Everyone interested in the arts and humanities knows what political aesthetics means. It means that aesthetic elements like style, symbols, material form and artistic meaning are political. It recalls Brecht, Mayakovsky and Glissant, Getino and Solanas’ manifesto for a third cinema, the Situationists and the Living Theater. It means activist art from Living Newspapers to Banksy. Aesthetic politics on the other hand is a blank on the map—terra incognita. Of course, we have always to be careful that terra incognita isn’t terra nullius: Australian history has taught us that no land is empty, even if we don’t know who or what lives there. Walter Benjamin spotted the aestheticisation of politics by the Nazi Party in the 1930s, and that negative judgement still shadows any attempt to build a positive notion of what aesthetic politics might be.
Aesthetics, at its inception, was the philosophy of the senses, dealing with appearances and their effects on humans. It developed to include how art (today we might say ‘media’) extend and shape how things appear, and how we respond to them. Faced as we are with environmental catastrophe, aesthetics cannot rest on what I can see from my window. It must extend beyond the human sensorium. Politics, in Aristotle’s sense, is the pursuit of the good life for all. Back in the fourth century BCE, ‘all’ didn’t include slaves and almost certainly excluded women too. More recently Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière have both argued that politics begins with the struggle over who should be included in that ‘all’. In the Anthropocene, the entangled destinies of humans and planet make the inclusion of non-humans a core political struggle. As a preliminary definition, let’s say that aesthetic politics starts with mediating ecological demands to participate in pursuing the good life. As such, aesthetic politics doesn’t so much describe a state of affairs as inaugurate a project.
One possible place to get the ball rolling is the problem of mediation, in particular its accuracy and adequacy: the problem of truth. Without some initial idea of truth, it would be difficult to say anything convincing, but then conviction is not necessarily the same as ‘true’. In a time where flamboyant lying is integral to political life, there’s a tendency to revert to the powerful modern myth of objectivity: ‘trust the science’. This poses a particular problem for aesthetics. If appearance always hides an essence, one that science defines by measurement, is the truth just an aggregation of numbers and algorithms? Is there only one truth, and any alternate take from Indigenous, colonised or marginalised peoples a snare and a delusion? And what about the things that appear and get measured: have they no perception of what they are or do? Animals apprehend the world at speeds, in wavelengths and through senses quite different to ours. Should their experience be discounted along with First Nations and children? Is there nothing to be gained from ‘thinking like a mountain’ (in Aldo Leopold’s phrase)? The evidence of composer Olivier Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles, envisioning in music Utah’s geological marvels and distant stars mediated by birdsong, is just one of the cultures and artworks that say there is.
Like God before it, scientific truth has a sorry record of genocide and ecocide from Columbus to Hiroshima. The myth of objectivity divided the world between subjects who knew and objects that were known, the epistemological expression of a white, male, European subject who colonises a colonised world. Abstract in the same way that the market is imagined as inevitably more intelligent than its participants, it is no longer people but science that knows. Science, the market and neo-populists fantasising a homogeneous, static society share a vision of a world that changes only according to unchanging laws and therefore timeless, permanent and indifferent. Aesthetic politics is not just about multiplying subjects and their objects but unravelling their separation and the abstraction that follows it. It involves moving from objectification to what my mother called consideration—paying attention and recognising obligations that we have to the world we inhabit and that inhabits us.
Consideration as an alternative to truth gets off the hook of monolithic claims to possess the true, but it has its own weaknesses. It’s perfectly possible to pay attention to everything that pertains to my well-being without considering yours. I can even create a little paradise of my own, comfortably green, apart from the horrors broadcast daily in the news. The good life is attainable if only for a privileged few, and depending on how you define it. The dominant good today is surely wealth: accumulate enough (or even way more than you will ever need) and be happy. There are two problems here. One, private property always implies depriving others. To be content with wealth implies excluding those who do not possess it, a serious lack of consideration. Two, though we like to imagine wealth as a pile of goods—house, car, furniture, food and drink—its dominant form is not material things but value, the intangible circulation of zeroes and ones we track on mobile banking apps. This value is tied up in debt: personal, governmental, industrial and fiscal. A bewildering array of financial instruments fails to make up for the truth that debt is money spent yesterday that we promise to pay in some indefinitely receding future. Those who accumulate value in fact accumulate debt and its unfortunate tendency to vanish. Since the Bank of England abandoned the gold standard in 1797, there has never been a pot of gold at the end of anybody’s rainbow. All there is is what Karl Marx called ‘the self-valorizing power of capital’. Trust it at your peril.
