Over the past decade, public discussions of democracy have revolved largely around the diagnosis of crisis. Although public discourse (Applebaum, Gessen, Mishra, Roy), political and sociological theory (Chatterjee, Geiselberger, Gudavarthy, Krastev/Holmes, Levitsky/Ziblatt, Mounk, Runciman, Urbinati), and empirical social sciences (Merkel, Przeworski, Schäfer/Zürn) have all expressed different views—with some questioning or even rejecting the diagnosis of an existential crisis of democracy (Kriesi, Manow, van Rahden)—a minimal consensus seems to have emerged: the continued existence of Western liberal democracies as they emerged in the late 18th century can no longer be taken for granted. The expectation that liberal democracy had entered a phase of progressive global dominance with the “end of history” (Fukuyama), widespread in the 1990s, has been proven false.
The discourse on the crisis of democracy is particularly revealing with regard to its competing diagnoses (some of which are more controversial than others). These include the rise of populist and radical right-wing movements in societies that were once considered stable democracies (Moffitt, Mudde, Ostiguy, de la Torre, Müller); the acceptance of anti-democratic views in society (Amlinger/Nachtwey, Heitmeyer, von Moltke); the loss of voters by major parties (Decker); the weakening of the separation of powers (Kneip); the perceived lack of adherence to fundamental democratic norms (Levitsky/Ziblatt); the erosion of opportunities for participation under the conditions of an administration-oriented “post-democracy” (Crouch, Rancière 1997); the widespread loss of trust in the effectiveness of democracy in the face of growing economic inequality (Przeworski, Manow 2018, Jörke); the loss of future prospects, and therefore, future-oriented democratic agency, in the “too-late modernity” (Bröckling, Kornbluh 2024; Abadi); and, lastly, the revelation of Western democracy as a means of colonial and imperial rule (Mbembe 2017; Mishra; Tully).
This broad spectrum of crises has sparked a reflection on the meaning of the concept of “democracy” as “the rule of the people.” Are political institutions and procedures the foundation of democracy? Or is it political norms of action that enable the political system to function in practice? Does democracy depend on the intertwining of statehood and civil society? Is democracy characterized by the democratic constitution of social institutions, ranging from parliaments to associations to families? Or does democracy constitute an even broader context of coexistence, extending beyond politics and institutions into the social and cultural spheres?
The latter position, which views democracy as a form of coexistence as well as a political system, draws on a rich tradition in political philosophy and theory reaching back to diverse Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Immanuel Kant. This tradition was further developed in the 19th century by thinkers such as G.W.F. Hegel, Alexis de Tocqueville, and J.S. Mill. Despite their differences, these thinkers all reflected on the importance of customs, rituals, and forms of sociability for the composition of democracies. In the 20th century, various schools of thought further developed this idea in ways that continue to resonate today. These include American pragmatism, which, according to John Dewey and Sidney Hook, conceives of democracy as a “way of life” (see Frega, Putnam, Hetzel/Wille, and, from a critical perspective, Talisse); deliberative democratic theory, which sees democracy as a form of government and a form of public deliberation and negotiation based on reason (Habermas, Cohen, Gutmann, and Thompson among others); ordinary language philosophy, which follows Wittgenstein in viewing democracy as a “way of life” based on shared language games, everyday practices, and core convictions (Wittgenstein, Cavell 1988, Laugier 2016, Zerilli, and many others). Another notable approach is radical democratic theory (Connolly, Laclau/Mouffe, Marchart, Mouffe, Saar 2019a), which locates the genuinely political—and therefore democratic—in an event that ruptures established procedures and institutions. Thus, for radical democratic theorists, the democratic emerges beyond routine politics in moments of negativity, dissent, and disruption. These moments have no fixed location and may manifest anywhere in the lifeworld.
If democracy is understood as a comprehensive context for collective life—whether as a “way of life,” “form of life,” “political form of society” (Lefort), or “social democracy” (Frega)—then it demands a task that goes beyond the boundaries of political theory. This task requires the contributions of other disciplines. Taking the discourse on coexistence seriously requires examining the relevant concept of form and the manifestations of social forms. The humanities, with their long tradition of formal and aesthetic analysis, have developed the methods of exploring social forms as aesthetic forms (Levine, Kornbluh, 2019). In addition to social philosophy and political theory, the RTG is primarily constituted by disciplines that have been on the margins of democratic research but are suited to contribute to the sensory, aesthetic, and experiential dimensions: literary studies, art history, film studies, media studies, and history.
