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Ten Theses for an Aesthetics Of Politics

Trent Talk Version

The purpose of the Ten These for an Aesthetics of Politics is to make

available a contribution to the analysis of a politics of appearances. Specifically my

site of contention, and my motivation for writing the Ten Theses, is to offer an

alternative approach to the political analysis of cultural objects than current

approaches, popular in cultural and political studies, that treat cultural objects –

whether image, text, sound, etc. – as things demanding epistemological validation

through the designation of semiotic and symbolic criteria that assign meaning to

things. Such approaches, indebted to what I refer to as the moral theory of the

image, take sustenance from the linguistic turn in cultural theory and work hard to

establish correspondences between qualities of objects and their symbolic reference.

The result is the expectation of adamantine correspondences that determine the

conditions in and through which something can signify. The act of critical

interpretation is thus, and in every respect, an act of indexing that inadvertently

conceals normative criteria for the right use of symbol and for the correct lines of

designation for establishing a relation between object and sense. Cultural theory

seems obsessed with giving objects meaning to such a degree that it has established

the work of sense-making as useful and necessary to the production of knowledge.

In contrast, my ambition in the Ten These for an Aesthetics of Politics is to explore

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a mode of critical engagement with cultural objects that does not require our having

to justify their intelligibility in order to validate our engagement with them. In this

respect, I attempt to develop a mode of attending to the politicality of objects and

events in the manner perspicuously articulated by Roland Barthes in Camera

Lucida, when he affirms his wanting “remonstrate with his moods, not to justify

them.” This, for him, is the only way he can express the attraction he feels at what

he calls the “advenience” of a picture. (18-19)

Before I proceed with an elaboration of the Ten Theses, however, I ask that

you indulge me in allowing me to make the stakes of my intervention a little less

opaque. As I see it, there is much work that can be done in the humanities and

social sciences regarding the role and function of our notions of causality, and the

place of causality in our thinking about the relationship between one’s experience

of an object and one’s designation of its status as a signifying thing. The issue for

my purposes has to do with the place of discontinuity in aesthetic experience. As I

have defined it in other publications, and borrowing heavily from the modern

discourse on aesthetic disinterest, an aesthetic experience is the experience of a

sensation that interrupts or discontinues our connections with a previous structure

of interest. Such a sensation has no necessary relation to that which came before

and that which succeeds it, including the criteria of judgment and the contours of

context that govern our habits of correspondence. In this regard, aesthetic

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experience is radically de-contextualizing and stochastic, and is structured by the

principle of non-necessity of succession: There is no necessary relation between an

object and its meaning, nor is there a necessary causal chain between an event of

experience and one’s sense of it. The implication of this is that an aesthetics of

politics does not regard the politicality of cultural objects as necessarily bound to

the project of epistemological validation of concepts, or of the epistemic legitimacy

of claim-making. To put this slightly differently, an aesthetics of politics is not

epistemological; this because one can never verify the site or point of allure in the

event of appearance that sources one’s sense of conviction regarding the intensity

of the appearance. This experience of not being able to isolate conditions for the

validity of a sensation is what David Hume (amongst many thinkers that inform the

Ten Theses) means when he accounts for the non-necessity of an impression: In

Part I of his Treatise of Human Nature Hume explains that there is nothing in the

striking forth of an impression that is a necessary condition for its striking forth in

all possible instances of it.

At a very basic level, then, the methodological focus of the Ten Theses

regards the status and validity of intelligibility as a concern for political and

cultural theory (in particular) and for the humanities and social sciences (in

general). The issue of the intelligibility of objects is indebted to a post-Kantian

hermeneutics of suspicion (to borrow Paul Ricoeur’s felicitous phrase) that posits

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first and foremost the question of how it is that I can know something in order to

then surmise what it is that I can know. This is our Kantian critical heritage. The

issue, in short, is what an appearance must do in order to count as intelligible.

Hence the project of critique as suspicion that puts to work all of the etymological

sensibilities of that word: to be suspicious is to be supine, with our palms facing up

– morally and mentally inactive, inert, and indolent. To be suspicious means to

look up at something with a glance at once of admiration and mistrust. In other

words, and here I must be brief, the hermeneutics of suspicion that structures many

of the pedagogical and interpretive ambitions of critical thinking in the humanities

is imbued and imbibes a specific relation of power that treats the beholder/spectator

as passive and as listless as the supine body of the docile penitent. Hence the

attraction of Althusser’s notion of interpellation or Debord’s critique of the society

of the spectacle. In both cases, these positions tap into and share an obsession with

our most delicate enlightenment sensibilities regarding our subjection to the

unknown and the unintelligible. That is, with Althusser and Debord (amongst many

others) we discover a neo-Kantian commitment to critique as liberation from the

chains of supine mystification.

But the question that needs asking – and that I pursue in the Ten Theses for

an Aesthetics of Politics – is whether the supposition of suspicion vis-à-vis objects

of aesthetic arrest is the only critical game in town, and the only mode for pursuing

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an aesthetics of politics? Put slightly differently, in the Ten Theses I pursue how we

might imagine a politics of appearances that is not indebted to, or entangled with,

the production of knowledge claims for the establishment of intelligibility criteria.

Simply put, is there an aesthetics of politics that is not supine to the demands of

epistemology? The wager is that the delimitation of intelligibility is not necessary

to the critical work of humanistic reflection and speculation.

