Conference Abstracts
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Lana Crowe (UCL): Good Surprises: Jazz and Reparative Reading as Resistance
‘Doesn’t reading queer mean learning […] that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?’ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 2003 essay on ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ was a landmark in queer studies: the postcritical style of reading she develops is predicated on reducing critical distance, not setting out to outsmart the text, and allowing oneself to be surprised. Jazz, as a musical form that revels in the creative power of making mistakes, demands scholarly attention that reads error, multiplicity and surprise as artistic techniques that destabilise hegemonic modes of meaning-making. The reparative attitude of jazz is intimately linked, as a form of resistance, to the historical subjugation of black people in the US. I will compare Sedgwick’s thoughts on ‘reading queer’ – also touching on the literary criticism of queer theorists Lee Edelman and John Emil Vincent – with jazz studies scholars Brent Hayes Edwards (in 2017’s Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination) and Fumi Okiji (in 2018’s Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited), who both make sense of ‘mistake’ in jazz by drawing on oral storytelling traditions rather than psychoanalysis. The use of homophones and heteronyms in jazz writing demonstrates, on a textual scale, how multiplicity brings instability of meaning to the surface. Interpretation is taken out of the hands of the individual – whether writer, musician or critic – and becomes the remit of the many, where a ‘multitude of renditions’ (Okiji) can exist in a single text or performance.
Logan Simpson (QMUL): Implementation of Visual Cultural Elements in Indigenous Script Creation
For centuries, colonial and missionary powers have provided writing systems for traditionally unwritten languages (Hovdhaugen 1996). The Roman and Cyrillic alphabets poorly represent many of the hundreds of languages for which foreign missionaries and governments have deployed them (Sassoon 2004), without due regard for their phonology, morphology, or sociolinguistic situation. Reacting against this, many Indigenous Peoples have invented their own writing systems (Schmitt 1980). During this process, many communities often choose to implement visual cultural elements into their new scripts as a means of resistance towards a more powerful language group and/or to express their own cultural identity. This paper will investigate the influences that traditional art, such as common pictorial icons and images, can have on the creation of a new writing system for a minority language. As this practice becomes more common throughout the world, I will investigate the ways in which different Indigenous language communities have employed this practice and attempt to establish commonalities that may be of use to future groups attempting to design a new script. Indigenous writing systems that have integrated visual cultural elements in their own script as a means of resistance/etc. that I will discuss include: Wancho, for a language of the same name from Arunachal Pradesh, India; Ol Chiki, for the Santali languages of northeast India; Ditema Tsa Dinoko, for Southern Bantu languages of South Africa; Afaka, for the Ndyuka language of Suriname; and Gulse, for the Mooré language of Burkina Faso.
Bibliography:
Hovdhaugen, E., 1996. - and the word was God: missionary linguistics and missionary grammar, Münster: Nodus Publikationen.
Sassoon, R., 2004. The acquisition of a second writing system, Bristol: Intellect.
Schmitt, A 1980 Entstehung und Entwicklung von Schriften, Cologne: Böhlau
Lucie Chateau (Tilburg University): Degradation as Resistance: Alienation in the Purposefully Poor Image
Degraded images are produced online by virtue of their own circulation. As images travel through networks, they lose resolution, information and quality and deteriorate. Degraded images run abound in our digital culture, but are not valorised as part of our aesthetic landscape because they do not live up to the societal expectations of what an image should look like. In their position at the margins of our aesthetic order, they possess untapped political potential to reflect onto digital culture, circulationism and alienation. Here, I specifically look at the politics of digital images that are produced with the intention of looking overly circulated. I do this through the lens of degraded memes, which I call purposefully poor images. The purposefully poor image overexaggerates all the material markers of human intervention that an image could potentially acquire throughout its life as a circulated text. Even more than the degraded image, the purposefully poor image deliberately makes its explicit its withdrawal from the aesthetic society (Manovich, 2019). In this way, it differentiates itself from the genuine poor image as it exercises control over its degradation. Building on Hito Steyerl’s theory of poor images as images that travel through networks and lose resolution and information, (2012) I introduce the notion of understanding these images as purposefully poor images that materially mediate alienation in their aesthetic form. In showcasing the material markers of objectification, purposefully poor images allow for an aesthetic encounter with the experience of alienation as defined by Marx.
Camille Crichlow (UCL): Biometric Facial Recognition and the ‘Racial Regime of Aesthetics’: Constructing a Universal Human Subject
Emergent ‘post-optical’ technology, such as facial recognition technology (FRT), is reshaping the visual parameters through which the human subject enters the field of representation. For racialised bodies historically “trapped between regimes of invisibility and spectacular hypervisibility” (Benjamin 82), biometric technology presents a new, digitised visual terrain whose social challenges, stakes, and dangers supersede older regimes of corporeal regulation (Browne; Magnet; Murray; Simmonite). Following David Lloyd’s claim that “there have been far too few substantive accounts of the central role of the aesthetic in the emergence and dissemination of universal human subjecthood”, this paper considers the extent to which FRT reproduce and expand what Lloyd terms the ‘racial regime of aesthetics’ (2). Analysing historical genealogies of aesthetic theory, anthropometry, and ethnographic photography, I examine ways FRT continues to perpetuate the Enlightenment model of the universal human subject through aesthetic norms. The paper provides insights into how aesthetic regimes not only produce racialised misrecognition but re-inscribe aesthetic ideologies of race within practices of contemporary surveillance. Here, I attend to how operations of biometric technologies normalise various categories of disentitlement in the context of border control and global mobility, engendering new regimes of dehumanisation and carceralization. At the same time, however, effects of surveillance regimes are not totalising but simultaneously produce creative modalities of counter-practice. To conclude, the paper considers what kinds of political and aesthetic interventions need to be explored that contest racialisation in surveillance technologies.
