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University of London, Goldsmiths

Jeannette Castioni

MFA Fine Art – FT2

2014

Imagination and Spheres of Social Actions

Total Word Count: 5946

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Imagination and Spheres of Social Action

In this essay I will introduce the field of ethical and moral choices, gathering an

understanding of and appreciation for the ways that social and political conditions shape

the production and reception of ideas and experiences within and across different fields.

My aim is to examine how convention and beliefs affect the identities of individuals and

small communities, as for example in working places and or/in private locations. I will try

to strengthen definitions created as a response to encompass the need for visibility and

presence of man in the world, where physical and/or theoretical actions become

operative and signifiers of interaction among different groups. The organization of the

world within fields of knowledge will be examined through ontological queries where the

description of subjects arrives within differentiation of forms; where the definition of

humans in their manifold features, and the manifested interpretation of the world are

compelled to the experience of the world, not to the interpretation of it.

Ideas and ethical choices alongside interpretation of actions will be investigated, seen as

potential fields of resistance within political and social parts, where their manifestations

gain visibility. I will consider the idea of ethics seen as a boundary, engaging with

statements of authority where ethics behind actions are restraining or otherwise

empowering individuals by stipulating criteria, and where meanings are hosted between

means and purposes.

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Ethics and/or moral laws will be considered as modes that create frictions between

social endowments and individual projections, where choices become the boundary

between sole necessities and the absolute.

My aim, revolves around the interpretation of a radically egalitarian way of rethinking

how community is formed, by focusing on the negotiation of the individual’s status as

judge.

What I will argue, discussing by means of ethical and political concerns from

G.Agamben, T. W. Adorno, H. Arendt ,and J. Rancière, is the way of thinking about how

subjects assert themselves, how they are recognized (or refused) in the constitution of

communities and inside the realm of an economic status and what this process means

as a kind of permanent undercurrent, to the political.

At the same time I will consider the figure of a French activist A. Blanqui, as an

example of political resistance alongside endured imagination, where the way he used

literature enabled him to persist with his political beliefs, and to resist the persecution

he endured while imprisoned.

The wide context will allow me to analyse ways of operative communications, between

different groups whereas the use of physical actions alongside written language and his

structure, might create the suspension rather than the locations, whilst tracing a

relationship among different disciplines. Where the political and social ambivalence of

content will enable subjects to experience a state of threshold, and furthermore enable

us to discuss whether these states are applied as a form of resistance and

emancipation inside groups, eventually allowing personal choices to be developed.

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My aim is to enhance and translate the meaning of actions as productive

resistance/defiance: whether the experience of man in the world is subdued by language

dismantling the power of actions and addressing the world as the site of un-knowledge

or differently whether physical actions might be seen as a reference for ethical and

moral choices, re-enabling experiences as matter of political distinctness and visibility.

Where human inability to gain recognition outside ethical and moral constrains will

eventually create locations to re-activate ways of defiance and disagreements.

Experience and language:

The definition of action as experience is subdued by operative implications when the

subject represents and stands for all that is known; where the location is pushing the

practice towards the threshold of the unknown to which the process is leading. This

place, an embodied space or moment in time is characterised by a willingness to let go

of anything known or familiar, towards an openness to what is emerging;

This location lies therefore, at the moment of both being and becoming, where the

immanent and the transcendent are joined.

I will briefly refer to Agamben’s concerns about experience, and the image of the world

that he features, where in The Open: Man and Animal (2004) he speaks to a state of

man as having always the world before him, where the subject is always only standing

“facing opposite” and never entering the “pure space” of the outside, comparing

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differently to the world of animals moving and experiencing inside it.

“It is always world and never nowhere without no: that pureness, that

unwatched, which one breathes and endlessly knows and never wants. But a

child might lose himself inside the quiet and become

shaken. Or someone dies and is. For near to death one sees that death no

more and stares ahead, perhaps with a beast’s huge glance...”

