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Transformations in our conceptions of space, time, and rationality bring to the fore and reinforce aesthetic forms of sociopolitical relations. In her seminal treaty on justice and differences, Iris Marion Young (1990) foresaw the importance of the ‘normative ideal of city life’. Against the idealization of community (anti‐urban) life, Young advances ‘city life’ as what we should valorize. ‘City life’, she writes, ‘instantiates difference as the erotic, in the wide sense of an attraction to the other, the pleasure and excitement of being drawn out of one’s secure routine to encounter the novel, strange, and surprising’ (Young 1990, p. 266). She normatively prioritizes eroticism against community recognition or the protective feeling of membership. Eroticism comes close to what we call acting aesthetically. ‘The erotic meaning of the city’, she pursues, ‘arises from its social and spatial inexhaustibility [what we have called a networked conception of space]. A place of many places, the city folds over on itself in so many layers and relationships that it is incomprehensible’ (Young 1990, p. 267). Young is identifying here the need to act aesthetically, to trust our senses and not only our rational and cognitive capacities to name and categorize the world.

Our engagement with the notion of aesthetics builds on various traditions of thought which foreground a pre‐Kantian conception of aesthetics: aesthetics not as a theory of the arts or of taste, but as the realm of sensory experience and perception. ‘Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body’, writes Terry Eagleton (1990, p. 13) in his study on the birth and importance of the category of the aesthetics in Modern thought. He reminds us that ‘[i]n its original formulation by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, the term refers not in the first place to art, but, as the Greek aisthesis would suggest, to the whole region of human perception and sensation, in contrast to the more rarefied domain of conceptual thought’ (Eagleton 1990, p. 13). If, by the nineteenth century, Western philosophical engagements with aesthetics had become increasingly focused on the fine arts, particularly within the Anglo‐American tradition (Saito 2019), philosophers interested in investigating the aesthetic experience of the world beyond the artworld began to challenge these trajectories and their limited scope. This led to the development of the fields of environmental aesthetics and everyday aesthetics in the second half of the century (Carlson 2019; Saito 2019). However, the rise of modern European metropolises also attracted the attention of philosophers and sociologists who sought to understand an aesthetics of urban modernity, as experienced particularly in Berlin and Paris (Thibaud 2010).

We need to engage with these various traditions of thought to explore how contemporary urban cultures are transforming the political process. Analyses of the sensible experience of urbanites and the transformation of the structure of this experience have influenced urban thought for over a century. Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer are well known for their analyses of the sensible culture of the modern city and the significance they put on microscopic scenes, gestures, or experiences of everyday life in order to capture the aesthetic differences and effects of the urban experience in modern European cities (Thibaud 2010).

Because of global urbanization processes, the urban experience is no longer spatially and temporarily bounded to the city. In The Politics of the Encounter, Andy Merrifield (2013, p. xvii) provocatively suggests foregoing the concept of the ‘city’; in his own words, ‘to give up the ghost of thinking in terms of absolutes – of entities with borders and clear demarcations between what’s inside and what’s outside’ and instead embrace ‘the urban process as a form that is formlessly open‐ended’ (Merrifield 2013, p. xviii). Yet, as we explore it here, the urban process remains in important ways shaped by situated aesthetic experiences and political acts that accumulate in given urban environments (see also Boudreau 2017).

To explore the significance of the ontological shifts from a world of nations‐states to a world of cities, as described earlier, epistemological perspectives from the field of environmental aesthetics are useful. Rather than focusing on the aesthetic appreciation of mute and passive objects, this tradition of thought has been centred on the aesthetic experience and appreciation of any kind of everyday life situation (routinized or breaking from the perceptions associated with the routine) and any kind of environment, including urban environments.

Arnold Berleant is a New York‐born philosopher who became a prominent figure in this field, laying the groundwork of the theory of aesthetic engagement (Carlson 2019). Foundational to this theory, by contrast to the posture of a detached and contemplative observer, is a continuity of perceptual engagement in the environment; the sensuous and sensate body’s full immersion ‘in a single intraconnected realm’ inhabited by ‘humans and all other things’ affecting and affected by everyone and everything (Berleant 1992, p. 9). It rejects the notion of environment as a container or an object that exists independently or externally to the perceiving subject. ‘There is no outward view, no distant scene. There are no surroundings separate from my presence in that place. There is rather a full awareness focused on the immediacy of the present situation, an engaged condition that encompasses richly inclusive perceptions and meanings’, writes Berleant (1992, p. 34). It foregrounds an ontology of the relation and the milieu rather than an ontology of the object (Thibaud 2010, p. 11).

