Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency 9780231544962

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WHY O N LY A R T C A N SAVE US

WHY O N LY A R T C A N SAVE US Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency

santiago zabala

columbia university press

New York

C o l u m bi a U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s Pu bl i s h e r s S i n c e 1893 N e w Yor k

C h ic h e s t e r , W e s t S u s s e x

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press All artworks appear by courtesy of the artists.

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-231-18348-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0231-54496-2 (e-book)

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America

Cover image: Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Ora, 1999. Polyester resin, painted wax, human hair, fabric, clothing, accessories, stone and carpet. Dimensions variable. Installation view: Kunsthalle Basel, Maurizio Cattelan, Oct. 16–Nov. 21. Photo: Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy, Maurizio Cattelan’s Archive.

Book and cover design: Chang Jae Lee

What I admire in Charles Peirce and Martin Heidegger is that they have sought to liberate aesthetics from its traditional preoccupation with beauty, and beauty’s traditional limitation to calm detachment—and at the same time to situate the beauty as part of the ontology of being human. —Arthur C. Danto, What Art Is

Critical art is an art that aims to produce a new perception of the world, and therefore to create a commitment to its transformation. This schema, very simple in appearance, is actually the conjunction of three processes. First, the production of a sensory form of “strangeness”; second, the development of an awareness of the reason for that strangeness; and third, a mobilization of individuals as a result of that awareness. —Jacques Rancière, Dissensus

The outcome of recent philosophical hermeneutics has been the “recovery of the truth claim of art,” to use Hans-Georg Gadamer’s expression. This recovery, in itself, is fundamentally polemical toward a large part of the twentieth century’s philosophical aesthetics, whose inclination has been to redefine art by excluding its theoretical or practical bearing or, at best, by assigning to art a position of subordination according to which, even though art belongs to the field of truth, it is the task of other activities to take cognizance of the truth that art represents, by including it into a perspective that is vaster, more comprehensive, and therefore “truer.” —Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1 1 The Emergency of Aesthetics 13 Measurable Contemplations 14 Indifferent Beauty 19

2 Emergency Through Art 25 Social Paradoxes 29 Urban Discharges 48 Environmental Calls 66 Historical Accounts 85

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CONTENTS

3 Emergency Aesthetics 111 Anarchic Interpretations 113 Existential Interventions 119

Afterword 127

Notes 133 Index 185

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 2.1. kennardphillipps, Photo Op, 2005 32 Figure 2.2. Jota Castro, Mortgage, 2009 37 Figure 2.3. Filippo Minelli, Contradictions, 2010 42 Figure 2.4. Hema Upadhyay, Dream a Wish, Wish a Dream, 2006 51 Figure 2.5. Wang Zhiyuan, Thrown to the Wind, 2010 56 Figure 2.6. Peter McFarlane, Nest, 2014 61 Figure 2.7. Néle Azevedo, Minimum Monument, 2009 70 Figure 2.8. Mandy Barker, Penalty: The World, 2014 75 Figure 2.9. Michael Sailstorfer, Forst, 2012 81 Figure 2.10. Jennifer Karady, “Former Sergeant Jose Adames, U.S. Marine Corps Recon, Stinger Gunner, 1st Platoon, Alpha Company, veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom”; Brooklyn, NY, 2009 89 Figure 2.11. Alfredo Jaar, The Eyes of Gutete Emerita, 1996 96 Figure 2.12. Jane Frere, Return of the Soul: The Nakba Project, 2007– 2008 105

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PREFACE

Th e image I have chosen as the cover image for this book is The Ninth Hour, a sculpture by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan that represents Pope John Paul II lying on the ground after being struck by a meteorite. The sculpture’s title alludes to the ninth hour of darkness that fell upon all the land when Christ cried out “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?”—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This alludes to this book’s title, which paraphrases Martin Heidegger’s famous statement that “only a God can still save us” when he was asked whether we could still have any influence now that we are so overpowered by technology. Heidegger alludes not to God’s representative on earth, as portrayed in Cattelan’s work, but rather the absence of Being, which in our technological world has become the essential emergency. The goal of this book is to thrust us into this emergency as it is revealed through works of art. In line with the hermeneutic ontology I exposed in The Remains of Being (2009), this book aims to show how contemporary art, like “communism” (which was the theme of my previous book, Hermeneutic Communism [2011], coauthored with Gianni Vattimo), is another realm where the remains of Being are disclosed, that is, where existence takes place. xi

PREFACE

In a world where, as Heidegger stated, “the only emergency has become the lack of a sense of emergency,” art’s alterations of reality disclose this emergency and demand a different aesthetics, one of emergency. While some may consider this aesthetic theory a simple contribution to the discipline begun by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735 and since developed by Theodore Adorno, Julia Kristeva, and many others, its primary aim is ontological, that is, to specify how Being and existence (for several contemporary artists such as Jennifer Karady, David Foster Wallace, and others) are no longer givens but are rather the points of departure to overcome oblivion or annihilation. Contemplation and beauty in contemporary art have not only been replaced by interpretations and interventions but also turn into an invitation to take a stance in favor of the remains of Being, that is, to become existentially involved for the sake of the salvation of the weak. The book is divided into three chapters, each of which responds to the others; that is, while the last chapter, “Emergency Aesthetics,” outlines how to answer (through hermeneutics) the ontological call of art in the twenty-fist century, the second chapter responds to the “Emergency of Aesthetics” that we begin with. Given that each chapter responds to the one before, the reader is invited to read the book forward or backward as long as the works of art considered are interpreted as representing the possibility of salvation from metaphysics, that is, as revealing a new aesthetics of emergency.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

O nce again, the encouragement, suggestions, and help of Michael Haskell, Wendy Lochner, and Gianni Vattimo have been crucial to me in completing this book. I owe them more than I can express. My conversations and correspondence with Arne de Boever, Pablo Cardoso, Carmelo Dotolo, Rob Fellman, Jonathan Gilmore, Arianna Letizia, Silvia Mazzini, Richard Polt, Ugo Ugazio, Martin Woessner, and Floriano von Arx have enriched this book not only philosophically but also aesthetically. I must also thank all the artists (Néle Azevedo, Mandy Barker, Jota Castro, Maurizio Cattelan, Jane Frere, Alfredo Jaar, Jennifer Karady, kennardphillipps, Peter McFarlane, Filippo Minelli, Michael Sailstorfer, Hema Upadhyay, and Wang Zhiyuan), who allowed us to reproduce their works of art in this book. Thank you all very much. This book is for Mauro Piola, who saved so many of us.

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WHY O N LY A R T C A N SAVE US

INTRODUCTION Yet from where does the emergency of the future of philosophy come? Must not philosophy itself—in the act of beginning—first awaken this emergency? Such emergency stands on this side of misery and grief, which always roam merely in some corner of established beings and of their “truth.” —Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event)

Si nce Martin Heidegger said that “only a God can still save us” in a legendary interview with Der Spiegel, many have interpreted the word “God” too literally.1 They have ignored that to Heidegger “God” was simply another realm where Being takes place, as he had explained thirty years earlier in “The Origin of the Work of Art.”2 In that famous essay he indicates not only how art embodies an ontological struggle between the self-concealing earth and the illuminating world but also that the event of truth can happen in different acts, such as the “essential sacrifice,” “founding a state,” or a “work of art.”3 Only Reiner Schürmann and Gianni Vattimo have managed to overcome the literal interpretation and suggest that “only Proteus” or “communism” can save us,4 but few have focused on “art” as a realm of salvation—even though Heidegger listed it among Being’s events.5 It should not come as a surprise that Heidegger wrote this important essay right after his political adventure of 1933 as rector of the University of Freiburg, in other words, after the failure and error implied by this political involvement,6 which inevitably caused him so many academic, public, and psychological difficulties, as the recent publication of his Black Notebooks (once again) confirmed.7 1

INTRODUCTION

It seems as if art could offer a possibility of salvation not only from the ontic world but also from the metaphysical implications of Heidegger’s idea, given the different events of truth he lists.8 Nonetheless, if Heidegger and his followers have been searching for salvation (or a decent decadence) in different events, it is not because they were searching for the one correct answer but rather because they have seen that no answer today could be framed within metaphysics, that is, where “Beings have been replaced by beings,”9 where “everything is held to be calculable,”10 and where the “only emergency is the lack of a sense of emergency.”11 We have reached a point, according to Heidegger, where human beings themselves, like the organized superman, seem to dominate everything and are dispropriated of the last possibility of their essence: they can never recognize in the extreme blindness that the human forgetfulness of being, a forgetfulness brought to maturity along with the abandonment of beings by being, leaves human beings without a sense of emergency insofar as it compels them to think that the ordering of beings and the instituting of order would bring about the substantive fullness of beings, whereas indeed what is assured everywhere is only the endlessly self-expanding emptiness of devastation. The dispropriation of beings, which takes from them the truth of beyng, allows humanity, ensnared in such beings, to fall into a lack of a sense of emergency.12

In the current condition of accomplished realism, where the culmination of Being’s replacement by beings (or the replacement of existence by objects), that is, in the technological organization of the world, existence has been jettisoned not only topologically but also aesthetically.13 “The lack of a sense of emergency,” Heidegger explained, “is greatest where self-certainty has become unsurpassable, where everything is held to be calculable, and especially where it has been decided, with no previous questioning, who we are and what we are supposed to do.”14 In such a world, where we are constantly under surveillance and where even the future is becoming predictable through online data mining,15 the problem is not only the emergencies we confront but the ones we are missing. Recent publicly remarked emergencies, such as the refugee crisis in Europe, ISIS terrorist attacks, and Edward Snowden’s revelations of U.S. National Security Agency surveillance, served to preserve the 2

INTRODUCTION

status quo. The refugee crisis and terrorist attacks are consequences of decades of Western military constraints in the Middle East, and Snowden’s revelations have served only to show how constrained and framed we are and continue to be. These events mark the absence of emergency, which does not mean they are not emergencies but rather that they are framed within our globalized system. They emerge as a consequence of this frame, which is the greatest emergency. To distinguish Heidegger’s “absence of emergency” (“Notlosigkeit”) from the popular “state of emergency” (“Ausnahmezustand”) of Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben, one must remember that the latter is a consequence of the former. Even though the terms have often been translated as “lack” or “state” of “emergency” and “exception,” Heidegger’s term does not refer to the “sovereign who decides on the exceptional case” but rather to “Being’s abandonment,” which also includes the decision of the sovereign.16 If a sovereign can decide upon or declare a state of exception or emergency in an epoch where Being has already been abandoned, then the epoch’s metaphysical condition is its greatest emergency, and this condition explains the rise of the term “emergency” in the public discourse. The fact that a number of intellectuals have embraced the rhetoric of exception, crisis, and emergency that is deployed by governments (the state of “exception,” the burkini “crisis,” or the transgender bathroom “emergency”)17 is an indication, as Janet Roitman pointed out, that this idea has become “a blind spot for the production of knowledge about what constitutes historical significance and about what constitutes social or historical meaning.”18 Although these “blind spots” entail “unremitting and often implicit judgment about latencies, or errors and failings that must be eradicated and, evidently hopefully, overcome,”19 they still conceal the greatest emergency. As we will see, if artists can “thrust” and “rescue” us into the greatest emergencies, it’s because they have retreated from what “constitutes social or historical meaning” or, as Heidegger says, “cultural politics.” The greatest emergency, then, concerns more than aspects of law, politics, and society, which belong to the ontic realm of knowledge. It also involves senses and feelings, that is, “existence,” which, Heidegger says, is never an “object” but instead is “Being—it is there only insofar as in each case a living ‘is’ it.”20 Herbert Marcuse summarizes Heidegger’s existentialist concerns over the rationalization of the world when he points out how the “total 3

INTRODUCTION

subordination of reason to metaphysical reality . . . would inevitably prepare the way for a ‘racist ideology.’ ”21 Although this racist ideology was already evident at the beginning of the twentieth century, demonstrated by the revolt of the humanistic spirit against the imposition of social rationalization in the artistic avant-garde and in theological and philosophical existentialism, “during the past century such forms of ‘humanistic’ resistance have appeared ever weaker and more partial.”22 This absence of revolutionary spirit is evident now in a number of young philosophers who once again “turn toward objects,” who seek to submit thought to “reality”: Quentin Meillassoux demands a return to “the Great Outdoors” (“le Grand Dehors”),23 which in his thought is constituted of supposedly independent objects; Graham Harman believes in a “reality never exhausted by any relation to it by humans or other entities.”24 This primacy of things over human relations has also given birth to a “speculative” or “realist aesthetics” that understands artworks as independent “not only from their social and political surroundings, their physical settings or their commercial exchange value, but from any other object whatsoever.”25 In sum, together with Markus Gabriel and others,26 they call for a “reality” independent of human beings, even though, as Slavoj Žižek recalls, “there is no ‘neutral’ reality within which gaps occur, within which frames isolate domains of appearances. Every field of ‘reality’ (every ‘world’) is always-already enframed, seen through an invisible frame.”27 Although these “new” philosophers justify their theoretical beliefs in different ways, such as the demonstration—despite Thomas Kuhn—of the supposed stability of a scientific (in particular, physical) understanding of the world, their work is part of a global call to order and to orderly behavior.28 All this is not very different, as Arthur C. Danto recalls, from “what in France was called after World War I rappel à l’ordre—a call to order—in which avant-garde artists were enjoined to put aside their experiments and represent the world in ways reassuring to those whose worlds had been torn apart by war.”29 This order, in the twenty-first century, contrary to what we might expect at first, does not simply refer to a reality that must be respected or imposed but also to the absence of events and emergencies, an absence that seems to constitute the condition of our globalized world. Although the media—traditional, online, and social—are full of “events” and “emergencies,” the dominant impression of citizens in industrialized countries, whether at their centers or 4

INTRODUCTION

in their postcolonial slums, is that nothing new happens: reality is fixed, stable, and secured. As we can see, the absence of emergency is a consequence of politics, finance, and culture having been framed within previously established realist parameters. These parameters are meant to rescue us from emergencies, from whatever emerges as different. It should come as no surprise that “to emerge” (which comes from Latin “e-,” “out of, from, according to,” and “mergere,” “to dip, plunge, immerse”) suggests openness, undecidedness, and multiple potentialities. But whoever does not submit to the ongoing absence of emergency is defined as mistaken or, worse, on the wrong side of reality—maybe even the wrong side of the border. Anything that is not framed within the dominant paradigms— political (democracy), financial (neoliberalism), and military (NATO)— not only is repressed but also constitutes an emergency as it strives to change these established paradigms. The agents that seek to disrupt the framing powers are the weak, the remnants of Being, that is, every person and idea forced to the margins of this frame and that inevitably strives for change or, better, for an alteration of the imposed representations of reality. This alteration is necessary not only politically and ethically but also aesthetically. An aesthetic force is needed to shake us out of our tendency to ignore the “social paradoxes” generated by the political, financial, and technological frames that contain us; the “urban discharge” of slums and plastic and electronic wastes; the “environmental calls” caused by global warming, ocean pollution, and deforestation; and the “historical accounts” of invisible, ignored, and denied events. These aesthetic forces, like Žižek’s four powerful antagonisms,30 will disrupt not only capitalism’s indefinite reproduction but also realism’s metaphysical impositions. Art, like other “events of truth,”31 does not operate within this metaphysical frame but rather at its margins and as a response to the lack of a sense of emergency. This does not mean that artists and galleries are now literally located in the slums, but they present works that disclose what remains of Being: paradoxes, discharges, calls, and accounts. If, as we will see, there are a number of artists whose works demand our intervention rather than simple aesthetic contemplation, it’s not because they lack classically artistic sensibility but rather because the lack of a sense of emergency in framed democracies demands a new artistic shock. Just as impressionism was a response to industrialization and 5

INTRODUCTION

Dada to the First World War, contemporary art of emergency responds to the “lack of a sense of emergency” that we are all framed within. Without ignoring the eighteenth-century split between “fine arts” (poetry, sculpture, music) and “crafts” (popular songs, embroidery, shoemaking) brilliantly exposed by Larry Shiner in The Invention of Art,32 my ontological account of art strives to overcome this division in order to focus on concerned disclosures. My goal is not to define art in the light of changes in the visual arts but rather to interpret these changes through the lack of a sense of emergency, the “racist ideology” I have already mentioned. The aim of this book, then, is not simply to criticize previous aesthetic theories or propose a new one; rather, I wish to point out the aesthetic emergency, in all senses of the word. Chapter 1, “The Emergency of Aesthetics,” will outline how Being’s events are concealed, and chapter 3, “Emergency Aesthetics,” will outline a philosophical stance capable of interpreting the ontological essence of contemporary art, in other words, its existential disclosures. As we can see, art’s ontological nature does not belong to aesthetics but rather to the remains of Being, that is, to everything that is not framed within metaphysics. This is probably why Heidegger, in Contributions to Philosophy (a text written after his political misadventure), pointed out how the question of the origin of the work of art is not intent on an eternally valid determination of the essence of the work of art, a determination that could also serve as a guideline for the historiological survey and explanation of the history of art. Instead, the question stands in the most intrinsic connection to the task of overcoming aesthetics, i.e., overcoming a particular conception of beings—as objects of representation. The overcoming of aesthetics again results necessarily from the historical confrontation with metaphysics as such. . . . Within the horizon of this knowledge, art loses its relation to culture; art manifests itself here only as an event of be-ing.33

As long as we do not overcome these representations, we will continue to experience the “absence of art,”34 the state of beings framed within the metaphysical organization of the lack of a sense of emergency. This is why, according to Heidegger, to overcome this emergency it’s not enough simply to leave aside “what is objectively representable”; rather, “something 6

INTRODUCTION

extraordinary, unimaginable, thrust[s] [us] into this emergency.”35 This is the “Emergency Through Art” presented in chapter 2 and that I will refer to throughout the book. My postmetaphysical aesthetics does not aim simply to overcome representations of reality but rather to disclose and interpret the forgotten and annihilated existential appeal of Being.36 Although this occurred several times throughout the history of art (Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is the paradigmatic example here: painted as a response to Spanish Nationalist forces’ bombing of a town in Basque country, it was used not only to inform the public but also as a symbol of all the ignored victims of war),37 since the fall of the Berlin wall, when globalization began to frame our lives politically, financially, and militarily, the call to this aesthetics has drastically increased among artists. Art often works better than commercial media or historical reconstructions as a way to express and bear emergencies. A work of art, such as a song or a photograph, is not that different from other objects in the world. The difference is not one of kind but rather of degree, intensity, and depth. This is evident in our everyday encounters. Media photographs can be truthful, but rarely as powerfully as a photographic work of art. Thus, Hans-Georg Gadamer believes that the term “aesthetic object” is a completely useless concept. “When a work of art truly takes hold of us, it is not an object that stands opposite us which we look at in the hope of seeing through it to an intended conceptual meaning. Just the reverse. The works is an ‘Ereignis’— an event that ‘appropriates us’ into itself. It shocks us, it overturns us, and sets up a world of its own, into which we are drawn, as it were.”38 Nonetheless, now that aesthetics has overcome metaphysics, that is, objectivist-representational forms (which also limited art’s creations), it can focus on the existential claims of art, which such distinguished thinkers as Arthur C. Danto, Jacques Rancière, and Gianni Vattimo have already begun to respond to through their “transfigurations of common places,” “dissensus from the sensible,” and “claims to truth” aesthetic theories.39 These responses are attempts to enact the demands not only of art but also of politics.40 These contemporary thinkers have moved beyond aesthetic representationalism and formalism both because of their postmetaphysical philosophical positions and because they are affected by art’s current ontological appeal. The truth of art no longer rests in representations of reality but rather in an existential project of transformation. The end of art proclaimed by Hegel and Danto 7

INTRODUCTION

was never a matter of art simply becoming conceptual, that is, “philosophical,” but instead its becoming existential.41 The radical changes brought about in the advent of global society mean that the artist today must respond to a wider public than in the past, one that is concerned with the same global emergencies that affect the artist. This is why Danto believes that art today is not for connoisseurs of collectors alone. Nor is it only for the people who share the artist’s culture or nationality. The globalization of the art world means that art addresses us in our humanity, as men and women who seek in art for meanings that neither of art’s peers—philosophy and religion—in what Hegel spoke of as the realm of Absolute Spirit, are able to provide.42

After the eras of “imitation” and “ideology,” when artists were often commissioned for their work, we have now entered the era of the “lack of a sense of emergency”; now artists, along with their audience, are called to intervene for the sake of humanity. But how does the encounter with the work of art take place today? It is no longer a question of the pleasure obtained by the identification of beauty and luminosity (the predominant aesthetic tradition up to Plotinus), the harmonious synthesis between sensibility and understanding (as Kant suggested), or even any more recent aesthetic system but rather, as Vattimo proposes, “an active interpretation and practical intervention.”43 In sum, it’s no longer possible to claim that the encounter with a work of art can be explained on the basis of optical, sociological, or even psychological models: this would ignore an ontological appeal to intervene expressed in contemporary art. As Danto brilliantly explains in his last book, What Art Is (2013), even though much “contemporary art is hardly aesthetic at all, it has in its stead the power of meaning and the possibility of truth, and depends upon the interpretation that brings these into play.”44 This different aesthetic relation with the work of art began taking shape in 1917, when Marcel Duchamp revealed his Fountain and pointed out how any “readymade” could become a work of art if placed within the walls of a museum, which forced the public to question the work and enter into dialogue with it.45 But there are now more radical examples of art determined to save us, such as the work of Tom Waits, Steven Soderbergh, Dmitry Lipkin, and Colette Burson. When one listens to Waits’s 8

INTRODUCTION

“The Road to Peace” or views Soderbergh’s Traffic or Lipkin and Burson’s Hung,46 it is difficult to remain simply aesthetically satisfied because they involve us at an existential level. But this is not because they simply narrate the truth of ongoing events (the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the drug trail between Mexico and the United States, and middle-class desperation in Detroit) in a more objectivist way than we are accustomed to. Rather, they demand that we take a stance in a process of transformation that is vital for our future. As Danto and Rancière would say, if there are “transfigurations” (in music, films, and TV series) of our “commonplaces” (conflict, violence, and economic recession) in these three works, they emerge not only from the creative energy in the composition but also because these commonplaces have become too common and we feel the need to “dissent” from them. In sum, if we have become so accustomed to these commonplaces that we take them for granted, then art, as Heidegger said, is “something” that “thrust[s] us into” emergencies, that is, saves us from discrimination, forgetfulness, and annihilation. Rather than points of arrival for consumers’ identification, contemplation, and realization of beauty, works of art are points of departure to change the world, a world that needs new interpretations instead of better descriptions.47 While some might consider emergency aesthetics excessively political, it is difficult to ignore contemporary art’s interest in our salvation, which one could also consider a late response to Walter Benjamin’s call to politicize art in the perspective of a communist revolution, one that is finally taking shape in some regions of the world.48 “The main goal of aesthetics today,” Michael Kelly rightly points out, “is to explain how the transformation of demands on art to demands by art is already a reality in some contemporary art.”49 These “demands by art” are particularly significant for my objectives because they will help aesthetics overcome not only its metaphysical nature but also our own, where the “will to get out,” as Heidegger noticed, “is lacking.”50 This will is lacking because of our condition within framed democracies and also because of our exaggerated confidence in metaphysics, which continues to condition aesthetics. This is why to formulate an aesthetic judgment today does not consist in recognizing the beautiful qualities of a work of art but rather in revealing, interpreting, and, most of all, emphasizing the fact that the work strives to belong to a community that has been discharged by history. This is probably why Heidegger’s most 9

INTRODUCTION

distinguished disciple, Gadamer, was so concerned to emphasize how art, like science, also manifests truth claims. The only difference between them is their requirements. Science will remain satisfied with measurable truths (information regarding the state of things), but art demands we enter into conversation with the work, that is, intervene existentially.51 It should not come as a surprise that Gadamer founded upon these arguments what today goes under the name of hermeneutics, a philosophical stance focused upon the interpretative nature of human beings.52 Although juridical and biblical hermeneutics (the interpretation of laws and the scriptures) played a significant role throughout the history of hermeneutics, Gadamer, in Truth and Method, decided to emphasize its aesthetic nature. While many believe this was to contrast the ongoing “neutralization” in the developments of Kantianism, Gadamer was probably also following Heidegger’s political disillusionment, searching in art for the possibility of salvation. After all, Gadamer’s aesthetic experience was modeled on the notion of dialogue, which does not aim for a passive exchange of different interpretations of a work of art but rather to effect change, to save us from what we are. But how does hermeneutics, which had constantly been accused of relativism (for stressing the interpretative nature of truth) and aestheticism defend itself, given that its theoretical architect founded the discipline on these arguments? As Gadamer explained: “Hermeneutic philosophy, as I envision it, does not understand itself as an ‘absolute’ position but as a path of experiencing. Its modesty consists in the fact that for it there is no higher principle than this: holding oneself open to the conversation.”53 However, hermeneutics is anything but an aestheticizing approach, because my whole argument begins precisely with art and not with aesthetics. There I would rather speak of the transcendence that goes beyond everything one encounters in the experience of life. Take for instance, ingratitude, the lack of thankfulness. This is something King Lear teaches us. This is also what Aristotle meant when he found poetry to be more philosophical than history. The writing of history deals with things as they have really happened; poetry in contrast shows how they will always happen.54

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INTRODUCTION

As we can see, hermeneutics strives for dialogue or, in Richard Rorty’s words, to pursue “the conversation of humankind”55 in order to allow events of Being (such as God, communism, or art) to “teach” and “address us in our humanity.” If Gadamer, with other hermeneutic philosophers, was concerned with art, it is because it points out the emergency of aesthetics as well as our own. Even though this emergency has only recently begun to be explicitly addressed,56 it is difficult to imagine this was not among Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s concerns when they explored art’s demands. Art discloses the remains of Being, the emergency at the margins of framed democracies. It exposes Being’s ontological condition (weak, discarded, and forgotten) for those who are politically prepared to interpret it. In sum, like art, hermeneutics does not seek compromises but interpretations, reactions, and, most of all, interventions. This is how the title of this book ought to be interpreted: only art can save us given the emergency of aesthetics, that is, the political “neutralization” or “lack of a sense of emergency” that we find ourselves in. Perhaps this political impasse is what moved Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said to create the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra (in which young Israeli and Arab musicians perform Beethoven, Mozart, and other classics), which asks the public not just to enjoy but also to intervene hermeneutically. If Barenboim was so pleased when a man, after one of his concerts in Gaza City, told him, “We feel like the world has forgotten us. We receive aid supplies, and we’re grateful for that. But the fact that you have come here with your orchestra gives us the feeling that we are human beings,” it’s because art, unlike politics, is “willing to do everything” for the sake of salvation.57

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1 THE EMERGENCY OF AESTHETICS The question of the origin of the work of art is not intent on an eternally valid determination of the essence of the work of art, a determination that could also serve as a guideline for the historiological survey and explanation of the history of art. Instead, the question stands in the most intrinsic connection to the task of overcoming aesthetics, i.e., overcoming a particular conception of beings—as objects of representation. The overcoming of aesthetics again results necessarily from the historical confrontation with metaphysics as such. . . . Within the horizon of this knowledge, art loses its relation to culture; art manifests itself here only as an event of be-ing. —Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event)

H e i de g ge r reformulated as an ontological question Hegel’s judgments on the end of art by asking: “Is art still an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence, or is this something that art no longer is?”1 In doing so, he was trying to overcome the emergency of aesthetics. This emergency does not lie in the “end of art” proclaimed by Hegel but rather in the reduction of art to representable objects to be felt, contemplated, and reproduced as we please. These objects are not simply forms corresponding to the world but also constitute the completion of the abandonment of Being, where “the only emergency is the lack of a sense of emergency.”2 In this condition, which Heidegger called the “age of the world picture”3 and the “machinational epoch,”4 aesthetics automatically conceals art’s ontological, existential, and historical meaning because it frames them within the parameters of metaphysical oppression. In a lecture course during 1929–1930, that is, after the world suffered its first global economic crisis, Heidegger specified that this “oppression” is not ontic but rather ontological, that is, related to Being’s concealment. What oppresses us 13

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is not this social misery, not that political confusion, not this powerlessness of science, not that erosion of art, not this groundlessness of philosophy, not that impotence of religion—the need in question is not the fact that this or that need oppresses [Bedrängt] in such or such a way. Rather what oppresses us most profoundly and in a concealed manner is the very absence of any essential oppressiveness [Bedrängnis] in our Dasein as a whole. . . . This absence of oppressiveness is only apparently hidden; it is rather attested by the very activities with which we busy ourselves in our contemporary restlessness.5

This is the “particular conception of beings” that Heidegger’s phrase “objects of representation” refers to in this chapter’s epigraph, a conception that must be overcome in order for art to “lose its relation to culture and manifest itself as an event of be-ing.”6 But why is it so important for art to lose its relation with aesthetics and culture? Isn’t culture supposed to help art and other realms of Being develop their potential? As we will see, aesthetics is not a heightening of art but rather, as Heidegger said, where art becomes “cultural politics,”7 dangerous in that it is an indifferent measure of beauty. Its concealment of art behind measurements of objective beauty is the emergency of aesthetics, an emergency that will continue to enforce the reification of a lack of emergency until Being is no longer systematically retrieved, appropriated, or disclosed through our cultural contemplation of beauty. This is why Heidegger believes we “must provide a new content for the word ‘art’ and for what it intends to name, on the basis of a fundamental orientation to Being that has been won back in an original way.”8 The goal of this chapter is to confront, weaken, and overcome the metaphysical frame of aesthetics, so that philosophy can stop seeing the problem of art as one of aesthetics.

MEASURABLE CONTEMPLATIONS Heidegger’s distrust of aesthetics is not that different from his feelings about logic, ethics, and other so-called disciplines of philosophy. All of these became framed within metaphysics and also began to frame their own horizons of thought to the point that “within metaphysics there is

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nothing to Being as such.”9 But what do the remains of Being have to do with these disciplines? Heidegger presents these disciplines (in his brief account of the history of aesthetics)10 through knowledge, that is, as “knowledge of logos,” “knowledge of ethos,” and “knowledge of aisthêsis,” not because they aim to know what truth, good, and beauty are but rather because they already know. Logic, ethics, and aesthetics are consequences of the metaphysical structure of modern subjectivism, where an “object” is posited, identified, and applied to a “subject” beforehand, that is, independently of its meaning.11 “The outward evidence of this,” explains Heidegger in Being and Time, “is the determination of the meaning of being as ‘parousia’ or ‘ousia,’ which ontologically and temporally means ‘presence,’ ‘Anwesenheit.’ ”12 The problem with this structure is that the difference between Being (the existence of human beings) and beings (reality) is obscured, and Being as such is exclusively thought in terms of its relation to beings as their only cause. But interpreting essences as the only cause of existence has led philosophy to emphasize exclusively beings and, most of all, to set up Being as a permanent nominal presence, that is, as a presence that speaks of, from, and for the present. When this occurs, priority is given to beings, forcing disciplines to deal with certain areas of Being through regional, secondary, or even applied ontologies. These new areas of Being apply different sets of questions and methods and also submit to these methods, losing sight of Being’s ontological essence, an essence that for both human beings and art is fundamentally different from other objects of the world. In sum, the difference between the “Being of beings” and “beings with respect to Being” does not disclose different areas of beings but rather indicates that we are always speaking, thinking, and creating within this difference, which can also “be interpreted and explained in various ways.”13 Ignoring this difference has not only devalued the thought of Being in favor of the technical use of beings but also transformed truth into a logical, ethical, and aesthetic intuition expressed through a correspondence between propositions and facts and where the real is what fits this correspondence and becomes contemplatable. If, as Heidegger emphasized several times, being and truth are “equiprimordial,”14 it is not because of their capacity to disclose beings but because of their ability

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to conceal them within our measurements. “Man establishes himself as the measure of all measures with which whatever can count as certain, i.e., true, i.e., in being, is measured off and measured out.”15 This is why, as we will see later, the German thinker does not consider the truth of art an aesthetic measure but rather “an origin, a distinctive way in which truth comes into Being, becomes historical.”16 The fundamental problem of this metaphysical structure is not only that Being, beings, and truth are understood as objective but also how this reduces the world to a predictable “picture.” This picture is not an image we have of the world but rather where “the world becomes picture” or, as Heidegger specified, “the world grasped as picture.”17 In this condition, humanity, as the representative of objective beings, rather than being incorporated into the world is the “predator” of the world, whose experiences are not possibilities for change but rather incidents, deviations, and emergencies that must be avoided. When “beings are not interpreted in this way,” Heidegger explains, “the world, too, cannot come into the picture,” and man cannot establish “himself as the measure of all measures with which whatever can count as certain.”18 Heidegger identifies what counts as certain within the world picture as the collective image of representing production. Within this, man fights for the position in which he can be that being who gives to every being the measure and draws up the guidelines. Because this position secures, organizes, and articulates itself as world view, the decisive unfolding of the modern relationship to being becomes a confrontation of world views; not, indeed, any old set of world views, but only those which have already taken hold of man’s most fundamental stance with the utmost decisiveness.19

As we can see, within the world picture truth’s function is not simply normative but also political; it requires humanity to fight for objective presence through measurable contemplations of those beings that justify their difference from other beings. This justification takes place logically, ethically, and also aesthetically, that is, through giving priority to those presences already established and secured. Within these world pictures, Being is marginalized, ignored, and abandoned; it becomes a remnant.20 But how can we recognize the remains of Being? 16

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The remains of Being are not something we see or contemplate; they instead constitute everything that is beyond the logical, ethical, and “aesthetic state” that Heidegger defined as “the lucidity through which we constantly see.”21 Wherever such lucidity is lacking, the remains of Being emerge as an alteration, an event, or an emergency of the world picture, that is, an interruption of the reality we’ve become accustomed to. When we are unable to contemplate something, it is not only because our measurements are inadequate but also because of Being’s own “invisibleness,” “unpresentability,” and “ungraspability.” These characteristics of Being’s remnants do not indicate its ineffectiveness but rather its “worn-out” condition.22 The remnants of Being show its condition at the margin of the world picture. As we can see, the remains of Being do not represent anything objective except its own remnants, which are not objective, escape all forms of lucidity, but are still the condition of such representation. In sum, the remains of Being are not available for contemplation from a logical, ethical, or aesthetic point of view; instead, they allow an acknowledgment of alterations in these same realms. After all, these disciplines are consequences of the metaphysical structure of knowledge, where Being has been abandoned and replaced by beings, that is, by a technological global organization of reality. This is probably why Heidegger emphasized that the “abandonment of Being is the innermost ground of the emergency of the lack of a sense of emergency.”23 But what is the relation between the remains of Being and the lack of a sense of emergency? The remains of Being allow the possibility of acknowledging and withstanding emergency. “Emergencies” result from our noticing an alteration within the world picture, but the “lack of a sense of emergency” emerges when we realize that everything is lucid and functioning correctly. This is why Heidegger believed that the lack of a sense of emergency is greatest where everything is held to be calculable, justifiable, and predictable, reducing the world to objective measures. But how can someone acknowledge a lack of a sense of emergency that “constantly denies itself as an emergency?”24 According to Heidegger, the “lack of a sense of emergency is the extreme form of this emergency and can be recognized above all as the abandonment of Being by beings.”25 This emergency does not first need help but instead must itself first become the help. Yet this emergency must actually be experienced. 17

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What if humans are hardened against it, indeed, as it seems, more obdurately than ever? Then those who awaken must arrive, those who would be the last ones to believe they had discovered the emergency, because they are aware of suffering it.26

For us to experience the lack of a sense of emergency it is not enough to acknowledge how the remains of Being are “made closer to us through a meditation on the darkening of the world and on the destruction of the earth in the name of speed, calculation, and the claim of the massive.” Rather, as Heidegger went on to explain, “something extraordinary, unimaginable,” must “be shocked into this emergency.”27 This “something extraordinary and unimaginable” is art, an event that discloses itself through the remains of Being. Works of art, as remnants beyond measurable contemplation, instead of being the focus of aesthetics have become its emergency, that is, what will “help” retrieve, appropriate, and disclose Being. This is why art, like Being, does not belong to humanity but is rather an event that takes place independently of our contemplations and as an ontological appeal we are invited to respond to. But instead of responding to this appeal, aesthetics has imposed a methodology of contemplating the beautiful where man’s feelings are considered independently of the remains of Being, that is, what lies beyond its horizon of thought. This is why Heidegger believes the beautiful is “what in its self-showing brings forth that state. But the beautiful can pertain to either nature or art. Because art in its way brings forth the beautiful, inasmuch as it is ‘fine’ art, meditation on art becomes aesthetics.”28 Aesthetics is a meditation on art where our affinity to beautiful representations sets the measures for all interpretations, judgments, and contemplations regardless of Being; for aesthetics, our feelings are not a consequence of what is beautiful but rather its point of departure, rendering its ontological appeal indifferent. Heidegger’s distrust of aesthetics was caused not by its metaphysical structure but because of how it incorporated and objectified art, which should be an “itinerary and sojourn for man in which the truth of beings as a whole, i.e., the unconditioned, the absolute, opens itself up to him.”29 Heidegger believes the “absence of art is grounded in the knowledge that the exercise of fully developed talents deriving from the most consummate mastery of the rules . . . can never be ‘art.’ ”30 What makes art

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great for Heidegger is not the quality of what is created but rather its ontological appeal, an appeal independent from natural sciences such as psychiatry (which traces feelings back to the nervous system), which aesthetics seems to rely on when it emphasizes sensibility. “Aesthetics,” Heidegger explains, “becomes a psychology that proceeds in the manner of the natural sciences: states of feeling are taken to be facts that come forward of themselves and may be subjected to experiments, observation, and measurement.”31 In delivering art over to the natural sciences, aesthetics “loses its immediate relation to the basic task of representing the absolute, i.e., of establishing the absolute definitively as such in the realm of historical man,”32 but it gains the possibility to secure the relation between beings and Being. But “everything that is to be secured by means of representing objectifications,” explains Heidegger, will become “binding for everyone,” and from this grip, “nothing can escape.”33 This is probably why the German master began to use “Ge-Stell,” “framed,”34 to refer to the political nature of technology in this epoch of accomplished realism. In sum, within “framed realism” beings are not simply controlled but also directed in advance toward what fits into public needs. Like logic and ethics, aesthetics knows beforehand how to organize beings (through art) in such a way as to appear original, unique, and also stylish, if necessary. This is why even the most popular art does not lack in style but, on the contrary, has a style that can be defined as an indifferent beauty.

INDIFFERENT BEAUTY In an illuminating paragraph of Mindfulness (1938–1939) entitled “Art in the Epoch of Completion of Modernity,” Heidegger calls for the overcoming of aesthetics given the current “absence of art” generated by our framed, realist, “machination age,” but he also points out how Being’s oblivion is not “even an error—only a matter of indifference.”35 This “indifference” is tied to the measurable contemplations required by aesthetics in order to preserve the lack of a sense of emergency. This condition obtains not simply in the sociopolitical realm, where beings are secured and organized, but also in the age of machine art, where our

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aesthetic feelings are constantly satisfied. Such satisfaction is indifferent toward everything that transcends the secured machination of beings, that is, those remnants of Being that by now have become a “hollow word.”36 When art takes place at the margins of aesthetics it finds a distinctive way to disclose the remains of Being, but when it takes place within the framing methodologies of aesthetics, art becomes a dangerous and indifferent beauty. This danger is not related to how culturally valuable a work of art might be but rather whether it is valuable at all from a cultural point of view. Among the various features of modernity, culture has a particular meaning for Heidegger because it strives to become the realization of humanity’s highest values, that is, to consolidate our most noble activities regardless of the “loss of Being” that aesthetics has generated.37 However, the problem with culture is not simply that it tries to make up for this loss through values but in how it pretends to evaluate other epochs in order to measure, confront, and judge whether they are worthwhile at all. But Heidegger emphasized it’s absurd to refer to the “cultural values” of other epochs (such as antiquity or the Middle Ages) because only “in the modern era have spirits and culture been deliberately experienced as fundamental modes of human comportment, and only in most recent times have ‘values’ been posited as standards for such comportment.”38 These standards are useless for judging other epochs not only because of the difference in historical contexts but also because of culture’s own measurements, which always pretend to secure and frame the meaning of values independently of Being. An indication of this is how cultural values arbitrarily frame their meanings by “restricting themselves to their self-validity: poetry for poetry’s sake, art for art’s sake, science for science’s sake.”39 In this way values are not simply the objectification of cultural needs within the world picture but also the fulfillment of modernity’s essence, which is determined to dominate, control, and plan regardless of the remains of Being. As Heidegger explains: The heretofore “cultural” pursuits (the Judeo-Christian, classically formed, democratic Occidental, and American kinds) entrust themselves to being (ideals and values). With utmost exaggeration, machination and the culture industry juxtapose beings and Being as measure

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and take along in each case the differentiated ones into the claim of attention and care. Machination of beings incorporates the culture industry into its planning as a means of power. Similarly, democratic cultural optimism presumes to recover and liberate the masses and uses and fosters technicity in all its “achievements.”40

If culture, politics, and religion have become values, it’s not simply because they are “conditions by virtue of which the classification of becoming—as what alone is real—is carried out”41 but also for their submission to such realism. But how does art become “real,” that is, incorporate itself within the machination of beings? Although modern works of art are created according to our aesthetic measures, art does not incorporate “itself” within the current machinational organization of reality, but the other way around. This is why Heidegger did not believe in the end of art but rather in the “disappearance of the work of art,”42 that is, in the possibility of disclosing Being and its truth. After all, works of art are not “works” because they are crafted or invented but rather because they disclose ontological meanings, that is, what remains of Being; however, just as art can disclose these remnants, it can also conceal them through the indifferent nature of beauty. The indifference of beauty does not come forth through popular or grotesque works of art but rather when art becomes a “means for cultural politics,” that is, a mode for producing, calculating, and representing machinational beings. As it turns out, democracy, which is the political stance currently supposed to liberate the public, does not need to impose pleasantness because it is already resigned to its indifference. Words, sounds, and images, as Heidegger explains, have become means to govern the masses; for example, it is “not films that are trashy, but what they offer as the consequence of machination of lived-experience and what they disseminate as worthy of live-experience.”43 The problem is that what is “worthy of live-experience” is not the result of a free decision but rather what has been decided in prior accord to the democratic frames, organization, and style of the masses. This is why museums (and galleries) exhibit what can be curated in prior accord to “proclamations of power, the parade of numbers, of length, of width, and of height of extension. Exhibition,” Heidegger continues, “means that what is shown is already principally rendered stable.”44 Beauty often takes place through

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these machine works because they call out what already exists and fits in advance into the public’s aesthetic criteria; they also conserve the cultural organization of democracy. In sum, beauty becomes indifferent when aesthetic measures rest in the correspondence between propositions and facts, that is, when they rest on truth. However, as Heidegger explained several times, correspondence is not the primary locus of truth. Rather, it is the other way around: “truth is the place of the proposition.”45 This distinction does not imply that truthful propositions are erroneous but rather that they are always rooted in the disclosedness of understanding, which determines every (logical, ethical, and aesthetic) correspondence.46 The difference between truth as correspondence and truth as disclosedness (like the difference between beings and Being) will establish whether beauty is indifferent, whether it will satisfy beings’ machinations or disclose Being’s remnants. This is why Heidegger believes the “beautiful is not what pleases, but what falls within that fateful gift of truth which comes to be when that which is eternally non-apparent and therefore invisible attains its most radiantly apparent appearance.”47 While art, in order for these (nonapparent and invisible) remnants to appear, must resist its incorporation into the machinational organization of reality, aesthetics, in order to recognize these remnants, must overcome its metaphysical frames: “where framing reigns, there is danger in the highest sense.”48 This danger, as I have mentioned, does not arise because of some failure on the part of people—beings—to correspond to the prevailing cultural organization; it arises, rather, when they always correspond, that is, where everything is rendered lucid and stable and “every danger is denied.”49 But the presence of this danger can be concealed by the indifferent nature of beauty. To acknowledge the remains of Being, aesthetics must overcome metaphysics in such a way that the total correspondence of beings is not simply abandoned (überwindung) but rather twisted (verwindung), in other words, gotten over as “what happens when, in the human realm, one works through grief or pain.”50 As Heidegger explains: Here the “overcoming” does not in the least possess the pejorative sense of forcing down, beating down, the sense of removal or curtailment. It is not the triumph of better insight and greater cleverness but, instead, is an event of Being itself. . . . The overcoming, in the realm of the history of Being, is essentially a twisting free.51 22

