The Aesthetics of Fascism
How art is degraded to create synthetic auras and destroy politics
In his much-applauded 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction”, German philosopher Walter Benjamin posited the thesis that “the logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticization of political life.” For Benjamin, this aestheticization of politics was logical because his understanding of fascism was as an ideology attempting to move a critical mass of the public to express a desire for “changed property relations” in society while also leaving those existing relations basically intact — the appearance of change without the effects of change, expression without consequence, aesthetics.
These aestheticized politics are not unique to the 20th century fascism Benjamin was directly writing about, nor do they require autocratic, one-party rule. Many present-day Western democracies bogged down in idiotic culture wars — including our own — are political systems of competing Left and Right aesthetics, which most often only benefits the status quo. We are treated to two interdependent and alienating aesthetic visions rather than a single and totalizing one. There’s certainly a temptation to call this situation two-sides of the same fascist coin, but that diagnosis would be imprudent and ahistorical. Our Western aestheticized politics aren’t fascism (at least, not yet), even if a core tenet of the aesthetic expression is to toss around the term willy-nilly.
That’s not to say that our situation doesn’t have any parallels to the crises of the first few decades of the 20th century. In both times, a small group of elites controls the political and economic systems, and they have rained down pain and humiliation on the lower and middle classes. Those elites have also managed to escape the consequences of their actions, but in many cases have become wealthier and more powerful. Common people are once again angrily demanding different distributions of social and financial capital, and once again the common people are being satiated and nullified with aesthetics instead of justice.
Our politics are not equivalent to the fascist politics of the 1930s, but their aestheticization does uncover a vulnerability we have in common with those past societies that sank into fascism. All across our faltering political system, alienated people desperately hold on to deceitful and destructive narratives sold to them by artificial TV and internet personalities. On this note, a critical difference between our cults of personality and those of the 30s is that theirs were limited to the top of the hierarchy, whereas nowadays everyone is (potentially) a star.
How did we get in this mess? There’s no single source of blame. Economics, social media, loneliness, pandemic, the proliferation of therapy culture, consumerism, the education system — none of those are singular at fault, but a full analysis would include all of them (and more). One answer that Benjamin points to, though often seen as implausible today, is the historical change in our society’s concept of art and the role of art.
Benjamin’s essay unflinchingly addresses a shift in the concept of art that he identifies with the arrival of mediums like film and photography, and with the mass-implementation of industrial reproduction techniques latched on to old forms of art. Modern technology separated art from the higher, almost religious area occupied by classical works of visual and musical arts, works that had a distinct “aura”, or sense of authenticity. Mass industrial reproduction lowered these works into the hands of the masses, and this new mass audience eroded the aristocratic differentiation of culture and aesthetic elitism.
Benjamin argues that artwork no longer resides in an elevated sphere; it is no longer subject to the detached contemplation of a reverent and privileged audience, and works no longer are intrinsically unique or original. Rather, modern art relentlessly seeks an audience, forcing itself into our experience, therefore requiring next to no attention or effort on our parts. Art has shifted from something to be venerated to the banal print on a fast food bag, a video you watch while shitting on the toilet, or a psychologically-engineered beat we listen to in order to drown out the noise of our fellow humans.
Throughout the essay, Benjamin uses the term “aura”. This term is difficult to pin down, but it is basically used to refer to an object’s uniqueness — whatever quality (or qualities) it is that separates it from all other objects and brings a moment of pondering to an audience. According to Benjamin, aura manifests “the phenomenon of a distance no matter how close the thing may be.” Furthermore, he applies this concept beyond art, to nature and even individual human beings as well.
In art, imagine aura as the difference between witnessing a Bach concerto in person as opposed to listening to it from your phone while you grind out emails at work. In the concert hall, the virtue of the art’s presence demands your attention and respect, even from those who don’t understand it or even really enjoy it. The art’s authenticity (and resulting authority) cannot be absorbed by the viewers; in fact, the art stands in opposition to us, in a sense. Citing a Chinese myth of a painter who literally walks into one of his works, Benjamin says that we get absorbed by it.
