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The problem of how aesthetic experience relates to the dimension of intersubjectivity is not new. What is new is the way this problem is being formulated. In contemporary aesthetic discourse it is not, as in Kant, a matter of some generality that would be implicit to every aesthetic judgment because it is based on a manner of experience that, in its very structure, can principally be assumed for all thinking beings. Nor, however, is it a matter of participating in some truth of universal validity. Like the first Kantian perspective, the second, the perspective of what has been called truth aesthetics, also abandons all concrete subjectivity. So, for Adorno, the ideal artist is one who emphasizes a moment in the work that allows it to step outside of its connection to the individuality of the artist (its expression). By committing to the project of relieving art’s autonomy from its relation to all concrete subjectivity, and thus also including his or her own, the “artist” is meant to become “the deputy of the total subject.” Out of art, writes Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory, “it is a We that speaks and not an I—indeed all the more so the less the artwork adapts externally to a We and its idiom.” From this perspective, participating in art means that the viewer, listener, spectator, or reader is meant to overcome his or her empirical situatedness in relation to the work and to participate in something universal. And as far as this participation is understood as participating in a “pure We,” the relation to the work gains a utopian dimension as well. To have an aesthetic experience, for Adorno, means participating in the “adumbration of reconciliation.”

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Everything you may have heard about online dating is true: It is steeped in a consumerist logic. It substitutes algorithms for pheromones. It instrumentalizes intimacy and mechanizes the wily ways of desire. It conjures illusions of privacy, control, and anonymity (while simultaneously violating that perceived privacy with the insidious practices of data mining and personalized advertising). It exacerbates the same barbarous impulses—hyper-individualism, cutthroat competition, solipsism, self-aggrandizement—so integral to and rewarded in the marketplace. Indeed, it is difficult to argue that social media at large do little else but construct and fortify what Michel Foucault designates homo economicus: that calculating spawn of neoliberalism who perceives himself and others foremost as human capital. If the lived experience of homo economicus turns on consumption, enterprise, brand creation, self-optimization, efficiency, aggressive speculation, and, ironically, amid the never ending workday, the maximization of individualized pleasure, it finds its virtual Elysium in the profile pages of online dating sites. At first glance, queer social media, including hookup apps such as Grindr and Scruff, would appear to be no different. They too seem the refuge and breeding ground for neoliberal subjectivity, communication, and relational forms. However, in contrast to the chorus of techno-pessimistic voices that holds the Internet responsible for the death of a public queer sex culture, I assert that to whatever extent social media have transformed the means of queer communication and connection, the ends are generally the same, that is, connection, hooking up. Despite significant differences between bathhouse cruising and profile browsing, between dark rooms and chat rooms, the antirelational ethical principles constituted in the former can nonetheless be found and fostered in the latter. In this article I will foreground an ethical commonality I see spanning public cruising and private browsing, namely, the queer practice of shared estrangement.

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Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University. He is the author of such influential volumes on the history and philosophy of science as Image and Logic (1997) and, with Lorraine Daston, Objectivity (2007). In addition to his scholarly work, Galison has been involved in the production of two documentary films—Ultimate Weapon (2000) and Secrecy (2008, directed with Robb Moss)—and collaborated with the South African artist William Kentridge on a 2012 multimedia exhibition, The Refusal of Time. He is currently at work on a new book, Building, Crashing, Thinking, and a new film, Containment, also directed with Moss. Jason de Stefano spoke with Galison in the summer of 2014 about these forthcoming projects, their relation to Galison’s previous work, and the historical, philosophical, and methodological questions that have guided his prolific and influential career.

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For those interested in pursuing the historical and philosophical origins of the idea of the political imaginary—a key concept in contemporary social and cultural theory—Spinoza represents a well-spring. Even if many seventeenth-century authors reflected on the imaginary and image-mediated nature of political relationships, particularly in the connection between politics and religion, few did so as thoroughly and systematically as Spinoza. Indeed, even more than for Hobbes, for Spinoza the ability of the human mind to create images is an anthropological given and an irreducible dimension of all human actions and interactions.

