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Ten Theses for an Aesthetics Of Politics
Trent Talk Version
The purpose of the Ten These for an Aesthetics of Politics is to make
available a contribution to the analysis of a politics of appearances. Specifically my
site of contention, and my motivation for writing the Ten Theses, is to offer an
alternative approach to the political analysis of cultural objects than current
approaches, popular in cultural and political studies, that treat cultural objects –
whether image, text, sound, etc. – as things demanding epistemological validation
through the designation of semiotic and symbolic criteria that assign meaning to
things. Such approaches, indebted to what I refer to as the moral theory of the
image, take sustenance from the linguistic turn in cultural theory and work hard to
establish correspondences between qualities of objects and their symbolic reference.
The result is the expectation of adamantine correspondences that determine the
conditions in and through which something can signify. The act of critical
interpretation is thus, and in every respect, an act of indexing that inadvertently
conceals normative criteria for the right use of symbol and for the correct lines of
designation for establishing a relation between object and sense. Cultural theory
seems obsessed with giving objects meaning to such a degree that it has established
the work of sense-making as useful and necessary to the production of knowledge.
In contrast, my ambition in the Ten These for an Aesthetics of Politics is to explore
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a mode of critical engagement with cultural objects that does not require our having
to justify their intelligibility in order to validate our engagement with them. In this
respect, I attempt to develop a mode of attending to the politicality of objects and
events in the manner perspicuously articulated by Roland Barthes in Camera
Lucida, when he affirms his wanting “remonstrate with his moods, not to justify
them.” This, for him, is the only way he can express the attraction he feels at what
he calls the “advenience” of a picture. (18-19)
Before I proceed with an elaboration of the Ten Theses, however, I ask that
you indulge me in allowing me to make the stakes of my intervention a little less
opaque. As I see it, there is much work that can be done in the humanities and
social sciences regarding the role and function of our notions of causality, and the
place of causality in our thinking about the relationship between one’s experience
of an object and one’s designation of its status as a signifying thing. The issue for
my purposes has to do with the place of discontinuity in aesthetic experience. As I
have defined it in other publications, and borrowing heavily from the modern
discourse on aesthetic disinterest, an aesthetic experience is the experience of a
sensation that interrupts or discontinues our connections with a previous structure
of interest. Such a sensation has no necessary relation to that which came before
and that which succeeds it, including the criteria of judgment and the contours of
context that govern our habits of correspondence. In this regard, aesthetic
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experience is radically de-contextualizing and stochastic, and is structured by the
principle of non-necessity of succession: There is no necessary relation between an
object and its meaning, nor is there a necessary causal chain between an event of
experience and one’s sense of it. The implication of this is that an aesthetics of
politics does not regard the politicality of cultural objects as necessarily bound to
the project of epistemological validation of concepts, or of the epistemic legitimacy
of claim-making. To put this slightly differently, an aesthetics of politics is not
epistemological; this because one can never verify the site or point of allure in the
event of appearance that sources one’s sense of conviction regarding the intensity
of the appearance. This experience of not being able to isolate conditions for the
validity of a sensation is what David Hume (amongst many thinkers that inform the
Ten Theses) means when he accounts for the non-necessity of an impression: In
Part I of his Treatise of Human Nature Hume explains that there is nothing in the
striking forth of an impression that is a necessary condition for its striking forth in
all possible instances of it.
At a very basic level, then, the methodological focus of the Ten Theses
regards the status and validity of intelligibility as a concern for political and
cultural theory (in particular) and for the humanities and social sciences (in
general). The issue of the intelligibility of objects is indebted to a post-Kantian
hermeneutics of suspicion (to borrow Paul Ricoeur’s felicitous phrase) that posits
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first and foremost the question of how it is that I can know something in order to
then surmise what it is that I can know. This is our Kantian critical heritage. The
issue, in short, is what an appearance must do in order to count as intelligible.
Hence the project of critique as suspicion that puts to work all of the etymological
sensibilities of that word: to be suspicious is to be supine, with our palms facing up
– morally and mentally inactive, inert, and indolent. To be suspicious means to
look up at something with a glance at once of admiration and mistrust. In other
words, and here I must be brief, the hermeneutics of suspicion that structures many
of the pedagogical and interpretive ambitions of critical thinking in the humanities
is imbued and imbibes a specific relation of power that treats the beholder/spectator
as passive and as listless as the supine body of the docile penitent. Hence the
attraction of Althusser’s notion of interpellation or Debord’s critique of the society
of the spectacle. In both cases, these positions tap into and share an obsession with
our most delicate enlightenment sensibilities regarding our subjection to the
unknown and the unintelligible. That is, with Althusser and Debord (amongst many
others) we discover a neo-Kantian commitment to critique as liberation from the
chains of supine mystification.
But the question that needs asking – and that I pursue in the Ten Theses for
an Aesthetics of Politics – is whether the supposition of suspicion vis-à-vis objects
of aesthetic arrest is the only critical game in town, and the only mode for pursuing
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an aesthetics of politics? Put slightly differently, in the Ten Theses I pursue how we
might imagine a politics of appearances that is not indebted to, or entangled with,
the production of knowledge claims for the establishment of intelligibility criteria.
Simply put, is there an aesthetics of politics that is not supine to the demands of
epistemology? The wager is that the delimitation of intelligibility is not necessary
to the critical work of humanistic reflection and speculation.
