Aesthetics and Politics in an "Age of Populism"

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

What might a new consideration of aesthetics bring to a political era which some have called an “Age of Populism” (Krastev, 2007)? On the one hand, further study of aesthetics may appear an untimely move during a period in which fascism is on the rise. As Walter Benjamin wrote in 1939, “The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life … All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in … war.” Moreover, the commonly-cited link between aesthetics and unregulated affect would seem to give more reason for caution. Political uses of art have often spurred rage toward political outsiders and minorities as much as toward social elites.

Yet in the past several decades, new work has highlighted the productive role aesthetics can play in further democratizing political theory and practice. Some have emphasized how certain aesthetic approaches create new possibilities for political judgment (Zerilli, 2016; Ferguson, 2007), while others have focused on the transformative power of aesthetic acts, particularly as they have been carried out by social movements (Panagia, 2018). For this set of theorists, political aesthetics offers a means of responding to, or rethinking, recent political conflict in a more responsive, participatory and egalitarian way.

This panel enters into the wide-ranging debate about political aesthetics and offers new avenues for extending and challenging the directions of recent discussion. Stephen Bush’s paper focuses on the function of beauty in fostering democratic attachment. Through an examination of Frantz Fanon’s and Alia Al-Saji’s discussions of race and visibility, he explores how appealing to beauty can avoid eliciting anti-democratic attitudes toward “otherness.” Michelle Rose’s paper assesses the potential role for aesthetics in rethinking interracial relations in America. Focusing specifically on a debate between Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois, she shows how Locke’s separation of moral and aesthetic valuation fueled his view that art has the power to enhance democracy. Patrick Giamario’s paper considers the relationship between a specific aesthetic experience—laughter—and contemporary sex and gender politics. Through an analysis of Freud’s The Joke and its Relation to the Unconcsious and Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix special Nanette, he contends that laughter should be examined not only for its emancipatory potential (as prominent feminist theorists like Hélène Cixous and Judith Butler suggest), but also for the way it functions to entrench patriarchal and heteronormative social norms. Lisa Gilson’s paper explores how political aesthetics work (and fail to work) to reach new audiences. Bringing together Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s and Walt Whitman’s writings, the May ’68 protests, and the contemporary American far right’s media campaigns, she argues that audiences’ pre-existing aesthetic biases play a far greater role in determining the transformative effect of innovative aesthetics than is often acknowledged.

Considered together, the papers in this panel attempt to grapple with the negative effects and the limits of political aesthetics. At the same time, they each affirm the importance of “thinking aesthetically” to understand the current political moment(s).

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• The Best Medicine? Re-politicizing Laughter for Feminist and Queer Politics - Patrick Giamario, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

• The Beauty of the Citizenry: Attachments, Democratic and Non- - Stephen Bush, Brown University

• Aesthetics and Persuasion: The Prospects and Limits of Subversive Art - Lisa Gilson, Harvard University

• Alain Locke's Aesthetic Valuation and Racial Relations in America - Michelle Rose, Brown University

Chair

• Nina Valiquette Moreau University of Chicago

Discussant

• Davide Panagia UCLA