Analyzing the frequently conflicting interplay of perceptible forms of sociality opens democracy up to investigation, definition, and criticism. This idea is based on a broad conception of democracy that extends beyond the boundaries of the constitutional political system and an equally broad conception of aesthetics. Following Achim Geisenhanslüke, we understand aesthetics “both as a theory and as a reference to the lifeworld” (Geisenhanslüke 2024, 214). Thus, the aesthetics of democracy are not merely an accessory or ornament to mask the actual substance of collective self-government. Rather, the very core of democracy, whether as a political system or an everyday experience, consists of sensory-based, sensory-effective forms of the lifeworld.
The RTG program takes as its starting point the conceptual intersection of aesthetics and democracy, drawing on several foundational ideas in Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory and its expansions by Hannah Arendt. These ideas serve as significant starting points, not end points. By basing his aesthetic theory on aesthetic judgment, or judgment of taste, Kant addresses questions concerning aesthetic form, sensorial experience, conceptual processing, and ultimately, political community formation. As Moritz Baßler and Heinz Drügh explain, Kant describes aesthetic judgments as encompassing “sensory impressions, concepts, and feelings simultaneously” (Drügh and Baßler 2021, 10). Aesthetic judgment begins with sensory perception—visual, auditory, olfactory, or synesthetic—making it clear that aisthesis has an immediate physical dimension in the here and now. At its extreme, it even puts the body at stake. However, the aesthetic also consists “in the astonishing technique of combining the experience of being wholly ‘there’ in perception and feeling with a form of distancing provided by conceptual processing” (Drügh and Baßler 2021, 13). The conceptual work must remain provisional, approximate, and, at best, playful because sensory impressions and the feelings they evoke cannot be definitively captured in words. For Kant, however, aesthetic judgment does not remain subjective. Those who make aesthetic judgments seek validation from others. Aesthetic judgments, as Kant says, are “proposed” or “imputed to others.” In Stanley Cavell’s words (2005), they are “passionate utterances” whose claimed normativity cannot be imposed through conceptual logic and argumentation.
By merging Kant and Arendt, we recognize the immediate political function of aesthetic judgment because in imputing judgment to others through passionate speech and address, which factual judgments do not require, it creates a community of judgment. Echoing Kant, Arendt speaks of an “enlarged way of thinking” (Kant 1970, §40), which consists of adopting the perspective of others in aesthetic judgment. Imputing one’s own judgment to others requires, at the very least, imagining and assuming the sensorial position of the other. The act of aesthetic judgment affirms plurality, referring primarily to the diversity of perspectives and points of view. Additionally, making a judgment creates a “space of appearance”: a public sphere of speaking and acting within which a shared political world takes shape (Arendt 1958). Arendt writes: “Strictly speaking, politics is not so much about human beings as it is about the world that comes into being between them and endures beyond them” (2005, p. 175). Thus, aesthetic judgment grounded in a plurality of perspectives becomes “democratic judgment”—a “world-constituting practice of freedom that is rooted in plurality” (Zerilli xv). However, as Sophie Loidolt writes, the shared world of the space of appearance is necessary for the realization of democratic plurality itself (Loidolt 51). Plurality is never simply given. “Plurality is […] essentially something we have to take up and do” (Loidolt 2).
Plurality is also key to refuting the suspicion that this conception of a shared world is based on closed entities—aesthetic and political orders marked by fixed boundaries between inside and outside. When taken to its logical conclusion, Kant’s or Arendt’s account of sensus communis allows for a practice of plurality that transcends established common sense, becoming a dissensus communis—a dynamic reconfiguration of what is considered meaningful and intelligible, without abandoning reference to a shared world in favor of privatized, relativistic parallel worlds (Räber 84). While pluralistic judgment strives for agreement, it may also be understood as a medium of conflict, reconfiguring what falls within the scope of judgment and the categories employed. Following Juliane Rebentisch’s reading of Arendt, the objective of democratic conflict is “the defense of a human world” (Rebentisch 2022, 26). It is a “conflict over plurality,” in which the meaning of plurality itself becomes plural (Connolly).
