Varieties of Aesthetic Politics Panel

8th ECPR General Conference 2014

Glasgow, 3-6 September 2014

Panel Proposal

 "Varieties of Aesthetic Politics"

(Section: Political Theory)

Chairs:

Giuseppe Ballacci (CEHUM, University of Minho) & M.F.N. Giglioli (SciencesPo)

The positing of a link between aesthetics and politics is a recurrent idea in Western intellectual history, but its various instantiations have not been compared in a broad and systematic debate. In the past, aesthetic politics has for instance been conceived of as a type of political action that morphs into an art form, hence as politics transformed into performance, to be read (and valued) aesthetically, as a text. Other thinkers have theorized aesthetic politics under the guise of aesthetic judgment, to be employed analogically in order to understand political judgment. In a further formulation, the way in which we comprehend artistic representation has been thought to influence political representation. At a more basic level, ‘aesthetic’ has also been used to signify the realm of the sensory, as opposed to the ideal, so that aesthetic politics is seen to concern itself with the materiality of human experience, against utopia. Finally, the notions of style and taste have been considered fundamental in the development of collective preferences and the formation of empathy and enmity groups, and thus for the understanding of the politics of the spectacular. What do all these ways of thinking about aesthetic politics have in common? Are they compatible? Are they bound by the type of political phenomena in whose context they arose, or do they have broader interpretive validity? This panel intends to confront questions such as these. The methodological approach will be broadly pluralist, tackling aesthetic politics analytically, through development of reflection in the history of political thought, and/or by considering specifically relevant case studies. Particular interest will be focused on the seeming commonality between different varieties of aesthetic politics in representing themselves as an alternative to rational, means-ends utilitarian politics.