Becoming-Democratic: Aesthetic Practices and Democratic Subjectivity in Radical Democratic Responses to Authoritarianism

The threat to democratic values by a rising authoritarianism call fors renewed democratic responses that
reinforce plurality and diversity. My project undertakes this task by identifying the centrality of aesthetics
- defined as a distinct sensual-experiential mode of knowledge and perception - to democratic politics,
arguing that aesthetics can activate pluralising/diversifying energies in democracy.
Progressing in three stages, the project explores the nature of aesthetic experience, its role in processes
of constituting or forming a democratic self, and the normative and critical significance of this
relationship in formulating democratic responses to authoritarianism. Critically analysing theories of
radical democracy, I argue that 'aesthetic practices' (practices embodying a cultivated aesthetic
sensibility) embodied in democratic protests, public art and social movements, enable encounters with
multiplicity and plurality that are the wellspring of democratic self-formation/subjectivity - what I call
processes of 'becoming-democratic'. It is these processes that constitute a democratic response to
authoritarian tendencies threatening democratic politics.
The project thus contributes to three areas of democracy studies:
1. Democratic politics: identifying practices embodied in public art, democratic protests, and social
movements that enable experiences of plurality, and thereby help democratic politics respond more
effectively to authoritarian homogenisation.
2. Democratic theory: deepening theorisations of subjectivity in post-foundational democratic theory by
identifying an experiential moment as the source of pluralising energies in democracy.
3. Democracy and aesthetics: strengthening the relation of aesthetics to democracy by showing how
activating democratic possibilities necessitates an aesthetic theorising.