Fancy David - Art As Revolt : Thinking Politics Through Immanent Aesthetics

Thinking Politics through
Immanent Aesthetics

Edited by

DAVID FANCY AND HANS SKOTT-MYHRE

McGill-Queens University Press
Montreal & Kingston London Chicago

McGill-Queens University Press 2019

ISBN 978-0-7735-5728-4 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-7735-5729-1 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-7735-5785-7 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-0-7735-5786-4 (ePUB)

Legal deposit third quarter 2019

Bibliothque nationale du Qubec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities Research Institute, Brock University, and from Kennesaw State University.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Art as revolt: thinking politics through immanent aesthetics / edited by David Fancy and Hans Skott-Myhre.

Names: Fancy, David, editor. | Skott-Myhre, Hans Arthur, editor.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190086920 | Canadiana (eBOOK) 20190086998 | ISBN 9780773557291 (softcover) | ISBN 9780773557284 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780773557857 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780773557864 (ePUB)

Subjects: LCSH: AestheticsPolitical aspects. | LCSH: ArtsPolitical aspects. | LCSH: Popular culture.

Classification: LCC BH301.P64 A78 2019 | DDC 111/.85dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript.

David Fancy and Hans Skott-Myhre

This edited collection is an effort to think about the force of Art writ large as popular culture in the most inclusive sense. We have gathered pieces on blues and hip hop, virtual reality, postcolonial science fiction, virtual gaming, riot girls and punk, raku pottery, post-pornography fanzines, zombie films, and role playing. We have imagined these divergent and diverse incursions into pop culture as clustering around themes such technology and the future, aesthetics and resistance, and auto-ethnographies of the post-identitarian. Of course, we realize that these assemblages engage the lines of inquiry we and our authors have foregrounded as being of interest, but, like artists, we have reserved the option to bricolage and pastiche our investigations while seeking to inhabit a broader canvas.

The surface onto which we project our collage in this volume is that of twenty-first-century politics, which we argue is now imbued and entangled with the aesthetic in a manner more powerful, troubling, and evocative of possibility than at any other time in history. We make this argument on the basis of the emerging system of rule that is global postmodern capitalism and its aggressive production and circulation of semiocapital (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004, 2009; Lazzarato 1996, 2014; Srnicek 2016; Stiegler 2014). This brutal and predatory system of absolute simulacrum, with its ever-shifting panorama of symbolic representations of value, presents the very real possibility of appropriating and eviscerating the realm of the aesthetic by producing it as radically scissioned from any material relation to living things.

With broad-reaching imperatives in the arenas of education, psychology, social and economic theory as well the production of what Antonio Negri (1996) and Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) call immaterial labour, twenty-first-century capitalism extends its filaments of the purely symbolic into the very fabric of our desiring capacities. Desire in this instance might be thought of either in terms of what Deleuze and Guattari (1977) term desiring production that agentless force of sheer productive force that imbues life with what Gregory Bateson (1972) calls the pattern which connects or we might think of it as what Eve Tuck (2010) refers to as that collective and cultural force operating both inside and outside of history that allows each of us to sustain modes of cultural subjectivity in the midst of what is now an ongoing global cultural genocide. In Negris (2011, 18, emphasis in original) words:

The market and its power [potere] have absorbed every potentiality [potenza] in order to deny them the possibility of becoming singular, of being valid for someone or for something. Of producing. Creativity is withdrawn. Impotence is the very fabric of discoursing, of communicating, of doing. Not emptiness but impotence. The great circulatory machine of the market produces the nothing of subjectivity. The market destroys creativity. Potenza is withdrawn.

Whether we think of such a cultural and social crisis in terms of what Guattari (2005) refers to as the escalating extinction of social and cultural forms such as collectivity, compassion, and non-monetary forms of value, or in terms of what Michael Hardt (1995) delineates as the evacuation of social forms of civil society such as the family, the church, and democratic forms of governance, it seems clear to us that the factional politics of the twentieth century are no longer adequate to the challenges of the twenty-first. To this end, we offer this book as a series of propositions that highlight politicized strategies that deploy the aesthetic under current conditions of late liberal capitalism with its economies of attention and affect. Our intention is to interrogate the capacities of art, as Deleuze and Guattari (2014) would have it, as an encounter and opportunity for experimentation.

What follows is premised on two integrally related philosophical concepts: immanence and aesthetics. We use these terms as theoretical frameworks because their interaction affords the opportunity for complex experimental connectivities and relationalities that open intersections and entanglements of subjectivity, creativity, perception, and culture. Immanence has a long history, from the work of Spinoza forward, as having the capacity to formulate a politics anchored in the inseparable relations of living force. Whether it is the neo-vitalist readings of Braidotti (2006), the posthumanism of Gatens (1996), the transversality of Guattari (2008), the dynamics of individuation in Simondon (2005), the affect of Massumi (2002), or the politics of sense to be found in Deleuze (2004), immanence seems to open the capacity to access indeterminate vistas of creative capacity produced in the confluence of sheer agential materiality and thought.

Following Spinoza (2000) we would suggest immanence as any system capable of producing itself without reference to an outside. That is to say, immanence is utterly autopoietic or self-generating and self-sustaining, not so much constructivist as inventivist (Massumi 2002). According to Spinoza, the impetus for an immanent system is the expression of it own capacities. This set of capacities is both infinite and utterly contingent. Immanence is an infinitely emergent system composed of elements each of which has an idiosyncratic capacity of singular expression. Each unit of infinite and singular expression can only discover what it can do through an encounter with another element. The sole determinate for immanence is the force of expression. What is expressed, how it is expressed, how long that expression is sustained, and what combinations and variations are extended across time and space are completely dependent upon the instant of encounter. Of course, in the human realm that instant of encounter is occurring within broader cultural and social assemblages and connectivities, but, on a more expansive and inclusive level, it is also occurring within each atomic second at an infinite rate. For Spinoza all systems, from galaxies to subatomic particles, are variations of the possibilities of complex assemblages. Put simply, immanence is the condition and potential for all creation and destruction.