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Part I
Conceptual Cartographies
Introduction
These chapters explore some of the various ways in which the relations between art and politics can be mapped as matters of theory and practice. We start with Columbian ethnomusicologist Ana MarĆa Ochoaās āOn the Zoopolitics of the Voice and the Distinction Between Nature and Culture,ā which advances an understanding of the political as grounded in a conception of the musical. Art is conventionally situated within the broader domain of culture and the notion of culture which supposedly distinguishes the realm of the human has historically been defined by an understanding of nature. Culture is at once a condition of and path toward development and, in this, having a voice is constitutive of whom and what can count as political participation. The colonial project which sorts what kinds of subjects are deserving of self-rule distinguish vocal elements that manifest the animal in the human upon which concepts of personhood are based. Against this, an anti-colonial zoopolitics of sounding like an animal embeds sound circulation in social relations and in turn a different political being than giving voice to the voiceless as a civilizing mission.
If the Western genealogy of art emerges from its location in the field of culture situated as a particular way of life, art under capitalism is situated in the double bind of a displacement of labor and a speculative form of capital valorization. This is what Marina Vishmidt demonstrates in āThe Aesthetic Subject and the Politics of Speculative Labor.ā She observes certain resonances between the modernist autonomy of art as an end in itself, and what has come to be called the autonomization of labor and capital as speculative or self-generating forms of activity. Art opens this double ground of creation of value that requires no work, that are expressed in a shared utopian vocabulary of self-investment and human capital evident in some initiatives of self-organized artistic labor and of finance-driven capital. The shift from wage labor as the basis of mutual association of workers to increasing entanglements of debt are indicative of a shift of the formal subsumption of labor to capital to a more comprehensive real subsumption that bears the potential of a broader interdependence through a more general social reproduction that these emergent value forms portend.
The assumption that there is a line of descent, often referred to as periodization captured in such artistic movements as classical realism and modernism, implicates a particular assumption of linear time without exploring the politics of that esthetic temporality, commonly formulated in terms of necessary innovation. John RobertsāāArt and the Politics of Time-as-Substanceā troubles these waters that he reveals, also circumscribe how politics get conceived within the esthetic field. He notes that both realism and modernism downgrade the political topicality of art, which leads to a question of what constitutes the time of the art work as such. What does, he asks, the gap between artās content and effect allow it to do politically? He also poses the challenge of how to avoid the reduction of the political as an already given content or effect that may be an attribute of activist art. Ultimately, he insists that by specifying the temporality of art as a research praxis in an expanded field of what is being considered esthetic activity, will evade the facile dismissal of artās politicality that is too often affixed to critical judgment and practical intervention.
If esthetics have at their root various approaches to sense-making, we cannot separate the artistic engagements from their material and embodied entailments with the senses that have been articulated as various disciplinesāeven as these boundaries and borders are being redrawn. The work of art therefore does a kind of double duty analytically and methodologically, and in the case of its relation to politics, opens the prospect of not only recasting how art gets valorized but of how the political is set to work. AndrĆ© Lepeckiās āThe Choreopolitical: Agency in the Age of Controlā focuses this issue well when he asks how can dance and choreography contribute to an understanding of the political. He affiliates these two dimensions of dancing as the materialized labor of the illocutionary force of the score, where bodies are set in motion through acts and techniques of inscription. Choreopolitics becomes the expanded vision of the relation between movement and politics between the undertheorized distinctions between formal and informal, legislative and quotidian, elite and grassroots. Instead, he offers the delineation between the command and domination associated with the coterminous modes of contemporary power found in sovereignty, discipline, and control, which he terms policy and planning, which emphasizes the immanent capacities to set bodies in motion.
