Aestheticization of politics

The aestheticization of politics was an idea first coined by Walter Benjamin as being a key ingredient to fascist regimes.[1] Benjamin said that "fascism tends towards an aestheticization of politics", in the sense of a spectacle in which it allows the masses to express themselves without seeing their rights recognized, and without affecting the relations of ownership which the proletarian masses aim to eliminate.[2] Benjamin said:

Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. (...) Mankind, which in Homer’s time was a spectacle for the Olympian gods, has become one for itself. (...) Communism responds by politicizing art.[2]

The counter response to the reactionary aestheticization of politics is the politicization of art.[2]

In this theory, life and the affairs of living are conceived of as innately artistic, and related to as such politically. Politics are in turn viewed as artistic, and structured like an art form which reciprocates the artistic conception of life being seen as art.

This has also been noted as being connected to the Italian Futurist movement and postulated as its main motivation for getting involved in the fascist regime of Italy.

Alternately, "politicization of aesthetics" (or "politicization of art") has been used as a term for an ideologically opposing synthesis, sometimes associated with the Soviet Union,[2] wherein art is ultimately subordinate to political life and thus a result of it, separate from it, but which is attempted to be incorporated for political use as theory relating to the consequential political nature of art. The historian Emilio Gentile has stressed that these two ideas are not mutually exclusive, and both regimes had a large degree of the other.

In Benjamin's (original) formulation, the politicization of aesthetics was considered the opposite of the aestheticization of politics, the former possibly being indicated as an instrument of "mythologizing" totalitarian Fascist regimes. In that light, the politicization of aesthetics was associated with a revolutionary praxis, a redeeming force, solace, undertoned by the fact that it represented a means to cope in such as the case of a restrictive, censorship enforcing society. It painted within a frame, so that something was put in place as a psychological incentive for survival, depending on a story dissolute outside of that frame - the story of a somehow socially asocial or asocially social (citizen-)individual able to transcend mundane surroundings and scenery, having an "ascetic scale", a ladder, maybe, at hand.

Benjamin's concept has been linked to Guy Debord's 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle.[3]

Translations

See also

References
  1. Jay, Martin (1992). ""The Aesthetic Ideology" as Ideology; Or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?". Cultural Critique. University of Minnesota Press (21). JSTOR 1354116.
  2. Walter Benjamin (1935) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", ch.XIX/Epilogue, link to full translated text
  3. Tamara Trodd (2015) The Art of Mechanical Reproduction p.14
  4. Susan Buck-Morss (1992) Aesthetic and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered, in October, n.62 Fall 1992, pp.3-41

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