remains “hidden” because revealing it weakens its purpose of assisting those groups in dealing with oppression’, writes Collins (1998, p. 49).
Political acts are creative moments that break from the routine and, through their unfolding, intrinsically legitimate the actor. An ‘act’ is not a reaction to a situation, but the creation of an actor who can legitimately be present in a situation they participate in creating. In turn, a situation is a moment and space where actors share a common sense of what is happening; they can sufficiently read what is happening to be able to engage in the interactions unfolding. Millions of banal situations unfold in our urban lives. A situation can become a political act when we make political gestures and give special meaning to what is happening. Take the following situation at the Saint‐Michel subway station. A police officer approaches a group of youngsters hanging out near the entrance gate. He asks them to move and disperse. The group poses a political gesture by asserting the presence of their bodies there. They negotiate with the police officer. This creates a situation they can identify, unlike routine or banal instances of urban interactions, and thus they constitute themselves as actors. This is a political act. The police officer smiles, stays a little while with them, and then continues his route. The group stays a little more time and then leaves. Had they not asserted their embodied presence to the police officer, this would not have been a situation that broke from routine. It would not have been a political act. The accumulation of such political acts in our everyday lives and their transformation into a politicized narrative is what we call political action.7
In other words, what matters in the exercise of power is our experience of its effects. In order to capture these effects, Allen (2003) distinguishes between different modalities of power, each with their own relational peculiarities. Domination is an instrumental form of power relation exercised at someone else’s expense; it restricts choice and closes down possibilities. Authority is also an instrumental power relation, but it does not involve the imposition of a form of conduct leading to submission. Coercion directly involves the threat of force to exact compliance, whereas manipulation implies the concealment of intent. Seduction, for Allen, is a modality of power relation that arouses specific desires by taking advantage of existing attitudes and expectations. Thus, it is the modality most relevant to aesthetic political relations. Because its effects are unpredictable, it is the opposite of domination. Seduction can be refused. It works through suggestion and enticement rather than prescription. If someone is not attracted to seducing acts, they will have no effects.
In his insightful empirical study of why criminals act when they do, Katz (1988) argues that a crime can occur only when a criminal senses a distinctive sensual dynamic at play in a specific moment and place. He explores how the criminal is attracted to the sensual possibilities opened by the situation and seduced by its ‘symbolic creativity’. He is attentive to the ‘mode of executing action, [the] symbolic creativity in defining the situation, and [the] esthetic finesse in recognizing and elaborating on the sensual possibilities’ (Katz 1988, p. 9). He argues that ‘to one degree or another, we are always being seduced and repelled by the world’, that we ‘are always moving away from and toward different objects of consciousness, taking account of this and ignoring that, and moving in one direction or the other between the extremes of involvement and boredom’. He pursues: ‘In this constant movement of consciousness, we do not perceive that we are controlling the movement’ (Katz 1988, p. 4). In other words, for Katz, seduction and attraction are almost synonymous. He does not ascribe to seduction an intentional strategy. Instead, he focuses on the effects of seduction and the ‘esthetic finesse’ required to respond to it. As an emitting modality of power, seduction needs a receptive effect. This is what we will call attraction.
In order to explain what we mean by ‘attraction’, allow us to describe a situation experienced by Julie‐Anne in the Prado Museum in Madrid. The Prado has a very large collection of Goya’s paintings depicting royal characters and religious scenes. When Julie‐Anne visited the museum, she focused on the story these paintings were telling, on how Goya depicted power. When, at the end of the day, she went down to the museum’s lower level, she encountered his Pinturas Negras, painted on the walls of his house toward the end of his life (during the 1820s). These murals depict barbaric scenes from everyday life in quasi‐phantasmagorical forms: embodied human interactions, eating, blood, fear, crowds, sickness, music, ageing bodies, raging gods, expressively reading a book, sexual desire, fire… (see Figure I.1). As she encountered this ‘aesthetic appearance’ (Panagia 2009), Julie‐Anne could no longer move her body. She could not read what she was seeing anymore; she could almost feel the warmth of the blood on her fingers, the fear of the crowd. She stayed for nearly an hour, without moving, until her husband came for her.
Exiting the museum, they sat on a bench under the fresh shade of a canopy tree for another hour, where Julie‐Anne couldn’t stop speaking, spitting out her emotions, trying to make sense of what she had sensed and the difference between her rational relation to Goya’s ‘power’ paintings and this political work. The Pinturas Negras have been analysed as Goya’s radically political position generated by the sourness he felt at the end of the Napoleonic Wars (Junquera 2003). They were painted in his country house just outside of Madrid, where he retired disgusted by urban power plays and barbaric humanity. They play with bodily functions such as blood, vomiting, and modified body parts in order to express a profound rejection of urban political life. It is this rejection that makes these paintings so urbanely intense, as opposed to the clean depiction of state and imperial power that transpires from his previous works.
FIGURE I.1 ‘Saturno’, Francisco de Goya, 1823.
The Pinturas Negras tell a story of aesthetic political action in the sense that they represent everyday scenes of power relations that are intensely emotional and embodied. They depict political gestures of fights, bodies resisting, and shocking inequalities. But beyond the story they tell (what they cognitively represent), Julie‐Anne’s encounter with them was a ‘pregnant moment’ of aesthetic politics. These moments occur when action‐oriented perception is temporarily suspended, when we sense that something different is happening without being able to articulate it with words. During these ‘fugitive glimmers of becoming’ (Connolly 2011, p. 7), what we sense ‘breaks our confidence in the correspondence between perception and signification’ (Panagia 2009, p. 5). In other words, in these pregnant moments, we can no longer rely on our cognitive capacities to understand what is going on. Julie‐Anne could only, as Panagia would put it, admit this ‘aesthetic appearance’ was affecting her.
Philosophically, Panagia emphasizes the immediacy, the here‐and‐now, the shock of an aesthetic appearance. When we are faced with something that speaks to our senses (such as the Pinturas Negras), we cannot name it (recognize it as something we know). We can simply ‘admit’ that it is touching us. Panagia suggests that aesthetic appearances are political because they provide us with opportunities for responsiveness. The intensity of this experience is generally neglected from political analysis because it cannot be described with words and thus articulated as ideology or interests. ‘Under the pressures of immediacy’, Panagia writes, ‘we lose access to the kinds of conditions that make it possible to determine things like motivation, use, or belief – all forces that constitute the nature of interest’ (Panagia 2009, p. 27). Pregnant moments are regulated by attraction.
It was only after this moment of ‘immediacy’ that Julie‐Anne tried to represent, rationalize, and explain what she experienced. To this day, the Pinturas Negras still exercise a strong force of attraction on her. They have modified what she can see, sense, utter, and think about politics. Some artefacts (proto‐agents, earth‐beings) are so powerful that our cognitive abilities no longer function to relate with them. When we stop looking
