Political Aesthetics Research Articles

Columbia / New York: The Ruins of the Civil War

This essay explores the political aesthetics of visual and textual representations of ruins following episodes of urban destruction during the Civil War. Although ruins were long held to be lacking in the nineteenth-century US landscape—and their absence deemed a sign of America’s newness—ruins were ubiquitous throughout the nation, in particular in its growing urban centres. These antebellum ruins spoke to America’s uncanny historicity, spelling out its premature growth as well as the risk of its untimely extinction. Their presence, however transient, thus provided Americans with a language to make sense of the devastation caused by the Civil War. The essay then turns to two instances of urban destruction: the burning of Columbia, SC, in February 1865 and the New York City draft riots of July 1863. Their representation in the periodical press, as well as in personal and literary accounts, archives the destructiveness of the war even as it shapes its collective memory. While the ashes of Columbia became a climactic episode in the narrative of the Lost Cause, the burning of New York City indexed the problematic memorialization of antistate and anti-Black violence.

Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema by Leila Mukhida

Reviewed by: Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema by Leila Mukhida Simone Pfleger Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema. By Leila Mukhida. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. Pp. 218. Paper $120.00. ISBN 978-1-78920-630-2. In Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema, Leila Mukhida engages with theory by German Jewish intellectuals Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Alexander Kluge, emphasizing "points of intersection and divergence in their writing, points that emerge from their shared disenchantment with the domestic output of the German film industry" (8) in order to examine the political aesthetics of postunification German and Austrian cinema. The book foregrounds the importance of medium-specific devices like lighting, [End Page 394] sound, and mise-en-scène for close readings of contemporary film. In dialogue with a number of works by these neo-Marxist thinkers, who have interrogated notions of precarity, temporality, and contingency, Mukhida argues that post-1989 films by directors such as Valeska Grisebach, Michael Haneke, Andreas Dresen, and Elke Hauck engender a political sensitivity in viewers. Mukhida insists that the political aesthetic of contemporary German-language cinema, when read through the writings of Benjamin, Kracauer, and Kluge, allows for a unique understanding of contemporary films that departs from Eric Rentschler's analysis of German post-Wall cinema as one of consensus. While Rentschler suggests that the political value of contemporary films becomes legible when compared to the aesthetic and stylistic choices and production strategies of the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 70s, Mukhida's readings seek to undo the dichotomy between "consensus" and "interference." After a brief introduction to set the stage for the project, chapter 1 foregrounds filmic content, or plot, and context as opposed to form. Mukhida interrogates representations of the working class and asks whether such a category is applicable to twenty-first-century German and Austrian films. Emphasizing that films such as Toni Erdmann (2016) by Maren Ade and Western (2017) by Valeska Grisebach visualize changes to the flow of capital and labor, they insist that films such as Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death (2004) and Elke Hauck's Karger (2007) "do not allow viewers to choose to remain ignorant of the human cost in the current global economic system" (63) and foreground the precarious conditions of workers. Leaning on Kracauer's understanding of film as "uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality" (Kracauer in Mukhida 68) in chapter 2, Mukhida turns their sights to the possibilities of representation. They offer readings of Angela Schanelec's Marseille (2004), Gerhard Friedl's Hat Wolff von Amerongen Konkursdelikte begangen? (2004), and Andreas Dresen's Halt auf freier Strecke (2011), films that pay close attention to the "real." Mukhida foregrounds how the three films "disrupt the viewing experience, yet at the same time there is a commitment to authenticity" (102). Thus, they understand the films discussed in this chapter as linked to documentary-style filmmaking. Chapter 3 argues that Benjamin, Kracauer, and Kluge encourage active viewer participation instead of the passive consumption of the films' storylines. Indeed, the theorists "demand a transformation from a passive viewer . . . to an active collaborator"(107). Analyzing Michael Haneke's 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (1994) and Code Inconnu: Récit incomplete de divers voyages (2000), Mukhida claims that the filmmaker seeks to "challenge viewers' imagination rather than to numb them" (108), but these films still exhibit a sense of optimism that is tied to the filmmaker's impetus to engage his audience. The fourth chapter turns to the notion of alienation and argues that Benjamin's theory of the shock effect functions as a means to generate alertness and critical awareness in the audience. Viewers' heightened awareness of their life worlds enables [End Page 395] them to become more sensitive and develop a sense of ethical responsibility. Both Ulrich Seidl's Hundstage (2001) and Valeska Grisebach's Sehnsucht (2006) generate feelings of discomfort and withhold the possibility for viewers to make sense of the images on-screen (such as the portrayal of accidents and suicide attempts). Mostly summarizing the main arguments of the book's four chapters...

