A Symposium on
Aesthetics & Politics
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The two panel discussions at New York University interrogate the transhistorical claims and ideological complexities of aesthetic autonomy. The first panel, Breaking the Aesthetic Contract, with Nasser Abourahme, Denise Ferreira da Silva, David Lloyd, and Lama El Khatib, examines the metaphysical foundations of aesthetics within the longue duree of colonial modernity and racial capitalism, while illuminating alternative modes of aesthetic experience and practice generated by various revolutionary traditions. The second panel, These Poems Went Down Fighting, with Hannah Black, Adelita Husni-Bey, Antonia Majaca, Ghalya Saadawi, and Ciarán Finlayson, centers on aesthetic autonomy through political-economic critiques that investigate its labor and infrastructural contradictions.
Breaking the Aesthetic Contract:
Capitalism & the Myth of Autonomy Presentations by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Nasser Abourahme, and David Lloyd.
Moderated by Lama El-Khatib
Bernie Brillstein Theater, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Film Center
36 East 8th Street
New York, NY 10003
The notion of aesthetic autonomy consciously and unconsciously coheres the terms of most contemporary artistic and cultural discourse. Aesthetic autonomy fortifies the very boundaries of “art,” distinguishing it as a sovereign sphere that stands apart from mere life and mere society. More critical positions argue that this distinction is the source of art’s negativity, the condition of possibility of its capacity to disarm the capitalist matrices of instrumentalist reason that otherwise permeate all realms of social reality. Though various economic shifts and aesthetic ruptures have occurred over the last few centuries, the logic of autonomy continues to persist as a structuring imaginary in both reactionary and progressive currents of thought and practice.
This panel attends to the limitations and complexities of this uniquely modern concept, situating its drives historically as constitutive of the metaphysical arsenal of racial-colonial-bourgeois formations. Heeding film theorist Clyde R. Taylor’s call to “break the aesthetic contract” installed by global capitalism’s ideological regimes and mythic self-justifications, the speakers on this panel explore what occurs when cultural workers attempt to think and practice beyond the hegemonic paradigm of aesthetic autonomy. Guided by traditions of black radical, anti-colonial, and anti-imperial aesthetic production, the panel considers various contexts in which this myth has been exceeded and what possibilities such traditions might open up in the present moment.
These Poems Went Down Fighting: On Art, Labor, and Infrastructure Presentations by Hannah Black, Ghalya Saadawi,
Adelita Husni-Bey, and Antonia Majaca.
Moderated by Ciarán Finlayson
Theater 200, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Film Center
36 East 8th Street
New York, NY 10003
“There will be a revolution or there will not. If the latter these poems were nothing but entertainments. If the former it will succeed or fail. … If the latter these poems went down fighting. If the former it will feature awful confrontations with former friends and there will be further manifestoes new slogans ongoing occupations and communes and lovers will be enemies.”
—Joshua Clover, “The Fire Sermon,” Red Epic
What makes the work of art different from other forms of work? What conditions determine its production, circulation, and consumption? Does art’s exceptional social and historical status grant it access to something beyond its material constitution, or does the claim to aesthetic exceptionality conceal the infrastructural relations of labor, extraction, and dispossession upon which artistic production depends?
The notion of art’s autonomy has long organized the distinction between artistic labor and other forms of work. Marxian critiques of art understand this distinction as a contradiction internal to capitalist modernity, where culture appears as an autonomous sphere precisely insofar as its material conditions are rendered secondary, external, or invisible.
This panel considers what happens when the autonomy of art is approached not as an aesthetic premise but as a social relation that is produced through institutions and forms of power. It asks how struggles over artistic labor, political identification, institutional legitimacy, and cultural freedom expose the contradictions through which art is produced as both commodity and critique, instrument and autonomous form. In making these conditions visible, the panel considers how practices of refusal, collective organization, and infrastructural transformation might interrupt the relations that sustain artistic autonomy. Drawing on workers’ and feminist movements, anticolonial cultural production, and forms of collective life, value, and exchange in which culture is inseparable from the social relations through which it is produced and sustained, the speakers ask, what other economies of production and circulation become imaginable when cultural practice is both understood and organized differently from its modern articulation?
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