Project Proposal- my new york-(Betances

I contacted some friends to work with,but I was not successful in communicating with them. So for this week, I created my own project:

Recently, I became part of the filmmaking group : “ New Third Cinema Circle” in which we would like to explore the limits of the medium within our political ideals of collaborative work. We are now creating workshops with the Betances Community Center in Bronx and the community center itself has the theme for their programs :” We are New York” . I would like to work with the community (mostly immigrant communities) within this theme and come up with collaborative art . As Kwan’s article suggests this relationship itself is an artwork by itself.

This project will have two steps:

First Step will be using a previous project of mine that I devolep with Nitin and Shannon Mattern : http://urt.parsons.edu/urt/research/project/my-new-york . In this part , I  will ask them to take me to the their most meaningful “space” in the city. I will walk with camera  (Sara Pink’s method) with them and record their walk as a text and I will also record their stories. Then I will map them out using the tool I used with collaborating with them.

Second step: In this step, we will have workshop with the participants to find ways to return their stories to the sites they picked. In this part , I will be more of a facilitator rather than the artist.

week 2- unfinished notes

Week-2

The Society of the Spectacle Guy Debord

Chapter 1 The Culmination of Separation

“But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence . . . truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.” Feuerbach p1

Feurbach suggests the rise of illusion over reality –representation to reach to level sacredness. This dialectic image is not explaining the positions in between but mostly Hegelian dichotomy. However, the critique is an important one.

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation (1) p 1

Criticism of modernity and its necessity to document everything and the politics of representation is mentioned in this quote. What about the spectacles prior to the modernism? What did change? Maybe modern spectacle is commoditization and used for control purposes. What about the old sacred (Feurbach) spectacles? What about the usage of the church images for the purposes of spreading the church ideology. Of course that times did not enjoy the mass production of the spectacles through technology- though the church ceremonies could be considered as spectacles.

The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving 2 p1

Important definition of the spectacle which includes the distinction of the non-living and life and relating it to non-living instead of the life.

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation. 3 – p1

The organization of the non-living from the previous quote turns into the society- it is the unification over the symbols and images as Benedict Anderson suggests about the imagined- communities but it is in fact the source of alienation. Maybe alienation from the interest of Arendt where the individual seeks the share the personal ones is the answer to this quote.

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. 4 p1

Behind the idea of spectacle, there is the politics of power and control. Images themselves is not the one who creates the spectacle but the ordering of them in certain order.

the spectacle is both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production…the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. 6 p 2

The illusion of choice in the market economy is clearly defined by Debord in this quote. The desire created from the system to choose as a command on the person- choices are the prisons of the individuals when it is not their choice.

Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global social practice split into reality and image. The social practice confronted by an autonomous spectacle is at the same time the real totality which contains that spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point that the spectacle seems to be its goal. The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the dominant system of production — signs which are at the same time the ultimate end-products of that system. 7 p2

Separation of real and image is the way the control established by the social practice, this separation works through creating signs –the language of the spectacle. This social practice is the ordering of the objects into the hierarchical categories and diminishing the represented from the representation.

In analyzing the spectacle we are obliged to a certain extent to use the spectacle’s own language, in the sense that we have to operate on the methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in the spectacle. For the spectacle is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we are caught. 11 P 3

The criticism of the spectacle and the modernism as a social economic formation uses the same language. so the criticism cannot go outside to the limits of the spectacle unless it defies the rationale. Historicism that Benjamin creates is the history of the spectacles and Debord’s comment of meaning and agenda is hidden behind the flow of similar images- Would Debord agree with Benjamin with using the materialist historiography to go against the oppressor’s narrative. Where is the victim of the spectacle? Do they have any language of their own or is it just limited to the hegemonic classes.

Being- Having- Appearing-17

This is the sequence of the meaning presented in the social systems appearing to be the last phase. Facebook is the ultimate product of this- it changes everything lived into its language and the person is equated with the profile.

The spectacle inherits the weakness of the Western philosophical project, which attempted to understand activity by means of the categories of vision, and it is based on the relentless development of the particular technical rationality that grew out of that form of thought.19 p4

Both Fabian and Foucault criticizes the visible to be the bases of Western thought and eliminating the other senses. Debord’s concept of spectacle can be discussed within the Orientalism discourses and the representation politics of World Fair’s in representing the other.

The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion.20 p4

This quote of Debord confirms my points about Church and its’ spectacle to be part of the modernist spectacle discourse as the colonialisation through the image has earlier parts in the history.

 

As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep. P4

Check Benjamin and collective dreaming, it sounds very similar.

