Political Aesthetics Research Articles

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).

Materiality, Race, and Speculative Aesthetics

The papers in this forum on Spaces and Politics of Aesthetics share a concern with analyzing relationships between politics and aesthetics in ways that question humanist, anthropocentric logics underpinning dominant aesthetic regimes of power. They do so by foregrounding more-than-human materialities and critical analyses of race and colonial power. In this introduction, we begin by routing debates around spaces and politics of aesthetics through post-humanist, new-materialist, and post-colonial trajectories. We also highlight theoretical reference points that animate many of the contributions to the forum, focusing on the aesthetics of disruption in Glissant, Rancière, and Benjamin. We then move on to guide the reader along two different routes through the collection, focusing first on material aesthetics, and then on aesthetic regimes of race.

Deadly serious: Humor and the politics of aesthetic transgression

This essay examines the political utility of humor using a framework developed in recent geopolitical scholarship read through Jacques Rancière's theorization of the politics of aesthetics and applied to everyday political life in contemporary Mexico City. Geopolitics here offers a unique lens through which to understand the spatiality of humor and its effects on the aesthetic and affective processes by which urban identities are constructed and contested. Building on roughly 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that humor's subversive potential allows for simultaneous or co-constitutive aesthetic effects, such as the simultaneous disruption of political norms and the genesis of a more inclusive spatial imaginary of urban citizenship. This argument extends previous work on humor by emphasizing the complex, mutable, and multifarious nature of humor effects in practice, perhaps most especially in subversive modes. I demonstrate the strategic political value of humor through the exploration of three ethnographically derived examples: an episode of a popular satirical video series, a newly christened popular saint said to protect residents of an historic neighborhood from gentrification, and a humorous tirade against the city's mayor at a local neighborhood meeting.

"It's not 30 pesos. It´s 500 years": monuments, memory and activism in the Wallmapu during the estallido social in Chile

This article studies to what extent the interaction between activists and historical monuments during the 2019 Chilean protests created a shift in the interpretation of the country's past, thus facilitating the emergence of alternative and more inclusive narratives able to challenge hegemonic power structures. The article embarks on this endeavour through an analysis of three cases of demonumentalisation that occurred in the Chilean city of Temuco on the 29th of October 2019. Methodologically, the article engages with a combination of theories regarding the coloniality of power, the politics of aesthetics, and cultural memory. Finally, the paper concludes by arguing that Chilean activists' engagement in the practice of demonumentalisation exposed alternative narratives concerning the historical conflict between the Chilean state and the Mapuche community. Making visible the perpetuation of unjust social structures in Chilean society and creating bonds of solidarity between the Chilean mass movement and the Mapuche movement.

Seeing beyond disciplines: aesthetic creativity in international theory

ABSTRACT This essay outlines the contribution that Australia-based scholars have made to aesthetic politics: the exploration of creative and interdisciplinary approaches to International Relations. The struggle to legitimise aesthetic insights is indicative of a larger challenge: how academic disciplines discipline thought in ways that constrains innovative scholarly contributions and their potential to address concrete political problems. The essay advances an argument in favour of seeing beyond the discipline of International Relations. The international is not some higher-order realm that is separate from the rest of the social and political world. The most pressing challenges, from terrorism to climate change, are too complex to be understood as uniquely international phenomena. They implicate the local as much as the global, the psychological as much as the institutional and the relational as much as the structural. Finding practical and policy-relevant solutions to complex transnational problems requires insights from fields as diverse as psychology, neuroscience, literature, demography art and economics, to name just a few. Needed, then, is greater acceptance and support for creative approaches that can understand and address political challenges from multiple parallel perspectives and without having to adhere to preconceived disciplinary conventions.

The Persistence of Photography

The Persistence of Photography

Retracing Political Dimensions: Strategies in Contemporary New Media Art

Retracing Political Dimensions: Strategies in Contemporary New Media Art

The politics of infrastructural aesthetics: a case of Delhi’s Bus Rapid Transit corridor

This paper studies how transportation infrastructure projects are dependent on making aesthetic arguments through form, space and experience. It does this through a discourse analysis of the media coverage of the Delhi Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor. Tracing the planning history of the BRT, it explores how it was construed as ineffective, expensive and dangerous. Deconstructing the BRT discourse, the authors make two propositions about the politics of transport infrastructure; its truth claims must be aesthetic arguments, and transformational agendas must be coupled with a distinctive aesthetic. The paper concludes by suggesting that a renewed and situated understanding of aesthetics is critical for urban practitioners, especially in the global South.

