TY - JOUR
AU - Yusoff, Kathryn
AB - As environments and their inhabitants undergo a multitude of abrupt changes due toclimate, in the aesthetic field there has been a hardening of a few representationalfigures that stand in for those contested political ecologies. Biodiversity loss andhabitat change can be seen to be forcing an acceleration of archival practices thatmobilize various images of the ‘play of the world’, including the making of starspecies to represent planetary loss, and the consolidation of other species intoarchives implicitly organized around the category of their destruction. The firstsection of this article looks at Jacques Rancière’s concept of political aestheticsin order to extend an argument about the importance of aesthetics in multispeciesliving beyond a concentration on practices per se and into a more excessiveengagement articulated by Georges Bataille. I argue that aesthetics must beconsidered as part of the practice of politics and a space that configures the realmof what is possible in that politics. This is to suggest aesthetics as a form ofethics or an ‘aesthetics of existence’, as Foucault put it. The conclusion considershow a biopolitical aesthetic comes into being through such archival practices, andasks what aesthetic shifts would make the ‘play of the world’ more present in itsabsences.
TI - Biopolitical Economies and the Political Aesthetics of Climate Change
JF - "Theory, Culture & Society"
DO - 10.1177/0263276410362090
DA - 2010-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/sage/biopolitical-economies-and-the-political-aesthetics-of-climate-change-J2xKZgTj6X
SP - 73
EP - 99
VL - 27
IS - 2-3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -