3 - Creative Resistance: An Aesthetics of Creative Affect in a Time of Global Terror

Summary

The invisible forces, the powers of the future, are they not already upon us, and much more insurmountable than the worst spectacle and even the worst pain? … It is within this visibility that the body actively struggles … [I]t is as if combat had now become possible. (Deleuze 2003: 52)

Not knowing how to share our own passion to see with another gaze, not knowing how to produce a culture of the gaze: this is where the real violence begins against those who are helplessly abandoned to the voracity of visibilities. It is thus the responsibility of those who make images to build a place for those who see, and it is the responsibility of those who present images to understand their modes of construction. (Mondzain 2009: 33)

The demands of revolutionary politics and recourse to aesthetic creativity do not always sit well together. My thinking attempts to straddle these unsettled boundaries, resisting the notions that, given the extent of the violence and injustice that floods the modern world, positing transformation on the basis of art is not radical or political enough. In part this is because the brutalities and political manipulations to which we are witness are often themselves affectively driven, requiring greater sensitivity and attunement to the aesthetically infused, affective components of our shared existence; and, in part, because I have found resources in Deleuze’s aesthetics to sustain my belief in the potency and necessity of creative resistance through art. The transformations that I believe are necessary begin from a change in the very nature of our thinking and desires, and according to Deleuze, art acts as the catalyst for changing both.

The Uses and Abuses of Image and Affect

The question that I want to address bears upon the intersection between art and the political in light of contemporary intensifications of violence and abuses of power. What is the role of art in a time of global terror? A straightforward response might be to interrogate the ways that images manifest themselves within this contemporary framework. Images of violence, brutality and injustice, generated through media and photography, have opened a visual window on to, and increased our participation in, the atrocities that are occurring all over the world (photographs of drowned refugees, the aftermath of bombings, videos of police brutality).