Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics

Established and emerging scholars of art and culture draw on Jacques Rancière´s theorization of democratic politics to suggest that aesthetics, traditionally defined as the "science of the sensible", is not a depoliticized discourse of theory of art, but instead part of a historically specific organization of social roles and communality. Rather than formulating aesthetics as the Other to politics, the contributors show that aesthetics and politics are mutually implicated in the construction of communities of visibility and sensation through which political orders emerge.