On the other hand, while the live concerto absorbs us, we absorb the one playing from our phone. Benjamin says: “The distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves. Their waves lap around it; they encompass it with their tide.” As opposed to causing us to forget ourselves, the art now, if we listen to it enough, becomes a sort of appendage to our self. We might even develop a sense that we deserve credit merely for liking the art, and it becomes nothing but a part of our manufactured personalities. When we “share” the art with others, we do so at least in part to show off our own style and to help them better their own.
In Benjamin’s estimation, aura is always incredibly vulnerable to mass-reproduction, and therefore the introduction of mass-reproduction led to a change in the role of art in society. In previous times, art was linked to cult, religion, and ritual — it even still maintained a sense of set apart sacredness after being detached from religion in modernity — and the political impact it had was a result of these connections. Art served a ritual function of keeping a distance between the privileged and the viewers.
As mass-reproduction took over and aura decayed, however, Benjamin says “the whole function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics.” Benjamin is not saying that all art is inherently political in content, but that the power of art is not in its past, but in its future. The importance of art is no longer due to its creation, creator, authenticity, or tradition, but now is owed to the potential impact it will have on people, how it is absorbed into their lives, and the mass movements that will use it. This new modern art is easily available, easily assimilated; it is unabashedly irreverent and disposable. It is no longer art, but “media”. Rather than taking our breath away, it is the air we breathe. And thus, the intertwining of culture and politics — that intertwining which characterizes our society — was simultaneously made possible and accelerated.
Benjamin didn’t see this as entirely a bad development, though. In fact, he thought it could be very positive. For example, in the experimental films of pioneers like Charlie Chaplin and Dziga Vertov, Benjamin saw works made “straight from life”, cementing a “right to be reproduced” and proving that “there exists no judge superior to the actual audience.” The decay of aesthetic stratification, he hoped, would help lead to the decay of social and political stratification.
Unfortunately, by the mid-1930s Benjamin was already feeling pessimistic about art’s revolutionary potential — Hollywood had commodified Chaplin and the authoritarian Soviet Union had clamped down on Vertov (not to mention what his own country of Germany was doing at the time). Benjamin concluded that the new art was far more likely to be used for “counterrevolutionary purposes” of fascism and capitalism. Looking at the Nazi propaganda produced by Leni Reifenstahl and Italian futurism, Benjamin believed that fascists were attempting to revive the cultish quality, or aura, in works of mass-reproduced art. An obvious example is Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl’s film about the Nuremberg Rally, which used sophisticated cinematic techniques to turn Hitler into something like a movie star.
In his study of Weimar-era German film, From Caligari to Hitler, art critic/theorist (and friend of Benjamin) Siegfried Kracauer identified authoritarian trends in German film before Hitler ever gained power. Kracauer explored a variety of historical movies about Frederick the Great, in which, Kracauer argued, there was a distinct tension between the ideals of individualism and submission to a leader. This tension was fed to audiences by plots that traveled “from rebellion to submission”, in which individuals “could participate in the ruler’s glory and thus drown the consciousness of one’s submission to him. The halo of glamour surrounding the screen Frederick lured the audience into acts of identification with this supergenius.”
In effect, Germany was using film to distort reality, rather than to make it more accessible. This distortion helped prop up Hitler’s cult of personality and Nazis’ mythology into something supernatural before mass-reproduction allowed this created aura to be distributed to the common people. This delivered a new kind of cult power to art, “the cult of the star”. Benjamin didn’t believe that this parallel between Hitler and Hollywood was an accident:
“The cult of the star promoted by film capital preserves that magic of the personality, which has long consisted in no more than the false gleam of its commodity character; its complement, the cult of the audience, at the same time promotes the corrupted condition of the masses, which fascism seeks to put in the place of their class consciousness.”
Film itself had “a compelling urge toward new social opportunities”, but contemporary film was “clandestinely exploiting [the medium]… in the interest of a property-owning minority.” This new cult power was very different from that of older art. Traditional art established a set-apartness that those in power used to ease submission, helping to keep social orders stable by defining realms of inaccessibility that commoners must obey. On the other hand, this new art took advantage of the masses by granting them ultimate access, so long as this access was used for self-expression. This alone is benign enough, but the same forces that were facilitating this self-expression were also making sure that what was expressed could never threaten entrenched elites. In Hollywood, this meant a relentless push towards consumerism, but Hitler and Goebbels showed that these same techniques could be used for much more totalitarian and genocidal ends.