(Rilke 1923: 57)

This depiction refers to the imagined occurence of man from Rainer Maria Rilke’s eighth

Duino Elegy where the poet writes of “a space that has been freed from ordinary time”

as experienced by children, animals and the dead, where Agamben is finding a

comparative approach between primal language, as used by children, and the located

‘experience’ for animals. Agamben reinvigorates this consideration by questioning the

metaphysical assumptions that inform language, and in particular he claims that the

defining essence of man is that of having language.

In his question, Agamben underlines the necessity of an “experimentum” in which what

creates experience is language itself, and where the limits of language becomes

apparent not in the relation of language to a referent outside, but in the experience of

language as self-reference. He defines the language and the use of it as “the”

experience, where language becomes at the same time the signifier and the operator.

Delivering concerns on how one can understand and ‘pursue’ this thought that seeks

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not to inquire into the meaning of a specific grammar of language, but instead into the

simpler fact that “there is language” as a differentiating state of expression of being,

what ever it might be.

“In which what is experienced is language itself . . . without language experienced as

this or that signifying proposition, but as the pure fact that one speaks, that language

exists” (Agamben 1993: 4–5).

In another text Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (1993) Agamben’s

speaks about the phenomenon of the destruction of experience itself, which is

concerned with the modern inability to tell and hand down stories, where the lack of

narrative, represents also the moment when the confrontation between experience and

tradition terminates. Where the experience is reconstituted in order to affirm the multiple

temporalities and forms-of-life within which experience occurs.

“Like dolphins, for a mere instant human language lifts its head from the

semiotic sea of nature”

(Agamben 1993: 234).

I will argue Agamben's limitation where the principle of experience is bound to

languages as a distinct relational model between: objects, subjects, and things.

But while the use of grammar alongside the rhetoric of language dis-empower the

experience in terms of subjectivity, flattening the existence of multiple meanings, I will

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emphasize and reconsider the imaginative process within each subject , able to re-

establish diversifications within each experience and being; where each encounter is

narrating new meanings and nourishing diversified ways of interpretation.

When re-enabling the subject experience within creative processes of imagination, will

become tangible platforms of encounters alongside empowering meanings, in the

ordinary.

I will try to give a brief introduction and a sympathetic account to Kant's theory of the role

played by what he calls the “productive imagination” a complex patterns of sensory

states bound to perceptual experience, from where Agamben partially conveys his belief

around experience and knowledge. To access the external world and the nature of a

variety of objects is only possible through perception; where physical reflections

therefore, should reveal the categories, the most generic kinds or classes, to which

these objects belong, as well as the manner in which objects perceived and perceiving

subjects come together in the perceptual act.

Exact imagination is a definition around the experience of the world quoted by W.

Adorno where he uses the term to describe non discursive rationality, where the world

with its content, is perceived through the perceptual act established throughout

language where the subject is kept on the boundaries between codified rules.

Exact imagination which is the opposite of creative imagination, marks the conjunction

between knowledge, subjective experience, and aesthetic form.

However deflection between theories of experience and knowledge inside multitudes of

interpretations are creating the ground for further debates; I will therefore briefly define

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ideas from language experiences, alongside radical choices and way of interpreting

social actions, giving an account on how subjects imagination is able to give an

alternative and a valuable credits to peoples resistance.

Actions inside the realm of gesture are defined differently Agamben claims the loss of

gesture been a priority to open up a space of possibilities of speaking itself;

While for Adorno instead the loss of gesture returns us to a “reified embodiment” that

can nevertheless image the possibility of a different way of relating to materiality, and

therefore towards reality.

I will take into consideration main concerns from Agamben´s description around the

“experience of language “ towards ideas of imagination introduced by Adorno,

comparing them to ideas of freedom and plurality, as important elements of social

definitions sustained by H.Arendt.

I will argue that in the attempt to immanently construct forms of resistance, within

generalized destruction of experiences as action, Agamben thinks about an absolute

gesturality towards an immuring of the subject within repetitive spaces , what Adorno

describe as “objectless inwardness”.

I will therefore argue the “theoretical” experience that appears within alienated gestures

which by means, offers possibilities for moving beyond the so called “destruction “ of

experience.

