7.

why, Leben? And after that,
it snowed
translucent middle night
the margins of the page
absorb color,
icicle snow | fantasize that
clarity

it's the construction of the battlefield,
too | in all the elsewhere
guilt, the palpable emotion

the child |is| the revolutionary spectator
above all, this is what
being |a parent|
implies, and yet, we close it off
there are "real, active men" out there
setting out

lost in all the drifts

6.

what a |lovely| day
the spring
already up
with sun
the outside
world again
--you have a fantasay
that you have
a job--so robbing,
again
polarized,
the indigo bunting
migrates by night.
this is enough.

this is enough

One of the most common desires of critical work is to get beyond the binary. There are many figures for the division--contradiction, antagonism, double bind, splitting--terms that also involve the construction of definitions that function to make clear the boundaries at work between terms. As Maria Mies describes in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (London: Zed Books, 1986), the strategy of the feminist movement to reject "all dualistic and hierarchical divisions, created by capitalist patriarchy, viz., between public and private, political and economic, body and mind, head and heart, etc.," was the right strategy, and I agree with her assessment that there is still work to be done here, in demystifying "all colonizing divisions," but the next part of the argument, which for her involves the "desire to 'become whole' again" (35), raises more questions about what kind of strategy there is to have in moving forward, and this in no small way relates back to how the divisions, splitting, and difference are conceptualized in the first place.

Of primary interest for her analysis is "the interplay between the sexual and international division of labor." She reflects on what terms we should use to describe these divided and yet related sides of the world market (and similarly, it's a question of how to refer to the divided and yet related aspects of the sexual division of labor). She writes, "If we follow the feminist principle of transcending the divisions created by capitalist patriarchy in order to be able to establish that these divisions constitute only parts of the whole, we cannot treat the 'First' and 'Third' world as separate entities, but have to identify the relations that exist between the two" (39). Her effort to relate the two parts involves thinking about "polarization": "one pole is getting 'developed' at the expense of the other pole, which in this process is getting 'underdeveloped'" (39). The terms of development thus function to describe the international division of labor, but the structure that she presents here is generalized as well to other divisions. Unlike "First" and "Third" world countries, or "center" and "peripheries," she argues that the process of polarization put to use by capitalist patriarchy requires terms that "identify the relations between the two" at the same time that they clarify how the processes produce distinct poles. The polarization that she describes happens both on the level of material reality and on the level of the concepts--both in relation to mental and material labor (see her reference to the distinction in Marx, page 51), and it is because it is preceded by a division of labor that for her is thoroughgoing that this division (like the others that she describes) does not adequately describe the conditions of capitalist patriarchy, but its effects. The division that she finds as primary or thoroughgoing is the designation of the "'production of new life' as 'natural' and not as a historical fact" (51). The polarization of the production of new life and the production of historical life is covered over by the division of labor (between mental and material labor), with the result that the production of new life is underdeveloped, economically and conceptually, and the production of historical life is overdeveloped. 

The "desire" to transcend these divisions, to find a place of "wholeness" again (as problematic as this might be, as Paige Sweet points out) is supposed to take place in opposition to the desire or the force that compels polarization (for the benefit of overdevelopment). She writes: "The very motor driving on this polarization of the world economy, namely, the capital accumulation process, is based on a world view which never says 'This is enough'" (39). As a "motor" of the world economy, polarization functions because there is a world view behind it which never says "enough." Here, the belief in an endless, limitless process functions to describe that "world view." What is the relation between the desire to overcome the binary, to find wholeness, and to say "this is enough"? Who, or what, would such a revolutionary spectator be?

pictures: Philli's feet and a drawing of a pufferfish; Rosemarie Trockel, A Cosmos (2011)
 

5.

the glance backwards
within is read
as unbecoming
look down, to look up
I wouldn't say otherwise
but it's forgotten, forgone,
becomes depressed, sunk
returns as
coin|cidence

4.

sucking is infantile
pleasure and aggression
the primordial all in one
in the figure of
the child

3.

before depletion
when the fibers were more luminous
fantasy of maternal imaginary
the oceanic, of plethora
the thinness now
not wear

2.

The world spools around us,
this enclosure, wringing out
incessant clicking around
filtering, the new
mechanism for administration--
but how to enclose the content
of the world? It's not the
word's inadequacy, but
marginalia--

1.