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As we can see, overcoming metaphysics is not an aesthetic issue but an ontological one. “Overcoming metaphysics means giving free rein to the priority of the question of the truth of Being over every ‘ideal,’ ‘causal,’ ‘transcendental,’ or ‘dialectical’ explanation of beings.”52 That is, the truth (as disclosedness) of Being has priority over the different ontic explanations of beings. Although these latter are not necessarily erroneous, in the sense of misrepresenting beings, their representations are always framed within cultural politics, where the danger is the lack of a sense of emergency. To acknowledge this lack, aesthetics must twist free from representations, allow alterations and difference to disclose themselves through works of art. This is probably why Heidegger called for an overcoming that is “creative,” that is, where “in one respect the directionality of thinking is maintained, although in another respect it is thereby at the same time radically raised beyond itself.”53 In this manner aesthetics will be able not only to recognize the ongoing “absence of art,” that is, the lack of any sense of emergency, but also to decide “whether the object of enjoyment stems at all from the essential domain of art or is merely an illusory product of historiological cleverness, borne by the prevailing goals of the age.”54 The problem, then, is not that in our age art has become a “business resource” but rather that aesthetics does not bring the disclosed truth of Being—its remains—into decision, that is, beyond itself. In sum, if we are able to acknowledge the remains of Being through the disclosures of art, it’s not simply because these occur beyond aesthetics, at its margins, but most of all because of the emergencies artworks create through alterations. These alterations produce disruptions that require interpretation, response, and intervention instead of contemplation. These alterations make possible the recognition of truth’s beauty because they disclose emergencies and, moreover, because they imply change. This is why Heidegger did not believe the “event” could be “represented as an ‘incident’ or a novelty.’ Its truth, i.e., the truth itself, essentially occurs only if sheltered in art, thinking, poetry, deed.”55 Static cultural expressions—art without emergency—make stable beauty’s indifference, but the remains of Being disclose change, instability—the aesthetic emergency. “Within the horizon of this knowledge,” as Heidegger explains, “art loses its relation to culture; art manifests itself only as an event of Being.”56

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2 EMERGENCY THROUGH ART What would happen if for once we wanted to be serious, withdrew from all fields of semblant “cultural activity,” and admitted that no necessity reigns there any longer? Would not an emergency then appear, come to power, and be compelling? . . . Why do we no longer posses the courage for this retreat? Why does it immediately strike us as something of no value? The reason is that for a long time we have been content to seem to pursue culture and are unwilling to renounce such semblance, because as soon as even that is taken away, not only would the necessity of action disappear but also action itself. —Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event)

Th e essential emergency of art is not a consequence of the emergency of aesthetics that we outlined in the previous chapter but rather of the absence of events, disruptions, and emergencies in an age that has seen the completion of the global technological organization of the world. Works of art, like events and emergencies, have become remnants of Being, that is, ontological or existential alterations that aim to shake our logical, ethical, and aesthetic assessments of reality. These alterations take place at the margins of culture because they represent not only a resistance to its values but also, as Heidegger suggests in this chapter’s epigraph, a “retreat” from them. However, this retreat does not imply a failure of musicians, writers, and painters; on the contrary, it represents the very success of their work. This is why the German thinker believes that those “creators” who have already carried out this retreat and encountered the emergency of the lack of a sense of emergency “know that this is precisely not renunciation and giving up for lost but, to the  contrary, is the power of clear decidedness as the harbinger of the essential.”1 But who are these creators, and how do they disclose the essential? 25

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The creators are those who have retreated from culture’s indifferent beauty in order to disclose the remains of Being—that is, the absence of emergencies—through art. But art’s emergency, unlike that of aesthetics, does not consist in the representation of objective images through art but rather in concealing the ongoing lack of a sense of emergency. This is why Heidegger believes there is a fundamental difference between “those who rescue us from emergency” and the “rescuers into emergency.”2 The former works of art are a means of “cultural politics,” that is, a way to conceal the emergency of Being; the latter are events that thrust us into this emergency. This distinction between artists and creators does not define who is more original but rather what is more essential: the emergency or its absence. If most artists have lost touch with the absence of emergency it’s not only because they are framed within cultural politics but also because they have become the means of such a culture; that is, they have become professional artists. This is probably why Heidegger emphasized how the “growing ‘affability’ of the ‘profession of art’ . . . coincides with the secure rhythm that originates from within the predominance of technicity and shapes everything that is instable and organizable.”3 While the decision to retreat from cultural politics belongs to the artist, the disclosure of the essential is not something the creator can decide as she pleases. Instead, it occurs through the work of art, which is “a work not because it is worked, made, but because it puts Being to work in a being.”4 The more a work of art is “worked” in this ontological sense rather than crafted, formed, and produced, the greater the possibility for the essential to emerge from those beings that conceal the remains of Being. In sum, just as a work of art can “put being to work in a Being,” concealing the essential in favor of beauty’s indifference, it can also “put Being to work in a being,” disclosing Being’s remnants. This is why in great art, according to Heidegger, the “artist remains something inconsequential in comparison with the work—almost like a passageway which, in the creative process, destroys itself for the sake of the coming forth of the work.”5 In this process the artist loses not only the work, in the sense of its becoming something out of his control, but also any cultural value his artistic profession involved. This is also why those who manage to disclose and rescue us “into” the emergency are also the ones “aware of suffering it,”6 that is, those who will pay the price for

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disclosing the lack of emergency. Nonetheless, all this does not imply that in great art the creator does not exist. As Heidegger explains: Artwork’s lack of relation to beings and to their familiar organization guarantees in itself a belongingness to the creator, which does not “biographically” connect the creator to the work, but casts creator’s Dasein as “sacrifice” unto the ab-ground. But this “sacrifice” too can no longer become an “object” of mourning and revering, because remembrance of such a “sacrifice” would still revert to a spiritualized cultural operation and deteriorate into the dis-humanization of art. What is ownmost to “sacrifice” . . . consists in reticently inabiding in an awaiting that is bequeathed [to us] for the truth of be-ing, the truth which as such has the struggle between countering and strife as its ownmost.7

The strife the creator must sacrifice for is not culturally related but ontologically determined; that is, it is an event of the truth of Being. This truth, contrary to beauty’s indifference, does not seek to conserve and satisfy our technological organization of reality but thrusts us into the emergency of the lack of a sense of emergency. If, as we will see, the art of the essential emergency discloses this absence through social paradoxes, urban discharges, environmental calls, and historical accounts, it’s not simply because they are beyond our social, urban, environmental, and historical frames but also because they are an existential call we must respond to, especially given our tendency to disregard them. This is probably why Heidegger believes a postmetaphysical “work of art is neither a symbolic object, nor the installation that organizes beings, but is the clearing of be-ing as such which holds the decision for man’s other way of being.”8 As we can predict, this “other way of being” is not simply where the essential emergency “is experienced” but also where for artists—the creators and interpreters—the imperative to disclose what the emergency requires that we alter is “raised to a principle.”9 The fact that these alterations can be revealed through different art forms, such as literature or theater, is an indication that the art of the essential emergency has become another “way of being” or, better, has “become the help”10 needed to overcome the absence of emergencies. This is what occurs, for example, when we are thrust into the environmental emergencies of David

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Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest11 or the gender emergencies of Young Jean Lee’s plays.12 In Infinite Jest, Wallace thrusts us into a future where Canada, the United States, and Mexico are unified (in what he calls the “Organization of North American Nations” or “ONAN”) but divided between toxic and nontoxic states. In The Shipment, Untitled Feminist Show, and Straight White Men, Lee deconstructs gender stereotypes but, moreover, challenges them in order to find possibilities for social emancipation. In their works, we leave the realm of culture and enter the remains of Being. We are also asked to alter our way of being, that is, to intervene for the sake of salvation. Independent of the environmental predictions and social conditions these works narrate, they mean to thrust us into an emergency that concerns us as human beings, that is, as responsible interpreters. Instead of shaping “everything that is instable and organizable,” these creators thrust us into the disclosure of an essential emergency. This disclosure encompasses the meanings that Arthur C. Danto saw as the artistic result of globalization: the “globalization of the art world means that art addresses us in our humanity, as men and women who seek in art for meanings that neither of art’s peers—philosophy and religion—in what Hegel spoke of as the realm of Absolute Spirit, are able to provide.”13 To provide these meanings Wallace, Lee, and the other creators we will now meet have retreated not only from the “profession of art” but also from any aesthetic value this profession involved. As Danto explains, truth in art has become more important than beauty. Artists have been intent upon disclosing meaning through works of art that are examples of visual thought. Art criticism today is more concerned with whether these meanings are also true than with the traditional consideration of pleasing the eye. Artists have become what philosophers used to be, guiding us to think about what their works express. With this, art is really about those who experience it. It is about who we are and how we live.14

The art of the essential emergency is really about those experiences we are compelled to ignore or are unwilling to face. Even though creators still present their works in galleries and museums and even produce commissioned works like the traditional “professional artist,” their disclosures provide meanings that have to overcome not only philosophy 28

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and religion but also the art world. This is not an easy task. After all, we are living in an epoch where, as Mark C. Taylor suggests in his seminal 2011 essay “Financialization of Art,” art often “loses its critical function and ends up reinforcing the very structures and systems it ought to be questioning.”15 Why should we think that in this epoch the art of the essential emergency is even available? Aren’t these creators always overlooked by the art financial market? Whether these works of art are available or overlooked depends not only on the art world (curators, critics, or biennales) but also on those of us prepared “for man’s other way of being,” where an existential project of transformation prevails over everything else. “From this point of view,” as Taylor specifies, “art is a transformative practice that is insistently critical.”16 To overcome the “art world,” “the financialization of art,” and “beauty’s indifference,” works of art must rescue us into the emergencies that concern us as human beings. This is why, instead “of offering reassurance, art should be insistently unsettling and disturbing. The art that really matters engenders rather than removes anxiety.”17 Whether such art enters into or lingers at the borders of the art world should be secondary. Much more significant is whether it strives to save us. The twelve works of art that I present are all visual works, but it’s not because visual works do better at disclosing the essential emergency than other forms of art (dance, music, or cinema). They are simply easier to reproduce in a book.

SOCIAL PARADOXES “The ultimate paradox,” according to Slavoj Žižek, “is that today’s excessive catastrophism (the mantra that ‘the end of the world is near’) is itself a defense mechanism, a way of obfuscating the real dangers, of not taking them seriously.”18 It is in this context that we must understand the artwork of kennardphillipps, Jota Castro, and Filippo Minelli. They are attempts to thrust us into the political, financial, and technological paradoxes that frame our social lives. Their aim is not simply to disclose particular paradoxes that we have been trained to ignore but to present them as an ontological alteration, that is, an essential emergency. To render this emergency manifest, in their images and installations they 29

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juxtapose politicians (Tony Blair), finance (dollar bills), and social networks (Twitter) in contexts where the remains of Being emerge. “kennardphillipps,” an artistic duo composed of the British artists Peter Kennard and Cat Phillips, has been creating art since 2002 that responds to the invasion of Iraq and critiques the ongoing impositions of capitalism and neoliberalism. The work often consists of digital collages and is not primarily created for galleries and museums but for the streets, the Web, and newspapers. They have also created posters for the Occupy Wall Street Movement and Greenpeace, whose activists have been imprisoned by Russian authorities for peaceful protest against oil drilling in the Arctic. These works are often used in public workshops, in collaboration with the International Solidarity Movement, which helps people develop skills to express visually their thoughts about the political, economic, and social issues that affect them. For example, during the 2015 Edinburgh Art Festival they organized a series of public workshops for “a whole spectrum of different community and support groups.” These workshops are meant to “encourage people to use all the equipment we’ve got, to make their own ideas and visualize them through using imagery and bits of text and smash through the order of newspapers and magazines by putting themselves in it.”19 As we can predict, kennardphillipps do not see their “work as separate to social and political movements that are confronting established political and economic systems. We see it as part of those movements, the visual arm of protest. We want to be used by people as a part of their own activism, not just as pictures on the wall to contemplate.”20 In sum, their art facilitates, as Adam Benmakhlouf points out, “a public-facing expression of the most important concerns of those who are the least enfranchised by current media, and social and political configurations.”21 Jota Castro is a French Peruvian curator and artist who retired from his work as a diplomat with the European Union and United Nations to devote himself to art. He is particularly interested in global ecological, democratic, and financial issues such as the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest, the United Nations’ inability to solve African conflicts, and financial crises. In an interview in 2003 he defined his work as a form of observing my era in order to subsequently create an interpretation from that observation. My work is anchored in daily life and the 30

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simplification of so-called serious subjects. . . . For me an artist is someone who lives in reality, who has chosen a certain form of communication. I am not socially autistic. Intellectually, I feel I am duty-bound to bring some form of rapid reaction to events or situations that provoke a societal dysfunction and which, as I see it, deserve an interpretation on my part.22

In January 2005 Castro, with Evelyne Jouanno, presented a public call to artists around the world to contribute to an “Emergency Biennale” to draw attention to the suffering in Chechnya. Sixty-two artists responded, submitting two copies of their works, which were shown both at the Palais du Tokyo contemporary art gallery in Paris and the National Library of Grozny along with a series of films and talks about Chechen life during the war. As Dan Hancox reported, the “Chechen Biennale has now been established,” and it will move on to four other cities in the care of its Chechen supporters, who cannot be named for safety reasons. This “arts sans frontières” approach makes the Emergency Biennale more than just another art festival—responding with speed and dedication, the Biennale is, like Médecins sans Frontières, working “on an emergency footing.”23

Minelli is an Italian graffiti and land artist interested in social media, geopolitics, and language. His ongoing series Contradictions (2007–) consists of writing the names of social networks and corporations on the walls of slums in developing countries such as Mali or Vietnam and in slums in the United States and Italy. Minelli stated that the aim of this series is to stress “the gap between the reality we live in and the ephemeral world of social media by writing the names of social networks and tech companies in economically or socially unstable locations, underlining the idealization implied in the act of sharing and pointing out the difference between what we decide to show about us and how reality actually is.”24 In recent years he has developed this project by creating small paint bombs. These explosions, which take place outdoors (in forests, deserts, and parking spaces) as well as indoors (in churches, museums, and warehouses) are meant to underline the current culture of fear and emergency. Minelli, as Lene Ter Haar suggests, “builds up tension between laissez-faire and control, between an uninhibited, enraptured 31

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2.1 kennardphillipps, Photo Op, 2005. From War on War Room, EAST International ’05, curated by Gustav Metzger, at Norwich School of Art and Design. Also available in Art & Agenda: Political Art and Activism, ed. R. Klanten et al. (Berlin: Gestalten, 2011), 232.

letting go and a conscious artistic application.” This is why, against the “hit-and-run mentality of interventionist practices,” he follows “an attitude of long-term artistic research, exploring not only a certain visual technique or form, but also the underlying ideas and concepts.”25 Minelli, kennardphillipps, and Castro thrust us into social paradoxes where the emergency of the absence of emergency emerges. kennardphillipps’s Photo Op (figure 2.1) is a photo montage that catches the former British prime minister Tony Blair smiling as he takes a selfie against the background of a burning oil field.26 The selfie was

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originally taken with a group of naval cadets during the 2005 general election campaign; the photograph was taken during the 2003 Iraqi invasion. The creators have replaced the cadets with an explosion in order to disclose the invasion’s remnants. These remnants both emerge from the juxtaposition and are altered ontologically. Blair and his allies proclaimed their right to invade Iraq based on Saddam Hussein’s alleged development of weapons of mass destruction. But most citizens of Great Britain (and many other nations) were opposed to the invasion because of the lack of evidence for the threat as well as a widespread and general opposition to military interventions. And it is precisely for these opponents that the work was created: it was used as a poster by protesters during the innumerable rallies against the invasion that took place in 2003. Photo Op thrusts us into the political paradox that frames our social life: liberalism’s impositions. Although liberalism, at least according to the Lockean tradition, is a line of political thinking that privileges individual liberties and rights against governmental powers, it is also meant to preserve these same rights “from any invasion from above.”27 But as the political scientist Georg Sorensen points out in A Liberal World Order in Crisis, contemporary liberalism, in contrast to the Cold War, when it only concerned the “autonomy and the space to act unobstructed by others,” since 9/11 has transformed into a “liberalism of impositions” that “requires active intervention by the state to secure the appropriate conditions for real freedom.”28 The problem is not only that liberalism, whether of restraint or imposition, has been incapable of assuring a peaceful world order but rather why and how it justifies its interventions. Liberalism is not simply a political theory among others but a comprehensive worldview that integrates politics, economics, and even science to promote and impose its universal values. Liberalism imposes democracy and capitalism not because of their superiority but rather because of liberalism’s own capacity to unfold indefinitely. The problem, as Samuel P. Huntington explains, is that if non-Western societies are once again to be shaped by Western culture, it will happen only as a result of the expansion, development, and impact of Western power. Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universalism. . . . Western universalism is dangerous to the

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world because it could lead to a major intercivilizational war between core states and it is dangerous to the West because it could lead to the defeat of the West.29

In sum, the problem is that these values are often imperialist in their conception, born from an arbitrary power from above with no respect for local liberties, values, and culture. While Carl Schmitt viewed “liberalism as a coherent, all-embracing, metaphysical system,”30 Heidegger saw it as another product of a subjectivist metaphysics that conceives of the human condition in measurable terms in order to exert absolute command of the world. This is why liberal electoral results represent humanity’s unconditional self-legislation, in other words, the focus on “the I” from which liberalism stems.31 But this vision of a pure “I,” according to Heidegger, is impossible to achieve, because in principle there is no experience that could ever set humans beyond themselves into an untrodden domain from which the human being as hitherto understood could become questionable. This (namely, such self-certainty) is the innermost essence of “liberalism,” which precisely for that reason can apparently unfold freely and can prescribe itself for the sake of achieving eternal progress. . . . Thus it now needed only a few years until it became clear to “science” that its “liberal” character and its “ideal of objectivity” are not only perfectly compatible with a political-ethnic “alignment” but are actually indispensable to that.32

As we can see, in order to achieve self-certainty and eternal progress, liberalism must also align itself with science’s ideal of objectivity. The problem with this ideal of objectivity is that it is basically a tautology, since the “pure relation of the I-think-unity . . . becomes the unconditioned relation, which means that the self-present present becomes the paradigm of all beingness.”33 In this way, liberalism, like other ideologies based on self-presence, misses the fact that the vision of a pure “I” is impossible and also that that presence depends on historical and contingent disclosures that are uncontrollable. When these disclosures are ignored, liberalism’s “self-certainty,” as Heidegger explains, becomes dogmatic “in the sense that it demands all persons be allowed their own

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opinion.”34 Heidegger is correct to consider this demand dogmatic because not everyone is capable of or willing to express an “opinion,” particularly if it’s a political one. This is why Robert Fisk emphasizes that even though both the Iraqis and Afghanis wanted to vote for freedom, voting for freedom “is not necessarily the same as democracy,” since “ethnically divided societies vote on ethnic lines.”35 But how can liberalism be imposed? When Francis Fukuyama, in 1992, declared the end of history and the victory of liberal democracies, the problem for liberalism was not how it would resist internal opposition but, given its imperialistic nature, how it was going to impose itself on nonliberal nations. Although the American thinker responded to this question by celebrating liberal democracy’s natural and economic superiority (meaning the balance of equality and liberty and free-market capitalism, respectively), the liberal nature of science would actually prove the real difference maker. After all, the end of history that Fukuyama proclaimed was a result not only of the end of ideologies, where liberal democracy became the “the most rational form of government, that is, the state that realizes most fully either rational desire or rational recognition,”36 but also of the domination of science over politics. This domination is assured through the scientific ideal of objectivity and also by war, which Fukuyama considers “a great force for the rationalization of societies, and for the creation of uniform social structures across cultures.”37 In sum, to impose liberalism, war is not simply necessary but also an inevitable consequence of science’s alignment with objectivity. When this alignment is absent or perverted, as with the claims over Iraq’s WMD, liberalism’s unconditional self-legislation must be justified through democracy. This is why, as Noam Chomsky reminds us, besides the (objective) threat of WMD, Bush and Blair could count on liberalism’s comprehensive worldview. That was the “single question” that justified invading Iraq, the president declared in a March 2003 press conference, a position stressed repeatedly by Blair, Bush, and their associates. Eliminating the threat of Iraq’s WMD was also the sole basis on which Bush received congressional authorization to resort to force. The answer to the “single question” was given shortly after the invasion, as Washington reluctantly conceded. Scarcely missing a beat, the doctrinal system concocted new pretexts

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and justifications, which quickly became virtual dogma: the war was inspired by President Bush’s noble visions of democracy, shared by his British colleague.38

This event demonstrated how the objective existence of WMD and liberalism’s self-certainty were used indistinguishably to justify the invasion of Iraq in order to create another liberal state where democratic and neoliberal measures would improve the well-being of the population at large. As David Harvey explains, these measures included the “full privatization of public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, full repatriation of foreign profits . . . the opening of Iraq’s banks to foreign control, national treatment for foreign companies and . . . the elimination of nearly all trade barriers.” The orders were to apply to all areas of the economy, including public services, the media, manufacturing, services, transportation, finance, and construction.39

Blair and his allies were convinced of the rightness of their mission given the emergency for liberal states implied by the absence of democracy and neoliberalism in Iraq, an emergency that must be confronted because it represents an obstruction to the liberal ideal of “eternal progress.” It should not come as a surprise that the most advanced technological societies are also the most liberal, those that can impose their ideal of objectivity and self-certainty regardless of national public opinion. The emergency that kennardphillipps disclose is related to the hypocrisy of Blair, the absurdity of the invasion, and also the political paradox of invasion by liberal states. The new context of the images allow us to acknowledge what those images concealed and marginalized in the first place, that is, the truth behind the actions of the liberal politicians. This truth, in the form of an alteration of the original photographs, discloses how the lack of emergency that the invasion was meant to achieve was in fact the actual emergency, as we can see from Blair’s smile. He seems not simply pleased with the explosion behind him but also satisfied, that is, confident of his actions. This confidence belongs to liberalism’s selfcertainty, which exerts control regardless of external contingencies. As we can see, kennardphillipps, instead of rescuing us from an emergency, have thrust us into the essential emergency, disclosing the political 36

2.2 Jota Castro, Mortgage, 2009, one-dollar bills, rope, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Renato Ghiazza. Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin. Also available in Art & Agenda: Political Art and Activism, ed. R. Klanten et al. (Berlin: Gestalten, 2011), 16.

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paradox of our age, where despite the opposition of the citizens, the invasion took place anyway for the sake of liberalism. In Mortgage (figure 2.2), Castro thrusts us into the financial paradox produced by the collapse of mortgage-backed loans in the United States in 2008. This work consists of several hangman’s nooses made of dollar bills. Other elements in the work are almost invisible: the ceiling, the house, and the homeowner. We can assume these suicide ropes are attached to the ceilings of the houses whose owners could not pay their loans because of the irresponsible behavior of government regulators. Castro’s work discloses the remnants of the home after the housing bubble has burst and also the remnants of the homeowners who were either evicted or committed suicide. Home and owner have been replaced by those same dollar bills with which the house was both purchased and lost. Under conditions in which crises are essential for the reproduction and conservation of capitalism,40 it should not come as a surprise that regulators were asked to preserve the financial system at any cost; the paradox does not lie in the policies adopted but in those rejected. According to the economist Thomas Piketty, the only reason this crisis did not trigger a crash as serious as the Great Depression is that governments and central banks did not allow the financial system to collapse. They saved the banks; that is, the necessary liquidity was created at taxpayers’ cost. However, as the French economist explains in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, this will not be the last crisis of “globalized patrimonial capitalism” because the policies adopted cannot “provide a durable response to the structural problems that made the crisis possible, including the crying lack of financial transparency and the rise of inequality.”41 Predictably, among the consequences of the increase in inequality in the United States, which also contributed to the nation’s financial instability, was the virtual stagnation of the purchasing power of the lower and middle classes. This made it more likely that “modest households would take on debt, especially since unscrupulous banks and financial intermediaries, freed from regulation and eager to earn good yields on the enormous savings injected into the system by the well-to-do, offered credit on increasingly generous terms.”42 Even though central banks are the only public institution capable of “averting a total collapse of the economy and society in an emergency,”43 the financial markets were safeguarded rather than reformed, as public opinion demanded. 38

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The 2008 housing crisis was generated, as many believe, not only by America’s “shadow banks,”44 the 2001 Internet bubble,45 and the cost of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq,46 but most of all by capitalist imperatives of “competition, profit-maximization and accumulation . . . which inevitably require putting ‘exchange-value’ before ‘use-value’ and profit before people.”47 These imperatives, guided by the logic of liberal individualism, have allowed banks to grow to be “too big to fail” and permitted mortgage companies to engage in predatory loans that maximized fees and imposed enormous risks on borrowers. “Virtually anyone,” as Jeffrey D. Sachs recalls, “could borrow to buy a house with little or even no down payment, and with interest charges pushed years into the future.” As the Fed ignored these risky and irresponsible measures, the “homelending boom took hold” and “became self-reinforcing”: Greater home buying pushed up housing prices, which made banks feel that it was safe to lend money to non-creditworthy borrowers. After all, if they defaulted on their loans, the banks would repossess the house at a higher value. Or so the theory went. Of course, it works only as long as housing prices rise. Once they peak and begin to decline, lending conditions tighten, and banks find themselves repossessing houses whose value does not cover the value of the debt. What was stunning was how the Fed, under Alan Greenspan’s leadership, stood by as the credit boom gathered steam, barreling toward a subsequent crash.48

Greenspan and other government financial regulators were blinded by a “vision of a perfect, frictionless market system” where “everyone is rational and markets work perfectly.” But the problem with this vision, as Paul Krugman explained, is that it has “blinded many if not most economists to the emergence of the biggest financial bubble in history.”49 Paradoxically, the regulators of the financial market, instead of managing risk as they were meant to, “created it.”50 This neoliberal deregulatory process is responsible for more than four million Americans losing their homes since the housing bubble began in 2008; an additional 3.5 million homeowners are still undergoing the foreclosure process. With “13.5 million homeowners underwater—they owe more than their home is now worth—the odds are high that many millions more will lose their homes.”51

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Unfortunately, this deregulatory process52 did not end with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. On the contrary, Obama continued these policies by renominating Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve and appointing Timothy Geithner as the secretary of the treasury. The latter directed the allocation of $700 billion in Wall Street bailout funds, also known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program. This program began with JP Morgan’s buying Bear Stearns in a deal involving huge subsidies from the Fed. Together with the FDIC and the Treasury, the Fed also took extraordinary measures to save mortgage companies (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), private insurance companies (AIG), and many other banks (Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Bank of America, among others). Without this massive government support, most of these financial institutions would today be operating under the supervision of a bankruptcy judge. The problem with these funds, among other measures and policies adopted, is that they were not socially productive; in other words, they were not meant to sustain a fiscal stimulus, reduce the burden of mortgage debt on families, or, most of all, reform the financial system that caused the crisis in the first place. So why were these banks saved? According to Geithner, the failure to raise money to save Wall Street would have led to a second Great Depression, something President Obama wanted to avoid at all costs. Also, as the former U.S. secretary of the treasury recalls in his account of the crisis,53 it was vital to restore as quickly as possible confidence in the financial system, given the panic among investors. Even though consumer confidence is not sufficient to deal with the broader consequences of the crisis, Geithner went on to save the banks because he thought it was the only way to protect the future of the U.S. economic system and its taxpayers. In Geithner’s account, we not only avoided a Depression but also “earn[ed], all in, a couple of hundred billion dollars” because the too-big-to-fail banks, the insurance giant AIG, and the mortgage-lending companies that had to borrow $187.5 billion have repaid the money they received from the government and also turned profitable.54 However, as Paul Krugman explains, while the United States did avoid the abyss of another Great Depression, it “did not, however, avoid economic disaster.” By any plausible accounting, we’ve lost trillions of dollars’ worth of goods and services that we could and should have produced; millions 40

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of Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, and their dreams. Call it the Lesser Depression—not as bad as the 1930s, but still a terrible thing. Not to mention the disastrous consequences abroad. Or to use one of the medical metaphors Geithner likes, we can think of the economy as a patient who was rushed to the emergency room with a lifethreatening condition. Thanks to the urgent efforts of the doctors present, the patient’s life was saved. But while the doctors kept him alive, they failed to cure his underlying illness, so he emerged from the procedure partly crippled, and never fully recovered.55

The policies adopted after the mortgage crisis did not simply preserve the financial system in its illness but actually caused this condition to deteriorate: a bank that becomes “too big to fail” will inevitably affect other institutions, intensifying the interdependency of the global financial system regardless of its inevitable losses. This is why Joseph Stiglitz believes that the policies of Geithner, Bernanke, and Paulson “led to a consolidation of the big banks increasing the risk of surviving banks becoming ‘too big to fail.’ ”56 In sum, the decision to spend billions of dollars to preserve the financial system demonstrates that we have become even more dependent on and framed by the banks than we were before the collapse of the mortgage-backed loans. Castro’s Mortgage thrusts us into this frame, but it’s doing more than simply disclosing the essential emergency of our financial system and its consequences. The dollar bills; the title, Mortgage (the term comes from Old French, “dead pledge,” which refers to the fact that the guarantee ends when the obligation is fulfilled or the property is taken through foreclosure), and the nooses are all consequences of the capitalist imperatives of competition, profit maximization, and accumulation, where Being is ignored in favor of liberal individualism. When this occurs, the paradox of the financial regulators emerges: instead of managing risk, they create it. But this risk, as Castro’s installation reveals, is not simply a possibility; it is a lived condition under which many homeowners still suffer. The nooses made of dollar bills show the risk of death and despair that, hidden behind policy and neoliberal rhetoric, is always present in financial transactions for those not considered too big to fail and thus protected. Like the work of kennardphillipps and Castro, Minelli’s Contradictions (figure 2.3) also juxtaposes apparently unrelated beings in order to 41

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2.3 Filippo Minelli, Contradictions, 2010, Brescia, Italy. Also available in Art & Agenda: Political Art and Activism, ed. R. Klanten et al. (Berlin: Gestalten, 2011), 13–14.

disclose a social paradox that frames our lives. But rather than the political and financial emergency of Photo Op and Mortgage, Minelli thrusts us into the technological paradox of our age: the apparent neutrality claimed by social media and microblogging services such as Facebook or Twitter. Minelli places the word “Twitter” on the wall of a factory farm full of identical-looking turkeys. These turkeys are identical not simply because their reproduction and growth are technologically managed but also because they are framed by an environment that pretends to be neutral, that pretends to be a simple growth medium, but that actually relies upon the active elimination of individual difference in service to industrial process. Minelli’s installation is meant to relate these turkeys to social-media users who are automatically framed within a global infrastructure in which alterations are almost impossible. Contradictions reveals social media’s apparent transparency and neutrality, that is, its absence of emergency.

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To understand the sociopolitical meaning of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, it’s important to remember that the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 at the beginning of the millennium was not as “social” or “democratic” at it seems.57 Even though Web 1.0 was primarily about connecting computers while Web 2.0 was meant to connect people, the information and relationships these webs provided are framed within the same interactive space.58 This is why Tim BernersLee, the founding developer of the World Wide Web, believes Web 2.0 is simply “a piece of jargon”: “The idea of the Web as interaction between people is really what the Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space where people can interact.”59 Just as the Internet was a clean platform on which software engineers and users could develop applications for the Web, the Web will itself become another platform “on which people keep developing other things.”60 Even though social media are not the simple result of online services becoming interactive, that is, two-way vehicles for network sociality, they are perceived as being the Internet or the Web itself. With the diffusion of social-media services such as Facebook and many others, the Internet has become easier to use but much more difficult to recognize, that is, to distinguish from the platforms that sustain these media. Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein have defined social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content.” Its origins can be traced back to 1979, when T. Truscott and Jim Ellis created the Usenet, a worldwide discussion system that allowed Internet users to post public messages. Yet, the era of Social Media as we understand it today probably started about 20 years later, when Bruce and Susan Abelson founded “Open Diary,” an early social networking site that brought together online diary writers into one community. The term “weblog” was first used at the same time, and truncated as “blog” a year later when one blogger jokingly transformed the noun “weblog” into the sentence “we blog.” The growing availability of high-speed Internet access further added to the popularity of the concept, leading to the creation of social networking sites such as MySpace (in 2003) and Facebook (in

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2004). This, in turn, coined the term “Social Media,” and contributed to the prominence it has today.61

The connection of hypertext technology to the Internet provided the basis for a new type of networked communication where weblogs, e-mail services, and list servers permitted online communities and supported offline groups. In this way, websites have been transformed from allpurpose devices into linear applied services (or platforms) for everyday activities. However, as Jose van Dijck explains in her history of social media, The Culture of Connectivity, “this layer of applied platforms is anything but a neutral utility exploiting a generic resource (data)”; on the contrary, they are “programmed with a specific objective.”62 Even though social-media companies present themselves as utilities transmitting communication and information data, they are actually providing a customized service meant to affect what users do and think.63 The platforms are constantly coding relationships among people, ideas, and things into algorithms that track our preferences and interests. These are particularly valuable to platform owners not simply to create networks of friends and followers but also to exploit the users commercially. Social-media companies, as the computer scientist Lev Manovich explains, have a direct interest in having users pour as much of their lives into these platforms as possible: the greater the amount of users, the more money they can make “by serving ads, by selling data about usage to other companies, by selling add-on services, and so on.”64 As we can predict, when platform owners call for more transparency and openness for online traffic, it’s not for the love of “human connectedness” but rather because they “are entrenched in a neoliberal political agenda often advocating a downsizing of the public sector.”65 But how can companies assure these advertisers the highest number of users when each integrates similar architectural designs and provides analogous services? To compete against similar services companies must transform their brand name into a symbol for specific mediated activities. This transformation was first achieved by Google, Skype, and Twitter. Each company has managed to become the synonym for online searching (“googling”), calling (“skyping”), and messages (“tweeting”), nesting themselves “in the heart of a larger online economy of inscription, where

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search engines form the valves of content distribution.”66 Google, Skype, and Twitter have not only effectively become exclusive platforms for each activity, but by maintaining their near-monopolies they also marginalize similar services as well as the whole environment that nourishes community-based platforms. The greatest problem of this “online economy of inscription” or “socially coded technology” is that it “renders people’s activities formal, manageable, and manipulable, enabling platforms to engineer the sociality in people’s everyday routines.”67 This is particularly evident in the case of Twitter, where “automated connectivity” has not simply become necessary for its platform to function correctly but also prevailed over “human connectedness.” In this way the neutrality Twitter claims to offer is founded upon a technological paradox.68 The goal of Twitter, as the company’s founding CEO Jack Dorsey explained at a “Future Media” panel at the 2009 Internet Week in New York, is to “stop talking about it, when we stop doing these panels and people just use it as a utility, use it like electricity. It fades into the background, something that’s just a part of communication. We put it on the same level as any communication device.”69 Considered a neutral infrastructure that transports streams of tweets regardless of who its users are and indifferent to the contents they exchange, since its emergence in 2006 it has become the world’s leading microblogging service, with approximately one billion registered users and 284 million monthly active users. Twitter rapidly managed to occupy a social-networking space unclaimed by competitors such as Facebook by positioning itself as an autonomous brand unconnected to one single country and also by choosing a character limit (140) compatible with mobile-phone SMS services. The company’s mission, as stated on its website, is “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”70 Even though these barriers have managed to fade into the background, the way water pipes are taken for granted, Twitter is not a neutral platform. That is, not all its users and tweets are equally influential. Despite Twitter’s image as the online “town hall” for networked communication—a mere amplifier of individual voices as well as collective opinions—the platform manifested itself increasingly as a

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potent instrument for routing ideas and manipulating opinions. On a self-proclaimed neutral “utility-like” platform such as Twitter, one would expect all users to be equal. But some users are more equal than others. . . . The ideal of an open and free twitterverse in reality comes closer to a public dialogue ruled by a small number of hyperconnected influencers skilled at handling large numbers of followers. The platform’s architecture privileges certain influential users who can increase tweet volume, and who thus garner more followers.71

In order for certain users to exert this extraordinary influence, Twitter uses specific algorithms that apply filtering mechanisms to weigh and select profitable contributions and content. As van Dijck explains, the “paradox of enabling connectedness while engineering connectivity, of propagating neutrality while securing profitability is played out in every aspect of the platform.”72 But profitability is not the only feature Twitter secures. Both political scientists and information scientists have raised doubts over social media’s liberatory potential. For example, it is unclear whether Twitter’s role in the Iranian uprising,73 the Arab Spring,74 and the Occupy Wall Street or Central movement75 improved the protesters’ prospects of emancipation or weakened them by allowing for the possibility of tracking its users. According to transparency reports from July to December 2014, government requests for specific users’ information rose 40 percent in the previous six months to about 2,871. D. Rushe reports: “The requests came from more than 50 countries. Twitter said it was getting more requests from countries around the world but three countries stood out: Russia, Turkey and the US.”76 This is why, as Evgeny Morozov suggests, the “advent of blogging and social networking has also made it easier for the state to plant and promote its own messages, spinning and neutralizing online discussions before they translate into offline action.” 77 A similar point has been made by Alexander R. Galloway, who believes “the protocols [defined as ‘a distributed management system that allows control to exist within a heterogeneous material milieu’] that underlie the Internet are not politically neutral. They regulate physical media, sculpt cultural formations, and exercise political control.”78 In sum, users of Twitter and other social networks, independently of their social or political activism, will always become framed within global infrastructures where alterations are almost

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impossible. This is why, as Berners-Lee recently pointed out, as socialnetworking sites become bigger they turn into not only “closed silo[s] of content” but also “a monopoly, which tends to limit innovation.”79 As we can see, using Twitter places us in a condition much like the one Contradictions discloses: framed beings allowed to communicate within previously established parameters. These parameters are meant to monopolize our interests, concerns, and creations. Even though Twitter, like liberalism, freely unfolds itself, it also prescribes itself indiscriminately, erasing differences among individuals until users become as identical as the turkeys in Minelli’s work. Perhaps this action is revealed in the piece’s composition. Twitter’s label is above the turkeys, in a position not only of superiority but also of control, a height from which all differences are erased. The “contradiction” of Twitter is not that everyone who uses it is identical but rather that they will become alike once they begin to tweet under the controlling label. The Italian artist’s work thrusts us into a space without innovation or freedom, a lack of emergency that social-media and microblogging services generate even though the controlling companies present themselves as neutral platforms for promoting human connectedness. Photo Op, Mortgage, and Contradictions indicate the political, financial, and technological paradoxes that frame our social lives in order to disclose essential emergencies or, as Žižek would say, the “real dangers.” These emergencies are not supposedly crucial moments trumpeted by the neoliberal governments and companies—the existence of WMD in Iraq, the possibility of a second Great Depression, or the liberating neutrality of Twitter. Rather, they occur in the silences: in Blair’s impositions, the 2008 financial bailouts, and Twitter’s engineered connectivity. Although these hidden emergencies emerge through the juxtaposition of images in these works, it is their ontological appeal that discloses the remains of Being. As remnants, these social paradoxes retreat from cultural politics, that is, from the indifferent beauty that characterizes the art of our technological organization of reality. This is why beauty in the work of kennardphillipps, Castro, and Minelli would not satisfy our aesthetic sensibilities. Instead of obfuscating emergencies or hiding behind acceptable beauty, these works thrust us into essential emergencies so that we might start “taking them seriously.”

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URBAN DISCHARGES “Capitalism,” as David Harvey recently said, “needs urbanization to absorb the surplus products it perpetually produces. In this way an inner connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization.”80 The installations and sculptures of Hema Upadhyay, Wang Zhiyuan, and Peter McFarlane are attempts to thrust us into the surplus products of this connection, that is, urban discharges. Their works disclose the different sorts of discharge produced and how we are framed within them. Like the social paradoxes explored earlier, these discharges are also remnants of Being, in other words, alterations and events hidden by relegation to the urban margins. But they are also composed of physical materials discarded by the same urban realm for which they were originally produced. To disclose these remnants and allow them to emerge from the silence of emergency’s absence, the creators have altered their original setting to compel a new way of seeing. As we will see, urban life is an essential component in the work of all these creators even though they come from different continents. Hema Upadhyay was an Indian artist based in Mumbai. After moving from her hometown, Baroda, she began to explore the political, religious, and gender challenges that confront urban migrants. Upadhyay’s first solo exhibition, Sweet-Sweat Memories, held at Gallery Chemould in 2001, presented her experience in Mumbai from multiple perspectives by pasting miniaturized, cut-out photographs of herself onto large mixed-media paintings. In 2002 she began to create her most successful series: three-dimensional miniature installations of Dharavi in Mumbai, Asia’s largest slum. Composed of material from these slums, her installations present aerial views of the overpopulated area in order to emphasize its socioeconomic inequalities. Even though these socioeconomic inequalities are at the center of her work, she said she was more interested in the aesthetics they created in the slum. When I looked at the architecture, the set up of the area, the form and colors they created, I am seeing surrealism, conceptual art and arte povera. But it’s their home. When I pass the area everyday on my way to work, I took the part of a voyeur to spy into their life. I am dealing with the dichotomy of social hierarchy and the whole idea [of] voyeurism where I take the protagonists as the 48

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performers. They become the objects for me. So as an artist, how do I relate to these images without an exhibition space? They are not arrangements; they are part of their daily basic life. How could I bring them out in the work? How’s the whole hierarchy between high art and low art? I think that’s the main concern for me.81

In recent years Upadhyay created a number of installations that also directly concern Dharavi. For example, Twin Souls (2010) consists of sixty ready-made toy birds flying in circles and attached to the ceiling of the gallery. These birds evoke both an aerial view of the slum as well as its own sky. The urban nature of Upadhyay’s art is evident throughout her work, so much so that Conor Macklin characterized her art as “re-creations of the tin shacks that cover her adopted town of Mumbai.”82 Wang Zhiyuan is a Chinese artist born in Tianjin. After living in Australia, he recently returned to China and currently resides in Beijing. As he recalls, my “ten years living in Australia had a decisive impact on my art. Australia trained me to develop the relationship between the brain and the artwork . . . between myself, my art and my living environment.”83 Most of Zhiyuan’s works are made of discarded materials, such as plastic, paper, and electronics. Although the aesthetic element of his works is particularly evident, they also embody a strong political and ethical message. Zhiyuan states on his website that his art has “to be about something bigger than me. If it wasn’t involved in society I would feel guilty.”84 One of his most recent works, Close to the Warm (2013), discloses the decay of language into verbal sludge. This installation consists of thousands of stickers printed with words and slogans; the stickers gather like flies around a single hanging light bulb. According to Zhiyuan, these words have been politicized so relentlessly and for so long in China that their meanings have been corrupted. The visitors who have the patience to read them will discover that the words closer to the light bulb are more positive (“harmony,” “upright,” “dedication,” etc.) while those far from the light are darker (“darkness,” “worry,” “disillusionment,” etc.). Zhiyuan’s goal is to emphasize the cultural, ethical, and political inclinations of those who still see light as a source of “glory,” “greatness,” and “warmth,” the traditional attributes of the Communist Party. Zhiyuan is also involved in the White Rabbit Collection (founded by Kerr and Judith Neilson in Sydney), which is one of the world’s largest and most significant collections of contemporary Chinese art. 49

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Zhiyuan introduced the founders to the astonishing explosion of creativity taking place in China in the wake of the “Opening Up” that began in 1989. His goal is to find “artists who bring something of China into their work every time”—“and not just yum cha or lion dances”— even as they cannot avoid “outside influences that are crashing in all the time.”85 Peter McFarlane is a Canadian conceptual environmental artist who transforms discarded electronic and industrial objects (circuit boards, typewriter keys, guitar strings, lawnmower blades, and so on) into sculptures. He selects particular objects from factory dumpsters or garbage-transfer stations and strips, solders, and paints them both to preserve their identity and alter their environment. Although he has been interested in discarded material ever since he worked on an assembly line and as a computer-sales consultant, it was after having been arrested for photographing children scavenging for usable objects in a dump on the borders of Nha Trang, Vietnam, that he realized the environmental meaning discarded objects have. While the police insisted his photographs exposed an embarrassing aspect of Vietnam, McFarlane thought the opposite was true: what he saw as embarrassing was the Western inability to rework and reuse waste imaginatively. This capacity must be restored in order to protect the environment. This is why McFarlane believes “waste is just lack of imagination”: This belief carries beyond the boundaries of my art production and permeates most aspects of my life. Most of my home and studio, and much of everything in them, is recycled. I’ve always had an epic imagination along with a driving desire to make things. Thus, used objects have pared my options down to a workable, manageable level. No object is beyond artistic merit, meaning and metaphor. So why throw it out? The materials of my work are connected intrinsically to my ideas, be they tailored beyond recognition or left as found. Each piece I make resurrects an object as an idea specific to the material and the meaning inherent in its use. The history of the object—from the manufacture to the dumpster—embellishes its contexts and the possibilities I have to manipulate them. I have often made a connection with the objects that I’ve used in my everyday life or work experience: that which I know. . . . Still, the theme remains: something new is once again recycled from the old meanings that consciousness has left behind but not forgotten.86 50

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2.4 Hema Upadhyay, Dream a Wish, Wish a Dream, 2006. Collection Claude Berri, Paris, France.

