This article explores a concept of artistic transgression I call aesthetic disobedience that runs parallel to the political concept of civil disobedience. Acts of civil disobedience break some law in order to publicly draw attention to and recommend the reform of a conflict between the commitments of a legal system and some shared commitments of a community. Likewise, acts of aesthetic disobedience break some entrenched artworld norm in order to publicly draw attention to and recommend the reform of a conflict (...) between artworld commitments and some shared commitments of a community. Considering artistic transgressions under the concept of aesthetic disobedience highlights often-overlooked features of modern artworld practices. Most significantly, it draws attention to the deliberative participation of a wide variety of citizens of the artworld, including not just artists and performers but also members of audiences, in the transformation of the rules and boundaries of the artworld itself. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on the interaction between affect and language as articulated in the works of Theodor W. Adorno and Julia Kristeva, sometimes in inchoate and non-explicit ways. Language is always in transit, exile, and dispossession. All language is the language of another, or the other, and precisely because of this, it is the site of dissenting and conflicting affect. In this context, my paper traces a missed but necessary dialogue between Adorno and Kristeva. Adorno’s diagnosis of failed (...) subjective inwardness, first presented in his book on Kierkegaard, was sustained throughout Adorno’s entire oeuvre, to the very end, in his posthumous 1969 Aesthetic Theory. I will explicate Adorno’s forced collapsing of subjective interiority into a negative space that opens up aesthetic emancipatory potential. In what follows I place Adorno’s negativity of subjective inwardness and the aesthetic potential after the fact of its destruction in dialogue with the writings of Kristeva, who has likewise diagnosed a subjective interiority of negativity but framed the latter in terms of the female, abjection and maternity. I conclude by placing Kristeva’s work in conversation with Adorno’s philosophy of the language of music, as one example of their shared framework for aesthetic emancipatory experience. (shrink)