Affect, blankness, theatrics: Rurality and faciality in three Chinese instances

The face and the close-up have been central to film theory since its early days. If modern visual theories of the face arose in Europe amid urbanization and imperial encounter, in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the political aesthetics of faciality became central to Maoist mass mobilizations of the countryside, in part through collective village film screenings. Bringing together themes of faciality, rurality and anxieties of global encounter, this article considers how the rural has been staged through genres of the face in Chinese cinema and television. Through close readings of the Maoist era The Youth of Our Village, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life and Zhao Benshan Media’s series Rural Love Story, I consider three distinct deployments of the face in depictions of rural and environmental transformation. Thinking with while also departing from Deleuze’s formulations in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, the article traces an emotively intense face reminiscent of the affection-image, a blank face that operates in part as a time-image and a performative face of what might be called a theatrics-image. Across its readings as a site of affective immediacy, despotic inscription, moral character and social–political manoeuvring, the face offers a multivalent site for political, aesthetic and affective mediation, on- and off-screen.

Deleuze on Francis Bacon’s Paintings: A Performative Witnessing of Coloring Sensation Among Schoolchildren

Inspired by the work of the Irish-born British figurative painter, Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze, one of the most influential French philosophers of the 20th century, wrote a book titled, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. In this book, Deleuze creates novel concepts of coloring sensation that rely on relations between colors or the juxtaposition of tints and hues in relation to feelings or perceptions, resulting from something that happens to or comes into contact with the body. Deleuze illuminates how Bacon uses the figure, colors, contours, and broken tones to show raw and dark motifs such as horror, vulnerability, and brutality. Using loosely connected scenes, narrative interruptions, storyline turns, recitations, and pedagogical moments, I show a tissue of coloring sensations among children in a primary school that will not be stilled, calmed, or dimmed. In this way, I pursue a desiring, political aesthetics of pedagogical, scholarly, and life-wide meanings.

Slum Realism and the Politics of Aesthetics in Walter Besant's All Sorts and Conditions of Men

Abstract: By critiquing how realism usually depicts the slums, Walter Besant's All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) makes room for an alternative mode of perceiving slums and slum dwellers. This mode, I argue, fuses realism and utopianism, as it revises realist images of the working class as bleak and monotonous to represent this demographic as happy, pleasurable, and life-affirming. This article departs from previous scholarship that tends to read Besant's aesthetic hybridity as a failure of realism or overly idealistic politics. In upending realist expectations about the slums, the novel challenges what has been deemed politically possible, thereby demonstrating the inextricability of politics and aesthetics.

Afterword

The sensory turn and the affective turn in contemporary scholarship both crystalised at roughly the same time but then diverged. This special issue reintegrates them. Conjointly, these twin approaches direct attention to the multiplicity, agency, and interactivity of the full spectrum of human faculties (i.e., how the senses and affects intersect with and may also disrupt the rule of reason) in addition to highlighting the extent to which ‘the perceptual is political.’ The resulting paradigm has precipitated a shift from the study of communities as ‘imagined’ to how they are sensed and/or felt, and from a focus on ‘the human condition’ to the intensive investigation of the multiple ‘national post-revolutionary conditions’ that define the current conjuncture. By foregrounding the aesthetics of politics, and tracking the eruption of dis-sensus (laughter, graffiti, dissent) within the con-sensus that states seek to foster in their citizenry, this special issue sounds a much-needed wake-up call.

The Experience of Authority:Hamletand the Political Aesthetics of Majesty

In Hamlet the crisis of political authority that famously rots Denmark is registered as an aesthetic crisis—a crisis of perception, feeling, and experience. This essay recovers this broken regime of feeling under the tradition of “majesty,” which in the period described the conventional set of affective and sensible experiences one was supposed to have in the presence of a sovereign prince. Whereas other contemporary plays such as Richard II often dispelled majesty as theatrical illusion, this essay argues that Hamlet takes majesty seriously but redescribes its enchantments to fit a new, post-Reformation decorum of sensibility characterized by dissensus. Here feelings of majesty most indicate sovereignty’s divine authority when, paradoxically, they fail, unable (precisely as exceptional feelings of exceptional authority) to command common agreement. This essay thus counters readings that overemphasize the epistemic nature of Hamlet’s crisis and resituates its aesthetic modernism at the intersection of phenomenology and political theology. [E.G.]

