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Democratic Aesthetics

Jon Simons

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Culture, Theory & Critique, 2009, 50(1), 1–5

Introduction: Democratic Aesthetics

Jon Simons
simonsj@indiana.edu
1473-5784
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10.1080/14735780802689638
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Francis JonSimons
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Walter Benjamin famously drew a definitive connection between the aestheti-

cisation of politics and politics in its paradigmatically right-wing form,
fascism and militarism. ‘The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of
political life … All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That
one point is war … Communism replies by politicizing art’ (Benjamin 2003:
269–70). Since then, any aestheticisation of politics has been regarded gener-
ally as inimical to democracy. Martin Jay (1992: 42) claims that following
Benjamin ‘the connection between the “aestheticization of politics” and
fascism has become … a commonplace’ that has its own ‘affective power’. The
very notion of democratic aesthetics might thus seem almost oxymoronic, if it
is taken to mean rendering politics aesthetic. Typically, critics attribute an
immense power to forms of politics that are said to emphasise style rather
than substance, play to the emotions rather than rely on reason, and follow
the formulae of the commercialised mass media rather than the logic of a crit-
ical public sphere. Aestheticised politics are said to be able to deceive people
into accepting manufactured needs as real needs, simplifications as full
pictures, and illusions as reality. Aestheticised politics, in short, are irrational.
Yet, if Benjamin’s association of aestheticised politics with fascism is
considered the grounds for dismissing any notion of democratic aesthetics,
those grounds are not as solid as a first encounter with his ‘sound-bite’ might
suggest. For Benjamin, aestheticised politics were not synonymous with
fascism. According to the structure of his argument it is only ‘the aestheticiz-
ing of politics, as practiced by fascism’ that culminates in war, so that logi-
cally room is left for other practices of aestheticised politics. In that case, the
‘politicizing [of] art’ by communism in response to fascism could be one of
those practices (Benjamin 2003: 269–70). ‘Benjamin failed to recognize’,
Richard Wolin (1982: 184) writes, ‘that in practice an aestheticized politics and
a politicized art are, at least formally speaking, equivalents’. This might be
taken to mean that anti-democratic aestheticisations of politics tend to look
quite similar, as illustrated by the 1995 exhibition ‘Art and Power: Europe
under the Dictators 1930–1945’ at the Hayward Gallery in London. Or it
might mean that even though fascist aesthetics tend to the eroticisation of
politics (Sontag 1975) and communist aesthetics tend to be didactic, as in
Bertolt Brecht’s theatre or socialist realism, they both aestheticise politics.
Whatever the case, not all aestheticisations of politics are fascist.
The question thus arises of whether there are or might be forms of
aestheticised politics that are democratic rather than fascist or totalitarian.
The answer to the question must surely depend on the sense in which the

Culture, Theory & Critique

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DOI: 10.1080/14735780802689638
2 Jon Simons

term ‘aesthetic’ is being used. There are many different notions of aesthetics,
ranging from a philosophical discourse about art (often understood in terms
of distinct cultural practices, objects, experiences, perceptions and judgments)
as well as certain non-art objects that can be appreciated aesthetically, to its
original broader sense of the study of sensory, bodily aspects of cognitive
interactions with the world (Baumgarten 1961). Benjamin focused on certain
aesthetic concepts, those of the German Idealist aesthetic tradition, when
characterising the fascist aestheticising of politics, in particular by considering
it as the apogee of l’art pout l’art or aesthetic autonomy. At the same time, he
sought to both ‘neutralize’ those ‘traditional concepts’ of aesthetics that
served fascism and to replace them with aesthetic concepts that would be
‘useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands’ (Benjamin 2003: 252).
Although one might question whether Benjamin’s commitment to commu-
nism included democracy, others have recognised that a conceptualisation of
democratic aesthetics also requires a reconsideration of aesthetics.
Wolfgang Welsch cuts a path towards democratically aestheticised
politics by attempting to clarify the various meanings of aesthetics, for which
he lists some seventeen different yet often overlapping semantic terms. His
particular bug-bear is the ‘aesthetic-theoretical provincialism’ that ‘links the
concept of the aesthetic exclusively to the province of art’ (Welsch 1997:18).
But the purpose of his clarification is to identify the elements of a traditional
aesthetics, akin to the Idealist aesthetics criticised by Benjamin, whose key
imperative is the elevation of aesthetic experience or perception above ordi-
nary sensation. Welsch argues that traditional aesthetics’ ‘anti-sensible abso-
lutism’ and ‘war against matter’ ‘must change if aesthetics is really to become
an aesthetics one day’ (66–67). Welsch’s preferred meaning of aesthetics is
sensitivity, an aesthetic and also ethical attitude to the heterogeneity of the
material with which it works. Welsch derives his principle of justice to hetero-
geneity from Theodor Adorno’s (1997) aesthetic theory, but his formulation is
also similar to Jean-François Lyotard’s (1988) postmodern aesthetics and
ethics of the sublime, accessed through the notion of the differend, which
cannot be represented or subsumed under a rule of judgment. Along similar
lines to Welsch’s concern for the materiality of difference, Isobel Armstrong
(2000: 2–3) argues that a ‘democratic aesthetic’, which would also be a femi-
nist aesthetic, would be built from components embedded in processes and
practices of ordinary life that are ‘common to what the early Marx called
species being’.
Yet, not every conception of democratic aesthetics eschews Idealist
aesthetics. When Jay claims that ‘not every variant of the aestheticization of
politics must lead to the same dismal end’ he upends the identification of
aesthetics ‘with irrationality, illusion, fantasy, myth, sensual seduction, the
imposition of will, and inhumane indifference to ethical, religious, or cogni-
tive considerations’ (Jay 1992: 56, 45). He interrupts the lineage leading to
fascism by referring to Joseph Chytry (1989), for whom the Idealist aesthetic
tradition is an effort to recover ‘the myth of an aesthetic Hellenic polis’, while
Schiller’s sensitivity to heterogeneity pits him against the totalising political
artistry of fascism. Chytry thus shows the way to ‘the more benign implica-
tions of aestheticizing politics’ (Jay 1992: 50–51). In a different vein, the
distancing associated with elevated aesthetics, the proper objects of which for
 Introduction: Democratic Aesthetics 3

