Disobedience and Complex Systems

Presentation at the symposium Disobedience and Complex Systems: Art, Design and Media and the Political, exploring the value and the limitations of Hannah Arendt's work for understanding the relationship between contemporary art, design and media practices and the political.

Abstract

The political philosophy of Hannah Arendt is marked by the persistent re-evaluation of the quality of the underlying question.

Secondeditions will be presenting antithetical posters that offer the opportunity to consider dialectic contradictions and the subjective impulse to obtain determinacy through conscientious value judgements and their repeated review.

The texts and questions focus on the possibility of free will, the Aristotelian concept of proairesis, referenced by Arendt as the “choice in the sense of preference between alternatives – one rather than the other”. Under the conditions of networked aesthetic praxis, the emergence of a collective consciousness may become tangible. The oscillating copy encourages a second reading, a reconsidering of primary interpretations, trusted assumptions and affirmation bias; and, expectantly, should lead to a comparing of notes.

We would hope to sustain a critique of ‘the pleasure in pure function’ and the resulting dissonant cognition that is imposed upon the political process, the intelligibility of power and governance, the administrative structures and institutions that show an innate reluctance or inability to refer to a reflexive, symmetrical value base, with the invariably catastrophic and dehumanising effect exerted on the social form.

Our interest in presenting a dialectic escalation originates in the intuitive distrust of the contemporary predilection, not least in recent ‘social practice’, for indeterminacy, interpassivity and aesthetic/political conformism.

The impending, far-reaching transformations projected for this “Age of Impotence” would appear to beg the question of scope and modus for a collective proairesis, for effective dissidence, resistance, acts of civil disobedience and of solidarity.

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