The Politics of Aesthetics

The Politics of Aesthetics
Author: Jacques Rancière
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2013-05-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1780936877

The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship between art and politics, reclaiming "aesthetics" from the narrow confines it is often reduced to. Jacques Rancière reveals its intrinsic link to politics by analysing what they both have in common: the delimitation of the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the thinkable and the unthinkable, the possible and the impossible. Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, The Politics of Aesthetics provides the most comprehensive introduction to Rancière's work to date, ranging across the history of art and politics from the Greek polis to the aesthetic revolution of the modern age. Available now in the Bloomsbury Revelations series 10 years after its original publication, The Politics of Aesthetics includes an afterword by Slavoj Zizek, an interview for the English edition, a glossary of technical terms and an extensive bibliography.

Communities of Sense

Communities of Sense
Author: Beth Hinderliter
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2009-09-18
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0822390973

Communities of Sense argues for a new understanding of the relation between politics and aesthetics in today’s globalized and image-saturated world. Established and emerging scholars of art and culture draw on Jacques Rancière’s theorization of democratic politics to suggest that aesthetics, traditionally defined as the “science of the sensible,” is not a depoliticized discourse or theory of art, but instead part of a historically specific organization of social roles and communality. Rather than formulating aesthetics as the Other to politics, the contributors show that aesthetics and politics are mutually implicated in the construction of communities of visibility and sensation through which political orders emerge. The first of the collection’s three sections explicitly examines the links between aesthetics and social and political experience. Here a new essay by Rancière posits art as a key site where disagreement can be staged in order to produce new communities of sense. In the second section, contributors investigate how sense was constructed in the past by the European avant-garde and how it is mobilized in today’s global visual and political culture. Exploring the viability of various models of artistic and political critique in the context of globalization, the authors of the essays in the volume’s final section suggest a shift from identity politics and preconstituted collectivities toward processes of identification and disidentification. Topics discussed in the volume vary from digital architecture to a makeshift museum in a Paris suburb, and from romantic art theory in the wake of Hegel to the history of the group-subject in political art and performance since 1968. An interview with Étienne Balibar rounds out the collection. Contributors. Emily Apter, Étienne Balibar, Carlos Basualdo, T. J. Demos, Rachel Haidu, Beth Hinderliter, David Joselit, William Kaizen, Ranjanna Khanna, Reinaldo Laddaga, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, Reinhold Martin, Seth McCormick, Yates McKee, Alexander Potts, Jacques Rancière, Toni Ross

The Politics of Aesthetics

The Politics of Aesthetics
Author: Marc Redfield
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804747509

This book suggests that modern cultural and critical institutions have persistently associated questions of aesthetics and politics with literature, theory, technics, and Romanticism. Its first section examines aesthetic nationalism and the figure of the body, focusing on writings by Benedict Anderson, J. G. Fichte, and Matthew Arnold, and arguing that uneasy acts of aestheticization (of media technology) and abjection (of the maternal body) undergird the production of the national body as “imagined community.” Subsequent chapters on Paul de Man, Friedrich Schlegel, and Percy Shelley explore the career of the gendered body in the aesthetic tradition and the relationship among aesthetics, technics, politics, and figurative language. The author accounts for the hysteria that has characterized media representations of theory, explains why and how Romanticism has remained a locus of extravagant political hopes and anxieties, and, in a sequence of close readings, uncovers the “anaesthetic” condition of possibility of the politics of aesthetics.

Dissensus

Dissensus
Author: Jacques Ranciere
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2010-03-17
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1847064450

A brand new collection of Jacques Rancière's writings on art and politics.

Distributions of the Sensible

Distributions of the Sensible
Author: Scott Durham
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2019-06-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0810140292

Jacques Rancière’s work is increasingly central to several debates across the humanities. Distributions of the Sensible confronts a question at the heart of his thought: How should we conceive the relationship between the “politics of aesthetics” and the “aesthetics of politics”? Specifically, the book explores the implications of Rancière’s rethinking of the relationship of aesthetic to political democracy from a wide range of critical perspectives. Distributions of the Sensible contains original essays by leading scholars on topics such as Rancière’s relation to political theory, critical theory, philosophical aesthetics, and film. The book concludes with a new essay by Rancière himself that reconsiders the practice of theory between aesthetics and politics.

Aesthetics and Politics

Aesthetics and Politics
Author: Theodor Adorno
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1788738586

An intense and lively debate on literature and art between thinkers who became some of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and literature. With an afterword by Fredric Jameson No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

Political Aesthetics

Political Aesthetics
Author: Crispin Sartwell
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2011-03-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0801458005

"I suggest that although at any given place and moment the aesthetic expressions of a political system just are that political system, the concepts are separable. Typically, aesthetic aspects of political systems shift in their meaning over time, or even are inverted or redeployed with an entirely transformed effect. You cannot understand politics without understanding the aesthetics of politics, but you cannot understand aesthetics as politics. The point is precisely to show the concrete nodes at which two distinct discourses coincide or connive, come apart or coalesce."—from Political Aesthetics Juxtaposing and connecting the art of states and the art of art historians with vernacular or popular arts such as reggae and hip-hop, Crispin Sartwell examines the reach and claims of political aesthetics. Most analysts focus on politics as discursive systems, privileging text and reducing other forms of expression to the merely illustrative. He suggests that we need to take much more seriously the aesthetic environment of political thought and action.Sartwell argues that graphic style, music, and architecture are more than the propaganda arm of political systems; they are its constituents. A noted cultural critic, Sartwell brings together the disciplines of political science and political philosophy, philosophy of art and art history, in a new way, clarifying basic notions of aesthetics—beauty, sublimity, and representation—and applying them in a political context. A general argument about the fundamental importance of political aesthetics is interspersed with a group of stimulating case studies as disparate as Leni Riefenstahl's films and Black Nationalist aesthetics, the Dead Kennedys and Jeffersonian architecture.

