Making things public2005

""Back to things!"--This is the new motto of what Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel call an "object-oriented democracy." For the more than 100 writers, artists, and philosophers assembled in this groundbreaking editorial and curatorial project, politics is not just a profession, sphere, or system, but a concern for things. Yet though the very word "republic" (res publica) is already full of "things"--things made public - it is these same things that are always forgotten. Through more than 900 illustrations and over 100 essays, this collection scarches for democracy beyond the official sphere of professional politics, and explores public assemblies too often left out of a narrowly-defined discourse: laboratories, assembly lines, supermarkets, trade rooms, courts of law, bureaucratic...