4 - Forensic Fallacies

Summary

Contemporary debates about the politics of migration, asylum, and exile witness a wide range of conspiracy theories, evidence-free arguments, and post-truth distortions. Social media are quick to present refugees as agents of sexual assault, even serious media outlets can’t help to wonder whether migrants are terrorists in disguise, and massproduced television shows cast immigrant communities in Germany and elsewhere as hotbeds of international drug trafficking and crime. The reasons for installing the immigrant’s body as a screen of often paranoid and unfounded projections are manifold; the rise of populist agitation is as much at its roots as the withering of nuanced perspectives—right and often left—amid the bubbles of post-neoliberal, internet-based communication. What might matter more, however, is that in the end free-floating claims about the figure of the migrant tend to untether the very possibility of public discourse and political debate in general: if evidence- free conjecture and blatant lies reign triumphant, then we lose— as Hannah Arendt already argued in the postwar period—the very base of political dialogue and of pluralistic conceptions of democratic life. In representing a feared loss or lack of spatial groundedness, of moored identity, the figure of the migrant thus increasingly turns into what the champions of populist and mostly right-wing identity politics demonize so as to pursue their anti-pluralistic attack on the foundations of democratic institutions altogether.

The same period that has produced the figure of the migrant as a screen of free-floating anxieties and post-truth speculation has also unmoored contemporary art from whatever it still could take for granted after the demise of dominant traditions and normative concepts of art in the twentieth century. As evidenced in recent art events such as Kassel’s Documenta 15 (2022), in its timely embrace of discourses of inclusivity, diversity, and decolonization, contemporary art has shed whatever previously remained of the normative frameworks of autonomous art: it prioritizes collaborative practices over the myth of the individual artist, open-ended process over self-contained work, social engagement over aesthetic self-referentiality, gestures of sharing over the reifying power of the market. Amid this, as critics such as Wolfgang Ulrich and Hanno Rauterberg argue, efforts to delimit the concept, domains, and borders of art no longer prove adequate.