Continuing such work, our panel asks: Given its frequent colonization by neoliberalism, what remains of the common today? It is by reconfiguring the common via aesthetics that we seek what may yet subsist in the concept.
Mikko Tuhkanen sets the stage by exploring the African American writer Richard Wright’s theory of totalitarianism (which anticipates Arendt’s more famous account). For Wright, fascism offers a compensatory “binding” mechanism by which “lonely” moderns can locate the principle of the “common good.” In his later work, he expands his account onto the decolonizing world: decolonization offers an opportunity, at once, for an unprecedented creation of common forms and for fascism’s potential resurgence. The urgency in Wright’s political philosophy—an urgency shared by our contemporary world—concerns the need to guarantee that the new world put together from modernity’s “shattered remains” is not the fiend of fascism but a monster of a different constitution. Always a philosophical and aesthetic experimenter, he turns to dreams and the blues—that is, to aesthetic forms explored in psychoanalysis and Black culture—to configure new ways of understanding how the common works in the ruins of modern life.
Like Tuhkanen, Dora Zhang turns to literary-philosophical debates to reconfigure the common for contemporary life, evoking the unspent potential in the problem of “type.” For the Marxist theorist Georg Lukács, the synthesis of “the individual and the typical” in nineteenth-century realism was lost with modernism’s emphasis on “transcendent particularity.” His discussion provides a useful framework for thinking about the promises and perils of being a type in contemporary ethnic literature, which has often been understood as sociological documentary (i.e., as a repository of social types), even as it is also concerned with refuting demeaning stereotypes. Zhang asks how the relationship of the individual to the group gets worked out when, as in the case of the “ethnic subject,” the individual is marked both as particular and as never simply an individual but always representative of a group. Zhang shows how a return to the seemingly outmoded notion of “type” can help us think about the relationship between the individual and the group beyond the impasses of identitarianism.
Tom Roach picks up on Zhang’s discussion of typicality and aesthetics to ask: What can a common of fungible types do? He turns to the work of Colombian multimedia artist Juan Pablo Echeverri (1978-2022), highlighting his signature work, miss fotojapón, which comprises thousands of self-portraits taken daily for twenty-four years. Echeverri conceives the self as fungible opacity: a self lost and inaccurately replicated in seriality. Pointing to the multidimensional aloneness that pervades each portrait, Roach argues that Echeverri offers an aesthetic experiment in antisociality born in a queer solitude, a vision of the common that pushes beyond the notion that contemporary (neo)liberal politics asks us to embrace. Echoing Zhang’s argument that the stereotype evinces a mode of being-in-common, Echeverri envisions a community for which “unity” is purely formal: the self finds its own blankness in nonidentical others and enacts a common of radically impersonal generic singularity.
Departing from the notion of type that structure Roach’s paper, John Paul Ricco explores “the logic of the incommensurable” in being alone, Dean Sameshima’s photo series of anonymous figures in sex clubs. Rather than a documentarian witness, the photographer is an equally anonymous someone, curious about the many incongruities between bodies and images amidst impersonal sexual intimacy. In this devastation of “solidarity,” we discover a new mode of the common: an incongruous common. Typically to contemporary queer art, Sameshima shows that what has been claimed as narcissism and failed solidarity bears in it the potential for rethinking the common, but only if we prioritize a queer aesthetic and erotic intuition of the incongruity of all sociability.
The panel incorporates a range of diverse voices by including a postwar African American author (Wright), late-twentieth-century Asian American authors (Kingston and Tan), a Colombian artist (Echeverri), and a Japanese-American artist (Sameshima).
Presentations adhere to the strict time limit of 12-15 minutes to leave sufficient time for audience engagement at the end of the session.