The Aestheticization of Politics

fascination with rebelliousness in general. The latter phenomenon, the one regarding a general rebelliousness, can be observed through how it’s made cultural preoccupations out of an actor that’d starred in East of Eden and then died in a car crash, a protagonist’s hallucination from the cult film Fight Club, a mentally ill man played by Joaquin Phoenix in this past year’s The Joker film, and a myriad of other figures who’d solicited such great attention. The popular lusting after extremist iconography was perhaps incurred by how the country was delivered, and it having come through a much mythologized insurrection whose shadow still hangs over much of the body politic. Disregarding the circumstance under which it might’ve been spawned, the aforementioned lusting is, nonetheless, very forthcoming. It’s manifest when, unaware of the contradictions it might present, unconventional forms of advertising by business conglomerates are thought as being ‘guerilla marketing.’ Its realization includes references to a ‘digital revolution’ in order to describe the shift from analogue to digital electronics. When a candidate bests the frontrunner, they might be described by pundits as having led an ‘insurgent’ campaign (one recent instance is when Tea Party challenger Dave Brat won against Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a 2014 election, and was then labeled an ‘insurgent’ candidate. There is, though, some inconsistency in labeling as an ‘insurgent’ an elected official who wants to maintain a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan).  More overt expression might include fashionable displays of the anarchist symbol (there is, more likely than not, one being carved into a school desk or notebook right now), or the popularity of t-shirts featuring a particular image of Argentine Marxist Che Guevara. Bi-monthly British style magazine Dazed notes them as having been worn by Prince Harry and Jay-Z in an article where the author remarks that they can be “commonly spotted emblazoned on the chests of… Camden Market stoner types.”   There is, of course, some irony in how a likeness of Che Guevara, one formerly used by Dutch anarchists and leftist agitators during the May 1968 events in France, is now being put onto t-shirts sewn in sweatshops, sold by entities that indulge in union busting, and whose transport is in some ways tethered to a ‘free trade’ alleged by Guevara’s ideological descendants to have been an imperialist design projected onto the global south. For a moment though, never mind the contradictions, and take it only as a demonstration of how deeply the fascination has permeated, and of just how fascinated we are with the picture of social upheaval that we project it onto things, things to which it has little substantive connection (‘guerrilla marketing’ for instance).

Indicative of its stature is how this fascination with radicalism and militancy has managed to work its way into the entertainment industry (note this is a sector whose principal efforts are directed toward exciting us, consumers). There is certainly not much more that can be said about the 1960s’ so-called counterculture, it’s adages of peace and love having, by this point, been thoroughly impinged upon the national consciousness. A more recent, salient example can be found in the punk movement’s adoption of radical iconography and ideology, and how it’d endeared itself to some of the more misanthropic youths of the world. To invoke a band which now solicits such dribbling infatuation, in 1977, the Sex Pistols, often erroneously cited as being punk’s progenitors (though they did, perhaps, impress upon it its image), released their debut single “God Save the Queen” to coincide with Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee. It featured singer Johnny Rotten expressing his displeasure, in a hoarse, kvetch inflection, with what was still in effect a sacred cow (the cow, of course, being the Queen of England, and those gentry organs through which she’d been installed head of state). It’d be hard to posit they weren’t looking for controversy in turning to an institution so beloved it’d prompted social critic Christopher Hitchens to write that “under [the monarchy’s]... influence, [human reason] seems sometimes to evaporate like a gas for whole weeks at a time.”  The BBC refused to play the single. Of cursory relevance is how one of their more enduring contemporaries, The Clash, would, five years later, don beige combat fatigues for a music video, where they’d belt out lyrics about “the Bedouin” and their “electric camel drum” in front oil wells, sand dunes, and some jet fighters. At a time when the Mullahs in Iran, clashes between leftist and rightist elements in the Lebanese Civil War, and PLO hijackings would regularly feature in the news cycle, the set elicits some connection to the sundry extremities of Middle Eastern politics. Appearing on the aptly titled Combat Rock, it was when they did this that they'd finally play stadiums in America and attract some following in that market. The Welsh outfit Manic Street Preachers had perhaps attempted to channel both the Pistols and the Clash 12 years later, in 1994, when they’d provoked both the ire of the more austere part of the British public and the interest of a more youthful crowd. Going on BBC music chart program Top of the Pops, they dressed in a guerrilla-esque manner resembling the Provisional Irish Republican Army, during a period of renewed separatist activity not too far from their home.  

