Curation as Ontology, Or, Can We Fold Reality as an Object?

Authors

  • Jan Gresil Kahambing University of Macau

Keywords:

Curation, Ontology, Realism, Anti-realism, Fold

Abstract

I propose to open a discussion on a realist philosophy of curation. To do so, I plot premises that will move towards such a philosophy. While I am neither introducing a new ontology nor contributing to metaphysics, I deal with metaphysical and ontological issues as these engage in the philosophy of curation and the philosophy of museums. In particular, I start with a museological or curatorial realism towards a discussion on meeting curation with the broadness of reality. There are three core premises. First, while reality is ontologically mind-independent, it is anti-realist for reality to be curation-dependent. Second, curation has to be folded (contrary to Deleuze’s use of dynamic folding qua ‘an origami cosmos’) to address the anti-realist connotations of curation. To do this, I methodologically introduce the fold and state two-fold, three-fold, fourfold, and fifth-fold semantics of curation. While curatorial realism can be argued in a fourfold curation, the third premise is that the realist aspect lies in the fifth-folding of curation to match the extensivity of reality. This paper will attempt to introduce the philosophy of museums and the philosophy of curation with a bent on the realism/anti-realism debate. It will expose the inherit anti-realism of curation, and survey the need for objects in metaphysics and within contemporary forms of realism. 

References

Akyol, Umit. ‘Realism, Speculative Realism, and Transgressive Realism’, Doctoral Paper: Doctor of Philosophy, University of Dundee (2023).

Asay, Jamin. Truthmaking. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Badiou, Alain. ‘Who is Nietzsche?’ Pli 11 (2001), 1-11.

Badiou, Alain. Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham. Continuum, 2006.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press, 2007.

Bergqvist, Anna, and Robert Cowan (eds), Evaluative Perception. USA: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Bergqvist, Anna. Framing Effects in Museum Narratives: Objectivity in Interpretation Revisited. In Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums, V. Harrison, A. Bergqvist, & G. Kemp, eds., pp. 295-318. Cambridge University Press: 2016.

Berkeley, George. ‘Of the Principles of Human Knowledge: Part 1’, Philosophical Works, edited by M. Ayers. London: Dent, 1975.

Bhaskar, Roy. A Realist Philosophy of Science. London and New York: Routledge, 2008.

Braver, Lee. ‘A brief history of continental realism’, Continental Philosophy Review 45 (2012), 261-289.

Brennan, Marcia. Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum. The MIT Press, 2012.

Brown, David. Context and Experiencing the Sacred. In Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums, V. Harrison, A. Bergqvist, & G. Kemp, eds., pp. 117-132. Cambridge University Press: 2016.

Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. Towards a Speculative Philosophy. In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. Australia: Re.Press, 2011.

Bukdahl, Else Marie. The Recurrent Actuality of the Baroque. Denmark: Controluce, 2017.

Carnap, Rudolf. ‘Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language’, in A.J. Ayer (ed.) Logical Positivism. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1959.

Carnap, Rudolf. ‘Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4:11 (1950), 20-40.

Carter, Curtis. ‘Curating [Encyclopedia Entry], Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications, Marquette University, 2014.

Davidson, Donald. ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47 (1973-1974), 5-20.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Jonathan Strauss, ‘The Fold’, Yale French Studies 80 (1991), 227-247.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley. London: The Athlone Press, 1993.

Descartes, René. Discourse on the Method, trans. Ian Maclean. Oxford University Press, 2006.

Dummett, Michael. ‘The Justificationist’s Response to the Realist’, Mind 114:455 (2005), 673.

Dyke, Heather. Time. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Ferraris, Maurizio. ‘Transcendental Realism’, The Monist 98:2 (2015), 215-232.

Fine, Kit. ‘Unified foundations for essence and ground’, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 1:2 (2015), 296-311.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Travistock, 1970.

Friend, Toby, and Samuel Kimpton-Nye. Dispositions and Powers. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Gabriel, Markus. ‘Neutral Realism’, The Monist 98:2 (2015), 181-196.

Gabriel, Markus. ‘Why the world does not exist but unicorns do’ Interview by Richard Marshall, 3:AM Magazine, October 16, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20181016151700/http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/why-the-world-does-not-exist-but-unicorns-do/

Gabriel, Markus. Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology. Edinburgh University Press, 2015.

Gabriel, Markus. Why the World Does Not Exist. John Wiley & Sons, 2015.