Kant are representations, leads F. R. Ankersmit (1996) to advocate a form of

aesthetic democratic politics in which the gap between the represented and
the representation legitimates political power. The distance in aesthetic
perception between artistic representations and that which they represent is
for Ankersmit a valuable model for political practice in representative
democracies, allowing the state to operate at a distance from the electorate.
When a range of meanings of aesthetics are considered, both liberal and radi-
cal democratic conceptions of aestheticised politics come into view (Simons
2008).
Overall, then, democratic aesthetics need not be conceived as an aestheti-
cised politics, thereby sidestepping the association with fascism. Jay finds his
main yet elusive source of ‘benign implications’ of aesthetic politics in rela-
tion to aesthetic judgment. The key source here is Kant (1987), whose aesthetic
judgment Jay says ‘judges particulars without presupposing universal rules’
and thus ‘implies a communicative model of rationality’ (Jay 1992: 52). For
Kant the result of aesthetic judgment that begins subjectively is a sense of
community, the basis for a reasoning democratic public, which as Jay notes
feeds into the political theories of both Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas.
Arendt (1992) regards judgment guided by the imaginative consideration of
others as the basis for producing ‘a kind of intersubjective impartiality’ and
for building ‘a sensus communis’ in which the general and particular can be
mediated (Jay 1992: 55). Arendt’s notion of politics is aesthetic, both in the
sense that appearance in the public sphere is theatrical and in the sense that
the very constitution of the public space depends on an appeal to shared
common sense that is analogous to Kant’s aesthetic judgment of beauty. Kant
also argues that aesthetic judgment, which is not governed by agreeable
sensation or personal interest, makes shared, impartial, universal judgments
of taste possible, which can also be seen as a model for the setting aside of
individual interests in the public sphere. Cultivated taste engenders the atti-
tudes needed for cultivated discussion in deliberative democracy, according
to an aesthetic politics that suits liberal democracy’s self-understanding as
universalist and consensus oriented. Building on and further developing
Kantian and Arendtian notions of aesthetic judgment, Kennan Ferguson
(1999) suggests that modern political identities depend on and are formed by
aesthetic judgment, entailing an aesthetic understanding of the relationship
between individuals and larger communities.
Given the centrality of aesthetic judgment to democratic theory, it is not
surprising that four of the articles included in this special issue follow that
route in developing a democratic aesthetics. Jeremy Arnold works through
both Kant and Arendt to arrive at an affirmative politics of laughter that is
cultivated in reflective judgments on the pleasurable, affective response to
experiences that defy our expectations of the world. Arendt’s writing on
aesthetic judgment is also a resource for Sharon Sliwinski, who argues that
aesthetic judgment is crucial to the discourse of human rights. Pictorial or
other representations of the suffering of others enable the vital judgment of
them as human, as deserving rights. Although she refers to Arendt only in
passing, Susan Sci draws on a similar tradition in developing a notion of
aesthetic negotiation in respect of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic negotiation
is a form of embodied reasoning and critical reflection, combining affective
4 Jon Simons

and cognitive responses to memorial sites that contain or enact arguments

about civic responsibility. Chris Kamrath’s essay also suggests that communi-
ties of aesthetic judgment may be the only remaining space for dissent and
resistance when the democratic public sphere is closed to them in a time of
war. There is an echo in his essay of Habermas’ (1989) influential argument
that the liberal democratic public sphere was born in eighteenth century
communities of aesthetic judgment, the publics of coffee houses and salons
who debated critically about culture and then government.
An aesthetic community may be built not around judgment but aesthetic,
artistic or cultural practices. In his essay Colin Wright argues that a cultural
movement can embody radical democracy itself, not so much as a politicisa-
tion of art but as a combination of culture and politics. There are indeed multi-
ple ways and directions in which ‘democratic aesthetics’ can be conceived, few
of which could be represented in the space of this special issue. Individual or
whole bodies of works of art, as well as genres, can be considered to be demo-
cratic in form or style, if they embody democratic values such as pluralism,
individuality, or dissent. An example would be Walt Whitman’s poetic
description of the people as a sublimely poetic, world-making power (Frank
2007). Or politicians may perform according to styles or rhetorical strategies
that may be considered democratic, especially when political actors present
themselves according to the modes of popular culture (Hariman 1995; Pels
2003). Following from the last point, democratic aesthetics might also refer to
the democratisation of aesthetics, recognising aesthetic activity in everyday
life, as in Paul Willis’ (1978) grounded aesthetics, or Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984)
popular aesthetics. This in turn brings us back to Benjamin (2003), whose thesis
about the technological reproducibility of art by modern media, as well as the
subsequent decay of the artwork’s aura, amount to a claim for the democrati-
sation of art. In sum, this special issue does not so much encapsulate the range
of scholarship on democratic aesthetics as explore some of its most productive
and engaging aspects. It adds to the existing scholarship a valuable and varied
set of examples of democratic aesthetics.

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