Geopower

A Panel on Elizabeth Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth

Bibliographic Data

ID4476647
AuthorsKathryn Yusoff (Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YQ, England, corresponding author), Elizabeth Grosz (Duke University, corresponding author), Nigel Clark (0000-0003-3738-1583), Arun Saldanha (0009-0000-5461-6212, University of Minnesota, corresponding author), C Nash (0000-0002-0868-7164, University of London, corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume30
Issue6
Pages971-988
Publication date2012-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1068/d3006pan
OpenAlexW2075936933
LanguageEN
Citations received66
References cited7

Rather than understand art as cultural accomplishment, Elizabeth Grosz argues that it is born from the intensities of chaos and disruptive forms of sexual selection-a corporeality that vibrates to the hum of the universe. Grosz contends that it is precisely this excessive, nonproductive expenditure of sexual attraction that is the condition for art's work. This intimate corporeality, composed of nonhuman forces, is what draws and transforms the cosmos, prompting experimentation with materiality, sensation, and life. In the book Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008, Duke University Press, Durham, NC), that is the subject of this panel discussion, Grosz sets out an ontology of art, looking at its forms of emergence as territorialising force, sexual selection, and nonhuman power. In Grosz's terms, art is an art of existence. This is not a narrow understanding of art as a practice that is about taste, cultural accomplishment, or a reflection of society, but an art that is-at its most provocative-an extraction from the universe and an elaboration on it. This 'geoaesthetics' which is both biospheric and biopolitical, presents a formable challenge to geographers interested in art, sexuality, time, and the territorialisation of the earth. How might we understand this distinctly different kind of biopolitics? And what might Grosz's concept of 'geopower' offer in terms of a renegotiation of a more active 'geo' in geopolitics? Grosz argues that art is not tied to the reproduction of the known, but to the possibility of the new, overcoming the containment of the present to elaborate on futures yet to come. In this rethinking of sexual selection Grosz suggests an intensely political role for art as a bioaesthetics that is charged with the creation of new worlds and forms of life. Grosz makes a radical argument for a feminist philosophy of the biosphere and for our thinking the world otherwise

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Biopower · Contemporary art · Epistemology · Framing (construction · Political science · Politics · Precarity · Sociology · Subjectivity · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

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