Agamben limits are compelled to the difference he portray around the experience of

language itself, (instead of considering and re-enabling subject potentialities as subject

authonomy) where grammar rules and structures are bounding the dialogue alongside

the experience of speakers within boundaries of established frames.

He beliefs this platform been the sole platform of exchanges between entities,

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furthermore dismissing the power of subjectivity and of the “creative” process of

imagination, which is the fundamental experience for the learning process to be gained.

Adorno on the other hand withdraws the faculty of creative imagination as model to

endorse subjectivity, strengthening instead “exact imagination” where only the singular

experience is recognized while dismissing plurality.

However I will try furthermore to give an account of how literature describing social

actions has had a strong engagement with social imagination in ways able to endorse

people's capacity to questioning politics and for political action.

Freedom and plurality:

I will consider and give credits to H. Arendt's central features of actions, which are

freedom and plurality alongside considering the idea of aesthetic realm from Ranciere’s

theories.

By freedom Arendt does not mean the ability to choose among a set of possible

alternatives (the freedom of choices so dear to the liberal tradition) or the faculty of the

liberum arbitrum which, following the Christian doctrine was given to us by God.

Rather, the capacity to begin something new, to do the unexpected, with which all

human beings are endowed by virtue of being born.

Action as the realization of freedom is therefore rooted in the fact that each birth

represents a new beginning and creates the introduction of novelty in the world;

an imagined freedom by being born.

Arendt's depiction around the creative process define man throughout the imaginative

process ; the practice which differentiates man from the natural element brings the

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conscious into projections and desires un-invisible in the realm of organization and

production of mere labor.

For Ranciere the main features of society are politics and aesthetics which are

concerned with imagining, envisioning, and even creating. However he speaks about

two different levels of performativities: about an imaginative model, describing people

visibility and aesthetics organization inside society, where people autonomy as the most

important feature to be endorsed is gained by political choices , enable subjects to

become agents of changes inside frames of contingencies.

Ranciere is sadly therefore dismissing the idea of the “imperceptible” where he claims

“leading politics to a dead end” and where the subject potential throughout visibility is

moved away from the realm of aesthetics;

He states that any esthetical organization becomes the counterpart into the politics of

the visual, and therefore accountable as such.

What I will argue is Ranciere's discrimination of the imperceptible, towards subjectivity

where he dismisses forms of (imagination as multiple coexistence; where meanings

through subjectivities, comes from an in depth desire of transformation knowing subjects

in terms of affectivity, territories, locations and forces.

Where multiple micro-political modes of daily activity are re-enabling action, in their

imaginative and potential form where they perform into an active and valuable platform

of resistance. As it is in aesthetics with the distribution of the sensible, politics happens

not only through the disruption of an aesthetic organization but throughout sustained

experiences, and the eruption of distinctive aesthetics envisioned.

In The Politics of Aesthetics Ranciere explores the idea of : “the distribution of the

sensible at stake in any politics".

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Politics first becomes a possibility with the institution of a community, where a

community itself begins with something in common. This commonality is no shared stock

of goods or shared claim to a territory; it is rather, a shared partition of the sensible;

around common modalities of sense and projections.

I will anew try to refer to Hanna Arendt's theories around definitions of radical ideologies,

creating a bridge between culture and politics, where she brings to the surface the

normative approach towards their relationship.

According to Arendt's theories, culture and imagination are central to politics.

(She sustains as an important location the plane of discursive space as factual action

aiming to define subjectivity where each individual “is”, and affirm his unique identity.

This is for Arendt a specific “uniqueness” featuring each subject and giving weight to the

act of speech as a process inside imagination, considering it away from abilities and

talents established by labor. Whereas the act of speech alongside the definition of

“storytelling “ becomes an important process able to measure the truthfulness of

individual actions;

I will suggest the idea of natural justice by taking into account the use of language as

the act of narration where the right of people to shape future choices become visible

through the process of imagination, whereas the unlimited transformation of the world

aims to create something more to our taste. This process alongside the idea of

re-establishing the value of uncompleted or dismissed actions and projects, become the

necessary agents of an openness towards the ” future” ; where the tasks involved to

keep flexibility without fully justifiable projects, becomes a significant ground ready to

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indulge with external circumstances.

