Guerrilla Aesthetics: Art, Memory, and the West German Urban Guerrilla by Kimberly Mair (review)

Kimberly Mair's assertively post-structuralist exploration focuses on the activities of West German activist groups beginning with the police / German Democratic Republic secret service killing of student protestor Benno Ohnesorg on 2 June 1967 through the German Autumn of 1977. This decade of radical activism is commonly bookended and treated as a unit, and in this sense, Mair is following the standard. However, her examination's stated aim is to unsettle normative assessments of what she terms the urban guerrilla, which the monograph does in several ways.

First, the historical events are considered in a fabric incorporating a robust assortment of subsequent artistic treatments of these events, such as Gerhard Richter's 1989 painting series October 18, 1977, the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art's 2005 exhibit Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition, and Mair and Allen Ball's 2007 photo series The German Autumn in Minor Spaces. Mair places the artworks in a conceptual weave with activist groups, including the Tupamaros West Berlin, the 2nd of June Movement, and the Red Army Faction (RAF), Kommune 1 and the Socialist Patients' Collective, and the Situationalists International and other avant-gardists, to highlight their proximate relationships to what Mair terms negative aesthetics, which in turn is relevant for her guerrilla aesthetics. This means of engagement with the topic downplays violence as a categorical distinction and goes against the grain of typical investigations of the RAF. Mair points to these other studies as being based in epistemologies of the liberal subject and to their subsequent tendency to assess actors and events according to yardsticks of effectiveness.

Second, Mair instead seeks to illuminate what she reads as the epistemologies of the activists, who sought to dissolve the liberal subject and normative communication. She focuses on their "enactments" into the world and their "emplacements" within it. Several concepts further Mair's considerations. Drawing upon Susan Buck-Morss and David Howes, she expands a common definition of aesthetic from the beautiful and the artistic to incorporate bodily experience. For Mair, the "concept of guerrilla aesthetics grants primacy to the sensorial, rather than rational, bearings of guerrilla communications. The senses, however, are not the possession of an independent body. They arise in the interstices of the quiet but stubborn politics of everyday life and its shifting emplacements."

This definition of guerrilla aesthetics thus also highlights the third trajectory. Namely, (the limits and myth of) individual agency and the corresponding notion of the subject are understood as being imbricated with others, space, place, time and environment. Starting from a selfconsciously Butlerian conceptualization, Mair describes the self-styled guerrillas's actions as emplacement – a perhaps local term that she deploys analytically – precisely to emphasize context over agency in the "entanglement of mind, body, and space." Negativity is also both a local and analytic-descriptive term deriving from the Frankfurt School's negative dialectics. Mair stresses that she does not see the activists as themselves post-structuralists. To my mind, her emphasis on the negative aesthetics of their emplacements that favoured potentially unintelligible communications and communitarian bodies over individual agency and corporality – for instance, when the RAF was imprisoned and in court – suggests a trajectory from the epistemologies of the urban guerilla to those of post-structuralism in which Mair's work is grounded.

Navigating from within a prison house of structuralist language, Mair's persistently forceful authorial voice asserts this project's deep concern precisely with contingencies of meanings and radical narrativity. A scholar trained in (tensions between) critical and post-structuralist theory, I read with particular interest, for my own hope of emancipation through a destabilization of "facts" seems to be fading relative to the intensification of science denial. Living now in what seems an emergent age of "fake news," I find myself more swayed by the objection to which Mair herself gestures; her approach that treats political emplacements involving violence and artistic emplacements thereof as cut from one categorical cloth...