My starting assumption, then, is negative: an appearance is not an
intelligibility. There is a difference of degree and duration between one’s
experience of an apperance, and one’s capacity to make sense of it. And that
difference, and the space of discontinuity that intervenes between these two points,
remains under-theorized. Thus, the position that I outline – beginning with the
central Barthesian concept of “advenience” – turns to a radical empiricist tradition
that challenges the presumed lineal continuities between perception and
signification. More than this, in the Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics, I
attempt to recuperate the aesthetic discourse of absorption and immersion that
seems to have gone to the way-side as a result of the emphasis on critique in the
mode of suspicion and unveiling: that is, the suspicion of an object’s collusive
effects and the unveiling of structures of power that command one’s supine stance.
This is why the radical empiricist tradition inaugurated by Hume but found
in varying degrees in many modern and contemporary authors including Arendt,
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Cavell, Barthes (of Camera Lucida), Fried, Whitehead, Bennett, Massumi, Deleuze,
and Rancière – but also in old and new fields of inquiry from New Media, to affect
studies, to political theory, to visual studies, heritage restoration, and education – is
important to me. Each of the Ten Theses draws sustenance from this varied and
diverse assembly of thinkers and projects whose ideas bear aspects of one another.
Ultimately, what I hope emerges from these diverse theoretical and experiential
encounters is a renewed attention to the idea of aesthetic conviction, which remains
that most elusive and curious of experiences: By aesthetic conviction, then, I mean
that kind of experience marked by a sensation of absolute certitude regarding the
advenience of an object, a sense of certitude that is at once exhilarating and
devastating: exhilarating because it compels us to want to express our sense of
certitude – in the work, in ourselves, or in a context – but also devastating because
that sensation cannot be verified nor prescribed; or, as Isabelle Stengers rightly
affirms, “No cause has the power to prescribe how it will cause.” The sensation of
aesthetic conviction is not a cause that requires proof, it is an expression of
intensity that bears no ground. It is, dare I say, an interval of discontinuity with
those structures of interest one refers to as one’s context, or one’s propriety, or
one’s subjectivity. It is a moment of what Hume called “interrupted perceptions”
and “broken appearances,” and what Barthes called the wounding punctum, and
what Rancière calls dissensus, and what Whitehead calls a lure of feeling, and what
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Fried calls absorption, and what Heidegger refers to as the tri-partite structure of
conspicuousness-obtrusiveness-obstinacy, and what Wittgenstein calls the
perspicuousness of aspect-dawning, and what Nancy calls the noli me tangere, and
what Arendt calls sheer appearance.
But what of the ‘politics’ side to an aesthetics of politics? Simply put, and as
I indicate in my previous remarks, the moral theory of the image that structures the
tradition of a hermeneutics of suspicion (i.e., the fact that there are good and bad
images that correspond to a good or bad politics) relies on a principal of causal
necessity that determines the validity of our expressions of good, common sense –
“le bon sense,” as Deleuze calls it in the “Image of Thought” chapter in Difference
and Repetition. The implicit objective for cultural inquiry, then, is to affirm the
intelligibility of our work so as to justify its social or political relevance, purpose,
and interest. The result is to establish and take as a given a specific partition
between intelligibility and use – which is, I might add as a side jab, the neo-liberal
ambition of current academic vision statements that implicitly ask faculty and
departments to justify the purpose of their existence, research, and pedagogy –
which usually translates into “what are the skills that students will learn from what
you teach so that they may get jobs in the real world?”
The aesthetics of politics that I pursue differs drastically from this, precisely
because of its commitment to the event of discontinuity I attribute to aesthetic
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experience. First and foremost, I approach the matter of the relation between
aesthetics and politics from the perspective of a radical democratic tradition that
takes as central to its idea of democracy the non-necessity of rule. This is at once a
political and ontological concept which affirms that democracies are not
institutional forms, or practices, but refer to acts of resistance to the expectations of
continuity in any system. The first principal of democracy, then, is the non-
necessity of rule: that no system or structure of ruling, or being ruled, is necessary
to any configuration of the demos – just as there is not structure of rule and ruling
necessary to an aesthetic experience; indeed – and if we are to follow Hume and
Kant on this matter – there can be no rules that will guarantee aesthetic experience.
An experience is not a quality of an object, just as the demos of democracy has no
necessary qualities for the conditions of political rule and assembly-formation in a
democracy.
To be forthcoming, this political insight is inspired by Jacques Rancière’s
contributions to political and cultural theory. It is most famously articulated in his
conception of the polemical dissensus of a partition of the sensible. One of
Rancière’s key contributions to political and cultural theory is to elaborate how
politics is as much (if not more) experiential than it is rationalist, and that the core
concern for a politics of emancipation and equality regards the articulations and
rearticulations of what is rendered available to perceptibility – what he calls the
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visible and the sayable. Political change, for Rancière, comes with the interruption
of conventions of sensing and making sense of the world; or, in short-form,
interruptions of common sense. Thus, for Rancière, the political dilemma is not the
problem of subjugation, as it is affirmed in Althusserian and post-Althusserian
theories of ideology and ideological state apparatuses. Rather, the site of political
contestation is the presuppositions that guarantee “an identity between cause and
effect”; or what he otherwise calls the police order. The police order regards those
perceptual conventions that endorse a continuous correspondence between
perception and signification, between experience and meaning. To put this slightly
differently, the police order is not a description of an office of power one might
occupy, or a structure of subjugation that imposes itself upon individual agents.