Both the successful pop-star and the demagogic politician realize that they are more than objects of fascination, but that they are, in fact, vehicles for the self-expression of their audience. For either to truly succeed, they must become a screen onto which their audience can project their fantasies — their power over others is not derived from elevation or reverence, but from imagined intimacy. Loyal, or fearful, subjects kneeled before their Medieval sovereigns, but modern audiences literally embrace and grope our artists. Stars don’t absorb or subsume, they don’t create transcendent spheres that we can hope to step into and forget ourselves, Rather, they are absorbed, becoming themselves a media that we (the audience) use to create and express ourselves.
Donald Trump’s greatest insight was to understand himself as a work of art in this new sense.
His act wasn’t really new, of course — politicians have been using mass-media to form cults of personality for decades. What Trump did that was new was to rather than simply claim to represent the interests of his base and hype-up their fears and resentments, he became — thanks to the complicity of social media and mainstream news organizations — the star of a 24/7 soap-opera adaptation of their resentments. Rather than expressing a desire and framework for a new kind of society, many alienated Trump supporters rallied behind a vulgar, vain anti-hero, simply because he was hated by all the people who hated them. Trump was not only admired, but absorbed. Trumpism was not only a political movement, but an aesthetic self-expression for his supporters. He literally and explicitly acknowledged this fact when he told one of his rally audiences: “I am your voice.”
In the 20th century, radio boosted demagogues in Europe and America. Now, Twitter and cable news serve the same function. Twitter especially gives us unmediated access to star-politicians, without the barrier of corrupt elites and institutions. Audiences no longer have to be content with the vicarious nature of voices on the radio or images on the TV; on Twitter, the consuming absorption of stars is something for the public to actively participate in. You can reconstruct your entire identity around your favorite celebrities and politicians, and if you’re outrageous or sexy enough you can even become a demi-star yourself.
On social media, cowards can manufacture confident and combative personas. Platforms that promised to connect us instead inject division among people and transform genuine friendships into relationships based on mutual consumption and social “monetization”. Everyone acts for everyone else, everyone is constantly engaged in self-advertising. Cooperation is replaced by mutual self-congratulation; debate and dialogue gives way to arrogant one-upmanship; genuine questioning has surrendered to ever-escalating one’s priors into hysterias. Perhaps worst of all, nothing is truly created except for individual “brands” and the reactionary mobs who occasionally rise up to destroy them.
None of these wretched dynamics are necessarily organic. The consumerist films of Hollywood and the Nazi propaganda of Berlin were not inevitable upshots of film technology; neither is social media (in its current form) an inevitable upshot of the internet. Rather, like Benjamin said about film in his day, social media intentionally boosts and “preserves that magic of the personality” and “the false gleam of its commodity character.” The internet promised to democratize communication, information, and influence. Instead, social media has simply democratized personality cults.
It’s a common remark that social media users are the products that these platforms sell to advertisers. This is true, but you’re also made (and making yourself) into a product sold to your friends and followers. That second commodification of people is what supports the first, and it’s the commodification that is probably the most damaging. We are manipulated and coerced into the cult of personality by business design choices and profit-seeking, which have grown a new kind of personal consumption and corresponding pathologies.
One result of this is the spread of mental anguish that was once reserved for Hollywood stars. When your self is replaced by your publicly-exposed persona, the connections you form between both are inevitably tenuous. Furthermore, you never really trust anyone — they only engage with the artificial commodity version of you, and you with that version of them. You become addicted to the constant affirmation of friends and strangers alike, affirmation that is, intentionally, never enough.
Another undeniable result is the increased aestheticization of politics. Like stars, political ideologies and opinion-makers no longer exist at a distance from their audiences. They are absorbed by them and reproduced by them as appendages to the personalities of their audience members Political junkies on Twitter dig around for content to latch onto and comment on just like Trump does, replacing their self with a collage of causes, outrages, and comments specifically curated for the daily and pointless dramas in their online orbit. (As a side note, I imagine that much of this type of person’s extreme aversion to Trump is a disgusted self-recognition.)
