- How do we understand politics in an age where visibility determines power? Drawing on thinkers like Benjamin, Debord, Baudrillard, Rancière, and Mirzoeff, let us explore how elections in Kerala are increasingly shaped by spectacle, simulation, and affect, transforming democracy into a sensory and mediated experience.
- Politics today is not only about governance - it is about appearance, performance, and circulation. This blog theorises the aestheticisation of political power in Kerala, asking how images reshape perception, participation, and democracy itself.
Aestheticising Power: Rethinking Political Culture in Kerala’s Elections
What if power today is not exercised primarily through force, policy, or ideology - but through appearance?
What if politics does not merely persuade or govern, but stages itself, inviting citizens to see, feel, and experience power before they evaluate it?
To ask these questions is to shift our attention from politics as a system of ideas to politics as an aesthetic formation - a field where power operates through images, performances, and affect. In contemporary Kerala, especially during elections, this shift is increasingly visible. Politics is not only debated; it is designed, performed, and circulated.
This is what theorists have described as the aestheticisation of politics.
From Power to Appearance
The concept of aestheticisation of politics is most famously articulated by Walter Benjamin, who argued that modern political regimes could transform power into spectacle - organising masses not through structural change, but through sensory participation. Politics becomes something to be seen, felt, and experienced.
The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values. (Benjamin, 1935)
Kerala’s election culture today offers a compelling site to revisit this idea.
Consider the proliferation of:
elaborately staged campaign events
visually striking roadshows with music, lighting, and choreography
carefully framed public meetings designed for television and digital circulation
These are not simply communication strategies. They are techniques of power.
Power, in this sense, does not only reside in institutions or policies. It is enacted through appearance - through the ability to command attention, structure perception, and produce affect.
The Spectacle as a Form of Power
Building on Benjamin, Guy Debord conceptualised modern society as dominated by the spectacle, where social relations are mediated through images.
The spectacle is the uninterrupted conversation which the present order maintains about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. (Debord, 1970)
In Kerala’s elections, the spectacle is not an addition to politics; it is one of its primary forms.
Rallies in various cities are organised with an acute awareness of their visual afterlife. A speech is crafted not only for those present but for its circulation as clips across platforms. A roadshow is designed as a moving image, meant to be captured, shared, and replayed.
Here, power operates through:
visibility
repetition
affective intensity
The spectacle does not merely represent power - it constitutes it.
Simulation and the Displacement of the Real
If spectacle foregrounds visibility, Jean Baudrillard complicates the picture by arguing that contemporary politics operates through simulation.
The pleasure of an excess of meaning, when the bar of the sign falls below the usual waterline of meaning: the nonsignifier is exalted by the camera angle. There one sees what the real never was (but "as if you were there"), without the distance that gives us perspectival space and depth vision (but "more real than nature"). Pleasure in the microscopic simulation that allows the real to pass into the hyperreal. (Baudrillard, 1981).
Political actors are increasingly encountered through:
viral video clips
WhatsApp forwards
meme cultures
These representations acquire a life of their own. A leader’s image can become more politically significant than governance itself.
Power, then, is sustained through continuous image production, where the boundary between reality and representation collapses.
Performing Power
Drawing on Erving Goffman and Judith Butler, we can understand politics as performance.
We have been using the term 'performance ' to refer to all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers. It will be convenient to label as ' front ’, that part of the individual's performance which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance. Front, then, is the expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during his performance. (Goffman, 1956)
Leaders enact roles:
the accessible representative
the development-oriented administrator
the ideological speaker
These are strategic performances through which power is made visible and credible.
As anthropologist Victor Turner suggests in his studies of ritual social drama, social action requires a performance which is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation. (Butler, 1988).
Power is not simply possessed; it is performed into existence.
Affective Power: Governing Through Feeling
Chantal Mouffe reminds us that politics is affective.
This recognizes that affects and desire play a crucial role in the constitution of collective forms of identification, and that they are the motivating forces of political action. I submit that this recognition of the crucial role of the affects and of the way they can be mobilized is decisive for envisaging democratic politics. (Mouffe, 2018)
Kerala’s campaigns mobilise:
pride
nostalgia
fear
anger
Power operates through emotion, not just argument. Citizens are not merely persuaded; they are moved.