The root of the spectacle is that oldest of all social specializations, the specialization of power. 23- p5

Debord in this quote equalizes the power and spectacle in its organization schematics.

But the spectacle is not the inevitable consequence of some supposedly natural technological development. On the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technological content. If the spectacle, considered in the limited sense of the “mass media” that are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to be invading society in the form of a mere technical apparatus, it should be understood that this apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been developed in accordance with the spectacle’s internal dynamics. If the social needs of the age in which such technologies are developed can be met only through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact between people has become totally dependent on these means of instantaneous communication, it is because this “communication” is essentially unilateral. The concentration of these media thus amounts to concentrating in the hands of the administrators of the existing system the means that enable them to carry on this particular form of administration. The social separation reflected in the spectacle is inseparable from the modern state — the product of the social division of labor that is both the chief instrument of class rule and the concentrated expression of all social divisions. 24-5

This quote of Debord suggests technological advances like clock, printing.. is not the basis of modernism as the most of the narratives suggests. It is closer to Mumford’s suggestion of technology to be result of the cultural it is more of a techne but Debord is more political about it as it is more ideology rather than culture. But the instant communication technologies like Facebook and Twitter is seen to be used as a way organizing uprisings against the political systems in either Cairo or OWS but as the Debord suggests these tools use the language of the political system . But I think agency is very limited in Debord’s formulation. What about the hackers but I guess I should not forget about the historical context as most of the practices rise out of Debord’s situationists.

Religion justified the cosmic and ontological order that corresponded to the interests of the masters, expounding and embellishing everything their societies could not deliver. In this sense, all separate power has been spectacular. But this earlier universal devotion to a fixed religious imagery was only a shared acknowledgment of loss, an imaginary compensation for the poverty of a concrete social activity that was still generally experienced as a unitary condition. In contrast, the modern spectacle depicts what society could deliver, but in so doing it rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted. 25 p5-6

As Debord points out Religion and modernity uses the spectacles to organize its hierarchical order on the society through using spectacles but one key difference Debord suggests in this quote is that previous uses it to suggest what it cannot establish and in the modernism it is the reverse of what could be done. Positive and negative freedom concepts of political systems comes to mind but in reality it is the lack of freedom in both of the cases.

 

 

 

 

There can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle activity is nullified — all real activity having been forcibly channeled into the global construction of the spectacle. Thus, what is referred to as a “liberation from work,” namely the modern increase in leisure time, is neither a liberation of work itself nor a liberation from the world shaped by this kind of work. 27 –p6

The management of the time into economical means and measuring it for the efficiency and giving people free-time (an ironic term) to make them productive is the key theme in this quote. “What are you doing in life?” is the everyday politics of this hegemony over time.

The spectacle’s social function is the concrete manufacture of alienation. 32- p7

Spectacle is the result of production but itself produces the alienation and alienation is the way the social structure is built. So Debord is presenting us with a circular image.

Chapter 2 The Commodity as Spectacle

Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator. The commodity’s independence has spread to the entire economy it now dominates. This economy has transformed the world, but it has merely transformed it into a world dominated by the economy. The pseudonature within which human labor has become alienated demands that such labor remain forever in its service; and since this demand is formulated by and answerable only to itself, it in fact ends up channeling all socially permitted projects and endeavors into its own reinforcement. The abundance of commodities — that is, the abundance of commodity relations — amounts to nothing more than an augmented survival. 40- p 10

Economy’s invention as a way to survive the natural difficulties but as a result of that the economy to be integrated into everything creating the pseudonature- labor turns into only serving this augmented survival with the abundance of the commodities it produces.

Chapter 3 Unity and Division Within Appearances

The agent of the spectacle who is put on stage as a star is the opposite of an individual; he is as clearly the enemy of his own individuality as of the individuality of others. Entering the spectacle as a model to be identified with, he renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the succession of things. The stars of consumption, though outwardly representing different personality types, actually show each of these types enjoying equal access to, and deriving equal happiness from, the entire realm of consumption. The stars of decisionmaking must possess the full range of admired human qualities: official differences between them are thus canceled out by the official similarity implied by their supposed excellence in every field of endeavor. 61 p17

People as role models and necessity for them to be so after their consumption at the same time, the necessity for the new ones to be produced constantly are the agents of the spectacle for Debord.  What about the stars of the art world and even activism- are not there some of the pseudo-revolutionaires? Are they really speaking the language of freedom or stuck within the spectacle? Harvey Dent’s portrayal as hero at the end of Dark Knight or even the Batman and other super heroes- are they really the hero or the order restorers.