McFarlane’s most recent works consist of figures of ancient creatures submerged in green circuit boards (as fossils would be) and of metal masks made of old machetes and rototiller blades. His sculptures, as Mary Reid writes, are “documents [of] the destruction of the natural world. Laden with meaning, almost bordering on guilt, his landscape vistas evoke a sense of powerlessness—that society is spinning out of control and the ability to turn back or even turn [back] the clock is lost.”87 Societies that are losing control are also at the center of Upadhyay’s installation Dream a Wish, Wish a Dream (figure 2.4), which thrusts the viewer into an overcrowded and polluted slum. Like an engineer’s urban model, the work is a three-dimensional large-scale installation of Dharavi, one of the largest slums of Mumbai, and it is created with the same materials that the dwellers there use to construct their homes. These materials consist of car scraps, hardware fabric, resin, m-seal, enamel paint, and aluminum and plastic sheets that the creator found in the waste of Mumbai. The different colors, forms, and spaces of her 51

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work disclose the slum’s decay as well as its social hierarchies and precarious infrastructure, which are revealed through the installation’s scale and placement on the gallery’s floor. The sense of congestion and entrapment that Dream a Wish, Wish a Dream creates compels us to relate to the dwellers’ precarious existence and also our own, considering the rate at which slums like Dharavi are emerging around urban areas throughout the world. In 2015 more than half of the world’s population (54 percent) lived in cities. These cities are divided between formal and informal workers and also between urban and slum settlements, that is, recognized and ignored areas. The poorest no longer live in inner cities but rather at their margins. Even though, as Mike Davis explains in Planet of Slums, the urban poor represent the largest share of urban population growth, they “have been absorbed by slum communities on the periphery of Third World cities.”88 According to the latest UN habitat estimates, today 863 million people live in the slums of the world’s developing regions, compared to 760 million in 2000 and 650 million in 1990.89 If this trend continues, according to United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs,90 by 2050 the world’s urban population will amount to 9.3 billion, of which 6.3 billion will be living in cities proper and three billion people in slums, at the margins. While the highest proportion of a nation’s urban population living in slums belongs to the Central African Republic (96 percent), the greatest numbers of slum dwellers are in China (180 million) and India (104 million). The “global capital of slum-dwelling,” with ten to twelve million squatters and tenement dwellers, is Mumbai. Mexico City and Dhaka follow with nine to ten million each, and “Lagos, Cairo, Karachi, Kinshasa-Brazzaville, São Paulo, Shanghai, and Delhi,” with eight to ten million.91 In developing countries slums are settlements built near a city by the residents and without official authorization. In the United States and Europe they are often rundown and marginalized areas and neighborhoods, such as Hidalgo County in southern Texas and Cañada Real Galiana near Madrid.92 However, not all slums are alike because even within a single city, slum populations can support a bewildering variety of responses to structural neglect and deprivation, ranging from charismatic churches and prophetic cults to ethnic militias, street gangs, neoliberal NGOs, and revolutionary social movements. But if 52

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there is no monolithic subject or unilateral trend in the global slum, there are nonetheless myriad acts of resistance. Indeed, the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism.93

Slums such as Dharavi have emerged throughout the cities of the developing world not only because the urban population has exceeded the rural for the first time in history but also because these populations are now part of the global neoliberal economy. This inclusion, as Davis and Josef Gugler explain,94 inevitably leads to increased relocations, inequality, and poverty, which governments are unable and unwilling to confront. “When markets and governments both fail to provide adequate housing to low-wage workers and their families, then slums proliferate.”95 Although in the 1960s there were ambitious land-reform and housing programs, they were soon forgotten under the dominant neoliberal project of the 1980s. “Instead of being a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and trade. . . . The rise of [this] informal sector is . . . a direct result of liberalization.”96 Overurbanization is not generated by the concentration of jobs, as neoliberals believe, but rather by the conditions of the working poor (civil servants, laborers, and former peasants) who are forced to live at the margins of cities. The employment opportunities of slum dwellers are often preferable to those who live in the rural hinterlands,97 but slums do not represent a temporary phase on the way to greater economic opportunities. They are, as the economists Benjamin Marx, Thomas Stoker, and Tavneet Suri explain, “poverty traps.”98 To rescue slums from their “terminal marginality within global capitalism,” government support is necessary, considering that 450 million new housing units are needed in the next twenty years to accommodate the growing numbers of the urban poor.99 Yet the challenge of slums is not simply one of housing policy: a holistic approach is needed to address housing needs for rural migrants, health and sanitation issues, local governance, private savings and investments, and land market institutions. Both formal and informal systems of property rights may be necessary to curb the rapid growth of slum areas worldwide. In the absence of strong policy agendas 53

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similar to those adopted in Singapore or, more recently, in Brazil, it seems unlikely that slums will disappear in the foreseeable future, as implicitly assumed by a modernization view of the issue.100

The global slums represent one of the major policy challenges of the twenty-first century not simply because they are poverty traps but also because, with their population growing at a rate of 25 million per year, they are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Therefore, instead of marginalizing slums through walls or low-intensity wars,101 it’s necessary to integrate them into urban-planning projects, as the Favela-Bairro program successfully demonstrated. This program was initiated in 1993 by the city of Rio de Janeiro and funded in part by the Inter-American Development Bank. As Adrian Parr recalls, when the military regime fell and the Favela-Bairro program set out to reorganize the physical structure of the favelas by widening streets and paving footpaths, the favelas were opened up to the formal economy of Rio. . . . The objectives were to improve the living conditions of the urban poor, and in doing so the program contained a rather wide mix of different social infrastructure, land tenure, and social development components.102

To meet these objectives, it is first vital to stop dismissing slums both semantically and topologically. The fact that slums, which are often left blank on city maps, are also referred to as “squatter cities,” “shantytowns,” and “informal settlements” is an indication of the low linguistic consideration we still have for these informal settlements.103 This is why, as the architect Teddy Cruz explains, we “should not dismiss them because they look ugly, they look messy. . . . They have sophisticated, participatory practices, a light way of occupying the land. Because people are trying to survive, creativity flourishes.”104 This is particularly true in the case of Dharavi. If Dharavi, as Liza Weinstein puts it, has become “too big to fail,” it’s not simply because it is indispensable to Mumbai’s economic development but also thanks to its cultural diversity. The “size and the diversity of its populations, activities, and industries distinguish it from almost all of Mumbai’s other slum settlements, most of which house a few dozen or a few hundred families in hutments or shanties built along railway 54

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tracks or highways.”105 On the other hand, Dharavi, which covers more than five hundred acres, with ten-by-fifteen-foot rooms, small alleyways, and narrow streets, is in the heart of Mumbai and has a population density more than ten times greater than the rest of the city. The area, which is also well known for its solidarity and diverse, collectively celebrated festivals, was first inhabited by a fishing community in the eighteenth century, the Kolis, who later switched to more profitable professions. Today Dharavi has close to five thousand industrial businesses, ranging from textiles, pottery, and leatherworking to such services as printing, recycling, and steel fabrication. Without any external help, its population has achieved an informal, decentralized, human-scale, home-based, low-tech, and labor-intensive economy that has been able to lift many of its dwellers out of poverty.106 Even though “Dharavi is a model settlement that needs to be replicated, not replaced,” property developers (with support from the government) are trying “to force the relocation of Dharavi’s population into “tiny cubby hole apartments in high rise towers so that the vacated land can be commercially exploited by developers through the Dharavi Redevelopment Plan.”107 This is why Dharavi’s public infrastructure continues to degrade. The lack of proper roads, drainage, and electricity systems is not caused only by it being the most overcrowded area of the city but also by the government’s interest in clearing and redeveloping the slum. Now that Mumbai is competing against Shanghai to become Asia’s global financial center, this area has acquired a value of two billion dollars. As “pressure to clear the slum (for environmental and social reasons that mask the land grab) is mounting daily,” Dharavi has become the “mirror image of capital absorption through urban development.”108 Harvey is correct when he defines urbanization as a “powerful process that newly defines what cities are about, as well as who can live there and who can’t.”109 Upadhyay’s installation embodies this mirror. But her work does not represent slums simply as capitalism’s dumping ground for a surplus population; it also discloses a sophisticated and pragmatic method of occupying the land. Her installation is detailed enough that it could be a three-dimensional model constructed by an architect or engineer. However, her model is constructed with material from the space it represents, which emphasizes the infrastructure and facility deficiencies this slum encompasses: the congestion of small houses indicates the lack 55

2.5 Wang Zhiyuan, Thrown to the Wind, 2010, steel and plastic bottles, 1150 x 400 (diameter) cm. Courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Collection, Sydney, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia.

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of recreational spaces such as parks and squares and also of proper streets. These are reduced to alleys and narrow spaces between and, in some cases, below the houses. Unlike an engineer’s model, Upadhyay’s installation thrusts us into an emergency that the former ignores. Zhiyuan’s sculpture also thrusts us into the surplus products that capitalism perpetually produces for its urban dwellers—in this case, plastic containers and bottles. But he does not simply display these bottles as they were found among the debris of Beijing and its countryside but rather assembles them as if a tornado has swept them into the air. The colorful bottles and caps that compose Thrown to the Wind (figure 2.5) are supported by a thirty-six-foot metal framework, and the whole structure is displayed both in galleries and outdoors. Zhiyuan uses smaller bottles as the sculpture rises, which forms an elegant curving point. However, the aesthetic intensity of the piece reveals the emergency behind this accumulation. The plastic bottles, now frozen and framed by the artwork, will never decompose, rendering inevitable their accumulation at the margins of the urban world. The alteration Zhiyuan creates through his sculpture thrusts us both into the overwhelming fact of the plastic bottles and their environmental consequences. Victor Emmanuel Yarsley and Edward Gordon Couzens predicted in 1941 that we would soon live in a revolutionary “plastic age” where plastic would form our surroundings, our walls, clothes, and bottles.110 But they never imagined that we would become so overloaded with plastic both on land and in the oceans. When the mass production of plastic utensils began in the 1940s, global production was less than a million tons per year; it has now reached three hundred million tons per year. In just the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, we have already generated as much plastic as was produced in the entire twentieth. The problem is not simply that around “4 per cent of world oil and gas production, a non-renewable resource, is used as feedstock for plastics and a further 3–4% is expended to provide energy for their manufacture”111 but also that most of this plastic is used to make disposable packaging items discarded within a year of manufacture. Even though the accumulation of plastic discharge on the surface of the earth has become a recognized ecological emergency,112 its annual global production is estimated to be increasing at approximately 9 percent a year, making waste management and alternative biodegradable plastics a vital matter. The scientist Rolf Halden believes “we are in need of a second plastic 57

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revolution,” since the “materials used to make plastics weren’t chosen judiciously and we see the adverse consequences in widespread environmental  pollution and unnecessary human exposure to harmful substances.”113 The increase in plastic production is a product of the rapid rate of urbanization, in which plastic plays an indispensable role because of its innumerable uses and benefits in medical, educational, and transportation applications. According to Richard C. Thompson, plastics “also have a key role to play in helping reduce humankind’s footprint on the environment. Use of plastic components in automobiles and aircrafts results in significant weight savings compared with metals.”114 Moreover, plastic, as Gay Hawkins explains, has become “an instrument for capital accumulation.” According to the Australian scientist, plastic’s “economic capacities are not so much intrinsic as enacted,” that is, elaborated and produced through specific arrangements and processes in which the  material interacts with several “other devices—human and nonhuman—to become valuable.”115 This interaction depends on plastic’s ability to generate a surplus product, something disposable. This is why the most valuable and substantial use of plastic today occurs in containers and bottles, in food and water packaging, which are always discarded after use. Although these unrefillable packages are particularly useful for their capacity to conserve and prolong the life of fish, meat, and vegetables for urban dwellers, they account for over a third of global plastic production and waste. The paradigmatic model of capital accumulation among packaging is the PET bottle, formed of polyethylene terephthalade, a plastic that forms the basis of the synthetic fiber polyester. Although this plastic has been around since the 1940s, it was only in the 1970s, after DuPont molded its fiber into bottles, that its mass production began. PET bottles managed to substitute for glass, metal, and other plastic containers because PET “appeared to enact the ‘bottleability’ of plastic better than any other plastic.”116 The capacity of these bottles to interact with human consumers as well as nonhuman water devices has revolutionized the global bottle and beverage markets in ways that could not have been predicted. PET was not simply a product of contingent, path-dependent processes of industrial development and translation, but also an event, a novel 58

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entity, in which the molecules of plastic revealed new associations and ways of relating. . . . The tendency in so many accounts of plastics waste is to frame it as a problem that emerges after use—to see the waste realities of disposability as displaced to other times and other spaces. The single-serve PET bottle disrupts this linearity. Like many plastic objects, it appears as rubbish from the beginning. It may have momentary functionality as packaging or as a container, but this is generally subsumed by its more substantial material presence as a transitional object—as something that is made to be wasted.117

While it is important to recall how PET bottles have managed to move drinking water to places it could never reach before, it is also vital to point out how it has financially and chemically transformed drinking water as well. From a financial point of view, the main difference between tap and PET water does not consist in its quality, which varies depending on its natural or urban sources and distributors, but rather in the freedom to choose what PET water offers and that tap water lacks. The problem with this neoliberal possibility to choose among waters from different regions, countries, or continents is that it contributes to the widening social gap via a natural resource that used to be free. The cost of this freedom is not simply financial and social; health is also involved. In 2009 a group of renowned scientists led by Richard Thompson and David Barnes published the first comprehensive report on the impact of plastic on the environment and human health.118 According to the report, the range of toxic plasticizers (flame retardants, stabilizers, antioxidants) and chemicals (phthalates, bisphenol A, and polybrominated diphenyl ethers) added to plastics during manufacture “could be transferred to humans directly from plastics.”119 Although these additives are meant to enhance the plastic’s performance, bioaccumulation analysis of human urine detected levels of bisphenol A, which, together with phthalates, has been associated with adverse effects on the reproductive system. Researchers are still at an early stage of assessing the risks to human health posed by plastics, but negative effects on the environment have been a growing concern for many years, given the durability of the polymers involved. These polymers, as well as other “plastics additives and constitutional monomers also present potential threats in terrestrial environments because they can leach from waste disposal sites into groundwater or/and surface waters.”120 According to the report’s 59

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conclusion, even though waste management121 and alternative biodegradable122 plastics will become vital to confront plastic accumulation in the twenty-first century, this is an emergency that ought to  be addressed “primarily through education. More attention and resources need to be devoted to increasing the awareness of consumers about the environmental consequences of litter, as this is the most effective solution.”123 The overproduction and accumulation of PET bottles puts enormous pressure on natural environments and on urban waste infrastructures, which are not always capable of managing, dismantling, and recycling all this plastic. China, which is the world’s largest scrap-plastics importer—and where recycling is the second-most popular profession in the country after farming—has begun to introduce recycling banks that pay subway credits for PET bottles.124 However, these facilities have not been installed to improve the selection of plastics but as an “attempt to reduce the environmental impact of the informal bottle collection business and improve the profits of the operator, which works in an industry thought to be worth billions of dollars.”125 Even though similar services have been introduced in Brazil, Japan, and the United States, experts are dubious whether they will work in China, since most recycling there is done informally. As Adam Minter explains in Junkyard Planet, China is home to roughly sixty thousand small-scale familyowned workshops devoted to recycling plastic without government regulation. Of those, 20,000 are concentrated here, in Wen’an County. In other words: Wen’an County isn’t just the heart of northern China’s scrapplastics industry; it is the Chinese scrap-plastics industry. And because China is the world’s largest scrap-plastics importer and processor, I think it’s fair to say that Wen’an County is at the heart of the global scrap-plastics trade.126

It should not come as a surprise that Wen’an County is close to Beijing, where more than seven million migrant workers reside. But the greatest problem for these family-owned workshops is not that they recycle without government regulation (and therefore ignore both environmental safeguards and worker safety) but also how they combine “urban waste and unwanted immigrants.”127 In this “garbage slum,” where 60

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approximately twenty thousand families process plastic bottles and taps into reusable plastics such as acrylic clothing, electronic devices, and food packaging, recycling is exclusively considered a profit-based activity, regardless of its environmental consequences. Irrespective of how recycling is conceived, as long as the freedom to choose among different waters persists, PET bottles will continue to accumulate at the margins of Beijing and other cities throughout the world. As urban discharge, the plastic bottles that constitute Zhiyuan’s sculpture expose one of the most extensive surplus products of capitalism as well as its accumulation at the margins of Beijing. The variety of bottles (which contained water, oil, and soap) and their almost pristine condition (as most containers are discarded within a year of their manufacture) indicates the absence of proper waste-management procedures that could reduce this accumulation and its environmental effects. These effects are a result of our neoliberal freedom to choose, and the accumulation represents the environmental emergency brought about by this choice, a choice that is really no choice at all and instead reveals that free choice has been thrown to the wind. Peter McFarlane’s work also thrusts us into the emergency produced by another product of capitalism that is overlooked, marginalized, but increasing at alarming rates: e-waste. Nest (figure 2.6) is a sculpture composed exclusively of a used circuit board and copper wires. The wires

2.6 Peter McFarlane, Nest, 2014. Loop Gallery, Toronto, October 25, 2014. 61

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coiled into a bird’s nest and placed on the green circuit board that holds the sculpture together. The dislocation this sculpture creates through its colors and symmetric composition, by extracting these particular components from the otherwise undifferentiated and unseen mass of e-waste, renders these discarded components significant again and reveals the otherwise concealed emergency of their existence. E-waste, like plastic bottles, is another surplus product of the connection between capitalism and urbanization: as urban dwellers increase, so does the demand for electronic devices such as computers, televisions, and mobile phones. Even though consumers are certainly responsible for this increase in demand, manufacturers also play a significant part given the intentional “lack of durability” built into their products. The increasingly short lifespan of electronics, as Giles Slade pointed out in Made to Break, “grows from a unique combination of psychological and technological obsolescence,” which is greater in the case of electronics than for other products “because of integrated chip technology and miniaturization.”128 The urban consumer must regularly seek new electronic goods, which inevitably increases the surplus. “The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion,” as Joseph A. Schumpeter explained in 1942, comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. . . . The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.129

E-waste includes both electronic goods, such as computers, televisions, and cell phones, and nonelectronic goods, such as refrigerators, ovens, and razors. But with the advent of pervasive computing, e-waste now increasingly originates from high-tech items. Stop the E-Waste Problem now defines e-waste as “a term used to cover items of all types of electric and electronic equipment and its parts that have been discarded by the owner as waste without the intention of re-use.”130 62

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These discarded products range from personal computers, cell phones, and processors (CPU, GPU, or APU chips) to display units (CRT, LCD, LED monitors) to memory boards (DRAM or SRAM) and color printers. In 2009, the global production of e-waste was estimated to be twenty to twenty-five million tons per year, most of which is “produced in Europe, the United States and Australasia.”131 Even though display units and processors are most often replaced without repair attempts, in the twenty-first century it is mobile phones that are most likely to become waste in the shortest amount of time. This is because they encompass the most extreme version of modern consumer behavior,132 where only what is new and original is valued, and because of their small size, which makes them more likely to be thrown out. While the range of techniques used to limit artificially their durability obliges consumers to replace their phones every eighteen months, the absence of a single cell-phone standard forces them “to purchase a new phone when they change service provider or travel abroad, even when their current phone is still functional.”133 It is imperative to replace today’s competing technical standards with a single standard that would permit the same phone to be used regardless of service provider. This would eliminate all the waste that results from subscribers replacing their existing phone, even when it is in good working order, when they change provider.134 Smartphones have substantially increased mobile-phone e-waste. As the fastest-selling electronic devices in history, having outsold not only simple mobile phones but also personal computers, smartphones are also the fastest producer of e-waste.135 In the United States, four million iPhone 6es and 6 Pluses were preordered in 2014, and global smartphone sales exceeded 1.2 billion units in 2014—a 23 percent increase over 2013.136 These numbers are growing as consumers make the switch to 3G or 4G cell phones and VOI (voice over Internet) and as old telephones with lead-solder connections and PVC cases become obsolete. Smartphones have not only achieved the dubious distinction of having the shortest lifecycle of any electronic product;137 they have also managed to become the most difficult to recycle. Although the CRTs of PC monitors and analog TVs contain the highest concentrations of toxins among the different varieties of e-waste, it is, ironically, the small size of cell phones that makes them a significant toxic hazard. Disassembling tiny components in order to recover their 63

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parts and materials for reuse is expensive. Also, because they are so small, most phones are simply tossed into the trash, and from there they travel to incinerators and landfills. The number of these discarded miniaturized devices now threatens to “exceed that of wired, brown goods.”138

Unlike the plastic waste that fills the world’s slums, e-waste is always discarded as far as possible from urban areas because of its toxic components, which can include cadmium, mercury, lead, beryllium, and polychlorinated biphenyls, which all contribute to groundwater contamination and atmospheric pollution. These elements are not simply toxic (from an environmental and human-health point of view) but also, as the scientist Ming Wong recently stated, an actual “global time bomb.”139 According to many experts, this bomb has already exploded. The amount of e-waste produced per year is expected to “grow by 33% over the next four years,”140 and most of this amount (90 percent) ends up in developing countries. For the United States and the European Union, which are among the largest producers of e-waste, transporting and discarding this waste in Africa, South America, or Asia is up to ten times cheaper than recycling internally. The lack of international consensus on the magnitude of the problem and gaps in legislative regulations led to the Basel Convention in 1989, which was meant to control transborder movements of harmful wastes and their disposal. Although the treaty was meant to level the playing field between countries that produce toxic waste and those that potentially consume or recycle it, there is still an “urgent need” to manage e-waste more efficiently.141 Two countries still have not ratified the treaty: the United States and Haiti. And there is a dearth of data surrounding the movements of e-waste around the world. In a recent study for StEP, Huabo Duan, T. Reed Miller, Jeremy Gregor, and Randolph Kirchain explained that although a multitude of different data sources exist, coherent sets of information on used electronics and their movement are lacking because of inherent challenges in obtaining such information. These challenges include limited mechanisms for data collection, undifferentiated trade codes, lack of consistent definitions for categorizing and labeling used electronics as well as their components, minimal

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regulatory oversight, and limited agreement on the definitions of end uses (i.e., reuse vs. recycling).142

The European Union has banned electronics that contain indestructible toxins, but in the United States the EPA-chartered National Electronic Product Stewardship Initiative failed to gain federal support to make American manufacturers responsible for reclaiming the toxic components of e-waste when it is shipped abroad. Even though it’s legal to export “used goods” to developing countries (in order to shorten the digital divide), most of the time they are nonfunctional and must be recycled. But when e-waste is shipped to Ghana or China for recycling purposes, taking advantage of these countries’ lower cost of labor, it often ends up in “toxic wastelands” where heavy metals and toxic chemicals are not only “released into the soil, atmosphere and water supply”143 but also exposed to a vulnerable population “attempting to make a living through artisanal e-waste mining.”144 These discarded components “contain high levels of permanent biological toxins (PBTs), ranging from arsenic, antimony, beryllium, and cadmium to lead, nickel, and zinc.” But these toxins are not only hazardous to the human population of the artisanal recycling wastelands; the threat is global. When “e-waste is burned anywhere in the world, dioxins, furans, and other pollutants are released into the air, with potentially disastrous health consequences around the globe.”145 There are several e-wastelands in the world, but Agbogbloshie in Ghana and Guiyu in China are considered the largest, with more than forty thousand people working in the former and one hundred thousand in the latter. In Agbogbloshie the e-waste mostly comes from Europe; Guiyu also receives debris from China and other parts of Asia. The labor in both places is predominantly informal, mostly slum dwellers who dismantle more than 1.5 million pounds of junked computers, cell phones, and other devices each year. The e-waste is mined for gold, copper, and other metals. The standard practice is to separate the plastic by boiling the circuit boards on stoves and then leaching the metals with acid. Workers risk burns, inhaling fumes, lead poisoning, and exposure to numerous carcinogens. Most of the waste from this practice, particularly ash from the burning coal, is dumped into the nearby streams and canals, poisoning rivers, wells, and groundwater. The Korle-Bu River,

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near Agbogbloshie, “is now black and thick like used oil, as it carries empty computer cases toward the ocean.”146 Water samples from the Lianjiang River near Guiyu “have shown lead levels up to 2,400 times above the World Health Organization (WHO) Drinking Water Guidelines.”147 The filthy, worn-out condition of the circuit boards and wires in McFarlane’s work is meant to thrust us into these wastelands where e-waste is informally processed. Plastic, gold, and copper are visible through the circuit board and the bright colors of the wires. These are the colors that draw workers’ attention as they search the e-waste. The revealed emergency is not that the board and wires are now technologically useless but rather that they now carry dangerous value as e-waste. The urban discharges disclosed by Upadhyay, Wang Zhiyuan, and McFarlane reveal three different surplus products of capitalism: slums, plastic, and electronic waste. As they are discharged and absorbed at the margins of capitalism, “an inner connection,” as Harvey would say, emerges among them, a connection manifest in the materials and the new systems of value that involve them. These works “absorb” capitalism’s surplus products and reveal the economies that both discard and value them. The absence of value to the society that produces the waste and the intense local value in the economies that live in and process it show that the effects of discharge and waste are not local but global, that they are an indication not only of the globalization of capitalism but also of how framed we are within its surplus products.

ENVIRONMENTAL CALLS Judith Butler points out how “certain calls we receive or that are registered within our ambient world . . . come through with static on the line, which means we are not always sure what precisely is being asked of us or what to do.”148 The works of Néle Azevedo, Mandy Barker, and Michael Sailstorfer are attempts to thrust us into an awareness of the environmental calls caused by global warming, ocean pollution, and deforestation. The essential emergency revealed by these calls invites us to respond. This emergency, like the ones discussed above, reveals both the causes of these environmental calls but also the extent to which we are framed within them. These frames are particularly harmful not 66

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simply because of their short-term effects upon our health but also because our survival on the planet depends on escaping them. In order to involve us in these emergencies, Azevedo, Barker, and Sailstorfer alter ice, ocean, and trees. These alterations call for our intervention but also request our resistance—for we are responsible for the world’s current environmental condition. Resistance and responsibility are at the heart of the three creators’ works. Azevedo is a Brazilian artist from Santos Dumont. Since the 1990s she has been developing an urban-intervention project called Minimum Monument, placing small handcrafted ice sculptures in the public squares of Berlin, Havana, and many other cities around the world. Although the work was not intended to symbolize or refer to global warming, it is often interpreted as an environmental installation that discloses the emergency of melting glaciers. In a recent interview, Azevedo explained the aim of her work: The project is a critical reading of the monument in the contemporary cities. In a few-minute action, the official canons of the monument are inverted: in the place of the hero, the anonym; in the place of the solidity of the stone, the ephemeral process of the ice; in the place of the monument scale, the minimum scale of the perishable bodies. The project started with solitary figures, later a multitude of small sculptures of  ice were placed in public spaces of several cities. The memory is inscribed in the photographic image and shared by everyone. It is not reserved to great heroes nor to great monuments. It loses its static condition to gain fluidity in the urban displacement and in the change of state of the water. It concentrates on small sculptures of small men, the common men.149

Even though Azevedo describes these sculptures as representations of anonymous monuments, their link to the environment is unquestionable, as her participation in the “Nuit Blanche” of Paris during the United Nations Climate Change Conference of 2015 demonstrated. Together with other artists she was invited to present her sculptures on the stairs of Aristide-Cavaillé-Col Square. Hundreds of people helped her place the sculptures, which slowly melted as the conference took place.150 Mandy Barker is a British artist. Her series Soup (which takes its name from a term describing plastic debris suspended in the sea, with 67

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particular reference to the mass accumulation in an area of the North Pacific Ocean known as the Garbage Patch) was nominated in 2012 and 2013 for the Prix Pictet, the world’s leading photography award that focuses on sustainability. As Jakob Schiller recently pointed out, “Barker makes garbage beautiful. She photographs detritus that washes ashore and spends hours arranging them to create complex, layered images. Working with everything from tsunami debris to discarded soccer balls, Barker makes the overwhelming issue of worldwide pollution easier to visualize.”151 Her interest in sustainability began when she learned there is more manmade debris than natural objects in the ocean. Barker recently explained how this project was a continuation of an earlier project, Indefinite, which portrayed individual objects of marine debris that collectively conveyed a message about the marine pollution. The emphasis for this project was to combine visual beauty with the message about the time it takes each individual material to biodegrade in the sea. Following on from the individual nature of this project I wanted to somehow show the scale of debris that exists in world oceans and came across an image by the photographer Chris Jordan. Images of albatross chick carcasses, the birds having died from ingesting plastics mistaken for food collected from the “garbage patch,” with their stomachs full of cigarette lighters and bottle tops was shocking. Following further research into how plastics affect marine life and ultimately end up in the human food chain was a subject I felt I could not turn away from. . . . The impact of oceanic plastic is an area that I am committed and determined to pursue through visual interpretation, by increasing awareness this way it is hoped it will ultimately lead to some action in tackling this global problem of pollution.152

Soup is not the only environmental series Barker has created. In Where, for example, she gathers plastic balloons from beaches around the world, and Hong Kong Soup: 1826 features butane lighters that she found littering thirty beaches around Hong Kong. All these series are calls to intervene and respond to the accumulation of plastic in the oceans in “the hope that somehow my images will make people think enough to act and in doing so it will make a difference.”153

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Michael Sailstorfer is a German artist. After his first solo exhibition in Berlin, centered on the theme of the forest, he was awarded the Vattenfall Contemporary 2012 prize. His work aims to question the classical notion of sculpture by incorporating sound, light, movement, and smell in his installations. These include bus stops transformed into apartments (Electrosex, 2005), trees turned into missiles (Rocket Trees, 2008), and tractor tires made into clouds over New York’s Central Park (Tornado, 2011). His technique is particularly evident in the installation of a hanging car tire (Time Is No Highway—Berlin, 2006), which does not simply rotate but also rubs against the wall, generating a familiar and pungent odor. Although most of Sailstorfer’s works consist of motorized machines connected in some way to trees, earth, or other natural elements, they are not always in galleries. For example, at the 2014 Folkestone triennial Sailstorfer buried thirty gold bars (worth a total of £10,000) in the sand of the outer harbor of Folkestone’s beaches. Anyone who found the bars could take them. What interested Sailstorfer was not simply whether these bars were going to be preserved, given the artistic rather than purely economic value his installation brought to them, but also that the public, by searching for them, would be brought into a natural environment. This was also at the center of Forest Cleaning (2000), where Sailstorfer created an artificial space within a natural space by removing the trees and clearing an area in a forest. “When you install a piece in the forest,” Sailstorfer explained, “people come by and they are just there; when you go to a museum you have a different intention. In the woods, they just walk by and I like that moment of irritation. They don’t know if someone is building a house or if there was a chemical accident, and the process starts.”154 There is always a tension between nature and the machine in Sailstorfer’s work, which he explores, as Steven Matijcio suggests, “through a 21st century lens of media, machinery, and how most of us typically experience the landscape.”155 The environment is at the center of Azevedo’s, Barker’s, and Sailstorfer’s work. In Minimum Monument (figure 2.7), Azevedo thrusts us into an environmental call caused by global warming. The work consists of hundreds of human beings sculpted in ice (twenty centimeters in height) and placed on the stairs of Gendarmenmarket Square in Berlin on September 2, 2009. To sound the work’s environmental call, Azevedo invites

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2.7 Néle Azevedo, Minimum Monument, urban action in Berlin, September 2, 2009. Also available in Art & Agenda: Political Art and Activism, ed. R. Klanten et al. (Berlin: Gestalten, 2011), 83.

bystanders to help her place the sculptures, involving them in a happening that concerns their environment. Although Minimum Monument disappears after a few minutes, it’s documented through photographs that disclose its various phases. The greatest challenge faced by climate scientists today is not to demonstrate the speed at which glaciers and ice caps are melting but to convince politicians to take action against global warming and its alarming consequences. The annual Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) no longer simply presents the latest scientific findings; it now also calls on governments to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions substantially.156 But governments are not the only ones called to intervene. At scientific gatherings researchers have begun to call on the general public to agitate for political change, as it has become clear that capitalism’s depletion of natural resources is indisputably the primary cause of global 70

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warning. This is why, as Naomi Klein reports in This Changes Everything, at the 2013 fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the complex-systems scientist Brad Werner went as far as to call on people to “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture.” These consist “in protests, blockades and sabotage by Indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups.”157 Klein, along with other investigative journalists, believes the scientific community is telling us to revolt because everything indicates we’ve reached a point of no return. Even though the IPCC was created to slow or reverse climate change, it has “not only failed to make progress over its twenty-odd years of work (and more than ninety official negotiation meetings since the agreement was adopted) [but also] overseen a process of virtually uninterrupted backsliding.”158 This political impasse was already evident at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Earth Summit in Rio, where more than 170 nations agreed on the need to limit carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel emissions, the principal cause of global warming and climate change. However, as James Hansen, Jeffrey Sachs, and other prominent scientists recently demonstrated, since these summits began, “emissions increased from 1.5%/year during 1980–2000 to 3%/year in 2000–2012, mainly because of increased coal use.”159 According to Klein, this increase is not caused by scientists’ inability to demonstrate the effects of CO2 emissions or governments’ disinterest in reducing them but rather in deregulated global capitalism.160 Even the agreement reached several years later at the Copenhagen IPCC summit (where the United States and China signed a nonbinding agreement to keep temperatures from increasing more than two degrees Celsius above where they were before we started powering our economies with coal) was not made for the well-being of the planet but rather to preserve the deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s. When the twodegree target was made official in Copenhagen there were impassioned objections from many delegates who said the goal amounted to a “death sentence” for some low-lying island states, as well as for large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact it is a very risky target for all of us: so far, temperatures have increased by just .8 degrees Celsius and we are already experiencing many alarming impacts, 71

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including the unprecedented melting of the Greenland ice sheet in the summer of 2012 and the acidification of oceans far more rapidly than expected. Allowing temperatures to warm by more than twice that amount will unquestionably have perilous consequences.161

It is interesting to note that scientists and governments began seriously debating radical cuts to greenhouse-gas emissions in 1988, “the exact year that marked the dawning of what came to be called ‘globalization,’ ” first with the signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and later with the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO).162 As the mass privatization of the former Soviet economies began in the 1990s and the emerging economies of Brazil and China joined the WTO, the increase of global emissions reached 3.4 percent per year for much of the decade. It should not come as a surprise that the only moment since 1988 that this growth was interrupted was not caused by an IPCC agreement but during the world financial crisis of 2009. The “liberation of world markets, a process powered by the liberation of unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels from the earth, has dramatically sped up the same process that is liberating Arctic ice from existence.”163 According to a recent study led by the glaciologist Eric Rignot at NASA, glaciers in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica appear to be in an irreversible state of decline.164 Among the six glaciers that constitute the area (which is almost the size of France), the largest ones are the Island glacier (thirty kilometers wide) and Thwaites glacier (one hundred kilometers wide), which stretch over five hundred kilometers. These glaciers, which already contribute significantly to sea-level rise (they annually release almost as much ice into the ocean as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet), are melting faster than most scientists had expected. With the help of the ERS-1 satellite, in 1997 Rignot discovered that the “grounding line (where the glacier detaches from its bed and becomes afloat) of Pine Island glacier had retreated five kilometers in the space of four years, between 1992 and 1996.”165 This discovery drew other scientists (from the British Antarctic Survey, NASA, and Chile) to join forces with Rignot to monitor these glaciers via satellite and with instruments placed on the ice and in the ocean. Two decades after this process started Rignot confirmed in 2014 that the glacier’s grounding lines retreat by “kilometers every year, glaciers thinning by meters every year hundreds of kilometers inland, losing billions of tons 72

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of water annually, and speeding up several percent every year to the flanks of topographic divides.”166 The disappearance of the Pine Island glacier will probably trigger the collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet, raising sea levels between three and five meters and forcing the displacement of millions of people worldwide. At the current rate, a large fraction of the basin will be gone in approximately nine hundred years, but a different modeling study conducted on the Thwaites glacier projects that this retreat rate will increase in the future.167 While previous studies were based on simplified models of ice sitting in an inward-sloping basin, this new study also used “airborne radars to image through the thick ice and map the topography of the underlying bedrock whose shape controls the ice sheet’s long-term stability.”168 But now that the grounding line sits on a shallower ridge (with a depth of six hundred meters), the glacier is not only losing its stability but also beginning to collapse as the ice edges retreat in the deeper part of the bay. This is why Ian Joughin, one of the authors of the study, believes that once the glacier “really gets past this shallow part, it’s going to start to lose ice very rapidly.”169 The future scenarios the study predicted, using different melting rates in relation to the amount of global warming, indicate the glacier “collapse may be closer to a few centuries than to a millennium.”170 If global temperatures increase several degrees over the next few centuries, it will not only speed the collapse of West Antarctica but could also trigger the irreversible retreat of marine-based sectors of East Antarctica, such as the Totten glacier. Together with other glaciers in East Antarctica, which include marine-based sectors that hold more ice than West Antarctica, this glacier holds the equivalent of seven meters of global sea level. These studies have confirmed that these glaciers’ ice is thinning and that the melting is accelerating over time, without any sign of stabilizing: A clue is that all the glaciers reacted at the same time, which suggested a common force that can only be the ocean. Ocean heat is pushed by the westerly winds and the westerlies have changed around Antarctica in response to climate warming and the depletion of the ozone. The stronger winds are caused by a world warming faster than a cooling Antarctica. Stronger westerlies push more subsurface warm waters poleward to melt the glaciers, and push surface waters northward. Nerilie 73

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Abram and others have just confirmed that the westerlies are stronger now than at any other time in the past 1,000 years and their strengthening has been particularly prominent since the 1970s as a result of human-induced climate warming. Model predictions also show that the trend will continue in a warming climate.171

James E. Hansen, Jeffrey Sachs, and other scientists also believe that once ice-sheet disintegration reaches a point that the dynamics and momentum of the process take over, it will be impossible through a reduction of greenhouse gases to prevent a sea-level rise of many meters and a loss of coastal cities worldwide. “Paleoclimate data for sea level change indicate that sea level changed at rates of the order of a meter per century, even at times when the forces driving climate change were far weaker than the human.”172 Even though in 2015 Antarctica experienced its warmest day ever recorded,173 climate warming will continue to increase substantially with new innovations in fossil-fuel extraction. These consist in drilling “to increasing ocean depths and into the Arctic, squeezing oil from tar sands and tar shale, hydro-fracking to expand extraction of natural gas, developing exploitation of methane hydrates, and mining of coal via mountaintop removal and mechanized longwall mining.”174 These new drilling methods, in particular fracking, will lead not only to the extraction of greater amounts of gases, increasing emissions substantially, but also to earthquakes and contaminated water.175 After numerous public protests against fracking, several nations have begun to ban these methods, which were addressed at the 2015 climate summit in Paris. Unfortunately, as the environmental economist Nicholas Stern predicted, this summit was not able to avert this global emergency, and government targets are still too high to prevent temperature rises.176 Hansen confirmed Stern’s prediction when he defined the summit a “fraud” that resulted in “no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”177 Like the models of the climate scientists, Azevedo’s event is not a matter of ideological prejudice but rather of the planet’s essential environmental emergency. But the difference between the calls that each makes is not the scientific foundation of the former but the alteration the latter creates in order to disclose the environment’s worsening condition. Azevedo’s ice sculptures represent people because global warning 74

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2.8 Mandy Barker, Penalty: The World, 2014. 769 marine debris footballs (and pieces of) collected from forty-one countries and islands around the world, from 144 different beaches and by eighty-nine members of the public in just four months.

concerns both glaciers and the human species. Minimum Monument invites its participants to touch these evanescent people, to place them in the work, and to observe how they melt away on the stairs of the square. It also forces them to see how quickly this occurs. During this disappearance the remains of Being emerge as a vital environmental call to intervene against global warming. A similar call takes place in Barker’s Penalty: The World (figure 2.8), where soccer balls gathered from beaches and oceans around the world stress the accumulation of plastic and its effects upon marine life. To accumulate the 769 soccer balls (from forty-one countries and islands) that constitute the work, Barker, like Azevedo, involved the public. She requested through social media that people send her soccer balls found on beaches. Each soccer ball was photographed as it was found (dirty, washed up on shore, and sometimes showing signs of having been bitten by turtles or fish) and captioned with the area or country where it 75

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was collected. Barker then scattered the colorful balls on a dark background (echoing the ocean’s void) and photographed them in groups according to size and color. These photographs were later sandwiched together, creating a feeling of depth and suspension in the final image. Barker completed the work just in time for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil; it highlights the penalty we will ultimately pay for letting this synthetic debris end up in the sea. Judith S. Weis explains in Marine Pollution that 6.5 million tons of debris reaches the oceans yearly.178 The most common constituent of marine debris is plastic. Most of this debris reaches the oceans through illegal dumping, storm drains, or simply as litter that is blown into the water. Although improper control of solid waste is responsible for over 80 percent of marine pollution, fishing ships and offshore drilling also play a significant part. Modern gear, which is often made of synthetic materials and metals, and monofilament fishing line can persist for hundreds of years in the ocean. These materials break up into smaller fragments once they become marine debris, but this does not mean they eventually disappear. Instead, they concentrate in gyres, “systems of rotating ocean currents.”179 According to a recent study, “at least 5.25 trillion plastic particles weighing 268,940 tons are currently floating at sea.”180 These small particles, under five millimeters in size, were collected by scientists from the United States, France, Chile, Australia, and New Zealand in twenty-four expeditions over a six-year period. Their results confirmed that most of this debris derives from clothing and food and drink packaging; they also showed what effect the ocean has on plastic and how plastic circulates around the globe: The two Northern Hemisphere ocean regions contain 55.6% of particles and 56.8% of plastic mass compared to the Southern Hemisphere, with the North Pacific containing 37.9% and 35.8% by particle count and mass, respectively. In the Southern Hemisphere the Indian Ocean appears to have a greater particle count and weight than the South Atlantic and South Pacific oceans combined. . . . Plastics of all sizes were found in all ocean regions, converging in accumulation zones in  the subtropical gyres, including southern hemisphere gyres where coastal population density is much lower than in the northern hemisphere.181 76

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As debris is captured in these gyres, wind-driven surface currents gradually move floating debris toward the center, trapping and accumulating plastic in so-called garbage patches. The largest patch is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch and the Pacific Trash Vortex; it is located in the North Pacific Ocean in an area estimated to be twice the size of the state of Texas. This area contains over three million tons of small pieces of plastic from across the North Pacific, including coastal North America and Japan. Although many oceanographers and climatologists predicted this patch, it was discovered only in 1997 by a racing-boat captain, Charles Moore, while sailing from Hawaii to California.182 In addition to the Pacific Trash Vortex and the North Atlantic Garbage Patch, which is estimated to spread across hundreds of kilometers, there are other smaller patches in the Southern Hemisphere that together “comprise as much as 40 percent of the planet’s ocean surface—roughly 25 percent of the entire earth.”183 The earthquake and tsunami that Japan suffered in March 2011 washed approximately five million tons of debris out to sea. About “1.5 million tons probably floated away and could be transported to the beaches of the northeast Pacific Ocean, including the West Coast of the United States and Canada.”184 This material is already accumulating on the coasts of Alaska and Hawaii and in the Pacific gyre. According to Holly Bamford, these patches are not trash islands, as many believe, but rather galaxies of garbage populated by billions of smaller areas of trash that may be hidden under water or spread over many miles.185 The Eastern Garbage Patch (between Hawaii and California) and the Western Pacific Garbage Patch (east of Japan and west of Hawaii) are connected by a thin, six-thousand-mile-long current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone and lie in a high-pressure area between Japan and California where the powerful circular motion of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre draws in debris. This gyre, created by a high-pressure system of air currents, has formed a sort of oceanic desert where fish, phytoplankton, and mammals struggle for survival in the midst of huge amounts of debris. This debris has increased significantly over the past forty years and now “outweighs zooplankton by a factor of 36 to one. Islands within the gyre frequently have their coastlines covered by litter that washes ashore—prime examples being Midway and Hawaii, where plankton tows sometimes come up with many more plastic pieces than plankton.”186 77

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch consists of debris from North America, Asia, and cargo ships traveling through the area. Garbage from Asia takes about a year to reach the patch, and garbage from North America, up to six years, but cargo ships “drop about 10,000 steel shipping containers into the sea each year, full of things like hockey gloves, computer monitors, resin pellets and LEGOs.”187 These products are harmful to marine life: sea turtles, seals, and other animals often become entangled in plastic fishing nets and ultimately drown or die of poisoning when they mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, for example. More than one hundred species of sea birds have been found to ingest plastic artifacts and become entangled with them, and the consequences of the wounds include “blockage of digestive tract followed by satiation, reduction in reproductive capacity” and “the possibility that plastic resin pellets may absorb and concentrate potentially damaging toxic compounds from sea water.”188 However, the most alarming effect of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on marine life takes place when debris prevents sunlight from reaching algae and plankton, which are the most common autotrophs in the marine food web. Without them, the natural balance of the ocean fails. As Weis explains, phytoplankton are the basis of the food web that supports the rest of oceanic life. They are widely distributed in huge numbers, but occur near the surface of the water only down as far as light penetrates, since light is essential for photosynthesis. Phytoplankton are eaten by small floating animals called zooplankton. Zooplankton consist of a wide variety of different types of generally small animals, some of which spend their whole life as small plankton, while others are larval stages of larger animals such as clams or crabs that will subsequently go to the bottom to live as adults. Zooplankton, in turn, are eaten by small fish, which are eaten by larger fish, which may be eaten by very large fish (or other large animals such as marine mammals).189

Although the environmental emergency constituted by these patches is unquestionable, microplastics loose in the rest of the ocean, separate from the gyres, also are part of this emergency. In a single square kilometer scientists may collect up to 750,000 bits of plastic (or 1.9 million bits per square mile), which tend to break into pieces too small to be seen 78

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by the human eye.190 Under five millimeters in diameter, microplastics are not only the most numerically abundant and rapidly increasing items of plastic debris in oceans today but also the most harmful from a physical and toxicological point of view. And according to Richard C. Thompson and others, the greatest concentration of microplastics does not take place in gyres and patches but in the deep sea.191 Even though public attention primarily focuses on plastic that accumulates on shorelines and the water’s surface, over weeks or months plastic can become negatively buoyant and sink. Microplastics also concentrate in Arctic ice: “Arctic Sea ice from remote locations contains concentrations of microplastics [which] are several orders of magnitude greater than those that have been previously reported in highly contaminated surface waters, such as those of the Pacific Gyre.”192 When sea ice forms from the water column, it also draws in a high level of microplastics and becomes a major global sink for manmade particulates. As Arctic sea ice continues to melt, “more than one trillion pieces of microplastic could be released. The toxicological and long-term environmental effects of this are unknown.”193 As we can see, the environmental emergency of marine pollution does not consist only in the three hundred million tons of plastic we manufacture yearly but also in whom we should hold responsible once this trash enters our oceans. The fact that “sixteen of the top 20 polluters are middle income countries where fast economic growth is not accompanied by major improvements in waste handling”194 is only the beginning of the problem because 60 percent of the world’s oceans lie beyond the jurisdiction of individual states. No nation will take responsibility once marine debris joins gyres. Their distance from any coastline illustrates not only governments’ environmental indifference but also the absence of jurisdictional accountability. China, India, and the United States are among the top twenty countries ranked by mass of mismanaged plastic waste.195 Neither the naked eye nor satellite imagery manages to show the giant gyre-caught patches or the diffused oceanic microplastics, which renders Penalty indispensable. Barker’s work is also accompanied by a statement: “The series Penalty aims to create awareness about the issue of marine pollution that exist in World oceans, using the single plastic object of a football to represent the problem on a global scale.” This statement clarifies her goal and also the global emergency this debris 79

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represents. The feeling of depth, suspension, and void her work creates thrusts us into this essential emergency. Like Azevedo, Michael Sailstorfer also uses natural resources to thrust us into an environmental emergency closely related to global warming: deforestation. Forst (figure 2.9) consists of four trees hanging upside down from the ceiling, slowly being rotated by electric motors attached to their trunks. As the trees’ crowns fold against the ground, causing the leaves and branches to leave circular marks on the floor of the gallery, the work makes a disturbing creaking sound. This sound, together with the dead leaves and marks on the floor, alters both the gallery’s silent and sterile setting and also the trees’ natural environment. Although the trees dry out over the course of the exhibition, nature is still brought into the gallery, forcing us to acknowledge the industrial consequences of forestry. Sailstorfer’s installation discloses both an alteration of the environment and an imposition on the environment. The unnaturally hanging, dislocated trees call to mind the millions of trees ready to be exploited, consumed, and annihilated by the new drivers of deforestation: globalized agricultural trade and the growth of cities. Although forests still cover about 31 percent of the world’s land, territories the size of Switzerland are lost every year primarily to industrial agricultural and logging. While urbanization also plays an important role, considering how roads are often built into forests, the biggest driver of deforestation is still agriculture. However, not all forestry related to agriculture can be considered deforestation. For example, the environmental effects of forestry in the Amazon or in sub-Saharan Africa does not depend only on its extent but also on its aim, that is, whether it’s for internal (collection of firewood for charcoal production) or external (road construction, agricultural development, and human settlement) purposes. Although both types cause the forest to suffer, as Daniel Murdiyarso pointed out, “the intensity is different.”196 This intensity has become particularly evident now that the global urban population has overtaken the rural population. But if forest loss now is correlated with urban-population growth, that is, industrial exports of agricultural products, it’s also because urban “consumers generally eat more processed foods and animal products than rural consumers, thereby inducing commercial production of crops and livestock.”197

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2.9 Michael Sailstorfer, Forst, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, 2012.

