Politics and Recognition. Towards a New Political Aesthetics
Politics and Recognition.
Towards a New Political Aesthetics, 1st Edition,
This book outlines a new conception of political aesthetics based on the
notion of order as an aesthetic category pertaining to human perception.
Engaging with the thought of a range of figures, including Veblen, Honneth,
Foucault, Popper, and MacIntyre, it explores the nature of political aesthetics
as an enquiry into the ways in which politics and our perceptions shape one
another and our moral choices. Moving beyond the consideration of politics as a
matter of perception, the author employs the concept of recognition to shed
fresh light on the normative dimensions of politics, before presenting a series
of case studies designed to show the utility of this conception of political
aesthetics for explaining contemporary urban social phenomena and political
conflicts. As such, Politics and
Recognition will appeal to sociologists, philosophers, and political social
theorists.
From the
Introduction:
The claims expounded in this book are elucidated, among others, by means
of a historical speculation concerning the stages through which philosophy
developed and transformed. In order to grasp the nature of these
transformations, I propose a definition of man as an ordering-and-order-seeking
being and contend that the purpose of philosophy as a human endeavour is the
search for order in all areas of its investigations: metaphysical, moral,
aesthetic, social, political, and others. I also argue that the concept of
order involved should be seen as an essentially aesthetic category.
The political aspect of the concept of order is at the centre of
attention in this book and forms the core of a standpoint which I like to
describe as political aesthetics. The elusiveness of the aesthetic and the
political, a feature which they share with the philosophical itself, is
responsible for the fact that the connection between them is understood in many
conflicting ways. It is fair to say that there is no dominant paradigm or
theoretical framework in the discipline. In this book I strove to outline the
conceptual underpinnings of something which I believe to be a new approach in
political aesthetics.
Aesthetics is usually thought to be concerned with beauty and the arts.
Accordingly, political aesthetics is understood as a discipline concerned with
the role of the arts in politics and with the influence of politics upon the
arts. In contrast to this, the conception of political aesthetics outlined in
this book is based on a belief that the prime task of the aesthetical inquiry
is the exploration of the faculty and processes of perception. Thus, I propose
to understand political aesthetics as a philosophical discipline investigating
the processes of perception, disclosure, and understanding of political
problems arising in the spaces of human life, and embodied in political
practices, patterns of human behaviour, customs, and artefacts of culture. The
task of political aesthetics thus understood is to diagnose these problems,
explain them, and formulate possible practical solutions to them. Therefore,
political aesthetics is an inquiry into the ways in which politics influences
our perceptions and, vice versa, how our perceptions determine our political
choices and actions.
The political aesthetics delineated here is, however, not only about the
perception of politics or the politics of perception but also about the
perception of things political as
commendable or not. In political philosophy, the implied normative dimension is
articulated often by means of the concept of “recognition.” I understand the
concept of recognition as encapsulating the idea that perception of anything
always involves perceiving it against a wider background, and therefore it presumes
both comparison and judgement.
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