life (Thibaud 2010). An implicit normativity orients this engagement with aesthetics. This is not our primary focus here.
Nonetheless, as part of a broader turn to affect in geography and urban studies, this field has opened theoretical perspectives by which to interrogate, beyond representational models of signification, the role of sensations, perceptions, feelings, and meanings as they are shaped by and give shape to routines of our everyday lives and urban experiences.
In this book, we explore more specifically the significance of diverse aesthetic relations and political forms influenced by the contemporary conditions of urbanity, by various urban political orders (pertaining to substantially different youth urban worlds), and by the aesthetic feel of certain places in an interconnected yet specific urban environment: Montreal. In this endeavour, we closely examine the workings and political effects of two precognitive modalities of aesthetics engagement and political action that have not received enough attention in academic scholarship: seduction and attraction.
Let us for a moment return to Young’s account of eroticism. Young (1990) emphasizes people’s relation to the spaces, times, and peoples of the city. In short, although she does not use these terms, she acknowledges that agency is distributed among human and other‐than‐human actors. The problem with the ideal of community life, she insists, is that it rests on the need for recognition. City life, in contrast, thrives on attraction to differences, not the search for recognition. Speaking of other‐than‐human forces, Stengers (2005, cited in de la Cadena 2010, p. 352) notes that ‘the political arena is peopled with shadows of that which does not have a political voice’. She is referring here to material forces, such as mountains and forests – and, inspired by Young, we could add specifically appealing buildings, objects, markets, and so on. City life is characterized by attraction to such material and human forces. Connolly (2011) speaks of the ‘proto‐agency’ of non‐human actors which disrupts our sense of perception through unexpected vibrations. When we allow proto‐agents to disturb our sense of perception (when, to use de la Cadena’s words, we let earth‐beings have a political voice), we distribute agency outside the sovereign, rational individual. In other words, in a world of cities, we need to zoom in on precognitive encounters between bodies, material artefacts, and spaces as elements of the political process. These encounters involve finesse, attuning, fascination, attraction, magnetism, seduction.
Conceiving of political action through a distributive sense of agency can challenge the democratic notion of personal responsibility. If agency is distributed, how can we attribute the effects of action to someone? In order to untie this conundrum, we follow Krause (2011, p. 301) in defining agency as ‘the affirmation of one’s subjective existence through concrete action in the world’. Whatever we do, intentionally or not, it has an effect in the world. For example, we might unintentionally look at a group of Black youths gathered at a subway station in the Saint‐Michel neighbourhood with disgust or fear, and it would have an effect on the individuals receiving this gaze. Such political gesture may not be rationally and strategically planned as a racist act, but it has an effect. We are responsible for our gesture, even if it was not cognitively planned. The embodied political gesture of looking with disgust or fear at other bodies in this specific moment and place produces effects on those bodies and on the signification of that place. In short, distributive agency, in the sense of analytically incorporating all forces at play in political action, from proto‐agents and earth‐beings to reflexive individuals, does not mean stripping away political obligations and responsibility for one’s involvement in the situation, intentional or not.
A critical attention to the political effects of precognitive and distributive aesthetic modalities of political action therefore also requires that we understand aesthetics not only as a domain of sensations, but also as a socially, culturally constructed domain of judgement. Perceptions (skin colours, body shapes, greens coming out of concrete) and the values ascribed to them (what is considered beautiful, disgusting, fearful, etc.) are influenced by ideologies and social education, and in turn effectively ‘partition the sensible’, as Jacques Rancière (2000) would say. Rancière’s understanding of the distribution of the sensible (le partage du sensible) has ‘in recent years become de rigueur in Anglophone political theoretical mobilizations of the relationships between aesthetics and politics’ (Jazeel and Mookherjee 2015, p. 354; see also Shapiro 2010; Dikeç 2015).
In English, we must read ‘distribution’ with the double meaning that the French word partage implies; that is, as distribution and/or partaking. For Rancière, the political consists of aesthetic practice insofar as ‘it sets up scenes of dissensus’ whereby the excluded, unseen, or those who don’t have a recognized (legitimized) political voice make a sensible appearance which disrupts the democratic sensorium by exposing the polemical distribution of its constituents and the modalities of their perception and partaking in what is to be held in common (Rancière 2000; Vihalem 2018, p. 6). In Rancière’s words (2000, p. 24; our translation), the relationship between aesthetics and politics is situated at the level of this ‘sensory cutting of parts of the common of a community, the forms of its visibility and its arrangement’.6 As the philosophy scholar Margus Vihalem (2018, p. 7) remarks, ‘Rancièrian aesthetics, especially due to its political implications, partly moves away from Kantian aesthetics, although it preserves and further develops the fundamental intuition of Kantian aesthetics, namely that the aesthetic is what pertains to “a priori forms of sensibility”’. This approach fruitfully suggests that the distribution of the sensible operates out of and through a certain regime of perceptibility which assigns meanings, value, place, parts, temporalities to sensations in a social democratic order. Yet, by focusing on moments of political dissensus or interventions that disrupt the polemical order of the distribution of the sensible, Rancière does not consider the empirical difficulty in identifying what Jazeel and Mookherjee (2015, p. 355) want to call ‘genuinely political interventions from what we might otherwise regard as anodyne postpolitical re‐orchestrations of the social order’ (see also Papastergiadis 2014).
We turn to Panagia (2009) to broaden our understanding of aesthetic political action that does not necessarily involve instant disruptions in the distribution of the sensible, but that nonetheless creates sensory lifeworlds affecting what is available to be sensed (in terms of both sensations and meanings) in urban youth worlds. Panagia’s reflection on the politics of sensation is useful here because it enables us to pause in the ‘experience of sensation that arises from the impact of an appearance’ (Panagia 2009, p. 187), which, in his words, disfigures or disarticulates the conditions of perceptibility that would make recognition possible. ‘Rather than recognition’, writes Panagia, ‘I suggest that the emergence of a political appearance requires an act of admission: an appearance advenes upon us, and we admit to it. An act of recognition might follow from the durational intensity of advenience but it does not follow causally in that there is no necessary condition that makes it so that it must (or even can) recognize any or all appearance’ (Panagia 2009, p. 151; our emphasis).
In order to understand this conception of aesthetic politics, we need to look at both how action unfolds and its effects. We find it useful to distinguish between political action and political gestures. Political gestures involve the body in aesthetic ways (marching in a demonstration, screaming to a police officer, going to a punk concert) but may not necessarily register attention in their unfolding, or be performed with an intent to register attention. As Black studies and Black feminist theorists show, some forms of aesthetic gestures do not necessarily unfold as interventions into the sensorium of a dominant order, seeking to disrupt structures that determine regimes of perceptibility. For instance, Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins (1998, p. 48) calls attentions to speech acts of Black women ‘breaking silence’ by ‘giving testimonials that often disrupt public truths about them’ from the authority of their own lived experiences. But, as she remarks, ‘[a] second type of knowledge exists, the collective secret knowledge generated by groups on either side of power that are shared in private when the other side’s surveillance seems absent’ (Collins 1998, p. 48). Political gestures in this context, conversations shared around the kitchen table