Any relation between art and politics imagines a third term in which situates and opens those specific dynamics to the social world. This work of contextualizing has a long trajectory among various sociologies of art. Eduardo de la Fuente in āThinking Contradictory Thoughts: On the Convergence of Aesthetic and Social Factors in Recent Sociologies of Artā provides a critical and attentive tracing of these routes through a consolidation of various tendencies to a phase of self-questioning to wind up with what could be called a new sociology of art. These recent efforts remap the aesthetics-sociality nexus as part of a field-rendering and societal transformation. The resulting art-sociology sets out a robust and expansive definition of art; it is able to engage with the quotidian and mine the analogies and metaphors that invoke art; is resonant with new esthetic thinking; and can focus on various expressions of embodied thinking. Perhaps most expansively, this emergent arena of art-sociology is able to serve as a kind of meshing ground for cognate endeavors of urban and spatial studies; leisure and tourism, event management, economics and organizational studies that bring attention to unexpected lines of causality and agency.
If there is an iconic instance of the articulation of art and politics, it would arguably be with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which both consummated a series of avant-garde artistic movements from futurism to constructivism to suprematism, and catapulted these artists to national political prominence. Boris GroysāāBecoming Revolutionary: On Russian Suprematismā ponders the relation between artistic and political revolution. He focuses on two central figures of the Russian avant garde in the challenges they faced to articulate and negotiate the relation between revolutionary artās critique of domination and its capacity of mobilization toward the utopian promise of social and formal innovation. The dense succession of avant-garde artistic movements leading to and affirmed by the victory of the Soviets gave political and esthetic weight to the revolutionary charge that effective innovation would not only introduce formal novelty, but would provide a way of visualizing and realizing the destruction of tradition. This in turn, however, sets up a paradoxical circumstance for such art and politics that simultaneously must achieve a destabilization of the old order and a means of stabilizing the assertive rule of the revolution itself.
The tendency of both modernization and modernism was to be directional. As time goes on, things are to get better; social progress and esthetic innovation therefore go hand in hand. The promise of more and better prospects lie on the utopian horizon of the future; where success is required and failure cannot be tolerated. This is precisely the premise that Lisa Le Feuvre calls into question in āFailure Over Utopia.ā She notes that when failure is released from the evaluative strictures of normative success it opens to worlds of contestation, ruptures of expectations that in turn afford opportunities to amplify doubt and uncertainty on which art can traffic so effectively. This revaluing of failure allows her to also rethink the very positioning of utopia as subjective ideals whose desires, in reality, necessarily fails but are nonetheless useful in their failure. What this dialectic of failure and utopia ultimately enables is a widening sense of possibility and contingency as to how value is defined both through and for art and therefore to help specify what is at stake in any desire for societal transformation that art may come to bear.
This section concludes with a return to the aural register, this time in the hands of an activist sound collective Ultra-red. Their contribution based on a series of collaborative projects, āWhat Did You Hear? Another Ten Theses on Militant Sound Investigation,ā is a conceptual cartography of how to politicize art by inviting an audition in the form of reception to their own work. They begin with a fundamental distinction, not between political and a-political work, but between activism, which mobilizes and unleashes a cascade of materiality; and organizing, which mines and attends to the consequent repetition and accumulation of what has been unleashed through such interventions. Echoing the first chapter, they insist that listening is never natural. Rather, it necessitates and generates literacy. Listening (whether to sound, voices, music, or ambient noise, which their various projects instantiate in a range of spaces); can facilitate an encounter for further collaboration that opens to the stranger and outsider upon which the oscillation between activism and organizing depends if it is to be self-expansive and amplify the surround of the political.
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1
On the Zoopolitics of the Voice and the Distinction Between Nature and Culture
Ana MarĆa Ochoa
One of the central tenets of the history of Western modernity has been the division between nature and culture as distinct spheres in which it has been generally understood that nature is a passive background against which humans constitute culture. Latin America and the Caribbean were crucial to the historical constitution of the history of such a distinction due to the centrality of the region in the emergence of the idea of the moderns. Key events of modern history such as the conquest and ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the transatlatic slave trade, and the history of trade of animals and plants across the Atlantic have been crucial to the way the relation between nature and culture has been understood and politically used by moderns since the sixteenth century. In this chapter I explore how the notion of culture itself is historically defined by our understanding of nature. The mutual definition of both terms and their political use depends on the politics of life through which they are constituted. In this chapter I present a fragment of such a history by exploring how the idea of āhaving a voiceā as a metaphor for political participation took form in the nineteenth century through the rise of the notion of orality developed in relation to the emergence of republican ideals that were forged in this early postcolonial period. I explore how, through the definition of the politics of life as present in the voice, specific notions of nature and culture were developed in Latin America and the Caribbean as central to the modernsā constitution of a political notion of the person. The examples I use to illustrate this process are from the history of the voice in Colombia in the nineteenth century and from the broader nineteenth-century colonial archive.
