Visual policy

The habitual poster, caricature or documentary images, which are believed to provoke a political decision, have their own background, which explains a lot in the breakdowns and failures of visual “mobilization”. Although one of the most important cultural myths of the era of the new and modern time (what they call Modernity) is a deep politically and worldview mobilizing effect that the picturesque canvas can have (only speech was used in the classical era), we observe constant malfunctions of technologies related to the influence of a certain figurative series, painting or documentary photography. The reasons for this, in our opinion, need to be sought not so much in the properties of visual materials themselves, but in the rhetoric, which was subordinated to the culture of visual works familiar to us.

The absorption of a visual culture that occurred in ancient rationalism by a rhetorical verbal culture, the culture of perception - a culture of a thoughtful description, predetermined the relationship between real and possible. The channel of entering the world of classical rationalism was not any philosophy of possible and not an advanced science, but a complex analytics of modalities, nuances of attitude towards things, examples of which we can see in a variety of Aristotle. The study of the modalities allowed the scientific culture of that time to connect the existing and due, which means that the formation and possibility - which was unthinkable for the archaic pre -classical consciousness, for which the tangible fact of becoming precisely excluded any conversation about the possibilities.

One of the first examples of binding and possibilities was the rhetorical amplification of surprise (admiration) is one of the dominant motives in literary and historical narratives from antiquity to modern times. That is how, for example, the Platonic and post -Platonian discussions about love, friendship and other similar states are arranged: from the description of this state as a given, “good in itself” to the recognition that seduction is more important than agreements, the thrust is more important than habit, and thus, the state is only the animation and universalization of the already existing internal gust.

At the same time, of course, if at the elevated level of philosophical conclusions it really is about a passion that turns into wisdom, then at the level of current political or judicial rhetoric we observe a kind of endless competition of wisdom and empiria. In fact, all this rhetoric boils down to put a new idealized subject of politics or law (the winner of a civil or judicial litigation that is addressed to praise or advice) at the place of the usual subject of politics or law (traditions of fathers, community or group), while maintaining competition between the usual and idealized subject as the key to the continued political process. It is with such competition and possibly the impact of speech both on the public that perceives empathic arguments, and on the situation that urgently requires the adoption of perfect decisions.

Cognition from the setting of an object then turned into a statement of some prospect of vision of an object that constantly produces its own given: we comprehend the concept, identifying it as the same, but with more clarity. It was this mental mechanism that was rethought at the beginning of the New Age as a verification of fact, and not as intellectual practice, and samples of visual experience - the deep effect of individual paintings as works of art, impressive (and usually eccentric) images of beauty and grace, etc.

In classical culture, it is impossible to tie a picture to the name, a picture to the subject, before the recognition of a special decoration of the picture, its turned off from the usual order, the presence of a thing in a much more consistent shape and beauty than that of the thing itself. Hence the necessary praise of any visual political reality - power, the city, the law - that from our positions is perceived as political agitation, then it was perceived as the only way to determine the complex reality that eludes our attention. In addition, the idea that is common in classical culture, which is produced in the classical culture, is the idea that the artistic form can be analyzed by the rejection into large parts - like we are studying the composition or plan of large works for educational purposes. This rejection seems to us didactic and rude, while for the theory of the classical type it was the only opportunity to derive a form from a regime of pure visualization into a regime of existence in history. But that is why the reproduction of classic image models today may turn out to be a failure, while breeding into parts as a frequent compositional principle in contemporary art has a great potential for exposure. The fact that contemporary art is almost not perceived as a political factor does not speak of the properties of contemporary art, but about the reproduction of pre-modern (classical) models in politics itself.

The performive duality of classical rhetoric, which affirmed the real subject of history only in conjunction with an idealized subject of speech, and thereby contributing to the visualization of this ideal subject simultaneously with the instrumentalization of speech figures, determined the ideological preferences of the classical culture. The dispute of classical science with a “natural” tradition was every time picked up a dispute with an “artificial” tradition (such was the dialectic of the development of any science and any practice of perception of the world). Therefore, the classical culture did not know that value breeding of the world of natural things and the world of invented things that we know. The new time turned the opposition of nature and art from the confrontation of conditional positions in an endless dispute, from more and more bets in artificial disputing of the natural and natural contest of artificial-in the dualism of the positions of historical experience: hypothetical initial experience-and relevant "non-clean", infected with cultural prejudices of experience.

In classical culture, there is a nature of speech as an endless dispute that creates personalized positions of the dispute, which means that these positions can be visualized. Of course, such a visual identification of positions with imaginary, but visual characters was blocked by the presence of real historical characters of the past as life examples of behavior, each of which appropriated the entire resource of expressive speech. The character of a historical composition and biography wanted to look better in the narrative than he was actually, and therefore his speech became completely smooth and expressive - the right and honed speech in the historical works of the classical type, those people said that no one would suspect such skill in life.

The documentary fixation of the speeches of historical figures at the beginning of the New Age, and not as in the classical era - as a word continuing the right and logical deed, but as a word that exposes the hidden motives of the one who uttered it, led to the development of historical painting and illustrations. This is no longer an image of perfectly modeled situations, but sketching spontaneous states, leading to such a development of events that the post -fact of the post is felt as natural. And actually, both in monumental propaganda and in the caricature counter -propagand, this idea of ​​a spontaneous state, a frozen mile of thought, which does everything that is “for granted”, is built into the caricature. The thought on the forehead of the Startier Emperor, or the thought of a prostate, mocking the backwardness of the ruler.

Instead of the skillful typology that the classical political speech awakening the imagination, conducting all the participants in the policy through all the standard options for participation in politics, the visuality of the New Age requires to see in political life just the destruction of any typology of the policy of the very personality of the politician, the very violence of its speech. Now the political is returning to our lives again, and returns with numerous and completely individualized speech turns, which inspires the hope that this policy will not be again seduced by “strong” visual images.