ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to open up the ways we think and frame the political potential of art. Instead of locating politics in art within the conceptual impetus of the artistic object – what art communicates – the author draws attention to the emergent and transformative qualities of an aesthetic encounter, which foregrounds a politics that is inventive of new modes of relation, rather than communication. In doing so, the chapter draws on Guattari’s ‘ethico-aesthetic paradigm’, where art is valued for its ability to engender and express other ways of becoming which cannot be reduced to utilitarian or instrumental logics. This rendering of aesthetics points us towards a micropolitics, which is not bound to discursive representation but wavers at the affective and sensory registers of art and the creative potential therein.