My starting assumption, then, is negative: an appearance is not an

intelligibility. There is a difference of degree and duration between one’s

experience of an apperance, and one’s capacity to make sense of it. And that

difference, and the space of discontinuity that intervenes between these two points,

remains under-theorized. Thus, the position that I outline – beginning with the

central Barthesian concept of “advenience” – turns to a radical empiricist tradition

that challenges the presumed lineal continuities between perception and

signification. More than this, in the Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics, I

attempt to recuperate the aesthetic discourse of absorption and immersion that

seems to have gone to the way-side as a result of the emphasis on critique in the

mode of suspicion and unveiling: that is, the suspicion of an object’s collusive

effects and the unveiling of structures of power that command one’s supine stance.

This is why the radical empiricist tradition inaugurated by Hume but found

in varying degrees in many modern and contemporary authors including Arendt,

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Cavell, Barthes (of Camera Lucida), Fried, Whitehead, Bennett, Massumi, Deleuze,

and Rancière – but also in old and new fields of inquiry from New Media, to affect

studies, to political theory, to visual studies, heritage restoration, and education – is

important to me. Each of the Ten Theses draws sustenance from this varied and

diverse assembly of thinkers and projects whose ideas bear aspects of one another.

Ultimately, what I hope emerges from these diverse theoretical and experiential

encounters is a renewed attention to the idea of aesthetic conviction, which remains

that most elusive and curious of experiences: By aesthetic conviction, then, I mean

that kind of experience marked by a sensation of absolute certitude regarding the

advenience of an object, a sense of certitude that is at once exhilarating and

devastating: exhilarating because it compels us to want to express our sense of

certitude – in the work, in ourselves, or in a context – but also devastating because

that sensation cannot be verified nor prescribed; or, as Isabelle Stengers rightly

affirms, “No cause has the power to prescribe how it will cause.” The sensation of

aesthetic conviction is not a cause that requires proof, it is an expression of

intensity that bears no ground. It is, dare I say, an interval of discontinuity with

those structures of interest one refers to as one’s context, or one’s propriety, or

one’s subjectivity. It is a moment of what Hume called “interrupted perceptions”

and “broken appearances,” and what Barthes called the wounding punctum, and

what Rancière calls dissensus, and what Whitehead calls a lure of feeling, and what

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Fried calls absorption, and what Heidegger refers to as the tri-partite structure of

conspicuousness-obtrusiveness-obstinacy, and what Wittgenstein calls the

perspicuousness of aspect-dawning, and what Nancy calls the noli me tangere, and

what Arendt calls sheer appearance.

But what of the ‘politics’ side to an aesthetics of politics? Simply put, and as

I indicate in my previous remarks, the moral theory of the image that structures the

tradition of a hermeneutics of suspicion (i.e., the fact that there are good and bad

images that correspond to a good or bad politics) relies on a principal of causal

necessity that determines the validity of our expressions of good, common sense –

“le bon sense,” as Deleuze calls it in the “Image of Thought” chapter in Difference

and Repetition. The implicit objective for cultural inquiry, then, is to affirm the

intelligibility of our work so as to justify its social or political relevance, purpose,

and interest. The result is to establish and take as a given a specific partition

between intelligibility and use – which is, I might add as a side jab, the neo-liberal

ambition of current academic vision statements that implicitly ask faculty and

departments to justify the purpose of their existence, research, and pedagogy –

which usually translates into “what are the skills that students will learn from what

you teach so that they may get jobs in the real world?”

The aesthetics of politics that I pursue differs drastically from this, precisely

because of its commitment to the event of discontinuity I attribute to aesthetic

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experience. First and foremost, I approach the matter of the relation between

aesthetics and politics from the perspective of a radical democratic tradition that

takes as central to its idea of democracy the non-necessity of rule. This is at once a

political and ontological concept which affirms that democracies are not

institutional forms, or practices, but refer to acts of resistance to the expectations of

continuity in any system. The first principal of democracy, then, is the non-

necessity of rule: that no system or structure of ruling, or being ruled, is necessary

to any configuration of the demos – just as there is not structure of rule and ruling

necessary to an aesthetic experience; indeed – and if we are to follow Hume and

Kant on this matter – there can be no rules that will guarantee aesthetic experience.

An experience is not a quality of an object, just as the demos of democracy has no

necessary qualities for the conditions of political rule and assembly-formation in a

democracy.

To be forthcoming, this political insight is inspired by Jacques Rancière’s

contributions to political and cultural theory. It is most famously articulated in his

conception of the polemical dissensus of a partition of the sensible. One of

Rancière’s key contributions to political and cultural theory is to elaborate how

politics is as much (if not more) experiential than it is rationalist, and that the core

concern for a politics of emancipation and equality regards the articulations and

rearticulations of what is rendered available to perceptibility – what he calls the

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visible and the sayable. Political change, for Rancière, comes with the interruption

of conventions of sensing and making sense of the world; or, in short-form,

interruptions of common sense. Thus, for Rancière, the political dilemma is not the

problem of subjugation, as it is affirmed in Althusserian and post-Althusserian

theories of ideology and ideological state apparatuses. Rather, the site of political

contestation is the presuppositions that guarantee “an identity between cause and

effect”; or what he otherwise calls the police order. The police order regards those

perceptual conventions that endorse a continuous correspondence between

perception and signification, between experience and meaning. To put this slightly

differently, the police order is not a description of an office of power one might

occupy, or a structure of subjugation that imposes itself upon individual agents.

