What Art and Literature Can Teach Us about Democracy. Aesthetic Knowledge and Political Emergence

Abstract

This project suggests a new research concept. It assumes that aesthetic expressions offer unique methods for inquiring into political emergence. Aesthetic works own this potentiality because they register sociopolitical transformation through voice, embodied experience and subjective expression, comparable to the testimonial mode of the participant, in situations of antagonism and political violence.

– How are collective protests, migrant movements, and authoritarian populism – and their mutualtensions and interdependencies – articulated in contemporary aesthetic presentations and performances?
– In comparison to disciplinary research in the social sciences, what do such aesthetically rendered accounts tell us about the political emergence of collective protest, migrant movements, and authoritarian populism?
– In which ways can the aesthetic dimension improve our understanding of the concept and practices of democracy, in an era of social rearrangement and computational control of collective behavior?

The project engages aesthetics to traverse epistemological boundaries and enables methodological convergences between the social sciences and the aesthetic humanities.

Keywords

Class, Diversity, Populism, Political Aesthetics, Collective Protest

Publications

Jonsson (2022)‘Rediscovering Class in Contemporary Aesthetics of Crime, Migration, and Protest’. Oxford Art Journal.

Jonsson (2022) ‘Unfolding Political Emergence: The Knowledge of Visual Artworks in Peter Weiss’ Aesthetics of Resistance’. New German Critique, forthcoming.

Jonsson (2021) ‘The Art of Protest: Understanding and Misunderstanding Monstrous Events’, Theory & Event, vol. 25:2 (April).

Jonsson (2020) 1. Där historien tar slut. Makt, monster och motstånd I en delad värld. Stockholm: Norstedts, 2020

Jonsson (2020)’A Society Which Is Not: Political Emergence and Migrant Agency”. Current Sociology, vol. 68: 2, 204–222.

Jonsson (2018) An Aesthetic Education of Social Theory: Some Comments on Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s What is an Event?. Distinktion. Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. 19:1 (2018): 98–105, DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2018.1450770