In both public discourse and academic scholarship, democracy is typically understood as a form of government: a set of institutions and procedures through which political interests are formed, articulated, and represented. The Research Training Group “Aesthetics of Democracy,” by contrast, asks what it means to conceive of democracy not only as an institutional order but as a lived form of collective coexistence. This shift directs attention to modes of association that unfold below the level of the state and, in this sense, need not be confined to “actually existing democracies.” Such forms may emerge in art and culture, but also in clubs, associations, or fleeting encounters in public space.
The group’s guiding hypothesis understands democracy as an open, reflexive mode of living together, shaped by ongoing public contestation over how it ought to be organized. The negotiation of its form is itself its form. In aesthetic terms, this means that democracy is something that can be experienced—sensuously as well as conceptually—while at the same time being marked by struggles over the very shaping of the sensible. At the heart of this hypothesis lies an internal tension: between institution and instituting, between the stabilizing force of established forms that provide continuity and orientation, and the dynamic force of their continual renegotiation and transformation. This observation leads to the overarching question of the Research Training Group: how can the tension between form and re-formation be specified in relation to particular objects of study, and what sensuously perceptible forms does this tension itself assume?
Our premise is that different forms of democratic association are by no means defined by harmony alone. Rather, they are consistently marked by conflict, disagreement, and an irreducible plurality of competing perspectives. The everyday practices and experiences of living together—whether in consensus or in conflict—form the basis for the stability, revitalization, and ongoing transformation of democratic life. Questions about the future viability and resilience of democracy, including beyond its current and by no means uniform institutional configurations, therefore require a more precise understanding of the forms of democratic coexistence.
An understanding of democracy not only as a political system, but as a form of coexistence can draw on a rich tradition within political philosophy and theory. It goes back to diverse Enlightenment thinkers from the founding period of modern democracies like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Immanuel Kant and was developed further in multifaceted ways in the nineteenth century—by G.W.F. Hegel, Alexis de Tocqueville, and J.S. Mill, among others. As different as these thinkers were, in one way or another they all reflect on the significance of customs, rituals, and forms of sociability for the structure of democracies. In the twentieth century, various schools of thought expanded on the connection between form of government and form of coexistence in ways that still resonate today. These include American pragmatism, which understands democracy as a “way of life”; deliberative democratic theory, which understands democracy not only as a form of state but as a form of public, rational deliberation and negotiation; ordinary language philosophy inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein, which conceives of democracy as a “form of life” grounded in shared language games, everyday practices, and background convictions. Also notable in this context is radical democratic theory, which locates the genuinely political—and thus the democratic—in the eventful rupture of established procedures and institutions, and for which the democratic, therefore, lies beyond routinized politics: in moments of negativity, dissent, and disruption, which have no fixed place and can potentially manifest anywhere in the lifeworld.
If democracy is understood as such a comprehensive context of collective life—whether as a “way of life,” “form of life,” “political form of society” (Lefort), or “social democracy” (Frega)—it raises a task that points beyond the boundaries of political theory and asks for the contribution of other disciplines. For if we take seriously the idea of the form of coexistence, then the relevant concept of form and the appearance of social forms must be examined. It is the disciplines of the humanities, with their long tradition of formal and aesthetic analysis, that have developed the expertise to study the social as aesthetic forms. Besides social philosophy and political theory, the RTG therefore includes disciplines that have so far been located at the fringes of democracy research, but can contribute to the sensorial, aesthetic, and experiential dimension: literary studies, art history, film and media studies, and history.
An analysis of the often conflictual interplay of the perceptible forms of sociality makes democracy open to description, investigation, and critique. Underpinning this idea is not only a broad concept of democracy, which reaches beyond the confines of the constituted political system, but also an equally broad concept of aesthetics. In the words of Achim Geisenhanslüke, we understand aesthetics “both as a theory and as a reference to the lifeworld.” In our approach, the aesthetics of democracy is by no means a mere accessory or ornament masking the actual substance of collective self-government. Rather, the very core of democracy—whether as a political system or as everyday experience—consists of sensorially constituted, sensorially effective forms of the lifeworld.