suliman's blog

the aesthetics of war

In my last post, I briefly touched upon the aestheticization of politics through mechanically reproduced art to serve a political agenda by stating “that those who give out funds for producing film can also decide what ideas to promote through their funding choices,” which I want to discuss further in this post. While mass-produced media can have emancipatory elements, the nature of its mass appeal and reach can be weaponized by nation-state actors and/or capital to propagandize a narrative of their choosing, thus turning art into an arena for politics.

Fascism is a political ideology or system that is irrational in practice and whose actions cannot be rationally explained. It imagines a model society based on a mythologized past that will come about through a Leader who is there to defend the true people’s will in the face of an unrelenting, corrupt elite, a definition that is eerily reminiscent of the one Cas Mudde formulated for populism. In this understanding, populism is the means by which a fascist Leader or party takes over liberal institutions. It claims to represent the volonté générale of the innocent people against the corrupt elite (Mudde, 2004, p. 543), using an existing antagonistic sentiment that is given the freedom to be expressed while changing nothing in the property relations that produced this sentiment, which, like the aggrandizing performance of war and conquest by a fascist regime, is an aesthetic-as-policy before anything else. The pinnacle of this performance is war. As Walter Benjamin put it:

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system (1935, p. 19).

One reason why fascist Leaders feel empowered to champion the volonté générale in their populist race to power has its roots in the creation myth of the State as the institution representing the population’s “general” interest. As Marx and Engels explained in “The German Ideology,” material history is founded in bourgeois society, thus making it the basis of the State, which lays claim to and assumes sole representation of “general” interest (1846, p. 36). By appealing to this portrayal of the State, fascism assumes legitimacy in doing whatever it takes, with whichever means necessary, to realize the nation’s mythologized past in the present.

To do so, information and media production systems need to be under the control of the Leader (=Gleichschaltung) to maintain the idea that this goal is underway. The acquisition of social media sites and journalistic institutions by capitalists favoring Trump laid the groundwork for sensationalized media reporting on his assaults on the Middle East, or reporting that aids in misconstruing the will of other people not part of the fascist’s envisioned nation. It allows for proclaiming actions for achieving a stated goal that share little with the created reality; like Iraq, like Iran. Here, power’s productive ability to reproduce existing hierarchies and power dynamics in new contexts comes to the fore, and it is thanks to mechanical reproduction that its impact is so large.

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