Aesthetic Politics and Political Aesthetics: a Crucial Distinction (original) (raw)
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2009
Is it trivial, or perhaps even irresponsible, to explore aesthetic themes at a time when the world is engulfed by war, genocide, terrorism, poverty, climate change and financial turmoil? Why indulge in painting, poetry or music when lives and livelihoods are at stake? Can we really afford to entertain questions of taste while concrete political action is urgently required? This book offers a passionate but systematically sustained defence of an aesthetic engagement with world politics. It argues that aesthetic sources can offer alternative insight: a type of reflective understanding that emerges not from applying the analytical skills that are central the social sciences, but from cultivating a more open-ended level of creativity and sensibility about the political. We then might be able to appreciate what we otherwise cannot even see: perspectives or people excluded from prevailing purviews, for instance, or the emotional nature and consequences of political events. Drawing on detailed case studies that range from Stalinist Russia to Cold War Germany and contemporary Korea, the author compellingly demonstrates how the poetic imagination can help us understand – and perhaps even shape - some of the most difficult political challenges.
Political Aesthetics of the Nation
Interventions, 2014
This essay argues that aesthetic approaches to studying politics can allow us to read politics in more nuanced ways. Through the study of murals and statues in the Indian parliament, it is suggested that the politics of art and the art of politics are conjoined. In particular, the essay examines the ways in which the postcolonial Indian state reproduces the discourse of nationalism and modernity through its production of a nationalist aesthetic and how the consumption of this aesthetics results in struggles over meaning-making and its legitimacy.
The aesthetics of nations: anthropological and historical approaches
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2011
The nation, it is increasingly recognized, needs to be performed and materialized. The representation of national conflicts and contested pasts by governments and communities through various aesthetic artefacts and practices seeks to evoke and regulate multiple senses and feelings. But is a straightforwardly productive affect-feeling-always manifested? In this introduction, I reflect critically on some of the anthropological scholarship on nation, aesthetics, and senses and seek to offer new terms of analysis and styles of interpretation. Overall, I seek to problematize the often too easily invoked relationship between performative material embodiment and the nation. It is at the (often fractured) intersection of these multiple levels and through an ethnographic engagement with the acts of production, consumption, and social participation in the aesthetic representation of these national pasts that I locate the analytical focus of the anthropology of nation, aesthetics, and feelings in this special issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. The nation, it is increasingly recognized, needs to be performed and materialized through various aesthetic artefacts like national anthems, flags, memorials, museums, visual art, literature, songs, dance, poetry, films, landscapes, cultural property, and linguistic (enunciative) authority. These artistic and aesthetic artefacts have not only served as a tool of education, indoctrination, and enculturation. They also embody moralizing, introspective, and cathartic possibilities. Aesthetics (the original Greek form aisthitikos denotes 'perceptive by feeling') here refers to an affective domain in which various objects and phenomena animate and perform the nation. Aesthetics may involve visual and auditory sensory experiences, perception, and imagination which may be either pleasant or disturbing. Aesthetics may include a personal experience of a peculiar emotion, what appear to be very private feelings about an object or practice. They are, however, always dependent on psychological dispositions and anxieties, politics, class, desire, values, and knowledge, which all contribute to the conditions under which one experiences the aesthetic object (Bell 1998: 15). Aesthetics are thus intrinsically linked to ideology. On the one hand the commodification of art and aesthetic practices has served to socialize people to consumer culture. At the same time it has become the site of political and social dissent, a space of resistance
Interlacing Political Aesthetics with the exertion of Art
Journal of emerging technologies and innovative research, 2019
Art is occupied through aesthetics. Most important philosophical understandingaesthetics derived through human evolution and the scale of apprehension of surroundings by humans itself. In political science, aesthetical sense is very important in designing democratic culture in the thoroughly changing world order. Aesthetics can be addressed as a political conditioning, the conditioning of recognition, acceptance, behavioral etc. Political aesthetics, called into being by Crispin Sartwell, attends to the aesthetic features of political science, that is, such things as political systems, and constitutions. Understanding politics, which is the place of power, of contestation between interests and interest groups, is incomplete without political aesthetics. In his 1897-published book, ‘What is Art?’ Leo Tolstoy described art as “one of the means of intercourse between man and man”. We know this to be true when we’re standing beside strangers in an art gallery or museum, gazing at an art...
The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2002
This essay explores the nature and significance of aesthetic approaches to the study of word politics. More specifically, it contrasts aesthetic with mimetic forms of representation. The latter, which have dominated international relations scholarship, seek to represent the political as authentically as possible. An aesthetic approach, by contrast, assumes that there is always a gap between a form of representation and what is represented therewith. Rather than ignoring or seeking to narrow this gap, as mimetic approaches do, aesthetic insight recognises that the inevitable difference between the represented and its representation is the very location of politics. The essay argues for the need to reclaim the political value of the aesthetic, not to replace one orthodoxy with another, but to broaden our abilities to comprehend and deal with the key dilemmas of world politics. Images, narratives and sounds could then be appreciated alongside more accepted sources of knowledge about the international. But embarking on such an aesthetic turn amounts to more than simply adding an additional, sensual layer of interpretation. It calls for a significant shift away from a model of thought that recognises external appearances and channels them into one form of common sense, towards an approach that generates a more diverse but also more direct encounter with the political. The latter allows for productive interactions across different faculties, including sensibility, imagination and reason, without