Friday, March 11, 2005
The fascist aesthetic. posted by Richard Seymour
Terry Eagleton begins his book The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) by reminding the reader that:Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body. In 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. ... It is as though philosophy suddenly wakes up to the fact that there is a dense, swarming territory beyond its own mental enclave which threatens to fall utterly outside its sway. The territory is nothing less than the whole of our sensate life together - the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, of that which takes root in the gaze and the guts and all that arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the world.
It is "the body's long inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical".
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, some of Mussolini's earliest allies were futurist artists and intellectuals, men attracted to speed and violence. They were supporters of the war, and despised the socialists for selling out the nation. Marinetti, a close associate of Mussolini's, wrote:
For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic ... War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamed of metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns.
It goes on, but you get the gist.
But the aesthetics of war is accompanied by the aestheticisation of politics - or, as Walter Benjamin had it:
Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicising art.
In the movie Max, a fictional Hitler befriends a Jewish art dealer called Max Rothman. Hitler's inadequacy and resentment of the decadent, cosmopolitan, upper bourgeois Rothman is obvious from the beginning. He hates modernism, and the film gives the clear impression that he resents it at least in part because he doesn't get it. For him, art must represent universal truths, while for Max this is an age in which such truths are in flux, expanding and contracting, shattering from time to time. Rothman encourages Hitler for, although his art betrays little in the way of talent, "there's definitely something twitching behind your curtain". Well, that something proved to be Hitler's oratory. Awful, posturing, vulgar, raging, and yet utterly compelling, Hitler discovers that he can compel a beer hall. He packs his speeches with vile anti-Semitism, the most odious filth from the right-wing gutter press where Hitler got much of his information from. He rants and fabulates, packs his discourse with irrationalist fantasies and libidinal intensites. His speech works by homonomy and synonomy rather than logic.
Walter Benjamin
The revolt of the pathological (in the Kantian sense) against universalising rationality partly underlies the appeal of fascism.
These themes unify the various material promises. For the petit-bourgeoisie, caught between this Scylla and that Charybdis, fascism promises capitalism without capitalism. That is, hierarchy and profit without instability and profiteering. Small, patriotic capital against greedy workers and usurious multi-national finance capital. For the conservative bourgeoisie, fascism is a useful ally against the left. For some workers and lumpenproletariat, it is a revolt against greedy capitalists.
There is a fascist idea of the body, the healthy organic unit. Some mistakenly think it is to be found in the film Fight Club, in which flabby, miserable workers turn their lethargic bodies into carved wood. But the aesthetic of Fight Club is nihilist, rather than fascist. There is no organicism, or fetishisation of hierarchy, only destruction, only levelling. Shiva, rather than Brahma, is the animus behind Fight Club. The marches of healthy fascist soldiers through towns, the myths of fit young men siezing trains and roads, 'liberating' towns and cities, muscles that snap, long elegant bones, 'pure' blood - this is the body politic, the anatomy, of fascism. The political body, for fascists, is prone to the odd 'virus'...
Fascists prioritise the local over the universal, preferring the warmth of the biological and the illumined poetics of the senses to chill rationalism and abstract ethics. Any successful universalism will answer the demands of the senses, without succumbing to their narcissism. That is why fascists aestheticize politics, while socialists politicise art.