New Materialism and Visual Studies: A Critical Realist Critique

The Art of the Real: Visual Studies and New Materialisms Edited by

Roger Rothman and Ian Verstegen

CHAPTER EIGHT NEW MATERIALISM AND VISUAL STUDIES: A CRITICAL REALIST CRITIQUE IAN VERSTEGEN

There is a movement afoot to both affirm and reenergize the material foundation of the world, a new materialism (Alaimo and Hekman; Hekman, Coole and Frost).1 It is just beginning to catch on in art history and visual studies, being talked about mostly in conference papers and the blogosphere, although it has made an appreciable contribution to media studies. In the most general terms, the new materialism asks us to rethink the “agency” of the world and the objects that populate it, while at the same time rethink our own “agency” in terms of its human uniqueness. It asks us to think about a new kind of animacy, relatedness, and hierarchy in the world. This is most welcome after a generation of idealism and text-based approaches to reality. However, the reader who comes from disciplines dealing with visuality will find a series of commitments that he or she may or not care to adopt. For the most part, those working in the arts do not espouse a position “that goes all the way down,” and worry over its ultimate theoretical consequences. If a theorist like Jane Bennett allows us to make matter “vibrant,” then all the better. However, even for those of us who are not concerned about such consequences, it is important to understand the intellectual origins of such thinking, particularly because much of it emerges from the French philosophical tradition, whose meanings undergo substantial modification in their translation across disciplines. This chapter serves as a kind of preemptive strike. My concern is not solely theory per se, but rather materialism as a theoretical complex. Understood as a complex, the movement of theory toward materialism 1 Fabio Gironi and Roger Rothman kindly read the chapter and offered comments that helped improve it.

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relates not only to the moment after postmodernism but also the institution of art history and visual studies. What do we gain with materialism not as a theory but as a rhetorical gesture in the academy? I am sympathetic with, and indeed excited by, many developments within the new materialism. When I say that I am against mere theory replacement I mean to aim at the higher ambition of reflexivity, the concern with meta-theory that may be occluded by our easy reinforcement of our subject position qua humanists, mere minorities in the economy of academic knowledge. Postmodernism ought to have taught us that theory functions rhetorically, yet this is a lesson that has often gone unlearned. Can we do better this time, or will we doomed to go round and round? My comments won’t be exhaustive. They will conflate two strands of contemporary materialism: that which is roughly related to what can be called the “actualist” networks of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett and the “virtualist” networks of Gilles Deleuze and Manuel De Landa. While Latour is content with that which is both real and concrete, Deleuze instead stresses the not yet actualized, which in an Anglo-Saxon context militates against naive empiricism. Latour’s materialism rejects the distinction between human subjects and other objects in the world. This can mean either that we demote ourselves to objects but usually means the opposite: objects take on subject-like qualities. Deleuze’s materialism holds that human subjects are simply modes of aggregated matter, no more special than any other modes of becoming. Together, such theories promise to bring visual studies closer to real philosophical discourse and perhaps even overcome the analytic/continental division within it. What both share – and what motivates much of the new materialism that has developed in their wakes – is a democratic, “flat” ontology. What I will conclude is that the asserted novelty is only apparent. In fact, the new materialism carries forward many commitments from traditional continental philosophy. This is not a bad thing, but one to be recognized. For part of the success of the new materialism stems from a genre confusion and slippage of terms within visual studies. By the time we leave general philosophy, for example, we don’t see references to science any more, beyond perfunctory references and a lot of familiar commitments appear: overcoming dualism, representation, transcendence, determinism, while affirming radical difference and immanence.2 I draw these conclusions from the point of view of critical realism, which has married scientific realism with dialectical thinking, and avoided monovalence by elevating absence, thereby simultaneously resisting 2

See for this tendency Dolphijn and van der Tuin.

