4/3: Annenberg Student Panel featuring Sun-Ha Hong, Nicholas Gilewicz, Aaron Shapiro and Lyndsey Beutin
A Prelude to 'The Revolutionary Public Sphere'
Lunch and colloquium at 12:00pm
Room 500
Annenberg School for Communication
3620 Walnut Street
Space is limited, please RSVP here.
The Mediated and Affective Presencing of the Burning Body
Sun-Ha Hong
Today, the revolutionary undertakes politics through global, mediated circuits of affect. Self-immolation is exemplary: it objectifies body and life into intolerable image in a fatal bid for affective presence. "An individual who had sacrificed himself for thought and now he is thought." What kind of 'presence' does this burning body generate? What are the ethical and experiential parameters of this intimacy between martyr, image, and spectator?
Can Journalism Accommodate Media Resisters? Parrhesia and the Revolutionary Public Sphere
Nicholas Gilewicz
Parrhesia can be translated as free, frank, or bold speech. Accompanying the ability to speak freely, speakers have concomitant duties to tell the truth and to truthfully represent themselves and their beliefs; they also bear the personal risks of truth-telling. Using examples from the Syrian crisis, this presentation argues for digital parrhesia as a framework for understanding a revolutionary public sphere that includes both media resisters and the journalists who rely on their work.
The Medium is the Mob
Aaron Shapiro
The overdetermination of new media in accounts of social and political transformation across the globe fundamentally undermines political subjectivity. Needed instead is an account of the mob itself as a mediating social form – a necessary but ambivalent “social envisioning" that renders social totalities imaginable. Accounting for the mob as mediation, first, pushes back against techno-determinist narratives that posit new media as an emergent global agent, and second, forces us to rethink the ideal of a deliberative Habermasian public sphere – the textually-mediated rationality of which having been defined against the apparent im-mediacy of the mob's "affective effervescence." The mob is fundamental to the understanding of the political as productively agonistic: it makes visible what Georges Bataille calls heterogenous social elements, and what Jacques Ranciére calls the demos – a threat to social homogeneity and political consensus.
The Biopolitics of Social Practice Art: Sovereignty and Social Control in Thomas Hirschhorn's Gramsci Monument
Lyndsey Beutin
Thomas Hirschhorn’s 2013 Gramsci Monument – a privately-commissioned art installation functioning as a temporary community center in public housing – has received significant critical praise and has raised popular doubts about its ability to affect ‘real’ social change. The deep ambivalence of reviewers and visitors asks: why is social practice art so dissatisfying? I address this question by analyzing the authorship and critical reception of Hirschhorn’s project to suggest that despite its self-fashioning, social practice art is congruent with, rather than oppositional to, state interests. I demonstrate that biopolitics, power’s dominant logic of social control, operates in and through social practice art, and is particularly visible in the space of public housing in New York. This temporal-spatial layering raises additional questions: What are the utopian potentialities of biopolitics? What is at stake if they are enacted? The Gramsci Monument reveals the discursive and epistemological limitations of collapsing art-for-change into social work, at the expense of developing an incisive analysis of the genre’s inability to exit the logics of domination.