Social media stars do not value truth (if they value it at all) for its inherent value, but for the value it can add to their aesthetic. They fetishize science, technocrats, and “facts”, and unintentionally undermine those same things. Deeply felt resentments and fantasies that feel emotionally correct foster conspiracy theories. Even views that begin fairly well-grounded often wander into conspiracy territory when people begin to value the views as aesthetic accessories rather than for their empirical or rational merit. After all, it’s difficult to give up or change a view that is part of your identity, and your views become precious facets of a narrative of reality starring you. Thus, any challenge to those views feel like an existential threat; reasonable objections to your views are dismissed as “gaslighting”, as nothing more than attempts to undercut your lived experience and foster self-doubt.
Aestheticized politics obscure immensely important social, economic, and political issues that transverse the culture wars and could manifest opportunities for solidarity — globalization, governance by corporate-state “partnerships”, and lack of purpose are all just a few such issues. Meanwhile, that aestheticization makes the culture wars worse, by burying those cultural issues in exaggeration, cruelty, and idiocy — for instance, systemic racism, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The main function of aestheticized politics is to distract people from meaningful politics, but this does not mean that they are simply inert roadblocks. Aesthetic political expression was most clearly seen on January 6, 2021, for instance. In the alienated’s quest for totalizing fulfillment, these politics practically invite disaster.
In a far more extreme example, failed artist but master propagandist, Adolf Hitler, attempted to mold reality itself in the shape of his deranged vision. As Benjamin wrote in 1935, “‘Fiat ars — pereat mundus,’ says fascism.” May art be made, and the world perish. Concluding his essay, Benjamin described fascism’s inevitable evolution from aestheticized politics to war as a sort of artistic climax:
“Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.”
Figures on the Left and Right are wondering about the possibility of a second civil war. Thankfully, it’s only the most fringe and troubled of them, so far, who have actually gone out looking for fights. However, there is a very widespread tendency to intoxicate ourselves — whether in a sense of despair or morbid curiosity — with thoughts on apocalyptic futures. Simultaneously, our Big Tech overlords and their apologists are promoting a weird fantasy within which their technology allows transcendence of humanity itself. I imagine that Benjamin would see these things as more evidence of our extreme alienation, as the media aggressively pushes us to turn into detached spectators of even our own personalities. This sort of quest always ultimately ends in visions of impossible transcendence or utter destruction — after all, if it’s all a show, there has to be a finale.
So what’s the solution? Rather than aestheticizing politics, Benjamin said we ought to “politicize art” — he didn’t give a clear explanation of what he meant by that, unfortunately, but I don’t believe he was referring to the sort of ham-fisted satire and “statement art” so abundant today. Really, in his terms, that sort of political art is not really political at all, nor is it art in the best sense. It aestheticize political content, but it places that content into spheres of fashion, wherein it can’t be objectively disagreed with or seriously engaged with — it can only be adored or hated. This kind of art is, therefore, anti-political, because it operates on the premise that every political question is already settled. The only question is whether the viewer is enlightened enough to “get it” or not, or, in that terrible progressive phrase, whether they are “on the right side of history”.
New art does not necessarily need to be depoliticized, then; instead, this art needs to be actually politicized for once. At the very least, this would require it to be cut off from personality cult and the culture wars so that it can meet its democratic potential. We would also need to imagine and then create new platforms that are not designed primarily around profit-generation. The commodification of attention — the ceaseless world of mining as much cash as possible from human concern and anxiety — produces beings who are equally alienated and narcissistic, chiefly concerned with appearances and literally incapable of communal sacrifice for a higher purpose.
Glimpses of genuinely politicized art might already be showing. As much as I hate the platform, Twitter does have a large group of bright and well-intentioned writers who want to have serious discussions and valiant debates. In early 2021, the “GameStonk” saga on Reddit brought us an imaginative and humorous attempt to protest economic arrangements, even though it was saturated in materialism and juvenile trolling. Substack, though I have my hesitations about it, also seems interested in offering a less-aestheticized form of journalism.
These glimpses have something in common, in that they are a sort of “no man’s land” between alienated individuals and the totalized whole. In other words, they show the boundaries of actual community, where people can interact without having to curate themselves for the whole world. These glimpses offer at least a partial refuge from the abyss of self-alienation that is social media. It is the sorts of communities that might offer an escape from aestheticized politics and the cult of stardom and make meaningful politics possible again.
