality, whereby grains respond in real time to the idiosyncratic movement of their neighbors.”[15] This should not be understood as a “sequential movement from one fixed point to another, but a tumbling of continuous variations with fuzzy borders.”[16] This tumbling is not necessarily a result of the force that a metallurgist applies, but it is an evidence of the “protean activeness of the metal itself.”[17] If metal and other non-humans do possess a life or a vitality at the very least, it is necessary for us to understand the impetus that allows non-humans to exert this force. In other words, we must investigate and redefine agency.
When one becomes attune to the vitality of materials, it is hard to ignore that humans are always in a constant “intricate dance” with non-humans.[18] As Bennett argues, “there was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and non-humanity.”[19] She identifies three elements (among others) that surround agency. First is efficacy. It is commonly understood as “a capacity to make something new appear or occur”—a capacity normally closely tied to creative intentionality.[20] In contrast, Bennett contends that there is no single subject that fundamentally causes a reaction. Instead, it is always a “swarm of vitalities at play.”[21] Agency then is distributive. This conception of agency sees intentionality as a thrown stone in a pond that competes with other ripples (other vitalities) in the water. It affects and is affected. Thus, intentionality does not define what the outcome should be. Efficacy becomes a capacity to cause ripples in an intricate network to invite other bodies to respond to a call of difference.[22]
We can understand this notion of efficacy and agency as a trajectory, “a directionality or movement away from somewhere even if the toward-which it moves is obscure or even absent.”[23] Bennett argues that trajectory is usually thought of as course imbued with a purpose originating from a conscious mind.[24] But she offers an alternative to this consciousness-centered conception of trajectory with reference to what Jacques Derrida calls messianicity—“a promissory quality of a claim, image, or entity” that is always in suspense, always on its way, but cannot be fulfilled.[25] This “unfulfilled promise” holds everything in suspense, pointing to a fullness somewhere else. This anticipation for something unspecified causes things to appear not because they are willed to reach a determined destination, but because they hope for this ungraspable future. Messianicity implies that vital materialities do not require a conscious intention to have a trajectory or propulsion.
The third element is perhaps more difficult to parse—causality. If we understand agency as distributed over a swarm of vitalities, causality should not be understood as linear nor should an effect be caused by a single determinant.[26] Bennett even argues that the process of effecting something should be viewed as an actor with its own vitality.[27] Despite the complications behind causality, one important thing must be clear: an effect is not engendered by a single body. It is always a result coming from an entangling swarm of vitalities. While one may misinterpret that I reimagine causality as relating to utter freedom, I do not intend to do away with causal structures. For if this is the case, scientific results would be impossible or extremely difficult to reproduce.[28] Causality is not strictly determinate nor entirely free. There are physical laws, for example, that are determinate such as an apple falling from a tree. However, there are other competing forces that affect the apple’s trajectory. All these forces produce unique causations that only happen because these forces happen to act together. In this case, causality is not linear but fractal and emergent—a result of various parts, cogs, and wheels, coming together in a sort of causal structure. Nonetheless, the result should not be understood as final but as an element that sediments itself in the process of effecting.
If we now see agency as a non-deterministic process loosened from the idea of consciousness and morality, it is not a stretch to argue that agency is not a thing to possess, but rather, an enactment. As Barad outlines, “agency is about changing possibilities of change entailed in reconfiguring material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production.”[29] In other words, agency is doing and causing ripples to disturb, or rather incite change, in a pattern and the possibilities of change. A change in change. If a material engages in a pattern of expected changes in conjunction with other materials, then agency as a possession—as commonly understood—is a false notion. Agency is to do and to be a disruption; thus, changing possible configurations in matter and meaning. Agency is like the nature of a swarm of bugs: no single insect can form the shape of a suspended swarm (efficacy) since there are always innumerable bugs in a swarm (causality). There is shape and direction in the swarm but never a definite destination; rather, there is an excitement or suspension towards an unspecified future (as in the ideas of trajectory and messianicity discussed above). Most importantly, the swarm ceases to exist if there is no constant movement among the bugs as they hover and engage with the air, because agency disappears if there is no enactment. If the swarm enacts agency, what then is the swarm? One can think of the swarm as a confederation of materials—both human and non-human—or as Bennett and Bruno Latour call it, an assemblage. Assemblages are, she says, “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of sorts. ... living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within.”[30]
The idea of assemblages is vital to our approach to arts. If we understand each material, each instrument, and each body that constitutes the work as having its own vitality, then arts should not be viewed as a singular static matter or act of creation but as an assemblage. If we are to redefine art as an assemblage, we must review and reassess the relationship of the artist, materials, and the artwork. Among the many elements that surround this relationship, there are two that must be addressed: authorship and the creation of meaning.
