Appearances of the Political: Summer, CFP and report

29 Aug 2016

Summer, CFP and report

Appearances of the Political was active in Orivesi July 24-31 as a part of the Summer Session of the Nordic Summer University. There were again over 20 active participants in the sessions. This time Max Ryynänen was taking part in organizing the infrastructure for the whole Summer Session and Raine Vasques was the coordinator together with Carsten Friberg.

Below you find the CFP for July 2016.

CALL FOR Presentation 2016

Appearances of the Political in 20th century culture

Appearances of the Political

Summer Symposium: 24-31 July, Orivesi, Finland

Invitation We invite scholars, students, artists and practitioners to take part in investigating the many forms by which we experience the presences of political reality, and in approaching these forms from social, artistic, aesthetic and cultural analysis. We wish to articulate the ideological forces underlying today’s political thinking. We also want to inaugurate a debate on the role of cultural approaches in political analysis. We wish to break new paths in connecting the cultural humanities and the political sciences and invite participants to bravely explore new ways of studying the issue. We believe that experimentation is crucial for rethinking the political.

Theme of the symposium:

In this summer session we explore historical examples from the 20th century of how the political has appeared, both intentionally and unintentionally. Examples can be movements with explicit programs for forming the modern, or future, world such as Russian Constructivism, Modernist architectural program and sub- or countercultural movements. Examples can also be cultural forms that are unintentionally, or at least without an explicit awareness, appearances of political ideologies, such as urban planning, consumer culture and fashion.

Such historical examples can take many forms, like the transformation of personal appearances in dress and hair-style in the '60s and '70s displayed in the period’s fashion and anti-fashion, including specific styles like punk and fetishized expressions of the military forms of guerrilla soldiers and freedom fighters. Or, for instance, the cold war had many forms of political expressions in both Soviet ideas of political manifestations in ideological decorations as well as the organisation of build environments.

The examples are numerous in art, literature, design and fashion as well as in organisation of work, culture, communication and entertainment, and include explicit political actions in fights for rights (workers, women, and minorities), movements of liberation across the world, and of political struggles, as well as the implicit forms of oppression preserved through cultural exercised routines.
We encourage the participants to share analysis and criticism of concrete examples and discussions hereof or to share texts throwing light on the topic and offering platforms for critical discourses.
Format(s) of the presentation:

We are encouraging traditional and non-traditional presentations, including:

1) Presentation of work:
We strongly encourage giving a free oral presentation rather than reading a paper. We wish to facilitate open debates for sharing and ask for presentations creating platforms for debate.
A presentation cannot exceed 20 min.

2) Presentation of a text:
You can offer to present a text, which can be either your own writing or the examination and presentation of another’s published text. The text will be distributed to all participants beforehand and should not exceed 25 pages. The presentation should have the form of a short introduction of the argumentation, facilitating participants to engage in discussion.
The presentation of the text cannot exceed 15 min followed by discussion

3) Performance, object or alternative forms:
You can present ideas, examples or reflections through other formats including inviting the participants to engage in experiments, situations, or individual and group activities.
Please indicate the optimal time for this form of presentation.

Please submit via email to the coordinators:
carsten.friberg@nsuweb.org
raine.vasquez@nsuweb.org

1. A written proposal (max. 350 words) with a title and descriptive subtitle. This text should include your presentation proposal, its format, its duration, and technology and/or facilities you may need.

2. A short bio (max. 100 words)
If you would like to attend the symposium without presenting, please email a short bio. Participants with presentations will be given priority.

The study circle provides a space for theoretical experimentation and the cross-fertilization of methodologies. It aims at developing insights that can be used in further research.
We invite you for a week of exchange and debates in an open environment of people with different backgrounds. Presentations are meant to be rather short, while space for discussions pursuing ideas are central for the circle and will be given considerate space during the week.
The deadline to submit proposals is 8 May, 2016. The preliminary program will be announced on May 15, 2016 on www.nordic.university where you can also find more information about NSU and sign up for the newsletter.

