Absence in Common
Author
Kevin Hamilton, American artist and scholar, of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is also affiliated with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His work concerns images, infrastructure and collective experience.
Citation
Hamilton, Kevin. "Absence in Common: An Operator for the Inoperative Community." Intelligent Agent 6, no. 2 (2006), 11 pp.[1] Also presented at ISEA2006, San Jose.
The Title's Reference
The subtitle points to Jean-Luc Nancy's La communauté désœuvrée (1986; English, The Inoperative Community, 1991), which is the argument the paper works from.
Nancy's position, formulated against both liberal individualism and communitarian nostalgia, is that community is not something a group of individuals produces by coming together, nor a lost fusion to be recovered. Community is prior to the individual and consists in being-with: a sharing that is constituted by separation rather than dissolved by it. His term désœuvrement — worklessness, inoperativity — names his insistence that community is precisely not a work, not a project, not something that can be made. Attempts to realise community as a completed fusion are, in Nancy's argument, the structure of totalitarianism.
The Argument
Hamilton takes this into networked and locative media. The prevailing assumption in that field — visible in nearly every social platform and in most locative art — is that community is produced by connection: more presence, more contact, more shared awareness, more co-location. Absence is treated as the problem the technology exists to solve.
Hamilton's counter-proposal is that absence is constitutive rather than deficient. What people share, on Nancy's account, is precisely their separation and their finitude; a technology that fills every gap does not perfect community but removes the space in which it consists. The paper asks what a media practice would look like that treats absence as material to be worked with rather than an interval to be closed — hence "an operator for the inoperative community."
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
This is one of the few pieces in the locative media literature that argues against connection as an unexamined good, and it does so from a serious philosophical position rather than from nostalgia.
It is the sharpest available counterweight to ambient intimacy, which proposes that continuous low-level contact produces closeness. Hamilton's question — whether continuous contact might remove the condition that made closeness possible — is not answered by the criticisms usually levelled at ambient intimacy, which concern volume and platform incentives rather than the premise. It also bears on belonging and on continuous partial attention.
Related Reading
References
- ↑ Absence in Common: An Operator for the Inoperative Community, University of Illinois Experts.