I believe performativity supported by creative forms of imagination are important

contingents establishing platforms for eventually re-imagine politics, alongside

invigorating people's decisions to create something new, a sudden change in existing

situations or a new reality.

I believe people attempt to improve circumstances, requiring exercise of the imagination,

where the requirement is to become representative, to think of ways in which our

environment or modes of acting could be different from what we already know, and

where platforms of creative imagination are establishing necessary locations to endorse

subject visibility. I believe the potentiality of this process reinforces the idea of a renewed

community able to assert multiform temporalities capable of endorsing and contrasting

rational organization of thoughts.

Limitations:

How the idea of ‘limitations’ as constrains is manipulated by social obligations dismissing

the imaginative process of power?

Limitations as a form of empowered social ethics are partially disregarding possibilities

strolling from a state, the human, able to utilize and therefore to re-enable potentialities

disconnected from the objectified and organizational realm of production, where

subjectivity becomes an agent of valuable changes.

Ranciere's ideas about democracy, towards Arendt's endeavors around the social

ground, are creating a new platforms for reasons, where both are seeking something

other than the democracy from the liberal-democratic state, with elected parties and

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oligarchic institutions;

I believe both are? seeking a real democracy conceived as a perpetual collective

struggle, endorsed by people taking up the project of managing the conditions of their

own existence. A democracy insisting on the autonomy of individuals rather than an

heteronomy based on the politics of self-management, whereby people make decisions

for themselves rather then give their power to another entity to make decisions for them,

establishing the creative process of imagining possibilities.

Arendt's beliefs around democracy come from established qualifications:

…is not enough to add some qualifications, such as that not all means are

permissible or that under certain circumstances means may be more important

then ends; these qualifications either take from granted a moral system which, as

the very exhortations demonstrate, can hardly be taken for granted, or they are

overpowered by the very language and analogies they use. For to make a

statement about ends that do not justify all means is to speak in paradoxes, the

definition of an end being precisely the justification of the means; and paradoxes

always indicate perplexities, they do not solve them and hence are never

convincing. As long as we believe we deal with ends in the political realm, we shall

not be bale to prevent anybody´s using all means to pursue recognized ends

(1958: 229).

She describes man’s activity within ”labor” as the limits and also its end, therefore

disregarding the potential of the creative process.

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She claims the activity of creation is within the “work” although limited by nature, the

location where choices from nature ,as strength and raw material are put together, in

new forms and meaning.

Since constructing and producing the world never takes place without first imagining it to

be a model, a goal an idea or shape of what someone wants to produce, the “work” is

therefore where thoughts become tangible creations of imagination; where pure

freedoms rely on the act of creation; where the act itself is not related to production, but

establishing and preserving an open space for action and freedom to be realize in front

of others; where the subject is not aiming to establish what is wrong from what is right

for the community, but more engaged in expressing the distinctiveness of who´s

speaking for visibility.

“…to recall something which wasn’t there before, calling into existence something

that did not exist before, that was not given, not even as an object of knowledge

or as imaginative faculties and therefore…could not be known”

H. Arendt(203).

Contingent Imagination:

.When considering imagination, it must never be confused with mere fantasy, unreal

thoughts or simply as a “figment of the imagination”, but rather as an extremely powerful,

natural skill that every single human being possesses.

However imagination is also included inside the frame of morality, where it becomes an

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ability to imaginatively discern various possibilities for acting in a given situation and to

envision the potential help and harm that are likely to result from a given action.

By an accurate examination this definition involves at least two skills, one being able to

imagine many possibilities and their consequences, and the other being able to morally

evaluate these possibilities, a more rational element.

The ability to imagine is heading towards gathered experiences, that rely on and include

possibilities that are not context-dependent which involve different mental models,

evaluating from a moral point of view both the original context alongside new

possibilities one has envisioned;

The imaginative as creative process is crucial in opening up a larger realm of possible

choices, and for more thoroughly accounting the moral implications of an action.

Concerns around the epistemological ground of moral and social actions, is gathering on

the same plane of multiple trajectories, where the truth is what makes ourself beliefs in

something are based on the experienced knowledge, endorsed by elements of daily

practice within our state.

The contemplation of an imaginary scenario, perceived or experienced in ordinary

activities can lead us to new knowledge about contingent features of the

world/surrounding which can provide us with relevant beliefs about contingent matters

that are simultaneously new and justified by their nature.

This scenario traces the source of both novelty and justification to the ways which

focuses one's attention to one specific field.

Imaginative resistance alongside defining the notion of visibility as a status into the

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ordinary,is resumed through a dismantling process with closer depiction of subjectivity

resistance, where daily practices become the feature of choice made by the entire

society. But for the resistance of the imagination to be justifiable, it is important to go

beyond imaginative resistance itself, as a mere occasional and viscereal reaction, and to

work towards it, as a self-conscious exercise in which we engage with others so as to

compare and contrast our resistances. To enable our self to do so, we need to embrace

a further concept which requires social support and practices of interaction, to maintain

the interplay of resistances of heterogeneous imaginations in its dynamic nature, while

cultivating interactive boundaries.

But if people deny their primary cultural identity (or differently by being subdued by

them) the need is then to forge a new one.

I will briefly refer to the Marxist ideology as inducted process of imagination made from

the proletarians, that had its climax in the idea that “proletarian have no homeland” by

definition, since they represent the un-rooted class, with the loss of attachments to the

bourgeois values.

I will clarify that an ideology may become a spiritual motherland, where regardless

judgment of any kind of ideologies may come as replacement of the lost sense of secure

worldly existence, in a community of collective memory and shared sentiment.

The friction, where imagination comes to a sense of worthiness is then towards the

sense of identity, where the pre-modern and modern conditions transformed identity into

achievement and free choices, eventually creating attempts to free us from our inherited

identity.

Creative processes and the visible world

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Imagination draws its energy from a confrontation with desire.

It feeds off desire, transmuting and magnifying reality through desire’s power, where

fantasy does the opposite; it avoids desire by fleeing into a crude sort of wish fulfillment

that seems much safer.

Fantasy and reality are opposing forces, but Imagination and reality are not in

opposition: Imagination goes toward reality, shapes and evokes it.

The contemporary mass media have emerged as by far the largest and most powerful

machine for producing and distributing desires as social imagery, more powerful and

effective then the contemporary art system. We are constantly fed with images of war,

and catastrophes of all kinds where the subject creative skills, cannot compete with such

a level of production.

I will compare modes of social appearances where imagination alongside creative

processes of resistance, as art are creating frictions inside the organizational fields of

media and networks.

Every major politician, television entertainer or sporting hero generates thousand of

images through their public appearances, far more then any artist could do, where the

aesthetic becomes bounded to commercial mass medias.

This prevailing status is created on the base of common taste, where on the wake of the

avant-garde, every subject needs to decide what to acknowledge and what not.

As stated before I´m referring to modes of creative actions in its differentiated meanings,

as art is able to produce but how is it possible to legitimise processes of imagination

inside the realm of the open media market just like any other product?

When thinking about imagery we need to embrace meanings created by the collective

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imagination, where overall medias have taken control of the production of such status;

where documentations, videos and films about wars and terrorism are impregnated in

our consciousness unfortunately much more than any work of art, and ultimately art itself

has started to use military concepts in order to gain successfully its targets.

The process used by contemporary art makers are the same as terrorists use:

photography, videos and films. But this popular way of comparing art and terrorism as

art and war, is uncomplete and inadequate.

Since the terrorist images are the icons of contemporary politics that we tend to

assimilate as “true” images from the hidden reality, these images become then Icons of

the collective imagination, as grounding new forms of “reality” to be endorsed.

Is it possible for subjects to enhance and further articulate terms and imagery around

war, constrain, disagreement, and limitations inside the frame of subjective imaginations

as radical way of changes?

