Theo Reeves-Evison - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Theo Reeves-Evison
Environmental Humanities, 2024
In its narrow sense, prospecting is defined as the search for mineral deposits with a view to exp... more In its narrow sense, prospecting is defined as the search for mineral deposits with a view to exploit them for financial gain. In the last few decades, this definition has been expanded to include bioprospecting, in which genetic resources are transformed into proprietary knowledge, frequently at the expense of communities who have cultivated this knowledge over generations. Prospecting is therefore inescapably extractive, but insofar as it involves a gamble on the profitability of a resource in the future, it is also inherently speculative. Taking recent discussions of the "extractive view" as its starting point, this article focuses on the role of visual culture in prospecting. It investigates how the search for resources generates a visual culture of prospecting and a visual culture about prospecting, whether through aerial views of resource frontiers, spectacular images that attract venture capital, or "specimen views" that isolate objects of economic interest. Tracing a path from the nineteenth-century survey photographs of Timothy O'Sullivan to contemporary work by the likes of Edith Morales and the group On-Trade-Off, it demonstrates how artists repurpose and diversify the visual culture of prospecting, documenting the forces at play in the struggle over lithium extraction or investigating the methods by which genetic raw materials are turned into patentable commodities.
Critical Inquiry, 2021
Contemporary art is brimming with images of a future shaped by environmental destruction, technol... more Contemporary art is brimming with images of a future shaped by environmental destruction, technological innovation, and new forms of sociality. This article looks beyond the content of such images in order to examine the infrastructures that underpin them. Paying attention to two key infrastructures in particular—the Cold War faith in prediction and the extraordinary explosion of scenario planning in the years that followed—the article explores the ways in which speculation was transformed into a tightly defined field of expertise straddling military, policy, and corporate worlds. No longer the preserve of prophets or mystics, the speculative infrastructures incubated within organizations such as the RAND corporation were underwritten by cybernetics, game theory, and systems analysis, all of which helped give prediction a veneer of scientific credibility. And yet, as the planning tools of the postwar era lost their predictive edge, new techniques came to exert influence in a world dominated by the uncertainties of looming environmental catastrophe. The future was no longer thought to emerge from the present in a linear fashion but unfold along a series of branch points that allowed decision makers to navigate through a landscape of uncertainty. Tracing the genealogy of forms of prediction and scenario planning from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, this article places futurological tools in the context of an expanded field of speculative practices that include works of art. Projects by the likes of Stephen Willats, Experiments in Art and Technology, the Harrisons, and others not only generate alternative images of the future but also rework the infrastructures by which such images are conceptualized and produced.
New Formations, 2019
How is it possible to profit from protecting the environment, rather than through deepening its t... more How is it possible to profit from protecting the environment, rather than through deepening its terminal crisis? In recent years, a growing group of investors, economists and governments have answered this question with a range of market-based instruments designed to facilitate the commodification and trade of everything from carbon to wetlands. A popular approach has been to establish ecological credit schemes that allow businesses to destroy a discrete ecosystem in return for the restoration of an ecological site elsewhere. Numerous scholars have already emphasised the questionable spatial politics inherent to such initiatives. Focusing on the UK's emergent biodiversity credit policy regime, this article, by contrast, considers what effect credit schemes have on the temporal dynamics of the ecosystems they capture. Drawing on discussions of financialisation in the social sciences, we show how biodiversity credits rearticulate ecosystems as units of 'derivative ecology'...
Third Text, 2018
Repairs, like many of the people who carry them out, often constitute an invisible background tha... more Repairs, like many of the people who carry them out, often constitute an invisible background that ensures the smooth functioning of everyday life-worlds. This extended introduction instead places them centre stage, situating the theory and practice of repair at the intersection of a number of different fields, from Science and Technology Studies to the Medical Humanities. It explores the role repair plays in the layered history of various objects and social forms, from technological devices and artworks, to post-conflict cultures. Repair, it argues, is a practice that exists in relational webs of entanglement, where its power can be multiplied if supplemented with an ethics of care. Like the examples of repair it brings to light, the introduction seeks to hold heterogeneous fragments in relation, positing repair as a ‘material metaphor’ that is invaluable for posing questions in a range of disciplinary arenas.