Imagination monsters in
the end also incognito
it's far easier to draw
the beginning, blackness--
the zero force out of which

but it's not that darkness
that stills, of necessity--

and speaks of loss
tiny and circumspect,
small harbor
indigo drift.

Der andere Schauplatz

I'm trying to synthesize a few things with this post, perhaps more wildly disparate than will merge in the space of writing this (both temporal and raeumlich), and all of them associatively linked to the convergence of some factors experientially and conceptually. The first is Balibar's notion of "the other scene," which occurred to me as a formulation that could be useful for thinking about alternative functions of the poetic work (alternative to the "task" of political lyric, or the task of lyric to sublimate aggression or combat barbarism). Turning to Balibar, I noted that "the other scene" is a reference taken from Freud (primarily in The Interpretation of Dreams), and further, that Freud develops his ideas about it from the luminous G.T. Fechner, whose Principles of Psycho-Physics is also a primary referent of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This all only means something to me because in attempting to think about "forepleasure [Vorlust]" as a means for thinking alternatively about the function of tension release in relation to pleasure and displeasure, Freud's references also lead to Fechner, who develops this notion in The Primer of Aesthetics, and here it is the idea of the mutual non-contradiction of factors that allows him to account for otherwise inexplicable effects, such as the feelings of identification and transfer of emotions that occur in experiencing works of art and aesthetic events.

In Politics and the Other Scene, Balibar uses the term to refer to the "differentiation of change," or a "change within change," rather than the "changing of conditions." The idea seems to provide Balibar with a way of conceptualizing the "locality" of such factors, or the coherence of a pattern that is, as he says, one "inverted" from Marx's turning away from the "apparent scene" of politics to reveal the "real scene" of economic processes. Balibar writes, "I have a certain tendency to invert this pattern--not to return to the idea that 'ideas drive history', but to emphasize the fact that 'material' processes are themselves (over- and under-) determined by the processes of the imaginary which have their own very effective materiality and need to be unveiled" (xiii). Balibar qualifies this distinction with the idea that it's not exactly that the political other scene is the scene of the imaginary collective processes and their unconscious determinants, and this qualification perhaps points to the significance of this being originally Fechner's notion. It's been a little while since I've looked more closely at his work, but the Fechner/Freud distinction (which is elaborated by Mai Wegener in "DAS PSYCHOPHYSISCHE UNBEWUSSTE: GUSTAV THEODOR FECHNER UND DER MOND" (Psychoanalytische Perspectiven 23 (2005) 2, 261-282)) often seems to consist of Fechner's greater emphasis upon the preconscious aspects of the unconscious, rather than the unconscious itself. The structure is interesting, however, and resonates with Balibar's above because Fechner's elaboration of the indistinction seems to require the rather more forceful distinction of cs/ucs, as Balibar's inversion seeks also to recombine and relocate the place, or perhaps "moment," of their interaction. This is the point at which, I think, the associative connection with "the other scene" shifts into a conceptualization of "civility" and for a "politics of civility." In the preface, the connection is drawn, although not explicit: "A politics of violence, or a politics of civility (the same thing obversely formulated), is not something that can be pursued solely on the stage of globalization, where processes, motivations and interests are supposed to be visible and manageable" (xii). Balibar explains that it's in order to account for the heterogeneity of the processes of globalization that Freud's concept is so useful, and it's this that Freud attempts to describe as the "essential heterogeneity of psychic processes" (xii). It's possible, therefore, to think about how this notion of the Schauplatz provides a scene for civility, for what is neither, according to Balibar, "transformation" or "emancipation."

Briefly, civility is, for Balibar, "a politics which regulates the conflict of identifications between the impossible (and yet, in a sense, very real) limits of a total and floating identification, 'civility'. Civility in this sense is certainly not a politics which suppresses all violence; but it excludes extremes of violence, so as to create a (public, private) space for politics (emancipation, transformation), and enable violence itself to be historicized. What interests me, here, is not to codify that civility, but to attempt, in conclusion to outline some of its problems" (29-30). "Civility" is not then a model for a politics, but a way of thinking about the problems that are necessarily involved in thinking what precedes political actions, or politics, or what takes place behind the scenes of globalization. And in this sense, "civility" refers to the processes of identification and misidentification (processes involved in the master-slave dynamic and in the notion that fascism is the desire that "desires its own repression") and the destructiveness (tending toward death drivenness) of these processes. These ideas are elaborated in "Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Anthropology" (differences 20 (2009)), and here above I've done little more than outline the argument and ideas, but the link that I'm attempting to draw out between "the other scene" and "civility" relates to the distinction between sleeping and waking.