Application process and registration: The application process has two steps: (1) Application to coordinators for acceptance. Application starts 1st of April and closes on 8th of May.
(If you wish to participate without presentation you can apply until 25th of May. Also, you can still apply late in case of vacant slots by contacting the coordinators and submitting an abstract.)
(2) After you have been accepted, the next step is registration and payments, which closes on 1st of June. All registration and payment will be done electronically.
Note: if you apply late, the payment must still be completed by the 1st of June.

Accomodation – the prices include all meals during the entire seminar. All priaces in €: Single room: 550 Double room: 320 Family members (in double room): 380 Children over 12 years: 380 Children between 4-12 years: 250 Children between 2-4: 46 Children less than 2 years: 0
NSU offers a number of grants and scholarships: Grants: 100 Sholarships: 80
Application for grant or scholarship must be send to the coordinators no later than 15 April
Please cite motivation for the application for a grant (such as being freelance or unemployed).
We favour participants from Baltic countries for grants.
Notification for applicants is given 1 May.

Arrival: 24 July
Departure: 31 July

For any questions about presentation, registration and NSU, please contact:
carsten.friberg@nsuweb.org or raine.vasquez@nsuweb.org
About the Study Group The intention of Appearances of the Political is to create a platform for future collaborations and applications, and to exchange knowledge and share common interest. It is important for the group to consult a variety of fields as broad as possible including political theory, philosophy, communication, social sciences and cultural studies, and we hope that scholars from all areas of interest would join us. Participating in this meeting of the group does not imply any obligation for participating in future meetings. We hope, however, that participants will be involved in building a strong community on this topic for future activities reflecting the diversity of interests in the community. Future seminars will focus on Material Culture, Activism, Political Art and Aesthetics in the Everyday, and Communication. We are open to any propositions concerning collaboration, partners and sites. Please bookmark the study circle on NSU’s webpage: http://nordic.university/study-circles/2-appearances-of-the-political/ and the blog of the study circle: http://appearancesofthepolitical.blogspot.com

The Nordic Summer University (NSU) summer session is a one-week seminar bringing all 8 NSU study circles together. While each circle holds their seminar, the week also contains common activities, including two Key-note’s each giving two presentations, (this summer Professor Robert Pfaller and Professor Elizabeth Povinelli) as well as a cultural program. There is an additional Children’s circle, where caretakers look after the children while the parents are in their respective seminars - it is thus possible to bring family to the summer session. The summer session includes NSU’s political institutions and any participant is eligible. Participants are a mix of university professors, academics in different positions inside as well as outside institutions, PhD-, and MA-students, artists, cultural producers and any others with a relation to academic work.
The Nordic Summer University (NSU) is a Nordic network for research and interdisciplinary studies.

NSU is a nomadic, academic institution, which organises workshop-seminars across disciplinary and national borders. Since it was established in 1950, Nordic Summer University has organised forums for cultural and intellectual debate in the Nordic and Baltic region, involving students, academics, politicians, and intellectuals from this region and beyond.
Decisions about the content and the organisational form of the NSU lay with its participants. The backbone of the activities in the NSU consists of its thematic study circles. In the study circles researchers, students and professionals from different backgrounds collaborate in scholarly investigations distributed regularly in summer and winter symposia during a three-year period.

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About Appearances of the Political

Appearances of the Political is a research network conecting participants in different fields from 25 different countries.

The aim is to investigate the appearances and the experiences of the political in contemporary democracies. What form does the political have today? How do we make sense out of it?

By the political we understand political acts and manifestations in all forms including not only debates and decisions but also institutional and material organization as well as communication and actions of everyday living. The political is thus a wider notion than political institutions and philosophies; it includes how our everyday is embedded in ideologies forming our thoughts and actions.

The focus on appearance is a focus on forms in which the political appears. This, again, covers a wide range of phenomena from the direct use of aesthetic means in the staging and presentation of politicians and events of political significance to the organization of our environment. A central phenomenon is the way the media aestheticizes politics making the media the heart of the everyday both for what is said and how it is said.

This topic is covered by a variety of disciplines such as aesthetics, rhetoric, communication, material culture studies, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, pedagogy, and philosophy. The aim of the study circle is to bring these different disciplines into dialogue based on expertise in each discipline and the importance of including knowledge from other disciplines.

The network began as a study circle in Nordic Summer University. Read the project description for the study circle here.

