Preface
From its first issue in 1990, Texte zur Kunst has addressed aesthetic developments in tandem with political change. We now take issue #105 “Wir sind ihr/They are us” to more closely consider the nationalist, conservative, and racist ideologies that have recently become markedly more visible across Europe and in the United States. At the core of this issue – which has been advised by Helmut Draxler, Isabelle Graw, and Susanne Leeb – are various forms of movement, migration, and border politics (of humans, of data, of patrimony, of signs), and the tipping point beyond which liberal institutions are no longer capable of arbitrating “truth.” Conceived prior to the US presidential election and produced amid the chaos of the new administration’s first weeks, this issue resists the mode of immediate mediation (à la Twitter and the daily news it metabolizes), instead indulging what distinguishes the bound printed page from the digital feed: providing a cooler, more distant reflection on the moment we’re currently experiencing, an analysis of political-aesthetic thinking at a time so seemingly accelerated that the very terms and events used to discursively engage have several times shifted in meaning literally overnight.
In the pages that follow, particular attention is paid to the question of what challenge flight and migration pose to political thinking – framed, here, as a crisis of the EU and perhaps the Enlightenment values of the democratic West more broadly. In this sense, we ask, for example: How can “hospitality,” as Derrida called it (critiquing Kant’s belief that it is conditional), be understood under these circumstances? What happens when identity politics turn identitarian or are appropriated to bigoted ends? And when we speak of “integration” (and indeed, when we speak as a “we”), what are the contingencies? Which we? Who are they? And are they also us? This December, Helmut Draxler sat down with migration scholar Manuela Bojadžijev, political theorist Nikita Dhawan, and philosopher Christoph Menke at the Texte zur Kunst office to discuss global refugee flows as a challenge to modern political thought. Their exchange, which opens this issue, demonstrates the elusiveness of left political discourse, which currently stands as equally vulnerable to being absorbed by the historical frame as by the fantastical theater of presently unfolding political events.
Art is of particular interest here in that it is not only impacted by the political classifications of “we and they,” it also transmits them. For this issue, Susanne Leeb writes on archaeological museums in light of the destruction of Syria’s cultural heritage, asking how cultural institutions, in certain ways, establish subject-object relations that effect a division between historic objects and the agents of history. In territory not unrelated, artist Angela Melitopoulos is currently at work on a project that will be aired (in one iteration) as part of Documenta 14 in Greece. Central, here, is her attempt to lend forms to social relations that allow them to escape what she calls “conditions of silence” – e.g., bans on addressing certain subjects (and the concrete implications of the European external borders), as well as the ways these issues are communicated. Brigitta Kuster, meanwhile, examines the “mobile undercommons”: forms of self-determination devised by migrants and refugees that range from useful advice during one’s journey to modes of protest against one’s legal situation upon arriving at a destination country. Taken together, Melitopoulos’s and Kuster’s research reveals aspects of migration that do not conform to the usual standards of identity, visibility, or narrative communicability.
One could also think here, albeit to different ends, of the shared subterranean digital space hosted by message board sites like 4chan and Reddit as another kind of shared informational underground dramatically reorganizing mainstream mores. These spaces likewise derive agency from the covert sharing of data, scripting of narrative, and rigorous protection of personal identity – except here, the border in question is that between the real (or IRL) and cybernetic worlds, a zone of increasing ambiguity, and which provided a key region from which the alt-right emerged. Offering a set of events and images marking that culture’s development, American artist Daniel Keller gives his timeline of the “alt-fact.”
Sven Lütticken meanwhile considers the influence of cybernetic practice and thought – from Cold War-era data processing to the accelerationist logic of Nick Land’s “Dark Enlightenment” – on current political dynamics. Just as the roundtable that opens this issue examines left political thought caught between history and projected ideals, Lütticken speaks of a multi-temporal present, one beholden to a future shaped, problematically yet also fantastically, by the “powers of the false.”
Setting out to make this issue, we strategized to de-emphasize the American position (of what was then still Obama’s USA). But in the time since Trump’s election, we have watched America be heedlessly directed toward a configuration all too familiar in the German context. And since January 20, the trauma has been not daily, but hourly – an epic (and at press-time, still ongoing) spectacle of political violence in the form of reality TV, served as fact (as indeed these events are really happening) demanding to be treated as truth. Responding to the apparent revival, in the time of Trump, of certain retrograde female archetypes, Caroline Busta comments on the 45th president’s fraught relationship to women (and perhaps theirs to him) as a parallel to how the country is being handled at large. And so we return again to the question of boundaries and the well-being of the bodies (personal, national, factual) they intersect, arguing, that they be not simply defended or blindly dismantled but, as we enter this new political order, repeatedly interrogated anew.