3. CAPÍTULO 1
3.3. El neoliberalismo como coyuntura de expansión del arbitraje
As mentioned, Rancière’s aesthetic regime provides a theory for understanding the relationship between art and politics. In addition, Rancière’s interest in aesthetics goes beyond art to matters concerning the formation of collective subjectivities through the notion of aesthetic community (Hinderliter et al., 2009). Committed to a similar task of producing
new subjectivities, Guattari (1995: 1-5) develops an aesthetic paradigm which suggests transversal, multiple, and unfixed factors which engender individuals, collective and institutional subjectivities and which takes into consideration current technological, ecological and political circumstances. Guattari (Ibid: 7) identifies creativity and emotions as the aesthetic paradigm’s main power of enunciations, in comparison to philosophy (thinking) and science’s (knowing) power of enunciations. The aesthetic paradigm’s qualities are equally important to those of philosophy and science to the shaping of the memory, sensibility and actions of subjectivities, and the exposure to what Guattari refers as unfamiliar universes of references and values (Ibid). The term ‘universe’ is part of Guattari’s (Guattari, 2014) complex ontological structure which explained how relations, affiliations and territories are constructed in the world and goes beyond the scope of this thesis. Nonetheless, based on examples used by Guattari to explain the term in relation to art, I will use the term ‘universes of references and values’ to point at the various forms of expressions, emotions and narratives that are combined together in the art collectives’ work to produce a new aesthetic experience.30
30 For example, in Chaosmosis, Guattari (1995: 6) brings an example from La Borde clinic
where a patient with a poor agricultural background was invited to experiment with plastic arts, drama and video. Guattari (ibid) understands this experience as introducing the patient “universes [that] had been unknown to them”. To describe the quality of performance art Guattari (Ibid: 90) writes: “performance art delivers the instant to the vertigo of the emergence of Universes that are simultaneously strange and familiar. It has the advantage of drawing out the full implications of this extraction of intensive, a- temporal, a-spatial, a-signifying dimensions from the semiotic net of everyday life”. And in an interview held with Guattari (cited in Alliez and Goffey, 2011: 33) in 1992 he describes the effect music lessons had on him when he was a child: “I studied the piano when I was a child. I continued to play for a long time and I can say which musical universes served as references for me, as routes of access to other aesthetic universes, because after all, musical universes are the most gratuitous, those that call inter- subjective relations into question most radically”.
Another similarity to Rancière is the understanding that the aesthetic paradigm is a broader set of values and perceptions not only applicable to art, although Guattari formulates different sets of concepts, perceptions and values. Alongside the aesthetic paradigm, Guattari identifies two other prior paradigms that define the relationship of art and other aspects of life. The first is the proto-aesthetic paradigm in which art is embedded under transcendent principles, such as Divinity, Truth, Power, Beauty and the Good (Bishop, 2012: 361fn71; Guattari, 1995: 99). This paradigm is characterised with a “territorialised Assemblage of enunciation” which bind the above principles to defined groups such as family, community, tribe or nation (Guattari 1995: 101). In Guattari’s theory, assemblage is another name for a group in which its political, technological, linguistic and psychological compositions are in a constant state of movement and change (Genosko, 2009: 35, 76; Lazzarato, 2008: 176, 181). The formations of assemblages are determined by both ‘stabilising’ factors, such as the police order (using Rancière’s term) that offer a sense of national and social security, as well as disturbing and eruptive factors (‘lines of flight’ Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 3- 4) that are also understood here as political and aesthetic dissensus (see also: Gilbert, 2014: 151). In contrast to the proto-aesthetic paradigm, the second paradigm is the “capitalist assemblage” which is characterised with a “deterritorialised Assemblage of enunciation” (Bishop, 2012: 361fn71; Guattari, 1995: 103). Within this paradigm, any transcendent and unified principle is demolished in favour of divided, sectoral, hierarchical and sterilised structures. These structures are reorganised under new principles
of reason, understanding, will and affectivity. Within this paradigm art has stopped being under the service of Divinity, Beauty or the Good (as in the first paradigm) and become bound to the capitalist market (Ibid). The ways in which Guattari characterises each of these prior paradigms are used here to explain the different political, economic and cultural transitions that have affected the continuous constructive and de-constructive processes of forming collective subjectivities in Israel. I will further elaborate on these processes in the second chapter.31
The aesthetic paradigm then is understood as the removal of art from the capitalist assemblage. It is similar to the proto-aesthetic paradigm in the sense that it marks a new understanding of an integration of art with life. However it differs in the sense that this integration does not occur under one set of universes of values and references. In that sense the aesthetic paradigm can be understood as a reterritorialised assemblage of enunciation consisting of ideas, practices, experiences and sentiments which produce new possible territories that are more diversified and heterogeneous (Genosko, 2009: 76; Gilbert, 2013: 151; Guattari, 1995: 105). Guattari (1995: 1-4) identifies the socio-political context of the aesthetic paradigm with the fall of the iron curtain, the global distribution of capitalism, the counter nationalistic and religious reactions in post-Soviet Union countries, and the emergence of new technologies of information and communication. Within this context, Guattari (1995: 105) suggests the aesthetic paradigm as a possibility, as it is not fully emerged but its beginnings can already be traced.
31 For another example of using Guattari and Deleuze and Guattari model of
territorialisation-deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation within an Israeli and Jewish context see: Pedaya, 2011.
As such, the aesthetic paradigm plays a role in resisting the divided, sectoral, hierarchical and sterilised structure of capitalism and its one-dimensional model of subjectivity.32 Art – or at least underground art, according to Guattari
– does this by confronting established borders both in the field of art and in arts’ relations with other fields. Its power of creativity thus provides the ability to produce “unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being” (Ibid: 106).
Guattari’s understanding of art as a universe that opens up new possibilities of living with ourselves, others and the world links back with Rancière’s notion of dissensus. Altogether, I will consider dissensus, feelings and creativity as the main aesthetic qualities that stand at the core of any act of art and politics discussed in this research. Yet it is important to note Guattari’s different take on art’s relations with the ethical regime. Guttari’s (1995: 107) aesthetic paradigm holds “ethico-political implications”. Ethics within this context is understood as a responsibility to ensure the equality of any form of life in the planet and which is engendered within the creative act (Ibid). This is a different conclusion to that of Rancière (2002: 135fn1) which understands the aesthetic and the ethical regimes as separate. Guttari’s insights on the relations between aesthetics and ethics is also manifested in his scholarly work that did not focus on art, but rather on “artistic techniques
and practices” which are used in other fields, such as psychiatry and ecology
(cited in Lazzarato, 2008: 174; see also Guattari, 1992; 2014).33 This
32 One dimensional in the sense that everything under capitalism is going through a
process of economisation, making an equivalence between labour and goods, thus silencing “all other modes of valorisation” (Guattari, 1995: 28-29).
33 According to Genosko (2009: 78-83), Guattari did refer to several artists as an example
circulation of aesthetics’ qualities in non-artistic fields, as well as designating art an emancipatory, empowering and mobilising role role is highly relevant to this thesis’ discussion.34 Using Guattari’s terminology will enable me to
discuss the art collectives’ conceptual and physical navigation between the public and private, institutionalised and alternative spaces of the art system, as well as other non-artistic regimes, such as the political, the educational and the ecological (Mckee, 2016).35 To further elaborate on this framework,
the following paragraphs examine the notions of affect and emotions as moving forces within the production of new aesthetic assemblage.