Perception, Jurisdiction, and Valorization in Colonial Modernity – On the Nexus of Accumulation, Race, and Aesthetics

Toward a Decolonial Aesthetics and the Question of Minor Relationalities

This conference is devoted to the reconsideration and reinvention of the social and political potentials of aesthetic practices that resist the manifold violences of racial capitalism. We are well aware of the highly ambivalent—if not downright belligerent—role that the discourse of Western aesthetics played in the constitution and justification of colonial, capitalist nation-states and their dynamics of subjectivation, whose core values are based on possessive universalisms and racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Nevertheless, we believe that any philosophical reflection that aspires to formulate radical alternatives to colonial, capitalist societies needs to be based upon a reconsideration of “the an/aesthetic,” the “un/sensible,” and the “im/perceptible.” In focusing on these concepts, we not only wish to explore the oppressive grammar of Western aesthetics that excluded myriads of aesthetic practitioners and deemed their practices as unaesthetic or insensible; we also want to investigate where and when seemingly contrasting endeavors such as total inclusion or complete transparency turn into violence. For it is against both these oppressive tendencies of closing in and closing out that minoritarian forms of aesthetic resistance need to constantly battle.

We conceive of the aesthetic as a fundamental part of both human and non-human agency; an agency that does not strive for total control, self-rule or self-fulfillment and therefore questions canonical notions of aesthetic liberty and autonomy. While often part of the flux of racial capitalism, aesthetic practices nonetheless have the potential to enable relationalities that escape, if not contradict, capitalist modes of accumulation and their differential regimes of oppression in forms such as fugitive resistances, alternative distributions of sensitivities and affects, solidarities and touches, operating in zones of dispossession, hyper-exploitation, disenfranchisement or mere survival. It is therefore our aim to delink the discourse of aesthetics from the discourses of exclusionary refinement, sublimation, and so-called civilization that made subjectivation under and into racial capitalism possible and contributed to various forms of exploitation by classifying (groups of) people as improper subjects and mere resources, supposedly not suited for aesthetic refinement and social life, and therefore excluded from the sphere of autonomy.

However, aesthetic practices have the potential to go beyond such hierarchies of subjectivation because they testify to and oftentimes intensify minoritarian nets of relations and alternative archives for remembering racial, gender, or economic violence within capitalist systems. What at first glance seems like a well-known commonplace takes on a new form if aesthetic relationality is not limited to the referentiality of artworks, the (self-)referentiality of the art field, or the genre of relational art. In contrast to these understandings of artistic relationality, we suggest conceptualizing aesthetic relationality as a broader and thoroughly political issue, which in turn demands a reframing of the concept of politics by including non-autonomous, disseminated, or fugitive practices, the excess of affects and percepts, the invention of minoritarian archives, and the world’s multiple temporalities and spatialities. To put it differently, liberating aesthetics from autonomy will reveal natures, bodies, affectabilities and affects as agents of passive and active syntheses that know no separation into objective and subjective elements, into sensed things and sensible subjects. Instead of reproducing the divisions that are so fundamental to Western aesthetics and its possessive universalism, aesthetics is transformed into the very practices that articulate and perform the co-articulation of matter, affect, and life—and, as a consequence, the minoritarian potentialities of the sensible.

The aim of our conference is twofold: On the one hand, we want to scrutinize the sociopolitical context of the formation of Western aesthetics in the eighteenth century in order to understand how autonomy became the fundamental (political) category of aesthetics. It does not seem a coincidence to us, for instance, that racial discourses about personhood excluded large groups of people from humanity by arguing that they had no immediate inclination toward the beauty of nature and art. Moreover, the development of art theory and the concomitant establishment of the autonomous field of art is accompanied by a specific mode of subjectivation whose goal is so-called civilization, which in turn is seen as the main agent of history. Such subjectivation rests upon exclusionary and oppressive divisions that are invisibilized by, among other things, Western aesthetics.

On the other hand, and more importantly, we want to go beyond the critique of the conceptual and political implications of the hegemony of autonomous art and its promises of an emancipation whose goal is liberal civility. We wish to usher in relational categories like minor plasticities, transversal becomings, undercommons or “black” and “brown commons, decolonial politics of the unconscious or of the inappropriable, as well as radical articulations of creolization, fabulation, antropofagia, minoritarian or diasporic memories. What these concepts share is their resistance to the logics of transparency and commodification, autonomy and appropriation. Moreover, they have the potential to help us to conceive aesthetic practices that go beyond art, and to develop a notion of relationality that is not limited by the standards and values of Western aesthetics and its ally, racial capitalism. In other words, the main goal of our conference is to discuss articulations of a minor aesthetic that draws on poststructuralist Marxisms and affect theories as well as queer feminist, decolonial, and Black radicalisms, and connects them in ever singular constellations that defy totalizing closures or universalizations from above.

Organized by Katja Diefenbach, Çiğdem Inan, Ruth Sonderegger, and Pablo Valdivia Orozco.