ABSTRACT
How are we to understand ‘the insidious presence of aesthetics in our daily routines’? How can we consider the close ties between the two spheres of activity – political and cultural – often opposed to each other? We must, first of all, forsake the idealistic vision of aesthetics in which only some forms linked to artistic productions or practices, paintings, theatre, operas, and so on, can be so labelled. To do so, we must choose a continuous vision of culture, that is to say, take the position that there is no break in continuity between different registers of human action, whether ethical, artistic, cultural, social or technological. The authors of Political Aesthetics: Culture, Critique and the Everyday go even beyond this frame by considering these cultural and social processes in their transnational dimensions. Remaining in a unique cultural dimension would have led to an error of framing: limiting the analysis exclusively to a single cultural domain instead of going back and forth between qualitative descriptions of common practices and multiple contexts of effectuation, cultural, but also political, ethical, social or technological. But more fundamentally, an analysis that does away with the most categorical barriers in use must interpret cultural and aesthetic registers while taking account of their rational dimension. How can the Techno-Mouvement of the early twenty-first century be considered outside this framework, as also Mussolini's career or photographic devices, without being subjected to the test of postcolonial relationships? But I might as well expand the list to all the issues proposed in this book.
