Things In Themselves

Just giving myself a moment of distraction while reading Adorno's Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems. He has it that all concepts initially arise as abstractions from matter, and therefor, concepts refer to the residual material world - the two are tied, and when we conceptualise, conceptualising does not occur at the cost of the material it supersedes (idealism) but is in fact a result of the material. Things, materiality, the natural, particularities and that which changes, are accordingly elevated by this schema, without our schema merely replacing those things' materiality with another set of concepts. The material is left to exist as material, whilst not being relegated to an inferior status in relation to the immutability of concepts.

These images come from a recent trip to HMS Belfast on the river Thames in London. I managed to utterly fail at learning anything about the ship and its life at war, nor much about the lives of the men who lived and worked in it. I did get very excited about the fixtures though and took a lot of photos that I'm excited to work on. In this philosophical dualism of form and content, I wonder at the role of photography. Does the camera impose a form upon the matter? And where is the matter - in the material of objects' physical makeup, or in their relationships to human activity? I like this thought that the concept refers to its material content - it is as if the form of these objects bring with them the memory of the industry and functionality of the warship.

Tribute/Tributary

In a discussion this evening I was reminded of an image I took in Greece, 2008, and how I had been thinking of Eva Hesse when I had composed it.

It's nice to see it again.

Natural-Historical, Natural-Artificial, Natural-Cultural.... (beginnings)

There's a process that is being undertaken by reading a lot of philosophy, from entering into philosophy, within the philosophical. And as the categories and concepts that philosophy refers to are being interrogated - clarified, so it seems are the fundamental elements of life and living.

I'm thinking about images again.

I'm also thinking about nature, second nature and the dialectical dissolution of the difference between first and second nature.

I'm going to be writing my thesis on Adorno and nature and his concept of 'natural-history'. Adorno uses the idea of first and second nature to account for the way that we naturalise cultural phenomenon dialectically, which also accounts for how we can move through the one concept to the other - that by moving through the artificial (as second nature) we can reach the natural (as first nature). That's not merely that there is a hidden authentic natural behind our world, but that natural and artificial are always mutually constitutive, and the natural is found as much in our actions as is the artificial - in the moving itself.

These images came to mind as I was thinking about this. When I took them (in Bodmin 2009) I was thinking about shared shapes and processes by us and by nature, which seems at this point to concur with my recent reading of Adorno. If Adorno is right, or at least if he offers a viable means to get beyond the limitations of the artificial-natural distinction, then the act of photography would enter into its claim to naturalism as well as the chosen subject matter. I find that quite exciting.