But even for those more interested in pursuing theoretical and methodological resources for a contemporary theory of political imaginaries, something can be found here. Despite the generality of Spinoza’s epistemological conception of the imaginatio, it receives a remarkable sharpness and concreteness in his political writings. Equipped with a fine sense of the imaginative power of the mind, Spinoza systematically describes political processes and institutions as imaginative and imaginary phenomena. From this perspective, politics as a whole can be read as an area of human life in which images, projections, misjudgments, and often-involuntary associations between ideas become effective.

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To speak of empire today is to speak about a global dispensation of power predicated on, and furthering, the aims of capitalist accumulation in an era when the familiar components and dynamics of the international order of sovereign states, by means of which such accumulation took place, seem to have been dramatically, perhaps irrevocably, reorganized. To understand empire’s workings is hence to try to grasp an order of common ideals, sensibilities, and practices that no longer simply entail the protocols of proper belonging defined by the nation-state, or, protocols of full citizenship, that defined the rights of peoples in the age of national sovereignty. Certainly, as identitarian codes for understanding and regulating human differences cut against the measure of Man, race, gender, and sexuality have long served to organize the social divisions of economic production and political power within and across nation-states—perhaps exemplarily so during the age of decolonization (the true and obverse content of the age of freedom)—and continue to do so in the present. Yet over the last several decades, these codes have operated beyond a normative cultural logic of social identities (where they act as means of specification, disciplining and representation of individuals, groups, and nations as integral units of modern sovereignty). These codes now also operate within numerous calculative procedures of attribution, where they act as variables for partitioning and bundling organic and inorganic masses, matters, and potentials in new modes of value production and life extraction, which have resulted in both a proliferation of social differences (in shifting scales) and a staggeringly profound breach in the fates of human beings.

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At first glance, the photograph Space where the Robert Taylor Homes used to be looks so mundane, so ordinary, that it doesn’t demand more than a moment’s attention. If you look hard enough you can see the Chicago skyline. The high-rises and skyscrapers are hidden behind the foreground of the image—the cracked cement and patched grass of an empty lot. The sky is slightly overcast. The grass is ragged and brown. There is a red fire hydrant and a tree that is either budding leaves or losing them. It might be March or perhaps November. The only remarkable thing about the photo is the empty space. A space so big in a city so large could not always have been empty. People, homes, buildings, and communities were there and are now only perceptible by their absence. The photo attempts to capture what can no longer be seen; it grasps at a kind of visible invisibility that characterizes what Shawn Michelle Smith calls “the edge of sight.” The photo tells a story about what is left behind by newer systems of economic and carceral state power that have emerged over the last forty years. The dismantling and privatization of public housing like the Robert Taylor Homes in favor of the biopolitics of homelessness and an unprecedented system of racialized and gendered incarceration are critical features of this shift from the welfare state to the carceral state. In this way, the photo documents that the sign of economic and carceral violence is often nothing at all. Gravel and weeds are the detritus of a system that is unimaginable and sometimes incomprehensible.

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This essay links questions of economic austerity, the crisis in public education, and contemporary US racial formations by considering the recent struggle over the privatization of what is recognized as the greatest public university in the world. We will approach this confluence of crises by examining the rise and fall of a particular piece of public art erected on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley as part of a slick public-relations and fund-raising campaign, and will consider the piece’s relationship with UC Berkeley as one of the birthplaces of the US Occupy Movement. This is also a personal effort by two members of the UC Berkeley faculty to translate their on-campus activism into a work of scholarship and to thereby synthesize nearly a decade of engagement and struggle to defend public higher education in California through the radical possibilities that remain strong within both multicultural and cultural studies.

We take as our object in this study the “Thanks to Berkeley . . .” photo wall that stood between the fall semester of 2009 and the spring semester of 2011 at a central place on the Berkeley campus, just north of Dwinelle Plaza. During its short lifespan, this public photography installation served as a staging ground for competing articulations of the twenty-first-century public university.

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A review of Crary, Jonathan, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013).

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A review of Kluge, Alexander and Negt, Oskar, History and Obstinacy, ed. Fore, Devin, trans. Langston, Richard et al.  (New York: Zone Books, 2014).

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