"De Landa: The call to be "more experimental" stems not from a utopian desire, and it certainly has absolutely nothing to do with "changing language in the hopes of changing perception". This type of talk belongs to the linguistic relativism that I attack above and which I think is a major block to any progress in this regard. Rather, the "call to action" stems from the realization that we never understood the world properly. We have extremely naive views about the economy, for example. We feel happy to simply speak about the "capitalist system" or "commodification", when the reality of economic history (as uncovered by Fernand Braudel, for example) is much more complex and full of opportunities. There are alternatives to the corporate model, such as a region of contemporary Italy called Emilia-Romagna, dominated by small businesses competing against each other not in terms of costs and reaping economies of scale, but in terms of product design and a concentration of creative people in a region (a model known as "economies of agglomeration"). Now, this region of Italy was put together over the last thirty or so years on the basis of experimentation: it was not planned from above (though local governments did play catalytic roles) and it was not guided by theory. Yet, our obsolete economic ideas prevent us from seeing how innovative this region is, and bias us to see in Emilia-Romagna just another form of "capitalism", or to dismiss it as a short-lived utopia. But a deeper understanding of economics has the opposite effect: it shows that past history is full of "Emilia-Romagnas", that our economic choices were never between "capitalism" and "socialism", but were more open than that.
A similar change has ocurred in our conception of matter, which is now viewed as capable of much richer behavior than before, and this needs to change the very form that a materialist philosophy takes. And being more experimental here is simply a way of responding to the extra capabilities we have discovered in matter itself. How this may impinge on the practice of art is related to what I said above in relation to theories of the genesis of form. To develop a new, non-essentialist, relation to materials (including linguistic materials) seems to me more important today than challenging social assumptions about what art is or how it should be displayed. (We have been "challenging conventions", or "deconstructing them" for over thirty years now, it's time to move on.)"
extract from an Interview by Art210
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