Rather, Rancière’s police regards the representational logic of symbolism that

generates uncontested continuities between disparate entities, whether subjects or

objects. Politics is, in this sense, the imposition of a discontinuity by those entities

whose actions are not perceptible according to the reigning allocations of

perceptibility. The political subject is, for Rancière, a discontinuity.

This is famously illumined by Rancière’s distinction, in his “Ten Theses on

Politics” (an explicit inspiration of my own work presented here today) between

Althusser’s petty officer and the traffic cop: “The police” Rancière affirms, “is not

that law interpellating individuals (as in Althusser’s ‘Hey, you there!’) unless one

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confuses it with religious subjectification. It is, first of all, a reminder of the

obviousness of what there is, or rather, of what there isn’t: ‘Move along! There is

nothing to see here!’ The police says that there is nothing to see on a road, that

there is nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space of circulating is

nothing other than the space of circulation. Politics, in contrast, consists in

transforming this space of ‘moving-along’ into a space for the appearance of a

subject: i.e., the people, the workers, the citizens: It consists in refiguring the space,

of what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein.” For Rancière, the

real problem posed by the logic of the police is not that it hails us, but that it insists

that we keep circulating and moving about in incessant waves of continuity, that we

not turn our attentions elsewhere, or that we not partake in acts of appearance that

break the adamantine lineality of the causal chain. One might paraphrase this

specification and say, with Rancière, that politics regards the rendering palpable of

the experiential discontinuities that exist in the unacknowledged fissures of

experience that make the bodying forth of appearances possible in the face of “the

obviousness of what there is.”

For my purposes, an aesthetics of politics that suspends its attachments to the

post-Kantian project of intelligibility and asserts the non-necessity of rule through

the experience of discontinuity of aesthetic conviction affords a new politics of

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resistance at a time and in a part of the world where the one cultural and political

rule is to keep things going as they are.

So now, and without any further ado, here is the abbreviated hit-list of the

Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics:

Thesis 1: On Advenience:

An advenience is the ingression of an appearance. An appearance is the

luminous partiality that strikes one’s sensorium. The advenience of an

appearance is thus the bodying forth of a luminosity that affronts our

regard. As an effrontery, as an intensity of interface, the advenience of an

appearance is an event of resistance.

By “advenience” I refer to the capacity of things to stand forth or affront the

spectator and, through this interface, to strike at one’s perceptual attentions. An

advenience is the projecting outward of an appearance: a sound, a sight, a touch

that, though perhaps always available, becomes obstinately perspicuous at the

moment of its bodying forth. The challenge – both aesthetic and political – is to

come to terms with this perspicuity. That an appearance advenes because of an

intensity of projection, and not one of referentiality or indexicality, means that we

cannot rely on pre-existing norms or criteria for making sense of the appearance.

Indeed, the making sense of an appearance is precisely what the advenience denies.

To regard an advenience is to allow the possibility of an absorptive be/holding that

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disarticulates our subjectivities from the structures of interest that conduct our

habits of sense-making. The stochasticity of an advenience interrupts the linear

necessity of cause and effect.

Thesis 2: On Be/holding:

Be/holding (written with a backslash between the ‘e’ and the ‘h’) is the

bearing of the burden of resistance that the advenience of an appearance

introduces. To be/hold does not suggest a passive viewership: it designates

an active participation in the curatorial handling of an appearance’s

ingression. To be/hold is to look, but it also a holding up to view, or a

handling as a view, of that which bodies forth. In other words to be/hold is

also to regard: it is to look but also to hold an appearance in regard.

Be/holding thus regards an absorptive attention to the world that is a basic

concern for an aesthetics of politics.

We are accustomed to those disenchanting positions that associate the terms

‘beholding’, ‘absorption’, and ‘spectatorship’ with a condition of subjugation

imposed by societies of the spectacle. The spectator is subjugated to a kind of

imagistic power akin to a burning bush whose divine power of illumination indexes

and designates a moral code. In most accounts of the aesthetics of politics that

desire to unveil the lie of the image, the structure and shape of spectatorship

remains at the level of propagandistic indoctrination so that all appearances operate

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like a Madison Avenue advertisement; as if, once again, all appearances exist and

work within a unitary and universal structure of mediatic consistency. This mode of

handling the image was first discovered by the Byzantine iconoclasts who

disseminated a fear of the image’s collusive effects. Today, such handlings are also

carriers of an inegalitarian pedagogy, rigidly partitioned between those who can

know (i.e., the critic) and those who cannot know (i.e., the audience) the truth of

the image.

In contrast, the diacritical backslash we insert in the word be/holding wants

to signal the pluralized entendre of spectatorship as at once a ‘regarding,’ a

‘bearing,’ and a ‘caring for.’ Here we are reminded of Robert Warshow’s 1954

ruminations on going to the movies: “I go to the movies for the same reason that

the ‘others’ go:” he says, “because I am attracted to Humphrey Bogart or Shelley

Winters or Greta Garbo; because I require the absorbing immediacy of the screen;

because in some way I take all that nonsense seriously.”

What we are speaking of when we speak of a be/holding is a curatorial

attention that ponders the ways in which the multitudinous practices endured for

bearing the frictions of an advenience are taken seriously. A be/holding is not

merely a looking, then, but a holding up to view, or the supporting of a view – as a

frame supports the canvas, or a screen supports a projected image, or a protestor

bears a placard. It is basic to the idea of democratic citizenship that individuals are

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said to have views. But this is a misnomer; a view is not something you have, it is

something you bear for others to be/hold.

