Appearances of the Political: CfP: AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND MATERIAL CULTURE (Wroclaw, Feb 24-26)

14 Sept 2016

CfP: AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND MATERIAL CULTURE (Wroclaw, Feb 24-26)

AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND MATERIAL CULTURE

Appearances of the Political 3/6 Winter Symposium: February 24-26, 2017, Wrocław, Poland,
in collaboration with the University of Wrocław

We invite scholars, students, artists and third sector agents to study together the forms, appearances and the aesthetic functions of the political. These can be discussed in social, artistic, aesthetic and cultural terms and with any method which is able to shine light on the problematics. We aspire 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 these issues. We believe that experimentation is crucial for rethinking the political.

Theme of the Symposium

What kind of objects (flags, megaphones) do we use in demonstrations and what is their actual role? What is the material culture of party politics – besides suits, microphones, soup kettles at marketplaces where politicians meet the people and the big black cars, which take the politicians from place to place? What is the material culture of administration, or has it all just become embedded in the computer screens?

What are the aesthetic orders and material resources of the human rights, human catastrophes and the warfare producing them - and how are these issues tackled in art? What is the future of the role of these orders and resources?

How do neoliberal and capitalist forces occupy spaces with material culture? In what ways do they embody certain political ideas, not the least ideas anchored to the free market and the consumer society. Benches are not anymore good for sitting, in many places, as many want the people to just walk and shop.

Design in general contributes to forming physical space in accordance with ideologies and intentions and plays a role in how we view space: how it is accessible, hierarchies, limitation of certain actions. Design is also used for changing actions like forming social and environmental sustainability.
And how are Western democracies constructing physical answers to migration and refugees? When borders are made again visible, camps for refugees established and also different forms of personal appearances such as dress codes become battlefields for ideologies.

The symposium is hosted by the University of Wrocław and will be organized together with the NSU-circles Understanding Migration in Nordic and Baltic Countries, Crisis and Crisis Scenarios and International Relations and Human Rights. There will be joint sessions shared by all circles.
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 third meeting of the group does not imply any obligation for participating in future meetings or participation in previous 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.

Format(s) of the presentations

We encourage people to do both traditional and non-traditional presentations:
1) Oral presentation of ideas:
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. but we encourage very short presentations (5-10 min.) of an idea and motivation making space for creating a discussion around this idea.
2) 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, however there is a maximum of 30 min including time for feedback.

Please submit via email to the coordinators:
circle2@nsuweb.org

A written proposal (max. 350 words) with a title. This text should include your presentation proposal, its format, its duration, and technology and/or facilities you may need as well as 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 exchange and debates in an open environment of people with different backgrounds.
The deadline to submit proposals is December 15, 2016. Notification about acceptance will be given before 31 December. A preliminary program will be announced on January 15, 2017 on http://nordic.university/study-circles/2-appearances-of-the-political/appearances-of-the-political/ where you can also find more information about NSU. Applicants will be informed by e-mail.

Registration and fee

Professors, lecturers and other professional scholars 50€
Students, unemployed, freelancers and participants from Baltic countries and Poland: 30 € Fee covers expenses for lunch Saturday and Sunday, coffee breaks and reception Friday evening The fee should be paid ABSOLUTELY NO LATER THAN JANUARY 10. The letter of acceptance will contain a bank account. NOTE: Bank fees are at the charge of the participant. Please notice that fee or other costs will not be reimbursed if the participant cancels.

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, NSU 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.

For more information www.nordic.university

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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

14 Sept 2016

CfP: AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND MATERIAL CULTURE (Wroclaw, Feb 24-26)

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