The Aesthetics of Democracy: Cognitive Mapping of Mind and Culture.

The mind—the centre of reflection and decision-making in every individual—is decisive for the formation of collective will that we associate with legitimate democratic governance and socially transformative action in modern societies. A democratic society is one in which, ideally, the citizens collectively govern themselves—they give the laws to themselves and control their own history, which, among other things, requires communication, deliberation, the achievement of some consensus, as well as effective action. Democratic freedom (political autonomy) exists when the laws that bind citizens are the product of their will in accordance with insights they have acquired intersubjectively. Such 'intersubjective' communication, however, ought to refer not just to discursive discussion, which is what it means in most of the deliberative democracy literature, but also to aesthetic communication, which can take a great many forms that influence and entwine with deliberation. The theory of democracy ideally clarifies the conditions under which democratic freedom obtains. Hence a full understanding of cognition will aid the theory of democracy by clarifying the ways people comprehend, come to understandings with one another, and embody the relationship between knowledge and social action. It is my contention that the mind must be understood as a social not an individual phenomenon that relies on communicative interactions of significant complexity along multiple axes of mind and body, body and environment, as well as that of the intersubjective relations of mind and other minds that are the products of society and politics. It is precisely because the processes of the mind occur in communicative (i.e., cultural and political) contexts and are not simply the product of physiological processes in the brain or the nervous system that the study of cognition is necessarily the study of social cognition (or socio-political cognition). I want to argue that as a result an 'aesthetics of democracy' is required for confluence with deliberation in the public sphere.This paper seeks to pose a set of questions that I consider important for such an aesthetics of democracy but which demand further research. Nevertheless, I wish to suggest some tentative responses to these questions in what follows. Specifically, along with Jameson, I wish to affirm the distinctiveness of postmodern consumer culture but also the dialectic still required by contemporary cultural politics.I begin with a reflection on the ideas of communicative freedom and communicative power by way of a critique of the cognitive theory of mass art. Next I consider the idea of social cognition in recent cognitive science. I would like to indicate how marxiological critical theory is consistent with recent social cognition research and how the changes in postmodern media culture demonstrate this affinity. I conclude with a consideration of the confluence of politics and cognition via a contemporary example that demonstrates the dialectic of an aesthetics of democracy in music technology in the public sphere. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]