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Many believed that pressures on tropical forests would decline as local populations urbanized, but the reverse has occurred as land use has increased for commercial food production and other products, such as biofuels. A recent report found that saving the trees destroyed for these purposes would do much more to prevent hunger than converting them to cropland and pastures because rural agriculture has a greater effect on food production and consumption. There is considerable evidence that suggests that forests and tree-based systems can play an important role in complementing agricultural production in providing better and more nutritionally-balanced diets; wood fuel for cooking; greater control over food consumption choices, particularly during lean seasons and periods of vulnerability (especially for marginalised groups); and deliver a  broad set of ecosystem services which enhance and support crop production.198

What keeps people hungry, the economist Amartya Sen says, is not only  lack of food but lack of access to that food and control over its production.199 According to a recent study, the world needs to “close a 70 percent gap between the crop calories that were available in 2006 and the calorie needs anticipated in 2050.”200 These predictions contrast with recent government policies encouraging the production of ethanol and biodiesel for transportation. This is now occurring in the United States and Europe, which are among the largest fossil fuel–consuming regions; both have established high biofuel targets amounting to at least 10 percent of transportation fuel by 2020. If “such targets were to go global by 2050, meeting them would consume crops with an energy content equivalent to roughly 30 percent of the energy in today’s global crop production. Consequently, the crop calorie gap would increase from 70 percent to about 90 percent, making a sustainable food future even more difficult to achieve.”201 With three-quarters of the world’s land area already under cultivation to meet human food needs as well as commercial timber and pulp, bioenergy (which requires exclusive use of land to grow the energy feedstock) “will undercut efforts to combat climate change and to achieve a sustainable food future.”202 Independent of these predictions, as of 2015 82

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a third of tropical forests, which once covered 3.6 billion hectares (half of all the world’s forests), have been lost as a result of deforestation: Of the remaining area, 46% is fragmented, 30% degraded, and only 24% (600 million hectares) is in a mature and relatively undisturbed state. Currently, c.8.5 million hectares are deforested in the tropics annually, with the rate of loss increasing by 200,000 hectares a year. These are arresting statistics, reflecting the progressive deterioration in the condition of vast areas of forest, as well as the largely irreversible clearance and conversion (mostly for agriculture) of more than 250 million hectares of tropical forest since the 1992 Rio Summit.203

Tropical forests will continue to face pressure as urban-based and international demands for agricultural and transportation products increase. This is why scientists believe that policies that reduce deforestation among rural populations are ineffective compared to those that limit “industrial-scale, export-oriented agricultural production, concomitant with efforts to increase yields in non-forested lands to satisfy demands for agricultural products.”204 Although the demand for tropical-forest products is insatiable, if markets are not controlled and managed appropriately, “international trade will lead to continued massive deforestation.”205 This is the case in Brazil and Indonesia, where more than half of the world forest loss between 1990 and 2010 took place. In these countries, as Will McFarland notes, more than one hundred times more money was spent on subsidies to industries that cause deforestation than was received from international conservation organizations to prevent it.206 In sum, the environmental emergency of deforestation is born from these industrial demands, which constantly expand cattle ranches, soybean plantations, and timber cutting regardless of the internal environmental consequences (to the forest’s natural balance) and the external consequences (increasing global warming). Deforestation, like the use of coal, is a direct cause not only of global warming but also of the shortage of fresh water and food for millions of endangered human beings and animals in forests throughout the world. As many as 150 million indigenous people live in ancient forests worldwide. And the Brazilian Amazon, for example, which is home to 40 percent of the world’s tropical forest and one of the most biodiverse regions of the planet, is one of the few places where such rare species as 83

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white-cheeked spider monkeys, pied tamarins, and giant otters can still be found. Unfortunately, at the current rate of deforestation, these species are “doomed to disappear even if deforestation were halted in the region overnight.”207 The animals lost to date in the eastern and southern Amazon rainforest region are just one-fifth of those that will eventually die as the full impact of the loss of habitat takes its toll.208 Thirty years of concerted deforestation in the Amazon have “shrunk viable living and breeding territories enough to condemn 38 species to regional extinction in coming years, including 10 mammal, 20 bird and eight amphibian species.”209 Tropical forests are vital for indigenous populations, animals, and local ecosystem services, but they also play a critical role in mitigating global warming. Forests absorb about 15 percent of the total CO2 emissions each year (which would otherwise remain in the atmosphere) and perpetuate the water cycle by returning vapor to the atmosphere. In addition, rain forests also cool the planet by maintaining a cloud cover that reflects ultraviolet radiation. But as the Amazon rain forest disappears so does this cloud, “thereby changing the Earth’s reflectance (albedo) and causing a potentially large positive feedback to warm the planet further.”210 The rain forest’s part in the “global regulation of climate, water cycle, and nutrient cycles is also of huge significance for planetary balances and for human wellbeing.”211 Forests remain, as Jeffrey Sachs explains in The Age of Sustainable Development, one of the major parts of terrestrial ecosystems on the planet, covering 31 percent of the total land area; yet the natural forest cover used to be a far higher proportion of the Earth’s land area before humanity got to it. . . . When we lose forests, we degrade ecosystems and lose a tremendous amount of biodiversity. Our three great equatorial rain forest areas (the Amazon basin, the Congo Basin, and the Indonesian archipelago) are home to a remarkable amount of the planet’s biodiversity, but this biodiversity is quickly being lost.212

It should not come as a surprise that among Johan Rockström’s nine planetary boundaries,213 within which humans can continue to live sustainable lives, “deforestation” (“land-system change”) is one of the four already transgressed. The other three are “climate change” (rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere), “biosphere integrity” 84

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(biodiversity loss and species extinction), and “biogeochemical flows” (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles). Even though the “planetary boundaries framework arises from the scientific evidence that Earth is a single, complex, integrated system—that is, the boundaries operate as an interdependent set,”214 the fact that these four boundaries have been crossed is an indication that the emergency they entail for our lives is hidden, absent, a lack made clear by the increasing rate of deforestation. Sailstorfer’s work is a call to respond to industrial deforestation, and it issues this call not simply by bringing trees into the gallery but by creating a rupture in the viewers’ perception, an alteration that discloses the essential emergency. This is why the mechanical components of Forst are particularly significant. The metal structure that grasps the trunks and the electric motors that rotate them emphasize our mechanized, instrumentalist abuse of forests and reveal our transgression of that planetary boundary. Minimum Monument, Penalty, and Forst are calls to end this environmental transgression, not simply because of their natural components but, most of all, because of their artificial ones. The unnatural setting in which ice, ocean, and trees find themselves are meant to guarantee the call does not come, as Butler says, “with static on the line.” Instead, these settings allow the call to act as active resistances to global warming, ocean pollution, and deforestation. While these works demand audience intervention—helping Azevedo place the sculptures, sending Barker soccer balls found on beaches, and listening to the disturbing creaking and mechanized sound of Sailstorfer’s leaves and electric motors—to a certain degree we have already participated them. The melting ice, plastic debris, and dying trees are a consequence of an essential emergency that we have contributed to. Through these works we know “what precisely is being asked of us or what to do.”

HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS “There is a space,” Avital Ronell says, “for which no account has been made, although its disruptive force has been acknowledged in various historical guises.”215 The works of Jennifer Karady, Alfredo Jaar, and Jane Frere alter these historical guises and allow this disruptive force to emerge. However, this disruption, emergency, does not reveal this space’s 85

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true history but instead provides an account in order to overcome the same historical frame that effaced the space. These artists’ works involve veterans, victims, and survivors who have directly or indirectly experienced wars (Iraq and Afghanistan, 2001–2015), genocides (Rwanda, 1994), and dispossessions (Palestine’s “Nakba,” 1948). Like the social paradoxes, urban discharges, and environmental calls we have already explored, these historical accounts do not aim to change the truth of what has happened but to alter the historical disguise concealing the essential emergency. The absence of emergency is particularly evident in the invisible, ignored, and denied historical accounts presented in these works and in how the works extend into the future the invitation to witness. Jennifer Karady is an American artist whose works consist of narrative portraits of individuals intertwined with representations of their childhood memories (Refitting, 1999–2001), animals (Animal Project, 2002–2006), or other issues that affect them emotionally, financially, or culturally. In the series Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan (2006–), Karady has worked with American veterans, creating staged narrative photographs that portray their individual stories and memories from Iraq and Afghanistan. Karady works with the soldiers to plan the reenactment. In an interview with Chuck Mobley, Karady explains that she does not see this project as political, meaning for or against the wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan; it’s really about individuals veterans’ experiences of those wars. My hope is that both sides at this point are able to acknowledge war’s impact on individual lives. . . . The audience for this work includes both veterans and civilians. My hope is that these photographs will have a therapeutic effect for the veteran, inspire other veterans to seek treatment, and increase public awareness of the issue in order to gain support for better mental healthcare for veterans. A recent RAND Corporation study found that approximately 300,000 veterans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from PTSD or depression. I would like for the work to be not only exhibited in an art context but also at VA campuses and other public spaces around the country. So far the veterans who have seen the work in progress have been deeply moved and identified with the portrayal of their peers.216

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According to Jesse McKinley, Karady’s works situate themselves between journalism and psychotherapy: the veterans bridge social distances created during the war, and the viewers are informed of their experiences.217 Alfredo Jaar is a Chilean conceptual artist based in New York. He was trained as an architect and filmmaker, but most of his works consist of photographs, installations, and happenings that analyze unequal contemporary political, social, and economic power relations. This is particular evident in A Logo for America (1987), an electronic billboard in New York City’s Times Square that emblazoned the statement “This is not America” across a map of the United States. This work was meant to remind us that the term “America” refers not only to the familiar shape identifiable as the “United States” but to the hemispheric mass comprising North, South, and Central America, what is more correctly designated by the plural las Americas in Spanish. To stress this difference Jaar also performed The Cloud (2000) at the San Diego/Tijuana border. This performance, honoring the victims of border crossing, involved a cellist placed on the U.S. side of the border and three thousand balloons on the Mexican side. As Elena Shtromberg pointed out, contradictions abounded as it became clear that balloons and music are free from any notion of borders and can travel where people cannot. . . . The performance was held on October 14, 2000, and lasted 45 minutes; as poetry and a list of the names of border crossers was read, the cello played and a moment of silence was held in honor of the victims observed. Despite the different circumstances surrounding each of his works focusing on society’s victims, it is easy to identify certain constants in Jaar’s work, the commemoration of social injustice chief among them.218

Inequality is also at the center of one of Jaar’s most recent works: May 1, 2011 (2011). This installation consists of two large screens. The right-hand screen depicts the Situation Room of the White House as President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other members of the cabinet watch Osama Bin Laden’s assassination; the left-hand screen is left blank, symbolizing our powerlessness to witness the action directly. The Rwanda Project: 1994–1998, is also about the absence of images,

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which the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo does not consider “closed images but messages calling for a response. The point is to bring history back to its roots, that is, the news or reportage, rather than to Aristotle’s philosophical poetics of history, which leaves out the details of contingent events in order to represent their essentially rational character.”219 The Scottish artist Jane Frere lived for many years in Greece, where she began her career as a painter and theatrical set and costume designer. Frere also gained an international reputation as a producer of radical theater, introducing cutting-edge companies from Iran, Eastern Europe, and the United Kingdom, particularly at the Edinburgh Festival, the City of London Festival, and the National Theatre of London. She has also produced outdoor outreach performances in the Scottish Highlands, including staging a performance in darkness on the slopes of the Cairngorms. Frere has taught courses on costume design for theater and film at the prestigious Arts Institute at Bournemouth for a number of years. Integrating a multiplicity of disciplines and media, including sculpture, sound, and film, Frere’s work has been exhibited in galleries and arts venues and hangs in several private collections. “As an artist and theater practitioner,” Frere wrote in the Scotsman, “my interests have always tended towards humanitarian concerns, and the journey an artist takes interests me almost more than the final work of art.”220 Since 9/11 Frere’s works have focused on the Middle East. She believes offering a greater understanding of its tradition and history can help us in this post-9/11 epoch, when Arabs are often dismissed as violent terrorists. This is probably why, after a performance of The Winter’s Tale in Tehran’s Fadjr Festival (which she attended as a member of a visiting artstheater delegation), Frere responded to a journalist who complained about the way the hejab was imposed on the actors by emphasizing how damaging social and political isolation is: I think cultural exchange is essential if only to dispel some of the myths that surround your country. You should understand many people are afraid to come here at all. Why? Because they associate Iran only with black veils and terrorism. . . . [Since 9/11, in] the parochial minds of too many, the danger is that all Muslims can be tarnished with the terrorist brush and if we are to try and confront such ignorance and bigotry, we have to bring people together and eradicate stereotyping. It’s our

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only hope, so please forgive the actors for not making more of a statement and thank God we are here.221

Frere designed the set for the play Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea (coauthored by Justin Butcher and Ahmed Masoud), which was performed at the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh following its London debut at Theatro Technis in 2009.222 In order to produce some of her best work, Frere

2.10 Jennifer Karady, “Former Sergeant Jose Adames, U.S. Marine Corps Recon, Stinger Gunner, 1st Platoon, Alpha Company, veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom”; Brooklyn, NY, from the series Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan, 2009. 48 in. x 48 in. chromogenic color print. Courtesy the artist. Also available in Country: Soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan (San Francisco: SF Camerawork Publications, 2010), 7.

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lived behind the apartheid wall in the West Bank. Several of her largescale paintings reflect this region’s daily ordeals. For Frere, as for Karady and Jaar, history is an essential component of art that thrusts us into essential emergencies. This is particularly evident in Karady’s Former Sergeant Jose Adames (figure 2.10), which portrays a veteran in distress on the streets of Brooklyn. He is crouched and covering his ears as a garbage truck is about to hit a pothole. This image, in the form of a staged narrative photograph, discloses a traumatic event from the war that has followed the veteran into the civilian world. But the goal of Karady’s photograph is not simply to represent this event but to thrust us into a distress that would otherwise remain invisible, unknown. The artist interviewed and worked with the veteran, who appears in his uniform. The work also includes a written statement that reveals how Adames was injured and why he chose this particular account for the work: I got hit by a mortar while on a convoy, which was not a typical mission for us. Three pieces of shrapnel went through my leg. It pretty much swept me sideways, and I was knocked out cold. I was immediately helivacked over to Baghdad Hospital, and from there to Frankfurt, Germany. Eighteen marines in my platoon were wounded. When I heard the stat reports a couple of weeks later, I found out we were hit by 40 mortars and two machine gun assaults. It was in a canyon, so there was no way to go forward or back. When mortars are coming in, it’s pretty much hard to cover yourself from that. That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever been through. That’s the bad part; I’ll never forget it. I am terrified of trucks, garbage trucks in particular, and it has to do with the fact that New York has so many potholes. When they hit one they make this deep echoing sound that sounds similar to a mortar exploding. I see a dump truck rolling down the street and I just try to go to the other end as fast as possible. I black out, not in a bad way. I just tune out. Everything gets dark, and these images keep fluttering through my mind of the night we got hit. It just replays in my mind. When I returned I was homeless for a total of five months. I spent two months in a shelter and I couldn’t take it. It was just this thin line of frustration, and then my PTSD wasn’t helping. So I really needed to come up with other ideas. I was stuck in a vicious circle from boarding house to a shelter at Bellevue. It was ridiculous what they did to me. I had a better chance 90

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sleeping on the A train. I felt more comfortable, actually. In New York, 85 percent of the homeless are veterans. I see a lot of veterans feeling very, very angry.223

Adames’s statement and the photograph are not meant only to present an account that would otherwise be ignored but also to thrust the viewer into the psychological and social emergency that veterans find themselves in after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. This hidden emergency is not only the visible (physical disabilities, musculoskeletal disorders, or skin diseases) and invisible (post–traumatic stress disorders, partial hearing loss, or sexual traumas) injuries veterans must bear but also how they are treated once they return. When veterans are not assisted in a timely fashion, cannot find meaningful employment, and, most of all, fail to reintegrate into their communities, they are at higher risk of both committing suicide and becoming homeless. These problems affected soldiers returning from previous wars, but Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have fought a different kind of war (with higher survival rates and longer tours of duty) and also returned to a country economically and administratively unprepared to receive new veterans. Soldiers, as Marguerite Guzman Bouvard explains in Invisible Wounds of War: Coming Home from Iraq and Afghanistan, “don’t just come home and reenter the life they had left behind as if they hadn’t changed. They return with a war that keeps haunting their dreams, their memories, and their behavior.”224 This “war at home,” as it’s often referred to, tends to create a feeling of isolation and the feeling that only those who have also served can understand the veteran’s distress. Some veterans turn to alcohol and drugs to alleviate the anxiety attacks related to recollections of traumatic events from the war. These attacks, now diagnosed as post–traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), include “depression, insomnia, feeling constantly threatened, and graphic nightmares. Many of those who come home feel reclusive and want to stay in their apartments or in their rooms.”225 PTSD afflicts more than 30 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Another alarming factor is suicides. In 2012, more U.S. military personnel died by their own hands (349) than in combat (295).226 As veterans struggle to reintegrate, the greatest danger they pose is not to others but, as Matt Kennard points out, “to themselves, by self-inflicted violence.”227 In 2013 the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America published a survey revealing that 91

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31 percent of recent veterans had thought of suicide; 40 percent knew someone who had killed themselves, and 47 percent knew someone who had attempted to. Despite much effort, setting up hotlines and suicide prevention programs—the military and the VA have not been able to reverse this trend. Veterans are facing challenges across the board— from finding meaningful employment and reintegrating into families and communities to translating their military skills into civilian ones and learning to enjoy life again. Female veterans, who now comprise 10 percent of the all volunteer force, have encountered additional difficulties, leading to higher rates of divorce, depression and unemployment. National guards, reservists and others who were older during their deployments have faced substantial disruption to their careers, with high unemployment and housing problems.228

Homelessness is also an alarming emergency for veterans, who account for 25 percent of the overall homeless population in the United States, numbering more than fifty thousand. One-third of veterans return to rural communities, where there are fewer medical facilities and job opportunities, which increases their chance of becoming homeless. Reintegrating into civilian life is particularly difficult for female veterans, who return to a nation that historically defines “veteran” as male. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) often lacks facilities for female veterans, and women veterans are nearly four times as likely as men to end up homeless: Lingering health problems and PTSD are contributing to the rise in homelessness among female veterans. Women encounter problems in combat that most men don’t. A shocking statistic is that one out of three women in the military is raped and sexually assaulted. Given this kind of emotional and psychological harm, not to mention the physical harm, it is very difficult for them to go back into society. Many of them become addicted and homeless, sleeping in their cars or in alleys. About 5 percent of the 104,000 veterans who are homeless are women. They can no longer fulfill their roles as wives and mothers. They return changed.229

Homelessness rates among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are higher than among Vietnam vets, and according to Aaron Glantz this is 92

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“related to the way the war is being fought. The fact that soldiers and Marines are forced to serve so many tours in Iraq is putting service members under unprecedented strain.”230 America’s post-9/11 veterans are the most diverse group of soldiers in the nation’s military history by race and gender. Many also entered the military through the “moralwaiver” program. This program allowed the military to recruit soldiers with criminal convictions for crimes such as rape, assault, and murder; even those serving prison sentences could enlist. In 2008 there were 1.6 million adult Americans behind bars. This is the highest number of prisoners in the country’s history. And army waivers for “felony convictions had more than doubled in a year, from 249 waivers in 2006 to 511 in 2007, while the marines’ waivers increased from 208 to 350 in the same period.”231 With the Bush administration struggling to populate two foreign occupations and unwilling to bring back conscription, the Pentagon had to find a way to confront one of the worst recruitment crises since 1979, when the U.S. military was suffering the effects of the so-called Vietnam Syndrome, which turned many Americans off military service. The moral-waiver program allowed the military to recruit and train more than one hundred thousand soldiers. The problem with these convicted veterans is not the message their recruitment sends to potential recruits but the social and employment conditions these veterans endured before they enlisted and the difficulty their criminal backgrounds add to their efforts to secure jobs and housing when they return. Indeed, “frequent periods of unemployment are often a factor in the descent into depression and other problems. The unemployment rate for veterans hit 15 percent in 2011, nearly doubling over the previous five years, and leaving returning soldiers with much worse odds than the general population.”232 As we can see, the economic costs of assisting returning veterans will “require a budget that is larger than the war itself and will last for decades.”233 The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the longest combat operations since the Vietnam War and also the most expensive—even more so because together with military operations one must also consider veterans’ long-term medical and disability benefits. The price of these benefits has increased substantially: soldiers are now surviving injuries that would have killed them in the past, thanks to better protective gear, faster evacuations, and advanced surgical techniques. The wars in Iraq 93

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and Afghanistan have the highest wounded-to-killed ratio in U.S. history: sixteen wounded servicemen for every fatality. In Vietnam it was two to six, in Korea two to eight, and in World Wars I and II approximately two to one. Also, in the past invisible injuries such as PTSD and mild traumatic brain injuries were likely to be ignored; today they are more often properly diagnosed and treated. Even though overseas troop levels began to fall after Barack Obama became president (as of 2015 there are 3,550 troops in Iraq and 9,800 in Afghanistan, in contrast to 139,500 and 34,400 in 2008),234 long-term costs continue to rise as soldiers return home and claim disability benefits. According to the economist Linda Bilmes (who, with Joseph Stiglitz, examined the cost of these wars), even though “the U.S. has been at war continuously since 2001, there has been little—if any—shared sacrifice in recent years” because no one “has paid for the war in cash.”235 Instead, as she explains, money was borrowed and put on the national debt. So even though the United States has spent trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, today’s taxpayers haven’t had to shoulder the burden by paying a war tax or buying war bonds or tightening our belts in any way. In fact, taxes were actually cut twice during the war years and hefty tax breaks were given to the wealthiest in our society—those who seldom serve in the military. This has led to a highly uneven distribution of the burden of war across the U.S. population.236

Paying for these wars entirely through borrowing has accounted for more than one-quarter of the total increase in U.S. government debt since 2001. As Stiglitz and Bilmes reported, throughout the past decade, “Congress routinely approved huge ‘emergency’ appropriations to pay for the wars.”237 The emergency nature of these appropriations is the reason we don’t know where the money was spent, why future debts are not listed anywhere in the federal government’s budget, and, why an accounting framework to assess the cost of these decisions was never presented. Bilmes believes one of “the most significant challenges to future US national security policy will not originate from any external threat” but rather in “coping with the legacy of the conflicts we have already fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.”238 The two trillion dollars spent so far in direct combat operations, reconstruction efforts, and other war spending (by the Department of Defense, State Department, Social 94

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Security Administration, and Department of Veterans Affairs) represent only a small fraction of the total war cost. After all, the peak year for paying disability compensation to World War I veterans was in 1969; for World War II veterans, the late 1980s; and costs for Vietnam veterans and veterans of the first Gulf War are still increasing. With more than twenty-four million living veterans, the VA budget has been recently increased from 61.4 billion dollars in 2001 to 140.3 billion dollars in 2013. Although the estimated cost of these benefits over the veterans’ lifetimes is more than one trillion dollars, Bilmes doesn’t think that throwing more money at the VA will solve the problem. Instead, it’s necessary to reform a system that was set up to serve “a military that was pre-Internet, pre-antibiotics, pre-all-volunteer armed forces,”239 where fewer soldiers survived their battlefield injuries, and where all soldiers were male. Although half of the 2.5 million members of the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, and related reserve and National Guard units that have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan are entitled to receive lifetime disability compensation, the VA (which is the world’s secondlargest government health-care system) seems incapable of getting everyone their medical appointments in a timely fashion, as the accumulation of disability claims demonstrates. A returned veteran must gather documentation and submit a claim to one of the fifty-seven regional VA benefits offices. Since each of the disabling conditions listed on the claim “has to be validated by a medical specialist in the VA health care system . . . an individual veteran claiming the average of eight to 10 conditions must see multiple doctors.”240 Another major problem veterans face is the military retirement system. The Defense Department grants retirement only to those who served for at least twenty years. However, “87 percent of today’s service members leave the military long before 20 years are up. For vets returning home after two or three grueling tours, disability compensation has become a kind of substitute for retirement benefits.”241 This is probably why the VA abruptly stopped releasing statistics on nonfatal war casualties to the public after the toll of injured veterans reached one million.242 In this condition, as Bilmes recently pointed out, it is necessary to ask whether we are willing “pay for a war against ISIS,” which will not only require further spending but, most of all, produce another generation of veterans with invisible wounds.243 95

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2.11 Alfredo Jaar, The Eyes of Gutete Emerita, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, August 31–October 27, 1996. Also available in Islands: Contemporary Installations from Australia, Asia, Europe, and America, ed. Kate Davidson and Michael Desmond (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1996).

Karady’s staged narrative photograph thrusts us into these wounds and discloses the essential emergency of returning veterans in the twenty-first century. Karady’s work reveals that the pictured veteran bears more than wounds from the war; he also bears the historical condition of emergency that marks veterans of his generation: youth, distress, and internal exile. These features (common to thousands of veterans today) create an alteration of the history from which his account emerges. As an essential emergency, this account, rather than rescuing us from the soldier’s emergency, rescues us into his emergency, which would otherwise remain, with similar accounts of the war, invisible. In The Eyes of Gutete Emerita (figure 2.11), Alfredo Jaar thrusts the spectator into another essential emergency, one that was ignored when

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it occurred over a decade ago and that has remained invisible ever since. The work consists of installations that display photographs of the eyes of a survivor of the 1994 Rwanda genocide in light boxes and slides. As one enters the gallery’s darkened space, the story of her terrifying ordeal briefly appears on two boxes mounted on the wall: Gutete Emerita, 30 years old, is standing in front of a church where 400 Tutsi men, women and children were systematically slaughtered by a Hutu death squad during Sunday mass. She was attending mass with her family when the massacre began. Killed with machetes in front of her eyes were her husband Tito Kahinamura, 40, and her two sons, Muhoza, 10, and Matirigari, 7. Somehow, Gutete managed to escape with her daughter Marie Louise Unumararunga, 12. They hid in a swamp for three weeks, coming out only at night for food.

This text is followed by another that describes her appearance and mannerisms: Her eyes look lost and incredulous. Her face is the face of someone who has witnessed an unbelievable tragedy and now wears it. She has returned to the place in the woods because she has nowhere else to go. When she speaks about her lost family, she gestures to corpses on the ground, rotting in the African sun.

This text also disappears and is followed by two more lines that last only for fifteen seconds: I remember her eyes. The eyes of Gutete Emerita.

Finally, for a fraction of a second, Emerita’s eyes appear, and then the boxes start projecting the texts again. A second installation consists of a pile of identical slide images of Emerita’s eyes piled in the center of a large light table. This pile, which resembles corpses in a mass grave, spills to the edges of the table, where a number of loupes demand that the spectator look more closely at her emergency. Jaar has created a similar version of this installation on the Internet; its text also describes the historical context of the genocide.244

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Over a five month period in 1994, more than one million Rwandans, mostly members of the Tutsi minority, were systematically slaughtered as the world closed its eyes to genocide. The killings were largely carried out by Hutu militias who had been armed and trained by the Rwandan military. As a consequence of this genocide, millions of Tutsis and Hutus fled to Zaire (now Congo), Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda. Many still remain in refugee camps, fearing renewed violence upon their return home.

Jaar’s installations both evoke an ignored account of history and reveal Emerita’s emergency and situation within the silent emergency of the contemporary condition. Jaar does not show mass graves or the scenes of violence; he displays Emerita’s eyes, in which the spectator can see the horror of the systemic violence she experienced. Her eyes, unlike those of the world that “closed its eyes to the genocide,” are open. Jaar’s work forces us to see what the world’s governments tried to ignore, covering emergency with its absence. In 1994, Rwanda’s population was composed of three ethnic groups: Hutu (approximately 85 percent), Tutsi (14 percent), and Twa (1 percent). Even though they have similar cultures, speak the same language, and live side by side, there has always been tension between Tutsi and Hutu. Although the precolonial roots of the distinction between Hutus and Tutsi is largely unknown, Philip Gourevitch recalls that one of the most important differences was that Hutus were cultivators and Tutsis were herdsmen. This was the original inequality: cattle are a more valuable asset than produce, and although some Hutus owned cows while some Tutsis tilled the soil, the word Tutsi became synonymous with a political and economic elite. The stratification is believed to have been accelerated after 1860, when the Mwami Kigeri Rwabugiri, a Tutsi, ascended to the Rwandan throne and initiated a series of military and political campaigns that expanded and consolidated his dominion over a territory nearly the size of the present Republic.245

However, the tension between Tutsi and Hutu, as Christian Caryl explains, is not an expression of some “ancient ethnic hatred” dating back centuries but rather “a product of warped racial ideas implanted by 98

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Rwanda’s Belgian colonizers and aggravated by scheming Rwandan politicians who sought to use ethnic hatred to keep themselves in power.”246 The Belgians required Rwandans to carry identity cards that classified them by their ethnicity, and the colonial power favored the minority Tutsis, giving them a range of advantages over the majority Hutus. Paradoxically, when the Hutus revolted in 1959, forcing as many as three hundred thousand Tutsi to flee the country, the Belgians abandoned their favorites and granted Rwanda’s independence, leaving the Hutus in control. Since 1962, Rwanda has been governed by political parties associated with the Hutu majority, who have systematically discredited the Tutsi and blamed them for the country’s increasing social, economic, and political problems. This led the Tutsi, half of whom were living outside the country, to form a rebel group (the Rwandan Patriot Front), which invaded Rwanda on October 1, 1990. This started a civil war between Hutus and Tutsi that officially ended with the signing of the Arusha Accords in August 1993. In the hope the groups could coexist in harmony, the UN-sponsored peace agreement requested that the Rwandan government govern with Hutu opposition parties and the Tutsi minority; UN peacekeepers would guarantee “a cease-fire and assist in demilitarization and demobilization as well as to help provide a secure environment, so that exiled Tutsi could return.”247 Unfortunately, hard-line elements within the Rwandan government and Hutu extremists were not pleased with the Arusha agreement because it included the deployment of a battalion of RPF troops in Kigali (to lead the formation of a broad-based transitional government) and did not grant Hutu killers amnesty. The Hutus, who had dominated the Rwandan political and economical scene for three decades, were afraid that the Tutsis, who had long been persecuted, would respond violently if given the chance to govern again. Memories of preindependence Rwanda were passed down through the generations (children could recite at length the sins the Tutsis had committed against their forefathers), and hatred of the Tutsi increased, encouraged by the national media.248 Hutu extremists began to “terrorize the Tutsi and those who supported power-sharing.”249 By 1992, as Samantha Power explains, “Hutu militia had purchased, stockpiled, and begun distributing an estimated eighty-five tons of munitions, as well as 581,000 machetes—one machete for every third adult Hutu male.”250 99

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The situation deteriorated dramatically enough in 1993 for a number of international and UN bodies to take interest. In early 1993 Monique Mujawamariya, executive director of the Rwanda Association for the Defense of Human Rights, urged international human rights groups to visit her country in the hopes of deterring further violence. . . . The commission’s March 1993 report found that more than 10,000 Tutsi had been detained and 2,000 murdered since the RPF’s 1990 invasion. 10 Government-supported killers had carried out at least three major massacres of Tutsi. Extremist, racist rhetoric and militias were proliferating. The international commission and a UN rapporteur who soon followed warned explicitly of a possible genocide.251

A 2,548-member UN peacekeeping force (UNAMIR) was sent to Rwanda in 1993 under the command of Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire to supervise the implementation of the Arusha Accords. The Canadian commander’s task was to negotiate with the Tutsi rebel commander Paul Kagame, the Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana, and the Rwandan army during this transitional period, but Rwanda was not ready for peace. The parties did not manage to follow through on their initial political agreements, and violence flared up around the country. In December Dallaire was warned by a senior group of Rwandan military officers that proregime Hutu militia groups known as the Interahamwe were planning massacres of Tutsi and their protectors. These warnings were later confirmed by an informant, Jean-Pierre Abubakar Turatsinze (introduced to UNAMIR by prime minister–designate Faustin Twagiramungu), a top-ranking security official of the Hutu-led government but also half-Tutsi and, thus, in danger. Turatsinze said that the militia first needed to “provoke and murder a number of Belgian peacekeepers, in order to ‘guarantee Belgian withdrawal from Rwanda.’ ”252 In exchange for protection for him and his family, the informant offered to take the peacekeepers to major arms caches littered throughout Rwanda, including one containing at least 135 weapons. As Philip Gourevitch reported in We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, on January 11, 1994, Dallaire sent a fax to the department of Peacekeeping Operations at the UN Headquarters in New York outlining the plan of the genocide and requesting approval to seize the Interahamwe weapons. Kofi Annan, at the time chief of UN peacekeeping and later secretary-general, treated 100

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the fax as a routine bureaucratic matter. His deputy, Iqbal Riza, replied to Dallaire the same day rejecting the operation as beyond the “mandate entrusted to UNAMIR” and instructing him to inform the ambassadors to Rwanda from France, Belgium, and the United States of the plans to exterminate Tutsi and to “share his information with President Habyarimana,”253 even though he was linked to the Interahamwe. No efforts were “made at peacekeeping headquarters to alert the United Nations Secretariat or the Security Council of the startling news that an ‘extermination’ was reportedly being planned in Rwanda.”254 Michael Barnett, who was a political officer at the United States Mission to the United Nations in 1993 and 1994, recalls that the greatest concern “was not what the Rwandans might do but rather what Dallaire intended to do.”255 Even though Dallaire felt he had the clear authority under the Arusha Accords to confiscate illegal weapons in the Kigali area, there was little he could do other than warn that both the Hutu-dominated Rwandan army and the Tutsi-dominated RPF were preparing for a fresh outbreak of hostilities. When President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down by Hutu officials on April 6,256 armed Hutu took command of the streets of Kigali, seeking to kill all those who supported a Hutu-Tutsi peace process. Two days after the plane crash, Dallaire sent another telegram to New York reporting the political killings of Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana, government ministers, and ten Belgian peacekeepers. Although the Hutu authorities claimed the violence was uncontrolled, “Dallaire described instead a ‘very well-planned, organized, deliberate and conducted campaign of terror initiated principally by the Presidential Guard;’ he urged that UN forces make protecting government leaders their ‘major task.’ ”257 After a week in which ten thousand Rwandans were killed in Kigali alone, the United Nations, instead of granting Dallaire a well-equipped battalion to stop the slaughter, “immediately ordered its forces not to protect civilians [and] on April 21, it ordered that all but 270 troops be withdrawn.”258 At this point the Canadian commander, who was insufficiently equipped with vehicles and personnel,259 was left with only one option: defend as many Tutsi as possible. He protected specific areas where Tutsi were hiding and assembled others at positions manned by UNAMIR personnel because the Hutus were generally reluctant to massacre large groups of Tutsi if foreigners were present.260 Even though Dallaire is estimated to have saved 32,000 people (of different races) in 101

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under one hundred days, “more than 800,000 would be dead, 2 million would flee for their lives to neighboring countries, and another 2 million would be driven from their homes,”261 resulting in the worst mass killing since the Holocaust and the Turkish genocide of Armenians. Although other nations claimed they were unaware of what was happening in Rwanda, today it has become clear, thanks to a number of declassified documents, that what prevented the international community from stopping the killings was the absence not of information but, as Timothy Longman recently suggested, “of political will.”262 These documents, obtained by the National Security Archive and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, consist of three hundred secret cables from the United States, Britain, New Zealand, and other members of the United Nations Security Council. Even though Madeleine K. Albright, the American ambassador to the United Nations at the time, welcomed the release of the cables, it has now become clear that she was ordered to request the withdrawal of all the forces from the country as soon as it became evident that the massacre would begin.263 The United States, which was the only country capable of dictating the UN reply to the slaughter, was reluctant to intervene. Even before UN and CIA officials briefed the Clinton administration on the Rwandan emergency,264 it had no interest in running any significant risks in Rwanda, for three reasons. First, eighteen U.S. marines in a UN peacekeeping operation had died in Mogadishu less than six months earlier. This operation, which Clinton inherited from President George H. W. Bush, was meant to pave the way for a massive humanitarian relief effort in Somalia but gradually entangled American military forces in a war with local militias, who also managed to shoot down two Black Hawk helicopters. Second, “the White House was finalizing a presidential directive, known as PDD-25, which placed severe constraints on the conditions required for U.S. support for peacekeeping missions.”265 And finally, Clinton, who was preoccupied with a healthcare bill and upcoming midterm congressional elections, had to confront a Republican-controlled Congress that, with the American public, preferred to avoid another UN peacekeeping mission after the Somali experience. As soon as it became clear the conflict would escalate, the White House’s only concern was to get all American citizens out of the country; find Monique Mujawamariya, the human-rights activist who had 102

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met with President Clinton at the White House; and put an end to UNAMIR. This is why, as Power recalls, most officials “in the Pentagon greeted the news of the Belgians’ death as proof that the UN mission in Rwanda had gone from being a ‘Somalia waiting to happen’ to a Somalia that was happening,”266 and in “her April 12 cable, Ms. Albright said there was a ‘window of opportunity’ to withdraw the bulk of the force because the airport in the capital, Kigali, was still under the control of Belgian and French troops.” Although she advocated leaving behind a “skeletal staff that might be able to facilitate a cease-fire and any future political negotiations,” it was clear the Rwandan emergency was to be ignored.267 When the massacres began, Clinton refused not only to put an end to the slaughter but also other options that could have saved many lives: President Clinton did not convene a single meeting of his senior foreign policy advisers to discuss U.S. options for Rwanda. His top aides rarely condemned the slaughter. The United States did not deploy its technical assets to jam Rwandan hate radio, and it did not lobby to have the genocidal Rwandan government’s ambassador expelled from the United Nations. Those steps that the United States did take had deadly repercussions. Washington demanded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from Rwanda and then refused to authorize the deployment of UN reinforcements. Remembering Somalia and hearing no American demands for intervention, President Clinton and his advisers knew that the military and political risks of involving the United States in a bloody conflict in central Africa were great, yet there were no costs to avoiding Rwanda altogether.268

Clinton, years after the genocide, flew to Rwanda to express regret for failing to halt the genocide. He explained, during an emotional threehour stop at Kigali’s airport, that the international community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy. We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. . . . We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide. . . . People like me . . . did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.269 103

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We now have evidence that his “claims were false”270 and that the Rwandan emergency was intentionally ignored. Perhaps this is why during his visit he never left the airfield. The open eyes in Jaar’s work reveal Clinton’s and the international community’s willfully closed eyes. It also overcomes the historical frame that led to this ignorance. Unlike photo essays reporting on the genocide in newspapers or magazines, which only disclose what occurred, Jaar’s installation thrusts us into the consequences of the international community’s indifference. These consequences went as fully ignored as had the genocide, considering that Clinton was reelected president and Annan elected UN secretary-general. But Emerita’s account breaks this indifference and invokes our intervention against this frame. This is why the text in Jaar’s installation does not simply inform us of the genocide  but also narrates Emerita’s personal account, which allows the spectators to see in her eyes what her eyes saw. In sum, while media photographs “put being to work in a Being,” concealing the essential emergency, Jaar’s creation “puts Being to work in a being,” disclosing Being, creating an alteration. This alteration allows us to recall and participate in an ordeal that the international community is still responsible for. What we see in The Eyes of Gutete Emerita is the ongoing emergency—and our own responsibility for its creation and complicity in its absence. Jane Frere’s work Return of the Soul: The Nakba Project (figure 2.12) engaged a number of Palestinian refugees. This work consists of approximately seven thousand miniature human figures representing the Nakba catastrophe, that is, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.271 Each wax figure is the same light yellow color, but they diminish in size (from twenty-two centimeters to half a centimeter), creating the illusion of a crowd receding into the distance. They are all suspended by transparent nylon from the roof of the gallery and face the same way. These figures were not made by Frere; instead, she taught Palestinian art groups how to make them in a series of workshops in refugee camps. The installation is accompanied by written testimonies and audio and video recordings of interviews with families expelled during the establishment of the state of Israel. These are accounts of loss, fear, and hope of return. Frere’s installation272 gives voice to these stories but also presents the essential emergency that has been concealed by their silence: the ongoing denial of the ethnic cleansing. The Nakba is still not recognized as a 104

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2.12 Jane Frere, Return of the Soul: The Nakba Project, 2007–2008. Al Hoash Gallery, East Jerusalem, June–July 2008. Photograph by Abdo Nawar at the Beirut exhibition in Balad al Shams Theatre, September 2008.

major historical event, even though Palestinians are still suffering its consequences in refugee camps throughout the Middle East. “Zionist thinkers claimed the biblical territory and recreated, indeed reinvented, it as the cradle of their new nationalist movement.”273 According to Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, Palestine was occupied by “strangers” who had to be evicted, but by “strangers” he did not mean foreigners but was referring to people who had been living there since the Roman period. Even before the first Jewish settlers arrived in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century, Herzl, like other colonialist leaders in the past, described (in his diaries) the two methods by which the poor and wealthy populations would be expelled. The former had to be pushed “across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country”; the latter was to be bought out with the illusion that “they are cheating us, selling things for more than they are worth. 105