At this central point of our approach, a political aesthetic informed by Kant and Arendt (which likewise features many connections to American pragmatism) dovetails with radical democratic theory. When we examine the specific aesthetic forms of democratic coexistence, we begin from the premise that conflict and dissensus are essential to democracy. Following Jacques Rancière (2010), practices of dissensus activate conflicts in a dual sense. The division of sense (dis-sensus) refers to both meaning and sensorial perception of the world. In this dual sense, dissensus is a dynamic force that “liquefies” aesthetic and social forms. The image of liquefying forms is based on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis (1984 [1975], 1994), who is often associated with radical democratic theory (Karalis, Marchart). Castoriadis’s conception of the interaction between the “instituting imaginary” and the “instituted society” provides a foundational model of social—especially democratic—emergence and creativity compatible with many theories and disciplines (Klooger, Iser, and Bieger/Saldívar/Voelz). In the tense relationship between the instituted and the instituting, form and transformation, all forms—social and aesthetic—appear fundamentally transformable. Conversely, the emergence of new forms requires recourse to pre-existing forms. Practices of engagement with the instituted can also be understood as practices of critique. However, the objectives and results of critical engagement with the instituted remain open for the time being. Thus, dissensus regarding the instituted society can lead not only to calls for reform but also to defending established forms—or even rejecting instituted social forms altogether (in our case, the institutions of democracy). Insofar as democracy remains open to critique, it must always integrate criticism that goes beyond its concrete form. Speaking of an aesthetics of democracy does not mean elevating permanent revolution to the core of democracy; rather, it means placing the permanent possibility of sensorial and political transformation at the center. In this sense, as Martin Saar notes, echoing Claude Lefort, “democracy is not anything [unambiguous], but rather something constituted by inherent contradiction and tension, grounded less in any ascertainable identity than in a void always requiring renewed determination—a contradiction or indeterminacy” (2018, 282).
To investigate the tension between form and transformation in the aesthetics of democracy, the RTG examines the viability of various relevant concepts currently discussed regarding the interrelation of democracy as a political system and social coexistence. These concepts include “way of life” (Dewey), “social democracy” (Frega), “public sphere” (Habermas et al.), “civil society” (Calhoun, 1992, 2010; Alexander et al.), “political forms of society” (Lefort), and “form of life” (Wittgenstein et al.). Our conception of democracy as a “form of coexistence” allows individual RTG doctoral projects to explore the advantages and disadvantages of various conceptual options in democratic theory discourse regarding their specific research focus.
The concept of “form of life,” which has recently garnered much attention in academic debates, currently offers a particularly wide array of point of departure for investigating the tension between dissensus and form in democratic systems. It appears in the work of thinkers in the Wittgensteinian tradition, such as Cavell, Zerilli, and Laugier (2016), as well as in contemporary pragmatism (Frega, Hetzel/Wille), critical theory (Honneth, Jaeggi, Loick, Celikates), and biopolitics, particularly in its intersection with radical democratic theory (Agamben 1994, 1998, 2013, 2014; R. Esposito, 2008; Foucault 2017; Fusco; Kishik; anticipated in Foucault 1963). Giorgio Agamben’s work is particularly relevant here, since to him “form of life” becomes the epitome of a “new politics” which overcomes the biopolitical division between bios and zoe—characterizing, as it does to him, all forms of sovereignty including democracy—and instead views existence as potentiality (Agamben 1994). Beyond political theory, the concept of “life form” or “form of life” is explored in relation to political—primarily democratic—issues in historiography (van Rahden), literary studies (Gailus, Glaser/Culler, Kohlmann), and film studies (Campbell), with the biopolitical use of the term dominating the latter two fields. Equally important to the RTG are debates on “form of life” in the biopolitical context which critically interrogate democracy in the Western, liberal form and explore alternative forms of sociality. These include researchers from postcolonial and decolonial studies (A. Allen, Mahmood, Mbembe 2019, Santos/Sobottka, Wynter), Black Studies (Hartman 2019, McKittrick 2021, Moten 2018, Weheliye), and the interdisciplinary field of posthumanism and the anthropocene (Braidotti, Henry et al., Grove, Haraway 1992, Nealon). Conversely, the concept of “life form” has recently been championed by defenders of liberalism (Lefebvre, Özmen).