The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class division underlying the real unity of the capitalist mode of production. What obliges the producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what excludes them from it. What brings people into relation with each other by liberating them from their local and national limitations is also what keeps them apart. What requires increased rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchical exploitation and repression. What produces society’s abstract power also produces its concrete lack of freedom. P 20  72

Good summary of the previous arguments. Debord’s critique is valid for globalization of the market and its claims for freedom and unity. It is an illusion. People thinks they are part of the global market- even social networks, but how much they are involved with decision- making processes or economical gains of the network they feed with their personal data to be sold. And how social are  the people within this so called social world. Some people calls Holocaust to be result of irrationality but as Resnais points out in his remarkable film Night and Fog it is completely depends on rationality and efficiency. So the solution is not about more logic but more empathy and care for the misdeeds of the states.

 

Chapter 4 The Proletariat as Subject and Representation

When people are thrust into history and forced to participate in the work and struggles that constitute history, they find themselves obliged to view their relationships in a clear and disabused manner. This history has no object distinct from what it creates from out of itself, although the final unconscious metaphysical vision of the historical era considered the productive progression through which history had unfolded as itself the object of history. As for the subject of history, it can be nothing other than the self-production of the living — living people becoming masters and possessors of their own historical world and of their own fully conscious adventures.

What is the struggle that makes the History? Most of the time ,History evades the narrative of the oppressed; even though they participated in these events. What Debord tries to say might be becoming the agent of the History- but I will not agree that History is the self-production of life and living people- it is more likely that it is made out of them and or despite of them.

unfinished notes week 1

Art and Accountability

Doris Sommer

Harvard University

 

Pedro Reyes- the spring of 2006 with projections of the future -felt stuck between wanting to be honest and not wanting to spread gloom.- Reyes discovered two cultural agents, ‘‘connectionists’’ to use his neologism, who show how to link creative practices to social and democratic development. P261

Distopic visions of the past are always more intriguing than the positive one and they are most likely to hold true. What does the “connectionists” connect? Is it  connecting the temporality or people? Future is not yet exist but it is not distant from the present. There is still a room for an agency to shape it.

The first and most spectacular agent today is Antanas Mockus, a mayor

who thinks like an artist. The second is Augusto Boal, an artist who acts in

city government. P261

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antanas_Mockus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Boal

http://www.pedroreyes.net/

 Alejandro Jodorowsky, for example, whose range of creative interventions (poetry, psycho magic, film, and plastic arts) may well serve as the third inspiration for the cultural agency of Reyes’s future show. ‘‘Latin America may be politically unstable and poor by economic measures,’’ he concluded, ‘‘but it is incredibly rich in creativity.’’ That richness can pay off in public gains. It’s not that creative arts lack intrinsic value, but that this very autonomy triggers fresh perceptions and unclogs procedure in

ways that make it a social resource to reckon with. P3

Jodorowsky’s interventions in the public sphere his criticism of OWS to lack spirituality to change the system but asking for materiality. http://vimeo.com/31446049

creativity may contribute to democratic social change. So much depends on the delicacy and skill of interpretation which often determines the pleasure and after-effects of others. ‘‘There is

nothing either good or bad,’’ says the artist Shakespeare, ‘‘but thinking makes it so’’ (Hamlet , II:2). P 262

What is the creativity and is it that strong to make changes. Can creativity defends democratic social change? Was not Weimar republic on its prime of creativity when Nazis got into the power or back in Italy? Can we really defeat fascism by the creativity?

To make good on this broad-based power of persuasion, humanists may want to add a reflexive question to research agendas and to lesson plans: how does our interpretive or pedagogical work affect the world? P262

Artists and artwork most of the time focus on to the immediate exposure of the finished work rather than the discursive affects it has and reappropriation by the community. Education is also similar but one question why is the author taking arts and education at the same category. Is artist a teacher?

Agent is a term that acknowledges the small shifts in perspective and practice that can turn artists and teachers into first movers toward collective change.3 The option of agency released Reyes from the familiar double bind of expecting too much from art and too little: on the one hand, artists and critics can make the radical and impractical demand that art replace a bad social system for a better one; on the other, they may stop short of expecting any change and stay stuck in denunciation, irony, cynicism, melancholy p262

This duality of gloominess or naïve hope of the artist was the dilemma I had faced in my own life as well. I have to admit most of the time I chose the darker version but it might be just throwing one stone to the lake and see the waves reach others. I decided to pursue Hannah Arendt’s “vita activa” to be present in the community rather than making comments from my couch.