Beyond documentary: Alanis Obomsawin’s cinematic worldview

This article reads Alanis Obomsawin’s short film When All the Leaves are Gone as a privileged site for understanding the aesthetic politics at stake in her cinematic worldview. Departing from both the conventions of documentary film as well as the filmmaker’s own established style, the aesthetic logic of this short film models a more profound antagonism between the settler and Indigenous worldviews than her work is conventionally understood to embrace.

Opium and Logistical Nightmares

Abstract This essay argues that opium’s pivotal role in nineteenth-century political economy and aesthetics constructed addiction as a relationship between labor and capital that has persisted throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Nineteenth-century discourses on opium addiction frame it as a crisis of sovereignty for individuals and masses in ways that veil its relationships to labor, collectivity, and community. Yet addiction arises within broad systems as much as it does within individuals: in this exemplary case, of labor, empire, opium, and logistics. This essay rereads nineteenth-century discourses of opium addiction through “the logistical sublime,” in which all manufacturing and distribution processes go smoothly, and “the logistical nightmare,” in which they descend into chaos. It reframes opium addiction as a logistical technique that secured and maintained the preeminence of British, and later, Chinese and US imperial capital.

Ridiculing the unreasonable: The political aesthetic ofZondag met Lubach

This article analyses the highly popular and critically acclaimed Dutch satirical TV show Zondag met Lubach (2014-2021), using the approach of political aesthetics. Through this approach, which focuses on the form, style and rhetoric of cultural artefacts, and the way in which these elements perform politics, it is shown that Zondag met Lubach was much less critical and progressive than is often thought. Overall, the show mainly defended the existing liberal status quo. It did so by depoliticising its own viewpoint, which was presented as simply reasonable, while ideas and practices that did not fit within this viewpoint were framed as irrational and ridiculous. It also turns out that the solutions it proposed for current social issues were strongly inclined towards individual responsibility, much less towards structural changes. This is another way in which the show acted as a defender of the given socio-political order.

Imaginary ethics: The morality of fictional aesthetics in speculative design

To effectively examine the underlying premises of emerging technology has become a major challenge to today’s design ethics. An adequate and prefigurative response to these situations requires a shift towards a fictional aesthetics that calls for co-imagination. Speculative design that sharing a similar ethical mechanism with Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic politics is worthy of attention since the affinity between the literature and emerging designs is becoming manifest. Speculative design embodies its ethical advantage by asking ‘what-if’ questions and providing no answer to keep its prerequisite of equality of intelligence. It devises fictional props and unreal scenarios to distribute the sensible to make audiences notice the possible latent negative social consequences of future technologies. The absurdity in speculative design is what Rancière termed ‘dissensus’, which is the result of fictional aesthetics that aims to inspire reflection and debate on the current state of reality and open the possibility for preferable transformation.

The Rumor of the Earth: Anti-nuclear Ecologies in Lam and Char’s Contre une maison sèche

This essay considers the collaborative projects of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and French poet René Char as thematizing an imbrication between two different ends of the world: the end of the colonial world through decolonization and the end of terrestrial life in nuclear war. This connection, I argue, is pursued by Lam and Char through a set of socio-ecological commitments in which the relation between humanity and the earth heralds an apocalyptic vision of planetary crisis. I proceed to my argument by reconstructing Char and Lam’s investments in a political aesthetics of inter-species and earthly habitation, beginning in the 1950s. By the mid-1960s, the threat of nuclear destruction transforms the meaning of the earth, especially in Char’s poetics. At the center of my analysis is their collaborative book, Contre une maison sèche, which I read in continuity with late 1960s anti-nuclear struggles. Finally, I suggest that we think formal decolonization and anti-nuclear ecology together as a point of historical reference for the current ecological crisis. What I call “the rumor of the Earth,” after Lam’s 1950 painting, names the possible but as-yet undiscovered forms of inhabiting the Earth and of making new relations at all levels of the general ecology.

