Aura and the Aesthetics of Politics

In his book, The Aesthetic State: a quest in Modern German thought (1989), Josef Chytry attempts to construct a genealogy of German thinking that could account for what the Frankfurt School saw as Germany's infatuation with an aestheticized politic in the period following WWI. He traces this line of thought down from Ancient Greek democracy through Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Wagner and on through to Marcuse. His conceit is that an aesthetic appreciation of social relations was not unique to the Fascists but is an underlying function of what he seems to envision as a collective Western effort to scientifically analyze aesthetic responses. This can be seen most clearly in his chapter entitled "Marx: Communism and the Laws of Beauty," in which he dialectically opposes Marx's early interest in Aesthetics with the later writing that adheres more rigidly to a telos, or better yet an eschatology, of Capital. By focusing his attention toward the transitional Marx of the Manifesto, Chytry argues that there are three factors that inform Marx's concept of the "proletariat": 1) Marx's obsession with pre-Socratic Greece, which he claimed, in opposition to Hegel's telos, were more substantive or sensuous and only turned toward the abstract, or spiritual, after Socrates and Plato; 2) Marx's own statements on aesthetics, which seem to reveal that Marx saw aesthetics, as did many of the Young Hegelians, as a vehicle toward radical thought and social organization; and 3)Marx's relationship with various working class movements, like the Paris Commune of 1871. These influences then culminate, according to Chytry, in Marx's re-formulation of history as the progression of mankind's relationship to artisanal praxis and the use-value of his/her labor. In other words, Historical Materialism could be seen as reading forms of beauty into mankind's socio-historical narrative. What seems important to Chytry is to recapture and emphasize this quasi-romantic strain in the early Marx, so that he can rationalize Marx's move in the later years away from a politicized aesthetic (e.g. the form is only a means to making or a tool) and toward an aestheticized politic (e.g. the form itself being the end goal) of the proletarian dictatorship. It seems quite timely that Chytry takes this project up during the final stages of Gorbachev's glasnost, in which much of Marx's legacy is swept under the rug as just another misguided manifestation of the utopian impulses that dominated much of the 19^th century.

In that respect, Chytry's project seems a good counterpart to Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay on the politics of photography "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (or sometimes translated as "technical reproducibility"). Like Chytry, Benjamin sets up a dialectic between the failed utopianism of the later Marx and the core structural principles of historical materialism that could potentially undermine the capitalist enterprise and render theories of the present politics of art (i.e. art produced under "mature" capitalism) that are "completely useless for the purposes of Fascism." To that end, Benjamin constructs a history of fine artistic production that begins with a mythos of "aura" that surrounded religious artifacts. According to Benjamin, the aura of a work of art was significantly tied to it's unique authenticity (it's specific location in time and space) and it's ritual function within a longstanding tradition (in a secular sense this is akin to provenance and the ritual of museum spectatorship). Unlike Chytry, though, Benjamin directly goes after the mythologies that allow for such a tradition to seem natural. In fact, art by definition can never be natural or authentic but produced by particular techniques that have always been reproducible. What, for Benjamin is profoundly different, post-1900 (cf. the invention of devices such as the lithograph, daguerreotype, and phonograph) is that the human labor expended in re-producing a work of art has been abstracted even further by the use of modern machinery, thus eliminating the basis for a concept of aura – the uniqueness of the bourgeois individual that subsumes the labor of a work's creation. The political ramification of this move is not lost on Benjamin who then takes this rupture within the tradition to posit a thesis that seems counterintuitive in a vulgar Marxist teleology: that the crisis of authenticity brought about by mechanical reproduction might actually undo one of the last vestiges of Socratic/Platonic idealism – the mind/body split. In effect, the ability of machines to recreate artifacts that cause aesthetic reactions in "individuals" raises a serious challenge to centrality/importance of the human species as inherently special or purposive. And this, for Benjamin, is vital because if we cannot talk about nature, aura, etc, then we can only talk about reproducible technique and the possible uses of such techne to change social relations (i.e. the politics of art). Of thecourse that also makes the obverse true – that we can no longer discuss with any validity any true or authentic politic that must evidence itself in the inherent form of all activity, or what he called the "aesthetic state" at work in the fascism of Hitler and Mussalini, and in 1936 what he began to see at work in Moscow too.