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anthropocentrism (Bhaskar; Norrie). By separating the reality of entities from our knowledge, critical realism enables us to understand how a truly conciliatory approach can do justice to analytic and continental concerns, as well as how a willful smudging of these two concerns maintains a humanistic status quo. In this, dialectical critical realism has been unjustly overlooked in the turn toward materialist ontologies. After stating the desiderata of a materialist theory, I consider the widespread usage of ontologies in the plural. Next, I trace the “weirdness” of new materialism back to a commitment to immanence in continental (particularly French) philosophy. Then I address flat ontology, the most significant consequence of immanence, and challenge its ultimate fruitfulness. Introducing the notion of a powerful particular, I challenge the straw man of evacuated matter promoted by Latourian theory. Lastly, reviewing materialist and ontological resources toward understanding society as a privileged problem area that does not necessarily make philosophy anthropocentric, I propose a reading of the auratic materiality of an early modern altarpiece. My comments are meant to flesh out the explicit and tacit consequences of the adoption of new materialism today.

Desiderata of a Material Theory Of the value of materialistic methodology there is no question. In various fields, particularly medieval art history and visual studies, the value of acknowledging the materiality, construction, weight, rarity, and associations of formed matter has yielded impressive results (Kumler and Lakey; Hunter and Lucchini). Nevertheless, the connection between methodology and the contemporaneous ontologies of matter is not always made clear. In regard to the present concern for a description of the world, history indeed proves that there are elements of historical cultures that do not seem to be adequately represented in contemporary theories. The tendency to animate matter, and more particularly art objects, requires a new way to conceptualize things. Immediately, however, a number of questions arise. Must a theory adequate to the past also hold for the present (or vice versa)? Do attempts to represent a vibrant worldview try to capture the reality of the world or advocate for a new vision? At least theoretically, the attempt to capture indigenous ontologies is a more tractable problem, even though in many authors’ writings the present value of these worldviews is often not far below the surface. There are apparently irrational beliefs held by various historical and contemporary cultures. They need to be described. In this sense, such projects seem to be committed to the adequacy of the description, or in other words realism.

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The dominant tradition in philosophical ontology is precisely based on adequacy, which means anti-reductionism. Yet most figures engaged in a new materialsm would consider contemporary philosophy to be Cartesian and therefore of little value. Indeed, they would be opposed to ontology or realism in general and see a new materialist platform as somehow escaping “ontologizing.” If philosophical ontology is merely the categorization of what is, this objection cannot arise. Yet ontology is regarded as reifying in some way, and not just classifying. Indeed, if one reviews the work of Deleuze or Latour and their followers, one will find that there is a strong antirepresentational streak running through it. But let me lay down a challenge. A truly descriptivist ontology will proliferate as many categories as are necessary to describe the world (Verstegen 2013). For example, the mode of being of a variety of objects or animals, might have dozens of levels of differentiation. Latour’s actor network theory has only two: people and objects. Here and elsewhere, new materialism runs the risk of reductionism, where a limited number of entities allow for simple dichotomies. I suspect that the descriptive project cannot really get off the ground today because descriptivism and normative advocacy have become too closely intertwined. Recognizing that we do, in fact, live in a period of global environmental disaster, does not imply that commitments to certain beliefs will improve our condition. At the level of basic theory, the result is disastrous because a regional typology of thought cannot be separated from a regional ontology of reality.3 Derek Brereton dramatizes how this takes place in Tim Ingold’s discussion of Ojibwa belief and the acceptance of talking stones, where such a belief is not a “salutary alternative” but true for any description of the world, “not just Ojibwa fact, but fact” (281). What we will see in the following is a slippage between belief and reality, the luxury of humanistic discourse, but in this context an example of what in critical realism is called the epistemic fallacy wherein the indigenous ontology is rolled into an account of reality tout court. In the case of Ingold’s interpretation of the indigenous ontology of the Ojibwa, this conflation begs the question of the purposes of Ojibwa belief systems, whereas the anthropologist recording these beliefs has an entirely different, reflexive motive in mind. Critical realism—unlike the new materialism—reminds us that the purposes of an indigenous ontology 3

See the discussion in Vandenberghe (2003), who coins these terms to reflect Roy Bhaskar’s distinction between the ultimate, intransitive reality and its transitive, epistemic representation.