Volume 51 (2021)

Volume 51 (2021)

진리의 정치성에 대한 현상학적 해명 - 정화열의 “몸의 정치”를 단서로 -

이 글은 ‘내재성’의 철학이 가리키는 ‘미시정치학’(micro-politics) 혹은 “미학의 정치학”(politics of aesthetics) 측면에서 진리의 주체 [“살”(flesh)의 로고스를 통해 자아를 형성하는 주체]를 ‘정치적인 것’과의 연관성 속에서 이야기한 메를로퐁티(Merleau-Ponty)의 현상학으로부터 거시담론을 넘어서는 새로운 해방의 진리를 짚어낸 정화열(Hwa Yol Jung)의 “몸의 정치”(body politics)가 갖는 의의와 과제를 규명하는 한편, 그 과제가 요하는 진리의 특성을 보다 극단화된 “미학의 정치학” 혹은 ‘미시정치학’의 주체[예컨대, “고기”(meat)의 욕망을 통해 자아를 형성하는 주체]의 측면에서 고찰할 것이다. 이를 통해 탈근대의 철학에서도 여전히 유효한 진보의 주체 및 진보의 변증법적 역사성에 대한 논의에 ‘기여한/기여할’ 메를로퐁티 현상학의 주요 단면을 드러내려는 것이 이 글의 목적이다.

Coexistence between attention and distraction: An attempt to bridge the gap between Bernard Stiegler and Walter Benjamin

Reflecting on the question of media, this paper attempts to bridge the gap between attention and distraction in Bernard Stiegler and Walter Benjamin’s respective philosophies. Based on Stiegler’s philosophical theory, this paper will demonstrate, on the one hand, how harmful the destruction of attention, i.e. deficit hyperactivity disorder (Mattew, 2012), can be to intergenerational relationships which is constructed of retentions including tertiary retention, and the other hand, how Stiegler’s theory is too exclusively focused upon ‘Generation M,’ that is children with hyper attention. We shall also analyze Benjamin’s arguments regarding distraction, a state he never condemns because he finds new political possibilities there. Based on them, this paper focuses on German educator’s arguments on film in 1910s–1920s and Azuma’s arguments regarding Otaku. German educators find distraction and deep attention in film for education. This coexistence of distraction and deep attention in film has the political potential to overcome aestheticization of politics by totalitarian Fascist regimes. As Lee argued, attention gives children unexpected creativity for teachers (Lee, 2018). On the other hand, Azuma analyzes Otaku’s work as a new type of subjectivity through the consideration of new media, Nico Nico douga. For Azuma, Otaku is inescapably linked to media such as anime, video games, and social media. From this perspective, he describes how blind identification with deep attention is destroyed by a mixture of commentators on the screen and comments that criticize the commentators. In Nico Nico douga, distraction is not disorder but self-reflection.

The aesthetics of political resistance: On silent politics

This article analyses the aesthetics of silent political resistance by focusing on refugees’ silent political action. The starting point for the analysis is Jacques Rancière’s philosophy and his theorisation of the aesthetics of politics. The article enquires into the aesthetic meaning of silent refugee activism and interprets how refugees’ silent acts of resistance can constitute aesthetically effective resistance to what can be called the ‘speech system’ of statist, representative democracy. The article analyses silence as a political tactic and interprets the emancipatory meaning of silent politics for refugees. It argues that refugees’ silent acts of political resistance can powerfully affect aesthetic, political subversion in prevailing legal-political contexts.

Hybrid Identities/Hybrid Music: The Political Aesthetics of Arab Youth Musical Performances in Diaspora

Hybrid Identities/Hybrid Music: The Political Aesthetics of Arab Youth Musical Performances in Diaspora

Review of Towards A Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film

Lie, S. (2020). Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film. Amsterdam University Press.

Sexual disorientation: queer narratology and affect plots in new narrative

ABSTRACT This essay argues that New Narrative exemplifies queer experimental literature's innovation of interpretative protocols and affective relations that break from those sanctioned within the heteronormative public sphere. In particular, New Narrative gives narrative form to “sexual disorientation,” or the ways that queers and other sexual dissidents suffer violence and social marginalization. As touchstones for this aesthetic politics, the essay looks to Robert Glück's short story “Sanchez and Day” (1982) and Kathy Acker's novel Great Expectations (1982), which compose “affect plots” that reimagine the relations between affect, queerness, and form. Taken together, their approaches to queer relationality offer a method for tracing uptakes of New Narrative's affective forms as they move promiscuously beyond their emergence in the early 1980s.