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But we are not going to sell them anything back.”274 Herzl thought of Zionism both as the creation of a Jewish theocracy (that is, the nationalization and secularization of Judaism) and as part of Europe’s overseas colonial project; he planned to form there “a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”275 This latter reason is probably why Zionism enjoyed great sympathy among Western policy makers. Many leading politicians, including Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour and Prime Minister Lloyd George of the United Kingdom, supported the Zionist movement, and others, such as President Theodore Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, also held strong anti-Arab views. As Ilan Pappé explains in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, although the British did not treat Palestine as a colony but as a state within the British sphere of influence, preference was always given to the Jewish people who lobbied from abroad. For example, in 1928 when the British put in place a political structure that would represent both communities equally in the state’s parliament as well as in the government, they “advantaged the Zionist colonies and discriminated against the Palestinian majority,”276 which was between 80 and 90 percent of the total population. As Ahmad H. Sa’di recalls, The British supported Zionism until at least 1940, blocking Palestinian efforts to halt Zionist immigration and settlement. Under British rule, the size of the Jewish population grew more than tenfold—from 56,000 in 1914 to about 650,000 in 1948. Their share in the population soared from a mere 9 percent to about 34 percent. Under the British, the Yishuv had established an underground military force that was larger and stronger than anything the Arab states and Palestinian community were able to put up.277

Although no significant outbursts of violence were reported between Jews and Palestinians before the British announced their intention to leave Palestine in February 1947, there were several signs of an imminent conflict. Once the United Nations accepted the mandate to decide Palestine’s future in 1948, a special commission was appointed (UNSCOP). The commission recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab one. The former was to be established on 56 percent of Palestine’s territory and was to include a slight Jewish majority of 106

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499,000 Jews versus 438,000 Palestinians. The latter was supposed to be composed of 43 percent of the country and would include 818,000 Palestinians and fewer than ten thousand Jews.278 The problem with this scheme is that it was presented to the “two contending parties, not as a basis for negotiation but as a fait accompli, even though the total Palestinian rejection of the principles underpinning the plan was well known to the UN.”279 The scheme proposed by the United Nations faithfully supported the Zionist strategy, granting the Jewish minority, 660,000 out of two million, the larger portion of the land, but the Jewish leaders also refused to accept a final demarcation of the Jewish state’s borders. As the historian Benny Morris points out, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion saw this “partition as a stepping stone to further expansion and eventual takeover of the whole of Palestine.”280 Either the UN peace architects did not have any idea of Zionist ideology and strategy, or they were trying “compensate the Jews for the Nazi Holocaust in Europe.”281 As a result, the Zionist movement was given a state that stretched over more than half of the region, starting a conflict that continues today. “The conflict of 1948 unfolded in several stages. Soon after the announcement of the UN partition resolution in November 1947, local clashes erupted between the two communities. Attacks and retributions escalated into civil strife.”282 As soon as a plan to place Palestine under an international trusteeship was presented at the beginning of April 1948, the Jewish military force opened a large-scale offensive known as “Plan D.” According to Pappé, the execution of “Plan D” was ordered on March 10, 1948, by a group of veteran Zionist leaders and young Jewish military officers. The orders were very clear: systematically expel Palestinians from areas of the country through “large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.”283 A month and a half after these orders were given, neighboring Arab states sent forces to attempt to halt the Zionist seizure of territory and the ethnic cleansing of the population, but within six months 531 villages had been destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied, water supplies had been poisoned, numerous cases of rape and murder were reported, and more than half of Palestine’s native population had 107

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been expelled.284 Palestinian refugees spent the winter of 1948 in tent camps provided by volunteer agencies, and these soon became “their permanent residences. The tents were replaced by clay huts that became a familiar feature of Palestinian existence in the Middle East.”285 Even though today there is almost no academic controversy about the course of these events, “popular perception of these events is still clouded by the myths the Zionist leadership created to hide what it had done.”286 These myths vary from the “Zionist leaders accepting the UN partition” and “Arab armies invading Israel and therefore making war unavoidable” to “Arab states turning down Israeli peace proposals.”287 However, the most absurd myth of all consists in portraying the events of 1948 as a war between two equally equipped armies instead of an expelling military force and the “the massive expulsion of an indigenous population.”288 The fundamental reason the Nakba is still denied is that it is “not over yet; after almost sixty years neither the Palestinians nor Israelis have yet achieved a state of normality; the violence and uprooting of Palestinians continues.”289 Although the Nakba is a clear consequence of the Zionist project in Palestine, its denial is based on the diplomatic and moral consequences of acknowledgment. This is why the worst fear of Israeli negotiators at the Camp David Summit in 2000 was that Israel’s responsibility for the 1948 catastrophe could become a negotiable issue for the return of its refugees. According to Pappé: It can be seen then, that a public debate on the issue of the Nakba, whether conducted in Israel itself or in the United States, its imperial protector, could open up questions concerning the moral legitimacy of the Zionist project as a whole. The mechanism of denial, therefore, was crucial, not only for defeating the counter-claims made by Palestinians in the peace process, but, far more importantly, for disallowing any significant debate on the very essence and moral foundations of Zionism.290

The absence of any significant debate on Zionism has transformed the ethnic cleansing into the ideological infrastructure on which the Jewish state was built, and the denial of what happened has guided Israeli policies. One of most alarming issues in contemporary Israeli society is that textbooks and intellectuals still cover over the Nakba with tales of their soldiers’ moral courage and military competence during 1948 ethnic 108

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cleansing, and many have also begun to see it as an “inevitable and justifiable consequence of the Zionist project in Palestine. If there is any lament, it is that the expulsion was not completed.”291 Denying the Nakba is a way to continue its implementation. When Yasser Arafat declared May 15, 1998, the day after Israeli independence in 1948, “Nakba Day” (a term adopted as an attempt to counter the moral weight of the Jewish Holocaust), the Palestinian Authority began organizing rallies in the Palestinian cities, refugee camps, and towns in Israel. Unfortunately, these rallies have often turned into demonstrations that would escalate into violent clashes with Israeli security forces. “On the evening before the first Nakba Day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented that ‘Israel was not responsible for the Palestinian tragedy, their leadership is.’ ”292 A sort of forced public amnesia was also imposed on Palestinians living in Israel after 1948: any commemorations of the Nakba were prohibited. “Only gradually, with the ending of military rule and the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, and especially after the shock of the 1967 war, did a narrative begin to develop and grow to its open manifestations of the last three decades.”293 In order to help this narrative, Pope Francis announced on May 15, 2015, that the Vatican would recognize the state of Palestine.294 Even though the Holy See had already recognized a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in 2012 (during a UN vote granting the Palestinian Authority observer status), this announcement is particularly significant because it took place on the date of the commemoration of the Nakba. The “Israel foreign minister issued a statement citing its ‘disappointment,’ saying the decision would not advance a negotiated end to the long-standing conflict.”295 Frere’s installation thrusts the viewer into this denied account and creates the conditions to overcome its historical frames, which take the form of official Israeli history. It does this not by granting the Nakba an image (there are photographs of refugees leaving Palestine) but by disclosing the absence the Nakba’s history contains. Frere’s installation allows the denial to emerge. The word “return” in the installation’s title refers not only to the evicted population but also to its descendants, those who participated in the creation of Frere’s work. In this way, the participation of Palestinian refugees in the creation of the figures accounts for the Nakba and also belongs to it, and in doing so it discloses 109

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its ongoing emergency. Again, Frere’s work rescues us into an essential emergency, one that determines both the most significant event in the history of Palestinians and their current condition. The veterans, victims, and survivors who participated in the creation of Karady’s, Jaar’s, and Frere’s works represent, in different ways, the “space” Ronell refers to. Their accounts have allowed the creators to alter the historical frames that concealed essential emergencies. This disclosure allows us to acknowledge their experiences but also participate in them. This participation is possible not because the artists reveal what historically or objectively occurred to their subjects but because they alter history by overcoming its framing. Something similar occurs in the social paradoxes, urban discharges, and environmental calls we confronted earlier in the chapter. Like these accounts, those works, instead of disclosing objective truths, overcome them so as to thrust us into their essential emergencies, emergencies that we can no longer afford to overlook if we care about our social, urban, environmental, and historical salvation.

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3 EMERGENCY AESTHETICS Only the most original meditation can save us—into emergency. One always finds a way to “happiness” in every case, even if it is only frugality and the abandonment of demands. Those who rescue us from “emergency”—certainly—but rescuers into emergency: where are they? Those who venture into the untrodden and unformed realm of the opening of the emergency that urges, insofar as it demands that human beings be free—that they bear the abyss—and this emergency is be-ing itself. (The emergency “of” be-ing: that is not an emergency in which be-ing “finds itself,” but one that it is.) —Heidegger, Überlegungen X (Schwarze Hefte)

Th e twelve works of art I discuss in chapter 2 thrust us into essential emergencies and call into question our comfortable existence. The emergency aesthetics I limn does not simply overcome measurable representations and indifferent beauty but most of all creates the conditions that enable us to respond to the existential call of art in the twenty-first century. If this call offers any opportunity for us to save ourselves, it does so not by indicating where the danger is but rather by itself being the danger. As Martin Heidegger says, what is most dangerous is when danger conceals “itself as the danger that it is.”1 The meditation that Heidegger refers to in this chapter’s epigraph is not aesthetics or any other philosophical discipline. These, as I mention in the first chapter, conceal the remains of Being as they are framed within metaphysics. Instead, the original meditation is the thought of Being that interprets its remnants and therefore can save us.2 In his comments on Friedrich Hölderlin’s verse “But where the danger is, also grows the saving power,” Heidegger gave two insightful definitions of these terms: “to interpret” means “to ground the projection of the truth of his poetry in the meditation and disposition wherein future 111

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Da-sein oscillates,”3 and salvation is “to fetch something home into its essence, in order to bring the essence for the first time into its genuine appearing.”4 So in the realm of the original meditation, contrary to such disciplines as hermeneutics and theology, interpretation is not a matter of “better” understanding a work of art, and salvation does not mean to “rescue” someone from danger. Instead, both draw us closer to the genuine appearance. This appearance (which emerges through the creator’s works) is the essential emergency. However, this drawing us closer does not mean that we “experience” or “awaken” the emergency but rather that we become the emergency. We cannot simply observe, describe, and understand emergencies without being part of them. The goal of this chapter is to interpret and intervene upon the genuine appearance. Aesthetics, as I suggest in the first chapter, must be overcome. This does not mean it disappears but rather surpasses those metaphysical frames that conceal the absence of emergency. Against the ahistorical mode of aesthetics, which represents, orders, and manipulates beings and leaves human beings without a sense of emergency, aesthetics in the original meditation dwells in this emergency. Contemplations of indifferent beauty, which rest on the correspondence between propositions and facts, are overcome in favor of interpretation and interventions that retrieve everything ignored by this same correspondence. These interventions, such as those performed by the works of art discussed in chapter 2, emerge through social, urban, environmental, and historical alterations. But instead of representable objects to be contemplated and experienced as we please, they enact tensions and events that we cannot control. The interpretation and intervention required to draw us closer to the genuine appearance must be anarchic and existential, suited to “venture into the untrodden and unformed realm of the opening of the emergency.”5 “Emergency,” then, can no longer always be considered something evil or unfavorable. According to Heidegger, we value freedom from emergency as a “good,” and indeed we are correct to do so when at issue are well-being and prosperity. For these depend entirely on an unbroken supply of useful and enjoyable things, things already objectively present, ones which can be increased through progress. Progress has no future, however, because it merely takes

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things that already are and expedites them “further on their previous path.”6

The problem with these enjoyable things is that they conceal Being, “what is genuinely to come and thus resides completely outside of the distinction between good and evil and withdraws itself from all calculation.”7 But how is it possible to reside outside this distinction? The fact that these artworks’ creators have thrust us into essential emergencies does not imply we also dwell in the emergency. We still have to become “aware of suffering it”8 to interpret its absence. Interpretation, unlike contemplation or description, requires an effort that is not merely linguistic but also anarchic because it can never strive for completeness. In contemplation, the contemplator has already made all decisions, but in interpretation they must always be established anew. We cannot manage or control the emergence of emergencies. However, the inability to control this emergence is not a flaw of interpretation but displays its exclusiveness, a restrictiveness that will save us from Heidegger’s infinite supply of enjoyable and beautiful things, where indifference reigns over Being’s remnants. In sum, if the distress we experience when our interpretations come into question is an indication of salvation, it is because it calls not for a different path but for an existential intervention. This is why emergency, as Heidegger says, “does not first need help but instead must itself first become the help.”9 In the original meditation, the principle of aesthetics ceases to be cultural (an indifferent measure of beauty) and becomes ontological, an existential intervention for the sake of genuine appearance, that is, salvation.10 To link this salvation to the essential emergencies disclosed by works of art, it is first necessary to outline the anarchic nature of interpretation.

ANARCHIC INTERPRETATIONS To confront the alterations revealed in the work of kennardphillipps, Hema Upadhyay, Néle Azevedo, or Jennifer Karady, emergency aesthetics must rely on hermeneutics (from the Greek hermeneuein, to interpret) because the goal of interpretation is not to understand the work

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better but to retrieve what is concealed. It is important first to recall that philosophical hermeneutics until now has primarily been concerned with stressing how art, like science, manifests truth claims. This was Hans-Georg Gadamer’s main goal when he systematically established it  as a philosophical discipline in his 1960 magnum opus Truth and Method. But while Gadamer and other hermeneutic thinkers such as Emilio Betti and Paul Ricoeur stress the interpretative nature of truth, they have ignored the anarchic nature of interpretation. This exclusion was probably caused by the weight that theological hermeneutics (hermeneutica sacra) and juridical hermeneutics (hermeneutica juris) still exerted upon modern hermeneutics as well as by an excessive academic prudence aimed at preserving the classical distinction between Geisteswissenschaften, the “human” or “moral” sciences, and Naturwissenschaften, the natural sciences. This has obscured the vital origins of hermeneutics and, most of all, its anarchic nature, which only recently has begun to gain attention from Reiner Schürmann, Gianni Vattimo, and other philosophers.11 As Francisco Gonzalez explains, the “very term ‘hermeneutics’ comes from a family of Ancient Greek terms: ‘hermeneuein’ or ‘hermêneusai’ and ‘hermêneia’ to designate an activity, ‘hermênês’ to designate the individual who carries out this activity, and ‘hermêneutikê’ to designate a particular discipline associated with this activity.”12 The individual is the messenger god Hermes, whose name points back to his winged feet. This messenger was renowned for his speed, athleticism, and swiftness; he exercised the practical activity of delivering the announcements, warnings, and prophecies of the gods of Olympus. In the Cratylus (407e), Ion (534e), and Symposium (202e), Plato connects the term “hermênea” etymologically to the name of the god Hermes and presents hermeneutics both as a theory of reception and “as a practice for transmission and mediation”: Hermes must transmit what is beyond human understanding in a form that human intelligence can grasp. However, in this transmission, Hermes was often accused of thievery, treachery, and even anarchy because the messages were never accurate; in other words, his interpretations always altered the original meanings. Hermes, as Gerald L. Bruns put it, was “the many-sided, uncontainable, nocturnal transgressor.”13 Hermes’s transgressions, his alterations, are the contribution of  interpretation; unlike descriptions, which pursue the ideal of total 114

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explanation, interpretation adds new vitality. Wilhelm Dilthey (who in the seventeenth century was the first systematically to trace the history of hermeneutics) saw in the vitalist essence of hermeneutics the priority of interpretation over theoretical criticism, scientific inquiry, and literary construction. Friedrich Schleiermacher believed it could help us understand a work “at first just as well and then better than its author,”14 and Friedrich Nietzsche recognized that “there are no facts, only interpretations, and this is also an interpretation.”15 Even though there are several other authors (Rudolf Bultmann, Richard Rorty, and John D. Caputo) who stress the vital or active side of hermeneutics, Martin Luther is “customarily considered responsible for discovering or revitalizing hermeneutics.”16 Luther is particularly significant for hermeneutics because he believed, as Gadamer pointed out, that neither “the doctrinal authority of the Pope nor the appeal to tradition can obviate the work of hermeneutics, which can safeguard the reasonable meaning of a text against all imposition.”17 This is why his Ninety-Five Theses (1517) and translation of the Bible into German (1534) provoked a general political revolt against the papacy. Until then, the ecclesiastical hierarchy had forced every believer to turn to its officials for readings, interpretations, and elucidations of the text. His hermeneutic operation was directed against the hegemony of the Catholic Church’s magisterial establishment, which pretended to be the only valid interpreter of the biblical text. In opposition to their spiritual, cultural, and political authority, Luther instead believed that the literal meaning of the Bible contained its own proper spiritual significance, which should be interpreted by each believer: the Bible is per se “certissima, apertissima, sui ipsius interpres, omnium omnia probans, indicans et illuminans”; that is, “it interprets itself.” With his principle of sola scriptura, that is, the absolutization of the text, Luther was valorizing the linguistic text and one’s own linguistic practice, the interpreter’s capacity to judge for herself. If, as Luther said, “Scripture is not understood, unless it is brought home, that is, experienced,” then interpretation cannot be dictated from above and must be experienced from within. Interpretation is part of existence because by bringing new vitality to the text, it also reinforces the interpreter’s own faith. Luther’s translation brought about a revolutionary political operation through hermeneutics, through the vital nature of interpretation. 115

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He transformed the Bible from a foreign book in a foreign tongue, accessible only through an establishment imposed from above, into a document open for all literate people’s interpretation. After his translation, the Bible could be read without the permission or intervention of the Catholic Church. In this translation Luther did not simply stretch “the syntax, grammar, and vocabulary of German to be able to say what had been inexpressible in German prior to this translation” but also “united previously diverse linguistic groups.”18 With Luther’s impact in Germany comparable to if not greater than that of Dante in Italy or Rousseau in France, Hegel could affirm that if Luther had done nothing besides this translation, he would still be one of the greatest benefactors of the German-speaking people. Although the traditions of the church should not be put aside, since they are also an effect of the Bible’s history, Luther should be recognized for his anarchic interpretation, that is, for depriving for the first time the Roman pontifex of his absolute authority over the Bible. By recognizing everyone’s right to interpret, Luther exercised the latent anarchic nature of hermeneutics, an anarchic interpretation. “As practiced by the ancients and their humanist admirers,” Kathy Eden explains, “interpretation is by and large adversarial, an antagonistic affair.”19 This adversarial and antagonistic quality is also evident in the various histories of hermeneutics. It seems almost impossible to establish its origins because what “counts as belonging to the hermeneutic ‘tradition,’ and how the history of hermeneutics should be configured, is thus itself a hermeneutic problem.”20 Some histories situate the creation of philosophical hermeneutics in the seventeenth century, when Johann Dannhauer introduced the Latin word “hermeneutica” as a necessary requirement for those sciences that relied on the interpretation of texts, but others proclaim that it was formed two centuries earlier by Flacius, in Clavis scripturae sacrae, or even centuries earlier by Aristotle, in his treatise Peri hermeneias (De interpretatione).21 However, what is certain is that the history of hermeneutics cannot be presented as a “teleological process that, starting in antiquity and proceeding through the Reformation and romanticism, was brought to consummation in philosophical hermeneutics.”22 This is probably why Vattimo believes that the history of modern hermeneutics, and, so far as we can imagine, also its future, is a history of “excess”—of the transgression of limits, or, to 116

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use another idiom, the history of a continuous “overflowing.” From its origins as an inquiry into the understanding of the texts of the past, it developed into a general philosophy of existence, and then into the only possibly ontology.23

Like Vattimo, Bruns, who is among the first to point out the anarchic nature of hermeneutics, finds that hermeneutics is a loose and baggy monster, or anyhow a less than fully disciplined body of thinking, whose inventory of topics spreads out over many different historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts. Hermeneutics is “anarchic” in Rainer Schürmann’s sense of this word; it does not try to assault its Sache but rather tries to grant what is singular and unrepeatable an open field.24

Both Vattimo and Bruns are following Schürmann’s definition of “anarchy” as the absence not of rules but of a unique and universal rule.25 This is why, as a resistance to authority, conventions, and categories, anarchy is not the end of hermeneutics but its beginning. The anarchy that hermeneutics relies upon is not a metaphysical foundation but an ontological condition where achievements are measured in relation not to factual truths but to historical events. Hermeneutics “can no longer be presented, if it was ever able to be, as an innocent theory of the interpretative character of every experience of truth.”26 Instead it is a vital effort to venture into the untrodden and unformed realm of the opening of the emergency. Although Heidegger never refers to “anarchic interpretations,” he was the first to elevate hermeneutics “to the center of philosophical concern,”27 that is, ontological inquiry. In Being and Time he explains that every interpretation (even scientific interpretation) is governed by the concrete existential situation of the interpreter. And in his lecture course Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity,28 he points out that the goal of hermeneutics “is not merely taking cognizance of something and having knowledge about it, but rather an existential knowing, i.e., a Being [‘ein Sein’]. It speaks from out of interpretation and for the sake of it.” But what does this “existential knowing” refer to, and why is it important for our anarchic interpretations? It is important to recall how we stand in the world according to Heidegger. 117

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“The fundamental thought of my thinking,” he told Richard Wisser in a televised interview in 1969, “is precisely that Being, or the manifestation [Offenbarkeit] of being, needs human beings and that, vice versa, human beings are only human beings if they are standing in the manifestation of Being.”29 What is significant in this declaration is what makes human beings different from other beings that are not human. Heidegger explains that this seems to be the capacity we have to “stand” in the manifestation or genuine appearance of Being. He does not believe we exist in the world as pure reason but rather as a “thrown project,” that is, an individual with interests, concerns, and expectations. Against the traditional tripartition of man into body, soul, and spirit, he coined the term “Dasein.” Dasein is not the world, the subject, or a property of both; it is the relation, the in-between, which does not arise from the subject coming together with the world but from its essential features: “thrownness,” “fallenness,” and, in particular, “existence.” “Thrownness” refers to the fact that Dasein always finds itself already in a certain historically conditioned environment, that is, in a world where the space of possibilities is always historically limited. “Fallenness” instead characterizes its existence in the midst of beings that are both Dasein and not Dasein. “Existence,” which is Dasein’s central feature, refers to its potentiality-for-being, “Seinkönnen,” since it projects its being upon various possibilities, in particular the phenomenon of the future. It is this essential characteristic that makes Dasein not a rational being but, more profoundly, a relationship to Being upon which humanity must decide if it wants to exist as “a describer of objectivity” or an “interpreter of Being.” While the former conceives itself on the basis of what is objectively present, implying that it is finished, determined, and completed as an object might be, the latter always remains open to the future because it implies “Möglich-sein,” being possible, possibilities that determine its existence. In sum, “hermeneutics no longer refers to the science of interpretation, but to the process of interpretation that is an essential characteristic of life or existence itself.”30 Heidegger called for the overcoming of the position of the neutral observer, who holds a “view from nowhere,” in favor of an interested interpreter who is concerned with the ontological essence of the world, that is, with existential knowing. In this condition, to “be human is thus to be an interpreter and not in any merely contingent sense, but essentially.”31

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The fundamental characteristic of this condition is that it must continuously struggle against the world (as it is) in order to exist. Its practice must be one of interpretations that (like those of Hermes and Luther) are transgressive, adversarial, and antagonistic. Vattimo has recently compared hermeneutics to environmental movements: both are “committed to defend[ing] the survival of the human species on earth” and also “explicitly accused of being crypto-terrorist[s] and fomenters of social disorder.”32 While some might consider this a negative attribute, Vattimo instead believes this accusation recognizes the anarchic nature of interpretations. Interpretation is a vital practice, a philosophy of praxis, where Being’s remnants are always held open for existential purposes.33 But interpretation does not simply overcome the passive acceptance that characterizes contemplation. It also overthrows the indifference that results from beauty. This is why the “hermeneuticist, if they are to become serious, must also become, fatally, a militant—the question is: for which cause?”34

EXISTENTIAL INTERVENTIONS The cause Vattimo refers to is the existential call of art in the twentyfirst century, the essential emergencies that are disclosed through works of art. This emergency has involved us at an ontological level where what is at stake is not beauty but rather our social, urban, environmental, and historical existence. Although each of these is threatened in different ways, they all require that we intervene in a process of transformation that is vital for our future. While the experience of truth encountered in art was the keystone of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, for us it’s the disclosure of the essential emergency, the absence of emergency. This absence does not request only our interpretative efforts but also an existential intervention in order to recover the sense of emergency lost through measurable contemplations. In metaphysical aesthetics, as Heidegger pointed out, “the beautiful is the relaxing, what is restful and thus intended for enjoyment. Art . . . [here] belongs in the domain of the pastry chef.”35 But in emergency aesthetics the beautiful is an existential intervention that belongs to the militant hermeneuticist, and the perception of beauty must thereby be a result of anarchic interpretations. This

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is why hermeneutics, as Nicholas Davey insists, “is a philosophical practice rather than a philosophical method.”36 Emergency aesthetics belongs to the original meditation where interpretation does not consist in a better understanding of a work of art but in a process that is an essential characteristic of existence. Thus, for Heidegger, “hermeneutics is not philosophy at all, but in fact something preliminary which runs in advance of it and has its own reason for being: what is at issue in it, what it all comes to, is not to become finished with it as quickly as possible, but rather to hold out in it as long as possible.”37 “Holding out,” like anarchic interpretation, is a practice, a vital involvement that requires effort and is uncertain in its outcome. In order to hold on to the emergency, interpretation must never come “to an end— or, at least, any ending to which interpretation comes is always temporary, always contingent, always open to revision. As hermeneutics is hermeneutical, so such indeterminacy applies to hermeneutics itself.”38 This indeterminacy belongs to the realm of the original meditation, where the distinction between propositions and facts or good and evil is secondary in relation to the genuine appearance that the militant hermeneuticist must hold open. In sum, anarchic interpretations do not strive for truth or completeness or to control the emergence of emergencies but rather seek to “hold out,” protect, and preserve the disclosure of emergency. This is probably why Vattimo believes one “can never simply theorize on the lack of emergency without considering a shift to praxis. In this situation, multiplying the conflicts at every level (union, neighborhood, political, and economic) is more important than theorizing.”39 Through this shift the work of art does not simply thrust us into the “untrodden and unformed realm of the opening of the emergency” but also turns into a call to intervene existentially. The nature of this intervention can be illuminated by how Heidegger and Gadamer conceive of the encounter with the work of art. A work of art for Heidegger is not an implement equipped with some aesthetic quality but rather the disclosure of a new origin, world, and truth. This truth is not a correspondence between propositions and facts but rather a “Streit,” strife or conflict, between two opposed inclinations: “lichtung,” clearing, and “verborgen,” concealing. In his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger characterizes this opposition as a

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strife between world and earth. While the world is the “clearing of the paths of the essential directives with which every decision complies . . . [the earth is] that which rises up as self-closing. World and earth are essentially in conflict, intrinsically belligerent. Only as such do they enter the strife of clearing and concealing.”40 In this eternal struggle between world and earth, truth is not meant to manifest something already given or known but enacts a practice, in other words, “the setting-into-work of truth.”41 Sculptures, songs, and poems do not install themselves as entities among other entities within an already open horizon but rather institute the horizon inside which the totality of beings places and arranges itself. The work creates a new “epoch” of Being, which is an originary event. To institute itself, the work must create a “Stoß,” a shock. The term (which is also used in Contributions to Philosophy in relation to the emergency) is here employed to shed light on our encounter with works of art: whenever “art happens, whenever, that is, there is a beginning, a shock enters history and history either begins or resumes.”42 But there is nothing violent about this multidirectional shock, for the more purely is the work itself transported into the openness of beings it itself opens up, then the more simply does it carry us into this openness and, at the same time, out of the realm of the usual. To submit to this displacement means: to transform all familiar relations to world and to earth, and henceforth to restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to dwell within the truth that is happening in the work. The restraint of this dwelling allows what is created to become, for the first time, the work that it is.43

What produces the shock in art is not a specific mode of being of the work (such as its composition, beauty, or style) but the fact that it refuses to install itself within an already open horizon, in other words, that there is a work of art at all. This is “why the origin of the artwork—of, that is, creators and preservers, which is to say, the historical existence of a people—is art.”44 In sum, for Heidegger, the encounter with a work of art is always the inception of a general reconsideration of our way of standing in the world. This inception defines us in relation to the traditions we stand in, and it also assists us in establishing a meaningful relationship

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with the world and others. Art is “the creative preservation of the truth in the work. Art is, then, a becoming and happening of truth. Does truth, then, arise out of nothing?”45 While Heidegger responded positively to this question,46 Gadamer, who described his philosophical hermeneutics as an attempt to take up and elaborate Heidegger’s later philosophy, is cautious: he is more concerned with the effects that works of art can have than he is with their origins. For him the “fact that through a work of art a truth is experienced that we cannot attain in any other way constitutes the philosophic importance of art, which asserts itself against all attempts to rationalize it away.”47 This is why the goal of hermeneutics is to assist us in the encounter with art, which is also its ideal object of investigation.48 Although art, like other hermeneutic problems, also presupposes and requires an existential involvement rather than a disinterested detachment, its greatest significance “depends on the fact that it speaks to us, that it confronts man with himself in his morally determined existence.”49 Gadamer’s concern is to stress that science, method, and rationality cannot exhaust truth because understanding is never an act that can be secured methodologically and verified objectively. It is an experience we must undergo. This is why “understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated.”50 While the past consists in individual experiences and inherited traditions, the future is the sense we make of things in terms of possibilities for our existence. In sum, understanding is self-understanding; when a person understands, she is also projecting her own possibilities.51 The most important aspect of the process of understanding is not that it will never become absolute knowledge, given the hermeneutic nature of existence, but that it occurs through the model of the “Gespräch,” that is, “dialogue” or “conversation.”52 A genuine work of art takes hold of the interpreter and becomes an event with which she engages through a conversation. However, in this conversation, she is not in control of the work of art but led by it. This model allowed Gadamer to defend the extramethodological truth of the human sciences and justify the interest in classics. If “the duration of a work’s power to speak directly is fundamentally unlimited,”53 it’s not because of the source or origin of the work but because of the effects and consequences it continues to have.54 122

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For Gadamer as for Heidegger, works of art are not closed, sealed, and static entities but dynamic events in which we become involved through hermeneutic experiences where meanings are mediated and understanding emerges. But what type of experience is Gadamer referring to when we become involved in a work of art: Erlebnis or Erfahrung? The former is the mode of experience of modern aesthetics where “the immediacy with which something real is grasped”55 exhausts the work of art. The latter indicates an “event of understanding,” in other words, an ongoing and cumulative experience that corresponds to the historical nature of human beings: The appeal to immediacy, to the instantaneous flash of genius, to the significance of “experiences” [“Erlebnisse”], cannot withstand the claim of human existence to continuity and unity of self-understanding. The binding quality of the experience [Erfahrung] of art must not be disintegrated by aesthetic consciousness. This negative insight, positively expressed, is that art is knowledge and experiencing an artwork means sharing in that knowledge.56

Sharing art’s knowledge “is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition.”57 Although beauty and pleasure are important elements in a work of art, knowledge and meaning transcend these internal categories because a work always addresses us in different ways.58 If interpretation is the execution (Vollzug) of the work of art,59 it’s because we are not simply neutral observers but engaged interpreters who intervene in a work that concerns our social, urban, environmental, and historical existence. As we can see, “interpretation is an insertion [Einlegen] of meaning and not a discovery [Finden] of it.”60 But this meaning does not belong only to the interpreter; it also has an important intersubjective dimension because it grounds a communal experience, that is, a “claim to truth.”61 As claims to truth, works of art are “ ‘Ereignis’—an event that ‘appropriates us’ into itself. It shocks us, it overturns us, and sets up a world of its own, into which we are drawn, as it were.”62 The shock we experience when we confront works of art that thrust us into essential emergencies is not attributable to the immediacy with which something “real is grasped”; rather, the shock is an “event of understanding” that concerns our existence. However, contrary to Heidegger 123

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and Gadamer, this event does not proceed from the disclosure of a new world or the commonality that binds us to a tradition but instead from the emergency of the absence of emergencies in our framed democracies; after all, this absence can only be felt inside the ruling world as a dysfunction, disturbance, and interruption of the technological organization of the world. What is set to work in art today is not truth but emergencies that existentially concern our social, urban, environmental, and historical existence. These demand a general reconsideration of our way of standing in the world, another “way of being” that will save us from the indifference that continues to prevail. Given the vital significance of these remnants, this intervention is not simply an alternative knowledge or a different practice but part of an existential project of transformation that concerns our future. To be part of this project is to dwell in the essential emergency, that is, to fulfill the absence of emergency. The sense of emergency revealed in the works of kennardphillipps, Jota Castro, and Filippo Minelli concerns the political, financial, and technological paradoxes that frame our social lives. This is why the paradoxes that emerge from their works (the “liberal” invasion of Iraq in 2003, “bailing out” banks during the financial crisis, and Twitter’s apparent “neutrality”) are requests to intervene against the indifference that reigns in our social existence. As a project of transformation for the future, our intervention is to dwell in these paradoxes, that is, to fulfill the absence of political, financial, and technological emergencies. This does not mean that it is enough to invoke Tony Blair’s military impositions, the unfair lack of regulation of financial markets, or Twitter’s engineered connectivity. We must also take a stance in favor of their victims. But the militant hermeneuticist, instead of simply offering solutions (which would continue to conceal indifference within the framing categories), must take on the burden of these essential emergencies, must, in other words, increase the “danger” that will also “save” us. This can take place through demonstrations against the war, through social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, or through social networks as long as these actions are part of an existential project of social transformation. As a militant practice in favor of the weak, existential interventions also require a reconsideration of modernity’s determination to manipulate the remnants of Being.

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In the form of urban discharge, these remnants are also at the center of the existential interventions called for by the works of Upadhyay, Wang Zhiyuan, and Peter McFarlane. To intervene existentially in the emergencies they reveal, a general reconsideration of urban life is necessary, of modernity’s obsession with progress, development, and growth. Against the constant satisfaction of useful and enjoyable things it is crucial to retrieve the sense of emergency that their accumulation entails. Slums are becoming poverty traps at the margins of global capitalism; the accumulation of plastic and e-waste contaminate the environment and have irreversible consequences for our health. The ongoing indifference toward these urban discharges demands not simply an intervention but an existential intervention. The existential interventions called for by the work of Azevedo, Mandy Barker, and Michael Sailstorfer are also linked to environmental emergencies: global warming, ocean pollution, and deforestation. These emergencies require involving others in an environmental project that concerns future generations as well as present behavior. It is the hermeneuticist’s responsibility to add to those conflicts that are necessary to defend the survival of the human species on earth. This is why the greater the danger faced by environmental groups, the greater the possibility of salvation. Indifference is also at the center of the works by Karady, Alfredo Jaar, and Jane Frere. However, the intervention they call for is not social, urban, or environmental but historical, in other words, a reconsideration of ignored accounts from history. This demands we intervene in a project of assistance, reconciliation, and recognition. For this existential project, it is not enough simply to dwell in the accounts of the victims or to recall their experiences. We must participate in the invisible wounds, experience the ignored genocides, and proclaim the denied dispossessions. The different existential interventions these works demand from us do not derive from their aesthetic qualities but from the ontological appeal of art. Even though this appeal is dangerous, it is an emergency we can’t ignore if we wish to live meaningful existences in this “destitute” age in which “God is dead.”63 Art does replace God. Instead of comfort, it offers the shock that thrusts us into essential emergencies. In this condition, “only the greatest occurrence, the most intimate event,

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can still save us from lostness in the bustle of mere incidents and machinations.”64 Moving toward salvation, the militant hermeneuticist must dwell in this event, that is, where the essential emergency emerges. As Heidegger once said, the “closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become.”65

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AFTERWORD We will never bring about the changes so urgently needed until our vision is transformed in ways that not only allow but actually require us to act differently. The hour is late—so late that perhaps only an artist can save us now. —Mark C. Taylor, Refiguring the Spiritual

At t e n t i v e readers may have noticed how the three epigraphs of this book, from Arthur C. Danto, Jacques Rancière, and Gianni Vattimo, relate to the text. The first pointed out how Martin Heidegger liberated aesthetics from “beauty’s traditional limitation to calm detachment” and situated “beauty as part of the ontology of being human,”1 the second presented works of art that aim to “produce a new perception of the world” and “create a commitment to its transformation,”2 and the third recovered art’s claim to truth and its “theoretical and practical bearing”3 through hermeneutics. Along with these philosophers, there are two other groups of thinkers whose ideas provide a point of origin for this book: Theodor Adorno’s, Max Horkheimer’s, and Herbert Marcuse’s notions of aesthetics and Carl Schmitt’s, Walter Benjamin’s, and Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception or emergency. The first group found that aesthetics had an “important function in freeing practical reason from the dominance of instrumental rationality”—remember Adorno’s call for a “committed and autonomous art” that struggles to liberate itself from “the real” and Marcuse’s interpretation of art as the expression of a “truth, an 127

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experience, a necessity which . . . are nevertheless essential components of revolution.”4 The second saw the state of exception as a paradigm for comprehending modern politics—Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as the one “who decides on the exception” and Agamben’s interpretation of the exception as an “empty space . . . in which a human action with no relation to law stands before a norm with no relation to life.”5 Although none of these thinkers is as present as Heidegger and other hermeneutic philosophers throughout this book, they are essential for selecting the works of art necessary to disclose the absence of emergency. The goal of this afterword is not to confront these thinkers, whose philosophical contributions are central in the development of aesthetics and the problem of emergency,6 but to point out how other radical contemporary aesthetic theories in the twenty-first century have also developed in relation to current social, political, and environmental emergencies. This will also define the contribution of emergency aesthetics to the ongoing renewal of aesthetics in the twenty-first century, for which Danto, Rancière, and Vattimo are directly responsible.7 Danto suggested, through the end of art, how truth has become more important than beauty,8 Rancière showed that aesthetics is irreducibly political in its distribution and imposition of the sensible,9 and Vattimo stressed the hermeneutic consequences of art’s ontological status.10 With other philosophers, such as Julia Kristeva and Stanley Cavell, these thinkers have managed to overcome the marginalization of aesthetics caused by “the rise of analytic philosophy,”11 whose “emphasis on linguistic philosophy, logic, and conceptual analysis most likely pushed aesthetics away from the central position it had enjoyed until the days of British Idealism.”12 The threat today does not lie in this marginalization but rather in a global call to order, that is, where thought is submitted to “reality” in order to keep us from alterations, events, and emergencies. This is the goal of so-called speculative or new-realist aesthetics, which seek to judge or describe works of art independently of their effects, environment, and relations.13 If, as Graham Harman suggests, aesthetics ought to become “first philosophy,”14 it is not because it can understand the “cryptic inner reality” that makes the effects of art possible15 but rather because aesthetics can provide a way to interpret the emergency of art’s existential disclosures. In the twenty-first century, as Jane Tormey and Gillian Whiteley recently pointed out, “aesthetics has undergone rehabilitation and has 128

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re-emerged as a vital issue for critique, exposition and application through practice.”16 But this practice is different from Benjamin’s call for an “activist art” where the artist puts “an end to his autonomy” for the political goals he supports.17 The “real state of emergency” the German thinker called for (through a new conception of history) requires an involvement that is intrinsically bound to the artist’s autonomy. This is why the goal of aesthetics, as Danto said, “is to address art now pragmatically, from the perspective of life.”18 The “life” and “vitality” Danto, Tormey, and Whiteley refer to is part of the “social turn” contemporary art undertook in the 1990s “to overturn,” as Claire Bishop recalls, “the traditional relationship between the art object, the artist and the audience.”19 Thus, the artist becomes a collaborator and producer of social situations: From a Western European perspective, the social turn in contemporary art can be contextualised by two previous historical moments, both synonymous with political upheaval and movements for social change: the historic avant-garde in Europe circa 1917, and the so-called “neo” avant-garde leading to 1968. The conspicuous resurgence of participatory art in the 1990s leads me to posit the fall of communism in 1989 as a third point of transformation. Triangulated, these three dates form a narrative of the triumph, heroic last stand and collapse of a collectivist vision of society. Each phase has been accompanied by a utopian rethinking of art’s relationship to the social and of its political potential—manifested in a reconsideration of the ways in which art is produced, consumed and debated.20

Among these reconsiderations, Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics”21 moves away “from the language of object-based analysis”22 and also proves able to “render discursive and dialogic projects more amenable to museums and galleries.”23 Relational art, according to the French curator, takes as its theoretical horizon “the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.”24 This aesthetics prefers provisional and small-scale convivial events created for interpersonal relations over permanent works for contemplation. Bourriaud is interested in events where spectators coproduce and intervene (as in Rirkrit Tiravanija’s installations, where meals are cooked and shared in order to bring 129

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people together) instead of anonymously pondering artworks in galleries and museums. In this form the territory of the museum does not belong anymore to the artist or collector alone because it’s “no longer possible to regard the contemporary work as a space to be walked through (the ‘owner’s tour’ is akin to the collector’s). It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through, like the opening of an unlimited discussion.”25 It is important to stress that relational aesthetics differs from Guy Debord’s “situational aesthetics,” since the latter does not imply coexistence with others, which Bourriaud retains as essential. Even though Bourriaud does not clearly distinguish between aesthetics and art, his insights have given birth to a number of debates on the aesthetic status of dialogic encounters, such as the exchange between the renowned art historians Grant Kester and Claire Bishop over the meaning of “participatory art.”26 Kester embraces an art in which the ongoing dialogical exchange is itself the aesthetic gesture, though Bishop believes it is impossible to determine where a work begins and ends through these exchanges. Nonetheless, this move toward social or participatory art has also given rise to different aesthetic theories, such as Jill Bennett’s “practical aesthetics,” Veronica Tello’s “counter-memorial aesthetics,” and Malcolm Miles’s “eco-aesthetics,” where emergencies (terrorist attacks, refugees, and environmental crises) also play a central role.27 Bennett outlines a “practical aesthetics which challenges the notion that art and life are somehow opposed.” Oriented toward actual events, for example, 9/11, aesthetics must become a “modus operandi rather than . . . a field in its own right”28 and call on other disciplines such as art history and visual studies to contribute in its response. She defines practical aesthetics as the “study of [art as a] means of apprehending the world via sense-based and affective processes—processes that touch bodies intimately and directly but that also underpin the emotions, sentiments and passions of public life.”29 This is why traumatic events such as 9/11 carry a privileged connection to the so-called affective turn, that is, where affects “emerge in its reorganization; in new ways of working— of seeing, doing, thinking, perceiving through art or other aesthetic forms”:30 Art, in other words, does not represent what has already occurred, but generates a set of aesthetic possibilities, which may in turn inform political thinking in regard to particular circumstances. If art can in 130

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some way evoke the pure event as a virtuality, the test is whether the virtual event is then amenable to different actualities.31

As we can see, Bennett is interested in the aesthetic effects of art, that is, in its call to contribute through reorganizations and projects. While the media simply take on the function of documenting what happens, artists such as Shona Illingworth, Susan Norrie, and Alfredo Jaar explore the nature of events in order to “participate in its political and social configuration.”32 This political and social configuration is also present in Tello’s “counter-memorial aesthetics” in relation to the ongoing refugee crisis. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria have forced millions of refugees to seek asylum in Europe, Australia, and the United States, with devastating political, social, and humanitarian consequences. Instead of carefully managing this flow of refugees, the neoliberal democracies have begun to restrict their borders by constructing new walls and questioning the validity of previous diplomatic accords, such as the Schengen agreement. According to Tello, there are a number of artists (Rosemary Laing, Tania Bruguera, and Isaac Julien, among others) that have begun to address the implementation of such policies in their works, giving birth to a countermemorial aesthetics, as the situation of refugees “cannot really be justified by thinking that it is driven by ‘one crisis.’ ”33 But this aesthetics is meant not only to overcome “the teleology of modernist master-narratives and chart a sense of time that may offer some alternative pathways to what the world picture may look like”34 but also to find “a better way to stay with the multiple and multiplying aftermaths of contemporaneity and refugee experiences (which continue to accumulate, layer upon layer) so not as to assume their finitude (or that this has only happened once).”35 Another aesthetic theory characterized by the conjunction of heterogeneous signifiers of different times and places is Miles’s ecoaesthetics. The signifiers here are not terrorist attacks or the refugee crisis but climate change. “If the arts can have agency in relation to climate change,” Miles explains, “it is probably in critical acts of re-distribution and re-identification, within but beyond the regime of the art-world. Beauty is radically other to routine.”36 “Routine” here means life in neoliberal democracies, where we have become accustomed to indiscriminate consumption. Miles prefers works of art that are not typical to the art 131

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market, temporary works such as land, performance, and installation art. Although he is well aware that art “cannot save the planet or the whale; it can represent, critique and play imaginatively on the problem, and picture futures not prescribed by money.”37 According to Miles, this would take place through “an imaginative as well as an interruptive project, requiring a re-visioning of the world’s value structures.”38 In this way art stands for an aesthetic dimension radically other and different from our ongoing consumerist relation. This is why he believes in works of art that critically respond to climate change and consequently contribute to an ecologically aware relation with our environment. Miles is also interested in art’s possibilities of salvation, that is, in its projects of “imagination” and “interruption” as it “intervenes to re-inflect the conditions by which it is conditioned; and this dialectical function validates art’s response to climate change, as it also validates political movements, as part of a process of change which is never completed.”39 The theoretical proposals of Bennett, Tello, and Miles, like my own emergency aesthetics, do not simply regenerate aesthetics through artistic practices; they also respond to current vital issues. Like relational aesthetics, these political, social, and environmental concerns entail a general attention to our salvation, that is, to escaping political, social, and environmental annihilation. This is evident in the practical interventions and projects they demand and also in the significance that art’s demands have taken on for philosophers. If, as Michael Kelly points out, the main goal of aesthetics today “is to explain how the transformation of demands on art to demands by art is already a reality in some contemporary art,”40 it’s also because, as Anita Silvers recalls, “we have begun to get aesthetics right, for philosophy now turns to art, rather than art to philosophy, for illumination.”41 While it’s probably too early to declare the end of the “social turn” and beginning of an “emergency turn” in contemporary art, it is possible to distinguish the sort of intervention each demands.42 Through collectivity and emergency, the traditional relationship among the art object, the artist, and the audience is not simply overturned, as in relational aesthetics, but also disturbed, agitated into new action by the danger its interventions reveal. As in Janet Wolff’s “aesthetics of uncertainty,” where beauty is saved from ahistorical universals through shared values, here existence is saved from annihilation through essential emergencies. Remember Hölderlin: “Where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” 132