Bibliography:
Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Lloyd, David. Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
Magnet, Shoshonna. When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Murray, Heather. "Monstrous Play in Negative Spaces: Illegible Bodies and the Cultural Construction of Biometric Technology." The Communication Review 4.10 (2007): 347-365. Simonite, Tom. "The Best Algorithms Struggle to Recognize Black Faces Equally." 22 July 2022. Wired. 5 September 2022.
Pieta Päällysaho (University of Jyväskylä): Plato and Three Problems of Aesthetics
In this paper I will study the three main problems that Plato’s has with aesthetics – taking the term in its broadest sense, referring both to the realm of art and to the realm of aisthêsis:
1) Dangers of music. Famous for banishing the tragedians from his ideal polis, Plato makes also a much less known is his assertion in the Republic that music is indispensable for educating the citizens – because it teaches them about “the beautiful” and “the ugly”. Art is politically dangerous precisely because it has a power to modify aesthetic judgements, which in ancient Athens are also moral judgements.
2) Poikilia. According to Plato, dangerous music tends to please women, slaves, and those who posses what Plato sees as democratic taste. Outlining two very different aesthetic preferences, Plato demarcates between the democratic enjoyment in poikilia, colors and exciting rhythms – and the philosopher king’s fondness for order, proportion, and clarity.
3) Beautiful illusions. The existence of different aesthetic preferences leads to speculations concerning relativism (an elegant early formulation is Sappho fr. 16), which Plato attacks by arguing for the existence of the truly beautiful. However, positing a notion of truly beautiful gives rise to the persistent idea of illusory beauty.
I argue that these problems rise from Plato’s opposition to the relativism and pluralism that tend to characterize aesthetic phenomena in general. However, the same problematics of “harmful art/entertainment,” “poor taste,” and “superficial illusions” still haunt the contemporary attitudes towards the intersections of art, aesthetic value, and politics.
Wenhan Zhang (Northwestern): Sovereign Fiction, Fictitious Sovereignty: George Buchanan and the Politics of Fiction
This paper reexamines the political thought of the sixteenth-century Scottish philosopher, George Buchanan, by investigating the fundamental role of literary fiction in constructing his theory of popular sovereignty. An anti-tyrannical humanist renowned for his dialogue De Jure Regni apud Scotos yet also a teacher-dramaturge who composes plays for his students, Buchanan’s biblical play Jephthah demonstrates an anxious concern with tyranny and the possibility of education as a remedy against it. While Buchanan’s prevalent use of irony in this play serves this pedagogical purpose by underscoring the need of maintaining a critical detachedness, the play’s problematic ending immediately challenges this reading and exposes the fictive quality of such indifferent spectatorship. Buchanan’s theory of popular sovereignty in De Jure Regni, upon closer inspection, also depends on carefully constructed fictions such as the rationalistic subjects, the Stoic king, and the detached audience. With his keen awareness of the sovereign power of literary fiction and its indispensable role in initiating collective action, Buchanan calibrates constituent power against tyranny by positing a fictitious mode of sovereignty based on Stoic subjectivity. At the same time, Buchanan also intimates that true political sovereignty resides in one’s quasi-artistic ability to construct convincing fictions, as is evident in Buchanan’s own deliberate misinterpretation of historical evidence in his political writings. The comparative study of these works, I suggest, provides an angle to reconsider Buchanan’s theory of sovereignty and the relationship between literature and politics in his thoughts.
Vladimir Gildin Zuckerman (University of Copenhagen): How Does a 'Political Performance' get its Form? Reflections on Xenophon's Cavalry and the Dithyrambic Chorus
My paper discusses the influence of aesthetic forms on political action on the basis of the case of Xenophon's Hipparchicus. Two recent phenomena illustrated the interconnections between 'aeshetic' and 'political' forms. The first is the rise of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose political career began in a transition from performing the character of an unlikely president in a TV-series to becoming the unlikely president of Ukraine. The second is the televised presentation of the January 6th Committee, which hired media executive James Goldston to help arrange its findings in the punctuated narrative arc of a TV-series. While these phenomena can be seen as pathologies of our life in ‘the Age of Netflix’ (Barker & Wiatrowski 2017), they raise a more fundamental question: how is political action shaped by a culture’s aesthetic expectations? The Hipparchicus offers an opportunity to examine this question historically in the ancient Athenian context. Motivated to reform the fraught relationship between the Athenian cavalry and the demos (so Stoll 2012; Keim 2018; Christ 2020), Xenophon suggested a series of innovations to the cavalry's public appearances in Athens. These include a mimetic sham battle, a complex series of demanding choreographic maneuvers, and an attention to the narrative organization of the affects evoked by the cavalry's performances. These formal and aesthetic features reflect similar features in Athen’s most popular cultural form, the Dithyrambic chorus. I argue that these formal similarities suggest that culturally particular aesthetic expectations should be given a greater role in analyses of politics as 'performative'.
