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The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events
Thursday, 16 May 2024, 18:15Goethe-Universität, Campus Westend, Casino CAS 1.811, Nina-Rubinstein-Weg 1, 60323 Frankfurt am Main
Research focus »Democratic Vistas«
Democratic Vistas Lecture Series: Was heißt »Demokratische Lebensform«? (in German)
Farai Chipato (Glasgow), Dominik Herold (Frankfurt), Zhiyi Yang (Frankfurt), Julius Schwarzwälder (Frankfurt)
Roundtable Discussion »Spontaneity and Democracy«
About the panel discussion
In cooperation with GRADE Initiative »Aesthetics of Democratic Life-Forms«.
The discussion will be in English.
In Democratic Vistas (1871), Walt Whitman passionately argues that the new frame of democracy shall not be held together by politics, suffrage, or legislation, but should go deeper and get »at least as firm and as warm a hold in men's hearts, emotions and belief.« Whitman trusted in the perfectibility of human nature through aesthetic education. Such education was to equip the democratic individual with skills in ethical spontaneity – an ability to »become a law, and series of laws, unto himself« and thus to live »the highest freedom.« In this international roundtable discussion, scholars from cultural geography, political philosophy, and sinology take up Whitman’s prompt to probe into the centrality of spontaneity for conceptualizing – and putting into question – democracy as a form-of-life. In bringing together scholars whose research focuses on different continents and who address democracy from different disciplinary vantage points, a wide and enriching range of perspectives on democracy and spontaneity is bound to open up.
Sinologist Zhiyi Yang takes as her starting point the continuity between Whitman’s epistemological optimism and Confucianism, which offers some real-world experiments of Whitman’s philosophy executed under different historical circumstances. In the Confucian Analects, moral spontaneity achieved through aesthetic education in the arts, especially poetry and music, is repeatedly mentioned to be the foundation of ritual and political order. Spontaneity in this context is an internalized cultivation, a freedom well trained. Later idealistic Confucianism (xinxue) further maintains that all universal laws are found complete in man himself, a belief in the spontaneous moral subjectivity embodied by the fully cultivated junzi (Confucian gentleman). This tradition leads to a unique kind of democratic thinking in Republican China. According to political leaders like Sun Yat-sen and Wang Jingwei, only an altruistic vanguard revolutionary party consisting of junzi can safely accumulate dictatorial powers and lead the nation in a march toward democracy. The danger of this vision is personality cult and moral dictatorship, since only a junzi—the »captain« of the nation—can make decisions that turn into laws, with such spontaneity that is always beyond the comprehension of others (lesser subjectivities).
Philosopher Dominik Herold translates Whitman’s idea of moral spontaneity into the language of the political theory of radical democracy. On his view, democracy is fundamentally open and dynamic – its nature is that it is untamed and wild. It can never be contained by existing formulae. Thinking about the democratic in this way raises questions about the interplay between organization and spontaneity. What spaces, channels, and practices does democracy require for ensuring its wildness? Can spontaneity be organized when the affirmation of having to be spontaneous is necessarily perverted? How can a de?mocratie sauvage (Abensour) be saved from either tipping over into the barbaric or, alternatively, becoming tamed altogether? The wild or spontaneous, on Herold’s view, represents a central engine for how (democratic) subjects are formed, modes of relating are shaped, and agency is grasped.
Cultural geographer Farai Chipato finally considers the extent to which thinkers and activists of the Black Radical Tradition and the Black Aesthetic reject existing forms of (liberal) democracy and turn to the aesthetic, and particularly to spontaneity, in the search for alternative avenues of social thought, knowledge, and being. As many writers in Black studies argue for the processual, improvised nature of Black aesthetics, any approach drawn from this tradition will emphasize spontaneity in its constantly changing and adaptive nature. Indeed, Black aesthetics can be said to offer a spontaneous counterpoint to more static, modernist approaches to politics and society, by refusing singular, fixed answers to questions of identity and being and emphasizing the importance of fluidity and unruliness. Are approaches grounded in aesthetics or poetics more amenable to grappling with the crises of the 21st century? What openings are provided by Black aesthetic critiques of modernity? What might Black aesthetic futures look like and how do they relate to governance and the world as it is today?
About the speakers
The panel discussion will be moderated by Julius Schwarzwälder, founding member of the GRADE Initiative “Aesthetics of Democratic Life-Forms” and student in Frankfurt’s MA program »Aesthetics.«
Farai Chipato is a lecturer in Black Geographies at the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow. His research interests include African politics, Black social and political thought, and the Anthropocene. His work has been published in several journals, including Political Geography, Third World Quarterly and Security Dialogue.
Dominik Herold studied philosophy and political theory in Frankfurt, Munich, Toronto, Vienna and New York. He is currently doing his PhD on the topic of radical democratic theory and the power of the affects at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Herold is (co-)founder and spokesperson of the Netzwerk Paulskirche and the NGO mehr als wählen e. V. His research focuses on social philosophy, democratic theory and affect theory.
Zhiyi Yang is Professor of Sinology at Goethe University Frankfurt. She graduated from Peking University and received her PhD from Princeton University in 2012. She is the author of Dialectics of Spontaneity: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Su Shi (1037-1101) in Poetry (Leiden: Brill, 2015; Chinese version: Sanlian 2018) and Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2023). She is currently working on a monograph on avant-garde classicist poetry in the Sinophone cyberspace and on a collaborative project on global Sinophone classicisms.
Find more information on the lectures series here.
Participation and registration
Please note that the event will take place at the Westend Campus of Goethe University in Frankfurt. Registration is not required.