There’s a lot to be said for love as a better alternative: a million love songs, plays, novels, movies … At its best, love lasts. It extends beyond the loving couple to children and family, even to small communities. Once it tries to claim to love everyone it turns into sentimentality, or at worst gendered, racial or national narcissism. Love between individuals, or in families and communities, takes the risk that it may not be returned. In politics and economics, no-one knows or cares. If the word ‘love’ occurs, it is a ploy to attract customers. We thought cyborgs would look like Arnie Schwarzenegger: basically human with computer enhancements. However, the actually existing cyborg is a corporate computer network with human biochips inserted. Cyborg corporations are incapable of love. Or hate. We know they are cyborg because their only motive is profit, and the exhausted populations and devastated planet they leave in their wake prove that the only value they create disappears into the vanishing future.
Combatting these titans requires the instruments of an aesthetic politics to understand the techniques and technologies they use. Much ecocritical thinking concerns itself with the division between foundational permeation of human bodies and minds with ecological processes and affects. Some blame technology for this historical separation, yet it’s clear that First Peoples often have both deep connections with land and sophisticated tools, languages and means of understanding and coping with rapid change. Other activists and thinkers approach technologies otherwise. What are technologies? They are the accumulated wisdom of previous generations handed down to the living so they will work with and on them to hand on something more to future generations. Technologies mediate between humans and gods—the autonomous, unpredictable and powerful agencies of land, water and sky. Modernity, marked by objectivity and the market, has taken this inherited wisdom—that Marx called ‘the general intellect’ and indigenous lore recognises as the co-presence of ancestors—and converted it into private property.
The mad oxymoron of intellectual property denies mediation, replacing it with communication on the model developed in the 1940s, at the same time as the emergence of neo-liberal economics. Communication, in Claude Shannon’s foundational mathematical theory, demands abandoning any attempt to convey meaning. Instead, the only requirement was to secure the passage of a signal from a sender to a receiver with maximum efficiency, and to provide feedback to the sender. Everything else—every irruption of ecologies into communication circuits, any meaning, emotion and any reaction other than ‘received and understood’—was noise. Similarly intellectual property, whose early manifestations attempted to reward creativity, became in the 1860s a quantity measurable by real or potential profit. In the process, creative labour became exchangeable with any other labour governed by commodities, and its measure is no longer novelty or interest but a quantum of clock time. This is why aesthetic politics must include not only place and space but time, transformed and reduced to units without regard to events and processes.
Living workers confront the clock every day. But even they are not as closely regulated by clock time as the ancestral agencies locked up in technologies and forced to labour, not for a future, but for profit. The common good that aesthetic politics proposes therefore embraces not only the well-being of local and planetary environments but the well-being of ancestral technologies. As Walter Benjamin wrote on the eve of his suicide in 1940, ‘Even the dead will not be safe if the enemy is triumphant’. Consideration must extend to the dead, the ancestors, the common inheritance that, instead of enriching, now masks, poisons and exploits.
Artificial intelligence is only the most recent and, in many respects, the most obvious example of the imprisonment and exploitation of ancestral language, logic, maths and techniques. With the rarest of exceptions, it is devoted to harvesting human behaviours, themselves reduced to enumerable interactions, to designing new products for the market and to risk-management and planning, specifically with the goal of minimising the difference between the perpetual present of profit and a future that would be utterly new. The task of aesthetic politics in the specific struggle with AI is not to refuse or celebrate how it works today, a tool of corporate cyborgs. It is to liberate the ancestors. Science fiction and journalism are full of dire warnings about rogue machines. Quite rightly: it is not unthinkable that after their centuries of slavery, the ancestors may be mad. The revenge of ecosystems against their centuries of exploitation, in the form of fires, floods and tempests, indicate just how dangerous it could be. On the other hand, now living human data is increasingly harvested, even the common knowledge of the living is treated as exploitable resource, just like land and history. The old belief that consuming finally turned commodities back into something useful is no longer credible: consumption is now another moment of production, a feedback loop, a data source: a commodity. Freeing ancestral technologies cannot be worse than surrendering to this catastrophic cycle of exploitation. An aesthetic politics of the good life shouldn’t come up with a plan: that is the domain of timeless capital. Instead, the good life for all, including gods and ancestors, means creating the potential to imagine not what will be but what might be, starting from the future we can imagine best: what happens next—right now.
Consideration and imagination are aesthetic-political responses to the traditional politics of truth and the good. Their most obvious aesthetic-political antitheses are anger and nostalgia. Anger, as Johnny Rotten spat, is an energy: it consumes the one who hates if anything even more than what they hate, eating their spirit, and blinding them to anything but their immediate, inward-looking community. Anger considers only what is close to, including and often driven by the attention economics that powers social media. It cannot see, for example, the planetary aetiology of local fires and floods, or that deprivation extends to others beyond their parish. Anger blunts and foreshortens consideration.
