Aesthetics and Political Culture in Modern Society

Henrik Kaare Nielsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815356424
• eBook ISBN: 9781351123167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Do aesthetic appeals to senses and emotions in political debate necessarily marginalise political reason and reduce citizens to consumers – thus dangerously undermining democracy? Or is sensuous-emotional engagement, on the contrary, a basic fact of the political process and a crucial precondition for revitalising democracy?

Aesthetics and Political Culture in Modern Society investigates the current interrelationship between aesthetic practice and political practice in Western democracies, focusing on its impact on democratic political culture. Henrik Kaare Nielsen argues that aesthetic interventions in the political process do not by definition undermine politics' content of reason. Instead, a differentiation must be made between a multiplicity of aesthetic forms of intervention – some of which tend to weaken the political judgement of citizens while other forms tend to stimulate competent judgement.

This book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of political science, sociology, media studies, and cultural studies.

1Introduction

Basic Themes and Overview

This book aims to revitalise the discussion on democracy and political culture and to point out the democratic challenges and the prospects of the present situation of Western democracies. The aim is to throw new light on the complexity and the importance of society’s public interactions and specifically to analyse and estimate the potentials and risks for democracy represented by aesthetic interventions in the political public sphere.

It is a core principle of Western democracy that political decisions at any time should be able to be legitimised in relation to the ongoing public opinion formation that emerges from communicative struggles and dialogic exchange among free, autonomous citizens. And correspondingly, for the ordinary citizen, engagement in public debate on common concerns of society represents the legitimate way of influencing political decision-making. This principle holds a central position in modern political philosophy, and it has been implemented widely as the normative foundation of the institutions of democratic nation-states.

This core principle has been facing challenges in recent years that stem from a variety of changing conditions for the political process. Also in well-established democratic societies, the legitimacy of the political system appears to be unstable. Conditions of political practice in which wide-reaching decisions are presented as being ‘without any alternative’ and in which public political communication has been conquered by spin and strategic positioning, seem to discourage citizen participation. This disengagement and the accompanying erosion of institutional legitimacy occasionally result in anti-democratic, populist currents.

Extensive research in both the social sciences and the humanities has identified a variety of developmental tendencies that represent major changes in the conditions for establishing democratic legitimacy: the development of new media technologies is transforming the terms of social interaction both in everyday life and in the interrelationship between citizens and professional politicians; similarly, globalisation is transforming the political process: today, a multiplicity of economic, technological and politico-administrative relations transgress the boundaries of the nation-state; consequently, the associated decision-making is taking place beyond the classic, nationally defined public sphere, and a transnational public sphere able to match these developments has not yet been established; in this process, the nation-state’s traditional, relatively homogeneous cultural frames of reference are being challenged by the increasing cultural complexity stemming from migration and transnational media contents.

As further democratic problems, research has pointed to unequal opportunities of participation on the basis of gender, class, and minority status; increased occurrence of non-democratic political movements; tendencies towards technocratisation of state policy-making and the growing importance of non-public forums of decision-making (governance networks, expert systems); the professionalisation of party politics and the simultaneous increased commercialisation of the media public and tendencies towards addressing the public as self-centred consumers rather than universally committed citizens; to the latter process belongs a slide in public exchange from reflective dialogue to attempting to obtain political power by way of fascinating the public and appealing to emotions. Under these conditions, so the predominant diagnosis, democratic legitimacy suffers, and civic engagement appears to be at risk.

The present analysis focuses on one of these contemporary tendencies that seem to challenge the dialogical nature of public interaction, namely, the tendency towards aestheticisation. The analysis investigates the relationship between political and aesthetic practice as it presently unfolds in public life in well-established Western democracies. To be sure, the focus of interest is neither aesthetics in the narrow art sense of the term nor the question of ‘politicising art’, but on the contrary, the role that aesthetic practice – in the broader sense of appeals to senses and emotions – plays in the democratic political process.

We have a long tradition of critical analysis of this issue: from Walter Benjamin via Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, Zygmunt Bauman and Jean Baudrillard to Richard Sennett and Benjamin Barber – just to mention a few prominent examples. A common feature of these critical diagnoses of the general state of modern politics is that form increasingly tends to replace substance, that staging overshadows political content, that emotions are addressed instead of reason, and that citizens in this process are being reduced to a state of stupidity and degraded to consumers.

The present argument stands on the shoulders of this critical tradition, but theoretically and analytically it attempts to dig deeper, move beyond dichotomous thinking in either–or terms, and develop a more nuanced understanding of the contemporary interrelationship between political and aesthetic practice, including the risks as well as positive potentials and developmental possibilities that this relationship may presently entail. In other words, the unequivocal diagnoses of decay will be challenged – not in the form of denying problems, but by developing a theoretical and analytical approach that does not regard emotions and reason as mutually excluding entities.

The investigation will be based on analyses of selected, marked tendencies in contemporary political communication as they manifest themselves in the media’s representation of politics, in political agents’ own communicative approaches, in citizens’ public participation in the media and in urban space, and in artistic interventions in politics. A central focal point will be whether a given aesthetic appeal contributes to undermining or to supporting the potential of reason in public debate and political practice – and to discuss on which premises the aesthetic appeal in question is liable to have either problematic or constructive effects on the debate.

