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A thread (I'm sorry) about whether ethics, aesthetics, and politics are one thing or three things
I believe that meaningful aesthetic conflict almost always encodes an ethical conflict, typically about eudaimonia ('the good life')
I also believe that meaningful aesthetic conflict only sometimes encodes a political conflict
And so -- you hate to see it -- it turns out that I accept something like Rawls's separation between politics, or at least politics of justice, and ethics writ large
The Rawlsian idea is that politics is about the division of the social resources (e.g. money but also complex affordances like 'social grounds of self-respect' and 'opportunity') that are generically necessary for pursuing one's idea of the good life
Rawls's conception of social resources is somewhere between left-liberal and woke-left-liberal, but the broader idea arguably captures something that all 'modernist' (the opposite being 'integralist') conceptions of politics have in common
For instance, Marx (arguably!) describes communism as a post-scarcity distribution of social resources like 'material control over your time' and 'material freedom from forced specialization' and 'material capacity to form intentional communities'
But there's also another, more or less opposite view of what 'politics' means, coming to us from Plato/Aristotle via Hannah Arendt, where politics is negotiation of the nature of eudaimonia without which eudaimonia itself cannot exist
Politics, in this tradition, is an everyday negotiation over how to use the powers of thinking and doing (and of meaning-making and world-making) that we only have collectively
If this is politics, then poets really are -- well, were -- the unseen legislators and so on, and the struggle of based and cringe is, to its bones, a political struggle
Why do I want to keep these two senses of 'politics' apart? This isn't simply a conceptual question -- I am asking why is it that I don't want the ways of life that I endorse aesthetically or eudaimonically to dominate the allocation of social resources
I think of hard-left politics that's 'politics' in the Rawlsian sense as the struggle to bring about the conditions that let everyone do politics in the Greek/Arendt sense in freely formed, freely maintained intentional communities
This doesn't mean that I see all intentional communities as equally eudaimonic, or that I think 'politics' has to be about something separate from eudaimonia by dint of definition
It means, instead, that my idea of good eudaimonic politics -- my idea of a community whose no-holds-barred negotiation of collective world-making and meaning-making is up to something valuable -- is itself incompatible with forced participation
And this includes, of course, the 'soft' coerced participation rich intentional communities induce by just existing in a world of scarcity. There are no ethical Greek/Arendt politics under capitalism
So, @pp0196 is rightly saying there should be a bunch of Ranciere here. Ranciere has a great story where the meaning (sorry) of a work of art is the socially organized sensory-cognitive conditions necessary for its apprehension as art
I think that story's basically correct! I sometimes call my dissertation 'robo-Ranciere' https://www.academia.edu/36402721/Mood_Vibe_System_The_Geometry_of_Ambient_Meaning
I liked this thread an hour ago but now I hate it. Borderline buckle-up-fuckos shit
In conclusion