Garfinkel, Harold. ‘Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Accountable Phenomena of Order, Logic, Reason, Meaning, Method, etc. in and as of the Essential Quiddity of Immortal Ordinary Society, (I of IV): An Announcement of Studies’, Sociological Theory 6:1 (1988), 103-109.

Gaskell, Ivan. ‘Museums and Philosophy – Of Art, and Many Other Things: Part II’, Philosophy Compass 7:2 (2012), 85-102.

Gaskell, Ivan. ‘Museums and Philosophy – Of Art, and Many Other Things: Part 1’, Philosophy Compass 7:2 (2012), 74-84.

Glazier, Martin. Essence. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

González-Díaz, Emilio. ‘Paradox, Time, and De-Paradoxication in Luhmann’, in World Futures 60 (2004), 15-27,

Günzel, Stephan. ‘Immanence and Deterritorialization: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,’ The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 6 (1998): 137-143.

Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. UK: Zero Books, 2011.

Harrison, Victoria, and Philip Tonner, ‘Philosophy of Museums’, Oxford Bibliographies (2020). 10.1093/OBO/9780199766567-0241

Harrison, Victoria. ‘Metaphor, Religious Language, and Religious Experience’, Sophia: International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 46:2 (2007), 127-145.

Heil, John. Relations. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Hildebrand, Tyler. Laws of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Horgan, Terence, and Matjaz Potrc, Austere realism: Contextual semantics meets minimal ontology. MIT Press, 2009.

Howarth, JM. ‘Franz Brentano and Object-Directedness’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 11:3 (1980), 239-254.

Hui, Yuk. On the Existence of Digital Objects. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1931.

Jacquette, Dale. ‘Origins of Gegenstandstheorie: Immanent and Transcendent Intended Objects in Brentano, Twardowski, and Meinong’, in Dale Jacquette (ed), Alexius Meinong, The Shepherd of Non-Being (Springer, 2015).

Jaksland, Rasmus. ‘Decoherence, appearance, and reality in agential realism’, European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13:2 (2023).

Jeffries, Stuart, and Nancy Groves, ‘Hans Ulrich Obrist: the art of curation’, The Guardian, March 23, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/23/hans-ulrich-obrist-art-curator

Kahambing, Jan Gresil. ‘ChatGPT, “polypsychic” artificial intelligence, and psychiatry in museums,’ Asian Journal of Psychiatry 83 (2023): 103548-103548.

Kahambing, Jan Gresil. ‘Fourfolded objects, or toward a philosophy of object-oriented curation,’ Curator: The Museum Journal, https://doi-org.libezproxy.um.edu.mo/10.1111/cura.12612 (2024).

Kahambing, Jan Gresil. ‘Healing as an Object: Curation, Sentience, and Slowness’, Oxford Public Philosophy, (2024), turn four.

Kahambing, Jan Gresil. ‘Heidegger’s Spectral Abyss: Grounding the (Strange) Return of the Subject and Object in the Žižek & Harman Duel/Duet’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 18, no. 1 (2022): 302-330.

Kahambing, Jan Gresil. ‘Jean-Luc Marion’s Phenomenology of the Icon as an Apologia for Quiapo’s Black Nazarene Traslación,’ Prajñā Vihāra: Journal of Philosophy and Religion 20(2), 13-31.

Kahambing, Jan Gresil. ‘Toward an organism-oriented ontology in organizing health, or recursive learning as resistance,’ in Journal of Public Health (2023): fdad251.

Kahambing, Jan Gresil. ‘What is metacuration? Antifragile realism between simulacrum and spectrality.’ Inscriptions 7, no. 1 (2024), 79-93.

Kahambing, Jan Gresil. “Curating and/or suffering: On palliative care and museums.” Palliative & supportive care vol. 21, no. 3 (2023): 565-566. doi:10.1017/S1478951523000263

Kleinherenbrink, Arjen. Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze’s’ Speculative Realism. Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press, 1980.

Kuhn, Thomas. ‘Reflection on my Critics’, in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge, 1970.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Penguin Classics, 1998.

Lord, Beth. ‘Philosophy and the museum: An introduction to the special issue’, Museum Management and Curatorship 21:2 (2006), 79-87.

Lord, Beth. A Sudden Surprise of the Soul” Wonder in Museums and Early Modern Philosophy. In Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums, V. Harrison, A. Bergqvist, & G. Kemp, eds., pp. 95-116. Cambridge University Press: 2016.