When discussing authorship, we often talk about the “human agent” who brought any material into a specific arrangement. In other words, this is the artist whom we usually ascribe credit for the creation of the artwork. However, if we are to understand art as an assemblage, authorship cannot be credited to the artist alone. As agency is distributed over a swarm of vitalities, the artist and every material constitute and affect the trajectory of the art. For example, when a sculptor chips at the stone, the stone’s integrity and composition directs the shape of the sculpture as much as the sculptor. Moreover, the nature of the sculptor’s tools also determines the traits of the artwork. In fact, if we commonly understand an artwork as the artist’s manifestation of their experiences, we must credit the materials and events (that have their own vitality) that molded these experiences. To think of authorship as distributed among a swarm poses a challenge to the boundaries between the artist, the artist’s experiences, the materials, and the artwork.
In my approach to art, the strict boundaries between the artist, the materials, and the artwork do not exist. When the artist engages with a medium, that medium always becomes a part of the artist, and the artist becomes part of the medium. As Barad points out, “humans do not merely assemble different apparatuses for satisfying particular knowledge projects; they themselves are part of the ongoing reconfiguring of the world.”[31] Moreover, she argues that “human subjects are neither observers of apparatuses, nor independent subjects that intervene in the workings of an apparatus, nor the products of social technologies that produce them.”[32] For example, when a pianist engages with a piano, they would often describe that the piano has become the extension of their fingers. Furthermore, a pianist only becomes one because of their relation to the piano. A pianist ceases to become one without the piano, and the piano ceases to produce sound as a musical instrument without its player. This is not to say that once a person plays a piano, they suddenly become a pianist. A person must practice and engage with their medium; thus, artists spend decades to master their craft. To be an artist is to be sensitive to a specific medium, so that they can be more attuned to that material. Musicians are attuned to sound and to their instruments; painters are attuned to visuals and their painting tools; and so on. From this, we understand that the boundary between the material and the artist becomes blurred.
In addition, there exists no clear boundaries that surround an artwork; rather we find a fuzzy periphery. In my approach, one cannot put a clear demarcation between the artwork, the medium utilized to create the work, and the artist. Art cannot be contained within a piece of sheet music, canvas, or on film. Take a symphony as an example. When an orchestra plays a symphony, what is the art? Is it the sounds that we hear? The skillful musicianship of the instrumentalists? The conductor’s musical interpretation? Is it the score that the composer wrote? Is it even the architecture and acoustics of the orchestra hall? I argue that all of them are the art. The artist, the materials, and the work have become indistinguishable. Thus, to do art is an iterative practice to undo or blur boundaries. When boundaries are blurred, authorship cannot be precisely accounted for. This does not mean that authorship does not exist, but we can never specify and name the entire swarm that authored the piece. What we can only do is to name the human artist and the medium that contributed to it, but never capture the entire assemblage; nonetheless, we can still be aware that the list of authors does not simply end there.
