The panel brings into view strategies of positioning, as they are located, for instance, in the way of writing, in the access to canonical sources or in the deliberate staging of polyphony. Following on from discourses on situatedness, identity politics and relevance in the face of austerity measures, we will examine the position from which knowledge emerges. How do these manoeuvres of positioning relate to existing norms of expression in science and art and to what extent can they be understood as critical? Do these strategies address a different audience, and if so, do they reach it? What is the relationship of these speaking positions to history, and how do they locate themselves in the present?

Speakers

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Ensemblage. Towards affirmative forms of (aesthetic) critique
Ruth Sonderegger

Especially under conditions of current forms of authoritarianism and the increasing fascisation of society critique is becoming ever less effective. This is primarily because the hegemony-based government by consensus is increasingly giving way to governance by brute force (of the strongest). Under these circumstances, critical appeals to shared foundations or drawing attention to contradictions are fading into emptiness. This makes what I call affirmative critique all the more important: the praxis of alternatives in the here and now, however marginal, minoritarian or provisional they may be. Engaging with such practices makes it clear that they have always been the most obvious form of critique for marginalised and oppressed groups. Moreover, the concept of prefigurative politics, which is related to affirmative critique and has recently arrived in the more privileged parts of the society, only illustrates that tyranny is spreading to new places. On the other hand, lived practices of affirmative critique bring diverse aesthetics into play; aesthetics, however, that have little to do with the field of art. In my attempt to think with and along such practices of affirmative critique, I take inspiration from, among others, the late Foucault, Jacques Rancière, and Fred Moten.

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From ICE Raids to #DeportationTok: Media Witnessing as Embodied Critique in the Age of AI Authoritarianism
Chris Tedjasukmana

Taking as its starting point the global rise of authoritarianism, the expansion of the military-industrial complex (epitomized in collaborations between ICE and Palantir in the U.S.), and the unreliable production of knowledge in digital infrastructures (from TikTok to ChatGPT), the talk observes a fundamental shift in media practices of witnessing. It discusses the difficult role of media witnessing as critical positioning and embodied knowledge. Based on a case analysis of witness videos of recent ICE raids in the U.S. and hashtags such as #DeportationTok, the talk examines the increasingly complex knowledge formations, distributed processuality, and multi-layered human-machine relations in contemporary acts of witnessing.