Power, Visibility, and the Right to Look
The question of visibility is central to understanding aestheticised power. Jacques Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible shows that politics is about what can be seen and heard.
The first possible meaning of the notion of a ‘factory of the sensible’ is the formation of a shared sensible world, a common habitat, by the weaving together of a plurality of human activities. However, the idea of a ‘distribution of the sensible’ implies something more. A ‘common’ world is never simply an ethos, a shared abode, that results from the sedimentation of a certain number of intertwined acts. It is always a polemical distribution of modes of being and ‘occupations’ in a space of possibilities. (Rancière, 2000)
Extending this, Nicholas Mirzoeff offers a crucial insight into visual power:
This ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer. In turn, the authorizing of authority requires permanent renewal in order to win consent as the ‘normal’ or everyday because it is always already contested. The autonomy claimed by the right to look is thus opposed by the authority of visuality. (Mirzoeff, 2011)
As Mirzoeff suggests, visuality is a mechanism through which authority determines what is visible - implying that control over visibility is a crucial form of power.
In Kerala’s election culture, this becomes strikingly evident:
posters, banners, and cut-outs dominate physical space
digital platforms determine reach and visibility
algorithmic circulation privileges certain voices
To be visible is to be politically real. To remain unseen is to be excluded.
Aestheticisation, therefore, is not merely about beauty or spectacle - it is about who controls the field of perception itself.
Media, Image, and the Manufacture of Consent
The insights of Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jacques Ellul reveal how this system is sustained.
The more strongly the culture industry entrenches itself, the more it can do as it chooses with the needs of consumers-producing, controlling, disciplining them. (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002)
In contemporary politics, communication becomes:
repetitive
standardised
affect-driven
Ellul’s analysis of image culture deepens this critique:
If we remained at the stage of verbal dialogue, inevitably we would be led to critical reflection. But images exclude criticism. The habit of living in this image-oriented world leads me to give up dialectical thought….It is so much easier to give up and let myself be carried along by the continually renewed wave of images. (Ellul, 1981)
This insight is crucial.
The dominance of images does not merely enhance politics - it transforms its cognitive structure. It replaces:
dialogue with display
critique with reaction
thought with stimulus
In Kerala’s election culture, campaigns function as media ecosystems, where:
slogans repeat across platforms
visuals circulate continuously
political meaning is compressed into images
Power is exercised through the creation of a total environment of perception, within which certain narratives feel natural and inevitable.
Rethinking Power in Contemporary Democracy
What emerges is a redefinition of power.
Power today includes:
control over images and appearances
the ability to stage and perform credibility
the capacity to generate affect
dominance over systems of visibility and circulation
Citizens engage as:
voters
viewers
participants in affective communities
circulators of content
Democracy is not only practiced - it is experienced.
Conclusion: Seeing Power Differently
To understand contemporary political culture, we must learn to see power differently.
Power today does not only command or govern - it appears, performs, circulates, and feels.
The aestheticisation of politics reshapes democracy into a sensory and mediated experience, where meaning is produced as much through images as through ideas.
In an age where visibility is power, politics becomes a struggle not only over governance, but over perception itself.
Recognising this transformation allows us to ask:
How is power made visible?
Who controls what is seen?
How does image reshape thought?
In answering these questions, we begin to understand not just politics - but the aesthetic life of power.
References
Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. Simulations. MIT Press, 1983.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production.”
Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, from the 1935 essay New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, Dec. 1988, p. 519.
Debord, Guy. 1970. The Society of the Spectacle. Princeton UP, 2020.
Ellul, Jacques. 1981. The Humiliation of the Word. Wipf and Stock Publishers,
2021.
Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor,
1959.
Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno, Theodor. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford
UP, 2002.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “The Right to Look.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 37, no. 3, 2011, pp.
473–96.
Mouffe, Chantal. “The Affects of Democracy.” Eurozine, 23 Nov. 2018,
www.eurozine.com/the-affects-of-democracy.
Rancière, Jacques. 2000. The Politics of Aesthetics. A&C Black, 2013.
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