In Between Art and Politics: Frame, Fold, Judgement

This thesis looks at the relationship between art and politics. It produces concepts that embrace the unstable impurity of artistic and political distinctions, identifying an interstitial plasticity between these fields. Extending Deleuze’s cinematic language, it unfolds as a four-stage montage of diverging authors, traditions and ideas.Chapter One reviews how the artistic-political relationship has been discussed through two historically dominant perspectives: ‘art for progress’ and ‘art for art’s sake.’ By examining the principles behind them, inherited from Plato and Kant and criticized by Nietzsche and Derrida, the chapter emphasises how despite efforts to conflate or isolate art and politics, an unstable region of cross-contamination between them persists within both perspectives. Chapter Two proposes Derrida’s concept of the frame as a figure of the constitutive, co-implicating in-between, examining its artistic and political applicability with reference to texts such as Danto’s Artworld and Derrida’s Politics of Friendship. Through a critique of the artistic and political frame of metaphor, Malabou’s motor-schema of plasticity is proposed as a necessary addition to this liminal figure in between art and politics. Chapter Three considers the in-between of art and politics as situated within a continuous landscape of plastic folds. Through this image, it elaborates a differential, generative plasticity in-between continuous artistic and political singularities. In light of Nancy, Deleuze, Bergson and Massumi’s concepts of creative movement and event, a neuronal image of complex relations emerges to contextualise the artistic and political relation. Chapter Four examines subjective transformations in between art and politics in relation to the mittelglied of judgement. With reference to Nancy, Zask, Bal and Malabou, it reconceptualises the mutations of artistic and democratic spaces after accounts of neuronal trauma and resilience. Kant and Arendt’s discussions of judgment and communal sense are then used to expand the creative aspect of this middle-articulation. Its creativity is then elaborated as it resonates with Deleuze’s concepts of jurisprudence, taste and style. Working in a space in-between academic disciplines, this thesis composes a fragmented image of the artistic and political in-between, through which their relationship can be reconceptualised rather than totalised