Rather, Rancière’s police regards the representational logic of symbolism that
generates uncontested continuities between disparate entities, whether subjects or
objects. Politics is, in this sense, the imposition of a discontinuity by those entities
whose actions are not perceptible according to the reigning allocations of
perceptibility. The political subject is, for Rancière, a discontinuity.
This is famously illumined by Rancière’s distinction, in his “Ten Theses on
Politics” (an explicit inspiration of my own work presented here today) between
Althusser’s petty officer and the traffic cop: “The police” Rancière affirms, “is not
that law interpellating individuals (as in Althusser’s ‘Hey, you there!’) unless one
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confuses it with religious subjectification. It is, first of all, a reminder of the
obviousness of what there is, or rather, of what there isn’t: ‘Move along! There is
nothing to see here!’ The police says that there is nothing to see on a road, that
there is nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space of circulating is
nothing other than the space of circulation. Politics, in contrast, consists in
transforming this space of ‘moving-along’ into a space for the appearance of a
subject: i.e., the people, the workers, the citizens: It consists in refiguring the space,
of what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein.” For Rancière, the
real problem posed by the logic of the police is not that it hails us, but that it insists
that we keep circulating and moving about in incessant waves of continuity, that we
not turn our attentions elsewhere, or that we not partake in acts of appearance that
break the adamantine lineality of the causal chain. One might paraphrase this
specification and say, with Rancière, that politics regards the rendering palpable of
the experiential discontinuities that exist in the unacknowledged fissures of
experience that make the bodying forth of appearances possible in the face of “the
obviousness of what there is.”
For my purposes, an aesthetics of politics that suspends its attachments to the
post-Kantian project of intelligibility and asserts the non-necessity of rule through
the experience of discontinuity of aesthetic conviction affords a new politics of
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resistance at a time and in a part of the world where the one cultural and political
rule is to keep things going as they are.
So now, and without any further ado, here is the abbreviated hit-list of the
Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics:
Thesis 1: On Advenience:
An advenience is the ingression of an appearance. An appearance is the
luminous partiality that strikes one’s sensorium. The advenience of an
appearance is thus the bodying forth of a luminosity that affronts our
regard. As an effrontery, as an intensity of interface, the advenience of an
appearance is an event of resistance.
By “advenience” I refer to the capacity of things to stand forth or affront the
spectator and, through this interface, to strike at one’s perceptual attentions. An
advenience is the projecting outward of an appearance: a sound, a sight, a touch
that, though perhaps always available, becomes obstinately perspicuous at the
moment of its bodying forth. The challenge – both aesthetic and political – is to
come to terms with this perspicuity. That an appearance advenes because of an
intensity of projection, and not one of referentiality or indexicality, means that we
cannot rely on pre-existing norms or criteria for making sense of the appearance.
Indeed, the making sense of an appearance is precisely what the advenience denies.
To regard an advenience is to allow the possibility of an absorptive be/holding that
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disarticulates our subjectivities from the structures of interest that conduct our
habits of sense-making. The stochasticity of an advenience interrupts the linear
necessity of cause and effect.
Thesis 2: On Be/holding:
Be/holding (written with a backslash between the ‘e’ and the ‘h’) is the
bearing of the burden of resistance that the advenience of an appearance
introduces. To be/hold does not suggest a passive viewership: it designates
an active participation in the curatorial handling of an appearance’s
ingression. To be/hold is to look, but it also a holding up to view, or a
handling as a view, of that which bodies forth. In other words to be/hold is
also to regard: it is to look but also to hold an appearance in regard.
Be/holding thus regards an absorptive attention to the world that is a basic
concern for an aesthetics of politics.
We are accustomed to those disenchanting positions that associate the terms
‘beholding’, ‘absorption’, and ‘spectatorship’ with a condition of subjugation
imposed by societies of the spectacle. The spectator is subjugated to a kind of
imagistic power akin to a burning bush whose divine power of illumination indexes
and designates a moral code. In most accounts of the aesthetics of politics that
desire to unveil the lie of the image, the structure and shape of spectatorship
remains at the level of propagandistic indoctrination so that all appearances operate
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like a Madison Avenue advertisement; as if, once again, all appearances exist and
work within a unitary and universal structure of mediatic consistency. This mode of
handling the image was first discovered by the Byzantine iconoclasts who
disseminated a fear of the image’s collusive effects. Today, such handlings are also
carriers of an inegalitarian pedagogy, rigidly partitioned between those who can
know (i.e., the critic) and those who cannot know (i.e., the audience) the truth of
the image.
In contrast, the diacritical backslash we insert in the word be/holding wants
to signal the pluralized entendre of spectatorship as at once a ‘regarding,’ a
‘bearing,’ and a ‘caring for.’ Here we are reminded of Robert Warshow’s 1954
ruminations on going to the movies: “I go to the movies for the same reason that
the ‘others’ go:” he says, “because I am attracted to Humphrey Bogart or Shelley
Winters or Greta Garbo; because I require the absorbing immediacy of the screen;
because in some way I take all that nonsense seriously.”
What we are speaking of when we speak of a be/holding is a curatorial
attention that ponders the ways in which the multitudinous practices endured for
bearing the frictions of an advenience are taken seriously. A be/holding is not
merely a looking, then, but a holding up to view, or the supporting of a view – as a
frame supports the canvas, or a screen supports a projected image, or a protestor
bears a placard. It is basic to the idea of democratic citizenship that individuals are
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said to have views. But this is a misnomer; a view is not something you have, it is
something you bear for others to be/hold.
