How does politics appear in a living democracy? This question may be one way of putting the conference’s attempt at relating the terms “democracy,” “aesthetics,” and “life-forms.” Scholars from six countries gathered to confront this problematic from vantage points within the full range of the humanities, including participants from the Social Sciences and the Fine Arts. Because of this unifying problem, the conference was able to place contributions from points within the whole continuum from general to particular, starting with the concepts of philosophy and continuing through the intermediate zone of theory to particular, historical cases. For this reason, the conference proved to be productively transdisciplinary.

On a systematic level, the connection between these terms is uneasy, maybe even contradictory. JOHANNES VOELZ’s (Frankfurt am Main) introduction recapitulated Walter Benjamin’s warning against aestheticization, which, by overriding a public’s critical capacities, functions as a tool for fascist takeovers. As an alternative, he presented two apparently contradictory places in which the aesthetic may bolster democracy: as negation, as indicated by deconstructive philosophy and the Frankfurt School and as affirmation, as suggested by Ordinary Language Philosophy and American Pragmatism. Aesthetic negation occurs in moments in which sense impressions rupture everyday generalizations, thus making space for the particular; affirmation sees aesthetic objects as common focal points, thereby enabling the renegotiation of collective identities, such as nations or political parties. The following themes may accordingly order the conference’s discussions: 1. the multiple meanings of representation – as speaking for others politically, or as aesthetic and epistemic depiction; 2. the self, both individual and collective, as an object of negotiation; 3. the body as the physical self and with that, the sensory aspects of collective and political life; 4. the relationship between art and everyday experience.

In democracies, a collective self can only exist as its own perpetual renegotiation. Thus, some of the talks had to engage with the process and possibility of such a negotiation. IVO EICHHORN (Frankfurt am Main) thinks this negotiation along the lines of Frantz Fanon’s account of Algeria’s independence struggle in “The Veil.” Eichhorn noted the double meaning of democracy’s demos, as both the organized collective entity of a people and the chaotic masses to capitalize on the transformative potential implied therein. Within the disorderly character of the masses lies the potential to erupt into insurrection, demanding the redrawing of the people’s boundaries. This he saw as a necessary foundation for democracies, noting however, that it needed to be kept in check by the masses themself. How this would be possible, Eichhorn left unaddressed. Here, the negotiation of a people’s boundary and its redrawing are identical.

Another way is the discursive renegotiation from an outside position. LEONHARD RIEP (Frankfurt am Main) and JOCHEN SCHUFF (Berlin) both addressed that such a position needs to be developed. Whereas Schuff merely noted that this would entail developing an awareness of “the strangeness of our lives”, Riep pointed towards Michel Foucault’s account of literature as a discourse of murmur and silence, as something which may play this role. By rupturing the dense texture of language – seen as predetermining ordinary experience – in “limit experiences”, literature could thus become a starting point for reflection and negotiation.

MARTIN RENZ (Frankfurt am Main) presented a form of aesthetic power as a third and original option. Following Hannah Arendt’s reading of the role appearances play in politics, he showed a source of political transformation which is neither reasoned agreement nor violent force. Rather, some performative acts can shift people’s perception of the world and thus, their political behavior.

If the character of democratic selves is open and procedural, then improvisation may be the mode of their existence – appropriately, three participants discussed it: SAM ROSENBLUM (Ithaca) and EVA-MARIA CIESLA (Berlin) explicitly, and SAMU/ELLE STRIEWSKI (Berlin) implicitly. Read together, these talks ask, if improvisation may be inherently democratic, while, by varying the place of fixed aims and experimental means, calling this possibility into question. Striewski and the participants of their drag workshops encountered drag as an opportunity for the freedom of a limit experience. What is freeing, however, is not the performance itself, but the experimentation in preparation for it. Especially the backstage phase – when performers interact with one another already fully costumed but not in their personae – suspends the gender binary and shared vulnerability remains.

Whereas in Striewski’s case, the value of experimentation along specific parameters is openness itself, Sam Rosenblum presented cases where the fixed, yet undefined task of political organizing was prepared for using the rules of improvisational theater. His examples for such practices were the IWW’s Highlander Folk Center and SNCC. Improvisation here has an instrumental character, thus allowing for potential non-democratic uses of the same tactic as well. This is different in the example discussed by Ciesla, the McAppy Project, in which the British architect Cedric Price used improvisational methods to give a bottom-up-structure to the work of architectural design. He interacted with the workers of a building site to develop what “improving their working conditions” would actually have to mean. Improvisation was his means of giving a democratic form to the design process.

SABINE MÜLLER (Vienna) connected the public negotiation of selfhood and representation by studying the fight for suffrage in early 20th-century Austria. Representation here was both collective self-presentation of protesters and their depiction in contemporary media. The latter’s official version aimed to depict public order by hiding the working-class origins of the protesters, obvious in sources produced by the protesters themselves.