Orality as a Pedagogy of Governmentality
One of the problems of the voice in the history of Western philosophy since Aristotle is that it has the potential of manifesting the animal in the human animal (Aristotle 1986, 2012). Thus one can think of the history of the voice in the West as one of trying to elucidate which vocal elements manifest the animal in the human. In the process what emerges is a politics of life that seeks to distinguish between human and other animals as part of the history of the relation between voice, reason, and sentience. One example of such thinking is Colombian philologist and acting president between 1892 and 1898 Miguel Antonio Caroās (1843ā1909) presentation of such a topic in his Manual of Elocution. He states:
Not only man, but also animals have the gift of the voice, and use a certain sonorous language, but it is inarticulate. Animals use a language similar to that of man when they cry or scream of happiness or terror, when they whine or complain, ultimately, when they emits voices without speaking (cuando vocea sin hablar). This is the inarticulate language common to man and animal that expresses faculties that are also common to one and the other: the sensitive faculty that consists in expressing pleasure and pain and the estimative (estimativa) faculty through which the animal appreciates (and man too) instinctively, without the use of reason, that which is convenient or repugnant to his physical nature. Thus if a hurt or wounded animal flees howling, it expresses an act of its sensitive faculty ā pain; if it gives voices to ask for food (si da voces para pedir alimento), to announce danger or something similar, it expresses an act of its estimative faculty ā¦ . Articulate, human language expresses acts of a superior faculty to those two previously mentioned and peculiar to rational beings ā the intellectual faculty (la facultad intelectiva). If a man in pain whimpers, showing his pain, he has made use of inarticulate animal language. But if he wants to express that same pain through words ā¦ in that case, he expresses directly what he thinks about what he feels and indirectly the sensation he is experimenting.
(Caro 1980 [1867]: 448ā449, translation by the author)
Following Aristotelian ideas on the voice, he distinguished between sentience and biological needs (such as eating) as animal dimensions of the human, versus intellect or reason, present in words as the site in which logical ideas manifest. Since, in this philosophical perspective, only humans have language, then the presence of reason in the voice through language was used to distinguish between humans and non-humans and between the human and non-human dimensions of the person.
Such a philosophical understanding of the politics of life in the voice has often implied a political history of cultivation and regimentation of the voice with the purpose of distinguishing between its human and non-human dimensions. Thus, voices, which are technically highly manipulable through the training of pronunciation and through different techniques of vocalization, were trained to manifest such a reason in order to constitute a politically viable notion of the person. A series of āfantasies of magical omnipotenceā (Connor 2006) were ascribed to the capacities of the voice to shape the political subject and the people. This also gave rise to the education of the senses, a crucial aspect of the relation between the ear, sight, and the voice, as a central aspect of a modern, enlightened pedagogy (Schmidt 2002). Steven Connor (2006) situates such a history of cultivation of the voice as occurring more intensely from the eighteenth century onward. The idea of orality, as a mode of speech in need of cultivation emerged, partially, out of this history.
This is seen, for example, in the ways that manuals of eloquence and elocution multiplied during this period to develop a pedagogy of proper speaking, thus separating citizens that did not know how to speak or voice themselves properly from those that did. This is a fragment of a longer history in which distinguishing between those who spoke well and those who did not became a means of constituting social inequality in the history of the modern (Ramos 1989, Bauman and Briggs 2004). According to Venezuelan philologist AndrĆ©s Bello (1781ā1865), for example, a foundational figure of the educational system in Chile in the nineteenth century and a major figure in Latin American l...
