Guest Editors’ Introduction

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2011

The nation, it is increasingly recognized, needs to be performed and materialized. The representation of national conflicts and contested pasts by governments and communities through various aesthetic artefacts and practices seeks to evoke and regulate multiple senses and feelings. But is a straightforwardly productive affect-feeling-always manifested? In this introduction, I reflect critically on some of the anthropological scholarship on nation, aesthetics, and senses and seek to offer new terms of analysis and styles of interpretation. Overall, I seek to problematize the often too easily invoked relationship between performative material embodiment and the nation. It is at the (often fractured) intersection of these multiple levels and through an ethnographic engagement with the acts of production, consumption, and social participation in the aesthetic representation of these national pasts that I locate the analytical focus of the anthropology of nation, aesthetics, and feelings in this special issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. The nation, it is increasingly recognized, needs to be performed and materialized through various aesthetic artefacts like national anthems, flags, memorials, museums, visual art, literature, songs, dance, poetry, films, landscapes, cultural property, and linguistic (enunciative) authority. These artistic and aesthetic artefacts have not only served as a tool of education, indoctrination, and enculturation. They also embody moralizing, introspective, and cathartic possibilities. Aesthetics (the original Greek form aisthitikos denotes 'perceptive by feeling') here refers to an affective domain in which various objects and phenomena animate and perform the nation. Aesthetics may involve visual and auditory sensory experiences, perception, and imagination which may be either pleasant or disturbing. Aesthetics may include a personal experience of a peculiar emotion, what appear to be very private feelings about an object or practice. They are, however, always dependent on psychological dispositions and anxieties, politics, class, desire, values, and knowledge, which all contribute to the conditions under which one experiences the aesthetic object (Bell 1998: 15). Aesthetics are thus intrinsically linked to ideology. On the one hand the commodification of art and aesthetic practices has served to socialize people to consumer culture. At the same time it has become the site of political and social dissent, a space of resistance

Proceedings of the 30th International Academic Conference, Venice, 2017

NeoMarxists scholars of education writing on urban life have tended to place aesthetics on the boundaries of critical practices, treating aesthetics as a surplus set of practices that could only be made fully usefully relevant when added on to a more concentrated attention to economy and politics. The main claim I want to make in this presentation is that aesthetic practices now underwrite the fibre of everyday modern life. As Arjun Appadurai usefully argues in Modernity at Large and History as Cultural Fact aesthetics are no longer to be simply understood as the practices of the artist, a maverick citizen creating images about the past, present and the future of human existence. But aesthetics are linked to the work of imagination of ordinary people and connected even more earnestly to the work of capitalism and its reorganization on a global scale. Contrary to the neoMarxist tradition, aesthetic practices are at the epicenter of lived experience and the commodified and institutional practices of modern societies. These practices, as CLR James allerted us to in American Civilization, constitute a great window on contemporary life revealing central contradictions, tensions and discontinuities. This, after all, was the burden of the Latin American and Caribbean Writers Forum of Intellectual and Cultural workers (George Lamming, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others) who had publicly opposed the Reagan government invasion of Grenada in 1983. They insisted, as did Arnaldo Roche-Rabel, that aesthetics were imbricated in economy and politics-that artistic militancy is critical to production of democracy. The work of aesthetics is crucial to any formula for democratic transformation. In this presentation, I would like to call attention to the following issues. First, the entanglement of the diffusion of modernization to the third world in aesthetics. Second, I want to point as well to the deepening role of aesthetics in the organization capitalism in the new millenium in which we live. Third, I will discuss briefly the crisis of language that the aestheticization of everyday life has imposed/precipitated in neoMarxist efforts to grasp the central dynamics of comtemporary society. The latter has led to a depreciation of the value and insightfulness of neoMarxist analysis in our time-old metaphors associated with the class, economy, state ("production," "reproduction," "resistance," "the labor/capital" contradiction) are all worn down by the transformations of the past decades in which the saturation of economic and political practices in aesthetic mediations has proceeded full scale.

sanart.org.tr

Dance is a widely practiced and appreciated art around the world; a highly rich event that “grows out of culture and feeds back into it”(Fraleigh," Family Resemblance" 6). Dance scholars in the West, however, have frequently complained about the little interest aestheticians have shown in dance and its complexities compared to other arts (Cohen," A Prolegomenon" 26; McFee, Dance, Education and Philosophy 1; Marchianò 20; Redfern 3; Sparshott 4; Thomas, Dance Modernity and Culture 10). It is the case that many ...

2009

I believe art is worldly, not otherworldly: not ineffable, untranslatable, or other. But I find myself increasingly troubled by the functionalism that shadows social theories of art, as critics vault over the disparities between individual works and social structures in their eagerness to nail down political meanings. The model of articulation, well known in cultural if not in literary studies, redeems such trespasses by allowing us to do justice to the contingency, mutability, and many-sidedness of cultural artifacts.

Art writing normally contrasts art with "everyday life." This book explores art as integral to the everyday life of modern society, providing materials to represent class and class conflict, to explore sex and sexuality, and to think about modern industry and economic relationships. Art, as we know it, is not common to all forms of society but is peculiar to our own; what art is changes with people's conceptions of the tasks of art, conceptions that are themselves a part of social history. The history of society does not shape art from the outside, but includes the attempts of artists to find new ways of making art and thinking about it.

2004

In its search for universal knowledge, philosophy has become mired in its own presuppositions. Its illuminating principles have often turned out to be illusions, its eternal truths merely local knowledge, its moral imperatives the architecture of custom often disguising the interests of privilege behind the sanctimoniousness of ethical structures. Thus the ancient dialectic between the Stoics and the Sophists continues to replay itself seemingly without end. But surely we must come at some point to a re-structuring of the issues, a re-direction of the philosophic quest. Where might this lie? Here we may find more answers than we might wish. It is important, however, to withstand the temptation to invent answers ex nihilo. Rather, we can use as our touchstone what is common and what is diverse in human experience, recognizing all the while that experience itself is never pure but historically and culturally conditioned. When we do this, the landscape of inquiry changes. It has, like ...

It is a pleasure and honour to be invited to open this conference on The Turn to Aesthetics. The programme before us is immensely rich and exciting and the organisers are to be congratulated not only for assembling such a comprehensive array of topics and speakers but indeed for conceiving the conference in the first place. There could be no better or more auspicious time to reflect on the “turn to aesthetics”, what it is, what it means, why it’s happening.

Rancière and Performance

This is a draft of my contribution to Colette Conroy and Nic Fryer (ed), Rancière and Peformance, forthcoming from Palgrave.