Panel: RELIGION AND AESTHETICS



662.7 - QUANTITATIVE AESTHETICS, THE FUGITIVE CRY, AND THE PROMISE OF FUTURIST HOPE

AUTHORS:
Chase C. (Fordham University ~ New York City ~ United States of America)
Text:
Religions all involve an ordered vision of the Real and ways to live into that vision. This is the premise of a theologian like David Tracy. For Tracy, a vision of the Real prefigures doctrine, ritual, ethics, and this vision involves perception (seeing the visible as it is) and imagination (envisioning the invisible as it might be, and, perhaps, the visible and the invisible as it ought to be). Such envisioning (and the employment of aesthetics) is, however, never neutral. The vision of the Real may be ordered according to a prime analogate or clue, but the act or ordering is always performed by a finite human agent, that is to say, it is always subjective. As such, religion and aesthetics has often been used to shore up a totalizing vision and dominant discourse, the consequence of which has resulted in conquest, genocide, and the commodification of whole peoples according to a criteria of adequacy set in motion by a quantitative aesthetic. The lecture uses the fugitive "cry" (the cry of the minoritized, non-person) to instigate a religio-aesthetic intervention against the totality of the quantitative. It sketches the contours of such an intervention, by drawing on Fred Moten's fugitive aesthetics, with its valorization of the anaoriginary and the paraontological, and on womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland's creative-generative apophatic awareness of always, already there is Something more. The lecture goes on to examine the artistic practices and spiritual futurist interventions of three Indigenous artists - Jeffrey Gibson, Rose B. Simpson, and Cannupa Hanska Luger, as a way forward into vital hitherto unimagined visions of hope.