Silvia Binenti (UCL): Designing Politics: the T-Shirts of Italian Politicians
In March 2022, Matteo Salvini – former Italian Deputy Prime Minister and anti-immigration advocate – visited a refugee centre in a Polish town in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Salvini did not receive the welcome he expected. The local Mayor, in front of journalists, theatrically pulled out a pro-Putin t-shirt with the Russian President’s face that the Italian politician had proudly worn on a visit to Russia in 2017, asking Salvini ‘see what your friend has done?’. In that occasion images of the scene went viral, but Salvini has a much longer history of wearing controversial – and often contradictory – political t-shirts. This paper aims to explore how the aesthetics of different types of t-shirts endorsed, used, or promoted by Italian politicians can modulate political affect, discourse, and action. This draws from 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork on political t-shirts in which bodies, objects, images, and words were treated together as part of the same aesthetic, political practice. In existing literature, the printed t-shirt is often taken as the visual materialisation of an egalitarian and democratic ethos. Yet, structures of domination and resistance can permeate the fabric of the garment. Relevant scholarship mainly looks at the printed and graphic t-shirt as politics taking a certain aesthetic form, rather than the aesthetic contributing to the formation of a certain politics. In my study I claim that political t-shirts – dressing and fashioning the body (or certain types of bodies) – act and interact to form and perform political subjectivities.
Gabriel Bristow (UCL): Sun Ra’s Anti-War Lullaby
‘Nuclear war—yeah’. This strange, simple, and seemingly affirmative call-and-response is the opening line of a 1982 single by Sun Ra and his Arkestra. The song, entitled straightforwardly ‘Nuclear War’, seems on the surface to be resigned to the inevitability of a looming man-made apocalypse, going as far as to ask: ‘what are you gonna do, without your ass?’ But the rhetorical inevitability of Sun Ra’s question is not as clear cut as it seems. If, as Anne Boyer states, poetry’s no can protect a potential yes, then the Arkestra’s languid yeahs shroud a subterfuge no. The song, in spite of its eerie buoyancy, is neither affirmation nor celebration. It is not an anti-war anthem but its underside—the negation of the negation, a lullaby whispered against the end of the world. This paper will explore the historical entanglement of jazz and war through the prism of Ra’s ‘Nuclear War’. It argues that the song’s oblique aesthetic negativity—drawn from the world-historical culture of freedom initiated during the overturning of racial slavery—points towards a political aesthetics apt for our apocalyptic age.
Liam Johnston-Mccondach (Oxford University): Doing Politics Differently: Bertolt Brecht in France
In 1954 the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht arrived in Paris for the staging of his play Mother Courage. Critical reaction to Brecht and his theatre company, the Berliner Ensemble, was predictably polarised along political lines. Performances that left-wing critics deemed a "Brechtian revolution" heralding a radical transformation of the theatre, were in turn derided by critics on the right as a "Brechtian epidemic", a politically dogmatic attack on the supposed aesthetic sanctity of the theatre. In the French press, Brechtian theatre quickly became a cipher for political art tout court and provoked a series of acrimonious debates and vicious political attacks. But the Berliner Ensemble’s Parisian performances, along with the translation of Brechtian theory into French, did also provide a useful prompt for theorists of the period to rethink and reconceptualise what ideologically committed and politically engaged art could do. In this paper, I will consider how Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Blanchot, and Roland Barthes understood Brecht’s work and how, in their writing on Brechtian theatre, they all arrived at a different notion of how art might be politically effective. By reading these theorists via their reception of Brecht, I hope to push beyond the sometimes unhelpful categories of politically "engaged" and "disengaged" art and uncover the various and often competing ways in which a possible relation between aesthetics and politics was conceptualised. In a politically fraught period of decolonisation and sweeping social change in France, Brecht opened up ways of doing literary politics differently.
Mathieu Farizier (Oxford University): Nathalie Quintane’s Strange Formula for Political Effectiveness: Between Voluntarism and Non-Intentionality
For Rancière, aesthetics is a way of representing the social world which originated in 18th Europe (namely with Winckelmann). Such representations act upon the prevailing hierarchical “distributions of the sensory”, reconfigure them in an egalitarian manner and break away from the logic of intentional action. In Rancière’s sense of the political, as opposed to the “police” mode of reproducing existing social exclusions, these representations are in themselves emancipatory. But in refusing to “sociologise” his stance with regard to which art is effectively produced and consumed by which social groups, as Nicolas Vieillescazes objects, Rancière remains entirely liable to Bourdieu’s critique of aesthetical purity and bourgeois “désintéressement”. Unconcerned as his aesthetics is from art’s real economic and cultural function within a conflicted social order, it can be shown to serve the dominant groups whose class interests have merged with “universal” values. And yet, as Rancière convincingly argues (2010), socially-conscious and committed art practices often reproduce the dominations which they set out to suppress. This dilemma boils down to the issue of political voluntarism. Quintane addresses it in a conflicted and surprising way. My talk will show how her poetical writings navigate between the two opposite poles of political art without resolving their tension: making politically voluntarist claims on the one hand (“le livre, pour être politique, [doit] parler de politique”*), and secretly undermining them through the forwarding of non-intentional outbreaks of nonsense, comical accidents and irrational fantasies on the other (2003; 2010; 2018). Working both for and against intentional political acts, and thereby with and against Rancière, Quintane’s poems manifest not just how revolutionary literature is necessarily caught between coercion and indeterminacy, but that it is effective on that condition.