Be/holding is thus not a possession but an intangible hapticity, a

dispossession. There is no capture or adherence here because neither the be/holder,

nor the maker, nor the object has the power to prescribe a mode of subjectivity

appropriate to an advenience. Indeed, it cannot, because the instant of advenience is

not determined by any necessary cause or relation. To be absorbed by the

advenience of an appearance is thus precisely not to be ‘taken in’ (or duped) by the

image. Rather, the experience of an absorptive be/holding refers to a discontinuity

of subjectivity that emerges at the instant of advenience. An advenience thus does

not require a viewing subject to occupy the position of spectator; rather, it

commends acts of regard, or practices of handling, or of bearing resistances. An

aesthetics of politics thus takes aesthetic experience as relevant to political life

because our microcultural practices of interface with aesthetic objects source our

curatorship of one another. To the extent that we are all advening appearances to

one another, the manners, attitudes, and forms of handling we enlist to be/hold

appearances is of central concern to our understandings of the forces of collectivity

that make a political handling-with-others at once thinkable and possible.

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Thesis 3: On Immediacy:

Immediacy is the temporality of an aesthetics of politics. When an

appearance advenes, it strikes an impression upon a sensorial apparatus,

variously conceived. In doing so, it disarticulates our senses of constancy,

continuity, and commonality. The immediacy of an aesthetics of politics is

rooted in a process ontology of discontinuity.

The ingression of an appearance occurs in an instant, this is why it cannot be

predicted, nor can it be anticipated or arranged. Consider the manner in which one

is struck by a particularly compelling detail – of a song, of a movie, or of the color

on a painting. However overpowering – or not – the experience may be, it

nonetheless is of the moment. It occurs instantaneously and one generates a sense

of conviction regarding the vitality of the thing experienced, as if the artifact were

at once real and wholly present. This is the prestige, the conjuring trick, of the

aesthetic object: it affords an immediate sensation of actuality – of concreteness –

that resists the necessity of having to show and verify its actuality or concreteness.

To appreciate the fullness of this point, consider for a moment what occurs at

the instant of impression: Upon the surface of any body, biological or not, an

impression strikes and leaves a mark. But that mark inevitably fades, like the letters

impressed upon printed manuscripts, or a bruise upon the skin, or the patina upon

celluloid, or the tread of a tire, or the scuff on a floor, or a publication in an

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academic journal [hence the language of impact-factors]. The punctuality of an

impression is variable, and its weight lightens, as does one’s memory of it.

David Hume’s insistence on the immediacy of impressions gives full

expression to a process ontology of discontinuity for an aesthetics of politics, as

when he advises in his Treatise that when one begins “with the SENSES, ’tis

evident these faculties are incapable of giving rise to the notion of continu’d

existence of their objects, after they no longer appear to the senses.” (T, 1.4.2.3).

There is a stochastic serialization between the advenience of an appearance, an

impression, and continuity that for Hume is dissipated at the instant when the

partiality of the appearance departs. This, in the end, is also the basis for his

conception of civil society that is rooted in the idea of reputation as that variable

impression that individuals press upon each other. Indeed, for Hume, civil society

is a fragile and discontinuous advenience. Hence the importance of such customary

practices as promising, that he compares to the Catholic doctrine of

transubstantiation and holy orders (T, 3.2.5.14). Promises are those speculative

artifices we devise to grant temporary constancy to an otherwise inconstant world.

By occupying the temporality of immediacy, an aesthetics of politics makes

an ontology of discontinuity central to one’s political considerations.

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Thesis 4: On Aspectuality

An aspect is a no-part: It is a durational impression that advances contours

of proximity which potentiate processes of intonation between advening

appearances. The part-taking of aspectuality is juxtapositive, where distinct

entities bestow mutual inflection one upon the other. An aspectual

interface is thus something we grasp, not something we know.

The temporality of immediacy and the process ontology of discontinuity that

arise in an aesthetics of politics emphasize the partiality of things.

Phenomenologists have always insisted on the limits of our perception by

suggesting that we ever only approach objects from a part, and that the totality of

objects is unavailable to us. This is distinctly different from saying that one always

has a partial perspective of the world. In other words, we are not defending here a

version of perspectivism. The perspectivism thesis always assumes that 1) objects

are complete and unitary despite our partial perceptions; 2) that our mode of

attention is cognitive to the extent that we can always surmise the difference

between a part and a whole; and 3) that our perceptions distort our realities. But to

say that an advenience is a perspicuous no-part is to affirm the partiality of all

things, and thus resist the urge to completion or fulfillment of what is lacking: all

that we have – all that we are – is parts.

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To the extent that an aspect is a no-part, it is the improper element that

strikes in an entirely unpredictable manner and that interrupts circulation through

its advenience. It is an event of resistance. This is the reason why we affirmed the

fact of be/holding in the face of advenience, and the intoning of inflection as an

aspect’s partition of the sensible. Aspects are impressions that emerge in the

immediacy of an advenience. We cannot know an aspect; the best that we can do is

grasp it’s juxtapositive impropriety.

Rather than consensus, resemblance, and comparison an aesthetics of politics

proposes an aspectual interface of emergent adveniences. The grasping of an aspect

thus regards an absorptive part-taking of and with the intonations of proximity that

emerge from the juxtaposition of adveniences. Aspectuality is the mode of relating

for an aesthetics of politics.

