Communities of Sense

"Communities of Sense" argues for a new understanding of the relations between politics and aesthetics in today's globalized and image-saturated world. Established and emerging scholars of art and culture draw on Jacques Ranciere's theorization of democratic politics to suggest that aesthetics, traditionally defined as the 'science of the sensible', is not a depoliticized discourse or theory of art, but instead part of a specific historical 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. The first of the collection's three sections explicitly examines the links between aesthetics and social and political experience. Here a new essay by Ranciere posits art as a key site where disagreement can be staged in order to produce new communities of sense. In the second section, contributors investigate how sense has been constructed in the historical European avant-garde and how it is mobilized in today's global visual and political culture. Exploring the viability of various models of artistic and political critique in the context of globalization, the authors of the essays in the volume's final section suggest a shift from identity politics and pre-constituted collectivities toward an investigation of processes of identification and disidentification. The specific topics engaged throughout the volume vary from digital architecture to a makeshift museum created in a Paris suburb, and from romantic art theory in the wake of Hegel to the history of the group-subject in political art and performance since 1968. An interview with Etienne Balibar rounds out the collection. Contributors include Emily Apter; Etienne Balibar; Carlos Basualdo; T. J. Demos; Rachel Haidu; Beth Hinderliter; David Joselit; William Kaizen; Ranjanna Khanna; Reinaldo Laddaga; Vered Maimon; Jaleh Mansoor; Reinhold Martin; Seth McCormick; Yates McKee; Alexander Potts; Jacques Ranciere; and Toni Ross.