Mockus took action by engaging culture to connect the body and soul of the city.6 If the body politic had grown too weak to process fiscal cures or to expect security, the first treatment was to revive a democratizing desire for civility through art, antics, and accountability. P263

What could be the body and soul of the city, engaging the people spreading hope that could make changes in the society. How could we create this for immigrants how can you make them feel at home or others to agree to hospitability?

Spectacle created a public, a res-pu´ blica to enjoy and to reflect on the law after citizens had

been avoiding one another during years of lawlessness, mutual suspicion,

and fear.p263

Could art speak the language of the law? Can it be a law? What is the boundary for using art to promote laws? Is the ethics self-contained within the artwork itself.

Engaged citizens don’t simply follow laws; they also participate in constructing and adjusting law to changing conditions .p263

Important point

 

the municipality’s inspired staff hired twenty pantomime / The mayor’s team also printed thousands of laminated cards with a green thumb-up on one side and red thumb-down on the other, for

citizens to signal approval or disapproval of traffic behavior and help to self-regulate a shared public sphere/Another playful interruption of murderous routine was ‘‘Women’s Night Out.’’ Unlike the direct demands for women’s rights in the Anglo-American movement ‘‘Take Back the Night,’’ Bogota´’s politics were indirect and playful, encouraging sociability among women who took to the streets, the bars, and dance clubs while the men stayed home.p263

The examples..

 

Mockus recommends inventing games that will work better and learning to think counterfactually. Without imagining the world otherwise, change is unthinkable. And thinking otherwise is an invitation p264

to play.

I should start thinking about this possibility of creating new documentary games as a way to challenge the established facts, I should start thinking about the possibility of impossible things..

Augusto Boal has been playing all his life. Founder of ‘‘Theater of the Oppressed’’ as a companion to Paulo Freire’s ‘‘pedagogy of the oppressed,’’ Boal developed interactive theater, first in Brazil and then throughout the world. P264

Information about Boal related to Freire

The difference between responsible action and reckless representation triggered Boal’s reflection

on the relationship between art and accountability. P264

Engaging the crowds even mobilizing them into certain actions are mostly positive things but history is full of examples where the good intended crowds creating fascistic communities. And as Boal indicates the responsibility of the artist to the reaction he or she incited on the society. Of course nothing could be calculated before hand but some artworks just work into being controversial.

‘‘Forum Theater’’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_theatre

After several people from the public intervene to adjust

the script, participants on and off stage can sense a double dose of magic:

insoluble problems have morphed into artistic challenges that spur

competition for creativity; and participants acknowledge new admiration

for creative neighbors who can avert tragedy.

When facilitators add a third act, to distribute pieces of paper and

pencils for the public to jot down possible laws that would respond to the

problems represented on stage, the activity is called ‘‘Legislative Theater.

                                                                                                                                 

While he served on the City Council, Boal sponsored

legislation collected from audiences and actors in marginal neighborhoods.

Thirteen of those laws have passed, and several were adopted at the

national level p265

General information about forum theater and how it is applied by Boal to administrative purposes. Some kind of direct democracy is present in here.

we humanists can recognize socially responsive agency through at least two standard professional approaches to the arts: we highlight particular creative practices; and we give those practices a

theoretical spin. P 266

What differentiates a creative practice from the ordinary daily activities? What about minor creative acts? How much theory could really cover the practice..

Bilingual games cross country limits; they evince histories of migration, complicated belonging, and flexible identity, as well as aesthetic (and cognitive, political, philosophical) advantages. My

preference for emphasizing these creative compensations for the difficulty of living in two or more languages is meant to renew appreciation for literary specificity in the face of cultural nationalism….

In other words, bilingual aesthetics casts the precarious subjects as self-authorizing and original agents, even in the face of monolingual nativists. P266

Bilingual aesthetics is an interesting way to challenge the limitations of the language and cultural nationalism (both of them intertwined in each other most of the time). One issue I have with this bilingual game is not its content but its limit of opening the space. This game could be illusion of overcoming the obstacles in getting alternative voices to be heard, but it is a way to show it is possible to have multivocality in the space.

The objective for cultural agents is not a partisan victory but the development of ‘‘thick’’ political subjects who participate in democratic life. Democracy depends on sturdy and

resourceful citizens able to engage more than one point of view and to wrest rights and resources from limited assets. In other words, nonauthoritarian government counts on creativity to loosen conventional

thought and free up the space where conflicts are negotiated, before they reach a brink of either despair or aggression. P 267

“thick political subjects” are the resourceful citizens and at the same time cultural agents living in non-authorian governments. And all the layer uniting these definitions are the inclination towards creativity. One problem I saw in this utopic view is the need for the thick political subjects most of the time rises under the authoritarian regimes where being resourceful citizen is a survival skill among many violent conflicts. The political affect of creativity is limited within the border of the other’s readiness for communication. I guess the limited assets is suggesting the conditions of the creativity in most cases.

