| Abstract [eng] |
This research is motivated by the neoliberal contemporary art sphere’s indifference to the ecological crisis, prompted by art historian T. J. Demos’ observations on the dOCUMENTA(13) exhibition in 2012. Considering the possibilities of practices, the thesis asks what conceptual relevance the Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers’ project of ecology of practices can have in addressing a range of today’s ethical, aesthetic, political and environmental challenges. It proposes to bring together what, according to Stengers, Plato’s state separated: ‘human affairs’ (praxis) and ‘the management-production of things’ (technē). Stengers’ perspective invites us to rethink the prevailing post-Marxist conception of critical practices, shifting the focus from ethics to ecology: from the ethics of individual practices to the ecology of interdependent relationship-making. This conception of the ecology of practices and the urgency of their reinvention can be associated with Félix Guattari’s idea of a “new aesthetic paradigm.” Stengers’ interpretation challenges the more conventional understandings of Guattari’s ethico-aesthetics in art theory, which tend to tie it to modern dissensus or institutional consensus, relational aesthetics, and participatory art forms. Stengers’ and Guattari’s ecological projects, which seek a third possibility of political consensus, allow us to see the attempt at the reinvention of practices primarily as a question of unstable and affective change, thus inevitably posing the attendant questions of vulnerability and responsibility. |
