Politics of Description.
Lecture and workshop with Jacques Rancière

4. und 5. Juni 2009

Politics and aesthetics cannot be considered as separate domains that
need to be connected a posteriori, but as essentially interrelated
from the start. According to Jacques Rancière, politics can’t be
reduced to the mechanisms and relations of power, and in the same way
aesthetics is more than just the forms of literature, theatre or film.
In fact, the basic activity of politics is linked to a „partition of
the sensible“: to a genuinely aesthetic decision about what is
perciveable as part of a community and what is not. Politics happens
as a conflict – a conflict between a logic of inequality that links
the position occupied by a singularity in the common space to its
abilities to speak and act, and a logic of equality understood as a
logic of indifference. Equality is thus not the aim of politics, but
its axiomatic condition, and it first of all means the possibility to
confront two voices, that is, two partitions of the common. This
conflict gives way to a re-partition of the sensible, to a
redistribution of the roles, activities and positions, that
individuals occupy in the common space, and therefore to the partaking
of those who have no part. The distinction between those who
participate in the political and those who do not is a distinction
defined aesthetically, between what is perceived as voice and what is
perceived as noise. We can take the French Realist novel as an
example: according to Rancière, it contributed to define the social in
the 19th century by describing not only the lower classes and
undermining the traditional reservations of artistic depiction, but
also and decisively by privileging description over narration, by
making mute things “speak for themselves”. This technique of
describing and connecting is equally at work in the emergence of human
sciences and a mode of exerting power that according to Foucault could
be called governmental: the attempt to explain and contextualise
subjects in terms of their existence in their social, biological or
economical surroundings.

Likewise, a politics of aesthetics or of the aesthetical can be
inscribed in various artistic positions, we would like to address
during the workshop. Its key hypothesis, borrowed from Rancière, is as
follows: The expression “politics of aesthetics” implies that the
political impact of artistic form does not rely on its political
content (its directly critical potential), neither on its sociological
context of emergence. If there is a politics of literature, film or
fine arts, it has to be as literature, film or fine arts. In this
context, the workshop will investigate whether the formal procedure of
description can be a key notion to approach such politics of aesthetics.

We welcome contributions to the workshop discussing descriptive
techniques in literature, film and the arts, confronting their
potential to influence formations of politics and the political by
actualizing a certain form of the common. These can include general
discussions of aesthetic concepts of commonness, as well as a
discussion of art’s ability to define and align itself with forms of
government. They can also be investigations of the question of the
political effectivity of description in a way that undermines
distinctions of genre, narrative forms and forms of politics.

Politics of Description is hosted by the »Professur für Geschichte und
Theorie Künstlicher Welten«, Fakultät Medien, Bauhaus-Universität
Weimar.

Conception: Maria Muhle / Simon Roloff

Contact: »Professur für Geschichte und Theorie Künstlicher Welten«,
Fakultät Medien, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Bauhausstr. 11, 99423
Weimar, telephone: +49 (0) 36 43 – 58 37 50, fax: +49 (0) 36 43 – 58
37 51, email: weltenmedien.uni-weimar.de,
http://www.uni-weimar.de/medien/kuenstlichewelten

The lecture and workshop will be held in English. Please register for
the workshop via email.

Programm:

LECTURE
Thursday / June 4th 2009 // Bauhausstrasse 11 / Room 015
19.30
Jacques Rancière (Paris): »Image, Narration. The Tensions of Fiction«

WORKSHOP WITH JACQUES RANCIÈRE
Friday / June 5th 2009 // Berkaer Straße 11 / Seminar room
9.30
Introduction: Maria Muhle / Simon Roloff
10.00–13.00
Francesca Raimondi (Frankfurt a. M.): »Politics of Appearance.
Aesthetics and Politics in Arendt and Rancière«
Matthias Wittmann (Weimar): »Meine verzognen Kinder.
Re-Distributions of the Sensible after Friedrich Schlegel«
Simon Roloff (Weimar): »Idle Description –
Robert Walser’s Poetics of the Unemployed«
Chair: Maria Muhle (Weimar)
14.00–16.00
Sulgi Lie (Berlin): »From ›hors-champ‹ to ›hors-lieu‹.
The Unrepresentable in Rossellini, Antonioni and Visconti«
Daniel Eschkötter (Weimar): »Organizing Dissent:
Realism, Defeatism, The Wire«
Chair: Antonia von Schöning (Weimar)