What perspectives and methods does advanced cultural theory offer for
our attempts to grasp political discourse and analyze aesthetic
treatments and performances of resistance? The international conference
THINKING – RESISTING – READING THE POLITICAL brings
together scholars from the fields of theatre, literature, art and media
studies, from cultural theory, sociology, and philosophy, to discuss
possibilities and limits of current models and attempt new approaches.
The deliberately ambiguous German title exemplifies the bidirectional
design: ‘widerständiges denken’ refers both to manners
of thinking resistance, and to the search for a quality of resistance
in manners of thought. Similarly, ‘politisches lesen’
intends both the search for a political element in dispositions towards
reading, and that for an adequate disposition to read for an element of
the political as understood in recent conceptions by Jacques
Rancière, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. The conference
assembles a set of thinkers from the fiels of theatre, literary, media
and art studies, from cultural theory, sociology and philosophy, to
discuss consequences that follow from these models: In what
theoretically describable forms of thought can resistance appear, and
how can resistance be thought of as an object of theory? How can the
political mark certain texts, and what procedures are available for a
reading that is marked by an appropriate sensibility for the contents
and orders of the political?
In recent years, theory, art and feuilleton have all seen a recurrence
of notions hailing from ethics and politics, including the
controversial concept of an ‘ethical’ or ‘political
turn’, but also an increased interest in ethical evaluation and
political engagement, and new studies into social preconditions, as
well as into reflections of the juridical and legislative influence on
the shape of art’s production and reception. These movements join
a by now well-established discourse on topically related objects within
post-colonial and gender studies, and not least a renewed attention for
politically engaged positions of previous theoretical discourses, which
are now often read in new ways that are quite removed from their
original and immediate political intentions.
At the same time, we find – often in different places, contexts
and traditions – an increasing attention for far-reaching
conceptions that entertain new claims to universality or an autonomous
weltanschauung or agenda. What these contributions in the context of
radical democracy theories and recent philosophical interventions
concerning politics share despite their differences is an emphatic
valorization of concepts of the political, the event or of truth, taken
in the sense of a radical interruption and re-constitution of
historical aprioris; a tendency that recurs in as different a manner as
those of Badiou and Rancière, of Critchley and Esposito.
With an aim to better understand, clearly describe and critically
discuss such concepts of a political dimension in aesthetics, the talks
at this conference will look at those facets of the
‘political’ that are problematized in their discourses: At
phenomena, that is, that depend upon their fundamental
incommensurability with representations and institutions, with stable
notions of political order and uninterrupted political discourse. Such
interpretations distance themselves from a simple equation of political
reading with an interest in politically engaged, appellative texts and
literatures that support or accuse specific party politics or
revolutionary programs; nor does their focus rest on purely literary
treatments of categorical de- and re-differentiation in established
political discourse, as they are discussed in postcolonial, gender and
minority studies among others. Rather, following La Mouffe and Laclau,
the political is here intended as a complementary and opposing concept
to that of politics, confronting that incoherence that balances the
politics of coherent commonality and communicability in favor of
conflicting political autonomy and enouncement.
So far, the demands and possibilities of these concepts have rarely
been fulfilled or even systematically considered in cultural studies.
Faced with a large number of almost positivistically empirical studies
focusing on particular phenomena on the one hand, and ambitioned
speculative designs on the other, we find a vast array of possible
links, each of which has proven itself productive, and yet each of
which threatens to oversimplify the ‘application’ of single
terms and ideas taken from overarching theories by turning them into
tools for highly specialized disciplines. At the same time, it is the
political ambitions and presuppositions of many superficially adopted
theories that seem to be insufficiently reflected, sometimes even
hardly made aware, in such ‘applications’.
We want to attack both deficits. Both, we suggest, are owed not least
to the difficulties engendered by the very idea of an
‘application’, a ‘use’ that is in itself often
foreign to the main tenets of the original discourses. A naïve
concept of method in the sense of established philosophy of science, or
even following traditionally hermeneutical, descriptive, e.g.
structuralist, and most poststructuralist approaches sometimes
misrepresents theory as a toolbox, its instruments readily separated
from their originating beliefs and turned to the screws and nails of
otherwise unconnected objects of culture and art. But this stand in
stark contrast to the central observation that political, social,
conceptual conditions and artistic practices are incontrovertibly
interlinked. Similarly unconvincing are those adoptions of radical
theory that avoid discussing any consequences from the positions they
adopt, omitting the necessary reflection of their own view of
scientific and scholarly practice in contemporary cultural studies.
Returning to an interest in the political, we thus propose to accompany
such interests with an intention towards theoretical conceptions, and
to openly examine if and how that intention might translate into
specific analytic or descriptive measures: The conference will discuss
the problematic ‘consequences in methodology’ attributed to
these theories from a number of different vantage points. The
interdisciplinary setup will hopefully provide opportunities to
productively discuss theories of various provenience and to grapple
with works of art and individual analyses, examining, defending or
rejecting the possibility of a methodology informed by advanced theory.
The conference will aim not only to continue a critical reflection upon
the proposals offered by current theories, but to constantly accompany
that reflection with a conscious question as to the specific
consequences that flow from these theories to the practice of cultural
study and the analysis of individual and concrete pieces of art; a
question that might well have to be answered in the negative, but
deserves an explicit answer nevertheless. Can there be methods for a
scholarly sound reading of the political? Is the activity of dealing
with always already elusive and thus doubly resistant categories at all
graspable in terms of methods or techniques? And whatever the answer
may be, can it in turn help us to better understand common suppositions
of methodology and contribute to a productive argument on what a method
is?
Talks are welcome in German and English; if possible, English is
preferred.