It's not just that "the other scene" refers to this distinction, and in fact becomes a concept that allows for the theorization of the distinction, but it remains very much the case, in Balibar's writings, that this also underlies the parallel (and gain) of the essential heterogeneity of the psychical and the essential heterogeneity of the political.

In her essay, Wegener describes the difference between Freud's and Fechner's notions of "the other scene [anderen Schauplatz] by talking about how Freud fixes the concept as a "synonym of the unconscious itself." (271, translations mine). In contrast, Wegener argues that Fechner's conceptualization of the unconscious is "physical," which is surprising, she notes, for the founder of psychophysics: "Dies ist nicht der Fall [die Zuordnung des Unbewussten zwischen dem Koerperlichen und dem Psychischen], Fechners Unbewusstsein ist unzweitdeutig ein physisches. Die psychophysisiche Taetigkeit wird, wie oben erwaehnt, von ihm als koerperliche gekennzeichnet, sie ist der koerperliche Traeger des Psychischen. Ihre negativen Werte, also das Unbewusste, entsprechen schlicht dem Schlaf [This is not the case [the placement of the unconscious between the bodily and the psychical]; Fechner's unconscious is unambivalently physical. The psychophysical activity becomes, as mentioned above, designated as bodily; it is the bodily carrier of the physical. Its negative value, the unconscious, corresponds simply in sleep]." As Wegener describes, "the other scene" is the expression of a negativity, rather than the expression of an ambivalence between psychical and physical life, as the distinction between waking and sleeping often seems to entail. Fechner articulates this: "Sollte der Schauplatz der psychophysischen Thaetigkeit waehrend des Schlafes und des Wachens derselbe sein, so koennte der Traum meines Erachtens blos eine, auf einem niedern Grade der Intensistaet sich haltende, Forsetzung des wachen Vorstellungsleben sein, und muesste uebrigens dessen Stoff und dessen Form theilen. Aber es verhaelt sich ganz anders [If the scene of psychophysical activity is supposed to be the same during sleep and waking, then the dream, in my opinion, can be merely a continuation, which maintains a lower degree of intensity, of the waking imaginative life and would therefore share this material and form. But it behaves quite differently]." His articulation of this difference between waking and sleeping makes use of the notion of the "threshold [die Schwelle]," which preoccupies the Elements. From this threshold, he derives the notion of negativity that Wegener takes up above: "...die zunehmende Vertiefung des Schlafes unter die Schwelle eben so mit wachsenden negativen Werthen zu bezeichnen, womit sich unsere fruehere Auffassung negativer Bewusstseinswerthe als unbewusster Werthe von der Empfindung auf das Gesammtbewusstsein uebertraegt, und eine Verallgemeinerung und Verstaerkung der frueheren Auffassung zugleich erwaechst [the growing deepening of sleep beneath the threshold indicates the growing negative value, with which our earlier ideas about the negative consciousness value were translated as the unconscious value of the sensation on the entire consciousness and a generalization and strengthening of the earlier ideas simultaneously increase] (441)." This rather figural notion of the negativity and positivity in relation to the threshold thus serves as Fechner's conceptualization of the oscillation that is constitutive of conscious and unconscious value. It's all about the threshold, for Fechner, and how or what its overcoming can be conceived of as. In this conception, "the other scene" is not the unconscious, per se, but the registration of a threshold which can be passed over and under, according to the gradations in the state of sleep.

Note: These associations/convergences latently manifested walking in Boston, with a recounted dream of EB (with Rei Terada and Travis Tanner).

die Aufgabe

“Was Wunder, da sie ihre Funktion darin haben, diesen Typ mit sich selbst zu versöhnen und jene Identität zwischen Berufs- und Privatleben herzustellen, die von diesen Leuten unter dem Namen »Menschlichkeit« verstanden wird, in Wahrheit aber das eigentlich Bestialische ist, weil alle echte Menschlichkeit – unter den heutigen Verhältnissen - nur aus der Spannung zwischen jenen beiden Polen hervorgehen kann. In ihr bilden sich Besinnung und Tat, sie zu schaffen ist die Aufgabe jeder politischen Lyrik, und erfüllt wird sie heute am strengsten in den Gedichten von Brecht.”