Lying has proven to be a surprisingly popular activity among artists in recent years. Over the la... more Lying has proven to be a surprisingly popular activity among artists in recent years. Over the last few decades projects have included advertisements for non-existent events, invented historical personae, forms of tactical media, imitation newspapers and websites, and a variety of pseudonyms adopted for various purposes. While this glut of deceptive artworks is relatively recent, it could be seen to build on a longer history that stretches back as far as early forms of camouflage, trompe-l’oeil and quadratura. Arguably what distinguishes recent artistic experiments in this domain
from their antecedents is a focus on process, with an eye to managing not only the deception itself, but also the moment when it unravels.
The artist Walid Raad writes that ‘facts have to be treated as processes’, highlighting the way they are produced, put to work, made affective, or otherwise challenged and disputed. The same could be said for lies. In both cases there is a process that unfolds over time – lies hatch, grow, survive unnoticed or shed their skin of truth. To account for the processual nature of artistic experiments with deception the art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty has coined the term ‘parafiction’, using it to describe artworks that actively dupe viewers, often before self-consciously shepherding them back to reality.3 The question at the heart of this article is ‘what remains of the artistic lie once the ‘truth’ has been restored?’ Once its object is revealed to be false, a lie does not simply evaporate; it leaves behind it a residue long after its truth-claims have been dropped. For better or worse, artworks that experiment with deception have the capacity to generate real effects. In this article I focus on two broad classes of effects: those that are somehow critical, that turn our attention back on the truth-framing devices that allowed for deception in the first place, and those that are inventive, that inscribe the image of a possible world onto
the mind of the viewer or participant.
Paragrana, 2016
This article probes the grey area between lies and fiction in order to interrogate the effects su... more This article probes the grey area between lies and fiction in order to interrogate the effects such strategies have, both within and outside of the sphere of art. For better or worse, art works that experiment with the methodologies of fiction and deception have the capacity to generate real effects. In this article I propose to focus on two broad classes of effects: those that are somehow critical, that turn our attention back on the truth-framing devices that allowed for deception to emerge in the first place, and those that are inventive, that somehow secrete a new universe of reference. The kinds of epistemological choreography used by artists such as The Yes Men and Dora Garcia do not only expose rhetorical devices and truth-framing mechanisms, they also leave a ‘residue’ of their false content long after their truth-claims have been dropped. In this article I will argue that such works have a germinal as well as a parasitic relationship to truth and are involved in a world-mak...
Parallax, 2015
Lying has proven to be a surprisingly popular activity among artists in recent years. Over the la... more Lying has proven to be a surprisingly popular activity among artists in recent years. Over the last few decades projects have included advertisements for non-existent events, invented historical personae, forms of tactical media, imitation newspapers and websites, and a variety of pseudonyms adopted for various purposes. While this glut of deceptive artworks is relatively recent, it could be seen to build on a longer history that stretches back as far as early forms of camouflage, trompe-l’oeil and quadratura. Arguably what distinguishes recent artistic experiments in this domain from their antecedents is a focus on process, with an eye to managing not only the deception itself, but also the moment when it unravels.
Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis can be characterized in many ways: as an ethics of the Real, of ... more Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis can be characterized in many ways: as an ethics of the Real, of ‘pure desire’, or of transgression. With few exceptions, these definitions all take as their primary reference Lacan’s reading of Antigone, who transgresses the universalizing ethics of the Other. What many secondary academic texts fail to address however, is that psychoanalysis is fundamentally a praxis that responds to social change. One such change has been described as a decline in the symbolic order; the fixed anchoring points of language have become untethered and new symptoms have emerged. So what becomes of Lacanian ethics in the wake of this change?
The aims of this paper are firstly to elaborate on the various modes of transgression in Lacan’s classical formulation of the ethics of psychoanalysis and secondly to show that in the latter period of Lacan’s work we arrive at a fragmentary new ethical theory. In stark contrast to the transgression of Antigone, this is articulated in relationship to James Joyce and the ‘sinthomatic’ function of his artistic creations. I will argue that in the context of a decline in the symbolic, and the concomitant ‘prohibition on prohibition’ (Miller), an ethics of creation poses more critical force than an ethics of transgression. This new ethics brings with it its own problems. If the freedom to create today takes the form of an imperative under what Boltanski and Chiapello call the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, then an ethics of creation will have to be articulated in such a way that is oppositional to this imperative without falling into the trap of transgression.
