In the pursuit of my understanding for the works of Martin Heidegger, and after many discussions with my principal tutor Dr Dale Holmes, he kindly lent me a book that has been very influential on his own practice and way of thinking, that being the book "Prince of Networks, Bruno Latour and Metaphysics", by Graham Harman (2009), an open access book published under 're-press', Melbourne, Australia.
Bruno Latour is widely regarded as a key influence on the field of metaphysics. Born in Beaune, France in 1947, his Jesuit upbringing and interest in the works of Wilhelm Frederick Nietzsche created a solid foundation for his further study at that academic level in anthropology and sociology.
In essence, what Latour realised, was;
"Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else". (Quoted from 'The Pasteurisation of France', Latour, B., translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, (1988).
In a philosophical sense what this means is that every object in existence, whether it be a human or non-human object, stands alone by itself and can be considered to have its own 'force' to reckon with. In other words again, every object has an influence. These influences can be conscious or subconscious. The interaction of those 'forces' (as Latour likes to call them), is what makes the world that we live in, together with our perception of everything within it. And that extends to the Galaxy & the Universe as we know it, by extension...
How we choose to study those forces, (or influences) and then philosophise about them, and necessarily, the objects which emit those influences, is very much what I am interested in, in creating my series of gnomes. As I have said before, the object, is arbitrary. It is how it influences our thinking that is at the root of my enquiry.
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