Be/holding is thus not a possession but an intangible hapticity, a
dispossession. There is no capture or adherence here because neither the be/holder,
nor the maker, nor the object has the power to prescribe a mode of subjectivity
appropriate to an advenience. Indeed, it cannot, because the instant of advenience is
not determined by any necessary cause or relation. To be absorbed by the
advenience of an appearance is thus precisely not to be ‘taken in’ (or duped) by the
image. Rather, the experience of an absorptive be/holding refers to a discontinuity
of subjectivity that emerges at the instant of advenience. An advenience thus does
not require a viewing subject to occupy the position of spectator; rather, it
commends acts of regard, or practices of handling, or of bearing resistances. An
aesthetics of politics thus takes aesthetic experience as relevant to political life
because our microcultural practices of interface with aesthetic objects source our
curatorship of one another. To the extent that we are all advening appearances to
one another, the manners, attitudes, and forms of handling we enlist to be/hold
appearances is of central concern to our understandings of the forces of collectivity
that make a political handling-with-others at once thinkable and possible.
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Thesis 3: On Immediacy:
Immediacy is the temporality of an aesthetics of politics. When an
appearance advenes, it strikes an impression upon a sensorial apparatus,
variously conceived. In doing so, it disarticulates our senses of constancy,
continuity, and commonality. The immediacy of an aesthetics of politics is
rooted in a process ontology of discontinuity.
The ingression of an appearance occurs in an instant, this is why it cannot be
predicted, nor can it be anticipated or arranged. Consider the manner in which one
is struck by a particularly compelling detail – of a song, of a movie, or of the color
on a painting. However overpowering – or not – the experience may be, it
nonetheless is of the moment. It occurs instantaneously and one generates a sense
of conviction regarding the vitality of the thing experienced, as if the artifact were
at once real and wholly present. This is the prestige, the conjuring trick, of the
aesthetic object: it affords an immediate sensation of actuality – of concreteness –
that resists the necessity of having to show and verify its actuality or concreteness.
To appreciate the fullness of this point, consider for a moment what occurs at
the instant of impression: Upon the surface of any body, biological or not, an
impression strikes and leaves a mark. But that mark inevitably fades, like the letters
impressed upon printed manuscripts, or a bruise upon the skin, or the patina upon
celluloid, or the tread of a tire, or the scuff on a floor, or a publication in an
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academic journal [hence the language of impact-factors]. The punctuality of an
impression is variable, and its weight lightens, as does one’s memory of it.
David Hume’s insistence on the immediacy of impressions gives full
expression to a process ontology of discontinuity for an aesthetics of politics, as
when he advises in his Treatise that when one begins “with the SENSES, ’tis
evident these faculties are incapable of giving rise to the notion of continu’d
existence of their objects, after they no longer appear to the senses.” (T, 1.4.2.3).
There is a stochastic serialization between the advenience of an appearance, an
impression, and continuity that for Hume is dissipated at the instant when the
partiality of the appearance departs. This, in the end, is also the basis for his
conception of civil society that is rooted in the idea of reputation as that variable
impression that individuals press upon each other. Indeed, for Hume, civil society
is a fragile and discontinuous advenience. Hence the importance of such customary
practices as promising, that he compares to the Catholic doctrine of
transubstantiation and holy orders (T, 3.2.5.14). Promises are those speculative
artifices we devise to grant temporary constancy to an otherwise inconstant world.
By occupying the temporality of immediacy, an aesthetics of politics makes
an ontology of discontinuity central to one’s political considerations.
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Thesis 4: On Aspectuality
An aspect is a no-part: It is a durational impression that advances contours
of proximity which potentiate processes of intonation between advening
appearances. The part-taking of aspectuality is juxtapositive, where distinct
entities bestow mutual inflection one upon the other. An aspectual
interface is thus something we grasp, not something we know.
The temporality of immediacy and the process ontology of discontinuity that
arise in an aesthetics of politics emphasize the partiality of things.
Phenomenologists have always insisted on the limits of our perception by
suggesting that we ever only approach objects from a part, and that the totality of
objects is unavailable to us. This is distinctly different from saying that one always
has a partial perspective of the world. In other words, we are not defending here a
version of perspectivism. The perspectivism thesis always assumes that 1) objects
are complete and unitary despite our partial perceptions; 2) that our mode of
attention is cognitive to the extent that we can always surmise the difference
between a part and a whole; and 3) that our perceptions distort our realities. But to
say that an advenience is a perspicuous no-part is to affirm the partiality of all
things, and thus resist the urge to completion or fulfillment of what is lacking: all
that we have – all that we are – is parts.
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To the extent that an aspect is a no-part, it is the improper element that
strikes in an entirely unpredictable manner and that interrupts circulation through
its advenience. It is an event of resistance. This is the reason why we affirmed the
fact of be/holding in the face of advenience, and the intoning of inflection as an
aspect’s partition of the sensible. Aspects are impressions that emerge in the
immediacy of an advenience. We cannot know an aspect; the best that we can do is
grasp it’s juxtapositive impropriety.
Rather than consensus, resemblance, and comparison an aesthetics of politics
proposes an aspectual interface of emergent adveniences. The grasping of an aspect
thus regards an absorptive part-taking of and with the intonations of proximity that
emerge from the juxtaposition of adveniences. Aspectuality is the mode of relating
for an aesthetics of politics.
Thesis 5: On Handling
We be/hold an advenience by handling it. But to handle something is not
the same as using it. The handling proposed by an aesthetics of politics is
neither useful nor useless, but unusable. In this respect, an aesthetics of
politics proposes that our handling of the advenience of an appearance
projects our handling of one another. Another term we might use to
indicate our handling of one another is “practices of governance.”
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The world is replete with practices of handling: the leaf handles the parasite,
the concierge handles the package, the wind handles the spore, the painter handles
the brush, the factory worker handles the minimum wage, the political scientist
handles the data, the camera handles the film, the beholder handles the appearance,
and (most importantly) vice versa: the brush handles the painter like the keyboard
handles the writer; the film handles the camera like the ink handles the pen; the
spore handles the wind like the string handles the guitar. Handling is a
microcultural practice that expresses the persistence of incipient trajectories of
awareness and immersion. A central concern for an aesthetics of politics, therefore,
regards the handling of adveniences and how such handlings mutually inflect our
handling of one another.
Our practices of handling make explicit the political question of certainty:
what is it that we want to remonstrate when we be/hold an advenience? An act of
handling, I want to say, is less a skill or a techné than an occurrence. A handling
arises from what Heidegger refers to as our “concernful dealings” with the world
and those things, peoples, and events that populate it. Thus a handling enlists our
abilities to engage objects beyond their value as either useful or useless.
Let’s invoke a practice of handling most of us part-take in when reading: that
of highlighting, or underlining – i.e., the act of indexing – what we sense as
relevant in a work. The rendering remarkable through highlighting is a handling.
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When marking a passage we remark to ourselves (or others): “pay attention to this;
be impressed by it, as I have been impressed.” In this way we may say that by
marking our absorptions, we render the passage remarkable. The highlighted
passage becomes something that stands out; it is an appearance that advenes and
impresses upon our curatorial attentions.
I might put the thrust of this example this way this way: our concernful
attention to the advenience of a passage that is remarkable in an assembly of words
highlights the partiality of the work and makes available to our attentions aspects
that would otherwise go unremarked if the work were a presupposed continuity. As
a broken partiality, a discontinuity, the highlighted passage is a site of absorption: it
stands out and draws us in in such a way that it makes any appeal to interest in the
work unreliable or, indeed, unnecessary. That we may then make use of this
passage – for professional purposes, to give comfort to our woes, or to provide
evidence for a developing argument – does not deny the fact that at the moment of
its incipient advenience, it is unusable. At a very basic but fundamental level, the
unusabiity of an advenience regards the ingression of a mode of monstrance that
strikes at us and affords an attention to the appearance of things; not, that is, to
explain them, but rather to concern ourselves with them. In this regard, a handling’s
unusability bespeaks of a curatorial absorption with the world.
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Thesis 6: On the Noli me tangere
The handling of an advenience resists the kind of penetrative touch that
wants to expose the truth of an object. Rather than expositive, an aesthetics
of politics operates within the domain of the noli me tangere; the ‘do not
touch me’, or ‘do not withhold me’ of the appearance. The noli me tangere
regards an intangible hapticity that discomposes the expectations of
possession.
Two images of the Biblical iconography of the story of Jesus will help us
navigate this thesis. Their theme regards the hapticity of the image. Here they are:
Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Thomas, (1603, ca)
Pontormo, Noli me tangere (1532, ca.)
Both are remarkable works.
In Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Thomas, the doubting disciple thrusts his
hand into the side of Jesus in order to perforate his referentiality and confirm his
actuality. Thomas’s touch wants to expose and possess evidence of Jesus’s
resurrection. Here the extended hand that handles the wound penetrates the source
of the sensation of belief so as to confirm the accuracy that the image of god is
present, and thus relieve the doubt of faith. Thomas’s touch clutches the wound; it
is an ostensive touch that wants to point to the source of the sensation in order to
hold on to one’s faith. Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Thomas, in other words,
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dramatizes a desire to know the image, to touch it in such a way as to penetrate its
behavior and possess the source of its sensations so as to firmly nail in place the
relation between sensation and reference.
The second image, Pontormo’s Noli me tangere painting, thematizes another
order of hapticity that, we can say, lies closer to the curatorial ethos of be/holding
of an aesthetics of politics. This Biblical scenario predates Jesus’s encounter with
the Doubting Thomas, but not by much. It refers to the moment when Jesus exits
the tomb on the third day after his crucifixion and encounters Mary Magdalen who
is in the garden, mourning his passing – a picture of the event of advenience if there
ever was one. Absorbed by his luminescence, Mary lunges towards Jesus in a
dance-like embrace (as Pontormo pictures the gesture) while he sashays away from
her, uttering the negative injunction “noli me tangere” (in Greek, mê mou haptou):
“do not touch me,” or “do not withhold me,” or “do not hold me back”; we might
wish to paraphrase as follows: ‘Be/hold me without possessing me’, ‘hold me in
your regard without clutching me.’ The interval of the noli me tangere, in other
words, pictures the intangible hapticity that we lend an advenience, an ungraspable
caress that concerns itself with the appearance as it advenes. In this interval, there
is a play of hapticity that never actually resolves, but that nonetheless invites our
ability to absorb and bear the scene. The be/holding that the advenience of
appearance invites makes untenable the claim of possessive exposition: One cannot
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own an experience of advenience. On the contrary, the interval of advenience calls
forth a curatorial regard of and for that which appears.
