Aesthetics and Politics: The Book and the Topic
This book is about what happens when aesthetics meet politics . It is about how cultural policy aims to let art influence society and its citizens. Aesthetics and politics meet whenever cultural policy gives art any form of agency . Such agency is given to art when it is supposed to fulfil other functions and represent other kinds of value than its intrinsic value —in other words, when art is promoted for the sake of something and not for art’s sake. This book is on how art in general and music in particular is given different forms of agency in cultural policy. We will show how music and arts is considered to be a building block and a Bildung block. It is comprehended as a building block in the sense that it is considered a foundation upon which cultural citizenship and cultural democracy might be built, or, in the words of the Merriam-Webster definition of building block: “something essential on which a larger entity is based.” It is, to use a neologism, also considered a Bildung block, using the German term for cultivation or self-cultivation, education and formation. Music is valued as a Bildung block in several of the cases described in this book, because it can serve as a cause of personal development, helping listeners and practitioners in becoming better versions of themselves.
We use the German word Bildung since the concept has no close equivalent in English and is more well known than its close equivalents in the Scandinavian languages, like dannelse in Norwegian and bildning in Swedish. As regards the content, these Scandinavian concepts are virtually identical to the German Bildung, due foremost to the fact that the Scandinavian conception of Bildung has originated and developed in close relationship with its origin and development in Germany.
In the book, we pose the overall question: How does culture policy negotiate between aesthetics and politics?
The book analyses different relations between aesthetics and politics , highlighted through public measures to ensure a social impact of the arts. Aesthetics denotes processes of ascribing artistic value and beauty to certain objects, while politics denotes processes of governing or influencing the development of a society. The relations between these processes are studied through empirical analyses of attempts to give arts and music developmental agency: through the democratization of culture, through pedagogical work, through music policy in general and through the use of culture in foreign policy. The cases represent separate instances of aesthetics meeting politics. As is evident from the subtitle of the book the analyses that follow are based on a Nordic perspective, both in terms of a Nordic cultural policy model and the cases represented. All the case studies in the book display different aspects of Norwegian cultural policy, but two of the cases consist of comparative studies to similar phenomena in the cultural policy of Sweden and Britain. The Nordic cultural policy model stands out as quite unique and with a flavour of avant-garde in a European as well as global context, not least due to its particular way of mixing welfare and cultural politics. This makes it essential to and significant for discussions and analyses of cultural policy in general. Hence, it is our conviction that both the general analyses and the case studies represented in this book are of general as well as specific value.
The following chapters all concentrate upon the relations between aesthetical valuation, perceived political relevance and social/societal impact. A majority of the chapters relate explicitly to the field of music, for several reasons: on the one hand, music is arguably the most prevalent and widely dispersed kind of artistic expression, for example being extensively available through digitized media. On the other hand, it also represents an area for cultural policy with large ambitions on both the participating and consuming side—focusing upon both learning how to play and learning how to listen.
A pivotal concept for this book is cultural policy, both in the explicit and in the implicit sense of the word (cf. Ahearne 2009; Throsby 2009). Cultural policy is in essence attempts to let culture in the narrow sense (cultural expression/the arts) influence culture in the broad (anthropological) sense; forming, changing or challenging the sphere within which various groups and individuals think, communicate and act. The belief in a social impact of the arts has a long intellectual history, as described by, for example, Belfiore and Bennett (2008), and such a belief lies at the core of most European varieties of cultural policy. In the UK in particular, the positive social impacts of the arts (more narrowly defined) became one of the hallmarks of New Labour’s cultural policy in the 1990s (Belfiore 2002). France has seen similar developments (Looseley 2005), while in Norway the idea has often been framed within an inclusion and access context, evident, for example, in the 2012 white paper on culture, inclusion and participation (Ministry of Culture 2012). We are interested in the way the belief in the power of arts is transformed to different kinds of political practice, and how this practice systematically combines the question of aesthetic valuation on the one hand with the question of effect and impact on the other. We understand this to be a form of translation and/or transformation of values—from aesthetic value (cf. Fenner 2008) to political, economic or democratic value. This book analyses this process of translating/transforming values as it unfolds in concrete versions of cultural policy.
