A Relational History of Art: 7 The Age of the Machine — Reflexive Modernity and the Displacement of Meaning

The Industrial Revolution marked not only the mechanisation of production but the mechanisation of perception. When mechanical reproduction entered the aesthetic field, art was forced into a new ontological negotiation: no longer the singular presence of a work, but the reproducibility of an instance. In relational terms, this shift externalised the system–instance relation itself — the machine became a literalisation of potential actualising instances.

In pre-industrial art, each work was an instantiation of a symbolic potential mediated by human construal — every stroke, carving, or weave bore the trace of embodied semiosis. But industrial technology abstracted the instance from its construal. The system of production, not the construal of the artist, began to generate the event. This displaced the locus of meaning from the site of creation to the circuits of circulation — an early form of what would become the culture industry.

Photography, as the metaphenomenal twin of mechanised production, enacted the same logic in the semiotic domain. It replaced construal with capture, encoding the phenomenal as data. The photographer’s act of construal became subordinated to the apparatus: light, lens, exposure — all mechanisms designed to “instantiate” without meaning. Yet this very dislocation of meaning made new metaphoric possibilities available. When meaning no longer inhered in the act of making, it could migrate to framing, sequencing, juxtaposition — to the relational organisation of the mechanical instance.

Thus, the modernist rupture: artists began to reclaim construal by foregrounding the very loss of it. Impressionism dissolved form to reveal perception itself as process; Cubism fractured the object to expose its perspectival multiplicity; Dada mocked the very idea of representation; Surrealism sought to actualise the unconscious as semiotic potential. Each movement can be seen as a reflexive response to the displacement of construal by the machine.

By the early twentieth century, art had entered a phase of self-conscious mediation — meaning about the conditions of meaning, a metaphenomenology of the symbolic. This is the birth of what we might call reflexive modernity: a world in which the symbolic order itself becomes the object of construal.