[It is surprising that their function is to reconcile this type of person to himself, and to establish that identity of professional and private life which these men understand by the name “humanity” but which is in truth the genuinely bestial, since authentic humanity—under present conditions—can arise only from a tension between these two poles? In this tension, consciousness and deed are formed. To create it is the task of the all political lyricism, and today this task is most strictly fulfilled by Bertolt Brecht’s poems.]

--Walter Benjamin, “Die Linke Melancholie [zu Erich Kästners neuem Gedichtbuch]” (1931; trans. Ben Brewer, italics mine)

In his essay criticizing the poetic work of Erich Kästner, Benjamin comments on the "task of all political lyricism [die Aufgabe jeder politischen Lyrik]," which follows up some recent conversations I had had regarding the conceptual terrain of the idea of the "task" at hand in thinking about the work of the poem, or of lyric poetry (more generally of art or writing). It emerges more clearly in relation to Benjamin's reference to the term that the term--the task, the idea of the vocation of the poetry--is itself to be regarded with skepticism. This task is not the type of vocation (Beruf) that Benjamin imagines to need suspending from private life (Privatleben) in the first part of the above statement, but is instead defines the function of maintaining "tension" (Spannung) against "establishing an identity" (Identität herstellen). I have found the work of the maintenance of tension to be something that requires the cover of other forms of affective work that do not usually receive credit for having a function in and of themselves (something like "beneath the cover of one," a poetic fragment I recovered recently in a pile of old books from earlier poetry-writing days). But I think what Benjamin imagines, and uses Brecht as an example of--which, in fact, Brecht is so often taken as an example of, by Eich, by Enzensbeger, by Muller--is the dissolution of the thing that functions as the "cover of one," a dissolution that allows for the real clarity of the political message to be illuminated even as it engages in this tension. That there is no tolerance for the "cover of one," for what we might consider that non-dialectical element, is not something that perhaps gets admitted, not something that well-meaning theorists intentionally thwart, but it does always happen on the way, in a way not at all dissimilar to how the task (Aufgabe) emerges here both in opposition to and as an extension of the Berufsleben. 

Although I would not offer the same utopian figure of the "search for a shared new language," as Zafer Senocak does in his essay "The Concept of Culture and its Discontents" (Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture, 1990-1998, trans. Leslie A. Adelson, U Nebraska Press, 2000), which functions similarly to above, to define and re-assign the task, I do appreciate the impulse that this is organized against, namely the "dialectically cast mode of thought" that describes civilization and the civilizing processes. Perhaps it is not so much the truth of the dialectic that remains such a powerful and compulsive idea, but in fact the way that its engagement with tension often (always?) involves the employment (or awareness) of a safety relief valve.

Federici and Arendt

Paolo Virno`s ``Virtuosity and Revolution`` pursues some of the lines I have been trying to draw between Arendt`s take on the ``subjective illusion,`` the contradiction between freedom and necessity, and the Marxist concern with the contradiction within the subjective modes of reproduction and productive to capitalism. Resolving such a contradiction on the side of a productive subject who is resistant, autonomous Marxist theorists such Cesare Casarino, Hardt and Negri, and Virno, posit the notion of the ``common`` as a way of thinking about positive models of subjective resistance. Casarino writes, ``To claim back and seize the common as production entails a drastic reorientation of subjectivity.... It entails the production of a form of subjectivity constituted by a counterdesire. Such a counterdesire is the desire to be in common--as opposed to the desire to be for the common-as-negated-by-capital, the desire to be captive of one`s own negation--in short, as opposed to the desire not to be`` (17). Such theories, which prescribe a mode of subjectivity, implicitly--or explicitly, as Casarino--corralling reason and desire, are predicated upon an opposition to the Arendtian model of subjectivity, or rather, the liberal subject that is assumed to be the model or the outcome of Arendt`s ideas about work, labor, and political activity.