History has become a system in which capital and policies are evermore returning to

shut down all possibilities of freedom. Could imaginative practices as art, constitute a

way of dismissing this system which can neither pronounce nor suppress it completely?

Can poetry alongside literature become the imaginative continuation and extension of

insurrection, even in defeat?

In the book On Resistance: A philosophy of Defiance, H. Caygill explains the act of

resistance as a problematic practice. Rather than provide an answer to a question of

whether differentiated forms of resistance might be understood as progressive or

reactionary, Caygill states that there is nothing in the concept or practice of resistance

that might decide the issue, insisting on the multifaceted complexity of the experience:

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…there is never a moment of pure resistance, but always a reciprocal play of

resistances that form clusters or sequences of resistance and counter-

resistance responding to each other in surrendering or seizing initiative.

(Caygill 2012: 22).

The variety of characters chosen by Caygill recalls the capacity and will to resist,

understood as the ability or “energy” where he is referring to the concept derived from

Carl von Clausewitz´s about “military-energeia” considered as a form “capable of

drawing political logic into self-destructive escalation or violence”.

In his text Caygill seems to link virtues as courage and fortitude with a readiness to hold

one's ground, whatever the cost and for however long it takes, where resistants are

those who dedicate their lives to the cause they embrace.

I will suggest the figure of Auguste Blanqui, (1805-1881) a French activist and politician

as an example of possible choices, fertilized by his endured imagination.

An example of disagreement engaging with poetry, philosophy and science, using them

as background to endorse disagreement alongside concerns towards the political state.

Blanqui’s overwhelming vision of capital, policies and comets, alleged in Eternity by the

Stars, which was written in the immediate aftermath of the Paris Commune, elaborates a

visionary conception of revolutionary poetics and the poetry of revolution.

“Let every word indicate the most frightening of distances, it would still take

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billions of centuries, talking at one word per second, to express a distance

which is only an insignificance when it comes to infinity.”

Louis-Auguste Blanqui, Eternity by the Stars

Blanqui was imprisoned in a cell at the Fort du Taureau (an island outside the shores of

Morlaix, France), the day before the Paris Commune was declared (March-Mai 1871).

Blanqui tries to imagine absolute infinity, and further, how that infinity might be

expressed in language. He wrote his ‘astronomical hypothesis’, Eternity by the Stars in

the months following the bloody massacre that finally defeated the Commune.

His accuracy in depictions seen as a final statement of revolutionary defeat, creates and

produces an account of the universe as an inescapable system, but his writings are also

about imagined insurrections on a cosmic scale, and in cosmic times. His writing recalls

poetry, because this is transformed into poetry by its proximity to the revolutionary

imagination.

In his cell, Blanqui’s concerns transform from questions of strategy to imagination, and

from them into poetics as a form of endorsed self-defence.

The enormity of the sentence that Blanqui describes, a sentence that can be almost

imagined, is a negation of the sentence the judge had imposed upon him.

Within an infinite universe defeat is always inevitable, but so also is victory.

The judge’s sentence expresses an absolute compression of all of Blanqui’s life: his

activity, his ‘literary’ production is fragmented into the counter-infinity of his reality as

prisoner, trapped in absolute immobility, whose guards have instructions to shoot if he

goes near the windows.

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The judge’s sentence encloses him, traps him in an eternity where he says:

“what I write at this moment in a cell at the Fort du Taureau I have written and shall

write throughout all eternity, at a table, with a pen, clothed as I am now, in

circumstances like these.”

But in what he writes there is an attempt to imagine a universe where the judge’s

sentence is, within the context of the infinite, absolutely insignificant.

For Blanqui, the universe is “populated by an infinite number of globes and leaves no

room in any corner for darkness, for solitude and for immobility “.

The solitude of his cell is left out of the universe that he imagines, and thus the

revolutionary imagination is also left out, meaning that Blanqui, and the radical traditions

that he represents, must occupy a counter-universe. .

The judge’s sentence has occupied all of reality, and so Blanqui’s imagination is forced

to become the defect in that sentence, an insurrectionary poetics that comes to define

the judge’s law, and as such make that law insignificant and ridiculous.

