A Modest Critique of Everything Existing (for the Glorious Dawn of a New Decade), part 1 of 212/31/2019 Given this week, which pivots around a Wednesday New Year's Day, I figured a two-part post on either end would be appropriate.
I recently read a blog post by Sonali Prasad, titled “Climate Change Storytelling Gets Multidimensional,” (Nieman Lab Dec. 24, 2019). Prasad, a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, writes that “Climate change is so far-reaching that it’s taken the form of a giant kraken, piercing its tentacles into our politics, economics, health, food, and culture.” Because it is a global phenomenon that permeates all aspects of life – political, cultural, technological, biological – it invites us to break down our mental “silos”: Cue the creatives, the fluttering kites of the newsroom: the artists, graphic designers, performers, coders, gadget nerds, poets, cartoonists, and musicians who will harness the emotional craft of science and climate journalism to tackle an overwhelming beast. They will look for inspiration outside the rigid boxes of standard news reporting to tell more visceral stories to a varied audience. They will lay their breadcrumb trail of ideas, covering the science and the hard-hitting impacts that drive decisions. Through their different forms, they will challenge the inflexibility of our thinking. If you’ve read any of my past posts, you probably know I’m down with this – with documentary poetry, living newsreels, science fiction. But for me, Prasad’s comments have even wider import than literature or performance per se. That’s due, in part, to something else I recently read, a little book Polity Press put out earlier this year (2019) called simply Politics and Aesthetics. It’s an extended interview of philosopher Jacques Rancière by editor Peter Engelmann. As the title of the book suggests, Rancière wants to look at the big picture – something a single short book can’t do justice to, let alone a blog post, but it's a start. For him, “the aesthetic dimension” can be defined as “the striving to live in a different sensual* world” (29). He opposes this dimension to the “regime of identifying art” (34) – that is, to policing generic boundaries, thinking about what is and isn’t art, debating the nature of artistic “excellence,” and so on.** Later Rancière explains that “there are essentially three possible attitudes towards what we call a work of art” (36): 1.) the “ethical regime”: art as extension of religion or philosophy – or the hostility towards art as an extension of religion or philosophy (e.g., Taliban or Plato) 2.) the “representative regime”: “a law of imitations that dictates what a poem should be like, what a work of art should be like, why and how one should make it, what audience one makes it for, what feeling it’s meant to evoke.” (37) – whether it’s Aristotle in the Poetics or the Jena Romantics. In other words, in the representative regime, “the arts” and the several genres of “literature,” each with its own “laws,” become realms that are seemingly independent. Their several “laws” purport to be based on those of “human nature,” but represent the values and interests of dominant classes. In it, an artistic hierarchy has “a very close connection” to a political or social one. 3.) the “aesthetic regime”: in which “the entire hierarchical order of representation is questioned,” leading to a paradox. “The paradox is that the aesthetic regime will define a specific sphere of art in which the arts no longer exist, but rather art.” And art (as a single, abstract noun) becomes “a sphere of specific experience which no longer obeys the same rules as other spheres of experience” – such as those imposed by political or social hierarchies (40). It is a short step from this idea to seeing art as actively opposing those hierarchies. So Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin “formulated a kind of embodiment of thought in the sensual forms of collective existence and placed them in opposition to the idea of the state” (48): an “aesthetic education” would produce a “human revolution” rather than a strictly political one. Still later, in the early 20th century, “artists of the avant-garde don’t want to make art in the service of politics or create works of art, but rather create forms of life” (49). What others call art works were, for them, constitutive parts of those new forms of life – either by creating them or thinking them into being as a totality. This way of thinking has implications for thinking through the climate crisis, it seems to me. To be continued . . . _____________________________________________________________ * “Sensuous” probably would be a better translation here. “Sensual” carries the connotation of “erotic” or “sybaritic.” “Sensuous” contains these, but relates to the workings of the senses more generally – that is, human beings’ interactions with the material conditions of existence. ** For instance, the way that poetry has become purely a vehicle for evaluation of itself. Contemporary poetics is not about what poetry is or does, but about who knows their poetry & who can set the pace.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |