picture: Still image from Jacques Tati’s Playtime, a similar shot to the opening sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (see rest of the essay).
This week’s guest writer is Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, who blogs at South/South and who is also a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. In her essay, Becoming Fugitive: Carceral Space and Rancierean Politics, she gives a vision of the political aesthetics and the aesthetic of politics based on the reading of French philosopher Jacques Rancière.
As an introduction, I would like to quote Walter Benjamin who stated that “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.” Benjamin was in fact, defining fascism as the introduction of aesthetics in politics. Fascism, in this essay, is not quoted but the police state is targeted in a contemporaneous world that can be said – as Eric Hazan puts it- to be engaged in a global civil war.
Becoming Fugitive: Carceral Space and Rancierean Politics
by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
The police regime is endowed with the power of ordering space. This text meets at the crossroads of space, policing, and visual perception, in terms of how I articulate a Rancierean aesthetic dimension of the political and political dimension of the aesthetic. Jacques Rancière is a useful and rich source for this tripartite investigation because in the course of his writings, aesthetics is not only about art, and politics is not only about the state. Politics, as laid out in Disagreement, is that which always takes a stage and takes a theatrical formation, putting ‘two worlds in one world.’ This staging often overturns sense-making at the level of language alone, relying also on microlevels of sensation and sense-making (we inherited the word ‘aesthetic’ from the Greek aisthēta ‘perceptible things’). In Dissensus, Rancière gives mention to artistic works that focus on matters of space, territories, borders, wastelands, and other transient spaces, matters ‘that are crucial to today’s issues of power and community.’ To provide a framework to the concern with visibility and emancipatory politics, my bifocal reading takes into account (1) the work of the police, seen in near vision, and (2) the work of politics, seen in distant vision.
Continue reading →
The Turin Horse (2011)