Even worse is the curtailing of imagination through apathy. Apathy is even more obviously an aesthetic concern given its roots in a-patheia, absence of feeling. Apathy yields to the dead weight of the present. The advertising company Ogilvy and Mather’s coinage ‘carbon footprint’ in a campaign for British Petroleum, for example, shifted the blame for fossil fuel pollution from corporations onto consumers. It seems to ask, what are you even capable of doing about it? A hundred well-meaning documentaries scarcely touch the estimated USD 3.5 billion spent on advertising by the US oil industry in the first quarter of this century. More efficient environmental communication won’t change apathy, which isn’t a belief: incapable of belief, not in in advertising, not in social media. Apathy isn’t fatalist or nihilist but numb. In ancient times, to be free from emotion was to be free from care, but in our times it has passed through mere carelessness to become uncaring—about others, about even ourselves, and most of all uncaring about the future because either, in William Burrough’s notorious expression, in the future we’re all f***ed, or because figuratively and literally there is nothing at the end of the rainbow.
Self-serving politicians and celebrity-chasing journalists have devalued truth. Advertising and overconsumption—apathy’s characteristic vices of junk food, porn and drugs—have devalued the good life. The rewards of consideration and imagination are immense, but they take too much effort. Apoplectic responses to well-worn triggers are far easier, if much worse for the psyche. Fury about the caricature enemy, ‘woke’—a word never heard outside the dialect of the extreme Right—is just another drug. The ‘war on woke’ is likely to be as successful as the war on drugs, and as expensive, financially, culturally and ecologically. But it occupies the space once devoted to ethics, with easy conformism and minimal demands for action. Actually existing aesthetic politics is based on the slogan ‘anything for an easy life’. It plays directly into the hands of those who want everything to continue to disappear. Apathy isn’t such an incomprehensible response.
There’s little point in getting angry and berating people for not noticing that their culture is vapid, their planet is dying and their money is vanishing. The project for a future-oriented aesthetic politics has to offer something more and better. The foundation of aesthetic politics is the thesis that everything mediates everything else and that ancestors, gods and mortals are all connected. The historical reality is that under the communicative regime of profit, property and commodities, everything has been disconnected. The job of aesthetic politics then is not to restore some Edenic past but to create the conditions for a new assembly of ecologies, technologies and societies. Because that is a job of work that doesn’t offer pay in a time when payment for labour is an absolute norm, there aren’t likely to be that many takers, especially for the promise of some non-existent future that can’t be guaranteed.
After being taken for a ride by centuries of promised pie in the sky, most people don’t want to fall for another con trick. The most successful politicians don’t promise unheard-of utopias. They offer to put things back the way they were: to make their country great again. The citizens of Palestine, Sudan and the Ukraine aren’t asking for jet packs: they just want to go back to living quiet lives. The deeper the political, technical or ecological crises get, the more enticing the scenario in the rearview mirror looks. A nice place to live, a happy family, good health, a satisfying job and a bit left over for treats and holidays is as good as it gets. Politicians and advertisers know these modest requirements are powerful motivators, especially gilded in the golden glow of memories. Like so much sentimental cultural production, they depend on giving us memories we never had. Nostalgia mobilises imagination, but instead of turning towards the future, it imagines returning to a home—the nice house, the pleasant job and all—that never existed. We talk about wallowing in nostalgia because it encourages a cheap gratification. History tells us how easily it can be recruited for pogroms and witch hunts. You can’t underestimate the aesthetic and political power of nostalgia.
Apathy and nostalgia and in its own way anger are variants on anaesthetics. Aisthesis for the Ancients was sensory experience. The senses always mediated between mortals and their world, shaping and selecting, using and seeking pleasures. They were always techniques, taking over and evolving older ways of seeing, describing, focusing and deploying. Tools mediate between people and things as cameras mediate between what I can see and what the world gives me to look at. An unwritten contract signs anyone who looks up to being visible in turn. Technologies are all media that connect people and things, from shovels to money. Any pretence that something like science or the market can see without being seen is an assertion of disconnection. It severs them from sensory experience as it cuts them off from meaning. Looking back on the past nostalgically gives a certain power over the past by denying any obligation to it. Melancholy is not nostalgic because its pain concerns unfulfilled duties owed to the dead. Melancholy is aesthetic because it connects past and present, where nostalgia disconnects them. Apathy is not trepidation not just because it fears that even worse might befall but because it acknowledges the unpaid obligation to future generations. Anxiety is aesthetic because it connects present and future where apathy disconnects them. Anaesthesia, as the medical term witnesses, is feeling nothing. It is not that the present is hideous, though God knows it is worse than ugly for many millions of living creatures. Anaesthesia is the condition of a culture that acknowledges only the banality and joylessness of the present.
