CGC Amman-New York

Conference Paper Abstract for the 14th Annual Meeting of the Cultural Studies Association

"Policing" and "Politics": Clarifying the Rhetoric Surrounding the Relationship of Popular Culture and Art with Activism

The recent controversy surrounding Beyonce’s Super Bowl half-time performance heightened the contradictory and multifaceted relationships among art, popular culture, and activism. Beyonce’s spectacular intervention, with visual tropes such as Black Panther berets and giving the black power salute, was deemed racist and have been attacked by white supremacists leading to protests and boycotts all over the country. On the other hand, it was embraced quickly by mainstream black population (especially women) and some progressive media. Guardian announced the event with the headline “The Superstar Who Brought Black Power to Super Bowl” while New York Times asked “Beyonce in Formation: Entertainer, Activist, Both?” Others pointed out that she was a product of the music industry and was acting as instructed. As a surprise to mainstream analysts, some academics and activists of Black Lives Matter movement voiced their fierce criticism and called the performance “capitalism masked as radical change.” Starting with this popular example, I propose to engage in the discussions that would analyze the paradoxical relationship of art and popular culture to activism and radical critique.

Arguments on Beyoncé’s controversial act are very timely because recently art’s social function as a political activity is also under attack by both the traditional art world professionals and the traditional activists. With what has been described as a “social turn of art,” we have witnessed a shift in art’s engagement with politics, ranging from igniting critical awakening in society to creating communal and egalitarian relations in the public spaces. Hence, the never-ending tension between political activism and artistic representation still persists in the century-old paradox: aestheticization of politics that leads to spectacularization of art to make political ideologies attractive, and politicization of aesthetics that strips art of its autonomy, thus its power to operate as a creative process.

In this paper, with various examples from the art world and popular culture, I will discuss art’s contemporary role in the activist sphere. Deriving from Ranciere’s analysis on the dialectics between “police” and “politics,” between the oppressive forces and oppositional forces, I will analyze different views and perspectives on the social value of art and focus on the question: does art activism tone down the social critique and sanitize political expression by spectacularizing it for popular appeal or does it open up necessary avenues for a radical social critique in the society?

Key Words: Art, Popular Culture, Activism, Social Movements, Social Engagement, Representational Strategies

Bosawas Reserve is home to Mayagna and Miskito peoples and is the last surviving primary tropical rainforest in Central America with an area of 750,000 hectares. It has more biodiversity than the US, Canada, and Mexico combined. In 1991 Bosawas was declared a National Reserve of Natural Resources by the Nicaraguan government without taking consent of the indigenous people that inhabit the area. The Indigenous cultures of the region are inseparably linked to the natural environment and their sustainable lifestyle is intrinsically linked to the ecology of the Biospheric Reserve. The legal protections for Native people and the rain forest are being flagrantly violated by increasingly violent mestizo colonists (colonos). Government at all levels has proven to be ineffectual in the face of the crisis. There has been no media coverage of this crisis, the unprecedented ecological destruction, the escalation of violence, or the plight of refugees fleeing the areas of conflict. Our documentary project aimes at recording Mayagna's unique music with their unique instruments. Mayangna's music is not only important as a symbolical cultural value but it also serves as a historical record of their oral tradition and cosmology. This centuries old knowledge is essential to understand that the existence of these communities depends on the Bosawas Rainforest and the preservation of this natural heritage depends on the survival of Mayagnas. Thus our main objective is not only to record Mayangna's music but to form permanent bonds between the mainstream Nicaraguan musicians and Mayagna musicians. This will enable Mayagnas to have a true dialogue with the larger society as equal subjects. There is an urgent need for the ecological-minded people of Nicaragua to build a collaborative force with the Mayangnas with a strong vision and bold, practical and realistic steps for achieving the preservation and protection of one of the world's most complex and rich ecosystem and its inhabitants. We believe that this project for building a bridge between the Mayangnas and the mainstream Nicaraguan society through music will inspire and facilitate a much-needed ecological and social consciousness in young generations.