Thesis 5: On Handling

We be/hold an advenience by handling it. But to handle something is not

the same as using it. The handling proposed by an aesthetics of politics is

neither useful nor useless, but unusable. In this respect, an aesthetics of

politics proposes that our handling of the advenience of an appearance

projects our handling of one another. Another term we might use to

indicate our handling of one another is “practices of governance.”

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The world is replete with practices of handling: the leaf handles the parasite,

the concierge handles the package, the wind handles the spore, the painter handles

the brush, the factory worker handles the minimum wage, the political scientist

handles the data, the camera handles the film, the beholder handles the appearance,

and (most importantly) vice versa: the brush handles the painter like the keyboard

handles the writer; the film handles the camera like the ink handles the pen; the

spore handles the wind like the string handles the guitar. Handling is a

microcultural practice that expresses the persistence of incipient trajectories of

awareness and immersion. A central concern for an aesthetics of politics, therefore,

regards the handling of adveniences and how such handlings mutually inflect our

handling of one another.

Our practices of handling make explicit the political question of certainty:

what is it that we want to remonstrate when we be/hold an advenience? An act of

handling, I want to say, is less a skill or a techné than an occurrence. A handling

arises from what Heidegger refers to as our “concernful dealings” with the world

and those things, peoples, and events that populate it. Thus a handling enlists our

abilities to engage objects beyond their value as either useful or useless.

Let’s invoke a practice of handling most of us part-take in when reading: that

of highlighting, or underlining – i.e., the act of indexing – what we sense as

relevant in a work. The rendering remarkable through highlighting is a handling.

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When marking a passage we remark to ourselves (or others): “pay attention to this;

be impressed by it, as I have been impressed.” In this way we may say that by

marking our absorptions, we render the passage remarkable. The highlighted

passage becomes something that stands out; it is an appearance that advenes and

impresses upon our curatorial attentions.

I might put the thrust of this example this way this way: our concernful

attention to the advenience of a passage that is remarkable in an assembly of words

highlights the partiality of the work and makes available to our attentions aspects

that would otherwise go unremarked if the work were a presupposed continuity. As

a broken partiality, a discontinuity, the highlighted passage is a site of absorption: it

stands out and draws us in in such a way that it makes any appeal to interest in the

work unreliable or, indeed, unnecessary. That we may then make use of this

passage – for professional purposes, to give comfort to our woes, or to provide

evidence for a developing argument – does not deny the fact that at the moment of

its incipient advenience, it is unusable. At a very basic but fundamental level, the

unusabiity of an advenience regards the ingression of a mode of monstrance that

strikes at us and affords an attention to the appearance of things; not, that is, to

explain them, but rather to concern ourselves with them. In this regard, a handling’s

unusability bespeaks of a curatorial absorption with the world.

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Thesis 6: On the Noli me tangere

The handling of an advenience resists the kind of penetrative touch that

wants to expose the truth of an object. Rather than expositive, an aesthetics

of politics operates within the domain of the noli me tangere; the ‘do not

touch me’, or ‘do not withhold me’ of the appearance. The noli me tangere

regards an intangible hapticity that discomposes the expectations of

possession.

Two images of the Biblical iconography of the story of Jesus will help us

navigate this thesis. Their theme regards the hapticity of the image. Here they are:

Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Thomas, (1603, ca)

Pontormo, Noli me tangere (1532, ca.)

Both are remarkable works.

In Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Thomas, the doubting disciple thrusts his

hand into the side of Jesus in order to perforate his referentiality and confirm his

actuality. Thomas’s touch wants to expose and possess evidence of Jesus’s

resurrection. Here the extended hand that handles the wound penetrates the source

of the sensation of belief so as to confirm the accuracy that the image of god is

present, and thus relieve the doubt of faith. Thomas’s touch clutches the wound; it

is an ostensive touch that wants to point to the source of the sensation in order to

hold on to one’s faith. Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Thomas, in other words,

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dramatizes a desire to know the image, to touch it in such a way as to penetrate its

behavior and possess the source of its sensations so as to firmly nail in place the

relation between sensation and reference.

The second image, Pontormo’s Noli me tangere painting, thematizes another

order of hapticity that, we can say, lies closer to the curatorial ethos of be/holding

of an aesthetics of politics. This Biblical scenario predates Jesus’s encounter with

the Doubting Thomas, but not by much. It refers to the moment when Jesus exits

the tomb on the third day after his crucifixion and encounters Mary Magdalen who

is in the garden, mourning his passing – a picture of the event of advenience if there

ever was one. Absorbed by his luminescence, Mary lunges towards Jesus in a

dance-like embrace (as Pontormo pictures the gesture) while he sashays away from

her, uttering the negative injunction “noli me tangere” (in Greek, mê mou haptou):

“do not touch me,” or “do not withhold me,” or “do not hold me back”; we might

wish to paraphrase as follows: ‘Be/hold me without possessing me’, ‘hold me in

your regard without clutching me.’ The interval of the noli me tangere, in other

words, pictures the intangible hapticity that we lend an advenience, an ungraspable

caress that concerns itself with the appearance as it advenes. In this interval, there

is a play of hapticity that never actually resolves, but that nonetheless invites our

ability to absorb and bear the scene. The be/holding that the advenience of

appearance invites makes untenable the claim of possessive exposition: One cannot

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own an experience of advenience. On the contrary, the interval of advenience calls

forth a curatorial regard of and for that which appears.