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cannot be conflated with the outward-directed and reality-tracking purposes of contemporary science (Vandenberghe 2003). Whereas Ingold presents Ojibwa belief as sui generis, Brereton points out that much more interesting things arise when the focus on reality is allowed to continue. If a man treats a stone as animate, does the stone, in turn, experience the man? If the stone is spoken to, does it respond? What we need in these instances is a clearly described regional typology or phenomenological Lebenswelt, a proliferative ontology, and an understanding of ontological commitments of various worldviews and theories. However, so long as the new materialism holds sway, this will not be forthcoming, because the rhetorical, political and submerged strength of the intellectual traditions that support the new materialism cannot abide such a conclusion.

Ontology or Ontologies? The conflation just described carries on typical themes of the humanities that are charged with developing new master keys to understanding a status quo. The normative element is strong in all these accounts. There is something “good” about recognizing objects as people (actants) or loose networks assembled together. Indeed, all the popular “ontologies” emphasize animism, panpsychism, a quasi-sentient earth, or at least networks, rhizomes, non-hierarchy, leveled and “democratic” universes of objects. As an example, Andrew Pickering espouses an open ontology based on embodiment and becoming in favor of a dualist ontology. And yet, Pickering supports his position by comparing a painting by Willem De Kooning, which he claims is indicative of an ontology of flux, and another by Piet Mondrian, which for him represents a static Cartesian world. This should suggest to us that the approach is not so realist or ontological or materialist, for in fact, the example is quite similar to Norman Bryson’s classic postmodern distinction between a painting by Raphael, with its central perspective and self-affirming Cartesian ego, and the flung ink of Sesshu. While the metaphysics has (apparently) changed, the advocacy has not. In the end, the difference between Bryson’s position and Pickering’s is merely rhetorical. In any case, today we usually hear about ontologies in the plural. And here, too, those who are calling for such pluralities fail to recognize their connection to past strands of thought. First, there is the commonality between their thinking and the logical positivism and neo-pragmatism of Rudolf Carnap and Hilary Putnam. Second, there are parallel developments in Information Technology, which since the 1990s have seen representations

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of knowledge in systems as plural ontologies. These are examples of what Barry Smith (2003) calls “internal metaphysics,” the description of the characterizations of a system without regard for its relation to the real world: Researchers in psychology and anthropology have sought to establish what individual human subjects, or entire human cultures, are committed to, ontologically, in their everyday cognition, in much the same way in which Quine-inspired philosophers of science had attempted to elicit the ontological commitments of the natural sciences (158).

If one still wishes to advocate for one (internal) ontology over another, problems remain. Valorizing one kind of ontology can lead to reinforcing those aspects of the world that already exist, at the expense of others. For example, aspects of Deleuze’s anti-hierarchical metaphysics can be liberating to a degree, but when they coincide with regressive pre-existing realities, they will continue to be reinforced. This indeed can be leveled against Deleuze, whose rhizomes can just as accurately describe the frictionless paths of modern global capitalism as they can the radical insurgencies against it (Žižek; Vandenberghe, 2008). As Smith notes, software engineers create their pragmatic “ontologies” following the principle that the “customer is always right,” so this can be guaranteed to follow globalized capitalist interests. Working with such a system, the only kind of truth that can be approached is truth to a system, adequacy to the internal metaphysics, not to the world. But as we have seen, this is troubling if the new materialism is trying to convince us that this is the way the world really is. One cannot valorize a traditional ontology over a modern Cartesian one without raising the question of adequacy. Another way to put this is to say that the failure to adequately describe the world has the consequence of an inability to change it. Mondrian can no more make the world Cartesian than De Kooning can make it Heideggerian. The fact that Mondrians exist indicates that there is materiality in the world adequate to produce Cartesian art. If we adopt a Heideggerian approach and produce de Kooning-like works, we are perhaps going against some grain in the world and our actions might not adequately address it. In other words, though we may well advocate for the ontological commitments contained within one particular social (or artistic) practice we cannot, in any sensible manner, advocate a “DeKooning ontology.”

