Political Aesthetics Research Articles

The visual construction of the people’s country and the Chinese nation: political aesthetics in the Ethno-documentaries of New China

This paper discusses the political positioning of the people and the cultural image of the Chinese nation through the lens of the Social-historical Scientific Documentary Films of China’s ethnic minorities (hereafter referred to as “the Ethno-documentaries”) by restoring the problem to the site of the investigation of humanities and social sciences and the General Surveys on (Folk) Arts in the early years of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. Through detailed analysis of specific Ethno-documentary films, this paper explores how the social sciences conducted its “Social and Historical Investigation of China’s Ethnic Minorities” via the medium of film to convey the advanced social concepts and ideological work of the new regime through the historical narrative of art and politics. This study highlights three key points. First, the “Chinese nation” as a modern political concept dates its origins back to the 1920s with the emergence of the “National Heritage Reorganization Movement” and the “Doubting Antiquity School.” However, it was only through the medium of the Ethno-documentaries that this concept was visually and aurally represented in films for the first time, which draws our attention to the fact that the entry point for understanding modern China lies in discerning the relationship between culture and politics. Second, when discussing the relationship between culture and politics, this study juxtaposes the Ethno-documentaries and “art for workers-peasants-soldiers,” which developed during the same period. These two forms of art focus respectively on national history and the suffering of the lower classes of society, and it is this intertextual nature of the historical narrative that jointly anchors the cultural and historical view of New China. Lastly, historical view is the core of the humanities, social sciences, and art disciplines in New China. Previous studies have mainly attributed certain phenomena to the “politicization” or “pan-politicization” of a particular historical period due to disciplinary barriers and cultural trauma and have stopped discussing such topics in depth. In contrast, the significance of the political aesthetics in the Ethno-documentaries is to have transformed classical Chinese artistic language into a modern one to represent the Chinese people and the Chinese nation. It also raises a question of re-sinicization of many modern political issues that have persisted until now: How do today’s Chinese art works vividly depict the prosperity of this country and its hardworking and courageous people?

The Case of the DOXA Four: A Year in the School of Political Prisoners

AbstractThis paper explores media strategies used by the four former editors of the Russian independent student‐run journal DOXA during their year of pre‐trial domestic confinement between April 2021 and April 2022. This high‐profile case ended only two months after the beginning of Russia’s full‐scale war in Ukraine and the intensification of repressions against the internal political opposition. It also concludes a decade‐long phase in the conflict between the Russian state and its increasingly politicized youth. By maintaining a public presence during their house arrest despite the official prohibition, the DOXA Four entered into a media competition with police: Both groups were trying to reach an audience of Russian youth and shape the public image of oppositional students. While the state strove to intimidate, infantilize, and isolate the young people, the DOXA editors promoted collectivist forms of feeling and imagination to encourage political mobilization. In doing so, they aimed to break with the prevailing culture of ironic aestheticization of state violence and to re‐articulate political aesthetics for its generation.

‘Nostalgia for the sacred’: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem

As a pervasive term in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work, ‘nostalgia’ remains theoretically enigmatic and often politically contradictory. This article argues for the critical potential of nostalgia in Pasolini’s political aesthetics through a seemingly unlikely subject: his 1968 film and novel Teorema (Theorem). Set in post-war Milan, Theorem depicts the transformative encounter between a godlike visitor and five archetypes of the bourgeois household. After he leaves, they must reckon with his departure. I suggest that Pasolini’s formal and theoretical interest in nostalgia is crucial to understanding Theorem’s aesthetic invocation of the sacred, which the film stages through an interplay of presence and absence in bodies, spaces and temporalities. Unpacking the etymological roots algos (‘pain’) and nostos (‘return’), my reading forges intertextual connections within Pasolini’s oeuvre while also suggesting that Pasolini’s oblique, materially rooted nostalgia encourages a re-evaluation of the critical productivity of this term more broadly.

