The Politics of Perception and the Aesthetics of Social Change

Connecting Hegelian aesthetics with contemporary cultural politics, Jason Miller argues that both the aesthetic and political value of art are found in the reflexive self-awareness that it enables. The significance of art in modern life is that it shows us both the particular element in humanity as well as the human element in particularity.

Jason Miller is professor of philosophy at Warren Wilson College.

Fred Evans, author of Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy: An Essay in Political Aesthetics:
Jason Miller's topic is important and timely: it is clearly important that art helps reveal our identities to each other so that we can obtain self-determination, gain an understanding of our common humanity, and apprehend each other's worth. His main contribution consists in doing what he feels contemporary aesthetic and political theory have failed to show sufficiently: to make us conscious of how art uses aesthetic representation to gain recognition and greater power for the cultural and individual identity of the marginalized.

Grant Kester, author of The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context:
Jason Miller's The Politics of Perception and the Aesthetics of Social Change makes a decisive contribution to current debates in both contemporary philosophy and art theory regarding the interconnection between aesthetic and political experience. In particular, he challenges the often-static notions of aesthetic autonomy that have been associated with the discourse of the neo-avant-garde over the past three decades. Instead of an aesthetic paradigm predicated on a hierarchical division between art and popular culture, and between the artist and public, Miller deftly explores the complex points of dialogical interconnection between them through a self-reflective, materialist account of the nature of identity inspired by Hegel's aesthetics. His book demonstrates the essential role that art, and culture more generally, can play in re-thinking the crucial relationship between the self and the other, and the one and the many. It is sure to be of interest to readers across a broad range of disciplines, especially contemporary art history and theory.

Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Swarthmore College:
By expressing human subjectivity in its distributed shapes, art can work both to bind us together in our differences and to help us to embrace our concrete individualities. Jason Miller's compelling account of the powers of art is vitally important for healthy democratic and personal life in contentious and uncertain times.

Paul C. Taylor, W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies, Vanderbilt University:
Reaching from Kara Walker to Kant, from Public Enemy to William Pope.L, this engagement with the contemporary cultural turn could not be timelier. This book is indispensable for anyone interested in the way representation, recognition, identity, and agency both resonate and intertwine in art and politics. What a valuable contribution!