CartVariations on The Great Refusal II Instructor: Cécile MalaspinaProgram: Art & Curatorial Practice, Critical PhilosophyCredit(s): 1Date: February 15th, 22th, March 1th, 8th.Time: 09:00-11:30 ET
DESCRIPTION: The first Variations on The Great Refusal Seminar situated this notion in the speculative aesthetics of Alfred North Whitehead and in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. This Seminar proposes the idea of great refusal as a lens through which to look at the nature of aesthetic achievement in contemporary artistic practices and the ethical commitment by intellectuals. Speakers will chart their trajectory in navigating the great refusal in the context of the highly fraught public discourse about Israel and Palestine.
Dante Alighieri first introduces the idea of ‘great refusal’ into the Western literary canon in his Divine Comedy (1321). Here, the ‘shade’ who commits the great refusal is emblematic of those who err eternally in the antechamber of hell in pursuit of the banner of conformity. Whitehead famously revives the notion of the great refusal as the mark of intellectual cowardice, namely, as the refusal to grant reason the exercise of its full rights. However, he also defines great refusal as the hallmark of aesthetic achievement!
It is in this second sense as aesthetic achievement that the great refusal has entered the vocabulary of 20th emancipatory movements via Herbert Marcuse. Dante’s great refusal has thus ultimately become the legacy of the exiled poet’s intellectual and aesthetic courage, namely, his refusal to be cowed by self-doubt and his courage to place the rank and file of his powerful contemporaries in the Divine Comedy’s Hell.
In this Seminar, we will hear from those who have entered the fray of a highly polarized public discourse through a courageous act of refusal – a refusal of censorship and a refusal of injunctions against the exercise, by reason, of its full rights. Outstanding contemporary artists, filmmakers, and curators will reflect on the idea of ‘aesthetic achievement,’ not as an ‘other’ to reason, but rather as requiring the intellectual courage to grant reason the exercise of its full rights.
The Seminar allows us to tune into the intellectual sensitivity we inherit from these thinkers such as Dante, Whitehead and Marcuse. We will take abreast of the problematic nature of inner conflicts that Great refusals imply: undecidability, self-deliberation vs deliberation with others. To look at contemporary art through this prism allows us to regain the means of complexity. The strategies, practices, and concepts we will encounter, such as the “mental state of noise” (The concept of noise, John Rathey & Steve Sands in Angelaki, Vol. 28, Nr. 3., 2023, ) and “social dissonance” borrowed from Mattin (Social Dissonance, Urbanomic, 2022) will contribute to the development of a much-needed self-defense kit against the compulsive ‘flight into meaning’ that, in the words of the psychologist Leon Festinger, corresponds to a “defensive searching for a ‘name’ or cognitive label” whose purpose is to alleviate the “cognitive dissonance” provoked by jarring beliefs and actions.
Guests will be announced later.
IMAGE: Israel Gaza war protests, 2023.
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