Aesthetics, Political

The relationship between the aesthetic and the political is historically controversial and increasingly complex. In broad terms, politics is associated with a commitment to substantial debate and concrete action, where aesthetics is related to image, style, and performance. Due to this dialectic, political aesthetics has been often equated with a potential for manipulation and mystification. The 20th century was set apart by pessimism toward popular culture and anxiety around the role and use of aesthetics in the political sphere. Though this suspicion towards the aesthetic persists across the humanities and social sciences, the growing interdependence of the popular and the political, alongside recent changes in communication technology, have compelled a number of scholars to consider aesthetics as a fundamental dimension of political activity. Careful attention to key moments of tension and complementarity, especially where political critique is realized through spectacle, encourages productive engagement with the aesthetic dimensions of political communication. Thanks to such engagement, it further becomes clear that the visual plays an especially significant role in mainstream and activist politics alike, insofar as key political activities such as debate, protest, and action commonly take place in and through sensorially rich mediated arenas like television, digital journalism, and social media.