He slams, he writes, he dances, he acts through an urban logic of political action. Although many social scientists would not see political action in Tivon’s life because he doesn’t participate in street demonstrations or political organizations, we argue here that by paying attention to how politics unfolds in an urban world, we can see in Tivon’s life many political gestures. Describing one of his video projects, he writes: ‘It’s crazy how things change. Condos are going up at a faster rate than ever and the word gentrification doesn’t even explain how the riches of the community are being replaced with the riches of the word’ (mapcollab.org). He expresses concern about the pace of change in his neighbourhood, and points to the inability of words to keep up. Words become useless to express his political outrage. He further alludes to how his neighbourhood is linked to the ‘riches of the wor[l]d’, thereby expressing a networked spatial conception linking the local with the global.
As he describes another photo, he pursues: ‘This is my daily eye level street view. This may be your first time seeing this view. I have seen this view almost everyday for the past twenty years!’ (mapcollab.org). Tivon grounds his political analysis in everyday life. You may not think this is particularly interesting, he seems to say when describing an ordinary ‘eye‐level street view’, but this is my standpoint, my entry point into the world. He is inviting us to enter this everyday world in order to understand his politics. The inadequate intensity of the word ‘gentrification’ and everydayness impelling political gestures, these are two examples of what we want to call the aesthetics of political action in an urban world. They call attention to the importance of conceiving a political relation aesthetically.
Acting Aesthetically: Political Gestures, Political Acts, and Political Action
Transformations in our conceptions of space, time, and rationality bring to the fore and reinforce aesthetic forms of sociopolitical relations. In her seminal treaty on justice and differences, Iris Marion Young (1990) foresaw the importance of the ‘normative ideal of city life’. Against the idealization of community (anti‐urban) life, Young advances ‘city life’ as what we should valorize. ‘City life’, she writes, ‘instantiates difference as the erotic, in the wide sense of an attraction to the other, the pleasure and excitement of being drawn out of one’s secure routine to encounter the novel, strange, and surprising’ (Young 1990, p. 266). She normatively prioritizes eroticism against community recognition or the protective feeling of membership. Eroticism comes close to what we call acting aesthetically. ‘The erotic meaning of the city’, she pursues, ‘arises from its social and spatial inexhaustibility [what we have called a networked conception of space]. A place of many places, the city folds over on itself in so many layers and relationships that it is incomprehensible’ (Young 1990, p. 267). Young is identifying here the need to act aesthetically, to trust our senses and not only our rational and cognitive capacities to name and categorize the world.
Our engagement with the notion of aesthetics builds on various traditions of thought which foreground a pre‐Kantian conception of aesthetics: aesthetics not as a theory of the arts or of taste, but as the realm of sensory experience and perception. ‘Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body’, writes Terry Eagleton (1990, p. 13) in his study on the birth and importance of the category of the aesthetics in Modern thought. He reminds us that ‘[i]n its original formulation by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, the term refers not in the first place to art, but, as the Greek aisthesis would suggest, to the whole region of human perception and sensation, in contrast to the more rarefied domain of conceptual thought’ (Eagleton 1990, p. 13). If, by the nineteenth century, Western philosophical engagements with aesthetics had become increasingly focused on the fine arts, particularly within the Anglo‐American tradition (Saito 2019), philosophers interested in investigating the aesthetic experience of the world beyond the artworld began to challenge these trajectories and their limited scope. This led to the development of the fields of environmental aesthetics and everyday aesthetics in the second half of the century (Carlson 2019; Saito 2019). However, the rise of modern European metropolises also attracted the attention of philosophers and sociologists who sought to understand an aesthetics of urban modernity, as experienced particularly in Berlin and Paris (Thibaud 2010).
We need to engage with these various traditions of thought to explore how contemporary urban cultures are transforming the political process. Analyses of the sensible experience of urbanites and the transformation of the structure of this experience have influenced urban thought for over a century. Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer are well known for their analyses of the sensible culture of the modern city and the significance they put on microscopic scenes, gestures, or experiences of everyday life in order to capture the aesthetic differences and effects of the urban experience in modern European cities (Thibaud 2010).
Because of global urbanization processes, the urban experience is no longer spatially and temporarily bounded to the city. In The Politics of the Encounter, Andy Merrifield (2013, p. xvii) provocatively suggests foregoing the concept of the ‘city’; in his own words, ‘to give up the ghost of thinking in terms of absolutes – of entities with borders and clear demarcations between what’s inside and what’s outside’ and instead embrace ‘the urban process as a form that is formlessly open‐ended’ (Merrifield 2013, p. xviii). Yet, as we explore it here, the urban process remains in important ways shaped by situated aesthetic experiences and political acts that accumulate in given urban environments (see also Boudreau 2017).
To explore the significance of the ontological shifts from a world of nations‐states to a world of cities, as described earlier, epistemological perspectives from the field of environmental aesthetics are useful. Rather than focusing on the aesthetic appreciation of mute and passive objects, this tradition of thought has been centred on the aesthetic experience and appreciation of any kind of everyday life situation (routinized or breaking from the perceptions associated with the routine) and any kind of environment, including urban environments.
Arnold Berleant is a New York‐born philosopher who became a prominent figure in this field, laying the groundwork of the theory of aesthetic engagement (Carlson 2019). Foundational to this theory, by contrast to the posture of a detached and contemplative observer, is a continuity of perceptual engagement in the environment; the sensuous and sensate body’s full immersion ‘in a single intraconnected realm’ inhabited by ‘humans and all other things’ affecting and affected by everyone and everything (Berleant 1992, p. 9). It rejects the notion of environment as a container or an object that exists independently or externally to the perceiving subject. ‘There is no outward view, no distant scene. There are no surroundings separate from my presence in that place. There is rather a full awareness focused on the immediacy of the present situation, an engaged condition that encompasses richly inclusive perceptions and meanings’, writes Berleant (1992, p. 34). It foregrounds an ontology of the relation and the milieu rather than an ontology of the object (Thibaud 2010, p. 11).
The development of environmental aesthetics has been closely related to the environmental movement as it emerged in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Two rather distinct orientations have crystallised within the field over the years: cognitive and noncognitive. The former is centred on the importance of having ‘knowledge of what something is, what it is like, and why it is as it is’ (Carlson 2019) in order to appreciate its aesthetic dimensions and qualities (e.g. the earwigs in Chapter 4). The latter is focused on the realm of precognitive sensations and inclinations, including the imagination, which arguably participate in shaping aesthetic experience and informing aesthetic appreciation. The aesthetic of engagement is most closely associated with this noncognitive orientation (Thibaud 2010; Carlson 2019).
While the field has led to the development of a significant body of research on the aesthetic experience and appreciation of urban environments, the intellectual and academic projects sustained through this scholarship have in many cases remained attached
