Plastische Demokratie

Beginning with the meeting between Joseph Beuys and representatives of the American Women’s Liberation Movement, the article compares their respective political and aesthetic practices. Against the backdrop of an increased appeal to the politicity of art and the celebration of Joseph Beuys as one of its great pioneers, the text argues that Beuys’s notion of democracy and his attempts to form a social movement were far less radical and plastic (in his own sense) than those of the feminists and highlights various areas in which the feminist movement was politically and aesthetically effective and innovative. Beuys’s social sculpture, the thesis goes, unfolds its stronger political effect where it does not act politically, but artistically.

This essay examines how Joseph Beuys uses the social plastic concept (›soziale Plastik‹) to think about the relationship between art and democracy. To this end, the first part analyzes the oppositions that define this concept in order to read them as the basic determinations of a dialectical concept of democracy. Against this background, the second part of the essay deals with how Beuys understands the contribution of art to democracy. In doing so, Beuys’ statement ›Every man is an artist‹ is subjected to a new reading.

My text adopts Joseph Beuys’ reflections on the revolution that we are, on anti-art, and on the plastic process, highlights parallels in Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis and attempts to develop guidelines for the plastic democracy of the future from them.

In bourgeois societies, the dominant dispositif that regulates how past wrongs are dealt with is juridical. Can or should radical political movements in general and critical artistic interventions in particular also make use of that form of court? I discuss this question in light of an argument between Michel Foucault and two Maoist comrades on the question of popular justice. I present the German NSU tribunals as best practice examples: They show how the form and content of tribunals can be put into tension in such a way that makes them re-usable as an aesthetic medium of transformative politics.

Why do we continue to adopt lifestyles that are destructive to both the ecological and social levels? The relative failure of environmental ethics is, above all, due to the fact that it has neither been able to link ecology with a philosophy of existence that could enable people to respect nature and its beauty, nor to indicate the way to a possible renewal of democracy. One has to face this double task. By considering everything we live on and depend upon as nourishment, and not as resources, we understand our inhabiting the earth as living together with other living beings. The political consequences of this phenomenology of corporeality, which emphasizes the aesthetic dimension of our relationship to nature, are highlighted. The question of which moral dispositions are required of subjects to achieve the ecological transition are highlighted, as well as the question of what kind of role aesthetics play in ethics and politics.

The connection between Adorno’s music aesthetics and his conception of a negative dialectic lies in the dark, not least because Adorno’s implicitly dialectical mode of argumentation cannot usually be precisely grasped and adequately located. Against this background, this article does not aim to apply a preconceived notion of dialectics to Adorno’s music-aesthetic writings, but rather to develop one on the other. With a view to the three-step ›constellation – insertion of meaning (»Sinn-Einlegen«) – dialectical image‹, Adorno’s statements on Beethoven, Wagner, and Mahler are subjected to a re-reading.

Adorno conceives of art as something tied to its material. He understands artistic material as historically mediated: it confronts artists with technical problems that keep renewing themselves. Artworks solve these problems. When they succeed, they can only be the way they are. Their power lies in this impossibility of imagining them any different from how they appear to be. However, Adorno also suggests another idea of art: the idea of art without power.

In times of an omnipresent interest in Hans Blumenberg’s work, this essay investigates motives of a type of philosophy which, in tracing metaphor, myth, rhetoric, and technology, apparently follows one goal: to keep reality at a distance. With a particular eye on a peculiarly forced reading of Kafka, which can be found in Blumenberg’s posthumous convolute about ›Die nackte Wahrheit‹, some contradictions however become apparent which may not only be of theoretical nature but may also be related to the institutional conditions of philosophy in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, namely that philosophy can ›afford‹ to discuss the matters of truth and reality, as if they were problems by which we are only affected distantly. In the light of war and hunger, which today have become part of our historical present, this essay works towards a very brief critique of Blumenberg as well as of the current interest in his works.