Coming events

28 February – 1 March, 2020

Winter Symposium: Representation of the City: Imagining and Reimagining Cityscape

Urban Studies: Between Creativity and Power

Riga, Latvia

4-10 August, seminar in Cēsis, Latvia

#2 teaser for programme

Monika Favara-Kurkowski, Mechanical reproducibility as an aesthetic category for design practice. Hybridization between design, theater, and photography.

In philosophy, discussions on “design objects” place the function to the fore. Such philosophical approaches can be found in Glenn Parsons, Allen Carlson and Jane Forsey’ books who focus mainly on the category of function to promote the aesthetic value of design. I argue that the evaluation of aesthetic experiences, based only on function, may impoverish the understanding of user satisfaction because it tries to fit

into culturally produced aesthetic categories.

The second task of this essay is to show that mechanical reproduction, understood as the condition of the philosophical definition of “design objects,” has been unjustly neglected. I believe that shifting the attention from the category of function to that of technical reproducibility reveals a new paradigm of user experience that enriches the philosophical perspective on design.

Finally, I point to the emancipatory aspect of the user experience, which manifests in the encounter with mass-produced objects, or, rather, that technical reproducibility materializes the place for a subversive potential in the user.

Laine Kristberga, Aestheic Categories of Performance Art - is that (ir)relevant?

Elisabetta Di Stefano, Artification between Aestheticization and Political Action

My paper will bring forward the relevance of a relationship among individuals in a urban space and how relationships acquire a political and aesthetical value. To achieve this end, I will focus the notion of Political Aesthetics and I will try to demonstrate how the processes of artification could be a tool of political action in this framework.

Following the idea of political understood as a relationship among individuals sharing benefits (Aristotle, Politics1253a) and as the art of taking care of mankind (Plato Pol. 274b-276c), and following the idea of aesthetics as a theory of perception (A. Baumgarten and G. Böhme), political aesthetics should focus on some transformations happening in an emotional and relational space. It should study how people can produce and perceive a transformation at the same time, or better to say, how a collaboration among people can change the world or, at least, the way of perceive it.

Within this theoretical background artification acquires an important role. The neologism artification, recently risen in the philosophical and artistic debate, has different theoretical nuances. After an overview of the different ideas on artification (Shapiro-Heinich; Ossi Naukkarinen; Thomas Leddy; Yuriko Saito), I will point out that artification can have a value of mere decoration – e.g. mural graffitis – or can mean a deeper transformation, triggering relational processes and regenerating experiences.

However, both perspectives of artification aim at urban requalification and can have consequence on several levels: 1. decorating peripheries and neglected space; 2. developing new way of sharing space through performing arts, sport and entertainment. Nevertheless, the latter meaning of artification is more significant than the former one. It better shows how art can acquire an educational value and produce an improvement not only in the urban area – become more beautiful – but also in the residents’ quality of life. In this direction, artification (from performance to street art) can contribute to shape the space, creating inclusive ambiance and, doing so, it acquire a political value.

Thorvald Gran, Sovereignty and democracy in nation states. Constraints on development. The case of Norway

The democratization of the political regime combined with the suggested democratic deficiency in the private economic sector and in bureaucracies, both public and private, is an expression of existing but withdrawn sovereignty. In an aesthetic perspective, the idea of a nearly complete democracy in Norway can be a veil covering the reality of the sovereignty potential, the reality of the military and police power (potential) of the Norwegian state.

The idea here is that sovereignty is a staying fact. Humans can use physical force towards others without assigning any value, dignity or right to the human – or animal – attacked. Humans develop norms that limit and counteract the unfolding of sovereign actions in the cultural field. In that field the language communities are of prime importance. Using language humans learn that they are moral members of communities; they produce a base- or proto-democratic norm system.

Because physical force is a social reality, political power implies control of physical, military and police power and in that control lies the possibility of sovereign actions. However, political regimes are confronted by a combination of base- or proto-democracies in language communities within their realm and by formalized democratic movements. Political regimes will therefore vary on the distribution and societal power of formalized democratic institutions, both as legal systems and task-oriented organizations.

