DOMINANCE AND REVOLUTION THE IMAGE, THE STRUGGLE AND THE USE OF FORCE

Themes of dominance and revolution are not so popular today. The idea of a comprehensive re-orientation of our world is claimed to be impossible, and the notion that there is a visible concentration of power that might be called dominant has been eviscerated by neo-liberal global capital as much as by the disaggregating mechanics of critical theory which has preferred to speak about horizontal forms of power as opposed to verticality.

In such case, the question of our social and political future has been described as open but also limited. Accordingly, on the one hand we are told that there are no grounds, no ‘givens’, no truth, which seems to hold the promise of open possibilities, but on the other hand these possibilities struggle to be free from the conventions and habits that not only define the condition of capitalism but also constrain us to its ontology. We are limited then, by our own diagnosis of the past, made through our assessment of our political failures but also by our beliefs and the development of ideologies that have taken the place of facts. The legacy of this has left us today in the scene of a post-tragic failure, a failure to imagine a world that is capable of being extracted from the one we currently inhabit. In this sense, capital defeats the ‘we’, critique has demolished the future and both have defeated the truth.

In this book, we document a series of talks over one semester that are part of the MA Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series, Spring, 2022. The series is part of a core class for our MA Aesthetics and Politics Graduate students in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, where our visitors lead seminars with students as well as present talks and discussion topics.

The format for this series consisted of three sets of talks each featuring one speaker and one respondent. These included Katerina Kolosova and Alice Lucy Rekab, Gean Moreno and Jaleh Monsoor and Anthony Bogues and James Trafford. In bringing these people together we sought to enable new dialogues across practice and theory; to understand theory as a form of practice and to ask how the production of ideas, beyond and in artistic and curatorial work produce and define reality and the political.

With this in mind we explored the possibility of theorizing, thinking and picturing the relations of the past, present and the future in a constructive sense. In doing this we crafted seminars and public presentations that foregrounded the complex dynamics of belief, suspicion, explication, rupture, and the perennial question of the relation of and between aesthetics and politics. The question of context, constraints, temporality and spatiality became vital across these discussions as we addressed the history of resistance and the methods that this has manifest, which now often define art, critique and the leftist struggle for emancipatory power. In the context of immanent critique that makes emancipation suspicious, critique as method without ground, does not escape the idealisms that it opposed, for it risks overdetermining critical method towards naive forms of dogmatism, fate and belief. In the wake of these problems, we opened up contemporary questions on the possibility for art and critique today, and how the quest for scientificity and critical analysis might encounter desires for unity both in forms of knowledge and in forms of collectivity and connectivity. For our discussion, these themes of transcendence often landed us in conversations and propositions for new parallel realities, new objective fictions, which did not necessarily need material invention but moreover social recognition. Key to this is the political question as to how these other spaces are identified, recognized and valued, from what address and what forms of power are at work in this. Throughout, we asked about the role and force of the image, the validity of speaking about the class struggle, the role of critique and reason for class consciousness, as well as race and equality. The question of a politics that can re-think the human, the subject and the ‘we’ became woven through this and especially when today, universals are normatively extirpated in the subliminal negativity of identity politics’ co-option by neo-liberal neo-expressivism, as well as made suspicious in critiques coming as much from the right as the left. Here, we asked what it is to understand, communicate and picture the political, one that can delve into the complex that is initiated by negativity and constructive affirmation?

At the start of this book, Katerina Kolozova discusses the possibilities of the structure of catharsis in the mode of the theatrical, where a form of tragedy takes place that repudiates a dialectic of human emotions at its center that can easily be unified as a holistic form. Instead, tragedy is seen as an assemblage of a clash of structures in time and space. Such an assemblage is resistant, for it articulates the irreducibility of alienation to philosophy itself, where philosophy is read as the pathology of an idealism that obfuscates and also fetishizes the foreclosure of the real. But it is also constructive since Kolozova asks us to redescribe the paradigms of human production with another metaphysics; a view that affiliates itself with the alienated, automated and structural elements of the human as animal-condition so as to see another story at work in what is often solely taken as the history of our self-narration. Alice Lucy Rekab responds to this work with a poetics of their own, that extends these questions to an alien anthropology, that included the degraded pixelated haze of cultic practices, alien autopsies and the working of primordial materials.

Both presentations ask us to consider if it is possible to take account of the complex form of science that we need to speak to today, that is; a science that knows that it cannot claim the hubris of objectivity but at the same time, that it must also understand that to sacrifice itself to humility, by declaring itself as a form of subjective mythology is equally an invention, and, is equally false.

In section two, Gean Moreno explores the complex history of revolutionary art and revolutionary politics focusing on the work of Juan Francisco Elso. His work deals with the antagonisms inside the Cuban revolutionary process as it sought to rectify and realign its politics with the dreams that had acted as the revolution’s original inspiration. Citing this tension between this act of thinking and doing, and the force that is required to unify the abstract idea to empirical forms of practice in everyday life, Jaleh Mansoor’s response takes this question up directly by asking how the possibility of agency, dreams of social and political change can be prosecuted without the totalization of force over others. This undergirded her curiosity regarding the claims that various Cuban artists of this 1980’s generation were already working in the vein of decolonizing critiques and practices; manifesting a form of critique that had yet to be named.

Both bring us to urgent and difficult questions regarding the ways in which critical cultural works obtain an out-ofjointness; that is they demonstrate and reinscribe the dissonance of the impossibility of equality between idea and form, people and people, and at the same time, the impossibility of being unequal to that time.

Finally, Anthony Bogues’ text locates specific question on the dynamics of image-power in the structure of Colonial avant-gardist aesthetics and how this differs in structure to the operations of “marvelous realism” in the context of Haitian art and voodoo practices. The avant-gardism of Picasso that seeks an ‘outside’ to the conventions of Western aesthetic production did so by colonizing and reifying the non-western other, as its primary figure, thus aiding and abetting the infrastructural operations of Empire in the name of critique. Bogues brings to light the ironies and disasters of such methods by contending that there is indeed an ‘other’ that does not require such relations. James Trafford responds by working through Sylvia Wynter’s critique, in order to repose the question of the imbrication of politics and aesthetics that has congealed to underwrite a history of Colonialism and anti-Blackness. Both Bogues and Trafford bring us to face the question of where such fissures lie, where dehesion exists, but also how we must see how the relation that is this non-relation must be re-thought as a problem in itself.

The ‘we’ that is referred to in this introduction, is that abstraction of a collective ‘we’, one that is imagined to come, but of course this slips between that, and the ‘we’ in this local case; a group of graduate students from CalArts who engaged with these questions for a short semester. Some of the responses deal specifically with reading matter that each presenter selected as resources, and some ask questions directly to the content of the lectures that were given on that day. In this way, the conversations that emerge and are made possible in this book offer a range of opportunities for new extensions and conversations. We acknowledge that this is just a starting point and we are delighted to share this work between student, presenter and respondent in this small volume.