Lowe, E.J. A Survey of Metaphysics. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Liggins, David. Abstract Objects. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Luhmann, Niklas. Theories of Distinction (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002).

Martinon, Jean-Paul. ‘Museum and Restlessness,’ in Hugh H. Genoways, ed., Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century. Lanham: Alta Mira Press, 2006.

Martinon, Jean-Paul. Curating as Ethics. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Martinon, Jean-Paul. ed., The Curatorial: The Philosophy of Curating. Bloomsbury, 2013.

Maurin, Anna-Sofia. Properties. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Meillasoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Continuum: 2010.

Miller, JTM. Metaphysical Realism and Anti-Realism. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Miller, Kristie. Persistence. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Moussa, Mario, and Ron Scapp, ‘The Practical Theorizing of Michel Foucault: Politics and Counter-Discourse’, Cultural Critique 33 (1996), 87-112.

Murphy, Timothy. Quantum ontology: a virtual mechanics of becoming. In Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller, eds, Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

O’Conaill, Donnchadh. Substance. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

O’Neill, Mark. Museums and their Paradoxes. In Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums, V. Harrison, A. Bergqvist, & G. Kemp, eds., pp. 13-34. Cambridge University Press: 2016.

Oddie, Graham. What Do We See in Museums? In Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums, V. Harrison, A. Bergqvist, & G. Kemp, eds., pp. 217-240. Cambridge University Press: 2016.

Odell, Sarah, Gerard Lazo, Margaret Woodhouse, David Hane, and Taner Sen, ‘The art of curation at a biological database: principles and application’, Current Plant Biology 11 (2017), 2-11.

Priest, Graham. ‘The Logic of the Catuṣkoṭi’, Comparative Philosophy 1:2 (2010), 24–54.

Priest, Graham. The Fifth Corner of Four. An Essay on Buddhist Metaphysics and the Catuṣkoṭi. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Quine, W.V. Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary. Cambridge, Massachusetts: London, Belknap, 1987.

Raud, Rein. Being in Flux: A Post-Anthropocentric Ontology of the Self. UK: Polity Press, 2021.

Robinson, Alistair, and Edward Juler (eds). Post-Specimen Encounters Between Art, Science and Curating: Rethinking Art Practice and Objecthood Through Scientific Collections. United Kingdom: Intellect, 2020.

Roca-Royes, Sònia. Modality. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Rodrigues, Alda. People and Things: Questions Museums Make Us Ask and Answer, In Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums, V. Harrison, A. Bergqvist, & G. Kemp, eds., pp. 199-216. Cambridge University Press: 2016.

Rodriguez-Pereyra, Gonzalo. Leibniz’s Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Russell, Bertrand. The Principles of Mathematics. Allen & Unwin, 1903.

Sandis, Constantine. An Honest Display of Fakery: Replicas and the Roles of Museums. In Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums, V. Harrison, A. Bergqvist, & G. Kemp, eds., pp. 241-260. Cambridge University Press: 2016.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism is a Humanism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Sattig, Thomas. Material Objects. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Shumener, Erica. Identity. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Spaid, Sue. The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice: Between Work and World. Bloomsbury, 2020.

Torza, Alessandro. Indeterminacy in the World. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Vergo, Peter. Introduction. In The New Museology, edited by Peter Vergo (London: Reaktion Books, 1989.

Wallace, Meg. Parts and Wholes. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Watson, Gerard. ‘St. Augustine’s Theory of Language’, The Maynooth Review 6:2 (1982), 4-20.

Wendler, Hannes, and Thomas Fuchs, ‘Understanding incomprehensibility: Misgivings and potentials of the phenomenological psychopathology of schizophrenia’, in Frontiers in Psychology 14 (2023), 1-6.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. New York: Humanities Press.

Wrisley, George. Davidson on the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme. In Michael Bruce and Steven Barbone (eds), Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy. Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011.

Wulff, Erich. ‘Zur Konstitution schizophrener Unverständlichkeit’ in Forum Kritische Psychologie 30 (1992), 6-28.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso, 1989.

Žukauskaitė, Audronė. Organism-Oriented Ontology. Edinburgh University Press, 2023.

Downloads

Published

26-07-2024

How to Cite

Kahambing, J. G. (2024). Curation as Ontology, Or, Can We Fold Reality as an Object?. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 20(1), 179–220. Retrieved from https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1131