* “The book, to be political, must talk about politics” (Quintane, Les Années 10, p. 197)
Bibliography
BOURDIEU, Pierre, The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature, ed. by Randal Jonhson, Polity Press, 1993
––, Méditations Pascaliennes, Seuil, 2003
QUINTANE, Nathalie, Formage, POL, 2003
––, Tomates, POL, 2010
––, Les Années 10, La Fabrique, 2014
––, Un œil en moins, POL, 2018
RANCIÈRE, Jacques, La Mésentente : politique et philosophie, Galilée, 1995
––, Le Partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique, La Fabrique, 2000
––, Le philosophe et ses pauvres, Flammarion, coll. « Champs Essais », 2010
––, Aisthesis, Ed. Galilée, 2011 Vieillescazes, Nicolas, “L’esthétique politique de Jacques Rancière”, Revue des Livres, n°8, Nov.-Dec. 2012
Patrick Chester (QMUL): Shelley’s Rome, Pompeii and England in 1819: Rhizomatic models of negativity in Shelley’s depiction of Rome and Pompeii
Shelley lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in European history, considered to be a liminal space that marks a shift between economic, social and political models. It was a period defined by a procession of cataclysmic events that altered both the meteorological and political climates of the era. These tectonic shifts can be evidenced in Shelley’s poetry and prose work and is commonly evidenced in readings of Shelley as a proto-Marxist. Shelley’s depictions of Rome, Pompeii and England are highly discordant with the general sentiment of the period and of the present: Rome, usually described as an eternal city, is a city of the dead; Pompeii, envisaged by Baudrillard as a simulacra of one’s own death, is a symbol of resurrection and political vitality; England, considered to be the most powerful country in the world in the early 18th century is a grave “from which a glorious phantom may burst.” In this paper, I plan to outline a negative dialectics in Shelley’s presentation of these locations. At the heart of this is Shelley’s volcanic voice, which comes to challenge the teleological optimism associated with enlightenment thought. Here the symbol of the volcano encapsulates an Adornoian negative capability and produces a negative dialectics. Thus, Pompei represents an architectonic aorgic entity capable of inspiring an apocalyptic intuition that necessitates a critical theory, positing the individual as a legislator capable of seeing through the ideological formulation of these symbols and realising the potential for revolutionary change.
Sophie Thompson (University of Kent): Childhood, Utopian Dreaming and the Domestic Aesthetic of Edith Nesbit
My paper will show how popular Edwardian children’s author Edith Nesbit conceptualises childhood imagination and play as having radical political potential. Under the cover of ‘unserious’ children’s fiction and the elevation of fantasy and play, Nesbit destabilises the authority of reality, encouraging children not just to question things as they are, but imagine utopia and socialist reconstruction. Nesbit proposes that the state of childhood contains redemptive possibility as a socialist way of living for adults, too, by accessing their imaginations through memories of their own childhood. This mode of socialism based on childhood and play exhibits the domestic made radical: a fin-de-siècle belief in environmental influence and lifestyle changes embedded in the home, the feminine, and the socialist community. Using Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s concepts of the “Not-Yet” and “concrete utopia” as a framework, I will explore Nesbit’s belief in the value of imagining utopia. I will focus primarily on her little-known treatise on child development, Wings and the Child; or, The Building of Magic Cities (1913), alongside some of her better-known fiction for children. Though Nesbit was a founding member of the Fabian society, little scholarship exists that takes her political ideas as a serious contribution to the socialist thinking of the time. I will show how Nesbit’s writings offer a unique insight into fin-de-siècle socialism, making the political personal through a domestic aesthetic that asks what it means to live a socialist life as a woman, a mother, and a professional author.
Alix Stephan (UCD): A Poetic Resistance: Rimbaud à Contre-Temps
When Ernest Pignon-Ernest puts up his portraits of Rimbaud between Charleville and Paris in the 70’s, he places him in the same dynamic as Desnos and Pasolini: aestheticizing the world to show its crudest reality. Haunted by the Commune, by the Revolution, in his poems Rimbaud incessantly asks one crucial question: “comment agir” (Le Cœur Suplicié)? The contestation of Rimbaud is not simply found in the subversive form of his poems, but in his ability to “fai[re] surgir un autre temps” as René Char writes in a text about Rimbaud. Our question, with Rimbaud and his most political poems (Le Forgeron, Rages de Césars…), is: what temporality is called by this irreverent tension between aesthetic and politic? A poetic temporality that will be “en avant” (Lettres du Voyant), but then desynchronized (or out of joint to use a derridean expression), as if this desynchronization was not only a stepping aside but a call for a better, a different attention to events. I will start from Rimbaud’s texts, to see how they ask and construct a singular and active temporality that enters in resistance with a certain political construction. I will first briefly map out Rimbaud’s political world to then highlight his inauguration of a peculiar temporality that is a temporality of resistance. I will end on an impossible but essential question: what call for justice formulates Rimbaud?