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Weirdness Let us consider another, even more influential example. Media theorist Ian Bogost coined the term “Latour litany,” to refer to the lists of disparate “objects” rattled off by Bruno Latour and his followers to indicate the range of things to which we should be giving equal attention (49). In a similar manner, Graham Harman expounds on Latour by equalizing “neutrinos, stars, palm trees, rivers, cats, armies, nations, superheroes, unicorns, and square circles” (188-189). Such litanies underscore a deep lesson about at least one trend of the new materialism, its unrelenting realism even (and in spite of) human cognitive powers. For the humanities, on the other hand, the democracy of objects of Latour and the selforganizing networks of “single-matter energy” of DeLanda (and Deleuze) is precisely what makes realism palatable in the first place. It will be important for those in art history and visual studies to take heed of the original, realist motivation behind this move. Its very purpose is to ensure the safety of objects from cognition, to guarantee their reality even when conceptual tools might not exist to recognize them. Weirdness and the very desire to speculate beyond cognition in its original guise was intended to move beyond anthropocentrism. On the other hand, for those in the visual disciplines, the interaction with humanity is in fact that which gives these “things” their power. They enter the human domain and cooccupy it with us. This is precisely why they matter. In other words the humanistic recuperation of the new materialsm involves a fundamental rejection of the very impulse that gave birth to it. Let us put this theoretical reversal into context. First, weirdness fits squarely within the French tradition of the constitutive role played by difference and multiplicity. The post-Deleuzian commitment to immanentism, the idea that there is nothing beyond this world, is married to the foundation of the same world on difference. Gary Gutting has called French philosophy since 1960 as concerned with “thinking the impossible” and the result here is similarly non-intuitive, weird. All of this regards being, and the effort is made not to foreclose it in thought. What is interesting to the student of visual studies is how such gestures tread, in Fabio Gironi’s words, “on the border of irrationalism and regressive metaphorizing” (383). That is, these gestures function as absurd, anarchic passages that stake out a purely discursive space of thought. This reaffirms the paradoxical claims of some traditional continental philosophy and make such a body of theorizing particularly appealing to the humanities where now such weirdness functions as a guarantee of democracy.

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It is interesting to note that weirdness starts in actor-network-theory, that is, Latour’s sociological work and not his philosophical work. In an early example, Michel Callon studied the symbiosis of fishermen and scallops, noting them as a methodological point in symmetrical terms. This allows for the various actors to be treated without prejudice and brings out previously unacknowledged relationships. Yet it was introduced in the best spirit of postmodernism, that is, complete suspension of normativity implied by other normative terms like “fetishism.” (It is worth pointing out, in a similar vein, that “thing theory” represents this indifference. It encompasses both things animated by social networks and those with powers sui generis).4 Here I am not (yet) concerned with the adequacy of the ontology but with our need to acknowledge its weirdness. If ontology is descriptive, as noted before, then we merely need to adjust it to fit whatever we find. For example, if we believe that society exists in some way based on the fact that it has causal effects, then we invent a non-substantive ontology. What might be operating here is the long-standing orientation toward criticality. Without weirdness we cannot help but underscore the dominant ideology. Put another way, if weirdness is already a commitment within continental philosophy, it would be a distinguishing feature amid realist commitments, where it becomes a lure against a generally irrealist framework. Once introduced into visual studies, however, weirdness ensures that the approach selected is not really realist, “positivist,” but a paradoxical theoretical exercise.

Actors, Objects, Symmetry, Flatness At this point I want to turn to metaphysics and more narrowly ontology, the constitution of things and objects in the world. We are in search of “vibrant being,” nature endowed with life as it was in prior thinking before our thought was denatured. For Latour, non-human actors are to be treated symmetrically with human actors. As expressed by Jane Bennett, all become actants and interaction becomes a matter of co-action, agent-to-agent. Like Latour’s action network theory, the notion of an actant comes from early structural syntactical theory that helped the theorization of the agents and patients in sentences. Today, however, we speak of “giving 4

On “thing theory,” see Bill Brown. He cites both earlier, classically anthropological work like that of Appadurai and later materialist (metaphysical) theories.