While I relate authorship to the assemblage that brought a specific arrangement of materials, it should not be conflated with the creation of meaning. Since meaning cannot be fixed, no author can nor attempt to predetermine the meaning of art. Meanings sediment through time; however, the process by which this happens to art is commonly understood as a multitude of human readers inscribing new meaning to it as tackled with Barthes earlier. I believe this is false. Humans do not inscribe meaning to art, but they are a part of a process—an assemblage—that marks the work and continually helps art to develop. This act of marking is an enactment of agency—a doing. This doing does not necessarily entail intentionality. It can (but not exclusively) be a product of a reflexive reaction towards small differences in one’s environment—sans consciousness and intellection. Feeling then can be a doing: a reaction to stimuli and a series of non-human agencies (e.g., hormones, glandular activities, the sensitivity of skin to air movements, etc.) acting within us to produce these feelings or reactions While we are not conscious of these doings, they enact changes within us. All these doings become sedimented as a part of an ongoing process of differential mattering.[33]
To be clear, I echo Connolly’s idea of creative “teleodynamism.” One can understand this concept by looking at basketball. If faced with an unfamiliar shot, a surprised team might not be able to defend against such a strategy. However, when repeated, the team learns to cope and defend against this shot in real-time. To be teleodynamic means that things “tacitly and reciprocally adjust and readjust” and to continually vibrate with each other in a network.[34] What makes this creative then? Because these actions are almost uncalculated, they are spontaneous and require innovative ways to respond to an unfamiliar stimulus—precisely differential mattering. These creative vibrations—doings—leave marks, which sediment through time and contribute to a never-ending process of becoming. Humans discover and read these marks left on the work, and these marks compel artists to share these discoveries. Through time, they find another expression through and with a perceptive artist, so that humans less attuned to such media can comprehend the meaning behind these marks. In a later section, I more thoroughly explore this idea using Sophocles’s tragic play, Antigone. For now, I want to highlight a few important elements of my idea of meaning and its creation.
First, a single body alone does not invest or cause meaning; rather, an assembly always propagates meaning across space and time. If agency is distributive and intentionality is a ripple in a pond with multiple ripples, then meaning is the entire space and topology of the pond. This topology is what innumerable ripples continually produce over time. Each cross-section in time shows a different configuration in the pond’s topology, yet it remains the same pond. In this logic, art is the same. The body of the work remains, but in a specific time, the art emanates a unique meaning.
Second, meaning is not exclusive to consciousness. We must understand meaning, not simply as a result of signification or representation, but as a result of enactments as differential responsiveness.[35] Meanings do not rely on a “knower” to exist. A form of intellect is not required at all to create and to know meaning. Barad illustrates this point using brittlestars. These sea creatures do not have eyes or a brain, but their responses to differential stimuli in the sea depict how it should catch prey or avoid predators.[36] The brittlestar indicates to us that knowing and intelligibility do not require intellection. Rather it requires that a body engages with the differential becoming of the world. These enactments then leave marks for other bodies to discover and respond to. By doing so, they perhaps leave another mark as a part of a never-ending becoming of the world. We know, and we seek meaning not because we can look at the world from its outset. In fact, we cannot. We know, because “we are of the world.”[37] We, both humans and non-humans, get to know meaning and the world, because we simply do.
Third, meaning can never be naturally good or evil. If a subject deems an act as good or evil, this judgment is based on the subject’s values, conception of usefulness, and their imagination.[38] However, if we understand that this individual imagination is influenced by another imagination—typically a collective—then we can infer that the collective imagination constructs the concept of these value judgments. Therefore, to think of meaning as having an intrinsic moral value is to center meaning around a socialized subject. However, if we understand meaning as caused by an assembly, then we must refute meaning as centered around a subject, and therefore, reject that meaning has intrinsic moral value. I do not deny that meaning has moral implications in the human mind, but I want to emphasize that these moral values are constructed and are not inherent in nature. To allow meaning to be free of inherent or fixed moral assignment is to let it be creatively teleodynamic. If meaning is such, then art is also teleodynamic—always responding to the world’s differential mattering.
To loosen meaning from the individual consciousness and subjectivity impels a new approach to art. Instead of focusing solely on the artist, we must understand art based on its ever-changing context and materiality. In other words, we must understand art as a teleodynamic assemblage with its own vitality with a constant state of becoming and unstable meaning. Art breathes a “life”—a vitality. By understanding art as an assemblage, we regard it not as a mere representation, but a thing with its own force that can diffractively move and affect matter and meaning.