This overview of current research on the concept of “form of life”/”life form” does not signal a conceptual choice for the RTG’s work. Rather, it illustrates the protean connections that may inform the RTG’s research question. This leaves open the possibility that competing concepts, such as “political forms of society,” “civil society,” and “social democracy,” may be more productive for analyses in individual doctoral projects. Our goal is to develop or refine concepts from political theory—including the aforementioned—to generate new approaches to researching the aesthetics of democracy with a focus on the negotiation of form and dissensus.
As we merge political and aesthetic theory, we also identify strands of aesthetic theory that are particularly relevant to the RTG. Building on the line of thought from Kant to Arendt to Rancière and Castoriadis, three established strands of aesthetic theory emerge as particularly relevant to our research approach: first, aesthetics as the social order of what is sensorially (aisthetically) perceptible (Rancière 2010, J. Frank 2010 and 2024, Panagia 2016, 2018; see also Arendt 1958); second, aesthetics in the sense of the interrelation of aesthetic forms, judgments, and experience (on form: Sklovskij, Tynjanov, Adorno 1958, Jameson, more recently Levinson, Altieri, Armstrong; on judgment: Kant, Arendt 1982, Zerilli, Baßler/Drügh, Ngai; on experience: Dewey, Shusterman, Seel); and third, aesthetics as the imaginative creation of what is not (yet) realized in society (Castoriadis 1984, Iser, Fluck, Peper).
Each of these three strands of aesthetic research may be linked to our initial point of reference based on the work of Kant and Arendt. However, since our approach sees practices of judgment and contestation as the basis of democracy as a sensorial form of coexistence, it is crucial to further clarify the relationship between these forms of coexistence and forms of government and state.
First, our perspective allows us to consider democracy—and the political more generally—beyond institutionalized public life and state institutions. According to Arendt, this would entail incorporating private aspects of life into the public sphere. Rahel Jaeggi, for example, notes: “If the space of appearance … is no longer equated with an institutional sphere of publicity … it becomes possible to integrate small, informal public spheres into the political domain and, conversely, allow effective public spheres to emerge from the private” (Jaeggi 1997, 155). However, this reveals a limitation of Arendt’s thinking, which Juliane Rebentisch describes as a “dichotomous logic” (Rebentisch 2022, 75). Arendt’s analyses center on binaries, such as “private” and “public,” “unfree” and “free,” “worldless” and “in the world,” but provide little understanding of the nuanced space in between these polar opposites. Going beyond Arendt, it is useful to speak not of differently scaled public spheres, but of different “modes” or ways of being democratic. These modes “transcend the restriction to certain institutional locations, procedures, and rules, as well as practices that make other and new forms of the democratic visible” (Hetzel/Wille 174). This illuminates forms of democracy that cut across established boundaries between the public and private, the political and pre-political, the deliberative and entertaining, and the rational and emotional.
One consequence of this approach is that the aesthetics of democratic coexistence may be examined in states without democratic constitutions. An example of this is the talent show Super Girl, which attracted enormous viewership on Chinese television in 2005. The finale of the singing competition, reminiscent of Germany’s Deutschland sucht den Superstar and American Idol, was watched by 400 million people who voted Li Yuchun the winner via text message, catapulting her to superstar status in China. In liberal-democratic, late-capitalist Europe and North America, voting on casting shows is seldom associated with democracy, but rather with the media representation of competitive markets (Ehrenberg, Pradtke, Reckwitz 2017). However, in anti-democratic China, a talent show vote accessible to all cell phone users was associated with “direct democracy” (Dong 84). Due to its “political implications,” Jingsi Wu describes the involvement of such a large “electorate” as a “provocative and revolutionary step” (53) that fostered an “aesthetic public sphere.” What was significant here was not only the voting process itself, but the possibility of altering the makeup of the media and social space of appearance through voting in the first place. Li Yuchun broke with the state-influenced norms of femininity and, with her decidedly tomboyish look, created a public representation of queer culture (Zhao). In doing so, she participated in using digital technologies and popular cultural media for identity performances free from state sanction (Yang 2023a). Within the framework of our research program, the television voting on Super Girl may be regarded as more than a mere simulation of political democracy. The approval manifested through the vote for Li Yuchun’s representation of queerness can be interpreted as an intervention in the visibility regime of the public sphere. In this sense, Super Girl may be seen as a phenomenon of aesthetic democracy in a non-democratic state. However, the “aesthetic public sphere” cannot be understood as isolated from the state. Here, too, democracy as a form of coexistence and as a political form are intertwined. Super Girl can only emerge as a form of democratic coexistence through a negative reference to anti-democratic state power.