Tunnels of power: The cultural politics of the Beijing subway

Abstract This article investigates the cultural politics of the Beijing subway. Drawing on diverse sources, we trace the evolution of the subway over the last half-century to reveal that it transcends its fluctuating, time-specific practicalities to serve as a potent conduit through which the Chinese state consistently shapes subjecthood. The article begins with the subway’s Cold War inception as a military enterprise, spotlighting its deliberate concealment to safeguard the echelons of power and obscure both international and domestic tensions. The second section delves into the subway’s rebirth in the wake of China’s opening-up reform and rapid economic rise, as it transforms into a mobile gallery of political aesthetics that extols China’s cultural heritage and triumphs, cultivating national pride under siege from unleashed market and social forces. The final section dissects the subway’s orchestration of undesirable passengers, sculpting a socioeconomic hierarchy in the city’s commuting system. As a multifaceted prism, the Beijing subway encapsulates a range of covert and overt, pragmatic and aesthetic, and inclusive and exclusive elements in the cultural politics of Chinese infrastructure at large; and it illustrates the sustained centrality of state power in shaping individual subjectivities and defining the cultural and representational significance of Chinese infrastructure, albeit amid growing contestation.

Remaking urban village through culture: the politics of urban aesthetics in Shenzhen, China

ABSTRACT This paper delves into the evolving governance dynamics of urban villages in China through a case study of the heritage-rich Nantou urban village in Shenzhen. Drawing on the Rancierian politics of aesthetics, the study examines the government’s repositioning of urban villages as cultural and aesthetic assets. The research highlights the state’s emerging approach to urban village redevelopment which combines aesthetics regime and cultural governance. The intricate interplay between consensus construction and dissensus destruction reveals the fluid and porous boundaries between policing and politicization. The findings contribute to a more dynamic approach to analyzing urban village governance in China, expanding the frameworks for understanding the diverse possibilities inherent in urban redevelopment.

“No One Is Who They Say They Are”: The Political Aesthetics of David Peace, Waste Land Poetry, and Extreme Music

Abstract This article constructs a genealogy of anti-imperialist cultural practice, connecting novels and spoken word projects of David Peace to post–World War II Japanese poetry and to the extreme music practice of the powerviolence band Column of Heaven. By placing Peace's novels in conversation with these different cultural forms, it aims to show how the modernist mystification can augment the radical political effects of popular art during the era of imperialism. The article proposes an alternative route to Marxist cultural criticism via Althusser's understanding of ideological interpellation and his critique of Lenin's classic analysis of imperialism. In this sense, it proposes to link contemporary experimental musical and literary practice to a Marxist politics of anti-imperialism, in contradistinction to the potentially depoliticizing effects of the popular critique of neoliberalism.

The messy ethics of household biogas in Tanzania: ambivalence and aesthetics in energy‐from‐waste

AbstractHousehold biogas is an off‐grid energy technology that converts human, animal, and agricultural waste into fuel. This article analyses the emergence and use of household biogas technologies in Tanzania to theorize energy ethics in a postcolonial world. It engages Jane Bennett's theorization of the ‘energetics’ and aestheticization of ethics to ask how people assert and think through their own notions of good energy in postcolonial Africa. It documents two distinct registers people use to evaluate the ethics of biogas. The ‘circle of life’ register mobilizes popular environmental aesthetics of circle, cycle, and reuse as well as neoliberal and socialist political aesthetics of self‐containment and self‐reliance to enchant biogas with an ethical aura. The ‘excremental ambivalence’ register, alternately, disenchants biogas through referencing the polyvalent semiotics of shit and the sedimentation of racial and economic inequalities that condition the propagation of biogas. People engage both registers in the context of specific political economic and ecological conditions that also affect biogas uptake or refusal. The article thus argues that political economy, materiality, and aestheticization all play a role in people's ethical orientation to biogas and that ambivalence is a defining feature of energy transition in the Global South.

Residents’ thermal comfort in Swedish newly built homes: political aesthetics and atmospheric practices

This paper draws on a case study of newly constructed passive houses in Sweden and explores how architecture and the material influence everyday life. We suggest the new aesthetics as a potential theoretical tool for understanding user experiences of low-energy housing, an approach that considers how atmospheres are produced and consumed, by whom and by what means. We approach passive house designs as the materialisation of environmental sustainability, facilitating the fulfilment of long-term goals for energy efficiency and renewable materials. In our case study, apartment designs involving lofts, timber and extensive glazing sometimes conflicted with the passive house concept once the residents had settled in their homes. Some designs, for example lofts, failed to facilitate comfortable everyday life, while designs with renewable materials enhanced a homely atmosphere. We propose to acknowledge the labour that is required by the residents of these buildings to create thermal comfort at home.