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agency” to something previously powerless. Metaphorically, regarding objects as actors is interesting until we ask what it means to be an agent. At the end of it all, we cannot sustain any of the half-claims made on behalf of such ontology. It is easy to accept objects sui generis but a true materialism is wary of anthropocentrism, whereby “folk” notions of animacy are removed as epiphenomenal. The object we want to give agency to in visual studies is precisely the object most suspicious in its putative metaphysics in philosophical materialism. Art historians become a little bashful, out of fear of being called reactionary, if they criticize such ideas. But let me quote some very sophisticated social scientists to clarify the important distinction between the experience of agency and the imputation of its being. Dave Elder-Vass says of Michel Callon’s work with Latour: As a literary device, such metaphors are stimulating. As a device for provoking the recognition of a gap in conventional sociological reasoning, they are effective. As a methodological requirement for sociological work, they are thoroughly misguided. Scallops don’t negotiate, represent, or betray. Motors don’t become interested in projects or allow or forbid anything (469).

Similarly, in reviewing Latour’s work, Frédéric Vandenberghe writes: Do cubes, bricks, slabs, beams, columns and bottles of beer act? Do they co-ordinate their actions through a common definition of a situation? Are they kept together or driven apart from each other through agreements or disagreements? Obviously not. Bottles, beams and slabs do not act. Only humans (and animals) act; not endowed with intentionality, artifacts do not act (52).

In a similar vein, anthropologist Derek Brereton’s reading of Tom Ingold’s works concludes: …it is possible for a culture to believe and act, after a very limited fashion, as though there were stones that can talk, but not to act as though there were water that cannot drown us. That in the ethnographic record we find cultural items such as talking stones, but not non-drowning water, is reason enough to accept that humans everywhere, in constructing their worldviews, have a weather eye out for reality (278).

Elder-Vass, Vandenberghe, and Brereton are in no way Cartesians. They, no less than Latour and De Landa insist upon comprehending the world as a non-anthropocentric, stratified universe. Where they differ from the new materialists is their resistance to an unsustainable conflation of experience and being.

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Looking beyond the work of critical realists like Elder-Vass, Vandenberghe, and Brereton, one finds that a flat ontology, or rather a language of formal ontology, already exists in the work of realist philosophers of an Austrian persuasion. Well before Latour, they created a completely non-substantialist way to talk about – creating their own “litanies”: “human beings, oxen, logs of wood, icebergs, planets…smiles, suntans, pains, beliefs” (Smith 1997, 105). In such an “Austrian” vein, we can look to the critical realist ideas of Rudolf Arnheim. He is useful in showing the availability of long-standing theoretical platforms in visual studies, in his case a Gestalt-phenomenological point of view. Its slowly worked out approach is instructive for the hasty theorization undertaken in the name of a new materialism. To review Arnheim’s gestalt approach, we can see that he affirms: ▪ ▪ ▪ ▪

Non-reductive materialism (Köhler) Complexity of nature, or, nature is “gestaltet” (Wolfgang Köhler) The equation of reality with its effects (Kurt Lewin) Primacy of phenomenological experience (Max Wertheimer, Köhler)

All of Arnheim’s commitments have a positive valence in the contemporary intellectual landscape. Like the new materialism, Arnheim’s critical realist view aims at expanding the ontological tools to encompass the variety of being that exists. Nevertheless, Gestalt epistemology stringently guards against the “stimulus” error, that is, the confusion between experience and stimulation. In so doing, it grants the maximal self-organizing power to nature while simultaneously refusing to confuse the epistemic qualities of experience with their actual being. This method will probably not be widely adopted, of course, because flatness is a continental method of radical de-anthropocentrism whereas the Austrian method is more “analytic,” meaning that it is not a feature of dramatic ontological recategorization but simply a feature of the gradual refinement of our descriptions of the world.