In the following sections, I examine three examples of art and analyze them through this new approach to art. The first is Banksy. I examine his street art to illustrate how art is an ongoing process of blurring boundaries. Second, I look at Antigone and its modern adaptations, specifically Antigone in Ferguson to show how art exudes a constantly changing and unstable meanings. Finally, Jose Rizal’s revolutionary novels, Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, depicts how art diffractively affects and changes other matter and meaning.
Banksy: A Borderless Canvas
The British artist Banksy is a graffiti master, painter, activist, and as Will Ellsworth-Jones puts it, an “all-purpose provocateur.”[39] Aside from keeping his identity and face hidden, he is famous for his street art, but most notably, his activism and stance against capitalism, which led to him to destroy and shred his Girl with Balloon right after it was auctioned at Sotheby's selling for £1,042,000. What makes Banksy a notable figure in art is how meaning is created through his art, medium, and audience. Banksy’s genre—street art—already uses a borderless canvas—the streets. According to Nicholas Alden Riggle, this is the first of two requirements to street art which he calls the material requirement.[40] Artists such as Banksy utilizes the street and commits to using an environment that poses countless threat to their art: theft, defacement, and destruction, among others.[41] Street artists embrace the ephemeral quality that necessarily results from using the street as a medium. Consequently, street artists “relinquish any claim on the art’s integrity.”[42]
Unlike a blank canvas, street art does not begin on an empty workbook. An artist chooses an environment (a co-author) with already marked bodies and rich varying meanings—the street. If this is the case, then the use of the street must have something important to the meaning of the art. Any meaning coming from the artwork is affected by its environment, more so since its environment is its canvas. This is the second requirement to street art—the immaterial requirement.[43] When Banksy stenciled Love is in the Air on the West Bank barrier wall that separated Israel from Palestine, the tension-filled environment automatically influences any meaning that the artwork has. Love is in the Air depicts a “masked thug” who appears to throw a bouquet of flowers instead of the typical Molotov cocktail.
These two requirements hint at street art’s inherent quality to blur the boundaries between the artist, medium, and the audience. Because the street is already alive and brimming with matter and meaning, the art has no choice but to co-exist teleodynamically with the life that the street already possesses. The street becomes part of the art since the art relies on the street to exist.
To illustrate this, I look at Banksy’s The Son of a Migrant from Syria. This graffiti work depicts Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple and multibillionaire, as a migrant refugee. Known to few, Jobs was also a son of a migrant from Syria. This work from Banksy sparked conversations as he installed this art in 2015 in the “Calais Jungle,” a migrant camp in France where migrant refugees are often housed upon coming to Europe. The Calais Jungle is a congregation of tents rather than a real refugee camp, becoming a display of demeaning living conditions that the migrants endure. And even if they escape this camp, they often encounter discrimination and hate speech in their host country.[44]
The Son of a Migrant from Syria evokes different actants that help the art in producing meaning. Among those I identify four. The first is Banksy’s subject—Steve Jobs. The art, in using Steve Jobs, utilizes another actant’s life as the epicenter of meaning. The art reminds us that migrants and their children often contribute in a significant manner as in Jobs’s case. Banksy could not have made an impactful meaning if he used another subject, say Bill Gates. This could be said also of the second actant: the Calais Jungle. If the artwork was placed in Silicon Valley as opposed to Calais Jungle, the art might still retain some of its humanitarian meaning, but its focus might shift from a migratory issue to an issue of representation in the field. While there is nothing wrong with this location change, it highlights how important the environment is in shaping the art’s meaning. The third actant is the artist, Banksy. While it is obvious that Banksy stenciled this art, what some people might neglect is Banksy’s brand and its effect on his artwork’s legibility. Banksy’s style is well documented and monitored by an officiating body, Pest Control, that Banksy created. Because of this and his popularity, his works are more accessible and more read. I do not necessarily argue that it is only because of Banksy that meaning is created; rather, people seem to recognize the marks that Banksy’s artwork possesses, even to the point of trying to read and interpret his work, because the art is “a Banksy.” The artist’s brand made his work to be more recognized and sought after for its deemed political significance.
