W139 launched this new series of discussion under the heading of ‘Allegories of Good and Bad Government’. The next session will take place on the 13th of May, i.e. this Friday. After having debated the history and present of the relation between art and politics, this session looks at the future of both projects. It made me think of Stenger’s analysis of the relation between the mechanism of representation in science and politics and – successively – Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour’s exibition at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. This exibition, in short, made explicit the phenomenon of re-presentation as an active act of ‘making public’ and as opposed to representation as a mechanism of procedural democracy. Where re-presentation asks for a performative stance (the making and carrying out of new identities of beings), representation always embodies a lack at the heart of what it aims at (i.e. with regard to its shared project with art, politics here merely serves as a taming of abundance and difference).
Looking forward to the session. For information, see W139’s website here.
LUKAS VERBURGT 