Sovereign actions are a potential of political regimes, while a base democracy is at work within language communities. The idea here has been to test this relationship between sovereignty and democracy in the political history of Norway. Sovereign action (by owners) is a reality in organizations applying the work contract. In signing the contract, employees assign away the right of participation in strategic leadership of the organization. The work contract creates a deficiency of democracy in all the organizations where it is applied.

In the latter half of the 19^th century the Norwegian state moved from primarily control of legality to a substantive engagement in economic development, building infrastructure needed for modern capitalist production and trade. Through taxation and expansion of public bureaucracies, the state gained strategic control of business development. Later the welfare state similarly gained strategic control of the labor market, taking care of people who for different reasons were less useful in competitive business. Increased state power reduced the freedom of local communities, while the power of the national and municipal formal democracies increased. The need for activating sovereign actions internally receded.

Formal democracy, as the system where a community elects its leaders, can expand, probably right up to doors of top government and the military. However, sovereign actions can counter those developments. Politics is perhaps about this unequal struggle between sovereignty and democracy. It might be that the best antidote to sovereign military actions by states is – as Krasner suggests – democratic organizations of sovereign states.

Anete Vanaga, Agonistics of Belonging: Rethinking the Political Frontier

In this presentation a case study of Urban Cultural planning project in Riga, Latvia will be investigated, critically approaching the community strengthening activities through cultural practices as a tool to increase the participatory activity. I argue that with the destructive form the current neoliberalism takes, non-activity and non-participation is an important tool of resistance, which shouldn't be overlooked, but instead seen as an opportunity to critically look at the neoliberal politics today.

Therefore a post-hegemonic thought, a notion of a political frontier between those who belong, and those who don't instead of hegemonic identities, is provoked. By looking at the cultural planning strategies in micro-neighborhoods in Latvia, I argue that instead of creating a dialogue between different identities, creative approaches of destruction of attachments, as defined by Bruno Latour, are at work. In broader categories speaking it is the process of neoliberalization of the "Illiberal East". I argue that by employing the tool of ecology of practices, as defined by Isabelle Stengers, the borders of neoliberalism can be recognized, instead of continuation of the destruction of the dismissed attachments, giving space to an approach I aim to call the agonistics of belonging. Stengers refers to it as a confusion of attachments with universal obligations that allows practitioners destroy other practices by either not recognizing them or acknowledging them as invalid. By demystifying the universal obligations, the radical negativity of belonging can be recognized, facilitating coexistence instead of destruction, even if unrecognized, forming adversarial relationship (agonistic) with the other.

Carsten Friberg, Formation and politics

I wish to invite you to discuss two topics: formation/Bildung and politics.

The first relates to the appearance in 'appearances of the political'. If appearance means how something makes itself present in the environment and this appearance is a matter of physical structures in designing and organising the environment hence what is sensorial and what should be called aesthetic, then we can talk about how we are affected by the environment, i.e. ourselves "designed". Our concrete perceptual skills are formed which implies also our perception of the environment. Does that mean we are cultivated through the environment? Should we talk about appearances not only as political structures we find and characterise but also what find us and more important form us to characteris in specific ways? And is this forming then to be considered as instruction, education or Bildung?

This leads to the second question. Is this appearance of something political or simply of structures of power? When are we talking about power and when about politics? Is what I'm suggesting here appearances of powers rather than appearances of the political?

Past activities

2019

- 8 May, Ap.pol.-group seminar, Aalto University, Finland

2018

- 2-5 November, Aesthetics and Politics, seminar, Ascea, Italy

- 29 July-5 August, The Politics of Memory in Art, NSU-seminar 6/6, Fårö Kursgåd, Sweden

- 11 May, Ap.pol.-group seminar, University of Palermo, Italy

- 2-4 February, Political art and aesthetics in the everyday, NSU-seminar 5/6, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

2017

- 26 July-2 August, Action and Activism, NSU-seminar 4/6, Saulkrasti, Latvia

- 24-26 February, Aesthetics, Politics and Material Culture, NSU-seminar 3/6, University of Wrocław, Poland

2016

- 24-31 July, Appearances of the Political in 20th Century Culture, NSU-seminar 2/6, Orivesi, Finland

- 22-23 February, Identifying the Political, NSU-seminar 1/6, Riga, Latvia

29 Aug 2016

Summer, CFP and report

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