In his recent study of the relationship between sight and touch, spurred on by

his looking at some noli me tangere paintings, Jean-Luc Nancy exposes a concern

with the phenomenality of holding as ownership and possession and how through

aesthetic experience – through the interval of advenience – we encounter the

possibility of there being a non-possessive hold; a be/holding. Along side the

history of liberalism’s possessive individuals, we might conclude, there is a parallel

and minoritarian trajectory of aesthetic dispossession. What does it mean – we ask

once again – to hold an appearance?

We might ask this too: is the holding or beholding of an advenience not also

a central problem of political citizenship? Does citizenship regard the holding of a

legal subject by a nation, or does it regard the be/holding of the advenience of a

political subjectivity that has neither place, nor name, nor status, nor part; someone

or something that cannot be held in its proper place? The crucial problem for an

aesthetics of politics is thus the following: if the advenience of political

subjectivities appear but do not count because an advenience is untenable (e.g.,

literally unholdable), then what are the practices of handling and modes of attention

we dispose to the noli me tangere of an advenience?

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Thesis 7: On Interface

Contemporary political life is characterized neither by the exchange of

ideas, nor by the communication of intentions between speaking subjects.

Rather, it is characterized by the microcultural dynamics of interface

through and by which subjects and objects cast appearances. The iconomy

of and interface with appearances is a principal feature of contemporary

political life.

We do not exchange appearances because appearances are not something we

can possess. Interface is thus not confrontational: it is not something that arises

from a mis-en-scène of exchange. If we cannot possess an appearance, then this

also means that it cannot be located in any one place: Interface cannot be staged.

Interface regards a structure of faciality.

As we affirmed in Thesis 6, possession is no longer the principal practice of

holding in contemporary life. Few, if any of us, have possessions; this despite our

culture of consumerism. Even property has been shown to be virtually untethered to

any ambition of possession, as the American sub-prime mortgage crisis

demonstrated in the first decade of the new millennium. The shock effects of that

cataclysm have been unfathomable, not only because they have ushered in a new

age of wealth discrepancy and poverty, and not only because it has decimated the

ambitions and spirit of entire classes of peoples, but also because it has shaken to

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the core our inherited faith in political economy’s linear causality of property and

ownership, that is the basis of our modern conceptions of exchange value. To resist

the dogmatic slumber of Capitalism no longer means a resistance to property and

structures of ownership: Capitalism has already co-opted this strategy and made

ownership irrelevant by making property itself not valuable. Instead, political

resistance comes with the overthrowing of ownership as a privileged modality of

holding.

Rather than holding, interface is now the dominant form of interaction: it is

the posting, disseminating, and facing up to the iconomy of appearances. This is

one of the many characteristics of politics in the age of new media technology. As

Lev Manovich has described it, the interfacilaity that comes with the rise of GUI

and subsequent cut and paste technology has resulted in a veritable gestalt switch in

our modes of handling the intersect of cultural forms.

Simply regard the extent to which we now privilege screens – and especially

touch screens – as our principal objects of handling. From film, to TV, to the

computer screen, to the cell phone screen, to the iPad, an inordinate amount of our

time is spent engaging these technologies of interface that operate as carriers and

disseminators of appearances; we might half-jokingly call these objects of interface

“iconomic indicators.” Thus, before we might think of reflecting on the effects of

Facebook, or Twitter, or the internet upon our political imaginaries and – indeed –

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upon our political-economic practices (as the recent revolutions in Egypt and

Zuccotti Park have made urgent), we must consider the practices of interface that

emerge from an ontology of the screen that allow someone like Robert Warshow –

to re-cite him – to affirm in 1954 that “I require the absorbing immediacy of the

screen.”

The political corollary to this is that it is no longer the word, nor the pen, nor

the piece of paper, that may be said to count as the principal objects of political

agency: the word was mightier than the sword, but now the mouse is mightier than

both sword and word. Though the modern political actor may have handled

speaking and writing, the contemporary political actor no longer operates in a

Gutenberg galaxy governed by the movements of word and deed. Her universe is

comprised of microcultural practices of interface that screen appearances. The

further corollary to this is that the materiality of political agency has also

transubstantiated: the political actor is, like the actor on the screen, a human

something; a partiality whose luminosity advenes.

To engage the micrucultural practices of interface that imbue our

contemporary political culture requires our having to take seriously, in a manner

heretofore unprecedented, the medium and media of interface; including the role of

the media industry not simply as the site of a symbolic subjugation but as source of

access to networks of navigation. What enables interface and how is interface

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impeded – for instance – by the shutting down of internet servers at the height of

revolutionary tweeting? Such questions require our having to rethink the ways in

which our current modes of interchange extend beyond the exchange of words and

ideas. The iconomic transmission of and interface with the advenience of an

appearance is thus one of the central sites of attention for an aesthetics of politics.

Thesis 8: On Luminosity

No object is qualitatively political; no object is qualitatively aesthetic.

Objects are plurivalent permanences: luminous entities without a cause or

a purpose. An aesthetics of politics thus does not refer to formulas for

interpreting the political value of works of art; it addresses the modes in

and through which the luminosity of an appearances is rendered available

to perceptibility.

