A Modest Critique of Everything Existing (for the Glorious Dawn of a New Decade), part 2 of 21/2/2020 Now, there were certainly avant-garde artists who were only too willing to make art in the service of political ideology (the Futurists, for instance). Indeed, Rancière has a specific version of the avant-garde in mind, as exemplified in early Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which is “not an instrument in the service of a political line,” but rather is “already an expression of communism in sensual terms, proceeding from all the everyday activities that are connected via montage and will form a sort of communal, egalitarian and dynamic fabric of sensual life” (49). Vertov’s film expresses not ideals or ideas; rather, it documents changes that are actually taking place on the ground (and the fact that such a movie could be made was itself a major change in Russia, albeit short-lived). For Rancière, the film illustrates the fact that a true revolution is not “simply a change of government, of laws, of institutions” (50), but “a revolution of the forms of life, of the sensual universe, and of how to perceive it and act within it” (51). Thus “the essence of the human” is not located elsewhere than in the human community per se, and revolution becomes a matter of “ensuring that the essence of the community is already realized now in everyday activities” (53). For instance, Rancière doesn’t “simply view workers’ emancipation as the fact of fighting for a better future, but as the fact of already living a different present” (58).
Now, one may detect the stamp of a “workerist” or “autonomist” outlook in these statements, over-against a more directly political or syndicalist one. There is certainly a utopian tinge to it. But it always amazes me how writers invent utopias in response to actually-existing dystopic moments in history (Looking Backward, Herland, Men Like Gods, Ecotopia, etc.). That phenomenon doesn’t surprise me. What better time to reimagine everything than in moments when everything seems to be falling apart? While Rancière’s thinking harks back to Mai ’68, it may also suggest a way to survive climate catastrophe – via his definition of the aesthetic. Which is what made me think of Prasad’s post. She speaks in terms of “storytelling” and, as a journalist, is pretty clearly thinking of other genres and media artists use to address climate crisis as extensions of news stories. And maybe they are (certainly, the ongoing verse-chronicle on this blog is an example). But Prasad is considering cultural forms that are “more visceral” than a proper news story – more gut-level – more sensual, we might say. She mentions practitioners of several versions of what we think of as art: visual artists, graphic designers, performers, poets, and musicians. But she also mentions “coders” and “gadget nerds.” I am glad that she included these last two, which we usually think of as relating to technology rather than technique. What Rancière and like-minded theorists have in mind, I think, is not just the blurring between what is and isn’t art, but rather an expansion of how we think of art. It is an expansion forward, into avant-garde forms of expression that are coterminous with the altered everyday experiences of a community; but also backwards, to the notion of “arts” as skills; and outward, to encompass both in concrete form in the present moment. Perhaps hooking up a solar array for your neighborhood in the wake of a hurricane is your art-work. Or documenting the process of gathering and conserving water in a drought. Maybe it has to do with developing forms of permaculture that can survive climatic extremes and very high winds (and maybe producing some land art in the process). Could be you'll intervene in the language people around you are using to talk about the world around them. Perhaps your art-work is thinking up ways to relate all of these – to link the making of solar ovens to the making of poems – merging technology and technique in technē. These are perhaps weak examples, but if so, they only evince the weakness of my imagination; others will come up with cleverer ideas. It does seem to me that humans need to take a more expansive view of life and the activities of life, in which political activism, livelihood, the arts, and ways of everyday living are part of a whole. And this wider angle of view, because it encompasses so much more than a more compartmentalized focus, necessarily entails more possibilities, good and bad. There are more and more things that need connecting: “politics, economics, health, food, and culture,” and everything else in our life-world. None of this will come from the state – COPout-25 underlined that fact in wide-tipped magic marker. And the economy is controlled by old men who think they’re going to be dead by the time SHTF and who wish to continue to live in the manner to which they have become accustomed. They’re necessarily the problem. The only hope for survival is in what we now (somewhat ironically) refer to as "civil society." Rancière uses the generic term “the community” - this could mean all non-state, non-firm actors, but in English carries the connotation of the local, the sub-national scale. And because those of us in the global north are on the whole not as severely, immediately, and permanently slammed by climate chaos as those in the global south,* it seems to me we have a particular duty to try this silo-busting experiment in community-definition and -creation on ourselves, while we still have some latitude for action. ____________________________________________ * The most notable current exception is, of course, Australia, which is in the geographic south. For more on the meaning of "global south" and "global north" (as opposed to the geographical north and south), the Wikipedia article is a good place to start - including the maps.
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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. |