DIALOGUES-Second Critical Studies Conference-Aesthetics Justice-I

Abstract

As you point out in the fourth heading of the conference outline, there are a variety of ways of approaching and engaging with the notion of justice, and it would seem to me that those approaches extend well beyond the realm of the social sciences. My proposal is to consider the whole issue of our “blindness,” or perhaps rather our myopia, with regard to injustice, as it is an issue which engages directly the aesthetic realm, and in which art and art-related practices may play an essential role. Art, like political action, is about shifting the “partition lines” of sense-based cognition, challenging the self-evident order of perception – that is, it is about making us hear as discourse what was previously heard as only noise or prattle, about seeing as fellow human beings those whom we previously saw only as shadows. My working title shall be:
To give you some idea how I propose to proceed in this presentation, which, logically, should also comprise the screening of several excerpts from contemporary videos, consider the following U.S. Supreme Court decision in Woodson v. North Carolina (1976):
“A process that accords no significance to relevant facets of the character and record of the individual offender or the circumstances of the particular offense excludes from consideration in fixing the ultimate punishment of death the possibility of compassionate or mitigating factors stemming from the diverse frailties of humankind. It treats all persons convicted of a designated offense not as uniquely individual human beings, but as members of a faceless, undifferentiated mass to be subjected to the blind infliction of the penalty of death.”
This eloquent and precedent-setting acknowledgement of the need for judicious spectatorship in the meting out of justice overturns the widely held idea that the cold, hard facts alone are adequate for judicial reasoning and suggests that empathetic imagining, when “tethered” to the evidence, as lawyers say, is an appropriate and indeed essential ingredient of any moral stance that is truly concerned with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own. It is one thing, of course, to instruct courts to treat defendants not “as members of a faceless, undifferentiated mass,” but “as uniquely individual human beings,” and another thing altogether to implement policies to attain this goal. What sort of stereotype-busting, perception-deepening, or empathy-engendering tools would be appropriate? In her 1995 book, entitled Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum makes a compelling case for the cognitive dimension of emotion and for the role of what she calls the “literary imagination” in constituting and sustaining meaningful public rationality, discourse, and policy making, which have come to be informed almost exclusively by cost-benefit analysis. Novels, and particularly realist novels, she argues, offer good guidance of both a predictive and normative kind. Without quite saying so, Nussbaum allows us to conclude that, for instance, before a White, middle-class jury is truly able to judge a Black, inner-city violent offender in North America today, they should be given the opportunity to read, say, Richard Wright’s Native Son, to gain at least some sort of insight into what it means to live in the defendant’s world. For as she points out, “the novel determinedly introduces its reader to that which is in a way common and close at hand – but which is often, in its significant strangeness, the object of profound ignorance and emotional refusal.” What is unconvincing, however, about Nussbaum’s book is the heuristic privilege she ascribes to the novel in particular and to narrative in general. Why not extend her reasoning to other forms of artistic expression – for if visual artists have not honed a full range of awareness-enriching tools throughout the history of art, they have not accomplished much at all? It is fair to say, I think, that if the real were ever to be the object of the sort of sustained attention that artworks regularly enjoy, justice would not for that be poorly served.
Hence the need for “poetic justice.” My presentation will not of course focus not on the well known literary device, whereby an evil deed-doer ironically befalls a fate comparable to the ill he or she inflicted on someone else (which, though it has little to do with justice, provides basic emotional satisfaction by suggesting some sort of divine equalizing effect) but rather will isolate the two terms, and then reunite them in an almost literal way: when poetic, justice reasserts the role of creative activity and art-making in the moral affairs of the world. If at all possible, I would like to screen four contemporary video works – or excerpts of them – not so much to “illustrate” my argument as to perform it.

Bionote

Stephen Wright is a Paris-based art writer and research fellow at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris). He has curated “Dataesthetics” (WHW, Zagreb), “Rumour as Media” (Aksanat, Istanbul), “In Absentia” (Passerelle, Brest) and “The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade” (Apexart, NYC), as part of a series of exhibitions examining art practices with low coefficients of artistic visibility, which raise the prospect of art without artworks, authorship or spectatorship. He seems to think that these contingent (though apparently self-evident) features of art actually impede art’s potential to play a meaningful and heuristic role in public affairs outside the confines of the artworld. Hence the need to sunder art from itself.

Abstract

Since the birth of the European Community in 1957, the objective of a free and peaceful public space has been launched through successive EU treaties. The fight against any type of discrimination – be it gender, racial or religious – has been implemented in the EC Charta of Fundamental rights.
With this concern, many local, national and pan-european associations have been committed into such objectives through the valorisation of communities’culture, as well as the promotion of individual artists. A significant part of European artists and cultural operators today, are from non European origin, notably from Pakistan, India, Turkey, Algeria, Marroco. Many cultural associations currently work along with EU representatives on social equity issues and equal opportunities as far as work and political participation are concerned.
In the Arts and Culture World which deals both with competition and solidarity, there are a lot of contradictions between collective cultural rights as a claim for equity and individual rights in a ” shifting identities ” atmosphere.
French philosopher Etienne Balibar stated that the European Union was under the threat of a new Apartheid, providing theoritical opportunities to immigrant individuals, as well as letting each State member operate on the level of concrete rights.
The idea of my communication is to investigate whether cultural associations are today in a situation of impulsing a new representation of the European citizens and to provide schemes for implementing an equitable promotion of immigrants in the European public space. Meanwhile, new forms of censorship too often threaten these good wills.

Bionote

Anne-Marie Autissier is a teacher at European Studies Institute, Paris VIII University, in Sociology of Culture and Cultural European Policies. Since 1986, she has been a consultant for various European organizations. She is chief editor of Culture Europe International, an online magazine dedicated to Cultural policies and practices in Europe, also consisting of various publications in French and English, released throughout Europe. Most recent publications : L’Europe culturelle en pratique, AFAA, Documentation française, Paris, 1999 ; “ Cultural networking in Europe ”, in ECA Report, Copenhagen, 2003 ; L’Europe de la culture, Histoire(s) et enjeux, Maison des Cultures du monde/Actes-Sud, 2005.