Leseprobe

7 JOHANNES GRAVE | CHRISTIANE HOLM VALÉRIE KOBI | CAROLINE VAN ECK The Agency of Display. Objects, Framings and Parerga— Introductory Thoughts 1 Decentring ‘Agency’ For at least two decades, the humanities and social studies have been fascinated by new conceptualisations of the apparent power of things to speak and act. ‘Things that talk,’ 1 ‘art and agency,’ 2 ‘the power of images,’ 3 and the ‘agency of objects’ 4 —to quote only the most influential keywords and phrases of these manifold and diverse discussions—more and more have attracted the attention of scholars from various disciplines. It seems that neither structuralist approaches that insist on general preconditions guiding our social life, nor semiotic theories, are able to illuminate and completely explain our complex interactions with tangible things. Current approaches underline the peculiar, sometimes idiosyncratic intrinsic logic of things by referring tomultifarious experiences of not being able to fully control them. The stubbornness of the so-called inanimate has become a challenging problem that can no longer be ignored. 5 Scholars of science studies, art his- tory, media studies, sociology, ethnology and anthropology have provided a wealth of evidence that puts the ‘power’ of things onto the agenda. 6 Moreover, the most radical thinkers in this field, for example Bruno Latour or Philippe Descola, have taken this evidence as a reason to fundamentally question our familiar ontol- ogy and its distinction between subjects and objects. 7 However, Latour’s proposal to consider a ‘symmetrical anthropology’ 8 that—from a methodological point of view—deals with human and ‘non-human actors’ in the same way has provoked strong criticism; and the same holds true, for example, for Horst Bredekamp’s ‘theory of image acts.’ 9 Both scholars did not 1 Daston (ed.), Things That Talk , 2004.  2 Gell, Art and Agency , 1998.  3  Freedberg, The Power of Images , 1989.  4 Gosden, ‘What Do ObjectsWant?,’ 2005.  5 See, e.g.: Brown, ‘Thing Theory,’ 2001; Ferus and Rübel (eds.), Die Tücke des Objekts , 2009; and Frank, Gockel, Hauschild, Kimmich and Mahlke (eds.), ‘Fremde Dinge,’ 2007.  6 See: van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence , 2015.  7 See: Latour, Reassembling the Social , 2005; and Descola, Par-delà nature et culture , 2005.  8 See: Latour, We Have Never Been Modern , 1993, especially pp. 91 –129; and Latour (interviewed by Miranda), ‘A Dialog About a NewMeaning of Symmet- ric Anthropology,’ 2016.  9 See: Bredekamp, Image Acts , 2018 [2015].