This leads us to the fourth actant: the audience. The audience is not merely a passive onlooker when they view art. In all cases, the audience contributes to shaping the art, and this is especially true for street art. The audience is a primary reason for that art’s ephemerality. The police deface graffiti. The city cleans up walls. Some passersby or another graffiti artist adds another paint or two. In fact, The Son of a Migrant from Syria was housed in glass by the city government, then the refugees started charging people to see the art, and finally, it was defaced as graffiti was sprayed over it. These are three various active engagements from the art’s audience, and each brings out a particular meaning that the work possesses. For the government, it is a cultural icon. For some of the refugees, it is an art that brings in a source of income. For a stranger, it might just be an artwork that annoyed them and prompted them to deface it. As we see, the audience simply does not look, they are a part of the art’s ongoing process of becoming and of blurring boundaries.
All these actants in Banksy’s art do not simply intersect or overlap to facilitate the creation of meaning, rather, they blend to create a specific arrangement of different materials. The actants become intertwined, and they are a part of a teleodynamic process that finds its encapsulated expression in The Son of a Migrant from Syria.
Antigone: Marking Bodies
Sophocles’s Antigone is over a thousand years old, and yet its themes continue to be relevant and evolve since its creation. This tragic play tells of the defiance of a young princess named Antigone—one of the four children of the late Oedipus. The night before, Antigone’s two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, fought each other for the Theban throne. They both died in each other’s hands; however, only Eteocles is given a proper burial, and Polyneices is left without those rites. The new Theban King Creon decreed that since Polyneices instigated the war, he must be branded a traitor, much to Antigone’s despair. Against Creon, Antigone buried Polyneices for which she is caught and jailed. A seer advised against Creon’s actions, arguing that he angered the gods for refusing to give Polyneices a proper burial. Lest he corrects this and releases Antigone, misfortune will soon befall Thebes. Creon at first did not listen. Antigone never denied any allegation against her and ended killing herself. Her fiancé and Creon’s son, Haemon, learned about this and committed suicide. When her mother, Creon’s wife, learned about this, she followed too. As the seer predicted, misfortune laid waste to Thebes, and King Creon is left alone to despair. The takeaway is that this is a tragedy where everyone feels that they are justified—and the resolution often leads to violence and death.
We might not know for certain how the Ancient Greek audiences reacted to the Antigone; however, modern-day audiences engage in multiple discussions about the nature of the play. As Paul Woodruff notes, there is no other Grecian play that “stirs the modern imagination,” and that even today, discussions surrounding the play turn to be “arguments between women and men, between young people and older ones, between religious folk and defenders of secular reason.”[45] Some people agree that Creon was sensible and legally just, while others believe that Antigone was fearlessly right in upholding the divine laws. There are some who are stuck in the middle as well. In fact, several adaptations of Antigone have resurfaced since its inception. From Mendelssohn’s Antigone suite to the Theater of War’s Antigone in Ferguson, Sophocles’s play is continually brought new life, or to be more precise, have its life always rediscovered. To understand how life in art is rediscovered and why multifaceted (yet seemingly contradictory) views and adaptations of Antigone exists are one of the cornerstones to my approach to art.
As I said before, art is involved in a never-ending process of becoming: marks are the only objective things that are continually left in a work’s body for others to discover and read. Singular events leave marks on bodies and add meaning to the constitution of that body. As Niels Bohr argues, objectivity is about “permanent marks—such as a spot on a photographic plate, caused by the impact of an electron—left on bodies.”[46] Bohr has reformulated objectivity in terms of marks. What he does is disrupt a common understanding of objectivity that inscribes inherent properties to objects through experimentation. Instead, objectivity references bodies. After all, for concepts to gain meaning, bodies must always be referenced. Similarly, and to help illustrate my point more fully, war veterans who have gone through intense and life-threatening situations are forever marked by these situations. People can read into these marks (a scar, wound marks, or the change of the person’s vibes), but they have not themselves inscribed these marks at all. Various people can try to interpret and read into the marks, but what is objective is that these marks exist, and they are caused by the war event. Events are not isolated processes, but as Bennett implied earlier, these events are assemblages with a vitality of their own. Thus, no single material is responsible for effecting an event. Why do I point this out? For even if a single person has wounded a soldier, that person is not solely responsible in creating the circumstances of that event. There are war generals, stationing, political tension, arms producers, and an endless list of actors including the materiality of guns and bullets that comprise this event. Similarly, when art is exposed to events, they are effectively marked, and another layer of fabric is added to its intricate weave of meaning—not by singular entities like parodists or adaptors, but by an assemblage. What is left is for others is to discover and read these marks; hence rediscovering and remaking the life of an art.