Books by Theo Reeves-Evison
What happens when the shock of artistic transgression wears off, when scandal dissipates, when ou... more What happens when the shock of artistic transgression wears off, when scandal dissipates, when outrage becomes a tired routine? In this original new book, Theo Reeves-Evison argues that transgressive art no longer succeeds on its own terms in societies where language, prohibition and morality have become increasingly malleable. This compels us to rethink the relationship between contemporary art and ethics, and focus our attention on the potential of artworks to propose new values rather than simply challenge pre-existing moral codes.
Assembling a novel theoretical framework from the writings of Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan and others, Ethics of Contemporary Art narrates a journey away from transgression towards a new critical paradigm for the relationship between ethics and aesthetics that places questions of subjectivity centre stage. Along the way artworks by Kader Attia, Artur Zmijewski, Dora Garcia and others serve as springboards launching discussions of the varied pathways along which a renewed ethics of contemporary art might develop.
Fiction as Method, 2017
See the world through the eyes of a search engine, if only for a millisecond; throw the workings ... more See the world through the eyes of a search engine, if only for a millisecond; throw the workings of power into sharper relief by any media necessary; reveal access points to other worlds within our own. In the anthology Fiction as Method, a mixture of new and established names in the fields of contemporary art, media theory, philosophy, and speculative fiction explore the diverse ways fiction manifests, and provide insights into subjects ranging from the hive mind of the art collective 0rphan Drift to the protocols of online self-presentation. With an extended introduction by the editors, the book invites reflection on how fictions proliferate, take on flesh, and are carried by a wide variety of mediums—including, but not limited to, the written word. In each case, fiction is bound up with the production and modulation of desire, the enfolding of matter and meaning, and the blending of practices that cast the existing world in a new light with those that participate in the creation of new openings of the possible.
Anthropology Essay's by Theo Reeves-Evison
Environmental Humanities, 2024
In its narrow sense, prospecting is defined as the search for mineral deposits with a view to exp... more In its narrow sense, prospecting is defined as the search for mineral deposits with a view to exploit them for financial gain. In the last few decades, this definition has been expanded to include bioprospecting, in which genetic resources are transformed into proprietary knowledge, frequently at the expense of communities who have cultivated this knowledge over generations. Prospecting is therefore inescapably extractive, but insofar as it involves a gamble on the profitability of a resource in the future, it is also inherently speculative. Taking recent discussions of the "extractive view" as its starting point, this article focuses on the role of visual culture in prospecting. It investigates how the search for resources generates a visual culture of prospecting and a visual culture about prospecting, whether through aerial views of resource frontiers, spectacular images that attract venture capital, or "specimen views" that isolate objects of economic interest. Tracing a path from the nineteenth-century survey photographs of Timothy O'Sullivan to contemporary work by the likes of Edith Morales and the group On-Trade-Off, it demonstrates how artists repurpose and diversify the visual culture of prospecting, documenting the forces at play in the struggle over lithium extraction or investigating the methods by which genetic raw materials are turned into patentable commodities.
Critical Inquiry, 2021
Contemporary art is brimming with images of a future shaped by environmental destruction, technol... more Contemporary art is brimming with images of a future shaped by environmental destruction, technological innovation, and new forms of sociality. This article looks beyond the content of such images in order to examine the infrastructures that underpin them. Paying attention to two key infrastructures in particular—the Cold War faith in prediction and the extraordinary explosion of scenario planning in the years that followed—the article explores the ways in which speculation was transformed into a tightly defined field of expertise straddling military, policy, and corporate worlds. No longer the preserve of prophets or mystics, the speculative infrastructures incubated within organizations such as the RAND corporation were underwritten by cybernetics, game theory, and systems analysis, all of which helped give prediction a veneer of scientific credibility. And yet, as the planning tools of the postwar era lost their predictive edge, new techniques came to exert influence in a world dominated by the uncertainties of looming environmental catastrophe. The future was no longer thought to emerge from the present in a linear fashion but unfold along a series of branch points that allowed decision makers to navigate through a landscape of uncertainty. Tracing the genealogy of forms of prediction and scenario planning from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, this article places futurological tools in the context of an expanded field of speculative practices that include works of art. Projects by the likes of Stephen Willats, Experiments in Art and Technology, the Harrisons, and others not only generate alternative images of the future but also rework the infrastructures by which such images are conceptualized and produced.
