CMCL-C 705: Research Seminar in Rhetoric and Public Culture
(Topic: Aestheticized Politics: Postmodernism and Democracy)
Class Number: 25748

F, 9:30 AM-12:00 PM, MJ 112

Open to Graduates Only!

Instructor: Jon Simons

Critical political theory has generally been antipathetic to the
aestheticization of politics, as in Walter Benjamin’s famous ‘sound
bite’ about the fascist aestheticization of politics. Such antipathy
can be traced back to Plato, but is best conceived in modern terms
through the Kantian tripartation of faculties, translated into
Weber’s cultural value spheres, which is adapted by Jürgen Habermas.
In contemporary terms, the Left’s anti-aestheticism translates into
a disdain for images, myths and symbols, and in condemnations of
contemporary ‘designer’ and ‘mediatized’ politics (shared with other
liberal political commentators, such as Daniel Boorstin). Using
Habermas, David Harvey and Terry Eagleton as examples, the course
examines the contemporary association of aestheticized democratic
politics with postmodernism, and in particular with commodified
culture. We then look at Benjamin’s own argument that concerned the
phantasmagoric dream-world of commodities in modernity. This
analysis might allow us to consider other forms of aesthetic
experience such as enchanting, mimetic, sensory relation to
commodities. Wolfgang Welsch’s work on postmodernism and
aestheticization also opens up the range of meanings to aesthetics
to include non-Kantian definitions that might be more appropriate to
the conduct of democratic politics. In particular, by working
through some positions of cultural pessimists (e.g. Adorno, Jim
McGuigan) and populists (e.g. John Fiske, John Hartley) in cultural
studies, as well as some mediating positions (notably Stuart Hall)
we will explore the potential for popular aesthetics to provide the
cultural resources for democratic politics. Students’ work for this
class will involve engagement with specific examples of popular,
political aesthetics as well as the contemporary academic debate
about aestheticized politics.