On the other hand, the struggle for aesthetic and social forms of democracy is also directly related to the state. This is because the form of the state is highly changeable itself. Based on discussions of state theory in political science by Weber, Hall, Tilly, Leibfried, et al., we proceed from the notion that the state is not an unchangeable system of institutions, rules, functions, and procedures. On the one hand, states always exist in historically specific processes of transformation, influenced by international and national factors as well as prevailing state structures (Leibfried et al. 2). On the other hand, a state’s actions tend to extend beyond the scope of the state itself. Andreas Fahrmeir illustrates this with a historical case study of diplomatic relations in Europe after the Congress of Vienna. Diplomacy remained the domain of monarchs, whose dynastic networks were transnational. Rather than by a dichotomy between internal and external relations, the interstate system was characterized by “degrees of ‘foreignness’” (Fahrmeir et al. 2016, 135). Additionally, even under stable conditions, states are bureaucratic or legal entities whose boundaries are blurred. As market participants, they bleed into the private sector. Thus, the term “public sector” (“öffentliche Hand”) ambiguously encompasses all realms of the state, describing economic endeavors carried out by public bodies and enterprises with both public and private legal forms. The intertwining of the private and public spheres forms the basis for the recently identified “new delineation of private and public responsibilities” (Lessenich 17; see also Jessop). From one perspective, this may appear to be a retrenchment of the state; from another, it appears to be a expansion of state power into “institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics” for the administration of the population. Foucault describes this as “governmentality” (Foucault 2007, 108; also Saar 2011). So, the governmental state ultimately permeates private life itself. The more closely the state is examined, the more complex—and, in many ways, blurry—the picture becomes.
Because of its formal vagueness, the democratic state requires aesthetic forms as much as the body politic does. More precisely, the aesthetic shape of coexistence requires an aesthetic imagination of the state. Literary scholar Jacqueline Rose has proposed a productive way to capture the imaginary quality of the state by using the Freudian psychoanalytic phrase “states of fantasy.” Rose argues that fantasy is neither the antithesis of social reality nor a purely private matter: “[Fantasy] fuels, or at least plays its part in, the forging of the collective will” (Rose 3; see also Pease, Brown 2010). Laliv Melamed (2023a, 2023b) demonstrates in her analysis of state and civil society media practices in Israel and the Middle East that “states of fantasy” (the phrase flickers between “fantasy of the state” and “practices of fantasizing”) are expressed in the aesthetic realm. This is evident in military state secrets, for example. Intelligence and military operations require aesthetic representation (see also Michael Taussig’s concept of “public secrets”). These operations require self-produced “operative images,” which anticipate their subsequent use in media reports (Melamed 2023b; cf. Hediger 2018b). However, what becomes perceptible in the media does not create transparency and clarity. Instead, it creates a space of approximation that virtually demands the participation of the collective imagination. “[…] mediation unsettles the unicentric truth of the secret” (Melamed 2023b, 37). Timothy Melley opens up a similar field of research in his work on the “covert sphere” (2012, 2015). The operations of the U.S. security state, which are removed from public deliberation, do not preclude collective communication about the state. Rather, they shift it into a mode in which the aesthetic articulation of imagination and fantasy plays a central role. Popular and artistic media create fictions about the state that become part of public “knowledge” about it. Such artifacts may even influence state activity. These fictional representations of the national security state may function as propaganda or as a satirical or moral critique of the state (Melley 2015, 161; see also Voelz 2018 and M. Frank). This insight into the significance of fiction for imagining the state raises the research question: Which aesthetic forms, procedures, and genres enable state fantasies to become modes of sensorial negotiation of democratic coexistence?