Making art, therefore, amounts to a kind of creative control over

available material. The first ripple effect is a self-authorizing, enabling,

sense of engagement with existing material. A second ripple effect of this

hands-on training with always limited resources is the recognition that

constraint is a condition of creativity, not a nemesis. P 268

participatory art projects could empower the participants to create their own works and improve their skills, while using the limited resources in a best way and it is important to learn not to fear.Politic , economic limits as well as the limits of the medium is within this discussion in the text.

 

 

 

Selfinterest apparently need not cancel social and moral norms; in fact, as Hannah Arendt reminds us, inter-est depends on others and on training to imagine their perspectives.24 Therefore, a third ripple effect of aesthetic education */ in the spirit of Schiller’s program for modern civility */ may well be a generally enhanced faculty for active and democratic citizenship. P268

The real dilemma of the collective movement is its dependency on the individuals . The question is how these cacophonic chorus of self-interests turns into the political action. Arendt’s description of interest hints at the necessity of the other to determine the self. So the self-interest is the interest in the other. Although, I have to admit this is a loose thread that does not work most of the time, we have the alienation process everywhere and objectification of the other to inflict violence.

Artful interruptions can unblock procedures mired in habitual abuses

or indifference in order to get those practices back on track. Theodore

Adorno explored this function of art when he dismissed art’s ultimate

autonomy as illusory, but nevertheless valued the magic show for the

margin of freedom to offer critique that art makes available.25 Less supple

treatments of the relationship between art and politics suggest a

substitution of one term by the other: either art is a kind of politics and

politics a kind of art, or the confusion seems hopelessly misguided. P269

The most important of this quote is the blending of art and politics into each other rather than seeing them as a separate spheres of action.What is a critique is an important question in this sense and is it really free of the illusion that is generally associated with art. Can art relate to real things and be an illusion or vice versa? How real is the politics and the politician?

 This is a recurring worry for Walter Benjamin. See his ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ especially numbers 2 and 9 in Illuminations, edited by Hanna Arendt, trans.

Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969) 253_/ 264. In the same volume, see also the Epilogue of ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’’ ‘‘All efforts to render politics aesthetic leads to one thing: war . . . Mankind, which in Homer’s time

was an object of contemplation for the Olympian Gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an

aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is

rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.’’ P269 endnotes

Benjamin’s worry about the replacing one sphere art to the sphere of politics is an answer to my question of politics of illusion. Nazis did not lack neither creativity nor arts but used it for propaganda in many cases it uses same strategies in mobilizing the crowds as the socially conscious art movements described here. I have to admit there is no ethics bound to any of the art activities at its conception but what distinct the mayhem of propaganda and the hope of artistic intervention is the time and the narrative. What is good or evil is not inherent or not clear. There are lots of gray areas.

What makes an interventionist artwork , good is it the intentions or functionality or the aesthetics? Can we use the established art criticism to value the performance of the mimes in Bogota?

Defamiliarization lifts the pall of unproductive repetition, including the procedure and political arguments that get jammed by corruption or tendentiousness. This makes renewed deliberation a possible after-effect of art. P270

What is the boundary between defamiliarization and alienation? Both of the processes works through the distancing effect of the art. The answer might be very out there but it should not be taken granted.But one important point here is taking “after-effect of art” into consideration that could maintain the difference between the two.

Reason would reduce judgment to mere calculation, so Kant located that faculty for thinking freely in the unreasonable evaluation of beauty and the sublime. Aesthetic experience is a second-order pleasure. It judges immediate pleasures in order to distinguish self-serving enjoyment of an object that may be physically or morally useful from the freely conferred admiration for the form of an object, regardless of use or meaning. The exercise of judgment requires practice in locating aesthetic pleasure beyond external purpose and existing concepts. Unlike other philosophical activities, aesthetic judgment for Kant assumes that all evaluators will reach the same conclusion, since their exercises should be equally free from interest. Positing intersubjective agreement, Kant resignified ‘‘common sense’’ as the sense of judgment derived from freedom that we have in common and that can develop into an aptitude for free citizenship. Kant did not follow up on this ethico-political consequence of art for art’s sake, Hannah Arendt explains, because it might have been risky to engage political philosophy and it was, in any case, redundant.30 Judgment leads to political deliberation, she concludes. But the corollary between examined private pleasures and enhanced public sphere is news to most scholars today, good news that humanists might explore through programs that develop a taste for active (i.e. creative) citizenship. P271