Lana Crowe (UCL): Good Surprises: Jazz and Reparative Reading as Resistance
‘Doesn’t reading queer mean learning […] that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?’ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 2003 essay on ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ was a landmark in queer studies: the postcritical style of reading she develops is predicated on reducing critical distance, not setting out to outsmart the text, and allowing oneself to be surprised. Jazz, as a musical form that revels in the creative power of making mistakes, demands scholarly attention that reads error, multiplicity and surprise as artistic techniques that destabilise hegemonic modes of meaning-making. The reparative attitude of jazz is intimately linked, as a form of resistance, to the historical subjugation of black people in the US. I will compare Sedgwick’s thoughts on ‘reading queer’ – also touching on the literary criticism of queer theorists Lee Edelman and John Emil Vincent – with jazz studies scholars Brent Hayes Edwards (in 2017’s Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination) and Fumi Okiji (in 2018’s Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited), who both make sense of ‘mistake’ in jazz by drawing on oral storytelling traditions rather than psychoanalysis. The use of homophones and heteronyms in jazz writing demonstrates, on a textual scale, how multiplicity brings instability of meaning to the surface. Interpretation is taken out of the hands of the individual – whether writer, musician or critic – and becomes the remit of the many, where a ‘multitude of renditions’ (Okiji) can exist in a single text or performance.
Logan Simpson (QMUL): Implementation of Visual Cultural Elements in Indigenous Script Creation
For centuries, colonial and missionary powers have provided writing systems for traditionally unwritten languages (Hovdhaugen 1996). The Roman and Cyrillic alphabets poorly represent many of the hundreds of languages for which foreign missionaries and governments have deployed them (Sassoon 2004), without due regard for their phonology, morphology, or sociolinguistic situation. Reacting against this, many Indigenous Peoples have invented their own writing systems (Schmitt 1980). During this process, many communities often choose to implement visual cultural elements into their new scripts as a means of resistance towards a more powerful language group and/or to express their own cultural identity. This paper will investigate the influences that traditional art, such as common pictorial icons and images, can have on the creation of a new writing system for a minority language. As this practice becomes more common throughout the world, I will investigate the ways in which different Indigenous language communities have employed this practice and attempt to establish commonalities that may be of use to future groups attempting to design a new script. Indigenous writing systems that have integrated visual cultural elements in their own script as a means of resistance/etc. that I will discuss include: Wancho, for a language of the same name from Arunachal Pradesh, India; Ol Chiki, for the Santali languages of northeast India; Ditema Tsa Dinoko, for Southern Bantu languages of South Africa; Afaka, for the Ndyuka language of Suriname; and Gulse, for the Mooré language of Burkina Faso.
Bibliography:
Hovdhaugen, E., 1996. - and the word was God: missionary linguistics and missionary grammar, Münster: Nodus Publikationen.
Sassoon, R., 2004. The acquisition of a second writing system, Bristol: Intellect.
Schmitt, A 1980 Entstehung und Entwicklung von Schriften, Cologne: Böhlau
Lucie Chateau (Tilburg University): Degradation as Resistance: Alienation in the Purposefully Poor Image
Degraded images are produced online by virtue of their own circulation. As images travel through networks, they lose resolution, information and quality and deteriorate. Degraded images run abound in our digital culture, but are not valorised as part of our aesthetic landscape because they do not live up to the societal expectations of what an image should look like. In their position at the margins of our aesthetic order, they possess untapped political potential to reflect onto digital culture, circulationism and alienation. Here, I specifically look at the politics of digital images that are produced with the intention of looking overly circulated. I do this through the lens of degraded memes, which I call purposefully poor images. The purposefully poor image overexaggerates all the material markers of human intervention that an image could potentially acquire throughout its life as a circulated text. Even more than the degraded image, the purposefully poor image deliberately makes its explicit its withdrawal from the aesthetic society (Manovich, 2019). In this way, it differentiates itself from the genuine poor image as it exercises control over its degradation. Building on Hito Steyerl’s theory of poor images as images that travel through networks and lose resolution and information, (2012) I introduce the notion of understanding these images as purposefully poor images that materially mediate alienation in their aesthetic form. In showcasing the material markers of objectification, purposefully poor images allow for an aesthetic encounter with the experience of alienation as defined by Marx.
Camille Crichlow (UCL): Biometric Facial Recognition and the ‘Racial Regime of Aesthetics’: Constructing a Universal Human Subject
Emergent ‘post-optical’ technology, such as facial recognition technology (FRT), is reshaping the visual parameters through which the human subject enters the field of representation. For racialised bodies historically “trapped between regimes of invisibility and spectacular hypervisibility” (Benjamin 82), biometric technology presents a new, digitised visual terrain whose social challenges, stakes, and dangers supersede older regimes of corporeal regulation (Browne; Magnet; Murray; Simmonite). Following David Lloyd’s claim that “there have been far too few substantive accounts of the central role of the aesthetic in the emergence and dissemination of universal human subjecthood”, this paper considers the extent to which FRT reproduce and expand what Lloyd terms the ‘racial regime of aesthetics’ (2). Analysing historical genealogies of aesthetic theory, anthropometry, and ethnographic photography, I examine ways FRT continues to perpetuate the Enlightenment model of the universal human subject through aesthetic norms. The paper provides insights into how aesthetic regimes not only produce racialised misrecognition but re-inscribe aesthetic ideologies of race within practices of contemporary surveillance. Here, I attend to how operations of biometric technologies normalise various categories of disentitlement in the context of border control and global mobility, engendering new regimes of dehumanisation and carceralization. At the same time, however, effects of surveillance regimes are not totalising but simultaneously produce creative modalities of counter-practice. To conclude, the paper considers what kinds of political and aesthetic interventions need to be explored that contest racialisation in surveillance technologies.