In the current stage of neuroaesthetics as an interdisciplinary field, it is merely embraced by the neurobiologists, the computer scientists, and a few artists producing computer-generated art. On the other hand, art historians and others in the humanities and social sciences have remained distant and some have even fiercely criticized it. One of the main pitfalls of neuroaesthetics—in its search for understanding how the brain responds to beauty—is its approach to aesthetics as simply " the experience of beauty. " This approach not only discounts that aesthetics is fundamentally a philosophical field (and definitely beyond the question of beauty) but it disregards its meaning loaded with cultural and political uses of it. In so doing, neuroscientists are heavily criticized for making questionable framing assumptions about art and aesthetics. Thus, the general conclusion in the philosophy discipline is that neuroscience is the wrong kind of empirical science for understanding art. On the other hand, since the emergence of transdisciplinarity in the artistic field, the visual art realizes its potential as a diverse and complex system of becoming. Thus, the theory of art is conferred to the philosophers who have not yet paid attention to the workings of the culture and the brain in forming complex systems of influence, control, and resistance. The possibility of art for realizing itself as one of the forces of social emancipation needs an essential shift in thinking, research, and methodology. Some pressing issues are: How can we translate the findings of neuroaesthetics to the humanities perspective for understanding the importance of neuroplasticity in the contemporary visual culture? And how can we merge the humanities perspective with the clinical evidence of neuroscience to form an aesthetic theory that strengthens both neuroaesthetics and the artistic field? This paper examines these issues and discusses why bridging of neuroaesthetics and art theory is important for rediscovering the true emancipating power of art in its neuromodulating capacity in the age of cognitive capitalism and the machines.

This paper analyzes the collective aesthetic experiences of the masses during marches, protests, and occupations. Based on the theories of aesthetics and rebellion, the paper proposes the concept of carnival aesthetics as the study of the sensuous and subversive experience of the multitude when marching, throwing slogans, battling with police forces behind the barricades, performing and dancing together on the streets. Inspired by Bakhtin's study of carnival in the work of the sixteenth-century century writer François Rabelais, carnival aesthetics define the aesthetic dimension of social and sensual encounters among fellow protesters, which allows transcending the immediate reality of existing social relations in daily life. Bakhtin's theory argues that carnival is a process of regeneration in an exultation of sensory encounters that lead to an experience of freedom, equality, and brotherhood. With the case-study of the 2013 Gezi uprising in Turkey, this paper argues that the aesthetic elements of the carnival—such as the satire, the laughter, the dance and the performance— connect the subject to the other subjects in ways that the individual subject would not experience during the capitalist relations extant in the current social order. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in the added section titled Carnival and Movement " in their book Multitude, propose the notion of carnival as the model for the protest movement of the multitude " not only in their atmosphere [but] also in their organization (2005) " Hardt and Negri join Bakhtin in his discussion that during carnivals, bodies are de-individualized and belong to a collective force. Those collective bodies represent an altogether a different social structure, where the emphasis is shifted from the life of the individual to the life of " the people. " Elsewhere Hardt and Negri noted that " participants experienced the power of creating new political effects through being together (2012). " This has also been paraphrased as unexpected relations of support and solidarity that allow communalism and democratic participation by the academics John Holloway, David Graeber, Gavin Grindon and Ken Hirschkop to name a few. This paper discusses the carnivalesque aesthetics as a means to create diversity, creativity, decentralization, horizontality, egalitarianism and direct action–the same principles that are in the heart of the contemporary anti-capitalist movements. Whilst thriving authoritarianism and the regeneration of neoliberal fascist domination depend on the disciplined individuals and the crisis in democracy, carnival aesthetics of the multitude, during marches, protests and occupations, presents radicalized social relations that is increasingly becoming the core of the current environmental, political and cultural struggles around the world for creating a new society.

Art activism has been a key element in current social movements and uprisings, even as the relation of art and activism appears to have changed significantly during recent decades. In the aftermath of the alter-globalization movements, Arab Spring, Occupy movements around the world, the Gezi Resistance in Turkey, and the ongoing Black Lives Matter Movement in the United States, discussing and theorizing about art has inevitably involved taking resistance, occupation, protest, and activism into consideration. Artists engage in making political intervention, and activists use artistic strategies as a part of political action. Political communities and artistic communities are more and more constitutive of one another in the counterhegemonic struggle. Drawing on photographic and artistic evidence from the 2013 Gezi Park resistance in Turkey, in tandem with theoretical work by Mikhail Bakhtin and Chantal Mouffe, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, this essay examines the changing relationship between art and activism to the extent that protest today references and embodies street carnival and carnival aesthetics. I contend that carnival aesthetics brings about displacements within modes of perception, thus stimulating new forms of subjectification and sociability through which the communities of social movements are constituted.