Spaces and Paradoxes of the Political

In his conversations on a politics of affect, Brian Massumi emphasizes that these reciprocal affect activities of being in encounter and in relation sustain change. Affect is therefore meant (in a Spinozean reading) as a way of acting in a situation while being affected and affect at the same time. It is also central for realizing plays of power and ideology. Sara Ahmed examines with a cultural political focus how single and collective bodies as well as their surfaces are formed through contact and how fear and its politics work to exclude bodies from social spaces and restrict their movements. She argues that emotions as being relational “produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects.” Therefore, not feelings themselves but their objects circulate and create a social a psychic presence. How could we think affect, emotion, sensation of bodies and cognition in relation to social, political and cultural spaces? And if “the aesthetic” and “the political“ would not be understood as biased, as either/or, as Ariella Azoulay highlights, but by enriching and contradicting one another, thus the gazes of art within photography are operating in parallel. Interestingly the “civil” professional gaze of the viewer of an image which is part of another structure of time and place is addressed and confronted by the persons photographed a part of a “citizenry of photography”.

In the seminar we are focusing on these close connections between aesthetic/artistic and political actions, on the paradoxes within and in which ways spaces, their (invisible) borders and micropolitics are related and could be confronted. We will do readings, writing and have a closer look into exhibitions and events (excursions) connected. Together we will work on a glossary of what you consider of significance for the aesthetic and political and of affecting and being affected.