The Coloniality of Space: Landscape, Aesthetics, and the Middle Classes in Dar es Salaam

AbstractIn Dar es Salaam, an aesthetic politics of landscape shaped by the coloniality of space is central to middle‐class boundary work that drives the city's middle classes to congregate in the city's northern suburbs. The colonial city was divided into three racially marked zones that became known as uzunguni, uhindini, and uswahilini (the place of the European, Indian, and African, respectively). The coloniality of space remains as the spatial residue of this colonial enframing. It endures in an aesthetic politics of landscape in which ideas about what, and who, makes good urban space in terms of architecture, topography, and planning, and who deserves to live where. The paper examines how middle‐class suburban residents’ mobilisation of the coloniality of space naturalises existing social and spatial hierarchies in the city.

"Political Romanticism" and "Aesthetic Politics": Content, Comparison, Criticism

Relevance. In Western political philosophy and political theory, the judgment that modern democracy does not have a satisfactory general ("synoptic") theory, has the status of (almost) universal significance ‒ the philosophical interpretation of this "situation" is an urgent research task for modern political philosophy.Purpose. The representation of the political in the "concept of the political" and the "economic paradigm of the political" reveals identical characteristic features; the configuration of their unity and the assessment attributed to them differ ‒ the goal is to understand the different meanings attributed to the same "phenomena" and "processes" of modernity in conceptual frameworks defined by opposite paradigms.Objectives. The method of determining the actual policy in the horizon of "metaphysical principles" is demonstrated. The fundamentals of the paradigmatic representation of the political and the principles of constructing the narrative of modern liberal democracy are revealed. The procedure of giving credibility to theoretical judgments about the political is analyzed. Methodology. The paradigmatic representation of the political can be understood, and only as a result explained; understanding refers to the real concept, explanation – to reality; the combination of the "real" and "real" distinguished in the tradition of Western philosophy takes place in a philosophical concept; the formation of the concept presupposes philosophical interest; philosophical hermeneutics and deduction provide tools suitable for understanding the political in unity: from "metaphysical foundations" to practical politics. Results. The statement about the romantic nature of the modern representation of the political in the liberal economic paradigm looks reliable. It is proved that historical and aesthetic representation, more than «mimetic», fulfills the imperatives attributed to the modern form of political – Western representative democracy. The evidence of the necessary replacement of the «center of political ontology» from the sovereign to an «empty place» is demonstrated.Conclusions. Representative democracy, romantic and postmodern, is a necessary and legitimate form of the modern liberal way of representing the political. The main task of aesthetic politics is supposed to ensure security: "keep to the middle and avoid extremes", exclude an event, normalize the political, that is, to banalize politics.

New municipalism and feminist leadership after the Indignados: The political aesthetics of truth in Ada Colau for Mayor (Faus 2016)

In this article, I reflect on the intersection between feminism and documentary art as truth-telling by focusing on Alcaldessa ( Ada Colau for Mayor), the most relevant documentary of the long-term collaboration between the film-maker Pau Faus and Ada Colau, the first female mayor of Barcelona (2015–2023). My argument is critical of a reductionist interpretation which portrays Alcaldessa as a personalist postfeminist documentary overly fixated on ‘biography rather than policy’. In contrast, I posit that Faus’ documentary, delving into Colau’s initial electoral campaign (2014–2015), offers valuable insights into pivotal aspects of an underexamined political vision that merges the principles of new municipalism with a focus on the ‘common people’ ( gent comú) and feminism. Furthermore, the documentary sheds light on unreconciled dilemmas inherent in the lived new politics and feminist leadership, issues that often remain concealed within the ideological trappings of political manifestos and programmes.

