spectivesonthese complicateddynamics and restore the aesthetic to its rightful
place asakey category of cultural history and, by extension, cultural studies.
Over the past decades, the concept of culture has been investedwith almostmag-
ical powers–especiallyasregards the contest over meaning within the existing
structures of power and domination and theavailable strategies of resistance to
hegemony. The analysis of culturehas becomeaprivileged sitefor studying the
negotiation of identitiesand assessing their ongoing re-articulation in the lan-
guageofintersectionality,positionality,and performativity.Inthe process, sym-
bolic practices have become the primary site for explaining–indeed, for estab-
lishing–social and political contests. Meanwhile, aesthetic questions have been
increasinglymarginalized, promptingIsobelArmstrongtospeak polemicallyof
an anti-aesthetic in culturalstudies. The reduction of theto amere function of
bourgeois ideology, in her view,has resulted in the abandonment of the critical
potential of the aesthetic, of beauty and the sublime,to traditionalsensibilities
and conservativereadings.⁹Forthat reason, the questions posed by MichaelBér-
ube,“Can politicallymotivated criticism have anything interesting to sayabout
theformof cultural forms?What is therole of aesthetic evaluation in such criti-
cism?[...]Can an understanding of the aestheticaugment an understanding of
social movements, or is one necessarilyadistraction from the others?,”are an-
swered here with an emphatic“yes.”¹⁰
In fact,onlyserious engagement with aesthetic questions in the form of
symptomatic readings provides critical accesstothe collective imaginaries pro-
duced at the intersection of socialism, classsociety,and workers’movement.The
eminent German historian GeorgeMossewas one of the first to use symbolic
practices to examine the parallel discourses of communitarianism and national-
ism and highlight theiremotional communalities even in the case of opposing
political ideologies.¹¹Continuing these lines of inquiry,aesthetic categories
See Isobel Armstrong,TheRadicalAesthetic(Malden: Blackwell,2000), 1–23,plusher very
critical responseto Terry Eagleton’sTheIdeology of theAestheticin chapter1. On the interlocking
modalities of the aesthetic, the political, and the popular,see IreneKacandes,“GermanCultural
Studies:What Is at Stake?”AUser’sGuide to German Cultural Studies,ed. IreneKacandes,Scott
D. Denham, andJonathan Petropoulos(Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1997), 3–28.
Foravery different argument (fromasociologist’sperspective)about the aesthetic politics of
social movements,see Kenneth H.Tucker,Workers of theWorldEnjoy!Aesthetic Politics fromRev-
olutionarySyndicalism to theGlobalJusticeMovement(Philadelphia:Temple University Press,
2010).
MichaelBérubé, Introduction,TheAesthetics of Cultural Studies(London: Blackwell,2005),
- In the same anthology,see RitaFelski,“The Role ofAesthetics inCultural Studies,” 28 – 43.
See George L. Mosse,The Nationalization of theMasses:Political Symbolism andMass Move-
ments in Germany from the NapoleonicWars to the ThirdReich(NewYork: HowardFerting,2001).
18 Introduction