We might say that objects (including those objects of analysis we call

political subjectivities) have a life of their own, regardless of the qualities we

attribute to them. However, our habits of political analysis operate in such a way as

to establish the usefulness of things in order for them to count as political. This is

the debt to utilitarianism of modern political science. It is also only as useful and

productive that we are able to justify the value of aesthetic objects to political

thought: that is, aesthetic objects are valuable – i.e., have an interest and a purpose

– because their qualities may be deployed for political purposes.

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But as we have noted, the domain of an aesthetics of politics is one of

disinterest and unpurposiveness: aesthetic experience is an event of discontinuity

where no structure of interest or criteria of belief suffices to explain the qualitative

value of an object. What this suggests is that the kind of explanatory system that

makes intention, causality, and predictability necessary to signification is

insufficient to an aesthetics of politics. This is why we say that no object is political,

and no object is aesthetic. Any object whatever may be experienced aesthetico-

politically – whether brush stroke, pop song hook, oil spill, policy initiative, kernel

of information, sexual orientation, economic standing, weather pattern, word,

image, and so forth.

An aesthetic of politics is responsive to a sensation of conviction that arises

from the luminosity of an appearance, its intensity, or power of monstrance. The

distinction we want to explore, then, is between an object’s luminosity and what it

might illuminate. For an object to illuminate something, it’s shine must be

indexical and directed at a referent: in this way, an object is imagined to operate

like a spotlight that designates a marker on a stage. Illumination is entirely

theatrical and denoted the project of intelligibility. An object’s luminosity, however,

disavows the directionality of the spotlight. A luminosity radiates without

referencing: it forgoes the ostension of the spotlight as the principal mode of

relation.

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To say that a luminous appearance advenes is thus not simply to define the

properties of its motility, it is also to speculate on the processual ontology that

affords it its ingressional properties. It is Alfred North Whitehead who first

introduces the idea of ingression vis-à-vis luminosities in The Concept of Nature.

For him, ingression refers to a mode of relation, and not simply a description of an

action: it is the event of relation that arises from superimposition of objects whose

contours remain unfinished. “The ingression of an object into an event,” Whitehead

affirms, “is the way the character of the event shapes itself in virtue of the being of

the object. Namely the event is what it is, because the object is what it is.” Thus,

object and event mutually inflect one another through a relational dynamic that

sustains their fluid, rather than static, natures. In Process and Reality Whitehead

calls this dynamic “a lure for feeling.”

The luminosity of an appearance radiates its perspicuity but does not

prescribe an attention to it. It cannot. Because a luminosity is not a quality inherent

in an object, it is that radiance about an object that is activated the moment it

becomes an object of attention. This is why when we speak of objects we speak of

them as plurivalent permanences. The have a durability that outlasts our encounter

with them; but that durability does not correspond to a continuous identity. As

plurivalent permanences, objects are in a state of continual and eventual flux; they

have a life of their own, if you will, that is not dependent on our interaction or

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interest with them. This is what makes an object and aesthetic object: it is aesthetic

not because it possess the quality of beauty, or the status of art; these latter

qualifications are mere categories we adopt to classify and coordinate the right

disposition of objects. Instead, and object is aesthetic and political because it is

remarkable in its manner of ingression. If a luminosity cannot designate in the

manner of a spotlight, then the challenge and work for an aesthetics of politics is to

acknowledge these moments of remark and generate creative ways for rendering

them available without treating them as objects that prescribe and determine a

mode of action, or form of attention. Rather, and as Heidegger might say,

luminosities are conspicuous because of the breaks they induce.

Thesis 9: On Impropriety

Politics is improper. It is the interval of discontinuity that emerges from the

immediacy of an advenience. What an aesthetics of politics thus makes

available to democratic theory is the fact that there has only ever truly been

one ontological principal for democracy: that there is no necessity of rule.

This is why democratic politics is always already aesthetic.

There is an aspectual affinity between aesthetics and democracy: Both

sustain the non-necessity of rule. Thus, both are improper. This does not mean that

democracy is anarchic and without rules. It means, rather, that no rule is necessary

to democracy.

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In the political sense of the term, an impropriety is a wrong. But here we

must not confuse the political wrong with an epistemological mistake. A political

wrong is not an error that needs correcting in order to return to the proper rule of

things. It is not “some flaw calling for reparation,” as Jacques Rancière has shown.

“It is the introduction of an incommensurable at the heart of the distribution of

speaking bodies.” What might this mean, exactly? Simply put, the impropriety of

politics regards the disproportioning of equivalences in any system or order: the

political wrong is the affirmation of an arresting conviction, or a site of resistance.

When we affirmed (in Theses 1) that an advenience was “an event of resistance,”

we were affirming its status as an impropriety. An advenience is that which

interrupts the organizations of perceptibility that make objects and values circulate

properly.

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1948 (1948)

Consider the example of Jackson Pollock’s line in his works dating from the

late 1940s, but especially Number 1, 1948. As is well known, Pollock became

known for pouring paint onto a stretched canvas on the floor, creating massive

tableaus with swirls of paint weaving throughout. As he famously affirmed in an

interview, “[m]y painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my

canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or

the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I

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feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work

from the four sides and literally be in the painting.” By resisting the convention of

the easel as the structure of support for the composition of a painting, Pollock

liberates painting from other structural conventions, not the least of which was the

necessity that paint be applied upon a canvas in order to draw a line. For, what

Pollock makes available in works like Number 1, 1948 is the possibility that a line

no longer designate or trace a border; or, as Michael Fried affirms, that a line is “no

longer the edge of anything.”