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INTRODUCTION 1. “Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.” M. Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us” (1966), in Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. M. Stassen (New York: Continuum, 2003), 38. 2. M. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936), in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 37. 3. Ibid., 37. A detailed and updated analysis of the concept of art in Heidegger is available in A. Boetzkes and A. Vinegar, eds., Heidegger and the Work of Art History (London: Ashgate, 2014); A. Ladopoulou, The Work of Art as Historical Event: Heidegger’s Later Philosophy as Aesthetic Theory (Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2011); B. Bolt, Heidegger 133

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Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); Iain Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); J. Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); R. Bernasconi, “Heidegger, Martin,” in A Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Stephen Davieset al. (West Sussex: Willey-Blackwell, 2009); F. de Alessi, Heidegger lettore dei poeti (Turin: Rosengberg & Sellier, 1991); K. Harries, “Heidegger’s Confrontation with Aesthetics,” in M. Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 2. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); K. Harries, Art Matters: A Critical Commentary on Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art (New York: Springer, 2009); P. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. C. Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); and D. N. Smith, Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 4. R. Schürmann suggested that “Proteus Alone Can Save Us Now” in Broken Hegemonies, trans. R. Lilly (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2003), 513; Gianni Vattimo went on to propose that “only communism can save us” in G. Vattimo and S. Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 111. 5. Although several authors, from Richard Rorty to Philippe LacoueLabarthe, have discussed art as a source of solidarity and private salvation from a Heideggerian point of view, none has used this exact formulation. For a detailed analysis of art as a realm of salvation in Heidegger, see M. de Beistegui, The New Heidegger (London: Continuum, 2005), chap. 5, “The Saving Power of Art.” See also R. Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1991); R. Rorty, Philosophy as Poetry (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016); and P. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, trans. J. Fort (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 6. M. de Beistegui (The New Heidegger, 126) also believes that it’s no coincidence that Heidegger began to lecture and write on art at the same time his political career ended: “Art, for him, came to represent the possibility of a relation to the world, and of a dwelling on earth, that was not technological. At the same time . . . he saw art as stemming from the same origin as technology itself. This means that, between art and technology itself, like between meditation and calculation, there is a relation of absolute proximity (with respect to their essence) and absolute proximity (with respect to their outcome). Increasingly, art came to be seen as the other, hidden side of the techne that developed into technology. It began to stand for a historical possibility that technology covered over, yet one that could unfold from the essence of technology itself. Such is the 134

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reason why, from 1933–4 onwards, Heidegger’s thought focuses on art, technology, and their relation to truth. Like Nietzsche, who saw art (at least a certain art) as the counter-movement to European nihilism, Heidegger envisages it as the possibility, held in reserve in the essence of technology itself, through which technological nihilism can be overcome.” 7. M. Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938), ed. P. Trawny, vol. 94, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014); Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39), ed, P. Trawny, vol. 95, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014); Überlegungen XII–XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941), ed. P. Trawny, vol. 96, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014). The first volume was translated as Ponderings II–VI: Black Notebooks, 1931–1938, trans. R. Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). As R. Polt reported in The Emergency of Being (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 152, 213, the Überlegungen are a series of notebooks written before, during, and after Contributions to Philosophy; they are part of a larger series known as Heidegger’s Black Notebooks. According to the editor of these volumes, Peter Trawny, Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks, in volumes 95–97 of his complete works, contain ideas that are “clearly antisemitic, even if it is not a question of antisemitism of the kind promoted by Nazi ideology.” P. Trawny, “Eine neue Dimension.” Die Zeit, December 27, 2013. Also see P. Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); and P. Trawny, Freedom to Fail: Heidegger’s Anarchy, trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner (Cambridge: Polity, 2015); Domenico Losurdo, “Heidegger’s Black Notebooks Aren’t That surprising,” Guardian, March 19, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree /2014/mar/19/heidegger-german-philosopher-black-books-not-sur pris ing-nazi; G. Fried, “The King Is Dead: Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks,’ ” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 13, 2014, http://lareviewofbooks .org/review/king-dead-heideggers-black-notebooks; David Farrell Krell, Ecstasy, Catastrophe: Heidegger from “Being and Time” to the Black Notebooks (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015); and Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, 1931–1941, ed. I. Farin and J. Malpas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2016). A general introduction to Heidegger’s politics is available in G. Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000). 8. This is also the opinion of Odo Marquard, who believes Heidegger’s interest in art after 1936 was a method to “substitute a failed revolutionary politics with successful art: the fundamental step into art is the vehicle for the soft belly landing of burst revolutionary hopes.” O. Marquard, 135

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9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

“Der Schritt in die Kunst: Über Schiller und Heidegger,” in Martin Heidegger, Übungen für Anfänger: Schillers Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, Wintersemester 1936/37, transcribed by Wilhelm Hallwachs, ed. Ulrich von Bülow, with an essay by O. Marquard (Marback: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2005), 1910; my translation. On Heidegger’s step into art, see Gerhard Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). M. Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans. J. Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010). M. Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel Interview,” in Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. M. Stassen. (New York: Continuum, 2003), 37. M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (1989), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 99. Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu translated “Not” as “plight,” as did P. Emad and K. Maly (in their previous translation of Heidegger’s text, also published by Indiana University Press). I opt for “distress” and, following the suggestion of R. Polt (The Emergency of Being [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006]), I also use “emergency” because it emphasizes the political nature of the dogmatism of metaphysics. While both translations of Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) are valid, I use Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu’s, modifying their choices when necessary. M. Heidegger, The Event (1936–1938), trans. R. Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 141. “What technology does, however,” Jeff Malpas explains, “is to hide its own place-bound character while also transforming and, indeed, obscuring place as such. . . . More radically, perhaps, one might even argue that the character of technology is such that, within its frame, place no longer has any significance.” J. Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 293, 292. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), 99. The software company Record Future predicts future events by mining millions of web pages. See T. Cheshire, “The News Forecast: Can You Predict the Future by Mining Millions of Web Pages for Data?” Wired (December 2011), http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/12/fea tures/the-news-forecast; and S. Zabala, “Predicting the Future Through Online Data Mining,” Al-Jazeera, October 5, 2012, http://www.aljazeera .com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/2012102105523661935.html. The German terms “Ausnahmezustand” and “Notlosigkeit” have often, although not exclusively, been translated as “state” or “lack” of “emergency.”

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While the first term is central in Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception” theory (C. Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. G. Schwab [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985]), the second acquired significant meaning in Martin Heidegger’s later thought on the “lack of emergency” (see Polt, The Emergency of Being). Since the publication of Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Polt’s The Emergency of Being, “Ausnahmezustand” and “Notlosigkeit” have become synonymous for several contemporary philosophers and political and literary theorists. As Tracey B. Strong explains in his brilliant foreword to the English edition of Schmitt’s Political Theology, a dictionary will tell you that “Ausnahmezustand” means “state of emergency,” but the idea of a “state of emergency” has “more of a legal connotation, and is more confined than an ‘exception.’ ” This is why “the exception is part of the ‘order’ even if that order is not precisely juridical” (xiii–xiv). A similar argument can be made for “Notlosigkeit.” While a dictionary will tell us that it means “lack of distress,” the notion of distress has more of a psychological connotation and seems more narrow than “emergency.” While Schwab translates “Soverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet” as “sovereign is he who decides on the exceptional case,” Harry Zohn, who took care of Benjamin’s translation of “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” renders “Die Tradition der Unterdrückten belehrt uns darüber, daß der ‘Ausnahmezustand’, in dem wir leben, die Regel ist” as “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 257. Agamben, who relies heavily on both thinkers, has used the equivalent in Italian of “state of exception” (“stato di eccezione”). Instead, Heidegger’s “Woher die Notlosigkeit als die hochste Not?” (M. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie [Vom Ereignis] [Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003], 125) was first translated as “Whence the lack of distress as utmost distress?” by P. Emad and K. Maly; then as “Whence the lack of a sense of plight as the greatest plight?” by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu; and, later, by R.  Polt as “How can the absence of emergency itself become an emergency?” Thus, the translators of Schmitt, Benjamin, and Agamben used both “state of exception” and “state of emergency” to translate “Ausnahmezustand,” but Heidegger’s translators opted for “lack of distress,” “lack of plight,” and “absence of emergency” to translate “Notlosigkeit.” As Hans-Georg Gadamer used to say, “We understand only when we understand differently,” that is, when general and unexamined meanings are altered through new use. Thus, the difference between “exception” and 137

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17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

“emergency” has a lot to do with Schmitt’s, Benjamin’s, and Agamben’s particular uses of “Ausnahmezustand” in relation to the problem of sovereignty. The same occurs with “Notlosigkeit.” In order to choose among “distress,” “plight,” and “emergency,” one must interpret Heidegger’s “Notlosigkeit” through Being’s abandonment, as I do in this volume. When François Hollande declared the state of emergency after the terrorist attacks of November 2015 in Paris, Agamben stressed how irresponsible it is to “say the state of emergency is a shield for democracy.” G. Agamben, “De l’Etat de droit à l’Etat de sécurité,” Le Monde, December 23, 2015. On the burkini and transgender “emergencies,” see Mehreen Khan, “The Burkini Row Shows the Depth of West’s Crisis of Confidence,” Financial Times, August 27, 2016; and David G. Savage, “Supreme Court Grants Emergency Order to Block Transgender Male Student in Virginia from Using Boys’ Restroom,” Los Angeles Times, August 3, 2016. J. Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 66. For a historical and cultural analysis of the term “crisis,” see Marie-Hélène Huet, The Culture of Disaster (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012). J. Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 14. M. Heidegger, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity (1923), trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 18. H. Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, ed. R. Wolin and J. Abromeit (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 158. G. Vattimo, “The Future of Hermeneutics,” in The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. J. Malpas and Hans-Helmuth Gander (London: Routledge, 2015), 725. Q. Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. R. Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2009). G. Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Illinois: Open Court, 2005), 74. G. Harman, “Art Without Relations,” ArtReview 66 (2014): 144–147. See also G. Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (2012): 193; G. Harman, The Third Table, dOCUMENTA (13) 100 Notes—100 Thoughts Series (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013); and the essays included in R. Askin, P. J. Ennis, A. Hägler, and P. Schweighauser, eds., Speculations V: Aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Punctum, 2014). M. Gabriel, Why the World Does Not Exist (Cambridge: Polity, 2015). See also M. Ferraris, Manifesto of New Realism, trans. Sarah De Sanctis (New York: SUNY: 2014); and Harman “Art Without Relations.” For a critical assessment, see G. Vattimo and S. Zabala, “In Social Life, We Know Truth

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27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

Through Human Relationships,” Big Think, July 22, 2015, http://bigthink .com/think-tank/stop-navel-gazing-and-return-to-the-great-outdoors. S. Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 27. This is why the Slovenian philosopher believes “philosophy begins the moment we do not simply accept what exists as given (‘It’s like that!,’ ‘Law is law!,’ etc.), but raise the question of how is what we encounter as actual also possible. What characterizes philosophy is this ‘step back’ from actuality into possibility.” S. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 2. It is curious, as Simon Critchley points out, that just “when a certain strand of Anglo-American philosophy (think of John McDowell or Robert Brandom) is making domestic the insights of Kant, Hegel and Heidegger and even allowing philosophers to flirt with forms of idealism, the latest development in Continental philosophy is seeking to return to a Cartesian realism that was believed to be dead and buried.” S. Critchley, “Back to the Great Outdoors,” Times Literary Supplement, February 28, 2009, 28. A. C. Danto, What Art Is (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013), 139–140. G. Vattimo has pointed out how these philosophers are actually responding to this global call to order in his last book, Of Reality: The Purposes of Philosophy, trans. R. T. Valgenti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). These four antagonisms are “the looming threat of ecological catastrophe, the inappropriateness of the notion of private property for so-called ‘intellectual property,’ the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics), and, last but not least, new forms of apartheid, new walls and slums.” S. Žižek, “How to Begin from the Beginning,” in The Idea of Communism, ed. C. Douzinas and S. Žižek (London: Verso, 2010), 212. Also see S. Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2011). “God,” as another event, has been studied by J. D. Caputo in The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Communism is the subject for a number of authors: Vattimo and Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism; J. Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012); and B. Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism (London: Verso, 2011). See also the various contributions in C. Douzinas and S. Žižek, eds., The Idea of Communism; and Žižek, The Idea of Communism 2 (London: Verso, 2013). L. Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

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33. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), 396–397. “Be-ing” (“Seyn”) is a neologism Heidegger proposed for the overcoming of metaphysics, that is, our metaphysical interpretation of “Being.” 34. Ibid., 397. 35. Ibid., 95. The word “Stoß” is sometimes translated as “thrust,” “shock,” or also “jolt.” As Heidegger uses this term in different contexts I will use “thrust” and “shock” depending on whether it refers to our confrontation with works of art or their internal conflict. As Polt (The Emergency of Being, 87) points out, “the word ‘Stoß’ suggests the impact of a transformative event.” 36. A different but equally stimulating interpretation of aesthetics after metaphysics is available in J. Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); M. Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); and M. Beistegui, Aesthetics After Metaphysics: From Mimesis to Metaphor (London: Routledge, 2012). 37. This painting belongs to the permanent collection of the Reina Sofia National Museum of Madrid; http://www.museoreinasofia.es/coleccion /autores-obras.html?id=322. 38. In this passage I translated “Stoß” as “shock” instead of “jolts” and “knocks.” The problem with “aesthetic objects” or “experience,” as Gadamer explained, is that one “ordinarily assumes that this dimension is not concerned with the content of the work; rather, it is concerned with its form—only with the formal quality possessed by a work of art. . . . Rather, I maintain that a work of art, thanks to its formal aspect, has something to say to us either through the question it awakens, or the questions it answers.  .  .  . The experience of art is an experience of meaning, and as  such this experience is something that is brought about by understanding. To this extent, then, aesthetics is absorbed into hermeneutics.” H.-G. Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation. Reflections and Commentary, ed. R. E. Palmer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 70–71. 39. A. C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Common Place: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1981); J. Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. S. Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010); G. Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, ed. S. Zabala, trans. L. D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 40. “Aesthetics and politics have been overtly implicated and entangled with each other since the late eighteenth century, when one could already speak of an aesthetic turn in political thought, retrospectively, in the writings of European romanticism from Rousseau to Schiller and the Jena romantics, and in the framing of the debates about the meaning of the 140

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41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

French Revolution. So what we may be speaking of is a return rather than a turn, or of a turn delayed and resisted until the emergence of more propitious conditions.” N. Kompridis, introduction to The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, ed. N. Kompridis (London: Bloomsbury: 2014), xv. On the inseparability of politics and aesthetics, see contributions of L. E. Gordon, J. Rancière, and others in that volume. “Existential” here should be interpreted as “postmetaphysical,” that is, not framed within a theory or determined meaning. I agree with Lydia Goehr when she points out how, in “attempting to overcome its age, metaphysical philosophy, in its posthistorical condition, does allow art to happen as it wants, but it also gives itself over to a most productive form of criticism.” L. Goehr, “For the Birds/Against the Birds,” in Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur C. Danto, ed. D. Herwitz and M. Kelly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 57. A. C. Danto, Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), xvi. Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, 165. Danto, What Art Is, 155. On Duchamp, see Herbert Molderings, Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experiment, trans. J. Brogden (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), xvi. T. Waits’s “The Road to Peace” was written by Waits and Kathleen Brennan and is included on Brawlers, the first of a 2006 three-CD set, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, produced by ANTI- Records. The lyrics of the song are available in the book that comes with the three-CD set and online: http://www.tomwaits.com/songs/?q=the+road+to+peace#/songs /song/271/Road_To_Peace/. Traffic is a 2001 American dramatic film written by Stephen Gaghan, directed by Steven Soderbergh, and produced by Bedford Falls Productions. Hung is a comedy-drama television series created by Dmitry Lipkin and Colette Burson and produced by HBO. The three seasons ran from June 28, 2009, to December 4, 2011. “Philosophers have only described the world in various ways; the moment now has arrived to interpret it.” Vattimo and Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism, 5. Vattimo and I also develop this thesis in an article and interview in Telos 161 (Winter 2012): 9–15, 188–192. Although Benjamin in “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) condemned fascism as “aestheticized politics,” he did not reject all “politicization of aesthetics,” as his preference for communism demonstrates. The distinction between an “aestheticized politics” and a “politicized aesthetics” is crucial when we must resist the media’s subordination to “the interest of domination, irrationalism, authoritarianism 141

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49. 50. 51.

52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

and fascism.” As Jaeho Kang points out, “Benjamin responded to this danger by demanding the politicization of aesthetics. That is to say, in these new cultural circumstances and in the light of new technological advances, the old aesthetic categories pertaining to painting, to theatrical performance, to musical concerts, to works of art—all these categories of taste—have been transformed. Art’s cultic origins are overturned, and a new basis in politics comes to the fore. Aesthetic questions are transformed into political questions, and this politicization of the aesthetic is counter-poised to the aestheticization of politics at the end of Benjamin’s Work of Art essay.” J. Kang, Walter Benjamin and the Media: The Spectacle of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 213. Even though Kang is dubious that “the politicization of art” means “making culture a catalyst for communist propaganda,” he agrees that Benjamin’s “use of the term ‘communism’ does tend to invite such a narrow interpretation” (130). On recent communist revolutions in Latin America, see B. Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism; and Vattimo and Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism. Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics, 22–23. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), 94. S. Zabala, “Being Is Conversation,” in Consequences of Hermeneutics, ed. J. Malpas and S. Zabala (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 161–176. Among the most distinguished representatives of hermeneutics we must mention Richard Rorty, Paul Ricoeur, and Emilio Betti. For a systematic outline of the consequences of hermeneutics after Gadamer, see Malpas and Zabala, eds., Consequences of Hermeneutics. H.-G. Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. L. E. Hahn (Peru, Ill.: Open Court, 1997), 36. H.-G. Gadamer, The Gadamer Reader, ed. R. Palmer (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 413–414. R. Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge Mass: Cambridge University Press 2007), 129. On the emergency of contemporary philosophy, see the special issue of Philosophy Today 59, no. 4 (Fall 2015), ed. S. Zabala, with contributions from Adrian Parr, Noreen Khawaj, Dorthe Jørgensen, Arne de Boever, Frédéric Neyrat, Bonnie Honig, Diego Rosselo, S. Mazzini, R. Polt, and G. Vattimo; Polt, The Emergency of Being; Zabala, “Being at Large: The Only Emergency Is the Absence of Events,” in Being Shaken: Ontology and the Event, ed. M. Marder and S. Zabala (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 77–84; and Vattimo and Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism,

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chap. 1; Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011); and Elaine Scarry, Thinking in an Emergency (New York: Norton, 2011). 57. D. Barenboim, “The Germans Are Prisoners of Their Past: Interview with Daniel Barenboim,” by J. Kronsbein and B. Zand, Der Spiegel, June 22,  2012, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-interview-with -daniel-barenboim-a-840129-2.html. Barenboim, interview, on Talk to Al-Jazeera, February 2, 2013, Doha, http://www.aljazeera.com/program mes/talktojazeera/2013/02/20132117333086936.html. On Barenboim, see E. Said, “Daniel Barenboim (Bonding Across Cultural Boundaries),” in Said, Music at the Limits (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007): 259–264.

1. THE EMERGENCY OF AESTHETICS 1. M. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936), in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 51. This is the passage from Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics that Heidegger refers to: “Art no longer counts as the highest way in which truth finds its existence for itself”; “one may well hope that art will continue to advance and perfect itself, but its form has ceased to be the highest need of spirit”; “in all these connections art is, and remains, with regard to its highest vocation, a thing of the past.” Danto, in After the End of Art, replies to Heidegger by pointing out that “philosophy of art after Hegel may have been barren, but art, which was seeking to break through to a philosophical understanding of itself, was very rich: the richness of philosophical speculation, in other words, was one with the richness of artistic production.” A. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 32. It is in this context that Eva Geulen believes Hegel does not initiate the end of art but rather the central motif of modernity in relation to aesthetics: “At the end of the end of art one does not find an end, but a beginning: the discovery of the end of art as a discourse of modernity.” E.  Geulen, The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor After Hegel, trans. J. McFarland (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 14. 2. M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 99. Polt, in his study of Heidegger’s concept of emergency, indicates how the theme of “Not,” “emergency,” “urgency,” “exigency,” or “pressing need” is central to Heidegger’s thinking in the 1930s. Two 143

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

slogans “run throughout the texts of this period: all necessity emerges from emergency, and we are living in the age of the emergency of the lack of emergency. These slogans say that we have lost touch with the tensions that animate history and expose us to the emergency of be-ing. Heidegger takes an apocalyptic stance, in the dual sense of apocalypse as revelation and revolution. The fresh, authentic disclosure of beings in the being requires an incentive, critical moment—a moment in which our comfortable dwelling is called into question. Revelation demands revolution. Emergence needs emergency.” R. Polt, The Emergency of Being (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 152. It is in this context that the “absence of art” that I mention in the introduction must be interpreted. Art, like to the tensions Polt refers to, is what exposes and discloses the emergency of Being. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, 57. M. Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. P. Emad and T. Kalary (New York: Continuum, 2006), 24. M. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 163–164. Gregory Fried is correct to emphasize how these “economic, political, social, and cultural crises of the world depression in general and of the Weimar Republic in particular do not in and of themselves concern Heidegger, for these too are at most signs of Dasein’s inability to take on the burden of Being. The search for reforms and solutions will only cover over completely the ‘concealed’ emergency.” G. Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 153–154. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 397. Ibid., 399. Heidegger (“The Age of the World Picture,” 57) explains that culture is a modern phenomenon that announces itself in the “fact that human action is understood and practiced as culture. Culture then becomes the realization of the highest values through the care and cultivation of man’s highest goods. It belongs to the essence of culture, as such care, that it, in turn, takes itself into care and then becomes the politics of culture.” M. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Polt and G. Fried (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), 140. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. D. F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 4:202. M. Heidegger, “Six Basic Developments in the History of Aesthetics,” in Nietzsche, 1:77–91. It’s important to emphasize that Heidegger does not end this history with Hegel (for whom religion and philosophy formed

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11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

the realm within which the absolute was to be established following the sublation of art) but rather with Nietzsche (for whom art overcomes religion and philosophy in order to confront nihilism). Robert Bernasconi points out: “Heidegger shares Nietzsche’s conviction that turning to art is the thinker’s best recourse in this crisis, and he assigns to the thinker the task of overcoming aesthetics and so preparing for the possible return of great art.” R. Bernasconi, “Heidegger, Martin,” in A Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Stephen Davies et al. (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 322. M. Heidegger’s understanding of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline is critically outlined in K. Harries, “Heidegger’s Confrontation with Aesthetics,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. M. Kelly, vol. 2. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and S. Crowell, “Phenomenology and Aesthetics; or, Why Art Matters,” in Art and Phenomenology, ed. J. Parry (New York: Routledge, 2011). M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 24. M. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 227. Heidegger, Being and Time, 213. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 83. A detailed analysis of “measure” in Heidegger is available in Denis McManus, Heidegger and the Measure of Truth: Themes from His Early Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 103–162. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 49. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 67, 83. Ibid., 71. The concept of “remnants of Being” is analyzed in S. Zabala, The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:139. While Krell has translated “Sichtige” as “envisionment,” I believe, like I. Thomson, that “lucidity” works better considering how Heidegger is criticizing the transparent medium of aesthetics in this passage. M. Heidegger, Basic Concepts, trans. G. E. Aylesworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 51–52. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 97. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 339. Ibid., 22. 145

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

Ibid., 94. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:78. Ibid., 1:84. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 397. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:89. As Thomson explains, these measurements are already taking place at “the University of New Mexico’s prestigious MIND institute,” where “subjects were given ‘beautiful’ images to look at and the resulting neurological activity in their brains was studied empirically using one of the world’s most powerful functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging machines.” I. Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2011), 59. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:84. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 83. “Framed” or “enframing” (Ge-Stell) is Heidegger’s term to indicate science and technology’s objectivist nature, that is, how “man’s essence is framed, claimed, and challenged by a power which man himself cannot control.” M. Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel’s Interview” (1976), in Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. Manfred Stassen, trans. M. P. Alter and J. D. Caputo (New York: Continuum, 2003), 38. “GeStell,” as De Beistegui points out, is a literary translation of the “Greek systema, which designates an assemblage, a totality or a composition, is built from the prefix syn-, together, and the verb istemi, or sistemi, which means to stand, or to make to stand, as well as to set up, to raise, to be set or placed and even, in Homer especially, to be in a certain state or condition. . . . For what Heidegger is after with this word is the precise manner in which things are held together for us today, and the manner in which we, as human beings, fit into this assemblage. And this manner is radically different from the one experienced in Greek antiquity, or in the Middle Ages: it is precisely as an increasingly violent challenging forth and a relentless summoning, as well as an increasingly integrated system, also known as a network. The system designates the way in which things stand together at the end of metaphysics, in the technological, and especially technoscientific age. . . . The Ge-stell points to the way in which the real is gathered, or held together.” M. De Beistegui, The New Heidegger (London: Continuum, 2005), 111. A detailed analysis of this concept in relation to danger and art is available in Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, 192–212. Heidegger, Mindfulness, 31. Ibid., 32. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 77. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:7.

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39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 50. Heidegger, Mindfulness, 30–31. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:66. Heidegger, Mindfulness, 23. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 25. M. Heidegger, Logic: The Question of Truth, trans. T. Sheehan (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2010), 113. On Heidegger’s concept of truth, see E. Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967, 1970, 1983); D. O. Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); C. Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure, trans. G. Harman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and M. A. Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 46. If Heidegger in the 1930s assumed that truth could be understood as “unconcealment” or “disclosedness,” according to O. Pöggeler, it is because he was looking for a “different conceptual platform. . . . Already in his first lectures Heidegger put forward the demand to take into account the practical and religious truth together with the theoretical one.” O. Pöggeler, “Heideggers logische Untersuchungen,” in Martin Heidegger: Innen-und Aussenansichten, Forum für Philosophie Bad Hamburg (Frankfurt: M. Suhrkamp, 1989), 80–82; my translation. Whether this was Heidegger’s intention has been at the center of a debate among Habermas, Tugendhat, and many others. See the second chapter of S.  Zabala, The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat, trans. M. Haskell and S. Zabala (New York: Columbia University, 2008). 47. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 19. 48. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Philosophical and Political Writings, 297. In this passage Heidegger goes on to quote Hölderlin’s verse: “But where danger is, grows / The saving power also” and asks “What does it mean ‘to save’? Usually we think that it means only to seize hold of a thing threatened by ruin, in order to secure it in its former continuance. But the verb ‘to save’ says more. ‘To save’ is to fetch something home into its essence, in order to bring the essence for the first time into its genuine appearing. If the essence of technology, Enframing, is the extreme danger, and if there is truth Hölderlin’s words, then the rule of Enframing cannot exhaust itself solely in blocking all lighting-up of every revealing, all appearing of truth. Rather, precisely the essence of technology must harbor in itself the growth of the saving power.” De Beistegui 147

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49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56.

(The New Heidegger, 127) is correct to point out that art, as a saving power, “does not save us from technology, as if technology signified this ultimate danger to be avoided. Rather, art forces us deeper into technology by bringing us face to face with its technology.” M. Heidegger, The Event, trans. R. Rojcewicz (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2010), 78. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 39. Heidegger, The Event, 40. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 369. Ibid., 143. It is important to emphasize how metaphysics cannot be opposed with another metaphysics because as “a mere countermovement, however, it necessarily remains trapped, like everything anti-, in the essence of what it is challenging.” M. Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God Is Dead,’ ” in Off the Beaten Track, 162. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 397. Ibid., 201. The “representation” of the event in poetry is well outlined in D. N. Smith, Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); and F. de Alessi, Heidegger lettore dei poeti (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991), where the poetry of Hölderlin, R. M. Rilke, and G. Trakl, J. P. Hebel, and S. George is not considered as simply a contribution to aesthetics and literary history but rather stem from a necessity for thought. A general explanation of the event within Heideggerian philosophy is now available in C. Romano, Event and World, trans. S. Mackinlay (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 10–21. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 397.

2. EMERGENCY THROUGH ART 1. M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. R. Rojcewicz and D. Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 90. 2. Only “the most original meditation can save us—into emergency. One always finds a way to ‘happiness’ in every case, even if it is only frugality and the abandonment of demands. Those who rescue us from ‘emergency’— certainly—but rescuers into emergency: where are they? Those who venture into the untrodden and unformed realm of the opening of the emergency that urges, insofar as it demands that human beings be free—that they bear the abyss—and this emergency is be-ing itself.”

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

M.  Heidegger, Überlegungen X, §12, Gesamtausgabe vol. 95 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 281; translated by R. Polt. M. Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. P. Emad and T. Kalary (New York: Continuum, 2006), 24. M. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Polt and G. Fried (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 170. M. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936), in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 19. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), 22. Heidegger, Mindfulness, 29. Ibid., 28. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), 185. Ibid., 22. D. F. Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Little Brown, 1996). It is interesting to notice also how Wallace’s early nonfiction works (e.g., Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will [1986], ed. S. M. Cahn and M. Eckert [New York: Columbia University Press, 2010]) reveals his interest in the future and how it can be framed. See also S. M. Cahn and M. Eckert, eds., Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). The Shipment was written and directed by Young Jean Lee and commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, and premiered in October 2008; Untitled Feminist Show was conceived and directed by Young Jean Lee in collaboration with Faye Driscoll, Morgan Gould, and the original performers and premiered at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, on January 5–7, 2012; and Straight White Men was written and directed by Young Jean Lee and premiered at the Wexner Center for Arts, Columbus, Ohio, on April 10–14, 2014. Reviews, interviews, and information on Lee’s plays are available on her website: http://www.youngjeanlee.org/content/ home. A. Danto, Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), xvi. It is important to notice how Danto’s “globalization of the art world” is actually achieved through the central role that art fairs and biennales have acquired in recent years. See C. A. Jones, The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Danto, Unnatural Wonders, xvi.

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15. M. C. Taylor, “Financialization of Art,” Capitalism and Society 6, no. 2 (2011): 17. A new version of this essay is now included in M. C. Taylor, Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 1–15. 16. Taylor, Refiguring the Spiritual, 14. As Taylor recalls, many others have also stressed art’s transformative force, such as Friedrich Schiller, who defined “the task of the avant-garde by translating Kant’s interpretation of the beautiful work of art into a psycho-social practice. The challenge, Schiller declares, is to transform the world into a work of art. As Schlegel has suggested, the realization of the artistic utopia would be the fulfillment of the kingdom of God on earth.” Ibid. 17. Taylor, “Financialization of Art,” 3. 18. S. Žižek, The Year of Living Dangerously (London: Verso, 2012), 132. 19. kennardphillips, in Adam Benmakhlouf, “kennardphillipps: Protest as Practice.” The Skinny, August 1, 2015, http://www.theskinny.co.uk/art/inter views/protest-as-practice-interview-kennardphillipps. 20. kennardphillipps, in Art and Agenda: Political Art and Activism, ed. R. Klanten et al. (Berlin: Gestalten, 2011, 232). Some of their work can be downloaded for free from their website: http://www.kennardphillipps.com. 21. Benmakhlouf, “kennardphillipps: Protest as Practice.” 22. J. Castro, “Not All’s Been Said and Done,” interview by Jérôme Sans, in “Hardcore, Towards a New Activism,” Palais de Tokyo, site de création contemporaine, Cercle d’Art editor, Paris, 2003: http://www.jotacastro .eu/texts-press/not-alls-been-said-and-done-2003-eng/#null. 23. D. Hancox, “Emergency Biennale,” Guardian, April 13, 2005, http://www .theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/apr/13/art1. It is important to note how Jouanno and Castro’s biennale is different from typical biennales: a “ ‘classical’ biennale means two years’ work and hundreds of thousands of Euros,’ says Jouanno, ‘We’ve proved that a big-scale artistic event of quality can be organized in three weeks, for less than a month’s wages.’ ” Castro’s works can be seen on his website: http://www.jotacastro.eu. 24. F. Minelli, http://www.filippominelli.com/contradictions_series. 25. Lene Ter Haar, “To Live It Up,” in Passing to Presents: Silence and Golden in the Work of Filippo Minelli, ed. Freek Lomme (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2014), 16–20. The political nature of Minelli’s work is outlined in S. Zabala, “Out of Network: The Art of Filippo Minelli,” New York Times, April 16, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/out-of -network-the-art-of-filippo-minelli/; and Lomme, ed., Passing to Presents, 92–108. His works are visible on his website: http://www.filippominelli .com.

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26. Blair served as the prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. Together with former president G. W. Bush of the United States, he is responsible for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. 27. R. Scruton, “Liberalism,” in The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 396. 28. G. Sorensen, A Liberal World Order in Crisis: Choosing Between Imposition and Restraint (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press), 41. 29. S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 310–311. In order to continue to impose liberalism, as the Italian philosopher of law Danilo Zolo points out, the West has begun to “neutralize” the notion of “aggression” by substituting the notion of “self-defense” expressed in article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations. “In the majority of the cases the concept of ‘aggression’ has been distorted and converted in the opposite idea of a war conducted to defend humanity against the menace of ‘global terrorism.’ ” Zolo specifies that the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 invasion of Iraq have managed to simulate the triumph of the humanitarian war through a terrorist use of military power. In particular, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq is an archetype of a war of aggression skillfully covered under the cloak of humanitarian war that actually aimed at realizing an imperialistic project of global hegemonic dimensions on liberal political, military, and economic grounds. D. Zolo, Terrorismo umanitario: Dalla guerra del Golfo alla strage di Gaza (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2009), 13–14. 30. C. Schmitt, Die Geistesgeschichtliche Lage des Heutigen Parlamentarismus (Berlin: Dunker and Humblot, 1926), 5. An outline of the inner contradictions and paradoxes of liberalism are available in D. Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. G. Elliott (London: Verso, 2014); and D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). The Italian historian points out that although classical liberals (e.g., John Locke, George Washington, or Alexis de Tocqueville, among many others) often differ in their philosophical views, they have always been united in their willingness to apply forms of severe oppression (slavery, indigenous genocides, or also work labor camps); the English geographer instead recalls how M. Friedman and the so-called Chicago Boys promoted in several nations the liberation of the market from the state as the most reliable way to ensure both democracy, freedom, and economic growth. Nonetheless, these “hegemonic practices of neoliberalism in both the economic and the political arenas have given rise to decentralised and networked oppositional forms” (D. Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism [New York: Oxford

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31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

University Press, 2014], 281) that we are now witnessing through the Tea Party and Occupy Movement. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), 43. Ibid., 43, 117. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 31–32. R. Fisk, “Democracy Will Not Bring Freedom,” Independent, August 21, 2009. Jamie Metzl and Christine Fair suggested, after serving as observers during the 2009 Afghan elections, that instead of submitting to “the international community,” which finances the government’s “official corruption,” Iraq and Afghanistan ought to be allowed to exercise “internally generated reforms” because they are ethnically divided societies. F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992, 2006), 211–212. Ibid., 73. In the new afterword Fukuyama specifies how “scientific development makes possible the enormous increase in productivity that has driven modern capitalism and the liberation of technology and ideas in modern market economies” (343). N. Chomsky, Failed States (London: Penguin, 2006), 24. These visions were also imposed when Iraqis were “invited” to vote on January 30, 2005, under the watch of occupation forces and international observers. As Tariq Ali explained in an article for the Guardian (“Out with the Old, in with the New,” Guardian, February, 7, 2004), this election was designed to preserve the unity not of Iraq but of the imperial policies of the occupation forces. “Only oil was exempt (presumably because of its special status as revenue producer to pay for the war and its geopolitical significance). The labor market, on the other hand, was to be strictly regulated. Strikes were effectively forbidden in key sectors and the right to unionize restricted. A highly regressive ‘flat tax’ (an ambitious tax-forms plan long advocated for implementation by conservatives in the US) was also imposed.” Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 6. “Crises are essential to the reproduction of capitalism. It is in the course of crises that the instabilities of capitalism are confronted, reshaped and re-engineered to create a new version of what capitalism is about.” Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, ix. T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 473. Ibid., 297. Ibid., 473.

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44. The problem by the mid-2000s, as Paul Krugman explains, was that “much of the US financial system . . . consisted of ‘shadow banks,’ which didn’t rely on traditional deposits but instead raised money through various forms of short-run borrowing. Lehman Brothers, for example, relied heavily on ‘repo’—short-term loans, mainly overnight, with assets like mortgage-backed securities as collateral. What became apparent in 2008 was that shadow banks were every bit as vulnerable to runs as conventional banks, but lacked any kind of public safety net.” P. Krugman, “Does He Pass the Test?” New York Review of Books, July 10, 2014, http://www .nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jul/10/geithner-does-he-pass-test/. 45. The Internet bubble is outlined in E. Ofek and M. Richardson, “DotComMania: The Rise and Fall of Internet Stock Prices,” Journal of Finance 68, no. 3 (June 2003): 1113–1137. 46. J. Stiglitz and L. J. Bilmes analyze the cost of the war in their edited volume The Three-Trillion-Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: Norton, 2008). 47. E. Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso, 2004), 14. 48. J. D. Sachs, “The Roots of America’s Financial Crisis,” in Project Syndicate, March 21, 2008, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the -roots-of-america-s-financial-crisis. 49. P. Krugman, “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” New York Times Magazine, September 2, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/maga zine/06Economic-t.html. 50. J. Stiglitz, “Global Crisis—Made in America,” Spiegel Online, December 11, 2008. 51. J. Stiglitz and M. Zandi, “The One Housing Solution Left: Mass Mortgage Refinancing,” New York Times, August 12, 2012. 52. As Stiglitz explains, the problem is not simply that regulators believed in the rational self-regulation of the market but that the “regulatory authorities [mostly the Fed] allowed the financial markets as well as banks to use the abundance of funds in ways that were not socially productive.” This is why the ongoing recession is not a crisis of the housing bubble alone but rather of our whole “economic and political system,” where bankers, regulators, and politicians helped one another to safeguard the system. Any discussion of who is to blame conjures promoters of neoliberalism such as “Robert Rubin, co-conspirator in deregulation and a senior official in one of the two financial institutions into which the American government has poured the most money. Then there is Alan Greenspan, who also pushed the deregulatory philosophy; who failed to use the regulatory authority that he had; who encouraged homeowners to take out highly

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53. 54.

55. 56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

risky adjustable mortgages; and who supported President Bush’s tax cut for the rich, making lower interest rates, which fed the bubble, necessary to stimulate the economy. . . . The list of institutions that must assume considerable responsibility for the crisis includes the investment banks and the investors; the credit-rating agencies; the regulators, including the SEC and the Federal Reserve; the mortgage brokers; and a string of administrations, from Bush to Reagan, that pushed a financial-sector deregulation.” J. Stiglitz, “The Anatomy of a Murder: Who Killed America’s Economy?” Critical Review 21, nos. 2–3 (2009): 33. T. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises (New York: Crown, 2014). T. Geithner, quoted in Andrew Ross Sorkin, “What Timothy Geithner Really Thinks,” New York Times Magazine, May 8, 2014, http://www .nytimes.com/2014/05/11/magazine/what-timothy-geithner-really -thinks.html. Krugman, “Does He Pass the Test?” J. Stiglitz, “Too Big to Fail or Too Big to Save? Examining the Systemic Threats of Large Financial Institutions,” Testimony for the Joint Economic Committee hearing, April 21, 2009, Washington, D.C., http://www2 .gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/download/papers/2009_JEC_TooBig ToFail.pdf. The term “Web 2.0” was coined in 1999 and made popular by Tim O’Reilly in 2004. See T. O’Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software,” O’Reilly Network, 2005, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is -web-20.html. Even though the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently approved a plan to govern broadband Internet like a public utility in the United States, it did not, however, safeguard net neutrality. As Robert McMillan explains, the FCC has simply “backed the idea of net neutrality for about a decade. . . . What’s changing here is the way the FCC is classifying broadband internet. And the reason this is happening is because the courts have told the FCC that it simply can’t enforce net neutrality unless it does this.” R. McMillan, “Net Neutrality Won Big Today. But We Can’t Get Complacent Just Yet,” Wired (February 2015), http:// www.wired.com/2015/02/net-neutrality-won -big-today-cant-get-com placent-just-yet/. T. Berners-Lee, “DeveloperWorks Interviews: Tim Berners-Lee,” by Scott Laningham, August 22, 2006, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/pod cast/dwi/cm-int082206txt.html. Ibid.

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61. Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media,” Business Horizons 53, no. 1 (2010): 60, http://es.slideshare.net/escpexchange/kaplan-haenlein-users -of-the-world-unite-the-challenges-and-opportunities-of-social-media. 62. J. van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 66. 63. N. A. Christakis and J. H. Fowler, Connected: How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do (New York: Back Bay Books, 2009). 64. L. Manovich, “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production?” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009). 65. Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity, 21. 66. Ibid., 7. 67. Ibid., 11. 68. Even though Evan Williams, the cofounder of Twitter, has said in a television interview that the purpose of Twitter is “about humans connecting with each other, and often in ways that they couldn’t otherwise,” Miranda Mowbray recalls how the platform “is also used by automated accounts. In 2009, Sysomos, Inc. estimated that 24% of all public tweets were sent by automated accounts tweeting at least 150 times a day.” M. Mowbray, “Automated Twitter Accounts,” in Twitter and Society, ed. K. Weller et al. (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 183. 69. C. McCarthy, “Twitter Cofounder: We’ll Have Made It When You Shut Up About Us,” CNet, June 3, 2009, http:// news.cnet.com/ 8301-13577_3 -10256113-36.html. 70. https://about.twitter.com/company. 71. Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity, 74. 72. Ibid., 69. 73. Hamid Tehrani, the Persian editor of the blogging network Global Voices, explained to the Guardian that there were fewer than one thousand active Twitter users in Iran at the time of the election in 2009. “Some people did provide updates from Tehran, but many didn’t check out. When someone tweeted that there were 700,000 people demonstrating in front of a  mosque, it turned out that only around 7,000 people showed up.” M. Weaver, “Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ Was Exaggerated, Says Editor,” Guardian, June 9, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/09 /iran-twitter-revolution-protests. 74. Only about a quarter of the Egyptian population was online in 2010. This is why, as D. Kravets points out in Wired, we should not “confuse tools with root causes, or means with ends” because the “protests in Tunisia, 155

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75.

76.

77.

78. 79.

80. 81. 82.

83.

Egypt and Yemen are against dictators who’ve held power—and clamped down on their people—for decades. That’s the fuel for the engine of dissent. The dozen or more protesters that self-immolated in Egypt didn’t do it for the tweets.” D. Kravets, “What’s Fueling Mideast Protests? It’s More Than Twitter,” Wired, January 28, 2011, http://www.wired.co.uk/news /archive/2011-01/28/middle-east-protests-twitter. On Occupy Wall Street, see E. Morozov, “Why Social Movements Should Ignore Social Media,” New Republic, February 5, 2015, http://www.newre public.com/article/112189/social-media-doesnt-always-help-social -movements. On Occupy Central in Hong Kong, see A. Lam, “Did Facebook Manipulate Central’s Participation?” Marketing Interactive, October 10, 2014, http://www.marketing-interactive.com/did-facebook-mani pulate-occupy-central-participation/. D. Rushe, “Twitter Transparency Report: US Among Biggest Offenders Requesting User Data,” Guardian, February 9, 2015, http://www.theguar dian.com/technology/2015/feb/09/twitter-transparency-report-user-in formation. On social media’s illusory liberating potentials, see E. Morozov, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World (New York: Penguin, 2011); and the essays by C. Christensen, B. Rahimi, N. Fenton, V. Barassi, A. Segerberg, W. Lance Bennett, P. N. Howard, S. D. Agarwal, and M. M. Hussain in “Twitter Revolutions? Addressing Social Media and Dissent,” special issue of The Communication Review 14, no. 3 (2011). E. Morozov, “How Dictators Watch Us on the Web,” Prospect, November 18, 2009, http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/how-dictators -watch-us-on-the-web. A. R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 214. T. Berners-Lee, “Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality,” Scientific American (December 2010), http://www .scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web. D. Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), 5. Hema Upadhyay, interview by S. Ting, initiArt, December 16, 2010, http:// www.initiartmagazine.com/interview.php?IVarchive=40. C. Macklin and H. G. Masters, “Hema Upadhyay: 1972–2015,” Asia Pacific Magazine, December 21, 2015, http://artasiapacific.com/News/Hema Upadhyay19722015. Her work is available on Gallery Chemould’s website: http://gallerychemould.com/artists/hema-homepage/. Wang Zhiyuan, in Jeremy Eccles, “Australians Lead the Market for Chinese Art,” Financial Times, October 13, 2010, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms /s/2/03ea1e44-d4d6-11df-b230-00144feabdc0.html.

