The Aesthetics Of Rule And Resistance

Effective visual communication has become an essential strategy for grassroots political activists, who use images to publicly express resistance and make their claims visible in the struggle for political power. However, this “aesthetics of resistance” is also employed by political and economic elites for their own purposes, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish from the “aesthetics of rule.” Through illuminating case studies of street art in Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Caracas, and Mexico City, The Aesthetics of Rule and Resistance explores the visual strategies of persuasion and meaning-making employed by both rulers and resisters to foster self-legitimization, identification, and mobilization.

The history of the last fifty (or 100 or 150) years has been accompanied by a constant flow of statements, of practices, of declarations of dissatisfaction with regard to prevailing conditions. When something is able to reach from the margins of society into its very center - something mostly unorganized and unruly, sometimes violent, rarely controllable - it forges ahead in the form of a protest. This takes place in (real or virtual) spaces and is accomplished by (likewise real or virtual) bodies. The spaces and the bodies to which the protest relates are the spaces of politics and society. It masterfully and creatively draws on contemporary signs and symbols, subverting and transforming them to engender new aesthetics and meanings, thereby opening up a space that eludes control. From a position of powerlessness, irony, subversion, and provocation are its tools for pricking small but palpable pinholes into the controlling system of rule. This book presents and reflects on present and past forms of protest and looks at marginalized communities? practices of resistance from a wide variety of perspectives.

Rule by Aesthetics offers a powerful examination of the process and experience of mass demolition in the world's second largest city of Delhi, India. Using Delhi's millennial effort to become a 'world-class city,' the book shows how aesthetic norms can replace the procedures of mapping and surveying typically considered necessary to administer space. This practice of evaluating territory based on its adherence to aesthetic norms - what Ghertner calls 'rule by aesthetics' - allowed the state in Delhi to intervene in the once ungovernable space of slums, overcoming its historical reliance on inaccurate maps and statistics. Slums hence were declared illegal because they looked illegal, an arrangement that led to the displacement of a million slum residents in the first decade of the 21st century. Drawing on close ethnographic engagement with the slum residents targeted for removal, as well as the planners, judges, and politicians who targeted them, the book demonstrates how easily plans, laws, and democratic procedures can be subverted once the subjects of democracy are seen as visually out of place. Slum dwellers' creative appropriation of dominant aesthetic norms shows, however, that aesthetic rule does not mark the end of democratic claims making. Rather, it signals a new relationship between the mechanism of government and the practice of politics, one in which struggles for a more inclusive city rely more than ever on urban aesthetics, in Delhi as in aspiring world-class cities the world over.

A contemporary snapshot of intellectual and practical engagements with legal and artistic practices in countering power.

This volume investigates our dissonant and exuberant existences online. As social media users we know we’re under surveillance, yet we continue to click, like, love and share ourselves online as if nothing was. So, how do we overcome the current online identity regime? Can we overthrow the rule of Narcissus and destroy the planetary middle class subject? In this catalogue of strategies, the reader will find stories on hacker groups, gaming platforms in the occupied territories, art objects, selfies, augmented reality, Gen Z autoethnographies, love and life. The authors of this anthology believe we cannot simply put vanity aside and a rational analysis of platform capitalism is not going to convince the youngs on TikTok nor liberate us from Zuckerbergian indentured servitude. Do we really need to wade through the subjective mud and ‘learn more’ about online aesthetics? The answer is yes. Writing by Wendy Chun, Franco Berardi “BIFO”, Julia Preisker, Katherine Behar, Rebecca Stein, Fabio Cristiano, Emilio Distretti, Natalie Bookchin, Ana Peraica, Mitra Azar, Donatella Della Ratta, Gabriella Coleman, Marco Deseriis, Alberto Micali, Daniel de Zeeuw, Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Jodi Dean.

A major literary event, the publication of the second volume of Peter Weiss's three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance makes one of the towering works of twentieth-century German literature available to English-speaking readers for the first time. The crowning achievement of Peter Weiss, the internationally renowned writer best known for his play Marat/Sade, The Aesthetics of Resistance spans the period from the late 1930s to World War II, dramatizing antifascist resistance and the rise and fall of proletarian political parties in Europe. Volume II, initially published in 1978, opens with the unnamed narrator in Paris after having retreated from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. From there, he moves on to Stockholm, where he works in a factory, becomes involved with the Communist Party, and meets Bertolt Brecht. Featuring the narrator's extended meditations on paintings, sculpture, and literature, the novel teems with characters, almost all of whom are based on historical figures. Throughout, the narrator explores the affinity between political resistance and art—the connection at the heart of Weiss's novel. Weiss suggests that meaning lies in embracing resistance, no matter how intense the oppression, and that we must look to art for new models of political action and social understanding. The Aesthetics of Resistance is one of the truly great works of postwar German literature and an essential resource for understanding twentieth-century German history.

From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ goal of producing world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.