Aesthetics and power intrinsically intertwined. Aesthetics is a sensation of love for beauty in all the diversity of it’s possible forms. These sensations are neither linear nor limited to some number of dimensions, their forms and realisation is subject of constant flux.
Power, ultimately, is also a sensation. Just like definition of the complex notion of ‘love’, ‘power’ is simplified and reduced in common understanding (in the Western-led Christian/Enlightenment discourse) to something connected with political authority. In Ancient Greece, writers were describing at least six different types of ‘love’. ‘Aesthetics’ and ‘power’ are bridged via multiplicity and complexity of notion of ‘love’.
Theories of ‘power’ nowadays depart in their classification of types of power from several bases: means of it’s execution, motivation in obtaining it by the subject, type of impact it causes on the objects. Bertram Raven spoke of legitimate, legal, referent and expert powers from the bases of source, communication/execution and impact. Referent power is defined by loyalty, led by charisma, consequently providing basis for the discourses of nationalism, patriotism, sense of attachment to personas, institutions, organisations and even products in marketing. In Raven’s words - “Referent power, as an aspect of personal power, becomes particularly important as organizational leadership… is increasingly about collaboration and influence rather than command and control.”
However referent power is multifaceted and composed of the system of milieus*, or micro-discourses, that define societal perceptions and emotional response to power narratives. Irrational decisions, that confuse economists like Vilfredo Pareto and make them turn to sociology later in their careers, are masked by a certain types of “imposed quasi-rational logical assessments”, in politics or marketing are dictated by the matrixes of milieus. Aesthetics and process of aestheticisation of milieus on micro and meta levels allows to legitimate those ‘quasi-rational’ matrixes and embed them of unconscious level into the everyday life.
Milieus are multidimensional systems of interconnected and symbiotic referent powers. It is an adjustable level of power analysis that incorporates individuals and institutions together with their environment as a population controlled in concert with its already given, a priori surroundings: a milieu. Milieus as designed in form of fictional construct are legitimised through the means of appropriation and contextualisation of referent power networks. Milieus can only be contextualised and appropriated through understandable language of signs, that legitimises it and converts it into “reality”.
Milieus create frames of manipulation and reality production, that are beneficial for certain groups. Without proper aestheticisation, milieus are not sustainable - ‘soft power’ of legitimisation of milieus is contemporary art, design, visuality of different modes. Narration is another tool: media plays crucial role in their fundamentalisation. But importance of visuality is growing now because of high saturation of the information and constant acceleration, which leads to shortening attention span, which becomes more scarce and dispersed. In order to fundamentalise or to critically challenge fundamentalisation of certain milieus, it is necessary to sustain aesthetic picture and be innovative at all times. Contemporary, post-conceptual art is a laboratory for testing out new aesthetic strategies, that in their expansion affect the way reality perceived, knitted, legitimised, communicated, enforced.
Risk perception depends on how solidly the network of milieus is perceived. When milieus are deconstructed people are getting lost - and there have to be offered another framework of milieus, as they, like Moirai, are forming the reality itself. Vision of ‘desired future’ is in the centre of the discussion - more this ‘desired’ picture articulated, easier it’s direct people towards evolvement, however illusory, of its implementation. Forming this pictorial idea of ‘desired future’ is an extension and further development of already existing milieus, mapping and designing its further evolution.
Referent power is distributed and aestheticised unevenly at all times, creating a hierarchy of morality, ethics, social stratification, etc. Milieu matrixes are the actual basis of power hierarchies and inherent source of inequality. Exchange inside their borders is performed through power currencies, which are (as well as the hierarchies themselves), defined by the quality of communication and legitimation, provided by aesthetics.
The importance of critical theory in providing the apparatus for dissecting through power milieus is therefore more than paramount.
*…To summarize all this, let’s say that the sovereign capitalizes on a territory, raising the major problem of the seat of government, whereas discipline structures a space and addresses the essential problem of a hierarchical and functional distribution of elements, and security will try to plan a milieu in terms of events or series of events or possible elements, of series that will have to be regulated within a multivalent and transform able framework. The specific space of security refers then to a series of possible events; it refers to the temporal and the uncertain, which have to be inserted within a given space. The space in which a series of uncertain elements unfold is, I think, roughly what one can call the milieu… It is therefore the medium of an action and the element in which it circulates. It is therefore the problem of circulation and causality that is at stake in this notion of the milieu… The apparatuses of security work, fabricate, organize, and plan a milieu even before the notion was formed and isolated. The milieu, then, will be that in which circulation is carried out. The milieu is a set of natural givens – rivers, marshes, hills – and a set of artificial givens – an agglomeration of individuals, of houses, etcetera. The milieu is a certain number of combined, overall effects bearing on all who live in it. It is an element in which a circular link is produced between effects and causes, since an effect from one point of view will be the cause of another… Finally, the milieu appears as a field of intervention in which, instead of affecting individuals as a set of legal subjects capable of voluntary actions – which would be the case of the sovereign – and instead of affecting them as a multiplicity of organisms, of bodies capable of performances, and of required performances – as in discipline – one tries to affect, precisely, a population. I mean a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality in which they live. What one tries to reach through this milieu, is precisely the conjunction of a series of events produced by these individuals, populations, and groups, and quasi natural events which occur around them. - Foucault, Security Territory Population: 11 January 1978, p.20-21