The development of environmental aesthetics has been closely related to the environmental movement as it emerged in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Two rather distinct orientations have crystallised within the field over the years: cognitive and noncognitive. The former is centred on the importance of having ‘knowledge of what something is, what it is like, and why it is as it is’ (Carlson 2019) in order to appreciate its aesthetic dimensions and qualities (e.g. the earwigs in Chapter 4). The latter is focused on the realm of precognitive sensations and inclinations, including the imagination, which arguably participate in shaping aesthetic experience and informing aesthetic appreciation. The aesthetic of engagement is most closely associated with this noncognitive orientation (Thibaud 2010; Carlson 2019).

While the field has led to the development of a significant body of research on the aesthetic experience and appreciation of urban environments, the intellectual and academic projects sustained through this scholarship have in many cases remained attached to the normative political goal of distinguishing how environments lead to or could increase human well‐being and quality of life (Thibaud 2010). An implicit normativity orients this engagement with aesthetics. This is not our primary focus here.

Nonetheless, as part of a broader turn to affect in geography and urban studies, this field has opened theoretical perspectives by which to interrogate, beyond representational models of signification, the role of sensations, perceptions, feelings, and meanings as they are shaped by and give shape to routines of our everyday lives and urban experiences.

In this book, we explore more specifically the significance of diverse aesthetic relations and political forms influenced by the contemporary conditions of urbanity, by various urban political orders (pertaining to substantially different youth urban worlds), and by the aesthetic feel of certain places in an interconnected yet specific urban environment: Montreal. In this endeavour, we closely examine the workings and political effects of two precognitive modalities of aesthetics engagement and political action that have not received enough attention in academic scholarship: seduction and attraction.

Let us for a moment return to Young’s account of eroticism. Young (1990) emphasizes people’s relation to the spaces, times, and peoples of the city. In short, although she does not use these terms, she acknowledges that agency is distributed among human and other‐than‐human actors. The problem with the ideal of community life, she insists, is that it rests on the need for recognition. City life, in contrast, thrives on attraction to differences, not the search for recognition. Speaking of other‐than‐human forces, Stengers (2005, cited in de la Cadena 2010, p. 352) notes that ‘the political arena is peopled with shadows of that which does not have a political voice’. She is referring here to material forces, such as mountains and forests – and, inspired by Young, we could add specifically appealing buildings, objects, markets, and so on. City life is characterized by attraction to such material and human forces. Connolly (2011) speaks of the ‘proto‐agency’ of non‐human actors which disrupts our sense of perception through unexpected vibrations. When we allow proto‐agents to disturb our sense of perception (when, to use de la Cadena’s words, we let earth‐beings have a political voice), we distribute agency outside the sovereign, rational individual. In other words, in a world of cities, we need to zoom in on precognitive encounters between bodies, material artefacts, and spaces as elements of the political process. These encounters involve finesse, attuning, fascination, attraction, magnetism, seduction.

Conceiving of political action through a distributive sense of agency can challenge the democratic notion of personal responsibility. If agency is distributed, how can we attribute the effects of action to someone? In order to untie this conundrum, we follow Krause (2011, p. 301) in defining agency as ‘the affirmation of one’s subjective existence through concrete action in the world’. Whatever we do, intentionally or not, it has an effect in the world. For example, we might unintentionally look at a group of Black youths gathered at a subway station in the Saint‐Michel neighbourhood with disgust or fear, and it would have an effect on the individuals receiving this gaze. Such political gesture may not be rationally and strategically planned as a racist act, but it has an effect. We are responsible for our gesture, even if it was not cognitively planned. The embodied political gesture of looking with disgust or fear at other bodies in this specific moment and place produces effects on those bodies and on the signification of that place. In short, distributive agency, in the sense of analytically incorporating all forces at play in political action, from proto‐agents and earth‐beings to reflexive individuals, does not mean stripping away political obligations and responsibility for one’s involvement in the situation, intentional or not.

A critical attention to the political effects of precognitive and distributive aesthetic modalities of political action therefore also requires that we understand aesthetics not only as a domain of sensations, but also as a socially, culturally constructed domain of judgement. Perceptions (skin colours, body shapes, greens coming out of concrete) and the values ascribed to them (what is considered beautiful, disgusting, fearful, etc.) are influenced by ideologies and social education, and in turn effectively ‘partition the sensible’, as Jacques Rancière (2000) would say. Rancière’s understanding of the distribution of the sensible (le partage du sensible) has ‘in recent years become de rigueur in Anglophone political theoretical mobilizations of the relationships between aesthetics and politics’ (Jazeel and Mookherjee 2015, p. 354; see also Shapiro 2010; Dikeç 2015).