Aesthetic Governance and China's Rural Toilet Revolution

ABSTRACTThis article addresses aesthetic politics in the Chinese rural toilet revolution. Toilet retrofitting is conventionally regarded as an issue of sanitation improvement, but in the emerging trend of rural post‐productivism transformation, toilets have become contested sites of aesthetic governance in rural development. Using the case of a village in Northern China, the authors show that, in order to beautify the rural environment, toilet identification, selection, placement and demolition are all directed by aesthetic norms for a beautiful village. Additionally, the aestheticization of village development has legitimized state‐led development by creating a common‐sense understanding of and imagination for the future. However, aesthetic logics can represent a mismatch with the realities of local lives, resulting in place alienation and suspended development. This article unpacks the logics, mechanisms and spatial‐social processes of aesthetic governance in the Chinese toilet revolution.

The Concept of a Multipolar World as the Aestheticization of Politics

The Concept of a Multipolar World as the Aestheticization of Politics

A Political Aesthetics of Peoplehood

A Political Aesthetics of Peoplehood

Reconsidering Photographic Temporality through Piotr Uklański’s Nazis

In The Nazis (1998) and its sequel, Real Nazis (2017), the Polish American artist Piotr Uklański creates glossy photographic assemblages of real and fictional Nazis, which critics have generally interpreted by turns as critiquing or participating in the culture industry’s fascination with and glamourization of Nazism. However, the formal mechanisms of Uklański’s work remain undertheorized. This essay offers a reading of The Nazis and Real Nazis that locates the aesthetic politics of these two products of the “perpetrator turn” in Holocaust studies and memory studies in the ways they manipulate assumptions about photographs’ temporality. Photographic theorists like Siegfried Kracauer, Susan Sontag, André Bazin, and Roland Barthes famously conceptualized photographic time through the category of grammatical tense and on examples of individual still images rather than photographic series. This essay builds on those theories by applying Peter Wollen’s work about narrative and grammatical aspect, which concerns the completedness or duration of what photographs depict, to argue that Uklański’s Nazi projects are more adequately explained as incomplete photographic narratives. By occluding viewers’ expectations about the aspect of photography, The Nazis and Real Nazis critically renarrate Nazism not as a completed historical trauma but as alive today amid a worldwide resurgence of right-wing populism.

No Justice, No Streets! Black radical placemaking and its political aesthetics in George Floyd Square

ABSTRACT Building from Black geographies and Black media studies, I propose “Black radical placemaking” as a communicative approach to reimagine urban planning practices toward more racially equitable futures. Using George Floyd Square as a case study and through photographic fieldwork, I argue that Black radical placemaking promotes a political aesthetics constituted of racialized inclusion, mutual aid, and reparative justice. This stands opposite to traditional urban planning practices that have historically privileged whiteness, predatory capitalism, and social control of BIPOC communities. Lastly, the study discusses how Black radical placemaking can transform communication, media, and geography scholarship toward a social justice arc.

“Stories one tells in dark times”: Fabulation, fugitivity, and futurity in Olivia Wenzel's 1000 Serpentinen Angst

AbstractThis article engages with aesthetic acts of experimentation in Olivia Wenzel's 1000 Serpentinen Angst. Building on recent scholarship on the politics of aesthetics in Wenzel's text, I argue that these experiments are intertwined with key themes in the book, particularly issues of racialization and of Black (im‐)possibility in present‐day Germany. In this context, my article focuses on a largely overlooked aspect of Wenzel's text, namely its surreal, fantastical, and speculative elements. Drawing on Tavia Nyong'o and Saidiya Hartman's notion of “(critical) fabulation,” I propose that Wenzel's writing mobilizes fantastic, imaginative, and speculative elements to unsettle oppressive realities and realisms in favor of alternative modes of world‐ and future‐making. Inspired by Tina M. Campt's work, I conceptualize these re‐makings as “fugitive” and quotidian strategies, developed in response to a broken world, which still have the potential to generate new infrastructures for relationality and futurity.

Aestheticization of media communication in the context of social reality aestheticization.

