Communities of Sense

Communities of Sense argues for a new understanding of the relations between politics and aesthetics in todays globalized and image-saturated world. Established and emerging scholars of art and culture draw on Jacques Rancires 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.