Virno`s essay makes clear how central the opposition to Arendt is to work on the common, since, as he claims, ```To each his own` seems to be the message of Arendt`s The Human Condition, and every man for himself...the other two fundamental spheres, work and intellect, remain unchanged in their quantitative structures`` (206). Virno uses Arendt as an (or the) example of unfettered individualism, figured first as a feature of the intellect and then as a figure of work. Virno`s claim that this is what Arendt is doing is built upon the idea that she ``rejects out of hand the very idea of a public intellect`` (193). Conflating the ``life of the mind`` with the private sphere, Virno wrongly concludes that the intellect--which includes thought, willing, and judging, according to The Life of the Mind--does not entail a ``care for common concerns`` (Virno 193). As both The Life of the Mind and her Lectures on Kant`s Political Philosophy demonstrate, however, the care for common concerns turns out to be the central thesis of our intellectual life. What is perhaps more immediate to my concerns here is not this interpretive argument, but rather the noticeable absence of the term ``labor`` from Virno`s analysis of Arendt.

The absence of labor is all the more notable in light of Sylvia Federici`s critique of autonomous Marxists` work on the subject of immaterial labor, ``Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint.`` More particularly, the points that Federici claims to be missing from this work--namely that ``capitalist development is always at the same time a process of underdevelopment,`` and that unpaid reproductive labor continues to remain unrecognized, despite feminist analysis of the sexual division of labor--can be seen to be functions of the same type of disregard that is paid Arendt. For in Arendt`s case, labor involves exactly the realm of unwaged labor and the uneven development of freedom to which Federici refers. In her discussion of the private and public realm in The Human Condition, Arendt writes:  ``What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity--for instance, by ruling over slaves--and to become free`` (31). Later in this same section, she describes how the private realm, far from being a realm that individuals could choose (over, say, the common or the public realm) is the realm of labor: ``Hidden away were the laborers who `with their bodies minister to the [bodily] needs of life` and the women who with their bodies guarantee the physical survival of the species. Women and slaves belonged to the same category and were hidden away not only because they were somebody else`s property but because their life was `laborious,` devoted to bodily functions`` (72). These lines from Arendt describe how the freedom of the worker is dependent upon a realm of necessity--whether his own or the necessary labor of another--from which he cannot become free. It is her concern with the effects of feeling that one is free--the justification of ``force and violence``--that inform her insistence of making visible the distinction between labor and work.

While the distinctions between private and public or between labor and work themselves may be belabored, Arendt`s distinctions in general--such as between ``necessity and freedom,`` ``futility and permanence,`` ``shame and honor`` (73)--they do not serve prescriptive purposes, as I indicated above in the case of the Marxist subject, but rather they work to retain other distinctions that runs across and within both categories (see, for example, unquiet/quiet distinction, HC 15). Arendt`s concern is not only that as work ``assumes the character of labor,`` the value of work (its permanence, the durable world it creates) is denigrated, but that no longer being able to see necessity, the private realm, has its own consequences. In this regard, it remains for Arendt crucial that man knows ``he is subject to necessity,`` since in contrast to ``life in slavery,`` ``this condition [of being subject to need and necessity] is no longer fully manifest and its lack of appearance has made it much more difficult to notice and remember`` (121). But why is it that Arendt finds it so important to maintain the perceptibility of the private realm, which is indeed that realm which is about ``privation,`` about the ``life processes`` which are ``futile``because they appear and disappear? Is it the easing of this ``repugnance to futility`` (121) that she seeks, or, in fact, its opposite? It is the figure of ``socialized mankind,`` the indistinction between society and the life-processes themselves, that presents a threat large enough to defend against with the insistence on maintaining the perceptibility of the private realm.

In Arendt`s conceptualization, the private realm is like ``the other, dark and hidden side of the public realm`` (64), and thus perception of it, or the ability to perceive it does not have the same qualities as perception in public life, which is built around being among others. The perception of the private entails the capacity to see what is ``no longer human`` about human existence, to see that ``man exist[s] in this sphere not as a truly human being but only as a specimen of the animal species man-kind`` (46). And while it is true that Arendt does not elevate the capacity to perceive this to the realm of action, its clear function is to preserve the ambivalence within ``futility``--its not only that futility is to be guarded against, as indicated by the danger of the phenomenon of ``loneliness`` (59, which in The Origins of Totalitarianism has consequences for terror), or by the threatened reality of a world that appears impermanent--but the idea that the feeling of ``futility`` is one that provides individuals with the ``strongest impulse`` toward liberation (and thus also toward mastery, violence, and force). The ambivalent treatment of futility in the private realm has to do with the fact that registering it is like registering the desire not to be. That this still follows a model in which the darker ground is given meaning by ``rising into sight,`` does not minimize the potential for thinking about the impacts of losing what Arendt calls the ``non-privative traits of privacy``: ``a life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses that quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense`` (71). 