In his recent study of the relationship between sight and touch, spurred on by
his looking at some noli me tangere paintings, Jean-Luc Nancy exposes a concern
with the phenomenality of holding as ownership and possession and how through
aesthetic experience – through the interval of advenience – we encounter the
possibility of there being a non-possessive hold; a be/holding. Along side the
history of liberalism’s possessive individuals, we might conclude, there is a parallel
and minoritarian trajectory of aesthetic dispossession. What does it mean – we ask
once again – to hold an appearance?
We might ask this too: is the holding or beholding of an advenience not also
a central problem of political citizenship? Does citizenship regard the holding of a
legal subject by a nation, or does it regard the be/holding of the advenience of a
political subjectivity that has neither place, nor name, nor status, nor part; someone
or something that cannot be held in its proper place? The crucial problem for an
aesthetics of politics is thus the following: if the advenience of political
subjectivities appear but do not count because an advenience is untenable (e.g.,
literally unholdable), then what are the practices of handling and modes of attention
we dispose to the noli me tangere of an advenience?
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Thesis 7: On Interface
Contemporary political life is characterized neither by the exchange of
ideas, nor by the communication of intentions between speaking subjects.
Rather, it is characterized by the microcultural dynamics of interface
through and by which subjects and objects cast appearances. The iconomy
of and interface with appearances is a principal feature of contemporary
political life.
We do not exchange appearances because appearances are not something we
can possess. Interface is thus not confrontational: it is not something that arises
from a mis-en-scène of exchange. If we cannot possess an appearance, then this
also means that it cannot be located in any one place: Interface cannot be staged.
Interface regards a structure of faciality.
As we affirmed in Thesis 6, possession is no longer the principal practice of
holding in contemporary life. Few, if any of us, have possessions; this despite our
culture of consumerism. Even property has been shown to be virtually untethered to
any ambition of possession, as the American sub-prime mortgage crisis
demonstrated in the first decade of the new millennium. The shock effects of that
cataclysm have been unfathomable, not only because they have ushered in a new
age of wealth discrepancy and poverty, and not only because it has decimated the
ambitions and spirit of entire classes of peoples, but also because it has shaken to
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the core our inherited faith in political economy’s linear causality of property and
ownership, that is the basis of our modern conceptions of exchange value. To resist
the dogmatic slumber of Capitalism no longer means a resistance to property and
structures of ownership: Capitalism has already co-opted this strategy and made
ownership irrelevant by making property itself not valuable. Instead, political
resistance comes with the overthrowing of ownership as a privileged modality of
holding.
Rather than holding, interface is now the dominant form of interaction: it is
the posting, disseminating, and facing up to the iconomy of appearances. This is
one of the many characteristics of politics in the age of new media technology. As
Lev Manovich has described it, the interfacilaity that comes with the rise of GUI
and subsequent cut and paste technology has resulted in a veritable gestalt switch in
our modes of handling the intersect of cultural forms.
Simply regard the extent to which we now privilege screens – and especially
touch screens – as our principal objects of handling. From film, to TV, to the
computer screen, to the cell phone screen, to the iPad, an inordinate amount of our
time is spent engaging these technologies of interface that operate as carriers and
disseminators of appearances; we might half-jokingly call these objects of interface
“iconomic indicators.” Thus, before we might think of reflecting on the effects of
Facebook, or Twitter, or the internet upon our political imaginaries and – indeed –
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upon our political-economic practices (as the recent revolutions in Egypt and
Zuccotti Park have made urgent), we must consider the practices of interface that
emerge from an ontology of the screen that allow someone like Robert Warshow –
to re-cite him – to affirm in 1954 that “I require the absorbing immediacy of the
screen.”
The political corollary to this is that it is no longer the word, nor the pen, nor
the piece of paper, that may be said to count as the principal objects of political
agency: the word was mightier than the sword, but now the mouse is mightier than
both sword and word. Though the modern political actor may have handled
speaking and writing, the contemporary political actor no longer operates in a
Gutenberg galaxy governed by the movements of word and deed. Her universe is
comprised of microcultural practices of interface that screen appearances. The
further corollary to this is that the materiality of political agency has also
transubstantiated: the political actor is, like the actor on the screen, a human
something; a partiality whose luminosity advenes.
To engage the micrucultural practices of interface that imbue our
contemporary political culture requires our having to take seriously, in a manner
heretofore unprecedented, the medium and media of interface; including the role of
the media industry not simply as the site of a symbolic subjugation but as source of
access to networks of navigation. What enables interface and how is interface
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impeded – for instance – by the shutting down of internet servers at the height of
revolutionary tweeting? Such questions require our having to rethink the ways in
which our current modes of interchange extend beyond the exchange of words and
ideas. The iconomic transmission of and interface with the advenience of an
appearance is thus one of the central sites of attention for an aesthetics of politics.
Thesis 8: On Luminosity
No object is qualitatively political; no object is qualitatively aesthetic.
Objects are plurivalent permanences: luminous entities without a cause or
a purpose. An aesthetics of politics thus does not refer to formulas for
interpreting the political value of works of art; it addresses the modes in
and through which the luminosity of an appearances is rendered available
to perceptibility.