 

Reason by itself is not enough for Kant just a calculation. So aesthetics are needed to create the decisions. Aesthetics as a way to relate to the world of objects and create a relationship with them. But even then it is not enpugh for making judgements but a need for intersubjective agreement and common sense is necessary so in a way this relationship with objects should be within the collective. This is not a result reached within this formulation but more of a suggestion. As aesthetics itself an area of politics and there are many instances in the art history to go against the common aesthetic values and even most of the art manifesto depends on that. As Arendt suggests even though being the sole supporter of some ideal belief in this case aesthetics will require to search for others to share it with.

Art and Accountability

Doris Sommer

Harvard University

 

Pedro Reyes- the spring of 2006 with projections of the future -felt stuck between wanting to be honest and not wanting to spread gloom.- Reyes discovered two cultural agents, ‘‘connectionists’’ to use his neologism, who show how to link creative practices to social and democratic development. P261

Distopic visions of the past are always more intriguing than the positive one and they are most likely to hold true. What does the “connectionists” connect? Is it  connecting the temporality or people? Future is not yet exist but it is not distant from the present. There is still a room for an agency to shape it.

The first and most spectacular agent today is Antanas Mockus, a mayor

who thinks like an artist. The second is Augusto Boal, an artist who acts in

city government. P261

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antanas_Mockus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Boal

http://www.pedroreyes.net/

 Alejandro Jodorowsky, for example, whose range of creative interventions (poetry, psycho magic, film, and plastic arts) may well serve as the third inspiration for the cultural agency of Reyes’s future show. ‘‘Latin America may be politically unstable and poor by economic measures,’’ he concluded, ‘‘but it is incredibly rich in creativity.’’ That richness can pay off in public gains. It’s not that creative arts lack intrinsic value, but that this very autonomy triggers fresh perceptions and unclogs procedure in

ways that make it a social resource to reckon with. P3

Jodorowsky’s interventions in the public sphere his criticism of OWS to lack spirituality to change the system but asking for materiality. http://vimeo.com/31446049

creativity may contribute to democratic social change. So much depends on the delicacy and skill of interpretation which often determines the pleasure and after-effects of others. ‘‘There is

nothing either good or bad,’’ says the artist Shakespeare, ‘‘but thinking makes it so’’ (Hamlet , II:2). P 262

What is the creativity and is it that strong to make changes. Can creativity defends democratic social change? Was not Weimar republic on its prime of creativity when Nazis got into the power or back in Italy? Can we really defeat fascism by the creativity?

To make good on this broad-based power of persuasion, humanists may want to add a reflexive question to research agendas and to lesson plans: how does our interpretive or pedagogical work affect the world? P262

Artists and artwork most of the time focus on to the immediate exposure of the finished work rather than the discursive affects it has and reappropriation by the community. Education is also similar but one question why is the author taking arts and education at the same category. Is artist a teacher?

Agent is a term that acknowledges the small shifts in perspective and practice that can turn artists and teachers into first movers toward collective change.3 The option of agency released Reyes from the familiar double bind of expecting too much from art and too little: on the one hand, artists and critics can make the radical and impractical demand that art replace a bad social system for a better one; on the other, they may stop short of expecting any change and stay stuck in denunciation, irony, cynicism, melancholy p262

This duality of gloominess or naïve hope of the artist was the dilemma I had faced in my own life as well. I have to admit most of the time I chose the darker version but it might be just throwing one stone to the lake and see the waves reach others. I decided to pursue Hannah Arendt’s “vita activa” to be present in the community rather than making comments from my couch.

Mockus took action by engaging culture to connect the body and soul of the city.6 If the body politic had grown too weak to process fiscal cures or to expect security, the first treatment was to revive a democratizing desire for civility through art, antics, and accountability. P263

What could be the body and soul of the city, engaging the people spreading hope that could make changes in the society. How could we create this for immigrants how can you make them feel at home or others to agree to hospitability?

Spectacle created a public, a res-pu´ blica to enjoy and to reflect on the law after citizens had

been avoiding one another during years of lawlessness, mutual suspicion,

and fear.p263

Could art speak the language of the law? Can it be a law? What is the boundary for using art to promote laws? Is the ethics self-contained within the artwork itself.

