Art as Political Discourse

Abstract

Much art is committed to political causes. However, does art contribute something unique to political discourse, or does it merely reflect the insights of political science and political philosophy? Here I argue for indispensability of art to political discourse by building on the debate about artistic cognitivism, the view that art is a source of knowledge. Different artforms, I suggest, make available specific epistemic resources, which allow audiences to overcome epistemic obstacles that obtain in a given ideological situation. My goal is to offer a general model for identifying cognitive advantages for artworks belonging to distinct artforms and genres (e.g. satire, visibility-raising artworks, caricatures, and so on), in a way that can account for each artwork’s historical and cultural specificity. More speculatively, however, my account also comments on the ancient struggle between philosophy and the arts as competing modes of persuasion, and expands our notion of legitimate political discourse to include a greater plurality of discursive genres.

Artivism: Art for Social Transformation and Critical Ability Development

“…e) Powerful (Political) Tool. Simoniti (2021) posits that art is devoted to radical causes. He asserts that art impacts something unique in political discourse.…”

“…It is used as a way of conveying powerful messages to inform society. As to Simoniti's (2021) investigation, he asserts that during the first half of the twentieth century, the understanding of political content in art had to be championed-for instance, in Du Bois' (1926) argument of anti-racist or Benjamin's (1934;1999) justification of 'tendentious art' and the responsibility of the author as 'producer'-at the moment, art has become an undisputably a kind of political forum. When artivism was done in the class, it was after the national elections.…”

Schiller on the Aesthetic Constitution of Moral Virtue and the Justification of Aesthetic Obligations

“…In this manner, and this is what makes his account so interesting, Schiller makes double use of sensibility in his account of moral virtue. The first is, as just presented, the conceptually constitutive or metaphysical role of aesthetically characterising the highest form of human self-determinability before action takes place as 'aesthetic condition', whereas the second use is his description of the moral agent as appearing free and thereby beautiful 22 For some recent interpretations of Schiller's various forms of freedom that I will discuss in more detail elsewhere, see Matherne & Riggle 2020, 2021and Schmalzried 2017 For definition of holy will in Kant see Kant (1785: IV, 439).…”