We might say that objects (including those objects of analysis we call
political subjectivities) have a life of their own, regardless of the qualities we
attribute to them. However, our habits of political analysis operate in such a way as
to establish the usefulness of things in order for them to count as political. This is
the debt to utilitarianism of modern political science. It is also only as useful and
productive that we are able to justify the value of aesthetic objects to political
thought: that is, aesthetic objects are valuable – i.e., have an interest and a purpose
– because their qualities may be deployed for political purposes.
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But as we have noted, the domain of an aesthetics of politics is one of
disinterest and unpurposiveness: aesthetic experience is an event of discontinuity
where no structure of interest or criteria of belief suffices to explain the qualitative
value of an object. What this suggests is that the kind of explanatory system that
makes intention, causality, and predictability necessary to signification is
insufficient to an aesthetics of politics. This is why we say that no object is political,
and no object is aesthetic. Any object whatever may be experienced aesthetico-
politically – whether brush stroke, pop song hook, oil spill, policy initiative, kernel
of information, sexual orientation, economic standing, weather pattern, word,
image, and so forth.
An aesthetic of politics is responsive to a sensation of conviction that arises
from the luminosity of an appearance, its intensity, or power of monstrance. The
distinction we want to explore, then, is between an object’s luminosity and what it
might illuminate. For an object to illuminate something, it’s shine must be
indexical and directed at a referent: in this way, an object is imagined to operate
like a spotlight that designates a marker on a stage. Illumination is entirely
theatrical and denoted the project of intelligibility. An object’s luminosity, however,
disavows the directionality of the spotlight. A luminosity radiates without
referencing: it forgoes the ostension of the spotlight as the principal mode of
relation.
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To say that a luminous appearance advenes is thus not simply to define the
properties of its motility, it is also to speculate on the processual ontology that
affords it its ingressional properties. It is Alfred North Whitehead who first
introduces the idea of ingression vis-à-vis luminosities in The Concept of Nature.
For him, ingression refers to a mode of relation, and not simply a description of an
action: it is the event of relation that arises from superimposition of objects whose
contours remain unfinished. “The ingression of an object into an event,” Whitehead
affirms, “is the way the character of the event shapes itself in virtue of the being of
the object. Namely the event is what it is, because the object is what it is.” Thus,
object and event mutually inflect one another through a relational dynamic that
sustains their fluid, rather than static, natures. In Process and Reality Whitehead
calls this dynamic “a lure for feeling.”
The luminosity of an appearance radiates its perspicuity but does not
prescribe an attention to it. It cannot. Because a luminosity is not a quality inherent
in an object, it is that radiance about an object that is activated the moment it
becomes an object of attention. This is why when we speak of objects we speak of
them as plurivalent permanences. The have a durability that outlasts our encounter
with them; but that durability does not correspond to a continuous identity. As
plurivalent permanences, objects are in a state of continual and eventual flux; they
have a life of their own, if you will, that is not dependent on our interaction or
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interest with them. This is what makes an object and aesthetic object: it is aesthetic
not because it possess the quality of beauty, or the status of art; these latter
qualifications are mere categories we adopt to classify and coordinate the right
disposition of objects. Instead, and object is aesthetic and political because it is
remarkable in its manner of ingression. If a luminosity cannot designate in the
manner of a spotlight, then the challenge and work for an aesthetics of politics is to
acknowledge these moments of remark and generate creative ways for rendering
them available without treating them as objects that prescribe and determine a
mode of action, or form of attention. Rather, and as Heidegger might say,
luminosities are conspicuous because of the breaks they induce.
Thesis 9: On Impropriety
Politics is improper. It is the interval of discontinuity that emerges from the
immediacy of an advenience. What an aesthetics of politics thus makes
available to democratic theory is the fact that there has only ever truly been
one ontological principal for democracy: that there is no necessity of rule.
This is why democratic politics is always already aesthetic.
There is an aspectual affinity between aesthetics and democracy: Both
sustain the non-necessity of rule. Thus, both are improper. This does not mean that
democracy is anarchic and without rules. It means, rather, that no rule is necessary
to democracy.
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In the political sense of the term, an impropriety is a wrong. But here we
must not confuse the political wrong with an epistemological mistake. A political
wrong is not an error that needs correcting in order to return to the proper rule of
things. It is not “some flaw calling for reparation,” as Jacques Rancière has shown.
“It is the introduction of an incommensurable at the heart of the distribution of
speaking bodies.” What might this mean, exactly? Simply put, the impropriety of
politics regards the disproportioning of equivalences in any system or order: the
political wrong is the affirmation of an arresting conviction, or a site of resistance.
When we affirmed (in Theses 1) that an advenience was “an event of resistance,”
we were affirming its status as an impropriety. An advenience is that which
interrupts the organizations of perceptibility that make objects and values circulate
properly.
Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1948 (1948)
Consider the example of Jackson Pollock’s line in his works dating from the
late 1940s, but especially Number 1, 1948. As is well known, Pollock became
known for pouring paint onto a stretched canvas on the floor, creating massive
tableaus with swirls of paint weaving throughout. As he famously affirmed in an
interview, “[m]y painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my
canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or
the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I
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feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work
from the four sides and literally be in the painting.” By resisting the convention of
the easel as the structure of support for the composition of a painting, Pollock
liberates painting from other structural conventions, not the least of which was the
necessity that paint be applied upon a canvas in order to draw a line. For, what
Pollock makes available in works like Number 1, 1948 is the possibility that a line
no longer designate or trace a border; or, as Michael Fried affirms, that a line is “no
longer the edge of anything.”