In a similar vein, Antigone has compounded a plethora of meaning accumulated over time, having gone through centuries of events. When the Theater of War produced Antigone in Ferguson, they did so in response to police brutality and the murder of Michael Brown in 2014 in St. Louis. They integrated dramatic readings of the play with choral music performed by “a diverse choir, including activists, youth, teachers, police officers, and concerned citizens from St. Louis, Missouri and New York City, culminating in powerful, healing discussions about race and social justice.”[47] This project came to fruition when Bryan Doerries, the director of Antigone is in Ferguson, was asked what play can invoke healing in Brown’s community in St. Louis. After a year or so of difficulty, Doerries proposed Antigone in Ferguson.[48] While some people may argue that Doerries injected the theme of police brutality into the reinterpretation of the play, I think he, along with Theater of War, materialized the marks that Antigone received in response to police brutality. In his talk in the PopTech Conference in 2018, Doerries ponders if “tragedy is a form of storytelling that was designed not to send us home to wallow in misery…but to bring us together and to wake us up to the slim possibility of making a choice before it’s too late.”[49] In those remarks, Doerries seems to infer that tragedies through their own vitality impel people to discover and read the marks from its body brought by the event. I suppose it is unlikely that Doerries is alone in thinking that tragedies hold this didactic element—and that they are still relevant centuries after they were first premiered. This shows that reinterpretations of Antigone are not just the artist’s brainchild, but that the art itself continues to grow and compound new meaning—waiting for a perceptive artist to discover the marks and materialize them.
Noli and Fili : Art and Ripples
The Filipino national hero Jose Rizal was a monumental figure in the propagandist and reformist movement during the 19th century in the Philippines. As a part of these movements, he wrote works that criticized the Spanish government, requesting for reforms and representation in the Spanish cortes. Those writings were instrumental in the awakening of national consciousness and the eventual rise of the Philippine Revolution. Among those works are two conjoined novels: Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) and its sequel, El Filibusterismo (The Filibuster). These two books are Rizal’s efforts to electrocute his readers into the harsh reality of the Philippines colonial state. In Noli, Rizal—through the characters—explores the complex structure and relationships of the then Philippines as it relates to the colonial government, the church, and the natives of the land whom the colonizers refer to as the indios. Rizal concludes Fili by foiling an explosion that might have incited a series of retributions against the Spanish colonizers—implying his potential desire for reform and not for a violent revolution for independence. However, as these novels become a staple of Philippine literature, they are now more commonly known as pivotal works towards the struggle for independence. This instance is consistent with our new approach in art. Using Noli and Fili, we witness how art can make ripples to change and impel them to be part of enacting agency.
Art has the capacity to engage with other materialities and enact agency—in other words, it can move those it interacts with and create a ripple in this intertwined network, a call for difference. In the case of Noli, this logic applies perfectly. Rizal did not simply whip this social critique out of thin air (he was already writing critiques in the propagandist newspaper, La Solidaridad). The idea of writing a novel was inspired by his interaction with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Virgilio Almario, Filipino National Artist for Literature and a translator for both Noli and Fili, writes that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is “the only American work that is involved in revealing the origins of Rizal’s novels.”[50] Nevertheless, even if Almario emphasizes that Stowe’s influence on Rizal is undoubted, many critics argue over “how or in what way Stowe’s work influenced Rizal.”[51] While this is an important discourse for Rizal scholars, this means little, if not nothing to my approach to art. I do not intend to create a genealogy of the novels or place utmost importance to a select number of actors who influenced the art’s creation. What I am interested in is that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a piece of artwork, has cast its own ripples, affecting a series of assemblages, and one of them is Rizal’s network. All of Rizal’s experiences, skills, patrons, among many other actors then form a part of an assemblage to create Noli Me Tangere. Did Stowe intend this to happen? Perhaps not. And neither did the art. While Uncle Tom’s Cabin engages racial injustices in the United States, which has deep relations with colonialism, it does not engage the Philippines directly. This goes to show that intellection and intention are not required to affect others—a simple ripple can cause other actors, even distant, to act differentially. This ripple does not need to materialize into another form of art like how Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired Noli. It can also become as little as charity donations to as big as social movements. Noli and Fili did so.