Bibliography:
Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Lloyd, David. Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
Magnet, Shoshonna. When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Murray, Heather. "Monstrous Play in Negative Spaces: Illegible Bodies and the Cultural Construction of Biometric Technology." The Communication Review 4.10 (2007): 347-365. Simonite, Tom. "The Best Algorithms Struggle to Recognize Black Faces Equally." 22 July 2022. Wired. 5 September 2022.
Pieta Päällysaho (University of Jyväskylä): Plato and Three Problems of Aesthetics
In this paper I will study the three main problems that Plato’s has with aesthetics – taking the term in its broadest sense, referring both to the realm of art and to the realm of aisthêsis:
1) Dangers of music. Famous for banishing the tragedians from his ideal polis, Plato makes also a much less known is his assertion in the Republic that music is indispensable for educating the citizens – because it teaches them about “the beautiful” and “the ugly”. Art is politically dangerous precisely because it has a power to modify aesthetic judgements, which in ancient Athens are also moral judgements.
2) Poikilia. According to Plato, dangerous music tends to please women, slaves, and those who posses what Plato sees as democratic taste. Outlining two very different aesthetic preferences, Plato demarcates between the democratic enjoyment in poikilia, colors and exciting rhythms – and the philosopher king’s fondness for order, proportion, and clarity.
3) Beautiful illusions. The existence of different aesthetic preferences leads to speculations concerning relativism (an elegant early formulation is Sappho fr. 16), which Plato attacks by arguing for the existence of the truly beautiful. However, positing a notion of truly beautiful gives rise to the persistent idea of illusory beauty.
I argue that these problems rise from Plato’s opposition to the relativism and pluralism that tend to characterize aesthetic phenomena in general. However, the same problematics of “harmful art/entertainment,” “poor taste,” and “superficial illusions” still haunt the contemporary attitudes towards the intersections of art, aesthetic value, and politics.
Wenhan Zhang (Northwestern): Sovereign Fiction, Fictitious Sovereignty: George Buchanan and the Politics of Fiction
This paper reexamines the political thought of the sixteenth-century Scottish philosopher, George Buchanan, by investigating the fundamental role of literary fiction in constructing his theory of popular sovereignty. An anti-tyrannical humanist renowned for his dialogue De Jure Regni apud Scotos yet also a teacher-dramaturge who composes plays for his students, Buchanan’s biblical play Jephthah demonstrates an anxious concern with tyranny and the possibility of education as a remedy against it. While Buchanan’s prevalent use of irony in this play serves this pedagogical purpose by underscoring the need of maintaining a critical detachedness, the play’s problematic ending immediately challenges this reading and exposes the fictive quality of such indifferent spectatorship. Buchanan’s theory of popular sovereignty in De Jure Regni, upon closer inspection, also depends on carefully constructed fictions such as the rationalistic subjects, the Stoic king, and the detached audience. With his keen awareness of the sovereign power of literary fiction and its indispensable role in initiating collective action, Buchanan calibrates constituent power against tyranny by positing a fictitious mode of sovereignty based on Stoic subjectivity. At the same time, Buchanan also intimates that true political sovereignty resides in one’s quasi-artistic ability to construct convincing fictions, as is evident in Buchanan’s own deliberate misinterpretation of historical evidence in his political writings. The comparative study of these works, I suggest, provides an angle to reconsider Buchanan’s theory of sovereignty and the relationship between literature and politics in his thoughts.
Vladimir Gildin Zuckerman (University of Copenhagen): How Does a 'Political Performance' get its Form? Reflections on Xenophon's Cavalry and the Dithyrambic Chorus
My paper discusses the influence of aesthetic forms on political action on the basis of the case of Xenophon's Hipparchicus. Two recent phenomena illustrated the interconnections between 'aeshetic' and 'political' forms. The first is the rise of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose political career began in a transition from performing the character of an unlikely president in a TV-series to becoming the unlikely president of Ukraine. The second is the televised presentation of the January 6th Committee, which hired media executive James Goldston to help arrange its findings in the punctuated narrative arc of a TV-series. While these phenomena can be seen as pathologies of our life in ‘the Age of Netflix’ (Barker & Wiatrowski 2017), they raise a more fundamental question: how is political action shaped by a culture’s aesthetic expectations? The Hipparchicus offers an opportunity to examine this question historically in the ancient Athenian context. Motivated to reform the fraught relationship between the Athenian cavalry and the demos (so Stoll 2012; Keim 2018; Christ 2020), Xenophon suggested a series of innovations to the cavalry's public appearances in Athens. These include a mimetic sham battle, a complex series of demanding choreographic maneuvers, and an attention to the narrative organization of the affects evoked by the cavalry's performances. These formal and aesthetic features reflect similar features in Athen’s most popular cultural form, the Dithyrambic chorus. I argue that these formal similarities suggest that culturally particular aesthetic expectations should be given a greater role in analyses of politics as 'performative'.
