Spaces of Appearance. Aesthetics and Politics After Analogy

How do things and people come to matter to people and things? What makes a thing or an action seem obvious, salient or evident? What, on the other hand, makes them seem obsolete, obscure or out of the question altogether? How are such relations of importance and insignificance produced and institutionalized, how do they get overturned and occluded? Or, to put it short: In what ways has the semblance of relevance been organized and disorganized?

The collection plans to assemble a variety of essays which, to reply to these far-reaching and general questions, take a concrete object as exemplary for the manner in which the perceptive standards of a given political situation may subtly change or consolidate. We are looking for essays that attempt to make palpable the real texture of their objects, while at the same time piercing through their tissue and into the space of the conditions of their effectivity, thus revealing their superficial impactfulness and their historico-political depth in the same stroke.

Exemplary objects could be drawn from (but are not limited to) literary works; architecture and art works; pop culture and fashion; forms of popular assembly in protests and political activism; institutions such as museums, courthouses, and parliaments; as well as older or more recent media formats and products.

For an initial orientation, we hold that the phenomenon of a ‘subtle change in the ways of perception’ is captured well in Hannah Arendt’s use of the notion of the ‘Space of Appearance’. This term designates a virtual aspect of the in-between, the interstices of the human world, which is different from, though always interwoven with, the physical or tangible aspects of the world. The collection is not disinclined towards analyses of the physical surroundings in which spaces of appearance are actualized. Yet, it invites for contributions that are sensitive towards the difference between changes in appearance and changes in material. It thus attempts to disclose the structures of relevance through which certain historical modes of articulation, conduct, and interpretation establish themselves as varyingly appealing or appalling within a specific political situation.

Therefore, the differences we are interested in are aesthetic, but their relevance and appeal, we suspect, concerns the specific political situations in which they occur.This means, incidentally, that we seek to diverge from a conception of aesthetics as an ‘autonomous sphere’ which stands disparate or even hostile towards politics – an assumption which posits a supposed ‘aestheticization’ of politics to always be inherently a- or anti-political. At the same time, we attempt to resist theorizing aesthetics as a mere structurally analogous model or mirror image to politics and to instead see their ways of working as imbued and mutually dependent on one another. For this endeavor, the notion of the space of appearance serves primarily as a first point of departure, which will be problematized, enriched and elaborated upon by the various case studies.