I want to view my personal, private beliefs and experiences as parallel and simultaneous to my social, public policies and actions. This is the difference between morality (metaphysics: what we think and feel in private) and ethics (politics: how we act in public society). Therefore, politics should be founded on the principle of not imposing a specific metaphysics, but rather to encourage and legislate policies that allow for as many metaphysics as there are people.
Aesthetics is the private choice and experience of a maker(s) expressed to an audience. Using a particular aesthetic can be a radical political act, but the actual aesthetic itself remains uniquely private (thus there is no absolutely right aesthetic).
Art is not valuable because of what it gives to you, it is valuable because of the process of giving meaning as a viewer/listener/reader. A particular aesthetic can be a radical political act by being in opposition to a conventional, commodified aesthetic, which pressures society toward passively accepting fascism. What is radical about Reinhardt’s aesthetic is its opposition to the deadening of people’s minds (one could make a similar argument against popular, conventional television, music, and Hollywood) and the way his paintings challenges their viewers’ to be active participants in the art-experience. If we learn that we can give (create) some meaning as audience, not just receive it obediently. We might become more intelligent, informed, and active citizens, as well. There is nothing in the aesthetic itself that produces this, though. It is in our confrontation with aesthetics where revolution lies.
This also continues an old theme in Farocki’s work: namely, the literal dehumanisation of the world and the consequent evacuation of the possibility of human agency, an ongoing event which often appears as the result of the spread of industrial and market processes to larger realms of the social. … Yet in each of these films … there is a sense of the possibility of actual human resistance to this process. It is precisely the sense of this possibility that gives Farocki’s films their (lasting) political urgency, and justifies Farocki’s art as itself just such an act of resistance.
His recent videos, however, give the sense that this process of dehumanisation has intensified. These works revolve around a void present in the social as it is now coming into being: paradoxically, that void consists of the absence of effective human beings, social agents, political actors, and workers producing, organising and resisting and more. His earlier work still sustained a sense that such subjects once existed and that some might emerge anew; in the recent work, such agents do not seem to exist and none seem about to enter the picture.
… This is a statement about the condition of the world, a world which Farocki is at pains to document. But it is not clear how his work can differentiate itself from the images of the world that surround us every day, apparently immune to any resistance, yet capable of being resampled in endlessly new arrays, seamlessly integrated into the white-walled, arid spaces of the contemporary museum. Farocki’s work, and with it the world, has come a long way from its agit-prop beginnings; one wonders, does it now suggest to us that there is no collective subject to agitate? And if that is the case, then the question begs itself: what distinguishes this new video art from propaganda for the merely existent?
In its collective dimension, the whole of cinema appears like a vast formal inquiry into the nature of presence. As something that is simultaneously a trace, a reconstitution and a flickering, the figurative material appears in the state of a fetish, it is a sample, offering or not a hypothesis on being. As Philippe Garrel put it: “There is a solidarity between real artists and revolutionaries, because they both refuse ordinary identifications.” Cinema could have the almost anthropological function of reminding us of what is possible for the body, of sending us image constructions which make it impossible to limit the organism to its determining factors.
Brenez is brilliant in the way she forms relations of translation and contamination between the seemingly incongruous terms and series she posits, for example the manner in which the “new figures of hypermorality” metamorphoses into the concept of “life as political passion” and in her way of provoking inspired encounters between the most sublime concepts: “composition by anamorphosis” and “the forms of the incomplete,” “the exigencies of infinity” and “the genesis of emotion.” There are incredible passages too on the manner in which an ecstatic epistemology of acknowledgement in Ferrara, his way of “letting infinity’s forms emerge,” can serve as a counter to contemporary forms of power/knowledge. Fundamentally for Brenez, it is the twin forces of anger and love that drive Ferrara’s films. They are “symbolic bombs that dynamite the shadows in an effort to hollow out a space for love.”
[Still from John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, 1974.]