WILLIAM ROSS (Frankfurt am Main) engaged a similar question from the perspective of a hermeneutical reader. His considerations took Spivak’s and Adorno’s conceptions respectively of the subaltern and Darstellung (representation or depiction). Within their Darstellung, subaltern voices could come to their much-debated ability to speak, Ross argued, if the hegemonic group would learn to listen. This ability to listen would mean to allow themselves to be affected in a way that would transform the hegemonic media of representation themselves. How this was supposed to be facilitated was not part of the talk. In that he approached the question theoretically, Ross’s talk appears far removed from Müller’s. Still, both navigated the tension between a subaltern group’s desire to appear and the ordering force of hegemonic media of appearance.

MARTIN JAY’s (Berkeley) keynote address on the notion of the body politic began a discussion of the interrelationship between the human body and the political aspects of representation. Ernst Kantorowicz‘s “The King’s Two Bodies” is the most relevant conceptual connection here. The first body is the place of the sovereign in the state structure, the second its human occupant. This duality permits a continuation beyond the life of an individual – it has even outlived political systems. Sovereignty survives in democracies, however occupied collectively by the people.

JASON FRANK (Ithaca) took up the problems this entailed for representation. His talk was built around the observation that, whereas a king appeared as his physical body, the people as an abstract idea could only be represented in art. To illustrate this, he pointed towards the statue of Hercules the people of revolutionary France used to depict themselves. In a question after the talk, Leonie Licht (Vienna) pointed out that everyone will at last have met a few fellow members of the people to which they belong, while most kings are far removed from most of the kingdom’s sensory organs. She thus indicated a limitation in Frank’s argument, if viewed from the vantage of an individual, though it may still hold in the absolute.

Others thought about the body in its role as the bearer of the sensory. PATCHEN MARKELL (Ithaca) did so by understanding the public as the “outside”. Whereas the inside is protected by walls, windows, and doors, the outside consists of uncontrolled sensory impressions. Thus, Markell pointed out, the protective devices introduced in reaction to climate change will also represent a limitation of publicity, or at least a modification thereof.

DOROTHEA DOUGLAS (Berlin) used the example of the staircase of Berlin’s Amtsgericht Mitte (district court) to show how ideas are transformed into sense impressions. By way of its design, the staircase put anyone entering this administrative courthouse sensorily and symbolically in the place of a legal subject or Rechtsperson. She thus showed how architectural design has functioned to spread the new concept of equality before the law.

The viscerality central to these discussions of living bodies connects to the concept of life forms, which few talks addressed directly. An exception herein was JULIUS SCHWARZWÄLDER‘s (Darmstadt/Frankfurt am Main) contextualization of Wittgenstein’s term Lebensform. Growing out of the life sciences at the turn of the century, it rapidly became a leading metaphor in general discourse. By shifting the emphasis back to the aspect of biological life, still dominant in this time, Schwarzwälder hoped to break with the prevalent culturalized understanding of the term. His talk thus showed the capacity of historical research to shift and widen the scope of theoretical thinking.

The invers of making ideas sensory is the question of the relationship between common, lived realities and artistic forms. FRANZISKA WILDT (Frankfurt am Main) presented a reading of Hegel, developing an opposite to his notion of poetry – Dichtung – the art closest to spirit. She suggested to call this art closest to matter “prose”.

The examples missing from Wildt’s talk may have been provided by art and media historian BIANCA LALIBERTÉ (Montréal). The “useful arts” she discussed are not merely representations of or stand in a relationship to the material lifeworlds of European colonists during the American revolution: as instruments, they were constitutive parts of it. Wildt’s “prose” might then be understood as meaning precisely such technology – after all, Hegel’s view of the poetic is not limited to the language arts —viewed however with the close attention to its artistic qualities that carried throughout Laliberté’s talk.

CLAUDIA PARK (Frankfurt am Main) and DANIEL HARTLEY (Durham) both surveyed the development of literary form in its relationship to socio-political realities. Hartley’s Marxist literary-theoretical argument started with Auerbach’s Stiltrennung, the correspondence between social estates and literary styles. Embedding it within social experience by way of the studies of Fredric Jameson, he arrived at Raymond Williams’s essay on English prose style. Williams therein documented a shift from the Enlightenment style, which addressed a seemingly universal audience, to 19th century writing that was more aware of the particularities of actual audiences. As a final step in this development, Hartley pointed towards Karl Marx who, in employing a protomodernist quotation style in “Das Kapital”, may have sublated audience and speaker altogether. As the final step in a similar development Park arrived at the new hybrid genre of auto-theory. Her starting point is the assumption that realism ought not to be understood as a literary movement but as the plausibility of genres or formats at a given historical moment. She and Hartley seemed to be approaching the same or a similar problem from different vantage points or rather distances. Whereas style and audience on a sentence level were Hartley’s focus, Park’s seemed to be the form of the work as a whole.

