Abstract:
Aesthetics and its Antipodes is about the political role of aesthetic practices in the antipodes. Aesthetics here is understood, after for example Walter Benjamin and Jacques Rancière, as the field of inquiry concerning structures of perception and the effects of presentation to sense experience. As such, it includes thoughts about the political role, if any, of artworks; but also considerations of the aesthetic nature of other political practices. I divide aesthetic practices broadly into those that seek representation and those that hope to intervene directly into the visible and symbolic order. Representation emerges from an urge to understand and reflect the determining conditions of society. Intervention, on the other hand, emphasises the possibility, outside of societal determination, of disruptive action. In Aesthetics and its Antipodes I argue that specific aesthetic considerations apply in the antipodes. I draw on readings of the history and theory of the settler colony to argue that, for the purposes of aesthetic thought, an antipodes should be defined in terms of a spatialised debt relationship with its metropolis. The antipodean space is the locus, not of conditions to be represented, but of a forcibly cleared background for the subject’s freedom to intervene and create new conditions. At the same time as it allows intervening freedoms, however, debt imposes limits by tethering those freedoms back to the determination of value by the perceptions of the metropolitan creditor. Based on this argument, I examine the ways in which a range of theoretical terms operate and relate to one another in the antipodes: subjectivity, freedom, ideology, nature, and waste. Taking Theodor Adorno as exemplary of representational theories, and Rancière of intervening ones, I offer an extended investigation of how each theorist’s work should be modified for the antipodean end of a spatialised debt relationship. As debt produces subjects and activities rather than objects, Adorno’s preference for the art object as ‘absolute commodity’ becomes, instead, an argument for antipodean art’s activity of ‘pure (self-)performance’. Rancière’s hopes for the ‘theatrical’ appearance of the intervening actor are shown, in the antipodes, to be limited by the distance from places of politics and by the mortgaging, under conditions of debt, of the ‘stage’ of appearance itself.