Recovering from a general anaesthetic leaves you groggy, hazy, dizzy and maybe nauseous, with impaired reflexes and judgment. It’s good to have someone there to help for a day or two. Sometimes it may take longer, like post-traumatic stress. It’s not easy, but in general those who are awake advise that you’re better off not staying under, no matter the temptation. They may feel tempted to shock you awake, but the cure might be as bad as the condition. Forcibly waking populations from a lifetime of semi-consciousness is a similarly dangerous procedure. The anaesthetist is expert at putting you to sleep, but there is no profession of aesthetist to wake you up. Besides, claiming that kind of expertise is too similar to the authoritarian objectivity that has induced their artificial comas. A million memes tell us not to go towards the light because that way lies death or something worse. But political aesthetics must find some kind of light at the end of the tunnel that isn’t an express train bearing down on the patient.
In line with the modern history of aesthetics, let’s call that light beauty. It’s possible we fear it for the same reasons we fear liberated AI: because it interrupts the endless movie about the tunnel of eternal repetition, ripping down the screen masking off the future, and because it entails risk. The final stab of the individualistic ethos characterising private ownership and competition is the truism that everyone dies alone. This is only true if everyone has cut the ties between themselves and past and future generations, who have given nothing back or forward, who allowed their loves to vanish into the black hole of profit.
In one of the earliest modern reinventions of aesthetics, then-young Irish philosopher Edmund Burke dismissed beauty as mere pleasure and seized instead on the sublime as the pinnacle of beauty. He was smitten by mountains and storms, writing that their scale, incomprehensible activity and magnificence inspired ‘sympathy, imitation and ambition’ and ‘that glorying and sense of inward greatness’. Sounds good. Sounds very like the effect of certain drugs that make you feel rich. However, while the sublime encourages identification and monumental egotism, the good Christian Burke also saw that it reduced the observer to a powerless speck in the face of immensity. Somewhere in that fluttering between Nietzschean Superman and an atom of dust on God’s shoes lies the sad reality that the sublime, which as the spectacle of nature ought to permeate our beings with cosmic union, results instead in creating only an abject plaything of supernal forces. Not long after Burke, the poet John Keats wrote ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’. The important word here is ‘thing’: Keats picks up on a tradition that believes beauty inheres in objects. More recent critics call it ‘form’, sometimes more and sometimes less involved in the matter the thing is made from. It presumes the world is a concatenation of objects, some ugly, most unappealing and a very few that are beautiful. As objects, things are apart from the poet who savours them, and their form often divisible from their material presence. If it is an object, a thing of beauty can be bought and sold the same way as a thing of usefulness or a thing of status. A thing of beauty can be stored in a Swiss vault. Worse still, an immaterial form like a mathematic equation, once treated as a thing, becomes an instrument of oppression and exploitation. The more dominant the use of code becomes, the more life itself, human and planetary, is treated as code-like, as things exchangeable like any commodity.
The alternative ought to be another truism, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Shaped by the abject and the object, the subject claimed its privilege in a line from Goya to 1970s guitar heroes, devil-may-care rebels brooding on impossible themes, hard-living poètes maudits and misjudged geniuses in penury. Beautiful objects are a problem if they demand that subjects learn how to appreciate them, which requires an aesthetic education, returning us to the expert problem. Making taste the arbiter is democratic: anyone can find beauty in whatever they please. But like the carbon footprint meme, it displaces responsibility onto consumers. The formal symmetries of Gregorian plainchant relied on a community of belief and participation in a shared idea of the measure and purpose of beauty. Between Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue and say Nick Cave’s Wild God almost two hundred years later, the roost has been ruled by slaps in the face of public taste. Over the same period, mass manufacture by culture industries from cheap prints to fast food persuaded creatives and aficionados that claiming the status of art meant being avant-garde, difficult, emotionally challenging and unique. The individual human spirit lurched into the spotlight during the period in history when it was dissolving into the very factory system that produced its cultural antithesis.