Powerful Particulars Part of the power of flat ontology is derived from a strawman notion of the status quo of metaphysics. The exaggerated indictment of Cartesianism is a traditional tendency of post-1960 French philosophy that new materialism carries on. There are a couple of misleading assumptions here. As pointed out by Ruth Groff,

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▪

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Contra Latour, human/subject centered agency is rare and not as ubiquitous as he would suggest. Libertarianism, which has been the strongest defender of a human agent-centered view, has in general been a minority philosophical position throughout the twentieth century; therefore, one cannot hold it up as the standard. Most philosophers do not aggressively promote personal agency; Contra Latour, the event-causal view (“There are events. I never act. I am always slightly surprised by what I do. That which acts through me is also surprised by what I do”) is “entirely orthodox.” It is the Humean “regularity” view that has dominated philosophy at the expense of the agential. Once again, it only has novelty against the straw man above.

Simply put, Latour wishes to remove human agency from a plane on which very few held it and to introduce a theory that is already in place. Another source of the new materialism’s confusion between ontology and advocacy is evident in the role that “left” Spinozism and metaphysics plays in Deleuze, Latour, Bennett and others. Spinoza plays a large rhetorical role in this endeavor as an exemplar of an anti-representational, anti-essential philosophy. The problem with this is that Spinoza was a determinist and necessitarian. Christopher Norris notes in his companion to Badiou’s Being and Event that Spinoza was anything but in flux in his writing, writing more geometrico (109). His advocacy of certain metaphysical doctrines did not suspend his desire to make analytical distinctions and argue for representations of ideas. Yet left Spinozism – as it is also carried on by Deleuzians like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri – regards representation as a violent imposition of sovereignty from outside itself.

A Problem of Applied Ontology: Society When all is said and done, weirdness and flatness help the new materialism accomplish very traditional continental goals. This explains why for someone with traditional expectations regarding “materialism” or “realism,” varieties of thought attached to Deleuze, DeLanda and Latour fizzle at the very moment they get interesting. They embrace the sciences – biology, neuroscience, complex systems – but do so in a traditional, rationalist way still suspicious of grand narratives, still plumbing the limits of the human mind, never attaching to concrete problems. The democracy of objects demands that the unicorn is just as interesting as racism. The critical realist response that I have been sketching argues that a flat ontology neglects too much differentiation in the world, its hierarchies,

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modes of interrelationship, and contingencies. But here a more direct interest has been the problem of the constitution of society. DeLanda has made an attempt to create a social ontology, but next to the cumulative efforts of the critical realists – for example Dave Elder-Vass’ The Social Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency – it is primitive (Archer, Bhaskar, Elder-Vass, Outhwaite, Porpora). It retains its status as another example of an assemblage, when a more committed philosophy would seek to address society directly.5 The work of critical realists – building on the work of Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer and others – has over the last few years examined the nature of society and concluded that in addition to human beings, social structures have causal consequences and therefore have causal powers. Resurrecting Aristotle’s (multiplying) four-fold notion of cause (material, formal, efficient and final), they have clarified that social structure can indeed be a formal, structuring cause but not a motivating, efficient cause. Work by Groff and Kurki show how society is determined by both formal and material factors, leading to the conclusion that its causal power is formal (Groff, 117; Kurki, 224). In Aristotelian fashion, people are the material cause, the relations between them (enforced through a normative community) are the formal cause and their combination is the efficient cause. In this way, a social whole – which of course is different from a totality or organic whole – is a powerful particular with the ability to exercise powers. People are still the only ones to be efficient causes whereas the structure binding them together could be likened to a formal cause. This gets at the “productive” power of institutions without granting them efficient existence.

Another Problem of Applied Ontology: The Auratic Altarpiece Though the previous example of society is somewhat distant from visual studies, it serves to underscore the intense political importance that attaches to ontology. More practically, I wish to end with an analysis of an auratic altarpiece from the European early modern period. As we shall see, the altarpiece sometimes has more and sometimes less aura, depending on 5

Fabio Gironi clearly spells out how this could occur: “the practical dimension of human social action might be derived from a non-correlationist ontology, but not be employed as a criterion for the construction of such an ontology, in order to avoid any privilege given to the human-world relation over the real object-real object relation” (42).

