The Aesthetic State (interview question #21)
Dr Simon Ussher has started emailing me interview questions about my recent books on aesthetics (see here). Over coming weeks I’ll post my responses to his questions.
In the table of contents of your book SMPLCTY, there are three ‘parts’, only two of which are published in that large text. There is a third part that has not yet been published, which is entitled ‘The Aesthetic State: Toward an Ecological Democracy of Art’. Can you provide some insight into what you mean by an ‘aesthetic state’? And how we might proceed toward what you call an ‘ecological democracy of art’?
Yes, the unpublished (and still incomplete!) third part of SMPLCTY is really where many of the philosophical, political, and ecological threads of the earlier essays converge. If the first part develops the metaphysical and existential foundations of the Will to Art, and the second explores the political economy of aesthetic life, then the final part asks the practical and institutional question: What kind of society could cultivate and sustain the flourishing of homo aestheticus within ecological limits?
The phrase ‘aesthetic state’ is, of course, indebted to Schiller. In his Letters on Aesthetic Education, Schiller imagined an ideal political condition in which aesthetic development mediates between coercive law and chaotic instinct. The aesthetic state, in his sense, is not merely a government that funds the arts. It is a civilisation in which freedom, beauty, culture, and sensuous human development become structurally embedded within social life itself.
Now, I reinterpret and radicalise that idea under conditions of ecological crisis and late capitalism. My concern is not with aristocratic refinement or elite cultural institutions, but with how entire societies might reorganise themselves around sufficiency, creativity, democratic participation, and ecological harmony. That is why I speak of an ‘ecological democracy of art’. The key idea is that art – understood broadly as meaningful and pleasurable creative labour – should cease to be the privilege of elites or professional specialists and instead become integrated into the ordinary structures of everyday life. We all need visions and goals to guide and incentivise our action. For me, I am inspired by the dream of a society in which labour itself becomes artistic, where useful things are also beautiful, and where the distinction between artist and artisan dissolves into forms of democratic creativity and participation. I have detailed what such a society might look like in my book of eco-fiction, Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation.
Marcuse, as I have acknowledged, also shaped this vision. He argued that a liberated society would involve the transformation of labour, technology, desire, and sensibility – not merely redistribution within the existing industrial order. The ecological crisis is not simply a problem of unjust distribution; it is also a problem of civilisational form. A growth-oriented industrial society organised around endless production and consumption cannot become sustainable merely through greener technologies. The entire conception of the good life must change.
The ‘aesthetic state’, as I imagine it, would therefore be a post-consumerist civilisation grounded in an economics of sufficiency. Its aim would not be maximising GDP, productivity, or consumer throughput, but creating the conditions under which all people can participate meaningfully in creative, communal, ecological, and aesthetic forms of existence.
This has several dimensions. Economically, it implies a dramatic contraction of unnecessary production and consumption within affluent societies – what can be described as voluntary simplification or degrowth. But this planned contraction would not be experienced merely as sacrifice because opportunities for non-material forms of flourishing would expand correspondingly. More time would become available for art, music, philosophy, craft, gardening, political participation, education, contemplation, ritual, friendship, and immersion in nature. The trade-off would be decidedly in favour of people and planet.
Politically, the aesthetic state would require far more participatory and decentralised forms of democracy. Consumer capitalism produces passive subjects: spectators rather than citizens. An ecological democracy of art would instead seek to cultivate active, self-governing communities, in which inclination and duty become one and the same thing. The archetype of ‘poet-farmer’ is important here because it symbolises citizens who are materially grounded yet creatively autonomous – people participating directly in both economic provisioning and cultural life.
Culturally, the aesthetic state would involve what we discussed earlier as aesthetic education. Human desires themselves must be transformed. A society addicted to speed, technological novelty, accumulation, and status consumption cannot transition sustainably into an ecological civilisation. People must increasingly come to experience sufficiency, simplicity, craft, ecological belonging, and communal creativity as rich and beautiful forms of life. Trying to prefigure this way of life is one of the most important modes of activism we have available. People must see that a simple, aesthetic existence can make for a life that is free.
Architecturally and spatially, an aestheticised society would also imply profound changes. Cities, workplaces, homes, and public spaces would need to be redesigned not merely for efficiency or profit extraction, but for conviviality, beauty, participation, ecological integration, and human scale. One of the tragedies of industrial modernity is that so many environments have become spiritually deadening – designed primarily around automobiles, commerce, surveillance, and productivity rather than human flourishing.
Of course, I do not envision the aesthetic state as authoritarian or centrally imposed. That would contradict the very principles I am trying to defend. A genuine democracy of art must remain pluralistic, experimental, participatory, and open-ended. Beauty cannot be bureaucratically dictated from above without degenerating into propaganda or domination – precisely the danger Walter Benjamin warned about in relation to fascism.
This is why I emphasise ‘ecological democracy’ rather than simply ‘aesthetic order’. The role of institutions would not be to impose a singular aesthetic ideal, but to create material and political conditions under which diverse forms of low-impact flourishing can emerge. The aesthetic state would therefore protect and expand the freedom of communities and individuals to experiment with alternative forms of meaningful living within biophysical limits.
There is also an important spiritual dimension to this vision. Modern industrial civilisation increasingly treats human beings as economic units and consumers. The aesthetic state would instead recognise that human beings possess deep existential needs for beauty, meaning, participation, ritual, and transcendence. Art, in the broad sense I defend, becomes a primary means through which those needs are expressed and cultivated.
Now, as I acknowledged earlier, I do not present this as a blueprint or utopian prediction. In SMPLCTY, I repeatedly insist that the project should be understood as an orienting vision. Human societies are too historically contingent and complex to conform to fixed designs. Moreover, the future is likely to involve disruption, instability, and perhaps collapse. But orienting visions matter. Without compelling images of alternative forms of civilisation, political imagination remains trapped within the horizons of industrial capitalism. The ecological crisis therefore demands not only critique but imagination – new myths, archetypes, and forms of collective aspiration.
Ultimately, the ‘aesthetic state’ names my (still developing) attempt to think beyond both consumer capitalism and bureaucratic socialism toward an anarcho-communitarian civilisation where freedom, beauty, ecology, and democracy become mutually reinforcing rather than antagonistic. It asks whether humanity might one day organise society less like a machine for accumulation and more like a collaborative work of art – unfinished, pluralistic, participatory, ecologically grounded, and open to endless creative becoming.