Aestheticization of social reality is a multifaceted process that affects various areas of social space and manifests itself as a reconstruction of social relations, social practices and the knowledge. Despite the active use of the term «aestheticization» in the scientific space and in creative activity, the categorical essence of this term remains uncertain, and there is no comprehensive understanding of the essence of the process of aestheticization. In the focus of existing scientific researches in this area are particular manifestations of aestheticization: the aestheticization of politics, science, history, war, violence, death, the aestheticization of everyday life, etc. In our research, we resorted to the historical, epistemological and ontological foundations of aesthetics, which allowed us to suggest a general scientific vision of aestheticization as a macro-process of semantic reconstruction of social reality; develop its three-aspect structure, highlighting the perceptual, axiological and pragmatic aspects. The conceptual foundations of aestheticization thus formed, allowed us to further offer an understanding of the process of aestheticization of media communication that is currently essential. Its essence is to rely on sentient intelligence and smart emotions of the recipient in building the communicative process and in choosing its forms and means. In aestheticized media communication, visual-sensuous and expressively emotive elements dominate over rational ones; imagery, affect and effect are emphasized. By creating new sensually expressive and attractive mass images, media communication not only modifies the forms of sensory perception, but changes the structural archetypes of the modern «media man» and transforms social perception. This reveals the potential of aestheticization in the «fundamental ideological reconstruction» of society (T. Eagleton) through the «aesthetic modulation of the human psyche» (F. Schiller).

The Aesthetics of Slowness and Politics of Speed Discrepancy: Revisiting Tsai Ming-Liang’s ‘Walker’ series and the Corporal Objections within Long Duration Performance

<p>蔡明亮的「行者」系列無論在電影、劇場表演或當代視覺藝術中都具有指標性意義。不少論者都會聚焦在李康生那頗能突顯時間之政治性意涵的緩行身影，議論其身體性如何引發我們對於日常生活節奏的敏銳覺察，並提供一種足以抵抗當代「競速政體」（dromocracy）及其加速時間暴力的重要美學潛能。不過，當前圍繞「緩慢美學」或「緩慢電影」（aesthetics / cinema of slowness）的論述建構，尚存在若干理論空缺有待梳理；對於緩慢行動之政治性的強調，往往也難擺脫一種關於時間秩序的懷舊鄉愁，因而只是單純將「慢」與「快」對立起來的「緩慢倫理學」，並不足以對當代社會日益強勢的加速度政治及其生命治理技術，提出有力而具體的批判。本文以「行者」系列為起點，但將討論轉移至錄像裝置、身體藝術及表演藝術的思考脈絡，透過探討當代藝術同樣觸及長時延概念的作品案例，對緩慢美學的既有觀點進行適度的修正和改寫。在此，關鍵既不是重回90年代早已脫離現實且過時的「慢活」運動思潮，也不是想像人能夠擺脫各種當代技術介入力量，返回某種身體的「自然模式」；我們真正需要的，是藉由藝術行動引發一系列針對時間的耗費，以及日常性變革的深刻反思。簡言之，構築一種重新掌握時間主權的「速差政治」。</p> <p> </p><p>Tsai Ming-Liang’s ‘Walker’ series is of iconic significance in the fields of cinema, theatre, and contemporary art. Many scholars focus on the political implications of Lee kang-Shang’s slow-moving body and argue that not only could this corporality lead us to a more insightful awareness of the pace of our everyday life, but also that it has an aesthetic potential that can resist contemporary ‘dromocracy’ and the agression of speedy temporality. However, there are some theoretical gaps in the arguments for this ‘aesthetics of slowness’(or cinema of slowness), and more detail and clarification are needed. IF the political implication of slowness is often reduced to nostalgia for the order of the past, and the value of slowness is simply the opposite of speed in this aesthetics, then it is nothing more than an ‘ethics of slowness.’ In the face of the politics of acceleration and its increasingly dominant technologies of biopolitical governmental control, the aesthetics of slowness will not offer any significant criticism. This paper takes the "Walker" series as a starting point, but shifts discussion to the context of video installation, body art and theatrical performance, while constructing a new version of the aesthetics of slowness by exploring examples of contemporary art that also engage with the concept of long duration. What is at stake here, however, is not a restatement of the outmoded and unrealistic Downshifting or Slow Movement in the 90s, nor a ‘return to nature’ which ignores the technological advances of our time. What we need here is a sort of art activism that can give rise to profound reflection on the transformation of everyday life and the passing of time. In short, what is needed is a “politics of different speeds” in order to reclaim our sovereignty over time.</p> <p> </p>

American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic by Daniel Diez Couch (review)

American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic by Daniel Diez Couch (review)