In English, we must read ‘distribution’ with the double meaning that the French word partage implies; that is, as distribution and/or partaking. For Rancière, the political consists of aesthetic practice insofar as ‘it sets up scenes of dissensus’ whereby the excluded, unseen, or those who don’t have a recognized (legitimized) political voice make a sensible appearance which disrupts the democratic sensorium by exposing the polemical distribution of its constituents and the modalities of their perception and partaking in what is to be held in common (Rancière 2000; Vihalem 2018, p. 6). In Rancière’s words (2000, p. 24; our translation), the relationship between aesthetics and politics is situated at the level of this ‘sensory cutting of parts of the common of a community, the forms of its visibility and its arrangement’.⁶ As the philosophy scholar Margus Vihalem (2018, p. 7) remarks, ‘Rancièrian aesthetics, especially due to its political implications, partly moves away from Kantian aesthetics, although it preserves and further develops the fundamental intuition of Kantian aesthetics, namely that the aesthetic is what pertains to “a priori forms of sensibility”’. This approach fruitfully suggests that the distribution of the sensible operates out of and through a certain regime of perceptibility which assigns meanings, value, place, parts, temporalities to sensations in a social democratic order. Yet, by focusing on moments of political dissensus or interventions that disrupt the polemical order of the distribution of the sensible, Rancière does not consider the empirical difficulty in identifying what Jazeel and Mookherjee (2015, p. 355) want to call ‘genuinely political interventions from what we might otherwise regard as anodyne postpolitical re‐orchestrations of the social order’ (see also Papastergiadis 2014).

We turn to Panagia (2009) to broaden our understanding of aesthetic political action that does not necessarily involve instant disruptions in the distribution of the sensible, but that nonetheless creates sensory lifeworlds affecting what is available to be sensed (in terms of both sensations and meanings) in urban youth worlds. Panagia’s reflection on the politics of sensation is useful here because it enables us to pause in the ‘experience of sensation that arises from the impact of an appearance’ (Panagia 2009, p. 187), which, in his words, disfigures or disarticulates the conditions of perceptibility that would make recognition possible. ‘Rather than recognition’, writes Panagia, ‘I suggest that the emergence of a political appearance requires an act of admission: an appearance advenes upon us, and we admit to it. An act of recognition might follow from the durational intensity of advenience but it does not follow causally in that there is no necessary condition that makes it so that it must (or even can) recognize any or all appearance’ (Panagia 2009, p. 151; our emphasis).

In order to understand this conception of aesthetic politics, we need to look at both how action unfolds and its effects. We find it useful to distinguish between political action and political gestures. Political gestures involve the body in aesthetic ways (marching in a demonstration, screaming to a police officer, going to a punk concert) but may not necessarily register attention in their unfolding, or be performed with an intent to register attention. As Black studies and Black feminist theorists show, some forms of aesthetic gestures do not necessarily unfold as interventions into the sensorium of a dominant order, seeking to disrupt structures that determine regimes of perceptibility. For instance, Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins (1998, p. 48) calls attentions to speech acts of Black women ‘breaking silence’ by ‘giving testimonials that often disrupt public truths about them’ from the authority of their own lived experiences. But, as she remarks, ‘[a] second type of knowledge exists, the collective secret knowledge generated by groups on either side of power that are shared in private when the other side’s surveillance seems absent’ (Collins 1998, p. 48). Political gestures in this context, conversations shared around the kitchen table or in student union offices for example, are not performed to register attention. ‘For oppressed groups, such knowledge typically remains “hidden” because revealing it weakens its purpose of assisting those groups in dealing with oppression’, writes Collins (1998, p. 49).

Political acts are creative moments that break from the routine and, through their unfolding, intrinsically legitimate the actor. An ‘act’ is not a reaction to a situation, but the creation of an actor who can legitimately be present in a situation they participate in creating. In turn, a situation is a moment and space where actors share a common sense of what is happening; they can sufficiently read what is happening to be able to engage in the interactions unfolding. Millions of banal situations unfold in our urban lives. A situation can become a political act when we make political gestures and give special meaning to what is happening. Take the following situation at the Saint‐Michel subway station. A police officer approaches a group of youngsters hanging out near the entrance gate. He asks them to move and disperse. The group poses a political gesture by asserting the presence of their bodies there. They negotiate with the police officer. This creates a situation they can identify, unlike routine or banal instances of urban interactions, and thus they constitute themselves as actors. This is a political act. The police officer smiles, stays a little while with them, and then continues his route. The group stays a little more time and then leaves. Had they not asserted their embodied presence to the police officer, this would not have been a situation that broke from routine. It would not have been a political act. The accumulation of such political acts in our everyday lives and their transformation into a politicized narrative is what we call political action.⁷