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the circumstances. This differential quality is precisely what is lacking in a flat ontology. Federico Barocci’s Perdono di Assisi is still on the high altar of the Franciscan church of San Francesco in Urbino (Lavin, Emiliani I:264-283, Lingo, 63-84, Mann et al., 121-133). Painted around 1576, it records an episode from the chapel of the Porziuncola, now incorporated within the sixteenth century church outside of Assisi, Santa Maria degli Angeli. According to St. Francis’ vision there, those who visited the shrine would be absolved of their sins. This indulgence was vigorously promoted by the Franciscans, in partial competition with the Dominicans and indulgences granted the saying of their rosary, and became increasingly important in the sixteenth century. The altarpiece presented and helped codify a uniquely Franciscan iconography of the indulgence of the Perdono. The Perdono was not ratified by the Pope in St. Francis’ lifetime, so the Franciscans stressed that it had been accepted by God himself through the “seal” of Francis’ Stigmata, and so was connected to the passion iconography of the Stigmata. Thus, Barocci pioneered, according to the analysis of Stuart Lingo, the Perdono-as-Stigmatization, which presented the narrative story but also presented Francis in an iconic way for the viewer’s worship and reinforced its miraculous nature. Barocci’s presentation was complicated, however, because of the need to reserve the Eucharist on the high altar. Indeed, one can surmise that there was an interesting interplay between the figure of Francis qua Christ figure and the body of Christ within the sacramental tabernacle. These spatial effects are extremely important for understanding early modern animistic beliefs because they are context-dependent rather than substantial. From head-on, the figure of Christ duplicates Christ in the raised tabernacle, and we can imagine that the (now lost) tabernacle coincided with Francis’ figure. However, from another angle, we would only see Francis. The result is thus performative and ritual-based. Approaching an altarpiece as if it has of agency, it is one thing to stress its part of a new, vibrant ontology. On the other hand, if we affirm the kind of native ontology that is period-specific, we should recognize that statements made about an object will not necessarily be structured in the same way we might today, or have the same standard of truth. Dan Sperber calls those beliefs that we have for ideas we do not quite understand “semi-propositional” and we can imagine that some beliefs regarding the aura and agency of this altarpiece were not formally propositional (“Francis is before us”). Even so, the early modern mind was capable of quite a bit of skepticism. After the Council of Trent, the sacrament of the Eucharist took

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on new importance and in this context Francis truly came alive only in the sense that he was aligned literally and figuratively with Christ in the tabernacle. In this sense, activation followed a specific channel. Similarly, in the early modern period, when belief in miracles was more widespread, evidence used for actual canonizations (sainthood) generally relied upon corroborating testimony, much of it subject to forensic analysis (Vidal). The power of Barocci’s altarpiece is thus hard to pinpoint. It is partly the work, its style, and partly the author himself – Barocci – and belief differentially activated in spatial context. Barocci’s altarpiece could indeed come to life in some sense but only at certain times, when spatial conditions permitted. But, as pointed out earlier, this would require a careful clarification as to whether this “life” was merely phenomenological or truly ontological (c.f. Verstegen, 2014).

Conclusion The new materialism has shaken loose many fixed dogmas in philosophy and promises to do the same in visual studies. As I have tried to show, however, many questions remain unanswered. Too little concern is given for the origin of the ideas and the complexity of their original context. Most importantly, the fixation upon (one kind of) immanence presents a needlessly restrictive limitation on what materiality can do, especially in the case of the materiality of social structure. The questions visual studies must answer in regard to the new materialism are: is a democracy of objects methodological or ontological, and is it descriptive or proscriptive? Does it want to erase the divide between analytic and continental philosophy or is it comfortable carrying on the commitments that were developed by previous “postmodern” theory? The answer to those questions will determine whether the new materialism in visual studies will bring us something new or simply carry on business as usual.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Archer, Margaret. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Arnheim, Rudolf. “Art Among the Objects.” Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 677-685.

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