Workers of the World, Enjoy!: Aesthetic Politics from Revolutionary Syndicalism to the Global Justice Movement

4. The World Is a Stage and Life Is a Carnival: The Rise of the Aesthetic Sphere and Popular Culture

❖ T he idea that social life consists of actors playing parts has a famous lineage from Homer to Shakespeare to, more ingloriously, the sociologist Talcott Parsons. Sociology historically has been fascinated by such issues, centered on the idea of role. While functionalists like Parsons assume that role playing stabilizes a social order, Erving Goffman constructs a dramaturgical approach to understanding social action around this acting metaphor that criticizes the functionalist assumption of the stability of the self and of social meanings. For Goffman, public life is an arena where players make particular moves to save face and augment their status. Society is like a Beckett play, a performance where sense is not guaranteed—it is a discontinuous deferral of satisfaction and closure, as meanings are fragile and liable to break down at any time, and the fullness of meaning is never achieved.1 Goffman alerts us to the taken-for-granted and complicated cultural knowledge that informs any social performance. Performances require settings that have a history. They are more of an art than a mere replay of existing norms and values. Though Goffman does not develop this idea, they also frequently have implicit or explicit political implications. In my view, performances often involve aesthetic The World Is a Stage and Life Is a Carnival The Rise of the Aesthetic Sphere and Popular Culture 4 92 ▪ Chapter 4 politics. In this chapter, I move beyond the microperspective of Goffman to address the social and cultural foundations of aesthetic politics . The aesthetic and theatrical dimensions of social movements and public life are inseparable from the history and dynamics of the aesthetic sphere and popular culture. I will briefly examine the emergence of the aesthetic sphere and popular culture, tying them to social and economic changes. Differing configurations of ideas and practices from avant-garde artists and popular culture created distinctive ideas of aesthetic politics and impacted public life and social movements. Moving beyond the abstract ideas of Weber and Habermas on the constitution of the aesthetic sphere, I consider the bohemian practices, especially concerning aesthetic display and performance, within the aesthetic sphere. This realm took on its particular texture because of social changes tied to urbanization, capitalism, and the rise of a bohemian subculture that became increasingly politicized in the early twentieth century. Second, I address the emergence of popular culture and the mass media, especially those aspects associated with carnival. While the bohemian dimension of the aesthetic sphere is tied to individualistic performance, carnival represents a distinctive communal and playful solidarity. Both have influenced public life and social movements in important ways, and each contributed to the rise of aesthetic politics. They provide the context for the emergence of the expressive and transgressive aesthetic politics and the playful solidarity outlined in the last chapter. I then discuss how both of these aesthetic features become part of everyday life in Western society as a consumerist and postindustrial economy emerges, especially after World War II. In this new society, artists have an important role in the production process, and culture and emotion often characterize both the experience of work and the marketing of commodities. Today, aesthetics are central to a post-Fordist West and globalized world where the welfare state is in crisis, and nation-states are losing the capacity to control their internal economies, police their borders, and manage the inflow and outflow of migrant populations. These social changes create a new context for aesthetic politics. As Slavoj Žižek writes, “the ‘postmodern’ politics of resistance [is] permeated with aesthetic phenomena, from body-piercing and cross-dressing to public spectacles.”2 The World Is a Stage and Life Is a Carnival ▪ 93 The History of the Aesthetic Sphere Weber and Habermas see the aesthetic sphere as a distinctive dimension of modernity, positing in Habermas’s words “a subjectivism freed from imperatives of objectification in dealing with individualized needs, desires, and feelings.”3 Yet it is necessary to put some historical meat on these abstract theoretical bones, and in particular to revise Habermas’s understanding of the aesthetic sphere. Habermas thinks of the aesthetic sphere as akin to a public sphere where debate about artistic claims to truth takes place. This is true to some degree, but it is also an arena where different artistic practices are elaborated. As Raymond Williams states, when discussing works of art or any aesthetic phenomenon, it is best to conceptualize them as practices, not...