In other words, what matters in the exercise of power is our experience of its effects. In order to capture these effects, Allen (2003) distinguishes between different modalities of power, each with their own relational peculiarities. Domination is an instrumental form of power relation exercised at someone else’s expense; it restricts choice and closes down possibilities. Authority is also an instrumental power relation, but it does not involve the imposition of a form of conduct leading to submission. Coercion directly involves the threat of force to exact compliance, whereas manipulation implies the concealment of intent. Seduction, for Allen, is a modality of power relation that arouses specific desires by taking advantage of existing attitudes and expectations. Thus, it is the modality most relevant to aesthetic political relations. Because its effects are unpredictable, it is the opposite of domination. Seduction can be refused. It works through suggestion and enticement rather than prescription. If someone is not attracted to seducing acts, they will have no effects.

In his insightful empirical study of why criminals act when they do, Katz (1988) argues that a crime can occur only when a criminal senses a distinctive sensual dynamic at play in a specific moment and place. He explores how the criminal is attracted to the sensual possibilities opened by the situation and seduced by its ‘symbolic creativity’. He is attentive to the ‘mode of executing action, [the] symbolic creativity in defining the situation, and [the] esthetic finesse in recognizing and elaborating on the sensual possibilities’ (Katz 1988, p. 9). He argues that ‘to one degree or another, we are always being seduced and repelled by the world’, that we ‘are always moving away from and toward different objects of consciousness, taking account of this and ignoring that, and moving in one direction or the other between the extremes of involvement and boredom’. He pursues: ‘In this constant movement of consciousness, we do not perceive that we are controlling the movement’ (Katz 1988, p. 4). In other words, for Katz, seduction and attraction are almost synonymous. He does not ascribe to seduction an intentional strategy. Instead, he focuses on the effects of seduction and the ‘esthetic finesse’ required to respond to it. As an emitting modality of power, seduction needs a receptive effect. This is what we will call attraction.

In order to explain what we mean by ‘attraction’, allow us to describe a situation experienced by Julie‐Anne in the Prado Museum in Madrid. The Prado has a very large collection of Goya’s paintings depicting royal characters and religious scenes. When Julie‐Anne visited the museum, she focused on the story these paintings were telling, on how Goya depicted power. When, at the end of the day, she went down to the museum’s lower level, she encountered his Pinturas Negras, painted on the walls of his house toward the end of his life (during the 1820s). These murals depict barbaric scenes from everyday life in quasi‐phantasmagorical forms: embodied human interactions, eating, blood, fear, crowds, sickness, music, ageing bodies, raging gods, expressively reading a book, sexual desire, fire… (see Figure I.1). As she encountered this ‘aesthetic appearance’ (Panagia 2009), Julie‐Anne could no longer move her body. She could not read what she was seeing anymore; she could almost feel the warmth of the blood on her fingers, the fear of the crowd. She stayed for nearly an hour, without moving, until her husband came for her.

Exiting the museum, they sat on a bench under the fresh shade of a canopy tree for another hour, where Julie‐Anne couldn’t stop speaking, spitting out her emotions, trying to make sense of what she had sensed and the difference between her rational relation to Goya’s ‘power’ paintings and this political work. The Pinturas Negras have been analysed as Goya’s radically political position generated by the sourness he felt at the end of the Napoleonic Wars (Junquera 2003). They were painted in his country house just outside of Madrid, where he retired disgusted by urban power plays and barbaric humanity. They play with bodily functions such as blood, vomiting, and modified body parts in order to express a profound rejection of urban political life. It is this rejection that makes these paintings so urbanely intense, as opposed to the clean depiction of state and imperial power that transpires from his previous works.

FIGURE I.1 ‘Saturno’, Francisco de Goya, 1823.