Silvia Binenti (UCL): Designing Politics: the T-Shirts of Italian Politicians
In March 2022, Matteo Salvini – former Italian Deputy Prime Minister and anti-immigration advocate – visited a refugee centre in a Polish town in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Salvini did not receive the welcome he expected. The local Mayor, in front of journalists, theatrically pulled out a pro-Putin t-shirt with the Russian President’s face that the Italian politician had proudly worn on a visit to Russia in 2017, asking Salvini ‘see what your friend has done?’. In that occasion images of the scene went viral, but Salvini has a much longer history of wearing controversial – and often contradictory – political t-shirts. This paper aims to explore how the aesthetics of different types of t-shirts endorsed, used, or promoted by Italian politicians can modulate political affect, discourse, and action. This draws from 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork on political t-shirts in which bodies, objects, images, and words were treated together as part of the same aesthetic, political practice. In existing literature, the printed t-shirt is often taken as the visual materialisation of an egalitarian and democratic ethos. Yet, structures of domination and resistance can permeate the fabric of the garment. Relevant scholarship mainly looks at the printed and graphic t-shirt as politics taking a certain aesthetic form, rather than the aesthetic contributing to the formation of a certain politics. In my study I claim that political t-shirts – dressing and fashioning the body (or certain types of bodies) – act and interact to form and perform political subjectivities.
Gabriel Bristow (UCL): Sun Ra’s Anti-War Lullaby
‘Nuclear war—yeah’. This strange, simple, and seemingly affirmative call-and-response is the opening line of a 1982 single by Sun Ra and his Arkestra. The song, entitled straightforwardly ‘Nuclear War’, seems on the surface to be resigned to the inevitability of a looming man-made apocalypse, going as far as to ask: ‘what are you gonna do, without your ass?’ But the rhetorical inevitability of Sun Ra’s question is not as clear cut as it seems. If, as Anne Boyer states, poetry’s no can protect a potential yes, then the Arkestra’s languid yeahs shroud a subterfuge no. The song, in spite of its eerie buoyancy, is neither affirmation nor celebration. It is not an anti-war anthem but its underside—the negation of the negation, a lullaby whispered against the end of the world. This paper will explore the historical entanglement of jazz and war through the prism of Ra’s ‘Nuclear War’. It argues that the song’s oblique aesthetic negativity—drawn from the world-historical culture of freedom initiated during the overturning of racial slavery—points towards a political aesthetics apt for our apocalyptic age.
Liam Johnston-Mccondach (Oxford University): Doing Politics Differently: Bertolt Brecht in France
In 1954 the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht arrived in Paris for the staging of his play Mother Courage. Critical reaction to Brecht and his theatre company, the Berliner Ensemble, was predictably polarised along political lines. Performances that left-wing critics deemed a "Brechtian revolution" heralding a radical transformation of the theatre, were in turn derided by critics on the right as a "Brechtian epidemic", a politically dogmatic attack on the supposed aesthetic sanctity of the theatre. In the French press, Brechtian theatre quickly became a cipher for political art tout court and provoked a series of acrimonious debates and vicious political attacks. But the Berliner Ensemble’s Parisian performances, along with the translation of Brechtian theory into French, did also provide a useful prompt for theorists of the period to rethink and reconceptualise what ideologically committed and politically engaged art could do. In this paper, I will consider how Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Blanchot, and Roland Barthes understood Brecht’s work and how, in their writing on Brechtian theatre, they all arrived at a different notion of how art might be politically effective. By reading these theorists via their reception of Brecht, I hope to push beyond the sometimes unhelpful categories of politically "engaged" and "disengaged" art and uncover the various and often competing ways in which a possible relation between aesthetics and politics was conceptualised. In a politically fraught period of decolonisation and sweeping social change in France, Brecht opened up ways of doing literary politics differently.
Mathieu Farizier (Oxford University): Nathalie Quintane’s Strange Formula for Political Effectiveness: Between Voluntarism and Non-Intentionality
For Rancière, aesthetics is a way of representing the social world which originated in 18th Europe (namely with Winckelmann). Such representations act upon the prevailing hierarchical “distributions of the sensory”, reconfigure them in an egalitarian manner and break away from the logic of intentional action. In Rancière’s sense of the political, as opposed to the “police” mode of reproducing existing social exclusions, these representations are in themselves emancipatory. But in refusing to “sociologise” his stance with regard to which art is effectively produced and consumed by which social groups, as Nicolas Vieillescazes objects, Rancière remains entirely liable to Bourdieu’s critique of aesthetical purity and bourgeois “désintéressement”. Unconcerned as his aesthetics is from art’s real economic and cultural function within a conflicted social order, it can be shown to serve the dominant groups whose class interests have merged with “universal” values. And yet, as Rancière convincingly argues (2010), socially-conscious and committed art practices often reproduce the dominations which they set out to suppress. This dilemma boils down to the issue of political voluntarism. Quintane addresses it in a conflicted and surprising way. My talk will show how her poetical writings navigate between the two opposite poles of political art without resolving their tension: making politically voluntarist claims on the one hand (“le livre, pour être politique, [doit] parler de politique”*), and secretly undermining them through the forwarding of non-intentional outbreaks of nonsense, comical accidents and irrational fantasies on the other (2003; 2010; 2018). Working both for and against intentional political acts, and thereby with and against Rancière, Quintane’s poems manifest not just how revolutionary literature is necessarily caught between coercion and indeterminacy, but that it is effective on that condition.