Engaged citizens don’t simply follow laws; they also participate in constructing and adjusting law to changing conditions .p263

Important point

 

the municipality’s inspired staff hired twenty pantomime / The mayor’s team also printed thousands of laminated cards with a green thumb-up on one side and red thumb-down on the other, for

citizens to signal approval or disapproval of traffic behavior and help to self-regulate a shared public sphere/Another playful interruption of murderous routine was ‘‘Women’s Night Out.’’ Unlike the direct demands for women’s rights in the Anglo-American movement ‘‘Take Back the Night,’’ Bogota´’s politics were indirect and playful, encouraging sociability among women who took to the streets, the bars, and dance clubs while the men stayed home.p263

The examples..

 

Mockus recommends inventing games that will work better and learning to think counterfactually. Without imagining the world otherwise, change is unthinkable. And thinking otherwise is an invitation p264

to play.

I should start thinking about this possibility of creating new documentary games as a way to challenge the established facts, I should start thinking about the possibility of impossible things..

Augusto Boal has been playing all his life. Founder of ‘‘Theater of the Oppressed’’ as a companion to Paulo Freire’s ‘‘pedagogy of the oppressed,’’ Boal developed interactive theater, first in Brazil and then throughout the world. P264

Information about Boal related to Freire

The difference between responsible action and reckless representation triggered Boal’s reflection

on the relationship between art and accountability. P264

Engaging the crowds even mobilizing them into certain actions are mostly positive things but history is full of examples where the good intended crowds creating fascistic communities. And as Boal indicates the responsibility of the artist to the reaction he or she incited on the society. Of course nothing could be calculated before hand but some artworks just work into being controversial.

‘‘Forum Theater’’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_theatre

After several people from the public intervene to adjust

the script, participants on and off stage can sense a double dose of magic:

insoluble problems have morphed into artistic challenges that spur

competition for creativity; and participants acknowledge new admiration

for creative neighbors who can avert tragedy.

When facilitators add a third act, to distribute pieces of paper and

pencils for the public to jot down possible laws that would respond to the

problems represented on stage, the activity is called ‘‘Legislative Theater.

                                                                                                                                 

While he served on the City Council, Boal sponsored

legislation collected from audiences and actors in marginal neighborhoods.

Thirteen of those laws have passed, and several were adopted at the

national level p265

General information about forum theater and how it is applied by Boal to administrative purposes. Some kind of direct democracy is present in here.

we humanists can recognize socially responsive agency through at least two standard professional approaches to the arts: we highlight particular creative practices; and we give those practices a

theoretical spin. P 266

What differentiates a creative practice from the ordinary daily activities? What about minor creative acts? How much theory could really cover the practice..

Bilingual games cross country limits; they evince histories of migration, complicated belonging, and flexible identity, as well as aesthetic (and cognitive, political, philosophical) advantages. My

preference for emphasizing these creative compensations for the difficulty of living in two or more languages is meant to renew appreciation for literary specificity in the face of cultural nationalism….

In other words, bilingual aesthetics casts the precarious subjects as self-authorizing and original agents, even in the face of monolingual nativists. P266

Bilingual aesthetics is an interesting way to challenge the limitations of the language and cultural nationalism (both of them intertwined in each other most of the time). One issue I have with this bilingual game is not its content but its limit of opening the space. This game could be illusion of overcoming the obstacles in getting alternative voices to be heard, but it is a way to show it is possible to have multivocality in the space.

The objective for cultural agents is not a partisan victory but the development of ‘‘thick’’ political subjects who participate in democratic life. Democracy depends on sturdy and

resourceful citizens able to engage more than one point of view and to wrest rights and resources from limited assets. In other words, nonauthoritarian government counts on creativity to loosen conventional

thought and free up the space where conflicts are negotiated, before they reach a brink of either despair or aggression. P 267

“thick political subjects” are the resourceful citizens and at the same time cultural agents living in non-authorian governments. And all the layer uniting these definitions are the inclination towards creativity. One problem I saw in this utopic view is the need for the thick political subjects most of the time rises under the authoritarian regimes where being resourceful citizen is a survival skill among many violent conflicts. The political affect of creativity is limited within the border of the other’s readiness for communication. I guess the limited assets is suggesting the conditions of the creativity in most cases.

Making art, therefore, amounts to a kind of creative control over

available material. The first ripple effect is a self-authorizing, enabling,

sense of engagement with existing material. A second ripple effect of this

hands-on training with always limited resources is the recognition that

constraint is a condition of creativity, not a nemesis. P 268

participatory art projects could empower the participants to create their own works and improve their skills, while using the limited resources in a best way and it is important to learn not to fear.Politic , economic limits as well as the limits of the medium is within this discussion in the text.

