Aesthetics and Politics

This article approaches the relationship between aesthetics and politics from a particular perspective, one to some extent articulated by Jacques Rancière. For Rancière aesthetic practices are informed by what he calls the aesthetic regime. In extending Rancière's insights, I proceed from the assumption that aesthetic experience has a double character where artworks render thought foreign to itself and invite reflection on a range of political and discursive predicaments and thereby also engage issues pertinent to International Relations (IR). In this paper I sketch the contours of the aesthetic regime and its deployment in a selection of postcolonial and postmodern works of art and offer some thoughts on how this regime is implicated in global politics and how it relates to, and differs from, what has been termed the aesthetic turn in IR. My argument is that the performative and disruptive politics of aesthetic practices are at odds with all reflective and interpretive practices, even if both disruption and reflection are components of aesthetic experience. In making this claim I hope to make a contribution to understanding how the products and practices of the aesthetic regime not only service the provision of insights about the predicaments of global or international politics but also are the enactment of a politics that prevaricates between sense and understanding.