We might say this: Pollock’s achievement is to interrupt the expectation that
a line hold shape so as to make available an improper modality of line-potential
previously unremarked. The line had always been just a line, useful for tracing
edges of shape, figure, or territory. But by affirming the availability of the line’s
drip, and by literally and physically suspending the intentionality of the brush
stroke, Pollock makes available a new cosmology of line.
To get a sense of the intensity of this gesture of impropriety, let us juxtapose
this aspect of line with Rousseau’s discussion in the Discourse on the Origins of
Inequality of the invention of property through the utterance “this is mine.” With
all its rhetorical flourishes, Rousseau accounts for this utterance as the historical
and metaphysical origin of inequality. That is, the invention and pronouncement of
a linguistic line that permits the capacity to draw a line, parse a territory, put up a
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fence around a plot of land, and have that line and that fence count as belonging to
someone (i.e., to be part of a person’s propriety) and have all these intensities
register as intelligible to others. Inequality begins and ends with the techné of
drawing a line upon a flat surface in such a way that it contains or holds a shape.
The ontological precondition for property (including the propriety of self implicit in
the “I” of the “this is mine”), is the existence of a geometrical line that designates
territory: what we might call a property line, or the drawing of a lot.
Jackson Pollock’s singular achievement – both aesthetic and political – is the
disfiguration of the line; it is to free the line from the compellant must of having to
draw shapes. “And this,” Michael Fried explains, “amounts to the claim that, in
these paintings, traditional drawing is revoked, or dissolved, at any rate drastically
undermined.” Within political theoretical parameters, this is tantamount to saying
that territorial borders can no longer be drawn, that the surface of land is a smooth
plateau upon which the tracing of a line does not designate the existence of a
territory; it is deterritorialization. We might, then, put the matter this way: Pollock’s
disfiguration of the line is an instance of impropriety in the face of an entire history
of political thinking committed to (indeed, founded on) the line’s capacity for
outlining, of drawing and holding shapes (of nations, of principalities, of identities,
of the human, of cultures, of concepts, and so forth).
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We thus define impropriety not as the absence of rule, but as the non-
necessity of rule. It is what is excessive to the proper (i.e., arche/rule), but also that
intensity that disarticulates the force of necessity in the proper. It is with these
thoughts in mind that we affirm that democratic politics has always been aesthetic.
Thesis 10: On Curatorship
I arrive now at my 10th thesis which, I will admit, is a disappointment. The
original version of the work has as its 10th thesis “on cognosis” – a made up word
that contracts gnosis and cognition and elaborates on the strategies of interpretation
in cultural theory that I find problematic – specifically, as I mentioned in my
introductory remarks, of the treating of cultural objects as possessing epistemic
qualities, that an aesthetic experience is like a moral claim. The ambition of the Ten
Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics is to show the limits of this interpretive given.
But as I said, the 10th thesis – on cognosis – is disappointing to me now after
reading it once again while preparing this talk. Instead, I want to propose and ask
you to help me think through another thesis that I call: “On Curatorship.”
The term curatorship is usually held for museum curators, or art restorers. It
involves the art of making distinctions about how and where things belong; but it
also involves the manners and practices of handling objects, of selections and
choices that bespeak a concernful attention to the world. Curatorship involves a
certain kind of attunement to care as a sensibility. To help us along – and have you
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help me along – in formulating this last thesis, here are a few passages that I find
central to my thinking on curatorship:
Heidegger:
Our concernful absorption in whatever work-world lies closest to us, has a function of discovering; and it is essential to this function that, depending upon the way in which we are absorbed, those entities within-the-world which are brought along [beigebrachte] in the work and with it (that is to say, in the assignments or references which are constitutive for it) remain discoverable in varying degrees of explicitness and with varying circumspective penetration. (Being & Time, I.3.71) When I am completely engrossed in dealing with something and make use of some equipment in this activity, I am just not directed toward the equipment as such, say, toward the tool. And I am just as little directed toward the work itself. Instead, in my occupation I move in the functionality relations as such. In understanding them I dwell with the equipmental contexture that is handy. (Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 293)
Another passage, this time from Cesare Brandi’s considerations on intervention in a work in his Theory of Restoration: Brandi:
And so, if we return to the alternatives of conservation or removal from visual and historical perspective, I consider it appropriate, whenever possible, to return a monument to that state of imperfection in which it had been left by the historical process, and which ill-considered restoration has completed. However, we should always respect the new oneness that – regardless of the restoration’s senselessness – affects the work of art, the more it is also a real source of historical material and evidence. (69)
And finally, a passage from Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason:
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Cavell:
I can’t tell you how I know. … It is the mark of a good teacher in certain domains to know when to stop prompting, domains in which further knowledge is earned not through further drilling but through proper waiting. Here is something I know but cannot prove: the closing image of For Whom the Bell Tolls. The hero dying in a pine forest in Spain, holding a rear-guard action alone to give his companions time for retreat, alludes to, or remembers, Roland’s death in The Song of Roland.
I ask you to help me figure not what these authors mean with these words, but how
we might handle these passages in order to think about the kind of concernful
awareness, or absorption, or regard, or care that accompanies an aesthetics of
politics as I have elaborated it in the nine preceding theses. I invite you, then, to
participate with me in handling these passages.
Thank you very much.
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