Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics

Examines the current history of architecture's contingency in the present situation of high security as the attempt to contain the inevitability of history by prediction and anticipation. Contingency is seen as the appearance of a lapse in time in which a potential insecurity can be anticipated. Architecture itself is responsible for insurance against risk and that has led to changes in the use of the architectural camera. Photography becomes securitized under conditions of emergency. Instead of its model in the archival function, architectural photography is absorbed to scanning technologies and automated photographies. The paper refers to the 2005 unveiling of architect Peter Eisenman's Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, as a model in regard of the contingency of the 'late' monument as effect. This effect - of historicity - is subjected to a methodology developed by Reinhardt Koselleck that of 'conceptual' history in Eisenman's practise and also in the work of two contemporary artists, Harun Farocki and  Walid Raad. The paper suggests architectural photography develops an ability to represent contingency as interruption to the circuits of exchange. In the ensuing delay, the virtual photographs used by Farocki and Raad create the possibility for the transition of photography into the ethical and political.

The following essay proceeds through twenty-one visual and textual 'scenes' from the complex history of the art school, as a contribution to debates about its political character. The title is taken from Jacques Rancière's (2013) Aisthesis. This is Rancière's most sustained exposition of the 'aesthetic regime of art'. His strategy in this book is to juxtapose 'the event' of an artwork against 'the interpretive network which gives it meaning' (2013, ix). He is specifically interested in the transition between different 'regimes of art'. The scenes in this article map the transition from what Rancière calls the 'representative regime' to the 'aesthetic regime' on to the historical, pedagogical, ideological, and political evolution of the modern art school. These scenes roughly cover the period from the formation of the Royal Academy in 1768 to the art school protests in 1968. They also include references to the nineteenth-century UK Schools of Design, Socialist Realism, Greenbergian Modernism, Althusserian ideology critique, and the Bauhaus. This essay is a sketch leading toward a longer, non-linear, counter-history of the art school.

We infer from Adorno (2004) that art alters the perception of reality, as it is through aesthetic experience that it is possible to overcome the limits of rationality and deny what dominates reality, and thus frees man from a state of alienation. Therefore, we follow a track based on art that involves aesthetics, ethics, and politics.

This study aims to determine what is left of the philosophical belief in art’s potential to bring about social emancipation and change early in the 21st century. It does so by critically assessing one of the most elaborate, emphatic and influential contemporary re-assertions of this potential by French philosopher Jacques Rancière. It focuses on three components of Rancière’s writings on aesthetics and politics that are key to such an evaluation. First, his affirmation of an emancipatory core at the heart of Idealist-Romanticist aesthetics, the aesthetic works of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich von Schiller in particular. Second, his reconceptualization of autonomous and heteronomous forms of political art in the modern era. Third, his critical analyses of dominant tendencies within political art from the 1960s until today and his own proposals for a truly emancipatory contemporary art practice.

With regard to the first component, the project problematizes Rancière’s return to aesthetics mainly by comparing it with theories recently articulated by other radical Leftist thinkers. It concerns theories that emphasize the contradictory political status of aesthetics as both reactionary and liberating (Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson) or point to a constitutive, original violence at its heart (Dave Beech & John Roberts). Based on this, I argue that Rancière’s redemptive approach toward aesthetics is too one-dimensional, resulting in an overly positive assessment of the emancipatory value of traditional conceptions of aesthetics.

In relation to the second key aspect of Rancière’s political aesthetics, I demonstrate how he offers a typically third way solution to the problematic of art’s autonomy and heteronomy. He does so by integrating some of the most complex twentieth century theorizations of both autonomous (Theodor Adorno) and heteronomous positions (Peter Bürger) into a dialectical working model. I argue that, regrettably, Rancière hereby also takes on board deeply tragic views on art’s political potential, resulting in an overcautious stance towards radically heteronomous art practices. Apart from critiquing him on this score, I point to alternative conceptualizations of art’s autonomy and heteronomy more suited to thinking the key characteristics and political potential of contemporary radicalized art.

As to Rancière’s critique of recent political art practices and his proposed alternative, I find it to be driven by a misguided attempt at conceiving the radical political potential of art in purely aesthetic terms to the neglect of other functions traditionally taken up by political artists such as representation and activism. I contend that not only can such a purist view on art’s politics not be upheld in fact - which even holds for Rancière’s own, alternative aesthetic politics of art - neither is it desirable if one wants to devise a robust and versatile theoretical framework for thinking contemporary politicized art. I do so by pointing to the radical political value of representational artistic strategies, as well as artistic practices that engage in activities beyond those traditionally associated with art.

This paper deals with the problem of filmically representing political revolutions. In working out what film can do with and for revolution, it argues that the representation of revolution is not as powerful or mobilizing as the reflection of revolutionary practices and ideas, always at a distance from the realm of representation. Documentary practices, I contend, can serve active reflection on the side and site of struggle. The concept of reflection leads to a deeper phenomenological and historical understanding of such documentary footage, as well as an understanding of the dynamics of revolutionary events themselves. The essay responds to political-theoretical discourse positing the “invisibility” of politics and the People. Its central claim is that film, but also more broadly audiovisual media in all their current proliferation, can have a revolutionary function that is usefully distinguished from the old one of symbolically representing revolutionary unity. The medium’s function need not be reduced to collective self-representation, of imagining the people as ‘One,’ when it is also engaged in the diffuse work of creating revolutionary subjects out of the process of collective reflection. As both a record and a means of this reflection, film can be revolutionary in ways that are as far from the practices of Eisenstein and Vertov as they are from those of Lenin and Mao.