Aesthetics Equals Politics

Aesthetics Equals Politics
Author: Mark Foster Gage
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2019-04-16
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0262351463

How aesthetics—understood as a more encompassing framework for human activity—might become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. These essays make the case for a reignited understanding of aesthetics—one that casts aesthetics not as illusory, subjective, or superficial, but as a more encompassing framework for human activity. Such an aesthetics, the contributors suggest, could become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. Departing from the “critical” stance of twentieth-century artists and theorists who embraced a counter-aesthetic framework for political engagement, this book documents how a broader understanding of aesthetics can offer insights into our relationships not only with objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and the political structures in which we are all enmeshed. The contributors—philosophers, media theorists, artists, curators, writers and architects including such notable figures as Jacques Rancière, Graham Harman, and Elaine Scarry—build a compelling framework for a new aesthetic discourse. The book opens with a conversation in which Rancière tells the volume's editor, Mark Foster Gage, that the aesthetic is “about the experience of a common world.” The essays following discuss such topics as the perception of reality; abstraction in ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics as the “first philosophy”; Afrofuturism; Xenofeminism; philosophical realism; the productive force of alienation; and the unbearable lightness of current creative discourse. Contributors Mark Foster Gage, Jacques Rancière, Elaine Scarry, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ferda Kolatan, Adam Fure, Michael Young, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Roger Rothman, Diann Bauer, Matt Shaw, Albena Yaneva, Brett Mommersteeg, Lydia Kallipoliti, Ariane Lourie Harrison, Rhett Russo, Peggy Deamer, Caroline Picard Matt Shaw, Managing Editor

Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière
Author: Gabriel Rockhill
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2009-08-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0822390930

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière has influenced disciplines from history and philosophy to political theory, literature, art history, and film studies. His research into nineteenth-century workers’ archives, reflections on political equality, critique of the traditional division between intellectual and manual labor, and analysis of the place of literature, film, and art in modern society have all constituted major contributions to contemporary thought. In this collection, leading scholars in the fields of philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism engage Rancière’s work, illuminating its originality, breadth, and rigor, as well as its place in current debates. They also explore the relationships between Rancière and the various authors and artists he has analyzed, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Flaubert, Rossellini, Auerbach, Bourdieu, and Deleuze. The contributors to this collection do not simply elucidate Rancière’s project; they also critically respond to it from their own perspectives. They consider the theorist’s engagement with the writing of history, with institutional and narrative constructions of time, and with the ways that individuals and communities can disturb or reconfigure what he has called the “distribution of the sensible.” They examine his unique conception of politics as the disruption of the established distribution of bodies and roles in the social order, and they elucidate his novel account of the relationship between aesthetics and politics by exploring his astute analyses of literature and the visual arts. In the collection’s final essay, Rancière addresses some of the questions raised by the other contributors and returns to his early work to provide a retrospective account of the fundamental stakes of his project. Contributors. Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Yves Citton, Tom Conley, Solange Guénoun, Peter Hallward, Todd May, Eric Méchoulan, Giuseppina Mecchia, Jean-Luc Nancy, Andrew Parker, Jacques Rancière, Gabriel Rockhill, Kristin Ross, James Swenson, Rajeshwari Vallury, Philip Watts

The Politics of Perception and the Aesthetics of Social Change

The Politics of Perception and the Aesthetics of Social Change
Author: Jason Miller
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 125
Release: 2021-08-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231554095

In both politics and art in recent decades, there has been a dramatic shift in emphasis on representation of identity. Liberal ideals of universality and individuality have given way to a concern with the visibility and recognition of underrepresented groups. Modernist and postmodernist celebrations of disruption and subversion have been challenged by the view that representation is integral to social change. Despite this convergence, neither political nor aesthetic theory has given much attention to the increasingly central role of art in debates and struggles over cultural identity in the public sphere. Connecting Hegelian aesthetics with contemporary cultural politics, Jason Miller argues that both the aesthetic and political value of art are found in the reflexive self-awareness that artistic representation enables. The significance of art in modern life is that it shows us both the particular element in humanity as well as the human element in particularity. Just as Hegel asks us to acknowledge how different historical and cultural contexts produce radically different experiences of art, identity-based art calls on its audiences to situate themselves in relation to perspectives and experiences potentially quite remote—or even inaccessible—from their own. Miller offers a timely response to questions such as: How does contemporary art’s politics of perception contest liberal notions of deliberative politics? How does the cultural identity of the artist relate to the representations of cultural identity in their work? How do we understand and evaluate identity-based art aesthetically? Discussing a wide range of works of art and popular culture—from Antigone to Do the Right Thing and The Wire—this book develops a new conceptual framework for understanding the representation of cultural identity that affirms art’s capacity to effect social change.