The Pinturas Negras tell a story of aesthetic political action in the sense that they represent everyday scenes of power relations that are intensely emotional and embodied. They depict political gestures of fights, bodies resisting, and shocking inequalities. But beyond the story they tell (what they cognitively represent), Julie‐Anne’s encounter with them was a ‘pregnant moment’ of aesthetic politics. These moments occur when action‐oriented perception is temporarily suspended, when we sense that something different is happening without being able to articulate it with words. During these ‘fugitive glimmers of becoming’ (Connolly 2011, p. 7), what we sense ‘breaks our confidence in the correspondence between perception and signification’ (Panagia 2009, p. 5). In other words, in these pregnant moments, we can no longer rely on our cognitive capacities to understand what is going on. Julie‐Anne could only, as Panagia would put it, admit this ‘aesthetic appearance’ was affecting her.

Philosophically, Panagia emphasizes the immediacy, the here‐and‐now, the shock of an aesthetic appearance. When we are faced with something that speaks to our senses (such as the Pinturas Negras), we cannot name it (recognize it as something we know). We can simply ‘admit’ that it is touching us. Panagia suggests that aesthetic appearances are political because they provide us with opportunities for responsiveness. The intensity of this experience is generally neglected from political analysis because it cannot be described with words and thus articulated as ideology or interests. ‘Under the pressures of immediacy’, Panagia writes, ‘we lose access to the kinds of conditions that make it possible to determine things like motivation, use, or belief – all forces that constitute the nature of interest’ (Panagia 2009, p. 27). Pregnant moments are regulated by attraction.

It was only after this moment of ‘immediacy’ that Julie‐Anne tried to represent, rationalize, and explain what she experienced. To this day, the Pinturas Negras still exercise a strong force of attraction on her. They have modified what she can see, sense, utter, and think about politics. Some artefacts (proto‐agents, earth‐beings) are so powerful that our cognitive abilities no longer function to relate with them. When we stop looking at a painting for the story it tells (relating to what is represented on the canvas) but instead feel we can enter and touch the colours and forms it offers without identifying what it is that is touching us, we find ourselves in an intense pregnant moment that will affect our sensing.

The Pinturas Negras qualify as bearing what the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch (2002) would call ‘transcultural effectiveness’. With regards to Japanese art, he describes a situation comparable to Julie‐Anne’s experience at the Prado. His words are insightful in defining attraction:

As distant as those works or conceptions may be in time and space, we yet feel, strangely enough, that it is we who are at stake here. Irresistible fascination is the outset. We sense a radiation emanating from these objects: though not made for us, they seem to approach us, to address us, we are strongly attracted and even fascinated by them. They appear to bear a promise – one, perhaps, of unexpected insight or of future enrichment. In any case a promise we should respond to. They seem to bear potentials able to improve and enlarge our sensitivity, our comprehension and perhaps even our way of being. (Welsch 2002)

Beyond works of art, everyday urban life is filled with pregnant moments. Living in a world of cities compels us to be sensitive to unusual political forms and immerse ourselves in everyday lifeworlds. We are inspired by Bence Nanay (2016), who stresses the multiplicity of aesthetic experiences and ‘resist[s] the urge to find some kind of essential feature of aesthetics: it comprises a diverse set of topics’. Because we are concerned with aesthetics as it relates to different dimensions of urban life and the politics embedded in and produced through urban experiences, our analyses mobilize conceptual resources from the main fields of aesthetic studies briefly discussed so far: everyday and environmental aesthetics (Berleant 1992, 2012; Blanc 2013) and aesthetic politics (Panagia 2009).

In the following chapters, we more specifically emphasize aesthetic political relations that operate through seduction and attraction, involving the strange feeling of being sucked into them, as within a magnetic field. This defines a pleasurable sensation, a hopeful horizon, ‘a promise we should respond to’ (Welsch 2002), because attraction involves responsiveness. Aesthetic political relations thus open up the imagination, prefiguring or charting new or other ways of being in the world (Murphy and Omar 2013; Carlson 2019). Seduction and attraction are twin modalities of power at play in aesthetic political relations. Examining their functioning entails looking at the execution of power (agency) and its effects in the world. In order to do so, agency is understood as embodied and distributed among human and other‐than‐human actors. Political action, therefore, results from embodied political gestures and the sensual, intuitive response to situational opportunities producing political acts which can become transformed into a politicized narrative through their accumulation in everyday life.

In short, aesthetic political gestures and acts are expressive of what Black feminist scholar Christa Davis Acampora (2007, p. 5) calls ‘aesthetic agency’ and potentially ‘transformative aesthetics’. She writes that ‘the core idea of aesthetic agency is that integral to our understanding of the world is our capacity for making and remaking the symbolic forms that supply the frameworks for the acquisition and transmission of knowledge’ (Acampora 2007, p. 5) and our sensory dispositions. In this book, we explore this by immersing ourselves in various youth urban worlds.