The point, really, in mentioning a gaggle of paltry punk musicians (the last word may be a stretch for some of those acts) is to demonstrate that this appeal to radicalism, it’s dissident spectacle, sells. In spite of, and really because of, the notoriety delivered on them by the BBC blacklisting and their debut’s inflammatory subject matter, the Sex Pistols had moved 150,000 units of “God Save the Queen” after only a week and a half of it being released. They’d soon manage a number one album. The Clash’s Combat Rock charted at number two in the United Kingdom and sold in excess of a million copies in the United States. After the Manic’s performance, Top of the Pops was inundated with 25,000 complaints over their alleged Republican sympathies, while they’d within four years go on to be described as being “one of the biggest bands in Britain” by the BBC.  Neglecting to mention their American counterparts that’d indulged in the same practices (DIY noisemakers Sonic Youth in their 1992 lead single “Youth Against Fascism,” Minor Threat and the straight edge movement…), dissident branding, whether or not it was always a deliberate thing by the punks, wasn’t left only to the less palatable musical trends, but was a point soon taken up by the cleaner parts of the music industry. The mass-market, radio rock politics of Green Day’s American Idiot is one instance. It having been, apparently, some kind of statement on the Bush Administration made the band fashionable once more. The black and red gimmick (colors that are often coupled under the faux, pop paramilitarism in question. We might forget, though, how these were once known principally for their association with an anarchism and syndicalism that’d so thoroughly frightened the Western world at the beginning of the 20th century. This may be why the colors are used in these phenomena), vague references to militarism, and having started to wear eyeliner for the title track’s music video (“welcome to a new kind of tension, all across the alien nation, where everything isn't meant to be okay” is terribly edgy; a less discernible message than one would think for all the hype around the albums supposed ideology) yielded 16 million units sold after several years of declining sales with decidedly less ‘political’ tracks. Contemporaries Rage Against the Machine can credit their career with the same practice. After having appropriated, for cover art, a photo of a monk’s 1963 self-immolation in protest of South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm’s administration, their debut went triple platinum and solicited such great staying power, the band could tour arenas and price tickets at $125 almost thirty years later. Mind that the lead single from the album in question featured a refrain of “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” a considerably less coherent ‘political’ message than that being put forward by the monk. It nonetheless helped get them their edgy, communist vibe.

There is a term for this. Journalist Tom Wolfe had first noted in 1970 what he identified as a ‘radical chic,’ "an exercise in double-tracking one's public image: on the one hand, defining oneself through committed allegiance to a radical cause, but on the other, vitally, demonstrating this allegiance because it is the fashionable, au courant way to be seen in moneyed, name-conscious society." Invoking this isn’t meant to disparage all those names mentioned (a couple of them might have sincerely wanted some social unraveling), but it’s to the point that being perceived as subversive (though probably not too subversive; there are limits to how far this can reasonably go while remaining palatable) and indulging in the aforementioned radical chic can be a powerful marketing tool in the “moneyed, name-conscious society” where Green Day was able to sell 13 million more records by wearing armbands and saying something about Bush.  

Circling back to something referenced earlier, it isn’t just musicians, as these practices are readily used in the mainstream of political dialogue as well. When David Brat had ran against Eric Cantor in 2014, he’d been described as an ‘insurgent,’ and this was a label applied not just to him, but to the whole of his movement (he was, like previously mentioned, a Tea Party-er). The Tea Party was often described, by most everyone and certainly by the mainstream of the press, as  “insurgent”,  as an “insurrection”,  and as a litany of other terms which fall under the umbrella of the ‘anti-establishment.’ It shouldn’t, though, be that bold an observation to make that, in a whole view, describing a faction which drew emphatic support from business interests (like the billionaire and decidedly capitalist Koch Brothers) as ‘anti-establishment’ is, at the least, terribly inexact (and, again, a similar conundrum is manifest when describing as ‘insurgent’ a faction that works within the periphery of electoral politics and advocates for maintaining a counterinsurgency in Asia). Noting that the Tea Party-ers had largely embraced their rebel perception (they had, in the first place, picked a name for themselves with a rebellious connotation through its allusion to the Boston Tea Party. It was, in some ways, a rhetorical predecessor to ‘draining the swamp’), this phenomenon is just as much a radical chic as the one promoted by the music industry. 

In this context, though, it overlaps with what Marxist theoretician Walter Benjamin termed ‘the aestheticization of politics’, something he’d originally posited as being integral to fascism. In 1935, he’d written that “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.”   Invoking this isn’t meant to suggest a particular faction in American politics is fascist, though it is meant to demonstrate that what Benjamin writes about is something applicable beyond the fascist movements he’d observed in the 1930s. The aestheticization of politics is present here as well, in that through their messaging, political factions have looked to whip the body politic into a riot of enthusiasms. They touch not just on substance, but on images and iconography in what is an appeal to human emotion, and the form this takes can often be described as a kind of radical chic. Like mentioned earlier, there is a certain fondness for rebellion and political radicalism. The picture of social unraveling is so present in the popular imagination (like how present various artistic renditions like Liberty Leading the People or George Washington Crossing the Delaware are, for instance) and solicits such great emotion, it can be exploited to great effect, and just as it’s exploited to sell products, it’s exploited to sell ideology. There are many examples (any campaign whose propaganda has contained vague platitudes about some abstract ‘change’) though a more recent and very relevant one is how, in the aftermath of the spontaneity from the beginning of summer, various entities, primarily liberal in the context of thee 2020 election, have looked to appeal to sentiment related to change and left-of-centre causes. Much has been written about the alleged virtue signaling by business interests, but these appeals are just as present in the propaganda of certain political factions, in an amalgamation of this radical chic with other more conventional forms of youth marketing.