99% of the 99%: the politics in collective artistic processes in the majority world

Paper prepared for DSA Conference: Social justice and development in a polarising world. Hosted at SOAS University of London, 26-28 June 2024.

Balança que pesa ouro, não é pra pesar metal The scales to weigh gold are not for weighing metal

Tem passarinho pequeno que mata cobra coral There’s a small bird that can kill a coral snake

Aesthetic turn – for whom?

The starting point for the project I’m starting is the Aesthetic turn in International Relations of the 2000s. It was led by Roland Bleiker, who proposes that aesthetics offer insights into human experience and behaviour that are not detectable by other enquiries. He recognises that “the dilemmas that currently haunt world politics, from terrorism to rising inequalities, are far too serious not to employ the full register of human intelligence to understand and deal with them” (Bleiker 2001, 529). In defining the object of analysis, Bleiker distinguishes between mimetic representation – which describes an attempt to represent the world as closely as possible, and aesthetics. He writes, “aesthetic insight recognises that the inevitable difference between the represented and its representation is the very location of politics” (Bleiker 2001, 510).

The aesthetic turn opened significant academic space; it focused, though, on erudite artists in the Global North – Europe and North America. In doing so it shone light on the politics of maybe 1% of the 1%, if we consider artists as 1% of the population. In expanding analysis, though, it did not rise to the challenge of engaging with 99% of the 99%. (The calculations are artistic – they are representations to provoke thought). For many people, collective art – of which there are massively diverse examples across the world – is significant to their identity, history, community and politics. John Street, in his book “Music and Politics,” notes that music is where we find ourselves (Street, 2011).

Aesthetics is more significant to understanding the world now than ever. The ubiquity of the internet, and the representation through formal and social media means that we are engaging with representations all the time. The explosion of fake news, deep fake and artificial intelligence is rewriting what we understand knowledge to be: how it is generated, tested, contested and presented.

At the same time we are facing threats that are uncharted, and have been generated largely by what has been described as development. We need creative solutions: that is to say, solutions that come from people’s creativity, because that’s where priorities are filtered, and energy is mustered.

Approach – networking artists in Northeastern Brazil

Lots of academic work has been done on culture in Brazil, particularly by ethnomusicologists. There is broad acceptance, too – in the support given to artists, and in the exile of many during the dictatorship – that artists have significant power. But there is something missing: how this power operates; how it relates to other forms of power and to racial, gender and economic inequality. Discussion of performing arts tend to focus on what and how art represents; research is also geared to how art impacts the observer.

Our project, linking popular artists in Northeastern Brazil, engages with a methodological shift to break with an extractive gaze that aims to decode artistic expression. Our starting position is to acknowledge the legitimacy of artists’ struggle, and this provides an entry to supporting the work.

From there, we are building a network of artists that enables them to explore their own and each others’ experiences of resistance and change-making. Instead of gathering data, we are using a methodology that creates the conditions for people to create new data. It is not about ‘finding out’ – we are not in a world where it’s difficult to find things out – it is about co-creating something new while exploring with the artists how it relates to the context and conditions of the overwhelming power it confronts.

Research needs to build power through methodology; so we are working to support artists’ ability to collaborate, gain funding and increase their profile, and to amplify artists’ efforts to work through performing arts to resist when they need to and to change the world around them.

It turns out it is not easy. Weighing gold takes a more sophisticated apparatus: the difference between the aesthetics of the majority world and social sciences are overlaid with differences in power, perspective, appetite for risk and bureaucracy. It is also very difficult to make academic conceptualisations significant beyond the academy, including to the sorts of people often referred to as participants or beneficiaries. And the methodology asks questions back about ownership: when finding the gold of actual resistance and change-making in the community, why does this need to be alchemised back to the hard metal of the academy? That is what brings into focus where the funding comes from, and where the power to change or reinforce the threats sits.

Initial findings

There are a number of ideas that are taking shape through the launch of the reseach.

Firstly, a common set of experiences across popular artforms is that various kinds of politics happen in the artistic process – by linking communities, experiencing things together, forming memories and meanings, engaging in ways that do not use words. It is not all about the show or the outcome outside the community; at times that is largely incidental. This chimes with previous work I have done on the Afro-Brazilian art of capoeira.

Secondly, in artistic settings, categorical boundaries established elsewhere are blurred. Mestra Di contests to the boundary between the physical and emotional in her capoeira classes: promoting physical forms of beauty through Black identity promotes the emotional health of the children, and shapes the narratives the children use in their interactions with each other. The distinction between cultural power and political power is also removed: Mestra Di is doing the work that society and schools are not able to because of structural and institutional racism. She is making the difference in children’s lives, and it is not realised through translation – capoeira is where it happens.

Thirdly, we are learning about the costs imposed by bureaucracy that enforces conceptual frames and processes, and how instutions keep people out. Redistributing power involves the work of translating everything – concepts and processes – from the bureaucratic to the artistic and back again, in order to support the work artists are doing in education, health, rights, freedom of expression and community organisation.

This project took its lead from the aesthetic turn, but has picked its way through the differences between the 1% and the 99% by critiquing assumptions about authorship and audience, categorisation and power. It engages with the power of popular art in the majority world without patronising or lionising it, and without dismissing the real ongoing struggles. Setting up the project has pushed us to dig through the research process and the academy, and has granted us some glimpses of different forms of knowledge, understanding and power which we will be not simply analysing but actively promoting with our research process.

Roland Bleiker (2001) “The aesthetic turn in international political theory” Millennium – Journal of International Studies 30, 509-533.

John Street (2011) “Music and Politics” Polity Press.