Along with other propagandist writings, Noli and Fili were instrumental in bolstering acts of reform, resistance, and then revolution against Spain. The first believed effect of Noli was when the gobernadorcillos of Manila (the appointed city head) petitioned to the Civil Governor to expel the friars from the Philippines, perhaps because of how Noli described the abuses of Spanish friars. The government responded by branding the petition as insurgent and promptly arresting the petitioners. This event is known as the Manifestation of 1888.[52] A series of arrests would happen the following years due to this anti-friar sentiment, and eventually in September 1890, the hacienda in Rizal’s hometown, Calamba, would see around 400 evictions due to Rizal, his family, and the tenants’ resistance to pay rent to the Dominicans friars who claimed ownership of the land.[53] A year later, Rizal would publish his revolutionary novel, El Filibusterismo. This novel exudes more anger and revolt than Noli, and it is proof that the Calamba incident always haunted Rizal as it prominently includes the resistance of farmers in Calamba notably through a character named Kabesang Tales—a victim of a friar’s land-grabbing who murdered this priest as revenge.[54]
Rizal’s writings, notably these two novels, would take part in inspiring the Philippine Revolution and in cementing Spain’s disdain towards him. The Revolution regarded Rizal as their “guiding spirit” in part due to his writings.[55] The Spanish government, meanwhile, accuses Rizal of being heretic and a filibuster, because of his writings—especially the two novels, to which the Governor-General’s office paid special attention in a special dossier on Rizal.[56] He was executed in 1896 in then Bagumbayan in Manila, while the Revolution pushed forward until the first Philippine President Emilio Aguinaldo declared independence from Spain in 1898.
One can wonder if events in Philippine history would be the same without Noli and Fili. The impact that these works made then and now are still reverberating across the Filipino society, and perhaps, beyond. That can show how fundamental art is in creating ripples to affect other materialities and to change the possibilities of change.
Coda
Art is alive. The vitality that it exudes is not whether it can reproduce or breathe, but a vitality that generates force—a voice that calls for a response. Whether it is a nude art or a moving song, these materialities exhort responses which are proof of their vibrancy. This conception of a vibrant life is intended to decenter the human will and intellection from the position given by “common sense.” Anthropocentrism, bred from a few centuries of representational thinking, plays a huge role in the dangers we all face from mass extinction to climate change, yet it is still deeply entrenched in (Western) epistemology in all fields from the Arts to the Natural Sciences.[57] While movements such as post-structuralism question representational thinking, this ideology remains common sense to most of us. Art offers us another way to counter anthropocentrism and provides us a force to enact further agency and spur changes. By decentering the human “I,” art becomes a tool to sensitize us to the presence of the marginalized, both human and non-human. We become aware that art is borderless and cannot be contained within the artist’s hands, like Banksy’s street art. We understand that art’s meaning continually evolves and sediments over time as we see more adaptations of Sophocles’s Antigone. We believe that art can move us and enact differences that effect the possibilities for change just as Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo helped spark consciousness and ignite a revolution. Most importantly, we now conceive of art not as a singular entity, but as a dynamic assemblage of ever-changing actors and agencies.