 

 

 

Selfinterest apparently need not cancel social and moral norms; in fact, as Hannah Arendt reminds us, inter-est depends on others and on training to imagine their perspectives.24 Therefore, a third ripple effect of aesthetic education */ in the spirit of Schiller’s program for modern civility */ may well be a generally enhanced faculty for active and democratic citizenship. P268

The real dilemma of the collective movement is its dependency on the individuals . The question is how these cacophonic chorus of self-interests turns into the political action. Arendt’s description of interest hints at the necessity of the other to determine the self. So the self-interest is the interest in the other. Although, I have to admit this is a loose thread that does not work most of the time, we have the alienation process everywhere and objectification of the other to inflict violence.

Artful interruptions can unblock procedures mired in habitual abuses

or indifference in order to get those practices back on track. Theodore

Adorno explored this function of art when he dismissed art’s ultimate

autonomy as illusory, but nevertheless valued the magic show for the

margin of freedom to offer critique that art makes available.25 Less supple

treatments of the relationship between art and politics suggest a

substitution of one term by the other: either art is a kind of politics and

politics a kind of art, or the confusion seems hopelessly misguided. P269

The most important of this quote is the blending of art and politics into each other rather than seeing them as a separate spheres of action.What is a critique is an important question in this sense and is it really free of the illusion that is generally associated with art. Can art relate to real things and be an illusion or vice versa? How real is the politics and the politician?

 This is a recurring worry for Walter Benjamin. See his ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ especially numbers 2 and 9 in Illuminations, edited by Hanna Arendt, trans.

Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969) 253_/ 264. In the same volume, see also the Epilogue of ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’’ ‘‘All efforts to render politics aesthetic leads to one thing: war . . . Mankind, which in Homer’s time

was an object of contemplation for the Olympian Gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an

aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is

rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.’’ P269 endnotes

Benjamin’s worry about the replacing one sphere art to the sphere of politics is an answer to my question of politics of illusion. Nazis did not lack neither creativity nor arts but used it for propaganda in many cases it uses same strategies in mobilizing the crowds as the socially conscious art movements described here. I have to admit there is no ethics bound to any of the art activities at its conception but what distinct the mayhem of propaganda and the hope of artistic intervention is the time and the narrative. What is good or evil is not inherent or not clear. There are lots of gray areas.

What makes an interventionist artwork , good is it the intentions or functionality or the aesthetics? Can we use the established art criticism to value the performance of the mimes in Bogota?

Defamiliarization lifts the pall of unproductive repetition, including the procedure and political arguments that get jammed by corruption or tendentiousness. This makes renewed deliberation a possible after-effect of art. P270

What is the boundary between defamiliarization and alienation? Both of the processes works through the distancing effect of the art. The answer might be very out there but it should not be taken granted.But one important point here is taking “after-effect of art” into consideration that could maintain the difference between the two.

Reason would reduce judgment to mere calculation, so Kant located that faculty for thinking freely in the unreasonable evaluation of beauty and the sublime. Aesthetic experience is a second-order pleasure. It judges immediate pleasures in order to distinguish self-serving enjoyment of an object that may be physically or morally useful from the freely conferred admiration for the form of an object, regardless of use or meaning. The exercise of judgment requires practice in locating aesthetic pleasure beyond external purpose and existing concepts. Unlike other philosophical activities, aesthetic judgment for Kant assumes that all evaluators will reach the same conclusion, since their exercises should be equally free from interest. Positing intersubjective agreement, Kant resignified ‘‘common sense’’ as the sense of judgment derived from freedom that we have in common and that can develop into an aptitude for free citizenship. Kant did not follow up on this ethico-political consequence of art for art’s sake, Hannah Arendt explains, because it might have been risky to engage political philosophy and it was, in any case, redundant.30 Judgment leads to political deliberation, she concludes. But the corollary between examined private pleasures and enhanced public sphere is news to most scholars today, good news that humanists might explore through programs that develop a taste for active (i.e. creative) citizenship. P271

 

Reason by itself is not enough for Kant just a calculation. So aesthetics are needed to create the decisions. Aesthetics as a way to relate to the world of objects and create a relationship with them. But even then it is not enpugh for making judgements but a need for intersubjective agreement and common sense is necessary so in a way this relationship with objects should be within the collective. This is not a result reached within this formulation but more of a suggestion. As aesthetics itself an area of politics and there are many instances in the art history to go against the common aesthetic values and even most of the art manifesto depends on that. As Arendt suggests even though being the sole supporter of some ideal belief in this case aesthetics will require to search for others to share it with.