* “The book, to be political, must talk about politics” (Quintane, Les Années 10, p. 197)
Bibliography
BOURDIEU, Pierre, The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature, ed. by Randal Jonhson, Polity Press, 1993
––, Méditations Pascaliennes, Seuil, 2003
QUINTANE, Nathalie, Formage, POL, 2003
––, Tomates, POL, 2010
––, Les Années 10, La Fabrique, 2014
––, Un œil en moins, POL, 2018
RANCIÈRE, Jacques, La Mésentente : politique et philosophie, Galilée, 1995
––, Le Partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique, La Fabrique, 2000
––, Le philosophe et ses pauvres, Flammarion, coll. « Champs Essais », 2010
––, Aisthesis, Ed. Galilée, 2011 Vieillescazes, Nicolas, “L’esthétique politique de Jacques Rancière”, Revue des Livres, n°8, Nov.-Dec. 2012
Patrick Chester (QMUL): Shelley’s Rome, Pompeii and England in 1819: Rhizomatic models of negativity in Shelley’s depiction of Rome and Pompeii
Shelley lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in European history, considered to be a liminal space that marks a shift between economic, social and political models. It was a period defined by a procession of cataclysmic events that altered both the meteorological and political climates of the era. These tectonic shifts can be evidenced in Shelley’s poetry and prose work and is commonly evidenced in readings of Shelley as a proto-Marxist. Shelley’s depictions of Rome, Pompeii and England are highly discordant with the general sentiment of the period and of the present: Rome, usually described as an eternal city, is a city of the dead; Pompeii, envisaged by Baudrillard as a simulacra of one’s own death, is a symbol of resurrection and political vitality; England, considered to be the most powerful country in the world in the early 18th century is a grave “from which a glorious phantom may burst.” In this paper, I plan to outline a negative dialectics in Shelley’s presentation of these locations. At the heart of this is Shelley’s volcanic voice, which comes to challenge the teleological optimism associated with enlightenment thought. Here the symbol of the volcano encapsulates an Adornoian negative capability and produces a negative dialectics. Thus, Pompei represents an architectonic aorgic entity capable of inspiring an apocalyptic intuition that necessitates a critical theory, positing the individual as a legislator capable of seeing through the ideological formulation of these symbols and realising the potential for revolutionary change.
Sophie Thompson (University of Kent): Childhood, Utopian Dreaming and the Domestic Aesthetic of Edith Nesbit
My paper will show how popular Edwardian children’s author Edith Nesbit conceptualises childhood imagination and play as having radical political potential. Under the cover of ‘unserious’ children’s fiction and the elevation of fantasy and play, Nesbit destabilises the authority of reality, encouraging children not just to question things as they are, but imagine utopia and socialist reconstruction. Nesbit proposes that the state of childhood contains redemptive possibility as a socialist way of living for adults, too, by accessing their imaginations through memories of their own childhood. This mode of socialism based on childhood and play exhibits the domestic made radical: a fin-de-siècle belief in environmental influence and lifestyle changes embedded in the home, the feminine, and the socialist community. Using Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s concepts of the “Not-Yet” and “concrete utopia” as a framework, I will explore Nesbit’s belief in the value of imagining utopia. I will focus primarily on her little-known treatise on child development, Wings and the Child; or, The Building of Magic Cities (1913), alongside some of her better-known fiction for children. Though Nesbit was a founding member of the Fabian society, little scholarship exists that takes her political ideas as a serious contribution to the socialist thinking of the time. I will show how Nesbit’s writings offer a unique insight into fin-de-siècle socialism, making the political personal through a domestic aesthetic that asks what it means to live a socialist life as a woman, a mother, and a professional author.
Alix Stephan (UCD): A Poetic Resistance: Rimbaud à Contre-Temps
When Ernest Pignon-Ernest puts up his portraits of Rimbaud between Charleville and Paris in the 70’s, he places him in the same dynamic as Desnos and Pasolini: aestheticizing the world to show its crudest reality. Haunted by the Commune, by the Revolution, in his poems Rimbaud incessantly asks one crucial question: “comment agir” (Le Cœur Suplicié)? The contestation of Rimbaud is not simply found in the subversive form of his poems, but in his ability to “fai[re] surgir un autre temps” as René Char writes in a text about Rimbaud. Our question, with Rimbaud and his most political poems (Le Forgeron, Rages de Césars…), is: what temporality is called by this irreverent tension between aesthetic and politic? A poetic temporality that will be “en avant” (Lettres du Voyant), but then desynchronized (or out of joint to use a derridean expression), as if this desynchronization was not only a stepping aside but a call for a better, a different attention to events. I will start from Rimbaud’s texts, to see how they ask and construct a singular and active temporality that enters in resistance with a certain political construction. I will first briefly map out Rimbaud’s political world to then highlight his inauguration of a peculiar temporality that is a temporality of resistance. I will end on an impossible but essential question: what call for justice formulates Rimbaud?