This approach to art is not easy to comprehend. However, it is not impossible. Scholars and writers such as Charles Darwin and Bruno Latour made us understand the agency of the non-human by anthropomorphizing worms.[58] By anthropomorphizing, the non-human traits that we see are interpreted “in terms of human and personal characteristics.”[59] Through anthropomorphism, one may start to see the world with a new life and vibrancy and eventually appreciate this vitality of non-humans. As Bennett argues, “we at first may see only a world in our own image, but what appears next is a swarm of ‘talented’ and vibrant materialities.”[60]
While this exploration is lengthy and admittedly dense at times, we have barely scratched the surface, and many questions remain. What ethical implications does this approach entail when it comes to authorship? In a system where artists require recognition and commissions to survive, how can one ascertain a far distribution of credit? By redefining agency as distributive and causality as emergent, how can we approach to accountability? More importantly, what does it mean to change the notion of agency and causality in social movements and revolutions, and what vital role can art specifically play in them? My sense is that art must go beyond the important work of healing as in Antigone in Ferguson; but it must also provoke, intrigue, and spark a new consciousness that makes visible not only the marginalized humans but also the non-human—the environment, animals, plants, and even rocks. A movement that excludes the non-human still neglects the intertwined and teleodynamic network that oppression—racism, misogyny, and capitalism, among others—operates in. I see art as having the potential to ignite a holistic movement, but for now, art must electrocute our senses to this intertwined network—that we are all connected, both human and non-human. Let art remind us that we are not alone—that humans are not and will never be alone in this universe.
Endnotes
[1] William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism, 1st edition (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2013), 97.
[2] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Second Printing edition (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007), 46.
[3] Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 117.
[4] Ibid., 78.
[5] Connolly, The Fragility of Things, 182.
[6] Ibid., 183
[7] Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 48.
[8] Nikolai Chernyshervsky, “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality,” in Russian Philosophy, Vol. II: The Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture, ed. James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan, and Mary-Barbara Zeldin, 1st ed. (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1965), 16–28, 25.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 142–48, 148.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2010), viii.
[13] Ibid., 4.
[14] Ibid., 6.
[15] Ibid., 59.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid., 31
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid., 32.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 131.
[29] Ibid., 178.
[30] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23-24.
[31] Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 171.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 181.
[34] Connolly, The Fragility of Things, 82.
[35] Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 149.
[36] Ibid., 379.
[37] Ibid., 185.
[38] Spinoza, Ethics, IV Preface
[39] Will Ellsworth-Jones, “The Story Behind Banksy,” Smithsonian Magazine, February 2013, Accessed December 19, 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-story-behind-banksy-4310304/.
[40] Nicholas Alden Riggle, “Street Art: The Transfiguration of the Commonplaces,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (2010): 243–57, 245.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Ibid., 246.
[44] Lexa Brenner, “The Banksy Effect: Revolutionizing Humanitarian Protest Art,” Harvard International Review 40, no. 2 (2019): 34–37, 35.
[45] Paul Woodruff, “Introduction to Antigone,” in Antigone (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2001), vii–xxvii, x.
[46] Niels Bohr, The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, vol. 2, Essays, 1958–1962, on Atomic Physics & Human Knowledge (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1963), 3.
[47] Theater of War Productions, “Antigone in Ferguson,” Antigone in Ferguson - Theater of War, accessed December 22, 2020, https://theaterofwar.com/projects/antigone-in-ferguson.
[48] Bryan Doerries, “Bryan Doerries: Antigone in Ferguson,” Youtube video, 14:28, posted by “poptech,” September 4, 2018, Accessed December 26, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt16_2Fvbys.
[49] Ibid.
[50] Virgilio S. Almario, Si Rizal: Nobelista (pagbasa sa Noli at Fili bilang nobela) (Manila: University of the Philippines Press, 2008), 22.
[51] Ibid., 26.
[52] Floro Quibuyen, “Towards a Radical Rizal,” Philippine Studies 46, no. 2 (1998): 151–83, 161.
[53] Ibid., 166.
[54] Ibid., 168.
[55] Vicente L. Rafael, “Foreignness and Vengeance: On Rizal’s El Filibusterismo,” in Border Interrogations, ed. Benita Sampedro Vizcaya and Simon Doubleday, NED-New edition, 1, Questioning Spanish Frontiers (Berghahn Books, 2008), 120–46, 121.
[56] John Nery, Revolutionary Spirit: Jose Rizal in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 78.
[57] Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 48.
[58] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 98.
[59] Ibid.
[60] Ibid., 99.