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84. Information on Zhiyuan’s works are available on his website: http:// wangzhiyuan.artron.net/. 85. Zhiyuan, “Australians Lead the Market for Chinese Art.” 86. P. McFarlane, “Left Behind but Not Forgotten,” artist statement, http:// petermcfarlane.com/Peter%20Macfarlane%20web%20site/06statement .php. 87. Mary Reid, “Salvation: The Deliverance from Sin,” in C. MacCool and P.  McFarlane, Salvation, ed. Virginia E. Eichhorn (Oshawa, Ont.: The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2004), 4. See also Elizabeth Nolan, “Physical and Cultural Transformations Inform MacFarlane’s Shapeshifters,” Gulf Islands Driftwood, August 17, 2011, http://petermcfarlane.com/Peter%20 Macfarlane%20web%20site/pdf/Peter_McFarlane_driftwood2011-8.pdf. 88. M. Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 37. 89. UN-Habitat, “Voices from Slums: Background Paper,” October 6, 2014 (World Habitat Day), http://unhabitat.org/whd-2014/. 90. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects, the 2011 Revision: Highlights (New York, 2012), http://esa.un.org/unup/Documentation/highlights .htm. 91. Davis, Planet of Slums, 23. 92. In the United States, at “last count, nearly 45,000 people lived in the 350 Texas colonias classified by the state as at the ‘highest health risk,’ meaning residents of these often unincorporated subdivisions have no running water, no wastewater treatment, no paved roads or solid waste disposal. Water- and mosquito-borne illnesses are rampant, the result of poor drainage, pooling sewage and water contaminated by leaking septic tanks.” E. Ramshaw, “Conditions, Health Risks Sicken Colonias Residents,” Texas Tribune, July 10, 2011, http://www.texastribune.org/2011/07 /10/conditions-health-risks-sicken-colonias-residents/. Cañada Real Galiana is a sixteen-kilometer-long, seventy-five-meter-wide strip of economic and social misery only a fifteen-minute drive from Madrid’s city center. It is considered to be Europe’s largest slum. See Alasdair Fotheringham, “In Spain’s Heart, a Slum to Shame Europe,” Independent, November 27, 2007, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/in-spains-heart -a-slum-to-shame-europe-6268652.html. 93. Davis, Planet of Slums, 201–202. 94. Ibid., 16; J. Gugler, “Overurbanization Reconsidered,” in Cities in the Developing World: Issues, Theory, and Policy, ed. J. Gugler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 114–123. 95. L. Weinstein, The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 10. 157

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96. UN-Habitat, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003 (London, 2003), 3. 97. According to the 2013 UN global report on human settlements, “urban slum dwellers” are defined as “individuals residing in housing with one or more of the following conditions: inadequate drinking water; inadequate sanitation; poor structural quality/durability of housing; overcrowding; and insecurity of tenure.” UN-Habitat, Planning and Design for Sustainable Urban Mobility: Global Report on Human Settlements 2013 (New York: Routledge, 2013, 2014), 210, http://unhabitat.org/books/plan ning-and-design-for-sustainable-urban-mobilityglobal-report-on-human -settlements-2013-policy-directions/. 98. B. Marx, T. Stoker, and T. Suri, “The Economics of Slums in the Developing World,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 190. 99. UN-Habitat, Sustainable Housing for Sustainable Cities: A Policy Framework for Developing Countries (Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2012). http://peoplebuildingbettercities.org/wp-con tent/uploads/2013/06/Sustainable-Housing-Policy-Framwork.pdf. 100. Marx, Stoker, and Suri, “The Economics of Slums in the Developing World,” 206. 101. Isolating walls are “reinforced by motion detectors, heat-sensing cameras, X-ray systems, night-vision equipment, helicopters, drones and blimps.” B. Debusmann, “Around Globes, Walls Spring up to Divide Neighbors,” Reuters, April 30, 2007. Davis (Planet of Slums, 205) maintains that the Pentagon is planning “low-intensity world wars of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor.” 102. A. Parr, Hijacking Sustainability (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 127, 137. In Venezuela, “improved and better connected pathways are important features of slum upgrading programs. In La Vega Barrio, one of Caracas, Venezuela’s largest and oldest informal settlements, 30 pathways that criss-cross steep hillsides have been built or rehabilitated to enhance access to jobs, schools and medical clinics, as part of a major neighborhood upgrading initiative.” UN-Habitat, Planning and Design for Sustainable Urban Mobility, 92. 103. R. Srivastava and M. Echanove, “ ‘Slum’ Is a Loaded Term. They Are Homegrown Neighborhoods,” Guardian, November 28, 2014, http://www .theguardian.com/cities/2014/nov/28/slum -loaded-term -home grown -neighbourhoods-mumbai-dharavi. 104. T. Cruz, in R. Tuhus-Dubrow, “Leaning from Slums,” Boston.com, March 1, 2009, http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/03/01/learn ing_from_slums. 105. Weinstein, The Durable Slum, 11. 158

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106. Dharavi “has challenged the very notion of a slum” because its residents have transformed what was a marshy outpost into a thriving entrepreneurial community that “collectively turn[s] over $650m annually and provide[s] affordable housing to the city’s working class” C. Carr, “The Best Idea to Redevelop Dharavi Slum? Scrap the Plans and Start Again,” Guardian, February 18, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/feb /18/best-ideas-redevelop-dharavi-slum-developers-india. 107. P. M. Apte, “Dharavi: India’s Model Slum,” Plaetizen, September 29, 2008, http://www.planetizen.com/node/35269. 108. D. Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), 18. Carr (“The Best Idea to Redevelop Dharavi Slum?”) reports, “Under the government-led Dharavi Redevelopment Project, developers will provide the people living there—who can prove residency since 2000—a new, 300 sq ft house for free. In return, authorities have allowed the builders to go higher (increasing the floor space index in Dharavi from 1.33 to 4), thereby concentrating residents into tower blocks and freeing up space for luxury high rises that will reap huge returns.” 109. D. Harvey, “Urban Class Warfare: Are Cities Built for the Rich?” interview by C. Twickel, Der Spiegel Online, May 21, 2013, http://www.spiegel .de/international/world/marxist-and-geographer-david-harvey-on -urban-development-and-power-a-900976.html. 110. V. E. Yarsley and E. G. Couzens, Plastics (Middlesex: Penguin, 1945). 111. J. Hopewell, R. Dvorak, and E. Kosior, “Plastics Recycling: Challenges and Opportunities,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364 (July 27, 2009): 2115. 112. There “is some urgency, as the quantity of plastics produced in the first 10 years of the current century is likely to approach the quantity produced in the entire century that preceded.” R. C. Thompson et al., “Plastics, the Environment, and Human Health: Current Consensus and Future Trends,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364 (July 27, 2009): 2153. 113. R. Halden, in “Health and Environment: A Closer Look at Plastics,” by  R.  Harth in the Biodesign Institute News: http://www.biodesign .asu.edu/news/health-and-environment-a-closer-look-at-plastics-. See also E. J. North and R. U. Halden, “Plastics and Environmental Health: The Road Ahead,” Reviews on Environmental Health 28, no. 1 (2013): 1–8. 114. For example, the new Boeing 787 aircraft will “have a skin that is 100 per cent composite and an interior that is 50 per cent plastic, resulting in combined fuel savings of around 20 per cent. Single-use plastic packaging items are among the most common components of marine litter; 159

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115.

116. 117. 118.

119. 120.

121.

122.

123. 124.

however, such packaging has a key role in reducing wastage since even a relatively small use of packaging can extend the shelf life of perishable products, hence contributing to food safety. Since plastic packaging is lightweight, it can also achieve significant reductions in fuel usage (packaging in PET can achieve a 52 per cent saving over glass, for example) during transportation. It is this combined success that has led to global production of plastics, accounting for around 4 per cent of world oil production in the products themselves and a further 4 per cent in the energy required for this production. However, this success also results in the accumulation of end-of-life plastics.” R. C. Thompson, “Plastics, Environment, and Health,” in Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic, ed. J. Gabrys et al. (London: Routledge, 2013), 157. G. Hawkins, “Made to Be Wasted: PET and Topologies of Disposability,” in Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic, ed. J. Gabrys et al. (Routledge: London 2013), 49. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 54, 50. R. C. Thompson et al., comps., “Plastics, the Environment, and Human Health,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364 (July 2009): 1526, http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1526.toc. R. C. Thompson et al., “Our Plastic Age,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364 (July 27, 2009): 1973. E. L. Teuten et al., “Transport and Release of Chemicals from Plastics to the Environment and to Wildlife,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364 (July 27, 2009): 2017. The best waste-management strategy is considered to be the “4Rs”: “reduce, reuse, recycle (materials) and recover (energy).” Recycling, in this strategy, consists in using the material recovered to fabricate new products. “For organic materials like plastics, the concept of recovery can also be expanded to include energy recovery, where the calorific value of the material is utilized by controlled combustion as a fuel, although this results in a lesser overall environmental performance than material recovery as it does not reduce the demand for new (virgin) material.” Hopewell, Dvorak, and Kosior, “Plastics Recycling,” 2116. On biodegradable plastics, see J. H. Song et al., “Biodegradable and Compostable Alternatives to Conventional Plastics,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364 (July 27, 2009): 2127–2139. Hopewell, Dvorak, and Kosior, “Plastics Recycling,” 1981. The principal destination of the four billion tons of municipal, industrial, and hazardous waste generated annually worldwide is China. In 2010 the Asian giant “imported around 7.4m tonnes of discarded plastic, 28m

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125.

126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

131.

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133. 134. 135.

tonnes of waste paper and 5.8m tonnes of steel scrap. Between 2000 and 2008, European exports of plastic waste increased by 250%—and about 87% of these exports ended up in China.” K. Moses, “China Leads the Waste Recycling League,” Guardian, June 14, 2013, http://www.theguardian .com/environment/2013/jun/14/waste-trade-china-recycling-rubbish. J. Watts, “Beijing Introduces Recycling Banks That Pay Subway Credits for Bottles,” Guardian, July 4, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/envi ronment/2012/jul/04/beijing-recycling-banks-subway-bottles. A. Minter, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade (London: Bloomsbury: 2013), 145. Davis, Planet of Slums, 47. G. Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 263. J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1942), 82–83. Solving the E-Waste Problem (Step), “One Global Definition of E-waste,” June 3, 2014, http://i.unu.edu/media/ias.unu.edu-en/news/3774/StEP_WP _One-Global-Definition-of-E-waste_20140603.pdf. B. H. Robinson, “E-waste: An Assessment of Global Production and Environmental Impacts,” Science of the Total Environment 408 (2009): 183. Robinson (184) goes on to specify that “computers, mobile telephones and television sets would contribute 5.5 million tonnes to the E-waste stream in 2010, rising to 9.8 million tonnes in 2015.” Modern consumers “tend to value whatever is new and original over what is old, traditional, durable, or used. Advertising and other marketing strategies have helped create this preference by encouraging dissatisfaction with the material goods we already have, and emphasizing the allure of goods we do not yet own. When dissatisfaction and desire reach a peak, we acquire the new and discard the old. Electronic waste is simply the most extreme version of this consumer behavior. In the words of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition: ‘Where once consumers purchased a stereo console or television set with the expectation that it would last for a decade or more, the increasingly rapid evolution of technology has effectively rendered everything ‘disposable.’ ” Slade, Made to Break, 264–265. Bette K. Fishbein, Waste in the Wireless World: The Challenge of Cell Phones (New York: INFORM, 2009), 5. Ibid., 11. “Today about half the adult population owns a smartphone and by 2020, 80% will.” “Planet of the Phones,” Economist (February 28, 2015), http:// www.economist.com/news/leaders/21645180-smartphone-ubiquitous -addictive-and-transformative-planet-phones. 161

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136. EarthTalk, “How to Reduce the Toxic Impact of Your Ex-Smartphone,” Scientific American, February 20, 2015, http://www.scientificamerican .com/article/how-to-reduce-the-toxic-impact-of-your-ex-smartphone/. 137. Slade, Made to Break, 263. 138. Ibid., 276. 139. M. Wong, in A. Salleh, “E-waste Is a ‘Global Time Bomb,’ ” ABC Science, September 16, 2013, http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/09/16 /3849737.htm. 140. Afua Hirsch, “ ‘This Is Not a Good Place to Live’: Inside Ghana’s Dump for Electronic Waste,” Guardian, December 14, 2013, http://www.the guardian.com/world/2013/dec/14/ghana-dump-electronic-waste-not-good -place-live. 141. Wong, in Salleh, “E-waste Is a ‘Global Time Bomb.’ ” 142. H. Duan et al., “Quantitative Characterization of Domestic and Transboundary Flows of Used Electronics. Analysis of Generation, Collection, and Export in the United States” (Massachusetts: MIT, MSL, NCER), http://www.step-initiative.org/files/step/_documents/MIT-NCER%20 US%20Used%20Electronics%20Flows%20Report%20-%20December%20 2013.pdf. 143. The Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, Trends in Sustainable Development: Chemicals, Mining, Transport, and Waste Management (New York: United Nations, 2010), 27. 144. Oladele A. Ogunseitan, “The Wild West of Electronic Waste,” Project Syndicate, January 6, 2010, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ the-wild-west-of-electronic-waste. It must be pointed out that for several years “the Federal Bureau of Prisons, has kept inmates busy processing e-waste” with harmful consequences for prisoners’ health. L. Acariglu, “Where Do Old Cellphones Go to Die?” New York Times, May 4, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/sunday/where-do-old-cell phones-go-to-die.html. 145. Slade, Made to Break, 261. 146. A. Adjei, “Life in Sodom and Gomorrah: The World’s Largest Digital Dump,” Guardian, April 29, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/globaldevelopment-professionals-network/2014/apr/29/agbogbloshie -accra -ghana-largest-ewaste-dump. 147. J. A. Kirschner, “An Analysis of Lead Pollution in Guiyu, China,” 1. A profound analysis of e-waste’s toxic effects on workers and communities around the world is available in T. Smith, D. A. Sonnenfeld, and D. N. Pellow, eds., Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). 162

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148. J. Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press), 10. 149. N. Azevedo, “Néle Azevedo Interview,” GreenMuze, December 12, 2008, http://www.greenmuze.com/art/interviews/641-nele-azevedo-interview .html. 150. On this event see Emmanuelle Jardonnet, “La Nuit Blanche, caisse de résonance artistique de la COP21,” Le Monde, October 3, 2015, http:// www.lemonde.fr/arts/article/2015/10/03/climat-chaleureux-pour-la-nuit -blanche_4781975_1655012.html. Reviews and interviews on Azevedo’s sculptures are available on her website: http://neleazevedo.com.br/. 151. J. Schiller, “It Took 350 Lighters and Three Years to Make This Photo,” Wired, July 14, 2015, http://www.wired.com/2015/07/mandy-barker-hong -kong-soup-1826/. 152. Mandy Barker, “Mandy Barker—Soup,” Start: A Student’s Art Magazine, January 28, 2012, http://startmag.co.uk/photography/mandy-barker-soup. Information on Barker’s photographs is available on her website: http:// mandy-barker.com/. 153. Barker, in Schiller, “It Took 350 Lighters and Three Years to Make This Photo.” 154. Karen Wright, “Michael Sailstorfer, Artist: ‘When You Install a Piece in the Woods, People Don’t Know If It’s a House or an Accident,’ ” Independent, September 12, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertain ment/art/features/michael-sailstorfer-artist-when-you-install-a-piece-in -the-woods-people-dont-know-if-its-a-house-or-an-accident-9726443 .html. 155. Steven Matijcio and Alyssa Konermann, “On View: Contemporary Arts Center,” Cincinnati Magazine, April 10, 2014, http://www.cincinnatimag azine.com/artsmindsblog/on-view-contemporary-arts-center/. Sailstorfer’s work can be seen on the Perrotin Gallery website: https://www.perrotin .com/artiste-Michael_Sailstorfer-38.html. 156. F. McDonald, “Human Influence on Climate Change a ‘Clarion Call’ to Global Community,” Irish Times, September 28, 2013, http://www.irish times.com/news/environment/human-influence-on-climate-change-aclarion-call-to-global-community-1.1543077. This trend can be seen even back in 1988, when James E. Hansen, the godfather of modern climate science, after speaking to a congressional committee, told reporters that it was “time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” J. E. Hansen, “Climate Maverick to Retire from NASA,” interview by Justin Gillis, New York Times, April 1, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/science/james-e-han sen-retiring-from-nasa-to-fight-global-warming.html. 163

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157. N. Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 450. 158. Ibid., 11. 159. J. E. Hansen et al., “Assessing ‘Dangerous Climate Change’: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations, and Nature,” in PLoS ONE 8, no. 12 (December 2013): 1. 160. “Large parts of the climate movement wasted precious decades attempting to make the square peg of the climate crisis fit into the round hole of deregulated capitalism, forever touting ways for the problem to be solved by the market itself.” Klein, This Changes Everything, 20. 161. Ibid., 12. 162. Ibid., 18–19. 163. Ibid., 21. 164. E. Rignot et al., “Widespread, Rapid Grounding Line Retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler Glaciers, West Antarctica, from 1992 to 2011,” Geophysical Research Letters, no. 41 (2014): 3502–3509. 165. E. Rignot, “Global Warming: It’s a Point of No Return in West Antarctica. What Happens Next?” Guardian, May 17, 2014, http://www.theguar dian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/17/climate-change -antarctica -gla ciers-melting-global-warming-nasa. 166. Ibid. 167. I. Joughin, B. E. Smith, and B. Medley, “Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica,” Science 344, no. 6185 (May 2014): 735–738. 168. H. Hickey, “West Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse Is Under Way,” UW Today, May 12, 2014, http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/05/12/west-antarctic -ice-sheet-collapse-is-under-way/. 169. Ibid. 170. Joughin, Smith, and Medley, “Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way,” 738. 171. Rignot, “Global Warming.” 172. Hansen et al., “Assessing ‘Dangerous Climate Change,’ ” 13–14. 173. At the end of March 2015 global warming caused the northern tip of Antarctica to reach a record-breaking high of 63.5 F (17.5 C), according to the Esperanza Base in Argentina. C. Hooton, “Antarctica Just Experienced Its Warmest Day Ever,” Independent, March 30, 2015, http://www.inde pendent.co.uk/news/world/antarctica-just-experienced-its-warmest-day -ever-10142968.html. 174. Hansen et al., “Assessing ‘Dangerous Climate Change,’ ” 1. 175. On links between fracking and small earthquakes, see Michael Wines, “New Research Links Scores of Earthquakes to Fracking Wells Near a 164

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181. 182.

183.

Fault in Ohio,” New York Times, January 7, 2015, http://www.nytimes .com/2015/01/08/us/new-research-links-scores-of-earthquakes-to-frack ing-wells-near-a-fault-in-ohio.html; and Klein, This Changes Everything, 328–329. For water contamination in fracking, see S. Brantley and A. Meyendorff, “The Facts on Fracking,” New York Times, March 13, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/opinion/global/the-facts-on-frack ing.html. “Scientists say 2C is the maximum increase in temperature the world can tolerate without risking environmental mayhem—which could include rises in sea level, melting of the ice caps, drought in Africa, America and Asia, storms and ocean acidification. Loss of ice caps would lead to less solar energy being reflected back into space, while thawing tundra would release more methane and other greenhouse gases currently frozen in polar regions. Both processes could lead to even greater temperature rises.” R. McKie, “Climate Summit’s Pledge on Carbon Cuts ‘Won’t Avert Global Disaster,’ ” Guardian, March 7, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com /environment/2015/mar/07/climate-summit-pledge-fail-carbon-cuts -temperature-rise. According to a different study, in order to prevent the massive and mostly irreversible impacts on ocean ecosystems and their services, it is necessary to reduce CO2 emissions immediately and substantially. See J.-P. Gattuso et al., “Contrasting Futures for Ocean and Society from Different Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions Scenarios,” Science 349, no. 6243 (July 2015). O. Milman, “James Hansen, Father of Climate Change Awareness, Calls Paris Talks ‘a Fraud,’ ” Guardian, December 12, 2015, http://www.theguar dian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/james-hansen-climate-change-paris -talks-fraud. J. S. Weis, Marine Pollution: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 42. Ibid., 45. M. Eriksen et al., “Plastic Pollution in the World’s Oceans: More Than 5 Trillion Plastic Pieces Weighing Over 250,000 Tons Afloat at Sea,” PLoS ONE 9, no. 12 (December 2014), http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article ?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111913. Ibid., 7, 9–10. C. J. Moore and C. Phillips, Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans (New York: Penguin, 2011). C. J. Moore, “Choking the Oceans with Plastics,” New York Times, August 25, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/opinion/choking-the-ocea ns-with-plastic.html. 165

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184. Weis, Marine Pollution, 55. According to recent oceanographic studies and models, about 75 percent of the floating debris will not come ashore; that is, only 25 percent will land along the west coast of the United States and Canada over several years. “The estimate is that no more than 138,000 tons is likely to land along the coasts of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia in any single year, with 11,000 tons as a more probable amount. . . . The government of Japan has given the United States $5 million in funds to help with clean up of marine debris from the tsunami.” Ibid. 185. H. Koi, “The Great Pacific Garbage,” Fiji Times Online, February 20, 2013. 186. Weis, Marine Pollution, 47. 187. Koi, “The Great Pacific Garbage.” 188. M. R. Gregory, “Environmental Implications of Plastic Debris in Marine Settings—Entanglements, Ingestion, Smothering, Hangers-On,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364 (July 27, 2009): 2015–2016. 189. Weis, Marine Pollution, 2. 190. “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” National Geographic Education, http:// education.nationalgeographic.com/education/encyclopedia/great -pacific-garbage-patch. 191. It is important to remember that microplastics have different effects from larger pieces of debris. “Floating microplastics in open ocean gyres provide habitats for diverse communities of microorganisms, with assemblages that differ from those in surrounding seawater and that vary with polymer type.” Also, plastic “debris readily accumulates harmful chemicals such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) from seawater worldwide, increasing their concentration by orders of magnitude. This process is reversible, with microplastics releasing contaminants upon ingestion and laboratory evidence of uptake in marine worms and fish.” K. L. Law and R. C. Thompson, “Microplastics in the Seas,” Science 345, no. 6193 (2014): 145. 192. R. W. Obbard et al., “Global Warming Releases Microplastic Legacy Frozen in Arctic Sea Ice,” Earth Future 2 (2014): 315. 193. L. Siegle, “Drowning in Plastic,” Guardian, January 25, 2015, http://www .theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/25/drowning-in-plastic-rubbish -in-oceans-ecological-emergency. 194. I. Sample, “Coastal Communities Dumping 8M Tonnes of Plastic in Oceans Every Year,” Guardian, February 12, 2015, http://www.theguardian .com/science/2015/feb/12/coastal -communities -dumping -8m -tonnes -of-plastic-in-oceans-every-year.

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195. See J. R. Jambeck et al., “Plastic Waste Inputs from Land Into the Ocean,” Science 347, no. 6223 (February 2015): 768–771. 196. D. Murdiyarso, “A New Approach to Solving Deforestation,” interview, Allianz, December 19, 2010, http://knowledge.allianz.com/environment /climate_change/?415/new-approach-to-solving-deforestation. 197. R. S. DeFries et al., “Deforestation Driven by Urban Population Growth and Agricultural Trade in the Twenty-First Century,” Nature Geoscience 3 (2010): 178–181. 198. B. Vira, C. Wildburger, and S. Mansourian, eds., Forests, Trees, and Landscapes for Food Security and Nutrition: A Global Assessment Report, IUFRO World Series 33 (Vienna: IUFRO, 2015), 14. 199. A. Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 200. T. Searchinger and R. Heimlich, “Avoiding Bioenergy Competition for Food Crops and Land,” Working Paper, installment 9 of Creating a Sustainable Food Future (Washington, D.C.: World Resources Institute), 1. 201. Ibid., 2. 202. Ibid., 1. 203. Tropical Forest: A Review, The Prince’s Charities’ International Sustainability Unit, April 2015, http://www.pcfisu.org/wp-content/uploads/2015 /04/Princes-Charities-International-Sustainability-Unit-Tropical-Forests -A-Review.pdf, 120. 204. R. S. DeFries et al., “Deforestation Driven by Urban Population Growth and Agricultural Trade,” 181. 205. J. D. Sachs, The Age of Sustainable Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 472. 206. W. McFarland, S. Whitley, and G. Kissinger, “Subsidies for DeforestationDriving Commodities Dwarf Conservation Finance,” Overseas Development Institute, March 2015, http://www.odi.org/publications/9286-sub sidies-commodities-deforestation-brazil-indonesia-redd. 207. I. Sample, “Amazon’s Doomed Species Set to Pay Deforestation’s ‘Extinction Debt,’ ” Guardian, July 12, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/envi ronment/2012/jul/12/amazon-deforestation-species-extinction-debt. 208. A. S. L. Rodrigues et al., “Boom-and-Bust Development Patterns Across the Amazon Deforestation Frontier,” Science 324, no. 5933 (2009): 1435–1437. 209. Sample, “Amazon’s Doomed Species Set to Pay Deforestation’s ‘Extinction Debt.’ ” 210. Sachs, The Age of Sustainable Development, 472. 211. Ibid. 212. Ibid., 469.

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213. These boundaries consist in stratospheric ozone depletion (through chlorofluorocarbons), ocean acidification (excessive flows of nitrogen and phosphorus), “climate change” (rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere), “biosphere integrity” (biodiversity loss and species extinction), “biogeochemical flows” (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles), “landsystem change” (deforestation), freshwater use (depleted aquifers), atmospheric aerosol loading (microscopic particles in the atmosphere that affect climate and living organisms), and the introduction of novel entities (e.g., organic pollutants, radioactive materials, and microplastics). See J. Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461, no. 24: 472–475. 214. Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science 347, no. 6223 (February 13, 2015): 736. See also Johan Rockström and Kate Raworth, “Planetary Boundaries and Human Prosperity,” in Project Syndicate, April 28, 2015, http://www.proj ect-syndicate.org/commentary/environment-boundaries -human-pros perity-by-johan-rockstr-m-and-kate-raworth-2015-04. 215. A. Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 19. 216. J. Karady, In Country: Soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan (San Francisco: SF Camerawork Publications, 2010), 29. 217. J. McKinley, “War Zone Traumas Restaged at Home,” New York Times, May 5, 2010. Karady’s latest portrait is of former army specialist Andrew Floyd, and the creation and production is reported in D. Holdshi, “The Art of War and Memory,” Michigan Today, October 22, 2014, http://michi gantoday.umich.edu/war-and-memory/. Reviews, interviews, and information on Karady’s staged photographs are available on her website: http://www.jenniferkarady.com/home.html. 218. E. Shtromberg, “I Will Not Act Before Understanding: Context Is Everything: The Work of Alfredo Jaar,” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 8, 2013, http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/i-will-not-act-before-under standing-context-is-everything-the-work-of-alfredo-jaar. 219. G. Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, ed. S. Zabala, trans. L. D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 164–165. Jaar’s website also includes other works: http://www.alfredojaar.net/. 220. J. Frere, “A Nightmare of Shattered Lives,” Scotsman, July 24, 2008, http:// www.scotsman.com/news/a-nightmare-of-shattered-lives-1-1081942. 221. J. Frere, “Persian Gulf,” Scotsman, February 5, 2008, http://www.scotsman .com/news/persian-gulf-1-544853. Frere’s works and productions are available on her website: http://www.janefrere.info/. 222. M. Billington, “Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea,” Guardian, February 21, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/feb/21/go-gaza-drink-sea-technis. 168

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223. J. Adames, in Karady, In Country, 7. Adames now works with homeless veterans at Black Veterans for Social Justice in Brooklyn, N.Y., and is studying accounting at Long Island University. 224. M. Guzman Bouvard, Invisible Wounds of War: Coming Home from Iraq and Afghanistan (New York: Prometheus, 2012), 13. 225. Ibid., 51. 226. E. Pilkington, “US Military Struggling to Stop Suicide Epidemic Among War Veterans,” Guardian, February 1, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com /world/2013/feb/01/us-military-suicide-epidemic-veteran. 227. M. Kennard, “How the ‘War on Terror’ Came Home,” Guardian, September 17, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/17/war-ter ror-came-home. 228. L. J. Bilmes, “A Call for a National Strategy on Veterans,” Cognoscenti, WBUR National Public Radio, November 11, 2014, http://cognoscenti .wbur.org/2014/11/11/veterans-day-linda-bilmes. 229. Guzman Bouvard, Invisible Wounds of War, 61. 230. A. Glantz, The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans (Berkeley: University of California Press), 160. 231. M. Kennard, Irregular Army: How the U.S. Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror (London: Verso, 2012), 80. The “situation had become so bad by 2007 that nearly one in five recruits entered the army courtesy of a waiver for a felony or misdemeanor, representing a 42 percent increase in the use of waivers since 2000” (82). 232. Ibid., 117. 233. Guzman Bouvard, Invisible Wounds of War, 47. 234. P. Ewing, “Obama Doubles Troop Deployment to Iraq,” Politico, July 11, 2014, http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/iraq-troops-deploymentdoubles-112691; P. Ewing, “Obama to Keep 9,800 Troops in Afghanistan Through 2015,” Politico, March 24, 2015, http://www.politico.com/story /2015/03/us-afghanistan-troop-withdraw-2015-116359.html; and M. R. Gordon and J. Hirschfeld Davis, “In Shift, U.S. Will Send 450 Advisers to Help Iraq Fight ISIS,” New York Times, June 10, 2015, http://www.nytimes .com/2015/06/11/world/middleeast/us-embracing-a-new-approach-on -battling-isis-in-iraq.html. 235. L. J. Bilmes and J. E. Stiglitz, The Three-Trillion-Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: Norton, 2008). 236. Bilmes, “A Call for a National Strategy on Veterans.” 237. J. E. Stiglitz and L. J. Bilmes, “America’s Costly War Machine,” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/18/opinion /la-oe--bilmes-war-cost-20110918. 169

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238. L. J. Bilmes, “The Financial Legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan: How Wartime Spending Decisions Will Constrain Future National Security Budgets,” HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP13-006, March 2013, 1, https://research.hks.harvard.edu/publications/workingpapers/citation .aspx?PubId=8956. 239. L. J. Bilmes, “Yesterday’s VA Is Serving Today’s Veterans. Therein Lies the Problem,” Cognoscenti, WBUR National Public Radio, July 16, 2014, http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/2014/07/08/va-scandal-linda-bilmes. 240. Ibid. 241. Ibid. 242. J. Reno, “VA Stops Releasing Data on Injured Vets as Total Reaches Grim Milestone,” International Business Times, November 1, 2013, http://www .ibtimes.com/va-stops-releasing-data-injured-vets-total-reaches-grim -milestone-exclusive-1449584. 243. Although the United States has been waging an air campaign against ISIS, Bilmes believes it’s time for a serious discussion about America’s role in the world, that is, how necessary military action is for the immediate or long-term U.S. national security. “What sacrifices is the country prepared to make in other programs, including sacred cows in the defense budget, to pay for a war against ISIS?” L. J. Bilmes, “What Are We Willing to Sacrifice in War on ISIS?” Boston Globe, March 11, 2015, https://www .bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/03/11/what-are-willing-sacrifice-war -isis/9uTVyrBBHmxO3e2BYSiE8J/story.html#. 244. http://alfredojaar.net/gutete/gutete.html. 245. P. Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 48. 246. C. Caryl, “Rwanda Shadows,” Foreign Policy (July 2014). 247. S. Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: HarperCollins), 336. 248. Hutu extremists distributed messages through the media claiming that the Tutsis were planning a killing campaign against them. Radio RTLM, a private Hutu-owned station, relentlessly condemned Tutsis and their supporters, characterizing them as subhuman. In December 1990, “the Hutu paper Kangura (‘Wake up!’) had published its ‘Ten Commandments of the Hutu.’ Like Hitler’s Nuremberg laws and the Bosnian Serbs’ 1992 edicts, these ten commandments articulated the rules of the game the radicals hoped to see imposed on the minority.” Power, A Problem from Hell, 338. On the role the media played during the genocide, see The Media and the Rwanda Massacre, ed. A. Thompson (London: Pluto, 2007), which includes contributions from K. Annan, R. Dallaire, and many others.

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249. Power, A Problem from Hell, 337. 250. Ibid., 336–337. 251. Ibid., 337–338. A “series of small-scale attacks against Tutsi in various parts of the country were designed to look like spontaneous popular actions, but an international human rights mission led by Human Rights Watch demonstrated in early 1993 that they were organized by government officials seeking to heighten ethnic tensions in the country.” T. Longman, “What Did the Clinton Administration Know About Rwanda?” Washington Post, April 6, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey -cage/wp/2015/04/06/what-did-the-clinton-administration-know-about -rwanda/. 252. Power, A Problem from Hell, 343. The Hutu thought that if the United States had retreated from Somalia after the deaths of eighteen U.S. soldiers, the Belgians would do the same. 253. Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You, 105. 254. Ibid. 255. M. Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 61. 256. See J. Kron, “Extremist Hutu Officials Blamed in ’94 Rwanda Assassination,” New York Times, January, 11, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010 /01/12/world/africa/12rwanda.html. 257. Power, A Problem from Hell, 349. 258. Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide, 2. 259. During “an initial visit to Rwanda in August 1993, Dallaire had recommended a force of 8,000 peacekeepers to oversee a tenuous peace process. The U.N. peacekeeping department shrunk that number down to 5,000, before the U.N. Security Council cut it in half, leaving a force of about 2,400 on the ground when the violence started.” C. Lynch, “Rwanda Revisited,” Foreign Policy, April 5, 2015, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04 /05/rwanda-revisited-genocide-united-states-state-depar tment. 260. “Dallaire had to work within narrow limits. He attempted simply to keep the positions he held and to protect the 25,000 Rwandans under UN supervision while hoping that the member states on the Security Council would change their minds and send him some help while it still mattered. . . . At the Hotel des Mille Collines, ten peacekeepers and four UN military observers helped to protect the several hundred civilians sheltered there for the duration of the crisis. About 10,000 Rwandans gathered at the Amohoro Stadium under light UN cover.” Power, A Problem from Hell, 368–369. 261. C. Lynch, “Genocide Under Our Watch,” Foreign Policy, April 16, 2015.

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262. Longman, “What Did the Clinton Administration Know About Rwanda?” 263. M. Lander, “Declassified U.N. Cables Reveal Turning Point in Rwanda Crisis of 1994,” New York Times, June 3, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com /2014/06/04/world/africa/un-cables-reveal-a-turning-point-in-rwanda -crisis.html. 264. U.S. intelligence analysts were aware of Rwanda’s history and the possibility that the atrocity would occur if the United Nations retreated. A “December 1993 CIA study found that some 40 million tons of small arms had been transferred from Poland to Rwanda, via Belgium, an extraordinary quantity for a government allegedly committed to a peace process. And in January 1994 a U.S. government intelligence analyst predicted that if conflict restarted in Rwanda, ‘the worst case scenario would involve one-half million people dying.’ ” Power, A Problem from Hell, 338. 265. Lynch, “Rwanda Revisited.” 266. Power, A Problem from Hell, 332. 267. Lander, “Declassified U.N. Cables Reveal Turning Point in Rwanda Crisis of 1994.” 268. Power, A Problem from Hell, 334–335. 269. Remarks by the president, Kampala, Uganda, March 25, 1998, Office of the Press Secretary, Washington, D.C. 270. Longman, “What did the Clinton Administration Know About Rwanda?” 271. To comprehend the enormity of the Nakba, Pappé prefers to use the paradigm of “ethnic cleansing” rather than “war” because this terminology is “part of the reason why the denial of the catastrophe has been able to go on for so long. When it created its nation-state, the Zionist movement did not wage a war that ‘tragically but inevitably’ led to the expulsion of ‘parts of’ the indigenous population, but the other way round: the main goal was the ethnic cleansing of all of Palestine, which the movement coveted for its new state.” I. Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), xvi. 272. Frere’s “Nakba Project” began with a journey to a concentration camp in Poland and led to Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank, Jordan, and Lebanon. The project was undertaken in collaboration with the Al Hoash Gallery in East Jerusalem and major support from the Welfare Association, UNRWA, and several other partner galleries. 273. Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 11. Until “the occupation of Palestine by Britain in 1918, Zionism was a blend of nationalist ideology and colonialist practice. It was limited in scope: Zionists made up no more than five per cent of the country’s overall population at that time” (ibid.). As Noam Chomsky points out, from 1948 on “Zionism meant the

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274. 275. 276. 277.

278. 279.

280.

281. 282.

ideology of the state. A state religion. Like Americanism, or the magnificence of France. In fact even in this period the notion has changed. I remember for example in 1964, I happened to spend some time in Israel, and among leftish intellectuals, Zionism was regarded as a joke. A thing that was used for propaganda for children. Three years later, most of these people were raving nationalists. That changed in 1967, which was a sea change in the way many Israelis saw themselves and what the state was like. Fundamentally in the pre-state period it was not a state religion.” N. Chomsky, “The Past,” in N. Chomsky and I. Pappé, On Palestine, ed. F. Barat (London: Penguin, 2015), 52. T. Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. R. Patai (New York: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), 1:88. Herzl, quoted in A. Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (New York: Temple, 1973), 222. Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 14. A. H. Sa’di, afterword to Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, ed. A. H. Sa’di and L. Abu-Lughod (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Sa’di lists the main landmarks on the road from the emergence of Zionism to the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948: They “are the first Zionist Congress and the establishment of the World Zionist Organization in 1897; the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Britain announced its decision to support the Zionist colonization of Palestine; Britain’s occupation of Palestine in World War I; the defeat by the British of the 1936–39 Palestinian Rebellion; World War II and the Holocaust; and finally the 1947 United Nations Resolution on the Partition of Palestine and the 1948 War that came fast on its heels” (afterword, 288–289). W. Khalidi, “Revisiting the UNGA Partition Resolution,” Journal of Palestine Studies 27, no. 1 (1997): 11. I. Pappé, “State of Denial: The Nakba in Israeli History and Today,” in N. Chomsky and I. Pappé, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians, ed. F. Barat (London: Penguin, 2010), 60. B. Morris, Righteous Victim: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881– 2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001), 138. Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952) was for decades the guiding spirit behind the World Zionist Organization and in 1949 became the first president of the new nation of Israel. David BenGurion (1886–1973) was the first prime minister (1948–1953, 1955–1963) and defense minister (1948–1953; 1955–1963) of Israel. Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 31. Sa’di, afterword to Nabka, 292.

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283. Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, xii. 284. A detailed analysis of these crimes is available in chapter 9 (“Occupation and Its Ugly Face”) of Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 199–224; and W. Khalidi, ed., All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992). 285. Pappé, “State of Denial,” 63. 286. Sa’di, afterword to Nabka, 294. As Gideon Levy recalls, “Israel started to battle the Nakba immediately after it occurred; it did not allow the refugees to return to their homes and lands and confiscated their abandoned property. It destroyed nearly all of their 418 villages out of foresight, covered them with trees planted by the Jewish National Fund and prevented any mention of their existence.” G. Levy, “The More Israel Represses the Nakba, the Stronger the Memories,” Haaretz, May 14, 2015. 287. These myths are outlined in S. Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (London: Croom Helm, 1987). 288. Pappé, “State of Denial,” 64–65. 289. A. H. Sa’di and L. Abu-Lughod, introduction to Nakba, 10. 290. Pappé, “State of Denial,” 73–74. 291. Ibid., 75. Pappé is correct to point out how the “problem with Israel was never its Jewishness—Judaism has many faces and many of them provide a solid basis for peace and cohabitation; it is its ethnic Zionist character. Zionism does not have the same margins of pluralism that Judaism offers, especially not for the Palestinians.” Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 260–261. 292. E. Gilad, “What Is Nakba Day? A Brief History,” Haaretz, May 14, 2015. Although Nakba Day was first commemorated in 1998, it “was later decided also to mention it during the official Israeli independence celebrations, which are fixed according to the Hebrew calendar.” I. Pappé, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011), 203. 293. H. Bresheeth, “The Continuity of Trauma and Struggle: Recent Cinematic Representations of the Nakba,” in Nakba, ed. Sa’di and Abu-Lughod, 175. 294. Palestine has so far been recognized by 135 countries throughout the world. The first nation within the European Union to recognize Palestine was Sweden in 2014. 295. J. Di Giovanni and Y. Bucay, “On Nakba Day, Pope Francis Gives Palestinians a Symbolic Victory,” Newsweek, May 15, 2015, http://www.news week.com/pope-palestine-israel-332546.

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3. EMERGENCY AESTHETICS 1. M. Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking, trans. A. J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 52. 2. This is why instead of “philosophy” or “philosophical disciplines” Heidegger refers to the “original meditation.” The original meditation ought to be interpreted against philosophy, against the possibility that philosophy can save us. As Polt points out, “Heidegger is not optimistic about the prospects for reawakening urgency through philosophical activity. Eliciting urgency is not a matter of announcing new doctrines, but of ‘deranging’ humanity into an emergency.” R. Polt, The Emergency of Being (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 152. 3. M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. R. Rojcewicz and D. Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 334. 4. M. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. Manfred Stassen, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Continuum, 2003), 297. 5. M. Heidegger, Überlegungen X, §12, Gesamtausgabe vol. 95 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), 281. 6. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), 89. I have changed “plight” to “emergency” in this passage. 7. Ibid., 89. 8. Ibid., 22. 9. Ibid. 10. Heidegger (“The Question Concerning Technology,” 302) refers to art’s salvation in relation to ancient Greece, where “the arts soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted them. They brought the presence [Gegenwart] of the gods, brought the dialogue of divine and human destinings, to radiance. . . . [Here] art works were not enjoyed aesthetically. Art was not a sector of cultural activity.” 11. G. L. Bruns is one of the first authors to point out the anarchic nature of hermeneutics. If “hermeneutics were as self-contained as geometry, or as coherent as a branch of philosophy, or even as tractable as one of the discursive or textual fields that an archeologist might analyze, or (most unlikely of all) as methodologically self-conscious as a school or movement in literary criticism one might have been able to confine it sufficiently to deal with it comprehensively and conclusively, thus finally getting beyond it, or in control of it, in some nontrivial way. But in fact

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12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

hermeneutics is a loose and baggy monster, or anyhow a less than fully disciplined body of thinking whose inventory of topics spreads out over many different historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts. Hermeneutics is ‘anarchic’ in Rainer Schürmann’s sense of this word; it does not try to assault its Sache but rather tries to grant what is singular and unrepeatable an open field.” G. L. Bruns, Hermeneutics: Ancient and Modern (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 16–17. See also G. L. Bruns, “The Hermeneutical Anarchist: Phronesis, Rhetoric, and the Experience of Art,” in Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. J. Malpas, U. Arnswald, and J. Kertscher (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 45–76; G. Vattimo and S. Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), chap. 3; and S. Zabala, “The Anarchy of Hermeneutics: Interpretation as a Vital Practice,” in Inheriting Gadamer: New Directions in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. G. Warnke (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 67–77. He goes on to specify that given “this ancient provenance of the word, it would seem not only that it makes sense to speak of an ‘Ancient Hermeneutics,’ but that hermeneutics is something distinctively characteristic of Ancient Greek thought.” F. Gonzalez, “Hermeneutics in Greek Philosophy,” in The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. J. Malpas and H.-H. Gander (London: Routledge, 2015), 13. Bruns, Hermeneutics: Ancient and Modern, 215. On Hermes see M. Bettini, Le orecchie di Hermes. Studi di antropologia e letterature classiche (Torino: Einaudi: 2000). F. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, and Other Writings, trans. A. Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1998), 14. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), 267. J. Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. J. Weinsheimer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 4. H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960), trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), 279. D. J. Schmidt, “Text and Translation,” in The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. J. Malpas and H.-H. Gander (London: Routledge, 2015), 350. K. Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 2. J. Malpas, “Introduction: Hermeneutics and Philosophy,” in The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. J. Malpas and H.-H. Gander (London: Routledge, 2015), 5.