New Formations, 2019
How is it possible to profit from protecting the environment, rather than through deepening its t... more How is it possible to profit from protecting the environment, rather than through deepening its terminal crisis? In recent years, a growing group of investors, economists and governments have answered this question with a range of market-based instruments designed to facilitate the commodification and trade of everything from carbon to wetlands. A popular approach has been to establish ecological credit schemes that allow businesses to destroy a discrete ecosystem in return for the restoration of an ecological site elsewhere. Numerous scholars have already emphasised the questionable spatial politics inherent to such initiatives. Focusing on the UK's emergent biodiversity credit policy regime, this article, by contrast, considers what effect credit schemes have on the temporal dynamics of the ecosystems they capture. Drawing on discussions of financialisation in the social sciences, we show how biodiversity credits rearticulate ecosystems as units of 'derivative ecology'...
Third Text, 2018
Repairs, like many of the people who carry them out, often constitute an invisible background tha... more Repairs, like many of the people who carry them out, often constitute an invisible background that ensures the smooth functioning of everyday life-worlds. This extended introduction instead places them centre stage, situating the theory and practice of repair at the intersection of a number of different fields, from Science and Technology Studies to the Medical Humanities. It explores the role repair plays in the layered history of various objects and social forms, from technological devices and artworks, to post-conflict cultures. Repair, it argues, is a practice that exists in relational webs of entanglement, where its power can be multiplied if supplemented with an ethics of care. Like the examples of repair it brings to light, the introduction seeks to hold heterogeneous fragments in relation, positing repair as a ‘material metaphor’ that is invaluable for posing questions in a range of disciplinary arenas.
Lying has proven to be a surprisingly popular activity among artists in recent years. Over the la... more Lying has proven to be a surprisingly popular activity among artists in recent years. Over the last few decades projects have included advertisements for non-existent events, invented historical personae, forms of tactical media, imitation newspapers and websites, and a variety of pseudonyms adopted for various purposes. While this glut of deceptive artworks is relatively recent, it could be seen to build on a longer history that stretches back as far as early forms of camouflage, trompe-l’oeil and quadratura. Arguably what distinguishes recent artistic experiments in this domain
from their antecedents is a focus on process, with an eye to managing not only the deception itself, but also the moment when it unravels.
The artist Walid Raad writes that ‘facts have to be treated as processes’, highlighting the way they are produced, put to work, made affective, or otherwise challenged and disputed. The same could be said for lies. In both cases there is a process that unfolds over time – lies hatch, grow, survive unnoticed or shed their skin of truth. To account for the processual nature of artistic experiments with deception the art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty has coined the term ‘parafiction’, using it to describe artworks that actively dupe viewers, often before self-consciously shepherding them back to reality.3 The question at the heart of this article is ‘what remains of the artistic lie once the ‘truth’ has been restored?’ Once its object is revealed to be false, a lie does not simply evaporate; it leaves behind it a residue long after its truth-claims have been dropped. For better or worse, artworks that experiment with deception have the capacity to generate real effects. In this article I focus on two broad classes of effects: those that are somehow critical, that turn our attention back on the truth-framing devices that allowed for deception in the first place, and those that are inventive, that inscribe the image of a possible world onto
the mind of the viewer or participant.
