Speaker
Description
‘We only see what we look at’ (Berger, 1972 p8)
In his classic work, Ways of Seeing, John Berger (1972), drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, questions how modern reproductions of art and images have changed their power and our relationships with meaning. He argues for the primacy of sight over language in the knowing of the world, but because the meanings of what we see are so regulated and conforming, it is hard for them to disrupt the established linguistic order. Changes to the reproduction of art works, and the decentring of view introduced by photography can begin to do this as it places things in different contexts, or alters the focus. Berger discusses how this can redefine and change our understanding of the past, but what about the future?
Using this question as a departure point, this explorative conceptual paper addresses the political possibilities of what we describe as prefigurative sensibilities in the urban environment. Bringing together thinking on prefigurative politics with Ranciere’s (2004) politics of aesthetics, and through engagement with a series of real-life examples, we argue that the idea of prefigurative sensibilities finds a politics to fleeting, gestural, and embodied interventions in the urban environment. A prefigurative sensibility, we argue, is a moment, encounter, or meeting place, where the aesthetic, sensible order of the urban is exposed as a constructed order. In this regard, the paper speculatively explores how, when, and at what scale aesthetic intervention may be considered as ‘political’, in Ranciere’s terms.
By so doing it explores the significance of everyday aesthetic interventions in the dominant urban order; asking whether such interventions can provide a gestural spark for alternative futures. Through engaging with literature about prefiguration, and with Ranciere’s conceptualisation of ‘politics’, we examine the possibilities of minor, gestural, aesthetic practices offering ways of seeing differently as well as ‘performing’ the world they wish to see within the bounds of the existing society. These creative experiments in the urban fabric juxtapose the regulation of spaces and suggest alternative orders and visions of the city.
References
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing, Penguin.
Ranciere, Jacques. (2004). The politics of aesthetics: the distribution of the sensible. Continuum.
| Keywords | aesthetics; art; prefiguration; politics |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