The relation between art and society, and between aesthetics and politics, is a topic belonging to several lines of research: aesthetics and aesthetic theory , art(s) history, cultural sociology, cultural studies and cultural policy studies , etc. These lines of research differ substantially in the way they construct their analytical object: as either the material art object, as the objects’ relations to individual experience, as the art object’s historical context, as the system that creates “taste” and “art” itself and as the oppositional/positional use of art. Accordingly, the actual politics of the art has been read as both autonomous and heteronomous, intrinsic and extrinsic to different works of art. A cultural studies-oriented approach will analyse the political/oppositional role of (popular) music , while either a Bourdieu-inspired or an Adorno/Marxist-inspired analysis would emphasize the political and social systems’ determinative influence on aesthetic practice.
The relationship between aesthetics and politics also lie at the core of a number of seminal works on aesthetic theory, from thinkers like Hegel, Adorno and Gadamer. The works of philosophical aesthetics constitute to a certain degree their own subject matter, and important works have often been born as critical responses to established works of aesthetics. Adorno’s work can be read as a response to Hegel and Kant’s aesthetics, combined with Marx’s notions of art’s embeddedness in society. Bourdieu’s sociology of aesthetics is an explicit critical answer to Kant’s Critique of the Judgement of Taste. A more recent aesthetic theorist like Jacques Ranciére has formulated his ideas together with a sharp criticism of Bourdieu’s work. Ranciére’s theory is an example of influential new ideas on the combination of aesthetics and politics, merging a Kantian concept of aesthetics with a concept of the political that stresses the role of the senses (cf. e.g. Ranciére 2004; Bale 2008). In recent years, there has also been a call for a revised conceptual version and expanded use of aesthetics. Ranciére, Böhme and others have represented a form of sensory turn, focusing upon the original subject matter of the acknowledged founding father of aesthetics, Alexander Baumgarten, namely a theory of the senses (cf. e.g. Böhme 2010).
Furthermore, the concept and topic of aesthetics is multivalent enough to play a role in separate academic traditions. In cultural studies, the role of both aesthetics and policy has been a topic of debate. Cultural studies have been criticized for neglecting the aesthetical element, and several voices have called for an aesthetical turn within this school of research (cf. Street 2000; Suhr 2009). In addition to this, other critics have asked for the inclusion of institutional and policy perspectives in cultural studies, to be able to place the aesthetic expression and experience in an analytically proper context (e.g. Bennett 1992; 1998).
The role of aesthetics within cultural sociology has especially been related to Bourdieu’s work on this topic. Several of Bourdieu’s studies on the arts (e.g. 1993; 1995) represented an attempt to escape a traditionalist, Kantian aesthetics, and replace it with an aesthetic rooted in social practice. Bourdieu has been criticized for not distancing himself far enough from a bourgeois aesthetic (Bennett 2007), for not including a broad enough concept of aesthetic experience (Bennett 2011) and for not retaining the relevant Kantian concepts (Ranciére 2004). In other words, critics have focused upon the importance of letting aesthetics play a role without locking this to a more or less determinative system theory, as well as upon the lacking openness for alternative aesthetic practices.
Cultural policy studies represent an interdisciplinary strand of research that this book has an ambition both to relate to and to try to expand methodologically. This research tradition consists of perspectives from cultural sociology, cultural studies, social economy, political science, as well as perspectives from humanistic studies like history, history of ideas and religion (cf. Lewis and Miller 2003; Scullion and Garcia 2005; Frenander 2008; Mangset 2010; Mangset and Hylland 2017). The aesthetic perspectives in these studies have varied accordingly. More often than not, such studies have dealt with these perspectives in an implicit fashion. This means that an explication of what aesthetics—what rules of art and beauty—cultural policy measures imply often has been lacking.
A study of cultural policy and arts’ perceived relevance to politics and society should be rooted in a history of both continuity and discontinuity. Firstly, there is a long historical continuity in the trust in the transformative powers of aesthetic expressions, affecting both the individual citizen and, conversely, society (cf. Belfiore and Bennett 2008). Among a range of ideas of development, the Enlightenment era also recognized the common man as playing a part in the formation of either a geographically finite nation and/or a financially sound state (cf. e.g. Burke 1978; Bauman 1987; Porter 1990; Belfiore and Bennett 2008; pp. 127ff.). For citizens to be able to serve as agents for development and progress, the clergy, the political and the intellectual elite sought to influence people through education, enlightenment, arts and entertainment. In essence, this consists of different attempts to create and/or influence the linguistic, mediated, technological or—cultural—environment of the citizens....