Paragrana, 2016
This article probes the grey area between lies and fiction in order to interrogate the effects su... more This article probes the grey area between lies and fiction in order to interrogate the effects such strategies have, both within and outside of the sphere of art. For better or worse, art works that experiment with the methodologies of fiction and deception have the capacity to generate real effects. In this article I propose to focus on two broad classes of effects: those that are somehow critical, that turn our attention back on the truth-framing devices that allowed for deception to emerge in the first place, and those that are inventive, that somehow secrete a new universe of reference. The kinds of epistemological choreography used by artists such as The Yes Men and Dora Garcia do not only expose rhetorical devices and truth-framing mechanisms, they also leave a ‘residue’ of their false content long after their truth-claims have been dropped. In this article I will argue that such works have a germinal as well as a parasitic relationship to truth and are involved in a world-mak...
Parallax, 2015
Lying has proven to be a surprisingly popular activity among artists in recent years. Over the la... more Lying has proven to be a surprisingly popular activity among artists in recent years. Over the last few decades projects have included advertisements for non-existent events, invented historical personae, forms of tactical media, imitation newspapers and websites, and a variety of pseudonyms adopted for various purposes. While this glut of deceptive artworks is relatively recent, it could be seen to build on a longer history that stretches back as far as early forms of camouflage, trompe-l’oeil and quadratura. Arguably what distinguishes recent artistic experiments in this domain from their antecedents is a focus on process, with an eye to managing not only the deception itself, but also the moment when it unravels.
Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis can be characterized in many ways: as an ethics of the Real, of ... more Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis can be characterized in many ways: as an ethics of the Real, of ‘pure desire’, or of transgression. With few exceptions, these definitions all take as their primary reference Lacan’s reading of Antigone, who transgresses the universalizing ethics of the Other. What many secondary academic texts fail to address however, is that psychoanalysis is fundamentally a praxis that responds to social change. One such change has been described as a decline in the symbolic order; the fixed anchoring points of language have become untethered and new symptoms have emerged. So what becomes of Lacanian ethics in the wake of this change?
The aims of this paper are firstly to elaborate on the various modes of transgression in Lacan’s classical formulation of the ethics of psychoanalysis and secondly to show that in the latter period of Lacan’s work we arrive at a fragmentary new ethical theory. In stark contrast to the transgression of Antigone, this is articulated in relationship to James Joyce and the ‘sinthomatic’ function of his artistic creations. I will argue that in the context of a decline in the symbolic, and the concomitant ‘prohibition on prohibition’ (Miller), an ethics of creation poses more critical force than an ethics of transgression. This new ethics brings with it its own problems. If the freedom to create today takes the form of an imperative under what Boltanski and Chiapello call the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, then an ethics of creation will have to be articulated in such a way that is oppositional to this imperative without falling into the trap of transgression.
What happens when the shock of artistic transgression wears off, when scandal dissipates, when ou... more What happens when the shock of artistic transgression wears off, when scandal dissipates, when outrage becomes a tired routine? In this original new book, Theo Reeves-Evison argues that transgressive art no longer succeeds on its own terms in societies where language, prohibition and morality have become increasingly malleable. This compels us to rethink the relationship between contemporary art and ethics, and focus our attention on the potential of artworks to propose new values rather than simply challenge pre-existing moral codes.
Assembling a novel theoretical framework from the writings of Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan and others, Ethics of Contemporary Art narrates a journey away from transgression towards a new critical paradigm for the relationship between ethics and aesthetics that places questions of subjectivity centre stage. Along the way artworks by Kader Attia, Artur Zmijewski, Dora Garcia and others serve as springboards launching discussions of the varied pathways along which a renewed ethics of contemporary art might develop.
Fiction as Method, 2017
See the world through the eyes of a search engine, if only for a millisecond; throw the workings ... more See the world through the eyes of a search engine, if only for a millisecond; throw the workings of power into sharper relief by any media necessary; reveal access points to other worlds within our own. In the anthology Fiction as Method, a mixture of new and established names in the fields of contemporary art, media theory, philosophy, and speculative fiction explore the diverse ways fiction manifests, and provide insights into subjects ranging from the hive mind of the art collective 0rphan Drift to the protocols of online self-presentation. With an extended introduction by the editors, the book invites reflection on how fictions proliferate, take on flesh, and are carried by a wide variety of mediums—including, but not limited to, the written word. In each case, fiction is bound up with the production and modulation of desire, the enfolding of matter and meaning, and the blending of practices that cast the existing world in a new light with those that participate in the creation of new openings of the possible.