Popular Art, Crime and Urban Order Beyond the State

This article engages with current discussions on the politics of aesthetics to theorize the role of popular art in reproducing or contesting urban orders. Specifically, we engage with scholars who have taken up the work of Jacques Rancière to understand how power structures are normalized through ‘the distribution of the sensible’. Building on and critically engaging with debates on the ‘post-political city’, we suggest that all too often scholars fall back on a binary, state-centric approach that depicts non-state popular aesthetics as either revolutionary and disruptive, or as indicative of an alternative form of oppression. Drawing on our work in Kingston, Jamaica, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we argue that sensorial-political, art-based urban struggles shape multiple urban orders that are distinct but not necessarily antagonistic. Applying Stuart Hall’s work on popular culture to contexts of criminal governance, we show how art is often simultaneously supportive and disruptive of urban orders.

Review: Life-Destroying Diagrams, by Eugenie Brinkema

Review: <i>Life-Destroying Diagrams</i>, by Eugenie Brinkema

“How Is Innovation Possible?”: An Analysis of Rancière’s Post-Marxist View on Innovation

As a representative figure of contemporary left-wing and post-Marxism, Rancière answers the question of how innovation is possible from the perspective of aesthetic politics. In his view, innovation is only possible when reformationary “undivided division” takes equality as a prerequisite, thus breaking the division of sensible space by the capitalist security order and achieving “sensible redistribution.” Although Rancière’s view on sensible innovation recognizes the confinement of sensible space by capitalist rule, it is ultimately reduced to post-Marxist discourse critique because it loses the practical orientation of Marx’s innovation theory. The analysis of Rancière’s innovation does not only help to discover the “bright spots” and defects in his thought, but also provide new ideas for us to consider the aforementioned question in contemporary times.

Democratic Portraiture: The Political Aesthetics of the Individual and the Collective in Whitman's "Song of Myself"

Examines "democratic portraiture" in "Song of Myself" in order to illuminate the ways that "aesthetics and politics" in the poem are not "two categories to be weighed against each other" but rather "one formational question about how to imagine and represent a democratic ideal" by "challeng[ing] readers with new understandings of representation (literary and political) and representativeness (who is the representative hero of the American epic?), which aim precisely to merge aesthetic-political projects"; demonstrates how such a reading of portraiture in the poem "brings all of these themes to life: Whitman's effort to represent and achieve equality, the relationship between literary and political representation, and the role played by photography and other visual arts in Whitman's poetry"; traces how, "by oscillating between the mass-portrait and the portrait-series, Whitman tried to imagine democracy in action while simultaneously enacting it in his poem" as he tried "to balance the mass-portrait and portrait-series in an overarching democratic portrait, with himself as its emblem."

The Politics of Aesthetics of Tara Books'The London Jungle Bookby Bhajju Shyam

This article discusses the conditions surrounding the production and reception of Pardhan-Gond art as book illustration and visual narrative in Bhajju Shyam's The London Jungle Book (2004). It argues for the need for new frameworks and approaches to understand the poetics and politics of the narrative which depend on the visual art by the artist, as well as the paratextual elements of the print form and the collaborative-creative process of publishing. While the narrative makes an important argument regarding the social structures and power relations affecting the production and reception of non-western art forms in the west, the form of the narrative also holds important clues for understanding and experiencing the unique conditions of the production and adaptation of the art form as crossover picturebook.

Miya Muslims of Assam: Identity, Visuality and the Construction of “Doubtful Citizens”

The stereotyping of the Miya Muslims as “illegal immigrants” is an everyday phenomenon in Assam, a state in the north eastern part of India. This paper seeks to understand this phenomenon in the context of British colonial politics and the history of migration in this region. The acrimonious question of citizenship is raised from time to time, especially in the course of political debates that attempt to identify “illegal citizens”. This entails a dominant politics of aesthetics in the making of the unwanted or “doubtful Bangladeshis”. This paper explores the construction of “doubtful Bangladeshis”, based on certain visual attributes like lungi (sarong), dari (beard) and topi (skullcap). Interrogating the nuances of everyday visual identity, the paper argues that the stereotype of a “doubtful Bangladeshi” is manufactured and reproduced through upper class and caste aesthetics manufactured by Assamese nationalism, framed within a radicalized discourse.

Random Acts of Poetry? Heidegger's Reading of Trakl

This essay concerns Heidegger’s assertion that the biography of the poet is unimportant when interpreting great works of poetry. I approach the question in three ways. First, I consider its merits as a principle of literary interpretation and contrast Heidegger’s view with those of other Trakl interpreters. This allows me to clarify his view as a unique variety of non-formalistic interpretation and raise some potential worries about his approach. Second, I consider Heidegger’s view in the context of his broader philosophical project. Viewed this way, Heidegger’s decision to neglect the poet’s biography seems quite reasonable and consistent with his inquiry into the being of language. Finally, I consider Heidegger’s suggestion that Trakl is a kind of mad genius. I recast this paradigmatic figure in terms of what I call the ‘wretched prophet’ and consider some ways in which its appeal sheds light on the crisis of modernity and the aestheticization of politics.