The study of the aesthetics of democracy has been a relatively marginal topic, existing at the intersection of political theory, political philosophy, and individual subdisciplines in the humanities. In contrast, the RTG proposes a new, systematic approach. Through the cooperation of various humanities disciplines, it enables the interdisciplinary investigation of the aesthetic dimensions of democratic coexistence. This approach departs from the still-dominant preconception, following Walter Benjamin, that the aestheticization of politics is fundamentally anti-democratic. Instead, the RTG aligns more closely with an alternative research tradition. According to this tradition, the various dimensions of the aesthetic are not indicators of the “other” or the decline of democracy but are elemental to it (Rebentisch 2012; Carnevali; Menke; Baßler/Drügh; Früchtl; Lefort). A key distinguishing feature of the RTG is its attempt systematically to decode democratic coexistence with respect to aesthetics and form—that is, in relation to aesthetic orders, action, objects, and experience.
Therefore, the program is also innovative in debates concerning the crisis in liberal democracies, a topic that has dominated public discourse in recent years. Against the backdrop of an analysis of democratic coexistence for which the concept of form is central, democratic crisis phenomena may be understood as ambivalent democratization phenomena (see Manow). These democratization dynamics often lead to tipping points at which an originally democratizing movement can become anti-democratic and illiberal in its anti-institutional impulse. To understand these ambiguities more deeply, researching the aesthetics of democracy is a very promising endeavor because the tension between democratization and de-democratization arises in part from the discomfort with representation among those who should be (but are not) represented. This creates connections to cultural and media sociological strands of populism research (Moffitt, Ostiguy, Voelz/Freischlager; critical in part: Müller). From this perspective, populism and other democratic crises—such as conspiracy theories, anti-elitism, and polarization—do not simply appear as external threats to democracy. Rather, they can also be interpreted as expressions of democratic coexistence itself.
Gender and diversity are important aspects of the RTG as the problem of democracy, examined here using aesthetic categories, is partly a question of coexistence between unequal and different people (Young, 1990). Although democracy’s self-image is based on the equality of all its members, differences remain pertinent because democracy is a space where diverse individuals encounter one another and must negotiate shared rules of coexistence. This is democracy’s open and undetermined form, which we aim to describe in more detail. However, many factual inequalities and instances of unequal treatment—which frame this negotiation or render it impossible—shape conceptions of the ideal or normal political subject, including certain real, attributed, or imagined identities and excluding others (Benhabib 1996).
Feminist democratic theory and critique have long highlighted these systemic exclusions in the history of ideas and in systematic terms (Brown 1988; Pateman 1988; Philipps 2021). The ideal of “the citizen” in democracy has often been coded as male (Sauer 2021). Similarly, queer theory has expanded this critique, as norms of citizenship often intersect with biopolitical notions of reproduction and family morality (Bersani 1987; Quaestio 2000; Edelman 2004). The extent to which processes of racialization, as well as racialized “othering,” mold conceptions of democratic community has also been analyzed in depth (Mills 1997; Hanchard 2018; Shelby 2018). Historically, democracies have undeniably been tied to and have promoted nation-state projects (Güven 2015). However, where nation-states are founded on exclusionary structures, this is in tension with the universal and cosmopolitan claims implicit in the very idea of democracy itself.
The RTG’s research program addresses the contradictions between the proclaimed universality of democracy and the exclusions that are factually reproduced by applying the critical resources mentioned above from feminist political theory, critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and Black studies. To avoid uncritically engaging with the supposedly unmarked concept of “democracy,” the RTG incorporates a reflection on lines of inclusion and discrimination at the research level, in the overall theoretical framework, and in the individual dissertation projects. The RTG also reflects on its own forms of representation. This includes raising awareness of the social, cultural, and other backgrounds that are assumed and considered normative in research processes and of which materials and discussion partners are considered authoritative and exemplary. The RTG is also committed to diversity-sensitive and non-discriminatory forms of speech, representation, and interaction.