the necessity of irresistibility

In The Micro-Politics of Capital, Jason Read describes the contradiction that is raised for the subject between “the total subjection of sociality and subjectivity to capital and the concomitant development of a subjective and social power irreducible to abstract labor” (119). Read points to a contradiction that gels into the problem of “thinking resistance” (11). I approach the problem of the production of subjectivity, in Read’s terms, of the “more than one” (Balibar’s transinidividual) from a different perspective, which is rooted in Arendt’s critical insight about how the “more than” of preference is not opposed to necessity, but rather, in its capacity to will or choose against the given, remains able to provoke necessity, to see the violence behind necessity. Preference, the “styles, desires, communities, and ways of communicating” (147), to use Read’s phrasing, that become productive in “real subsumption” do not represent a depature from the “necessities of “bare life’” (147), nor do they represent the shift or temporal progression from one mode of production to another; rather, these “preferences” are there from the beginning, first registered as qualities destroyed in “primitive accumulation,” by the “violence necessary to destroy precapitalist social relations” (14). The destruction of preferences is actually, however, the creation of “needs and wants,” the transformation of the oppressive violence of the master into the violence which is there is the force of necessity. Arendt’s interest in preference is linked to her abiding concern with “the beginning,” and with the potential for freedom that is created in this moment of expropriation, the unearthing of what appears as natural or necessary as man-made and political. Arendt describes this as Marx’s most explosive contribution, but following Hegelian turn, in which the recovery of the “ability to act,” which now places laborers under their “daily needs and wants” (53) makes action “irresistible,” not any longer from a feeling of “being violated,” but “by virtue of the very necessity under which emancipation had put the working class” (53).

Arendt’s critique of Marx in On Revolution and The Human Condition and her copious discussions of the thinking individual make her unpopular among theorists of the revolutionary subject. In fact, Arendt is often with the assumption of the liberal subject, but it is more accurate to say that Arendt hits upon the contradictions between the liberal subject and the revolutionary, proposing that the problem of this subject is not, as it has long been assumed, getting rid of the “responsible and isolated subject.” For Arendt, the illusion of the individual subject is necessary (or inevitable) and attempts to do away with it—to reveal how the singular “I” is a collective “We”—end up circling around the problems of agency invoked by this formulation. For Arendt, this illusion is a false problem (Scheinproblem), one whose calls for demystification end up contributing to a mystification that is far worthier of being demystified: the confusion of being at once spectators and actors and the tendency to mistake spectating for acting. It is this illusion, according to Arendt, that allows liberal and revolutionary subjects alike to develop a political morality grounded in the certainty of the self. Whereas this illusion can be disentangled from what appears as historical or economic necessity, the persistence of that other subjective illusion—of the “I”’s feeling that she is a singular one with wants and needs—reveals how “necessary” this articulation is to the concept of freedom.

Preference does not involve becoming free from this necessity, but continually unearths the violent, non-natural premises of necessity, developing the capacity to intervene in this necessity by foregrounding the role of the spectator—our role as spectators—even when it is more compelling to understand ourselves as actors. Arendt’s ideas about preference end up illuminating her discussion of how terror results when necessity replaces freedom, and these insights are significant—not only because of the implicit warning, but because the discussion makes an argument for a opposition of art and politics, based on the what has been seen to happen choices become mistaken as criterion for the endpoint of revolution. The opposition of art and politics is not, as first it may seem, an argument for an apolitical aesthetics. Quite the opposite: the aesthetic is unearthed as a political moment; this unearthing is what I will refer to as aesthetic activity, for it is—quite akin to discussion of the subject—about “recover[ing] its ability to act.” But in being read as political, this artistic “choice” does not, of course, become necessarily political or become a “criterion” for political activity.

picture: Marsha Cottrell, Hitherto Unknown Lights (2011, iron oxide on mulberry paper)