GSA-Panel 2023: Aesthetics and Resistance, Montreal (01.03.2023)

Aesthetics and Resistance: Call for Contributions to a Panel Series at GSA 2023 

Rather than keeping the main focus on open and militant acts of refusal, sabotage, or assassination, recent theorists of resistance (Caygill, 2015; Därmann, 2021) pay attention to a wider variety of forms and capacities of resistance, bringing into view the many inconspicuous and low-threshold gestures of resistance that took place in spaces and situations previously accepted as sites of total domination. Attention to these “flat” forms of resistance (Därmann) allows for the re-conceptualization of antifascist resistance and new insights into the limits of totalitarian power.  

In conversation with such proposals to reassess forms of resistance, our panels aim to place equal weight on reconsiderations of the resistant potential of aesthetic forms. In doing so, we respond to five separate but ultimately intertwined debates about the relationship between aesthetics and resistance that have recently dominated Germany’s public sphere. First, there are the debates about the fate of democracy and the forms of resistance that would adequately address authoritarian parties and neo-fascist movements that have threatened to take political power, or indeed have taken it, in democracies around the world. Second, there is the fierce controversy, dubbed “Historikerstreit 2.0” by some observers, about the legacy of the Holocaust and (European) colonialism, revolving around claims about the “singularity” and thus non-comparability of the former. In this context, Max Czollek activated Daniel Kahn’s notion of Gegenwartsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the present, arguing that the ritualized “memory-theatre” no longer corresponds to the reality of German society with its communities of immigrants, migrants, refugees, and young, often non-German Jews. Third, there are the ongoing controversies about the 2022 Kassel documenta and People’s Justice, a work by Indonesian artists containing antisemitic images. Fourth, the debates surrounding climate activists who in search of new forms of resistance appropriate masterpieces in museums in a disrupting way by gluing themselves to paintings by Goya, Monet, and Picasso. Fifth and finally, there are discussions about the new Humboldt Forum with its showcasing of ethnological collections dating from the colonial era and conversations about the restitution of non-European artworks and cult objects—a debate about the place of art, and culture, in the negotiation of contemporary political affairs and histories of injustice.

We intend to submit a multi-panel sequence on the topic of Aesthetics and Resistance. Peter Weiss will be at the center of two panels in the sequence, which are focused on Weiss's life-long engagement with many of the problems debated in the controversies outlined here. While this engagement culminated in The Aesthetics of Resistance (1976-1981), we will also rethink his earlier works in light of the present. To expand this discussion outward from Weiss’s life and work, we seek contributions dealing with the panel's topic that focus on authors/artists other than Weiss, and also invite contributions that address the problematic of aesthetics and resistance from a theoretical angle. Please submit abstracts @250 words to hell@umich.edu, kevers@uci.edu, and howesw@missouri.edu by March 1st, 2023.