If we initially, on the basis of common sense, understand politics as a question of organising societal power, and aesthetics as a question of form and expression, the matter appears quite uncontroversial: like any other kind of social practice, political power must necessarily assume a form, express itself, in order to become a societal reality. In other words, in this overall sense aesthetic designing is a condition of political practice in general, and the interesting question is therefore not whether we are dealing with an intentionally shaped expression (we always are), but, on the contrary, which specific forms are at stake, which weight and status the concrete practice ascribes to expression in proportion to political content, which type of dialogue the recipient of a political approach is invited to engage in, which socio-cultural and historical experiences are forming the context, and which implications the given staging of political practice may have in the context in question.

In the following chapters, a theoretical frame of reference will be outlined for the analysis of contemporary developmental tendencies in the interrelationship between political and aesthetic practice. This Introduction gives an overview of what will follow. After that, some basic themes of the book will briefly be elaborated in a historical perspective. Significant historical examples of traditions and developments in the aesthetic staging of political power – both in artworks and in the self-presentation of power holders – will serve as illustrations of the complex ways in which aesthetic forms are interwoven with and play a role in their specific historical contexts. Finally, the basic theoretical and methodological frame of reference of the book will be outlined.

Chapter 2, ‘Politics and Democracy’, proposes a conceptual framework for understanding the democratic political process that integrates the perspectives of conflict and consensus, leading to a complex conceptualisation of political culture. Further, the tradition of deliberative democracy is characterised as a congenial position, and in a critical discussion of previous debates on the public sphere, an alternative conceptual distinction between public discourse (in various modalities) and public space is suggested. Finally, late modern identity work is analysed as a complex resource for public interaction and politicisation.

Chapter 3, ‘Public Space and Late Modern Forms of Public Practice’, takes its point of departure in an understanding of public space as an open arena in which a variety of conflictual interactions continuously take place, and it suggests an overall distinction between the different types of publics that engage in these interactions. The chapter further characterises basic contemporary conditions of practice in public space such as neoliberal technocratisation and an overall process of aestheticisation, and it outlines specific conditions of physical, medial and virtual spaces of practice, including social media.

Chapter 4, ‘Political and Aesthetic Discursive Practice’, integrates elements of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics and the work of a number of contemporary aesthetic theorists and suggests basic definitions of aesthetic discourse and aesthetic experience. Further, conceptualising modern society as a discursively differentiated entity characterised by conflictual interplay of discourses, it theoretically elaborates differences and compatibilities between aesthetic and political discourse. It introduces the concept political judgement as a composed entity and discusses the potentials and limitations of aesthetic experience in relation to the democratic political process.

Chapter 5, ‘Power-Oriented Aesthetic Interventions in Politics’, analyses, on the basis of the developed theoretical framework, a variety of examples of aesthetic interventions in politics with a special focus on the type of public termed ‘the public of parliament-oriented mass media’. The analysis distinguishes between interventions at the concrete artefact level and atmospheric interventions concerning the creation of general moods. Finally, the chapter discusses the possible consequences of this type of aestheticisation in regard to democratic political culture.

Chapter 6, then, is entitled ‘Artistic Interventions in the Field of Political Practice’. Whereas the types of aesthetic interventions in politics that are analysed in Chapter 5 are power-oriented by nature, this chapter deals with interventions that do not relate directly to concrete conflicts and power issues, but intervene in the established formations of meaning in more subtle, artistic ways. A variety of contemporary examples are analysed – again with a distinction between an artefact level and an atmospheric level. The examples have been selected on the basis of their respective potentials for generating critical public discourse by way of indeterminate aesthetic intervention in political issues. The examples do not claim to exhaust the field of such interventions, but they cover a broad variety of genres and types of approaches, and each of them has by way of its specific aesthetic characteristics gained considerable public attention and provoked debate.

Chapter 7, ‘Current Developmental Perspectives of Public Discourse’, concludes the analyses and discusses the situation of contemporary Western democracy in regard to civic engagement, the scope for public discourse, and the prospects of political culture. Based on the analyses of the previous chapters, it is argued that reflectively processed sensuous-emotional engagement is the foundation of the political in a genuinely democratic sense of the term – and that non-power-oriented, artistic interventions in political practice hold a significant potential to initiate this reflective processing.

Artistic Representation of Political Power

The following two sections will very briefly characterise some significant continuities and changes in the interrelationship between aesthetic and political practice in the West over the past two centuries.

One traditional type of aesthetic staging of political matters occurs in artworks’ reflection and processing of contemporary issues. The following three examples (Figures 1.1–1.3) were all created in the 1800s and represent significant artistic interpretations of the period’s broad democratic rising in Europe, but the respective national contexts of experience are reflected in the shape of quite different aesthetic adaptations of the issue of political power.

Eugène Delacroix pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Politics and Democracy
• 3 Public Space and Late Modern Forms of Public Practice
• 4 Political and Aesthetic Discursive Practice
• 5 Power-Oriented Aesthetic Interventions in Politics
• 6 Artistic Interventions in the Field of Political Practice
• 7 Current Developmental Perspectives of Public Discourse
• Index