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21. G. Bruns, M. Ferraris, H.-H. Gander, J. Grondin, P. Lanceros, J. Malpas, A. Ortiz-Osés, L. Ormiston, R. Palmer, J. Risser, A. D. Schrift, J. Weinsheimer, and others have written extensive histories, introductions, and dictionaries of hermeneutics that all disagree about the origins of the discipline. 22. Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 3. 23. G. Vattimo, “The Future of Hermeneutics,” in The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. J. Malpas and H.-H. Gander (London: Routledge, 2015), 722. 24. Bruns, Hermeneutics: Ancient and Modern, 16–17. 25. R. Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 295. Simon Critchley is correct to point out anarchism “is not so much a grand unified theory of revolution based on a socio-economic metaphysics and a philosophy of history, as a moral conviction, an ethical disposition that finds expression in practice and as practice. Anarchism is a different way of conceiving and enacting social relations between people, where they are not defined by the authority of the state, the law and the police, but by free agreement between them.” S. Critchley, introduction to The Anarchist Turn, ed. J. Blumenfeld, C. Bottici, and S. Critchley (New York: Pluto, 2013), 4. 26. G. Vattimo, “The Political Outcome of Hermeneutics,” in Consequences of Hermeneutics: Fifty Years After Gadamer’s Truth and Method, ed. J. Malpas and S. Zabala (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 282. 27. Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 91. For a detailed analysis of Heidegger’s hermeneutics, see I. Farin, “Heidegger: Hermeneutics as Ontology,” in The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. J. Malpas and H.-H. Gander (London: Routledge, 2015), 107–126. 28. M. Heidegger, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. J. van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 29. “Martin Heidegger in Conversation,” trans. L. Harries, in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, ed. G. Neske and E. Kettering (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 82. 30. M. De Beistegui, The New Heidegger (London: Continuum, 2005), 23. 31. Malpas, “Introduction: Hermeneutics and Philosophy,” 2. 32. Vattimo, “The Political Outcome of Hermeneutics,” 284, 286. 33. This is why Vattimo (“The Future of Hermeneutics,” 723) believes the “future of hermeneutics must take the form of the transformation of hermeneutics into a practical philosophy or philosophy of praxis. That does not mean that hermeneutics, as philosophy of interpretation, somehow progresses in a positive sense through its increasing realization of its 177

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

character as a philosophy of praxis. There is no object proper to hermeneutical thought that is better understood, described or represented, through the progressive development of hermeneutics into an explicit philosophy of praxis.” Ibid., 725. M. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Polt and G. Fried (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 140. N. Davey, Unquiet Understanding: Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 242. Heidegger, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 15–16. Malpas, “Introduction: Hermeneutics and Philosophy,” 3. G. Vattimo, “Emergency and Event: Technique, Politics, and the Work of Art,” Philosophy Today 59, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 586. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 31. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 49. Here J. Young and K. Haynes translate “Stoß” as “thrust.” I opted for “shock,” given the impact and event of works of art. Walter Benjamin also used “shock” to outline both the urban and artistic experience: “In a film, perception in the form of shocks [shockförmige Wahrnehmung] was established as a formal principle.” W. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 171. On Benjamin’s “shock experience,” see J. Kang, Walter Benjamin and the Media: The Spectacle of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 120–123. G. Vattimo, in Art’s Claim to Truth, ed. S. Zabala, trans. L. D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), specifies “that such an encounter with the work— understood as the ‘Stoß’ of encountering a new world—cannot be reduced in any way to the traditional concepts of aesthetic enjoyment” because it “suspends in the reader all natural relationships, making strange everything that until that moment had appeared obvious and familiar” (152). It is important to recall that Vattimo was among the first to connect Heidegger’s Stoß with Benjamin’s idea of shock in his 1989 book The Transparent Society, trans. D. Webb (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 45–61. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 40. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 44. Heidegger’s response to this question is positive: “It does indeed, if by nothing is meant the mere not of beings, and if we represent the being as that which is present in the ordinary way—that which later comes to light through the standing there of the work as what is merely presumed to be a true being, that which is brought into question. Truth will never be

178

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47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

gathered from what is present and ordinary. The disclosure of the open and the clearing of beings happen, rather, only insofar as the approaching openness is projected within thrownness.” Ibid. Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxi. “The work of art is an object of hermeneutics.” H.-G. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. D. E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 98. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 45. Ibid., 291. Self-understanding “always occurs through understanding something other than the self, and includes the unity and integrity of the other. Since we meet the artwork in the world and encounter a world in the individual artwork, the work of art is not some alien universe into which we are magically transported for a time. Rather, we learn to understand ourselves in and through it, and this means that we sublate (aufheben) the discontinuity and atomism of isolated experiences in the continuity of our own existence.” Ibid., 83. The distinction between “dialogue” and “conversation” is analyzed in S. Zabala, “Being Is Conversation,” in Consequences of Hermeneutics, ed. J. Malpas and S. Zabala (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 161–176. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 290. Ibid., 286–291. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 293. H.-G. Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. L. E. Hahn (Peru, Ill.: Open Court, 1997), 44. H-G. Gadamer, The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, ed. R. Palmer (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 217. Ibid., 181. While R. Palmer translated “Stoß” as “jolt” and “stößt” as “knocks,” I opted for “thrust” and “overturns.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 296. H.-G. Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation. Reflections and Commentary, ed. R. E. Palmer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 71. In this passage I translated “Stoß” as “shock.” M. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 94. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), 46. Benjamin also defined that salvation as an event or “an image which flashes up at the 179

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instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255. 65. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 303.

AFTERWORD 1. A. C. Danto, What Art Is (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013), 154. 2. J. Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. S. Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 142. 3. G. Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, ed. S. Zabala, trans. L. D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 125. 4. F. Halsall, J. Jansen, and T. O’Connor, introduction to Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice, ed. F. Halsall, J. Jansen, and T. O’Connor (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 10; T. Adorno, “Commitment,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt, trans. F.  McDonagh (Oxford: Continuum, 1978), 300–318; H. Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (Boston: Beacon, 1978), 1. 5. C. Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 5; G. Agamben, State of Exception, trans. K. Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 86. 6. On Adorno, see the essays in J. M. Bernstein et al., eds., Art and Aesthetics After Adorno (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); on Horkheimer, see J. Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and on Marcuse, see M. Miles, Herbert Marcuse: An Aesthetics of Liberation (London: Pluto, 2012). On Schmitt, see C. Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999); on Benjamin, see Agamben, State of  Exception; and on Agamben, see M. Calarco and S. DeCaroli, eds., Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007). On the emergency of contemporary philosophy, see the special issue of Philosophy Today 59, no. 4 (Fall 2015), ed. S. Zabala, with contributions from A. Parr, N. Khawaj, D. Jørgensen, A. de Boever, F. Neyrat, B. Honig, D. Rosselo, S. Mazzini, R. Polt, and G. Vattimo. 7. The renewal of aesthetics is evident in various publications, such as Halsall, Jansen, and O’Connor, eds., Rediscovering Aesthetics; J. Loesberg,

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A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015); J. Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, 2015); M. de Beistegui, Aesthetics After Metaphysics: From Mimesis to Metaphor (London: Routledge, 2012); G. Grindon, ed., Aesthetics and Radical Politics  (Cambridge:  Cambridge Scholars, 2008); B. Hindeliter, W. Kaizen, and V. Maimon, eds., Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009); M. Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); N. Kompridis, ed., The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought (London: Bloomsbury: 2014); H. Molderings, Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experiment, trans. J. Brogden (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); G. Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); A. van den Braembussche, H. Kimmerle, and N. Note, Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective: Towards an Intercultural Aesthetics (Berlin: Springer, 2008). 8. See A. Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61 (October 15, 1964): 571–584; A. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); A. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); A. Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); A. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty (Chicago: Open Court, 2003); and Danto, What Art Is. On Danto’s philosophy, see M. Rollins, ed., Danto and His Critics (Sussex: Wiley, 2012); R. E. Auxier and L. E. Hahn, eds., The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto (Chicago: Open Court, 2013); and D.  Herwitz and M. Kelly, eds., Art, Action, History: Engagements with Arthur C. Danto (New York: Columbia University Press: 2007). 9. See J. Rancière, Dissensus, The Aesthetic Unconscious, trans. D. Keates and J. Swenson (Cambridge: Polity, 2009); and J. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, ed. and trans. G. Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). A profound analysis of the French thinker is available in part 3 of G. Rockhill, Radical History and the Politics of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 10. See Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth; G. Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. D. Webb (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), chap. 5; and G. Vattimo, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, ed. F. D’Agostini, trans., W. McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), chap. 2. On Vattimo, see S. Zabala, ed., Weakening Philosophy: Festschrift in Honour of Gianni Vattimo (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007).

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11. M. Devereaux, “The Philosophical Status of Aesthetics,” American Society of Aesthetics, http://aesthetics-online.org/default.asp?page=Devere auxStatus. 12. F. Halsall, J. Jansen, and T. O’Connor, introduction, 5. Recently, L. Zuidervaart has attempted to overcome both analytic and continental philosophy through a new hermeneutic theory of artistic truth in Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 13. On speculative or new realism, see the critical assessment of S. Bromberg, “The Anti-Political Aesthetics of Objects and Worlds Beyond,” Mute, July 25, 2013, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/anti-political -aesthetics-objects-and-worlds-beyond. 14. G. Harman, “On Vicarious Causation,” Collapse 2, no. 181: 221. 15. G. Harman, “Art Without Relations,” ArtReview 66 (2014): 144–147. 16. J. Tormey and G. Whiteley, foreword to M. Miles, Eco-Aesthetics, EcoAesthetics: Art, Literature, and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change (London: Bloomsbury: 2014), ix. 17. W. Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (Oxford: Continuum, 1978), 254–269. 18. Danto, “The Future of Aesthetics,” 116. 19. C. Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 2. 20. Ibid., 3. 21. N. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Presses du Réel, 2002). 22. G. Kester, in What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation, ed. T. Finkelpearl (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 123. 23. Bishop, Artificial Hells, 2. 24. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 14. 25. Ibid., 15. 26. See C. Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Artforum (February 2006): 178–183; G. Kester, “Letter to the Editor,” Artforum (May 2006): 22; and C. Bishop, “Letter to the Editor,” Artforum (May 2006): 23. On participatory and activist art, see G. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Bishop, Artificial Hells; B. Groys, “On Art Activism,” e-flux Journal 56 (June 2014), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/ on-art-activism/; and N. Thompson, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Melville House, 2015). An “aesthetics of the performative” is available in D. Mersch, Ereignis und Aura. Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp: 2002). 182

AFTERWORD

27. J. Bennett, Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affect, and Art After 9/11 (New York: Tauris, 2012); V. Tello, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Miles, Eco-Aesthetics. Emergency has also been at the center of other studies in relation to aesthetics, art, and art history: M. Miles, “Aesthetics in a Time of Emergency,” Third Text 23, no. 4 (2009): 421–434; R. Laaddaga, Estética de la emergencia: La formacion de otra cultura de las artes (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo editor, 2006); and D. Breslin and D. English, eds., Art History and Emergency: Crises in the Visual Arts and Humanities (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016). 28. Bennett, Practical Aesthetics, 2, 9. 29. Ibid., 3. 30. Ibid., 18. 31. Ibid., 51. 32. Ibid., 6. 33. Tello, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics, 181. 34. Ibid., 1. 35. Ibid., 183. 36. Miles, Eco-Aesthetics, 70. 37. Ibid., 3. 38. Ibid., 30. 39. Ibid., 3. 40. M. Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics, 22–23. 41. A. Silvers, “Aesthetics of Art’s Sake, Not for Philosophy’s!” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993): 149. 42. Even though H. Foster, in Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (New York: Verso, 2015), does not distinguish between emergency and absence of emergency, he also emphasizes contemporary art’s response to our current state of exception or emergency after 9/11. On the collision of activism and art after the Occupy Movement, see Y. McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (New York: Verso, 2016).

183

INDEX

abandoned (überwindung), 22–23 Abelson, Bruce, 43 Abelson, Susan, 43 absence of art, 19, 23, 143n2 absence of emergency (Notlosigkeit), 3–7, 136n16 Abu-Lughod, L., 173n277 Adorno, Theodor, 127–28 aesthetics (aisthêsis), 4–5, 13–23, 111–26, 127–32, 140n36, 145n11; objects, 7, 140n38; turn, 140n40 Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, The (Kompridis), 140n40 Afghanistan, 35, 131, 152n35. See also Karady, Jennifer After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Danto), 143n1 Agamben, Giorgio, 3, 127, 128, 136n16, 138n17

Agbogbloshie, Ghana, 65–66 Age of Sustainable Development, The (Sachs), 84 aisthêsis. See aesthetics Albright, Madeleine K., 102, 103 Ali, Tariq, 152n38 Amazon, 83–84 Amohoro Stadium, 171n260 Amundsen Sea, 72–74 anarchism, 111–19, 177n25 Anarchist Turn, The (Critchley), 177n25 “Anatomy of a Murder, The: Who Killed America’s Economy?” (Stiglitz), 153n52 Annan, Kofi, 100–101, 104 Antarctica, 72–74, 164n173 “Antarctica Just Experienced Its Warmest Day Ever” (Hooton), 164n173 185

INDEX

Anwesenheit. See presence Arab Spring, 46 Arctic, 30, 72, 79 Aristotle, 88, 116 “Around Globes, Walls Spring up to Divide Neighbors” (Debusmann), 158n101 art: absence of, 19, 23, 143n2; aesthetics as meditation on, 18–19; demands by, 9–11; emergencies through, 25–110, 32, 37, 42, 51, 56, 61, 70, 75, 81, 89, 96, 105; end of, 13; globalization, 28–29, 149n13; overview, 1–11, 127–32; profession of, 26, 28–29; truth in, 28–29, 122, 127–28, 182n12; world, 28–29, 149n13. See also works “Art in the Epoch of Completion of Modernity” (Heidegger), 19–20 Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure (Zuidervaart), 182n12 Arusha Accords, 99, 101 Ausnahmezustand. See state of emergency “Automated Twitter Accounts” (Mowbray), 155n68 Azevedo, Néle, 66–67, 80, 125–26, 163n150. See also Minimum Monument “Back to the Great Outdoors” (Critchley), 139n28 Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (Foster), 183n42 bailouts, 40–41, 47 Bamford, Holly, 77 Barenboim, Daniel, 11 Barker, Mandy, 66–68, 69, 125–26, 163n152. See also Penalty: The World Barnes, David, 59 Barnett, Michael, 101 186

beauty, 19–23, 29, 125–26, 127, 131–32, 146n31 Beijing, China, 60–61 Being (Sein), 1–7, 15–19, 119, 140n33, 145n20, 178n46; beings and, 104; Dasein taking on burden of, 144n5; disclosure of, 143n2; emergency of, 26, 143n2; epoch of, 121; event of, 22–23; interpreter of, 118; liberal individualism favored over, 41; loss of, 20–21; manifestation of, 118; original meditation as thought of, 111; particular conception of, 13–14; way of, 27–29, 124; works of art and, 25–110, 32, 37, 42, 51, 56, 61, 70, 75, 81, 89, 96, 105 Be-ing (Seyn), 140n33, 148n2 Being and Time (Heidegger), 15, 117 Beistegui, M. de, 134n6, 146n34, 147n48 Belgians, 99, 100, 103, 171n252 Belgium, 101, 172n264 Ben-Gurion, David, 107, 173n280 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 9, 127, 128, 129; on fascism, 141n48; shock used by, 178n42; writings of, 136n16, 141n48, 179n64 Benmakhlouf, Adam, 30 Bennett, Jill, 130–31, 132 Berlin, Germany, 7, 69–75, 70 Bernanke, Ben, 40, 41 Bernasconi, Robert, 144n10 Berners-Lee, Tim, 43, 47 “Best Idea to Redevelop Dharavi Slum? Scrap the Plans and Start Again, The” (Carr), 159n106 Betti, Emilio, 114, 142n52 Bible, 115–16 biennales, 31, 150n23 Bilmes, Linda, 94–95, 170n243 Bin Laden, Osama, 87–88 bioenergy, 82–83

INDEX

biogeochemical flows, 84–85 biosphere integrity, 84–85 Bishop, Claire, 129, 130 bisphenol A (BPA), 59–60 Black Notebooks (Heidegger), 1, 111, 135n7 Blair, Tony, 32, 32–33, 35–36, 38, 47, 151n26 Boeing 787, 159n114 bottles, 58–59, 60–61 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 129–30 Bouvard, Marguerite Guzman, 91 BPA. See bisphenol A Brazil, 60, 71, 83–84. See also Azevedo, Néle Brief History of Neoliberalism, A (Harvey), 151n30, 152n39 British, 106–7, 128 Broken Hegemonies (Schürmann), 134n4 Brooklyn, New York, 89, 90–95, 96 Bruns, Gerald L., 114, 117, 175n11 Bush, George H. W., 102 Bush, George W., 35–36, 93, 151n26, 153n52 Butler, Judith, 66, 85 cables, 102–4 call to order (rappel à l’ordre), 4–5, 139n29 Camp David Summit, 108 Cañada Real Galiana, Spain, 52, 157n92 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 38 capitalism, 30, 71–72, 152n37, 152n40, 164n160; housing crisis, 37, 38–41; urban discharges, 48–66, 51, 56, 61 Cartesian realism, 139n28 Caryl, Christian, 98–99 Castro, Jota, 29–31, 32, 124, 125–26, 150n23. See also Mortgage

Catholic Church, 115–16 Cavell, Stanley, 128 Chechnya, 31 China, 49–50, 52, 55, 160n124; e-waste shipped to, 65–66; plastic of, 60–61, 79. See also Zhiyuan, Wang “China Leads the Waste Recycling League” (Moses), 160n124 Chomsky, Noam, 35–36, 172n273 claims to truth, 7, 123 Clavis scripturae sacrae (Flacius), 116 climate change, 84–85, 131–32, 163n156, 164n160. See also global warming “Climate Maverick to Retire from NASA” (Hansen), 163n156 “Climate Summit’s Pledge on Carbon Cuts ‘Won’t Avert Global Disaster’ ” (McKie), 165n176 Clinton, Bill, 102–4 Clinton, Hillary, 87–88 Close to the Warm (Zhiyuan), 49 Cloud, The (jaar), 87 commonplaces, 7–9 communism, 1, 9, 129, 134n4, 139n31, 141n48 “Conditions, Health Risks Sicken Colonias Residents” (Ramshaw), 157n92 Congress, U.S., 94, 102 contemplations, 14–19 Contradictions (Minelli), 31–32, 41–47, 42 Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (Heidegger), 1, 6–7, 13, 25, 136n11, 175n6 conversation (Gespräch), 11, 122–23, 179n52 Copenhagen summit, 71–72 counter-memorial aesthetics, 130, 131 Couzens, Edward Gordon, 57–58 Cratylus (Plato), 114 187

INDEX

creators: Dasein of, 27; essential disclosed by, 25–110, 32, 37, 42, 51, 56, 61, 70, 75, 81, 89, 96, 105; sacrifice of, 27 crises, 2–3, 93, 131, 152n40 Critchley, Simon, 139n28, 177n25 Cruz, Teddy, 54 culture, 3, 14, 20–22, 26, 144n7 Culture of Connectivity, The (van Dijck), 44 Dallaire, Roméo, 100–103, 171nn259–60 danger, 22–23, 124, 125–26 Dannhauer, Johann, 116 Danto, Arthur C., 4–5, 7–9, 28, 127, 128, 129; on art world, 149n13; on globalization, 149n13; Heidegger replied to by, 143n1 Dasein, 14, 27, 118, 144n5 Davey, Nicholas, 120 Davis, Mike, 52, 158n101 death, 71–72, 96, 96–104, 125–26 Debord, Guy, 130 Debusmann, B., 158n101 deforestation, 80–85, 81, 125 De interpretatione (Peri hermeneias) (Aristotle), 116 “De l’Etat de droit à l’Etat de sécurité” (Agamben), 138n17 demands by art, 9–11 Department of Veterans Affairs, U.S. (VA), 86, 92, 95 Dharavi, India, 48–49, 51, 51–55, 57, 159n106, 159n108 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 115 disclosure, 178n46; of Being, 143n2; of essential emergencies, 25–110, 32, 37, 42, 51, 56, 61, 70, 75, 81, 89, 96, 105 “Does He Pass the Test?” (Krugman), 153n44 Dorsey, Jack, 45 188

Dream a Wish, Wish a Dream (Upadhyay), 51, 51–55, 57 Duan, Huabo, 64–65 Duchamp, Marcel, 8–9 Dvorak, R., 160n121 earthquakes, 77, 164n175 Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, 77–79 eco-aesthetics, 130, 131–32 Economist, 161n135 Eden, Kathy, 116 Egypt, 156n74 “Eine neue Dimension” (Trawny), 135n7 elections, 152n35, 152n38 Ellis, Jim, 43 emergencies, 1, 2–11, 136n11, 136n16, 143n2, 175n6; aesthetics, 13–23, 111–26, 128, 132; appropriations, 94; through art, 25–110, 32, 37, 42, 51, 56, 61, 70, 75, 81, 89, 96, 105; of Being, 26, 143n2; as concealed, 144n5; essential, 25–110, 32, 37, 42, 51, 56, 61, 70, 75, 81, 89, 96, 105; Heidegger on, 112–13; lack of sense of, 17–18; rescuers, 26, 148n2; suffering of, 18, 26–27, 113; turn, 132; as world picture result, 17. See also environmental calls; historical accounts; social paradoxes; state of emergency; urban discharges Emergency Biennale, 31 Emergency of Being, The (Polt), 135n7, 136n16, 143n2, 175n2 Emerita, Gutete, 96, 96–104 End of Art: Readings in a Rumor After Hegel, The (Geulen), 143n1 End of History and the Last Man (Fukuyama), 152n37 enframing (Ge-Stell), 19–23, 146n34, 147n48 environmental calls, 66–85, 70, 75, 81, 110, 125

INDEX

Ereignis. See event Erfahrung. See experience Erlebnisse. See experiences ERS-1 satellite, 72–73 Esperanza Base, 164n173 essential. See emergencies ethnic cleansing, 104–10, 105, 172n271 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The (Pappé), 106, 172n273, 174n291 EU. See European Union Europe, 52, 106, 129, 131, 157n92; bioenergy, 82–83; e-waste produced in, 63, 64; plastic exports of, 160n124 European Union (EU), 64, 65, 174n294 event (Ereignis), 4–7, 22–23, 123–26, 131, 148n55; God as, 139n31; salvation as, 179n64 e-waste, 61, 61–66, 161nn131–32, 162n144, 162n147 “E-waste: An Assessment of Global Production and Environmental Impacts” (Robinson), 161n131 exception, 127, 128, 136n16 execution (Vollzug), 123 existence, 3–5, 117–26, 141n41 experience (Erfahrung), 123–24 experiences (Erlebnisse), 123–24 Eyes of Gutete Emerita, The, 96, 96–104 Fair, Christine, 152n35 Favela-Bairro program, 54 FCC. See Federal Communications Commission Federal Bureau of Prisons, 162n144 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 154n58 Federal Reserve, 39, 40, 153n52 financial bailouts, 40–41, 47 “Financialization of Art” (Taylor), 29 Fisk, Robert, 35

Flacius, 116 Folkestone triennial, 69 Forest Cleaning, 69 Forgotten Palestinians, The: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (Pappé), 174n292 “Former Sergeant Jose Adames . . .” (Karady), 89, 90–95, 96 Forst (Sailstorfer), 80–85, 81 “For the Birds/Against the Birds” (Goehr), 141n41 Foster, H., 183n42 Fotheringham, Alasdair, 157n92 Fountain (Duchamp), 8–9 fracking, 74, 164n175 France, 4–5, 31, 67, 74, 101, 138n17 Francis (pope), 109 French Revolution, 140n40 Frere, Jane, 85–86, 88–90, 125–26, 168n221, 172n272. See also Return of the Soul: The Nakba Project Fried, Gregory, 144n5 Friedman, M., 151n30 Fukuyama, Francis, 35, 152n37 “Future Media,” 45 Gabriel, Markus, 4 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 7, 10–11, 114, 115, 119, 179n62; on aesthetic objects, 140n38; on understanding, 136n16; work of art encountered by, 120, 122–24, 179n48, 179n51 Gadamer in Conversation. Reflections and Commentary (Gadamer), 140n38, 179n62 Galloway, Alexander R., 46 garbage, 60–61, 68, 77–80 Gaza, 11, 109 Gegenwart. See presence Geithner, Timothy, 40, 41 Gendarmenmarket Square, 69–75, 70 189

INDEX

genocide. See Rwanda Germany, 115–16, 144n5. See also Berlin, Germany Gespräch. See conversation Ge-Stell. See enframing Geulen, Eva, 143n1 Ghana, 65–66 glaciers, 72–74 Glantz, Aaron, 92–93 globalization, 28–29, 38, 72, 149n13, 151n29 Global Voices, 155n73 global warming, 69–75, 70, 125, 164n173, 165n176 God, 1, 125–26, 133n1, 139n31, 150n16 Goehr, Lydia, 141n41 Gonzalez, Francisco, 114, 176n12 Google, 44–45 Gourevitch, Philip, 98, 100–101 Great Depression, 38, 40–41, 47, 144n5 Great Pacific Garbage Patch, 77–79 Greece, 175n10 Greenspan, Alan, 39, 153n52 Gregor, Jeremy, 64–65 Gugler, Davis, 53 Gugler, Josef, 53 Guiyu, China, 65–66 Gulf War, 95, 151n29 Haar, Lene Ter, 31–32 Habermas, Jürgen, 147n46 Haenlein, Michael, 43 Halden, Rolf, 57–58 Hancox, Dan, 31 Hansen, James E., 71, 74, 163n156 happiness, 111, 148n2 Harvey, David, 36, 48, 55, 66, 152nn39– 40, 159n108. See also Brief History of Neoliberalism, A Hawkins, Gay, 58 Haynes, K., 178n42 190

Hegel, G. W. F., 7–8, 13–14, 28, 116, 143n1, 144n10 Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Thomson), 146n31 Heidegger, Martin, 1–7, 9–11, 13–23, 25–28, 34–35, 175n10; aesthetics understood by, 145n11; Be-ing proposed by, 140n33; Beistegui on, 134n6; on culture, 144n7; Danto replying to, 143n1; on emergency, 112–13; enframing and, 146n34, 147n48; on god, 133n1; Hegel and, 143n1, 144n10; hermeneutics elevated by, 117–24; lucidity and, 145n21; Marquard on, 135n8; measure in, 145n15; on meditation, 111–13, 148n2, 175n2; Nietzsche and, 144n10; truth understood by, 147n46, 178n46; work of art encountered by, 120–22. See also Being and Time; Black Notebooks; Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event); emergencies; “Origin of the Work of Art, The” “Heidegger, Martin” (Bernasconi), 144n10 “Heideggers logische Untersuchungen” (Pöggeler), 147n46 Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (Fried), 144n5 Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Malpas), 136n13 hermeneutica. See hermeneutics Hermeneutic Communism (Vattimo and Zabala), 134n4, 141n47 hermeneutics (hermeneutica), 10–11, 113–26, 127, 128, 175nn11–12, 177n33; artistic truth theory, 182n12; origins of, 177n21; representatives of, 142n52; works as object of, 179n48

INDEX

Hermeneutics: Ancient and Modern (Bruns), 175n11 “Hermeneutics in Greek Philosophy” (Gonzalez), 176n12 Hermes, 114–15 Herzl, Theodor, 105–6 historical accounts, 85–110, 89, 96, 105 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 111–12, 132, 147n48 Hollande, François, 138n17 Holocaust, 102–4, 107 Hooton, C., 164n173 Hopewell, J., 160n121 Horkheimer, Max, 127–28 Hotel des Mille Collines, 171n260 “How to Begin from the Beginning” (Žižek), 139n30 Human Rights Watch, 171n251 Huntington, Samuel P., 33–34 Hutu, 170n248, 171n252. See also Eyes of Gutete Emerita, The “I,” pure, 34–35 Illingworth, Shona, 131 Indefinite (Barker), 68 India, plastic of, 79. See also Dharavi, India indifferent beauty, 19–23, 29, 125–26, 127 Indonesia, 83 “In Spain’s Heart, a Slum to Shame Europe” (Fotheringham), 157n92 Interahamwe, 100–103 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 70–72 Internet, 42, 42–47, 63, 136n15, 153n45, 154n58 interpretations, 111–19, 177n33 interventions, 119–26 Invention of Art, The (Shiner), 6 Invisible Wounds of War: Coming Home from Iraq and Afghanistan (Bouvard), 91

Ion (Plato), 114 IPCC. See Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Iran, 46, 88–89, 155n73 “Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ Was Exaggerated, Says Editor” (Weaver), 155n73 Iraq, 152n35, 152n38; invasion, 30, 32, 32–33, 35–36, 38, 42, 47, 151n26, 151n29, 153n46; refugees, 131. See also Karady, Jennifer Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, 91–92 Irregular Army: How the U.S. Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror (Kennard), 169n231 Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), 95, 170n243 Israel, 104–10, 105, 172n273, 173n280, 174nn286–87. See also Nakba catastrophe; Palestine; Zionism Jaar, Alfredo: events’ nature explored by, 131; works of, 85–86, 87–88, 90, 96, 96–104, 110, 125–26, 168n219 Japan, 60, 166n184 Jews, 104–10, 105 jolts. See shock Jordan, Chris, 68 Jouanno, Evelyne, 31, 150n23 Joughin, Ian, 73 Junkyard Planet (Minter), 60 Kang, Jaeho, 141n48 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 150n16 Kaplan, Andreas M., 43 Karady, Jennifer, 85–87, 110, 125–26, 168n217. See also Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan Kelly, Michael, 9, 132 191

INDEX

Kennard, Matt, 91–92, 169n231 Kennard, Peter, 30 kennardphillipps, 29–30, 32–36, 38, 124, 125–26, 150n20. See also Photo Op Kester, Grant, 130 Kigali, Rwanda, 99, 101, 103–4 Kirchain, Randolph, 64–65 Klein, Naomi, 71–72, 164n160 knocks. See shock knowledge, 15, 117–24 Kompridis, N., 140n40 Korle-Bu River, 65–66 Kosior, E., 160n121 Kravets, D., 156n74 Krell, Farrell, 145n21 Kristeva, Julia, 128 Krugman, Paul, 39, 40–41, 153n44 Kuhn, Thomas, 4 La Vega Barrio, 158n102 Law, K. L., 166n191 Lectures on Aesthetics (Hegel), 143n1 Lee, Young Jean, 28, 149n12 Levy, Gideon, 174n286 Lianjiang River, 66 liberalism, 32, 32–47, 37, 42, 151n29, 151nn29–30 Liberalism: A Counter-History (Losurdo), 151n30 Liberal World Order in Crisis, A (Sorensen), 33 live-experience, 21–22 Locke, John, 33 Logo for America, A, 87 Longman, Timothy, 102, 171n251 Losurdo, D., 151n30 Luther, Martin, 115–16 Lynch, C., 171n259 Macklin, Conor, 49 Made to Break (Slade), 62, 161n132 192

Madrid, Spain, 52, 157n92 Malpas, Jeff, 136n13 Manovich, Lev, 44 Marcuse, Herbert, 3–4, 127–28 Marine Pollution (Weis), 76, 166n184 Marquard, Odo, 135n8 Marx, Benjamin, 53–54 Matijcio, Steven, 69 May 1, 2011 (Jaar), 87–88 McFarland, Will, 83 McFarlane, Peter, 48, 50–51, 61, 61–66, 125–26 McKie, R., 165n176 McKinley, Jesse, 87 McMillan, Robert, 154n58 measurable contemplations, 14–19 meditation, 18–19, 111–13, 148n2, 175n2 Mental Illness and Neuroscience Discovery (MIND) institute, 146n31 metaphysics, 15–19, 22–23, 140n33, 140n36, 148n53 Metzl, Jamie, 152n35 Mexico, 28, 52, 87 microplastics, 78–80, 166n191 “Microplastics in the Seas” (Law and Thompson), 166n191 Miles, Malcolm, 130, 131–32 Miller, T. Reed, 64–65 Mindfulness (Heidegger), 19–20 MIND institute. See Mental Illness and Neuroscience Discovery institute Minelli, Filippo, 29–30, 124, 125–26, 150n25. See also Contradictions Minimum Monument (Azevedo), 67, 69–75, 70, 85 Minter, Adam, 60 mobile phones, 63–64, 161n135 Mobley, Chuck, 86 Moore, Charles, 77 moral-waiver program, 93, 169n231

INDEX

“More Israel Represses the Nakba, the Stronger the Memories, The” (Levy), 174n286 Morozov, Evgeny, 46 Morris, Benny, 107 Mortgage (Castro), 37, 38–41, 42, 47 Moses, K., 160n124 Mowbray, Miranda, 155n68 Mujawamariya, Monique, 100, 102–3 Mumbai, India. See Dharavi, India Murdiyarso, Daniel, 80 NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Agreement Nakba catastrophe, 104–10, 105, 172nn271–72, 174n286, 174n292 Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (Sa’di and Abu-Lughod), 173n277 National Security Archive, 102–4 neoliberalism, 30, 151n30 Nest (McFarlane), 61, 61–66 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 109 “Net Neutrality Won Big Today. But We Can’t Get Complacent Just Yet” (McMillan), 154n58 neutral, 4, 10–11, 151n29 New Heidegger, The (Beistegui), 146n34, 147n48 new-realist aesthetics. See speculative aesthetics New York, 45, 87–88, 100–101. See also Brooklyn, New York Nietzsche, Friedrich, 115, 134n6, 144n10 “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God Is Dead’ ” (Heidegger), 148n53 9/11, 88–89, 130–31, 183n42 Ninety-Five Theses (Luther), 115 Norrie, Susan, 131 North America, 77, 78

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 72 North Pacific, 76–79 Notlosigkeit. See absence of emergency Nuit Blanche, 67 Obama, Barack, 40, 87–88, 94 objectivity, 34–35, 118 objects, 3, 15, 27, 179n48; aesthetic, 7, 140n38; of representation, 6–7, 13–14 Occupy Wall Street, 30, 46 Of Reality: The Purposes of Philosophy (Vattimo), 139n29 online economy of inscription, 44–45 “Only a God Can Save Us” (Heidegger), 133n1 “Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel’s Interview” (Heidegger), 146n34 On Palestine (Chomsky and Pappé), 172n273 Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Heidegger), 117 oppression, 13–14, 151n30 O’Reilly, Tim, 154n57 original meditation, 111–13, 175n2 “Origin of the Work of Art, The” (Heidegger), 1, 120–21, 178n46 ousia. See presence overcoming, 22–23 Pacific Trash Vortex, 77–79 Palestine, 104–10, 105, 172nn271–73, 173n277, 174n294. See also Nakba catastrophe Palestinians, 104–10, 105, 174n286, 174n291 Palmer, R., 179n60 Pappé, Ilan, 106, 107, 108, 172n271, 172n273, 174nn291–92 Paris, France, 67, 74, 138n17 193

INDEX

parousia. See presence Parr, Adrian, 54 particular conception of beings, 6–7, 13–14 “Past, The” (Chomsky), 172n273 PDD-25. See Presidential Decision Directive 25 Penalty: The World, 75, 75–80, 85 Pentagon, 93, 103, 158n101 Peri hermeneias (De interpretatione) (Aristotle), 116 PET. See polyethylene terephthalade Phillips, Cat, 30. See also kennardphillipps Philosophical Hermeneutics (Gadamer), 179n48 philosophy, 128, 139n28, 175n2, 177n33, 182n12 phones, 63–64, 161n135 Photo Op (kennardphillipps), 32, 32–33, 42, 47 picture, 13–14, 16–17 Piketty, Thomas, 38 Plan D, 104–10, 105 planetary boundaries, 84–85, 168n213 Planet of Slums (Davis), 52, 158n101 “Planet of the Phones” (Economist), 161n135 plankton, 77–78 Planning and Design for Sustainable Urban Mobility: Global Report on Human Settlements (UN-Habitat), 158n97, 158n102 plastics, 56, 57–61, 67–68, 75, 75–80, 166n191; European exports of, 160n124; production, 159n112, 159n114; recycling, 160n121 “Plastics, Environment, and Health” (Thompson), 159n114 “Plastics, the Environment, and Human Health: Current Consensus 194

and Future Trends” (Thompson et al.), 159n112 “Plastics Recycling” (Hopewell, Dvorak, and Kosior), 160n121 Plato, 114 Pöggeler, O., 147n46 political, 102–4, 140n40, 141n48 Political Theology (Schmitt), 136n16 Polt, R., 136n11, 140n35. See also Emergency of Being, The polyethylene terephthalade (PET), 58–59, 60–61 post–traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 86, 90–91, 94 poverty traps, 53–54 Power, Samantha, 99, 103, 170n248, 171n260, 172n264 practical aesthetics, 130–31 practice (praxis), 119, 120, 129, 177n33 presence (Anwesenheit) (parousia) (ousia) (Gegenwart), 15, 175n10 Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD-25), 102 Problem from Hell, A (Power), 170n248, 171n260, 172n264 profession of art, 26, 28–29 protests, 155nn73–74 Proteus, 1, 134n4 “Proteus Alone Can Save Us Now” (Schürmann), 134n4 PTSD. See post–traumatic stress disorder “Question Concerning Technology, The” (Heidegger), 147n48, 175n10 racist ideology, 4–6 Ramshaw, E., 157n92 Rancière, Jacques, 7, 9, 127, 128 rappel à l’ordre. See call to order readymade, 8–9

INDEX

real, 4–8, 21, 127, 128, 129 Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Harvey), 159n108 Record Future, 136n15 recycling, 60–61, 160n121 Refiguring the Spiritual (Taylor), 127, 150n16 refugees, 104–10, 105, 131, 174n286 Reid, Mary, 51 relational aesthetics, 129–30, 132 representation, 6–7, 13–14, 148n55 rescuers, 26, 148n2 retreat, 25–26 Return of the Soul: The Nakba Project (Frere), 104–10, 105 revolution, 9, 58, 140n40 Ricoeur, Paul, 114, 142n52 Rignot, Eric, 72–74 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 54, 71 Rio Summit, 83 Riza, Iqbal, 101 Robinson, B. H., 161n131 Rockström, Johan, 84–85 Roitman, Janet, 3 Rojcewicz, Richard, 136n11 Ronell, Avital, 85–86, 110 Rorty, Richard, 11, 142n52 routine, 131–32 Rubin, Robert, 153n52 Rushe, D., 46 Russia, 30, 46 Rwabugiri, Mwami Kigeri, 98 Rwanda, 96, 96–104, 172n264. See also Dallaire, Roméo; Hutu; Tutsis Rwanda Project: 1994–1998 (Jaar), 87–88 “Rwanda Revisited” (Lynch), 171n259 Sachs, Jeffrey D., 39, 71, 74, 84 Sa’di, Ahmad H., 106, 173n277 Said, Edward, 11

Sailstorfer, Michael, 66–67, 69, 80–85, 81, 125–26, 163n155 salvation, 112, 124, 125, 126, 134n5, 175n10; as event, 179n64; Miles interested in, 132 San Diego/Tijuana border, 87 Schiller, Friedrich, 150n16 Schiller, Jakob, 68 Schlegel, Friedrich, 150n16 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 115 Schmitt, Carl, 3, 34, 127, 128, 136n16 “Schritt in die Kunst: Über Schiller und Heidegger, Der” (Marquard), 135n8 Schumpeter, Joseph A., 62 Schürmann, Reiner, 1, 114, 117, 134n4, 175n11 Schwab, G., 136n16 sciences, 34–35, 114, 152n37 Sein. See Being self-certainty, 34–35 Sen, Amartya, 82 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 88–89, 130–31, 183n42 Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Harvey), 152n40 Seyn. See Be-ing Shiner, Larry, 6 shock (Stoß), 121–26, 140n35, 140n38, 178n42, 179n60, 179n62 Shtromberg, Elena, 87 Silvers, Anita, 132 Situation Room, 87–88 Skype, 44–45 Slade, Giles, 62 slums, 48–49, 51, 51–55, 57, 60–61, 157n92; UN on, 158n97, 158n102; upgrading programs, 158n102. See also Dharavi, India smartphones, 63–64, 161n135 socially coded technology, 45 195

INDEX

social media, 42, 42–47, 155n68, 155nn73–74 social paradoxes, 29–47, 32, 37, 42, 110, 124 social turn, 129, 132 Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan (Karady), 86–87, 89, 90–95, 96 Solving the E-Waste Problem (StEP), 64–65 Sorensen, Georg, 33 sovereign, 128, 136n16 Spain, 52, 157n92 speculative aesthetics, 4–5, 128 Spiegel, Der, 1 state of emergency (Ausnahmezustand), 3, 127, 128, 129, 136nn16–17, 183n42 State of Exception (Agamben), 136n16 StEP. See Solving the E-Waste Problem Stern, Nicholas, 74 Stiglitz, Joseph, 41, 94, 153n52 Stoker, Thomas, 53–54 Stop the E-Waste Problem, 62 Stoß. See shock strangers, 104–10, 105 Strong, Tracey B., 136n16 suffering, 18, 26–27, 31, 113 suicides, 91–92 Suri, Tavneet, 53–54 Sweden, 174n294 Symposium (Plato), 114 TARP. See Troubled Asset Relief Program Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Žižek), 139n27 Taylor, Mark C., 29, 127, 150n16 technology, 134n6, 136n13, 147n48, 152n37, 161n132 Tehran, Iran, 88–89, 155n73 196

Tehrani, Hamid, 155n73 Tello, Veronica, 130, 131, 132 “Ten Commandments of the Hutu” (Kangura), 170n248 terrorism, 2–3, 88–89, 130–31, 138n17, 151n29, 183n42 Terrorismo umanitario: Dalla guerra del Golfo alla strage di Gaza (Zolo), 151n29 Texas, 157n92 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 136n16, 179n64 This Changes Everything (Klein), 71, 164n160 Thompson, Richard C., 58, 59, 79, 159n112, 159n114, 166n191 Thomson, Iain, 146n31 thrownness, 118, 178n46 Thrown to the Wind (Zhiyuan), 56, 57–61 thrust. See shock (Stoß) too big to fail, 39, 40–41, 54–55 Tormey, Jane, 128–29 transfigurations of common places, 7–9 Transparent Society (Vattimo), 178n42 Trawny, Peter, 135n7 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), 40–41 Truscott, T., 43 truth, 5, 15–16, 22, 147n46, 178n46; in art, 28–29, 122, 127–28, 182n12; claims to, 7, 123 Truth and Method (Gadamer), 10 tsunami, 77, 166n184 Tugendhat, Ernst, 147n46 Tunisia, 156n74 Turatsinze, Jean-Pierre Abubakar, 100 Turkey, 46, 102 Tutsis, 170n248, 171n251. See also Eyes of Gutete Emerita, The

INDEX

twisted (verwindung), 22–23 Twitter, 42, 42–47, 155n68, 155nn73–74

urban slum dwellers, 158n97 utility-like platform, 45–47

Überlegungen, 135n7 Überlegungen X (Heidegger), 111 überwindung. See abandoned UNAMIR. See United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda UNCED. See United Nations Conference on Environment and Development understanding, 122–24, 136n16, 179n51 United Kingdom, 32, 32–33. See also Blair, Tony United Nations, 52, 99–104, 158n97, 158n102, 171n259, 171n260; Charter of, 151n29; Climate Change Conference, 67 United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), 100–103 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), 71 United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), 106–7 United States), 28, 46, 101, 157n92, 166n184, 171n252; Basel Convention ratified by, 64; Bilmes on, 170n243; bioenergy, 82–83; e-waste produced in, 63, 64, 65; plastic of, 79; recycling in, 60; refugees seeking asylum in, 131; Rwanda intervened in by, 102–4. See also Bush, George W.; Mortgage UNSCOP. See United Nations Special Committee on Palestine Upadhyay, Hema, 48–49, 66, 125–26, 156n82. See also Dream a Wish, Wish a Dream urban discharges, 48–66, 51, 56, 61, 110, 125

VA. See Department of Veterans Affairs, U.S. Vallega-Neu, Daniela, 136n11 van Dijck, Jose, 44, 45 Vattimo, Gianni, 1, 7, 8, 88, 139n29, 178n42; book by, 134n4, 141n47; on communism, 134n4; hermeneutics and, 114, 116–17, 119, 120, 128, 177n33; truth claim recovered by, 127 verwindung. See twisted veterans, 92–93, 95. See also Karady, Jennifer Vietnam, 31, 50, 92–93, 95 Vollzug. See execution Wallace, David Foster, 28, 149n11 Walter Benjamin and the Media: The Spectacle of Modernity (Kang), 141n48 wars, 33, 35–36, 38, 91, 158n101, 172n271; Gulf, 95, 151n29; against ISIS, 95, 170n243. See also Iraq; Karady, Jennifer; Vietnam waste, 50–51, 160n124 way of being, 27–29, 124 Weaver, M., 155n73 Web, 42, 42–47, 136n15, 154n57 Weinstein, Liza, 54–55 Weis, Judith S., 76, 78, 166n184 Weizmann, Chaim, 107, 173n280 Wen’an County, China, 60 Werner, Brad, 71 West, 33–34, 151n29 West Bank, 90, 109 West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, 11 We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (Gourevitch), 100–101 What Art Is (Danto), 8 197

INDEX

White House, 87–88, 102–4 Whiteley, Gillian, 128–29 Williams, Evan, 155n68 Wisser, Richard, 118 Wolff, Janet, 132 Wong, Ming, 64 “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” (Benjamin), 141n48 works, 21, 25–110, 119–26, 150n16, 179n48, 179n51. See also specific works world, 13–14, 16–17, 121, 127, 150n16; art, 28–29, 149n13; wars, 158n101

198

Yarsley, Victor Emmanuel, 57–58 Yemen, 156n74 Young, J., 178n42 Zabala, Santiago, 134n4, 141n47 Zhiyuan, Wang, 48, 49–50, 66, 125–26, 157n84. See also Thrown to the Wind Zionism, 104–10, 105, 172n271, 172n273, 173n277, 174n291 Žižek, Slavoj, 4, 5, 29, 139n27, 139n30 Zohn, Harry, 136n16 Zolo, Danilo, 151n29 Zuidervaart, L., 182n12