The process of reflecting on the conference made drawing close connections the conceptual, the theoretical, the historic a necessity. This springs from the setup of the conference itself and may count as its strongest feature. By bringing these two kinds of intellectual work close to one another, it becomes evident how a dialogue between them is beneficial for both. The conference’s themes united the philosophical work of, for example, Wildt with historical studies by, for example, Laliberté. In this regard, the conference can be seen as a success, though necessarily an incomplete one. Placing these perspectives in a dialogue with one another may be the beginning of a perpetual negotiation, thus continuing the conference’s content to its own form. It would be interesting to see how future iterations of this intellectual endeavor could be transformed if extra-academic presenters were introduced to add the dimension of practice – surely relevant to the question of aesthetics and democracies as they pertain to life forms. It would befit the broad ambitions of this project.

Conference overview:

Dominik Herold (Frankfurt am Main): Welcome by organizers

Rainer Forst (Frankfurt am Main): Opening Remarks

Johannes Völz (Frankfurt am Main): Theme Introduction

Keynote

Martin Jay (Berkeley): Leib, Körper and the Body Politic

Panel Discussion

Martin Jay (Berkeley) / Susan Buck-Morss (New York) / Katrin Trüstedt (Berlin) / Martin Saar (Frankfurt am Main)

Forum 1

Chair: Jonathan Schöniger (Offenbach am Main)

Rob Horning (New York): Lifeless Life-Forms: Generative AI as Predictive Solipsism

Panel 1
Chair: Andrea C. Blättler (Frankfurt am Main)

Andrew Norris (Santa Barbara): Finitude and Perfection

Sören Fiedler (Darmstadt): ’I’m speaking for us.’ Exemplarity of and in Democracy

Julius Schwarzwälder (Frankfurt am Main/Darmstadt): The Pluralization of ’Life-Form’

Jochen Schuff (Berlin): The Senses of Democracy

Leonhard Riep (Frankfurt am Main): Between Exclusion and Transgression: The Politics of Limit-Experience After Foucault

Leonie Licht (Vienna): ’A horizon, then, is an empty locus…’. On a Heavenly Metaphor as an Aesthetic Dimension in the Work of E. Laclau and Ch. Mouffe

Panel 2
Chair: Lisa Pfeifer (Frankfurt am Main)

Susan Buck-Morss (New York): Aesthesis as Democratic Knowledge

Samu/elle Striewski (Berlin): Drag as Political Form of Life. From Tucking and Binding to Lip-Syncing Democracy

Eva-Maria Ciesla (Berlin): Architectural Processes of Designing and Intervening – Improvisation as an Aesthetic Practice of Democratic Life-Forms

Ivo Eichhorn (Frankfurt am Main): Fanon, The Veil, Insurgent Democracy: Some Aisthetic Considerations

Samuel Rosenblum (Ithaca): ’Faking It’ at the Highlander Folk Center and SNCC: On Improvisational Practices of Organizing

Martin Renz (Frankfurt am Main): Once You See It, You Cannot Unsee It. The Aesthetic Effectivity of Arendtian Power

Forum 2
Discussant: Nathan Taylor (Frankfurt am Main)

Jason Frank (Ithaca): An Aesthetics of Democracy

Patchen Markell (Ithaca): Hannah Arendt and the Outdoor Condition

Panel 3
Chair: Lorena Nauschnegg (Frankfurt am Main)

Katrin Trüstedt (Berlin): Representing Gaia? Towards a Politics of Appearing

Sabine Müller (Vienna): Political and Aesthetic Representation: A Problem Solved, Or Still a Challenge?

Daniel Hartley (Durham): The Politics of Style

Franziska Wildt (Frankfurt am Main): Politics of Prose. The Language of Resistance and the Resistance of Language

Claudia Young-joo Park (Frankfurt am Main): Literary Form as Life-Form: Reflections on the Realism and Politics of Literature

Sebastian Staab (Frankfurt am Main): Jaques Tati’s Playtime

Panel 4
Chair: Amadeus Ulrich (Frankfurt am Main)

Antje Krause-Wahl (Frankfurt am Main): The Aesthetics of Touch. Art and Being Together in Time of Crisis

Johanna Wurz (Kassel): Exhibition Design as a Performative Medium of Democracy? The Aesthetic-Political Double Life of Permanent Art Exhibitions in the 1970s

Dorothea Douglas (Berlin): The Projected Body of the Legal Subject. Institutional Embodiment in the Stairwell of the Amtsgericht Mitte in Berlin

Jaka Lombar (Dublin): The Return of Mimesis and Mirroring in New Media

William Ross (Frankfurt am Main): Spivak and Adorno on the Transformation of Darstellung

Bianca Laliberté (Montréal): The ‘Useful Arts’ Apparatus. The American Revolution’s Visual Production

Forum 3
Chair: Daniel Fejzo (Frankfurt am Main)

Anne Eusterschulte (Berlin) / Sophie Loidolt (Darmstadt): Is Arendt’s Political Aesthetics a Democratic Practice?