Aesthetics Equals Politics, Gage

Review and notes on Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses Across Art, Architecture, and Philosophy.

Politics Equals Aesthetics, Jacques Ranciere and Mark Foster Gage

• Aesthetics as more than a theory of art, but about the constitution of sensibility in experience. How do we experience the ‘common world’? - how do we hold experiences and images in common; how do we share, distribute, disseminate, transfigure, disfigure, modify, copy, replicate, duplicate, remix these?
• Politics is aesthetic: it was aesthetic before art. Politics is dominated by the argument over which experiences should be designated by which audiences and how these experiences can be restricted, spread, modified, shared.
• Social revolution is the daughter of aesthetic revolution.
• An aesthetic experience is the reattribution of the sensible.
• The aesthetic experience in relationship to temporality: taking time which the laborer does not have, emancipation.
• Standpoint epistemology - how does the distribution of the sensible manifest as a function of what we do and what we experience? In this sense, the aesthetic transfigures and disfigures itself.
• Does aesthetics generate equality or hierarchical differentiation?
• Althusser’s problem: where is the one who presents a grand theory of ideology situated in ideology? Althusser’s solution: the Wise One is situated somehow outside of ideology (‘seen the light’ - beckons the cynical interpretation of ideology as totalizing, Baudrillard-style) and leads the indoctrinated masses towards seeing beyond ideology. Williams’ solution: from cultural materialism, certain ideas capture a common structure of feeling which is irrepressible by nature of oppressive conditions of existence, and they escape incorporation and accumulate into substantive change. How does the aesthetic play this dynamic?
• ‘Inactive activity’, ‘active inactivity’ - disturbing the traditional distribution of activities and capacities
• How is space distributed in the modern sense? What is aesthetic about political acts such as Occupy Wall Street? Suppression of segregation of spaces; subverting the circulation of bodies throughout space. Standing Tank Man - occupation of space by doing nothing. (Additionally - Bartleby in Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener.)
  • Can architecture similarly engage in political subversion of space? Ranciere suggests such is not the point.
• Raising awareness doesn’t require action; it is not critical intervention.
  • Is this valid or fair? Is there really a fundamental difference between the notion of a ‘critical intervention’ and a real ‘awareness’ in an Althusserian analysis of visibility within ideological systems?
• Art always does something else than its ‘proper business’.
• Aesthetic vs Artistic - the artistic is concerned with the implementation of an idea, but the aesthetic operates more speculatively.
• Kantian disjunction - the form that is perceived is not always the same as the form that is planned. Concerned with how an idea may be subject to varied reception and give rise to differing stimulation.
• Estrangement: overturned from its original definition as the absence of interpretation into the forcefulness of interpretation - strangeness which must be explained and which gives rise to critical visibility as a product of such a journey.
• It is more difficult to enact estrangement in architecture than in more dynamic modes of art, such as literature or theater.
• Critical architecture reveals that there is nothing to reveal. You expect somehting, but there is nothing; the criticism is of that you are expecting something.
  • Blur Building
• It is very hard to reveal something through design or architecture.
• Architects hold tremendous poltiical power - the design of how bodies shall enter, make use of, and exit space. How to harness this?
• ‘Form follows function’
• Architecture - not only supposed to build new buildings, but new ways of inhabiting, and therefore new ways of life. It is not supposed to reveal the problems of this world but, to paraphrase Gandhi, ‘be the world you want to see’.
• Architectural dream of promoting equality through design - indeed a dream. Equality cannot be the product; it must be the point of departure.
  • Many emboldened architectural projects ended up becoming ghettos for drugs, criminality, terrorism. e.g. La Grande Borne anti-Le-Corbusier design.
• Architecture must produce a new condition of life.
  • Rosa Parks did not reveal inequality - it could not be ignored. By sitting in the front of the bus, she forcibly imagined a new world.
• Manya ttempts at liberating education end up being authoritarian.
• Poetics of knowledge - learning can derive form a multiplicity of places and ways.

Building and Breath: Beauty and the Pact of Aliveness, Elain Scarry

• Beauty surfaces everywhere. he beautiful affirms life.
• ‘Life pact’
• Architecture confirms beauty and the life pact.
• Beauty is always lifesaving, regardless of identity.
  • Is this really true? Is beauty an important function of identity - a ‘middle-class preoccupation’?
• How literal is the lifesaving power of beauty? Beautiful hospital design saves.
• Aliveness can be physically affirmed in the exterior of a building - through moss, biological wildlife, coral-like textures, snailshell spirals, and so on.
• Ugly spaces are punishing and inhibit healing. People desperately try to find beauty in these ugly spaces.
  • Is this really true? What counts as ugly? In which ways is ugliness a function of our prejudices and restrictive worldviews? And how does architecture which runs away from ugliness towards beauty a manifestation of such prejudices?
  • Is there a universality to beauty?
• Much of art is tied to breath - the regulation of intake and exhale of air.
• The Eiffel Tower as an airy structure lifted into the sky, breathing.
• Modern skyscrapers with green building tops literally breathe.
• Nuclear architecture is extreme asymmetricism and the total inversion of beauty.