We might say this: Pollock’s achievement is to interrupt the expectation that

a line hold shape so as to make available an improper modality of line-potential

previously unremarked. The line had always been just a line, useful for tracing

edges of shape, figure, or territory. But by affirming the availability of the line’s

drip, and by literally and physically suspending the intentionality of the brush

stroke, Pollock makes available a new cosmology of line.

To get a sense of the intensity of this gesture of impropriety, let us juxtapose

this aspect of line with Rousseau’s discussion in the Discourse on the Origins of

Inequality of the invention of property through the utterance “this is mine.” With

all its rhetorical flourishes, Rousseau accounts for this utterance as the historical

and metaphysical origin of inequality. That is, the invention and pronouncement of

a linguistic line that permits the capacity to draw a line, parse a territory, put up a

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fence around a plot of land, and have that line and that fence count as belonging to

someone (i.e., to be part of a person’s propriety) and have all these intensities

register as intelligible to others. Inequality begins and ends with the techné of

drawing a line upon a flat surface in such a way that it contains or holds a shape.

The ontological precondition for property (including the propriety of self implicit in

the “I” of the “this is mine”), is the existence of a geometrical line that designates

territory: what we might call a property line, or the drawing of a lot.

Jackson Pollock’s singular achievement – both aesthetic and political – is the

disfiguration of the line; it is to free the line from the compellant must of having to

draw shapes. “And this,” Michael Fried explains, “amounts to the claim that, in

these paintings, traditional drawing is revoked, or dissolved, at any rate drastically

undermined.” Within political theoretical parameters, this is tantamount to saying

that territorial borders can no longer be drawn, that the surface of land is a smooth

plateau upon which the tracing of a line does not designate the existence of a

territory; it is deterritorialization. We might, then, put the matter this way: Pollock’s

disfiguration of the line is an instance of impropriety in the face of an entire history

of political thinking committed to (indeed, founded on) the line’s capacity for

outlining, of drawing and holding shapes (of nations, of principalities, of identities,

of the human, of cultures, of concepts, and so forth).

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We thus define impropriety not as the absence of rule, but as the non-

necessity of rule. It is what is excessive to the proper (i.e., arche/rule), but also that

intensity that disarticulates the force of necessity in the proper. It is with these

thoughts in mind that we affirm that democratic politics has always been aesthetic.

Thesis 10: On Curatorship

I arrive now at my 10th thesis which, I will admit, is a disappointment. The

original version of the work has as its 10th thesis “on cognosis” – a made up word

that contracts gnosis and cognition and elaborates on the strategies of interpretation

in cultural theory that I find problematic – specifically, as I mentioned in my

introductory remarks, of the treating of cultural objects as possessing epistemic

qualities, that an aesthetic experience is like a moral claim. The ambition of the Ten

Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics is to show the limits of this interpretive given.

But as I said, the 10th thesis – on cognosis – is disappointing to me now after

reading it once again while preparing this talk. Instead, I want to propose and ask

you to help me think through another thesis that I call: “On Curatorship.”

The term curatorship is usually held for museum curators, or art restorers. It

involves the art of making distinctions about how and where things belong; but it

also involves the manners and practices of handling objects, of selections and

choices that bespeak a concernful attention to the world. Curatorship involves a

certain kind of attunement to care as a sensibility. To help us along – and have you

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help me along – in formulating this last thesis, here are a few passages that I find

central to my thinking on curatorship:

Heidegger:

Our concernful absorption in whatever work-world lies closest to us, has a function of discovering; and it is essential to this function that, depending upon the way in which we are absorbed, those entities within-the-world which are brought along [beigebrachte] in the work and with it (that is to say, in the assignments or references which are constitutive for it) remain discoverable in varying degrees of explicitness and with varying circumspective penetration. (Being & Time, I.3.71) When I am completely engrossed in dealing with something and make use of some equipment in this activity, I am just not directed toward the equipment as such, say, toward the tool. And I am just as little directed toward the work itself. Instead, in my occupation I move in the functionality relations as such. In understanding them I dwell with the equipmental contexture that is handy. (Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 293)

Another passage, this time from Cesare Brandi’s considerations on intervention in a work in his Theory of Restoration: Brandi:

And so, if we return to the alternatives of conservation or removal from visual and historical perspective, I consider it appropriate, whenever possible, to return a monument to that state of imperfection in which it had been left by the historical process, and which ill-considered restoration has completed. However, we should always respect the new oneness that – regardless of the restoration’s senselessness – affects the work of art, the more it is also a real source of historical material and evidence. (69)

And finally, a passage from Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason:

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Cavell:

I can’t tell you how I know. … It is the mark of a good teacher in certain domains to know when to stop prompting, domains in which further knowledge is earned not through further drilling but through proper waiting. Here is something I know but cannot prove: the closing image of For Whom the Bell Tolls. The hero dying in a pine forest in Spain, holding a rear-guard action alone to give his companions time for retreat, alludes to, or remembers, Roland’s death in The Song of Roland.

I ask you to help me figure not what these authors mean with these words, but how

we might handle these passages in order to think about the kind of concernful

awareness, or absorption, or regard, or care that accompanies an aesthetics of

politics as I have elaborated it in the nine preceding theses. I invite you, then, to

participate with me in handling these passages.

Thank you very much.