Once again hope seems to occupy centre stage on the political and cultural scene. Obama taught us about the rhetoric power of personal hope. The Green Movement proved its desperate tenacity at the last G8 meeting. And artists all around are trying to find a way out of the stronghold of production agenda's, clearly defined esthetics, out of the confines of the artistic market system. After having been sandwiched between critical theory and conceptual esthetics for the last half of the 20th century, the last decade seems to have opened up some new perspectives on action, on relations, on the way we stand an act in our worlds.
Though a lot of the time no more than a rhetoric strategy to get people in line on issues like ecological doom, global confusion or political terror, a contemporary understanding of hope might prove to be a useful strategy in constructing a different perspective on our contemporary political, and yes, artistic ethics.

Hope in this age is no longer projected upon a distant utopia, a far-away future. We no longer believe in the big ideologies, since we seem to have been sucked up head-over-heels by the all-encompassing musings of capitalism. Instead of dreaming about a bloody revolution, hope situates itself today in the eternal now: in every situation, relation, ethical set-up you commit to. Hope is relational, but not in the sense of a safe cosmopolitan interest in the 'other': hope departs from the interest in what binds us, in our contemporary complex identities, in our daily confrontation with nomadism and migration, in our questioning of resistance within a globalized community.

In other words: hope is about rethinking space and relations, about daring to allow change to happen, however microscopic, in whatever kind of way. A hopeful gesture is one that alters the situation: between me and you, between me and my environment, and in that moment changes both of us. In other words: how can we re-think the different 'spaces' we inhabit, how can we think about the co-existence of different zones of experience. Most of us are part of a myriad of 'virtual' communities (as a citizen, an intellectual, a student, an activist, as a part of an artistic esthetics, as a believer,...). Some of these communities are constrained to my physical location (the café, the club, the shops, the hobbies, ...), some are free-floating (the community of readers, of Californication-fans, of Warcraft-adepts,...). I can relate today to all kinds of communities, I can share knowledge live and on the net, I can be part of very different networks, I can learn and relate following my own guidelines and premises. Still there are boundaries to my 'experience' of knowledge and my freedom to act it out. In fact, these zones not only limit my freedom of experience, but also shape and control it. In my ever changing experience of global life, which no longer tells me top-down what to think, what to find important or how to assemble my life. Knowledge and experience are flexible: they re-assembles and aligns themselves constantly, adjusting to the elastic borders of highly developed consumerism. But where is the hope in this? How do we understand these boundaries? Where can we introduce difference, and what can and can we not talk about or experience together?

Some first ideas

Here follows an excerpt from “The politics of esthetics: the distribution of the sensible” by Jacques Ranciere, my favorite view on politics and art (we can read the book together, it’s great!):

"Political statements and literary locutions produce effects in reality. They define models of speech or action but also regimes of sensible intensity. They draft maps of the visible, and the sayable, relationships between modes of being, modes of saying, and modes of doing and making. They define variations of sensible intensities, perceptions, and the abilities of bodies. They thereby take hold of unspecified groups of people, they widen gaps, open up space for deviations, modify the speech, the trajectories, and the ways in which groups of people adhere to a condition, react to situations, recognize their images. They reconfigure the map of the sensible by interfering with the functionality of gestures and rhythms adapted to the natural cycles of production, reproduction and submission. Man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his ‘natural’ purpose by the power of words.”

Another author that can be interesting to read is Brian Holmes. He is an art and cultural critic, activist,.., interested primarily in the intersections of artistic and political practices.(I just saw a lecture by him in IMAL some months ago and he is a passionate person). I will search for an article to bring to the discussion.)