Gothic Politics in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013)

The present article examines a narrative of darkness to illuminate the rhetoric of haunting and monstrosity. Gothicity evokes a sense of indeterminateness and it dramatizes disruptive incorporeal occurrences as interrogated in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, a war Frankenfiction. It stages horror to chronicle national disintegration through the rise of a sewn-together zombie to mark the appalling arrival of the Iraqi dissenter. The new twenty-first-century monster is a zombie to defy marginality and to associate monstrosity with deviance and abnormality. Within this rationale, the present study investigates the aesthetics of Postcolonial Gothic politics to examine the use of the supernatural, the grotesque body, the monstrous abject, and the haunted ruins to depict a dismembered nation through the deployment of eerie motifs and surreal techniques. My premise fleshes out the Frankenstein hubris to dismantle the US political culture in Iraq. The aim is to reframe the modern Gothic monster as an emblem of reverse colonialism to defy the imperialist ideologies and to articulate past trauma through the rhetoric of bodily horror, haunting and ghostly fear.

Pandemonium and postmedia animism

In what follows I distinguish «postmodern animism» from my preferred term «postmedia animism», which I propose is a better term to express a minor, virtual, contrarian art and media. In the time of planetary trauma, ecological devastation and collapse, this term will serve as a heuristic concept to trace the passage from pandemic, panic, catastrophe and crisis to the series pandemonium, delirium and the carnivalesque. My gambit is to invoke a rebellious and affirmative Yōkai imaginary (妖怪, ghost, phantom, strange apparition) in order to contest passive forms of «transcendental narcissism» or «transcendental miserabilism».This we shall designate s an aesthetics of existence. In particular, I will analyse the relationship between natural disasters and politics within the Japanese imagination through reference to Namazu-e (鯰絵, woodblock prints depicting catfish), and their political effects in the aftermath of the earthquake of October 1855 (安政江戸地震, Ansei Edo Jishin) in the Edo period of Japanese history (FIG 1). My intention is to show that this historic art form, which grew out of trauma, demonstrates a fabulatory, dissensual and political aesthetics of resistance and creativity. It is an imaginary which appears conspicuously absent in our contemporary moment

Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi by Peter Limbrick

Reviewed by: Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi by Peter Limbrick Terri Ginsberg (bio) Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi by Peter Limbrick. University of California Press. 2020. 302 pages. $90.00 hardcover; $34.95 paper; also available in e-book. Pressure has been placed on Arab film scholars to "delink" from Western and Eurocentric frames of intelligibility in the name of decolonial epistemologies. The ensuing debate is not new in academic circles, but it is undergoing a contemporary reconditioning as postcolonial states in the Middle East region turn to hybrid forms of nationalism fostered by neoliberal investment imperatives dominated by the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia in collaboration with the United States and Israel.1 The contemporary call to break with the West claims a different structural base than a similar call issued over thirty years ago by Egyptian political scientist Samir Amin, for whom "delinking" from the West was a revolutionary matter of transitioning from capitalism to socialism and carried no rejectionist position vis-à-vis European theory, in particular Marxism.2 For Amin, dismantling neocolonialism would require a radical internationalism, not today's reactionary isolationism whose interests lie in consolidating local and regional entities into competitive blocs within the global capitalist system. [End Page 214] The importance of Peter Limbrick's Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi becomes evident within this context. Limbrick focuses his text on the overlooked Moroccan independent filmmaker Moumen Smihi, whose entire cinematic oeuvre and artistic life stands as a counter to contemporary currents. Smihi was born in Tangier, attended a French lycée, and frequented local ciné-clubs before pursuing higher education and cinematic training in France. There he was exposed to existentialist philosophy and poststructuralist theory, including works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes, and to the revolutionary writings of Karl Marx. Smihi interpreted the significance of these works in the context of twentiethcentury Nahda (Arab Awakening) intellectuals such as Taha Hussein, considered by many the founder of Pharaonism, and Tawfiq al-Hakim, both giants of modern Egyptian literary culture, and in light of medieval philosophers of Islamic classical thought, such as the ninth-century theologian Al-Jahiz, who theorized evolution from the perspective of anti-sectarian rationalism, and the twelfth-century philosopher and novelist Ibn Tufayl, who argued for the interrelationship of religious and rational thought. Smihi went on to make films almost completely outside of the commercial structures and neocolonial state funding and distribution networks that continue to overdetermine the political aesthetics of Arab cinema. He has thus been able to formulate a cinematic intertext that integrates European modernist modalities—the neorealism of Roberto Rossellini, the ciné-ethnography of Jean Rouch, and the poetic realism of Pier Paolo Pasolini—while emphasizing their Arab influences and articulations. These include the Egyptian new realism of Salah Abu Seif and, especially, the literary arabesque. Through what amounts to a deconstruction of European modernism, Smihi's films enable what Limbrick calls a radicalization of Arab subjectivity: a renewed sense of Nahda founded upon an uncanny illumination of the proverbial Western civilizational narrative as it bypasses Islamic classicism and dissimulates its European scholastic appropriation—a tack now being followed on its obverse by the reactionary calls for delinking. Limbrick reading Smihi advances this "new Nahda" as against contemporary irredentism as a means of restoring European modernism to its historical moment—the intellectual legacy of Islamic rational philosophy. In turn, modernism and its profoundly transnational character are redeemed for Arab, not only Moroccan or Egyptian, cinema. Smihi's deconstructionism appears most saliently at the formal register of his films. For Limbrick, Smihi's films reconfigure Alexandre Astruc's caméra-stylo for the purpose of reconciling modernist ciné-écriture with the Defeat-conscious realism famously advocated by Tunisian cinéaste Nouri Bouzid as a remedy to the Arab world's cultural colonization.3 Such reconciliation is facilitated by intellectual montage, noncausal digressions, and a cinematography that resists omniscience and moral absolutism, recalling both early Soviet filmmaking and a certain immanentism attributable to some forms of Islamic textuality—for example, those related to Sufism. In this [End Page 215] way, Smihi's...

A delicate balance between authenticity and artistry——takes the director Zhang yang’s movies as examples

The films of directors of Chinese six generation are rooted in the fertile soil of realism and have a strong documentary style. As loyal practitioners of documentary style, their movies are based on the life experiences and closed to the social underlying living state, featuring the previous ideological discourse and political aesthetics reflection and breakthroughs. They inject the sensory experience of real life into the film art creation in view of disclosing the complex dimensions of the soul. Their movies are similar to the French New Wave movies which seem to be indulged in self - expression. Nonetheless, they borrow the framework of realism. They are more eclectic on the film selection and creation, combine the western classic film theories and the results of modern film theory, and reach after the left wave of mainland film in a narrative and image style with the international standards again. Zhang Yang is a representative figure of the sixth generation directors. His main works include Sunflower, Quitting , Path of The Soul and so on. Many of his works adopt the shooting method and design concept of documentaries, and the integration of feature films. In a word, documentary is his unique creative style.

AIMING FOR THE ‘GREEN’: (Post)Colonial and Aesthetic Politics in the Design of a Purified Gated Environment

AbstractThis article investigates the politics of the design of a golf‐focused gated community in Gurgaon, India. It considers the aesthetic uses of golf and architecture that go into the production of a purified urban environment to explore the relationship between urban development, environmental aesthetics and spatial purification in contemporary India. I demonstrate how an architectural focus on golf reproduces the ‘distribution of the sensible’ by attempting to delimit the field of view: who and what is seen, and what an individual can or cannot see. I show how golf is political—deeply connected to and inseparable from legacies of colonial environmental and spatial purification and exclusion, as well as contemporary aesthetic‐political regimes that justify spatial segregation, cleansing, and the protection of beautiful environments away from the urban poor. The aesthetic emphasis on a beautified, green and empty environment that characterizes the production of golf highlights the aesthetic terms on which environmental selves are imagined and how environmental images are constructed. This is an aesthetic premised on the creation of shared viewership combined with the power to be(long) in a place where one can be with others but not mixed up with them.

JACQUES RANCIÈRE: The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 121 pp. JACQUES RANCIÈRE, PETER ENGELMANN: Politics and Aesthetics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019, 121 pp.

Article JACQUES RANCIÈRE: The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 121 pp. JACQUES RANCIÈRE, PETER ENGELMANN: Politics and Aesthetics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019, 121 pp. was published on December 1, 2021 in the journal Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy / Zeitschrift für Kulturmanagement und Kulturpolitik (volume 7, issue 2).