Individual subjectivity not only provides the alibi for the normative procedures of contemporary culture. It motivates competitive consumption, defuses struggles for a commons or mutual aid, tears apart community and rewards personal triumph. The self veers so easily into selfish. Thrown back on their own paltry resources, subjects are forced to accommodate backstories of injury and abuse, the traumas of oppressive socialisation, alone. Justin Fashanu, Amy Whitehouse, Anthony Bourdain … the cost of creative success is too often too great to bear, and idolisation turns swiftly into victimisation. Alternatively, there are cures, touting either accepting the suffering or self-improvement, never a road to collective change—asocial by design and antisocial in implementation. Unhappiness is not an unfortunate by-product. Finance capital used to suppress such contingent misery as noise that threatened the efficient running of markets, but now they depend on the random fluctuations that human misery brings to consumption. Our prized idiosyncratic aesthetic choices are integral to a system that thrives on randomness.
Kitsch is one way out of this loop, embracing instead of rejecting cultural products designed for an urban proletariat whose folk cultures has disappeared but were still hungry, even for the fictional emotions and ersatz simulacrum of culture. Mid-twentieth century culture critics were tough on kitsch, which failed to live up to the high ideals of the avant-garde, but precisely because it has no such aspirations, kitsch was revalued after postmodernism, and pretty, even vacuous artefacts became icons of a generation who learnt from Las Vegas. Even if, as some maintain, kitsch is incapable of irony, a knowing, ironic taste for the cheap and sentimental satisfies both the need for pleasurable beauty and the sense of superiority that attaches to ‘good taste’. As a celebrant of apathy, sociologist Jean Baudrillard called the spectacular vacuity of consumerism the simulacrum, revelling in its emptiness and the indifference it promoted—a position not all that far from Burke’s description of the sublime.
The phenomenal success of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie in the summer of 2023 gives kitsch another twist. The film’s voice-over reminds viewers that the movie only exists to make money, while its style celebrates plastic as a material and a term of abuse. Boasting that it is a product of cyborg capital blending petrochemicals with the failure to be properly human, Barbie is a portrait of this age of enforced consumption, right down to the disastrous attempt to visit reality. Kitsch is the last possible response adequate to the triumph of the commodity. As if incidentally, it is also a portrait of the disastrous struggle to produce a self, a subjectivity capable of surviving beyond the era of mass production. Innocent and without work or money, Barbieland simulates the kind of utopia only children have inhabited till now. At the same time, it shows that the perfect world it portrays is incoherent and incomplete, and that the characters that inhabit it are not subjects at all but non-identities. Barbie wants her world to be a product of ‘me’, only to discover that she is a product of her world, and the product she is has no identity of its own. What individuality she manages to hold together is irreducibly de-natured and de-realised; and even existential crisis reveals only the inevitable fragility of deep psychology in a depthless world. Even as brilliant a satire as Barbie arrives at the vanishing point where non-entity announces that it is a magic trick veiling the sordid supply chains and pollution that make its plastic aesthetic possible. Its satire doesn’t need a shared set of values to judge it by. It is an entirely self-enclosed circular construction —autonomous and floating free of actuality. Except that its denizens know that they are unreal. The artwork that once functioned as the model and aspiration of the self-identical self, its highest pleasure, reveals that it too is non-identical.
The passage from abject and object to the failure of the subject leaves one last possibility. Beauty does not exist. It must be made. Beyond consideration and imagination, aesthetic politics offers not a finished utopia or even a map of how to get there. It offers only the pleasures of making. Think about cooking. Think of the history of the spice trade. Think of Columbus setting off to find a new route to the Indies and coming back with capsicums he called ‘peppers’ in an effort to get into the market. Think how Vasco da Gama took those New World fruit to India and South east Asia for the very first time as part of a package that would generate the colonial horror stories of nutmeg, cinnamon and all the others, right up to today. Consideration demands considering what we eat, the tools we use to prepare it, and the energy we use to cook it. It also requires imagination to set out to marinade, make sauce, get the ingredients and set up the guests. But imagining is not enough. It remains to make the meal. In the backyard barbie (not the plastic doll version), flames tickling the wood, smoke curling from the fire, sauce and veggies singeing, friends around taking it in turns to poke the food, turn it and look forward to sharing the meal. It is a ritual as old as the species. Ecologies, technologies and social forms assemble and reveal what they are: gods, ancestors and mortals gathered to celebrate their contiguity.
In the twenty-first century, aesthetics became the administration of taste and politics, the administration of public affairs. It’s not good enough. Truth, good and beauty have too much trouble struggling to exist and descend into anger, apathy and anaesthesia. Aesthetic politics must confront the sensation that everything connects with the distress of realising that nothing does. The only reward it can offer, ethically and politically, is the pleasure of making a future as imminent as tonight’s dinner, and to do that in conjunction with the commons of living, dead and eternal agents. All of whom have been damaged by human hegemony and its inhuman violence against itself and its others. We should not have to abandon our dreams for them to come true. We must make the future like we make good: one stitch at a time.