“I am thus not in front of judges, but in the presence of enemies; so it would be

quite useless to defend myself. Also, I have no fear of any sentence that you

may pass on me, while protesting nevertheless with energy against this

substitution of violence for justice, for this frees me in the future of any inhibition

against repaying the law with force.”

Even when captured and walled in, Blanqui refuses to accept that the judge’s language

can restrain him: the judge’s sentence is perversely liberating, the law as it expresses

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itself within the insurrectionary imagination ignites a ‘force’, a force that, by 1871, would

be expressing itself in a cosmic rage that would make the judge inaudible.

Even in 1832, he concluded his defiant contempt around the power of the judges, with a

threat that anticipated the visions of his later cosmological speculations:

“You confiscated the rifles of July. Yes; but the bullets have taken off.

Every bullet is on its way around the world: they strike without cease;

they will continue to strike until not a single enemy of the happiness of

the people and of freedom is left standing”

Auguste Blanqui's personality, is used here as a reference to engage with the movement

inside the author’s soul alongside the idea of imaginative actions, creating a frame

where the experience of isolation and of imprisonment within the restrain of possible

choices, is seen as a metaphor breaking through the world of repetition, allowing the

world to be recognised differently as the place of possibilities.

He places the human mind at the core of the universe, establishing the coexistence of all

events, where the two different approaches of time conjunctive and disjunctive, merges

into a “cosmic” reality, where the possible is simply a name of the actual, unfolding time

into an unfolded space of activity, where the practical approach within the restrictions

imposed became his defiance.

Thus, while according to his own system, Blanqui’s cell is a negative space trapped

outside the universe, at the same time the entirety of that universe is transformed into

that cell.

Blanqui's ‘actions’ then are dismantling the political space, therefore creating an

engagement within internal human forces where the imaginable overflows the limits of a

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spatial reality, and where the lived imaginary creates a modality of appearance between

the present and the absent or the possible.

Blanqui's Imagination, alongside the power of his political status is an unusual example

of ways to encompass and activate imagination and choices within subjectivities, re-

enabling ideas of ‘resistance” as tangible and as differentiated practices, where single

motivations alongside external features are at the same time restraining and engaged.

Art practice as resistance?

What does it mean to produce a cultural moment that makes someone think about the

world or perhaps their place in the world- in an all together new manner?

For the most part, many people in the arts would agree that this is something they want

in an artwork. Whether it is a provocation, an emotional reaction, or just evoking a

feeling of curiosity, many people evaluate the success of an art work based on if it

makes them feel or think differently. To communicate emotionally and conceptually is

pointed out as a succesfull artwork, which also comes with an ethical position.

The relationship is based on power, where the viewer gains agency to interpret the world

around them, free from the constrain of some didactic demand or commercial

manipulation. But the freedom to evaluate becomes accessible only when faculties are

in “free play”, and only when Imagination is not restrained by a concept (given by the

understanding) or by moral laws (when given by reason) can the experience of

autonomy alongside freedom be fully experienced.

In the free play, as we can define art into as well as other fields of imaginative

practices, imagination itself is no longer at the service of concepts, where events and

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objects expand our sense of community, not because they tells us what is morally or

politically justified, or what we should do, but because it expands our sense of what is

real or communicable. The singular viewer becomes then the interpreter, the emotive

agent, the audience with agency. Spectators do not produce judgements as a final

principle for actions or for other judgements; they create the space in time in which the

“objects” whatever they are or where their source is, become an agent of political

judgements, the actors and actions themselves, which while appearing thus alter our

sense of what at last belongs to the common world.

In this kind of open-ended politics, on a world scale perhaps most of all anarchist in spirit

is possible to refer to a state of resistance/defiance constituted by form of daily-practices

where the a narrative spreading across numbers of different disciplines in which

cooperation, collective action and complex interdependencies, alongside human

communication media, and the ways in which we organize socially have been co-

evolving, have always played an important role, counter to the feeling of impotence to

which we have often been led by the impasses of present conditions.

.

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Eric Alliez and Peter Osborne (2013) Art and Politics