16 Aesthetic causality

The aesthetic character of production of facticity of the pandemic and the normalized suppression of the circulation of news surrounding it by governmental and nongovernmental apparatus bring about totalitarian character of contemporary networks of power. This totalitarian character of contemporary relations of power follows the destruction of Nazism which as Lyotard highlights was not derived from an immanent critique but first and foremost done through military action. Yet this military victory over fascism is not pure application of force but it involved also the operationalization of aesthetic sources developed from different gepolitical and ideological standpoints rendering the meaning of the term, anti-fascism, unresolved. In fact, the ways in which Nazi party rallied the population and bureaucracy, and attempted to become a historical force by breaking new grounds, left an incalculable formative trace on its political adversaries.

Historians and cultural critiques of fascism remark the aesthetic mobilization of the population and the scientific utilization of resources by Nazi party -most influentially in logistics. The contemporary of the political movement, Walter Benjamin, describes two opposing vectors on the conjunction of art and politics: Aesthetization of politics and politicization of aesthetics in his work, The Work of Art in the Age of Mass Reproduction, that became seminal for art history and cultural studies.

The title of this highly influential essay is a play on Nietzsche’s book The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music that characterized the conditions of emergence of the tragic form.

Nietzsche contrasted two driving principles in this work. He referred to Apollonian to describe the measuredness and distinguishing mind. The proportionality in art and engineering produces an intensification of practical engagement and reason (ratio as in reason and rationality) leading to big leaps in crafts, i.e. creativity.He juxtaposed it with the Dionysian to underline the feral, life-affirming attitude which came through the mystic rituals enlivened by wine, music and sexuality where the measuredness dissolve as the force of music envelops what’s distinguished through reason. Not so much a destruction but dissolution-in-harmony –transfiguration (gr. meta-morphosis). For Niezsche the philologist, the tremendous tension between these two horizons was the miraculous condition of Ancient Greek culture that in a short period of time simultaneously gave birth to a number of influential artistic, scientific and political traditions.

In the early 20th century, living and writing one or two generation after Friedrich Nietzsche—which meant that he was contemporary to Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust as well as to revolutionary physics of his time, Walter Benjamin tackled the problem of massification of mechanics. In this essay, the elitist rejection of the industrialization of art is seen as problematic from the perspective of a historical materialist methodology that articulates the significance of the sensuous and practical experience of the modern masses, proletariat or lumpen-proletariat. Mass reproduction of works of art shrinks the distance between revered artwork and the public. The aura of classic work of art is undone. This aura was indeed produced by tradition through homage. Public saw the work only on rare occasions, there was a ceremoniousness to art viewership. Generations of artists cultivated the aura of the revered art by copying, developing and refusing its esteemed features in their own work. The memory of the original is reproduced through new work that sustains and changes what it pays homage to. This temporality between the work of art its artistic and popular audience has changed with the ability of reproduce works of art with little to no change to its content as a result of mass printing and distribution.

With cinema new perspectives on body and material environments are explored. Instead of debasement and banalization, Benjamin saw in this turn the possibility of democratization of perception as camera entered into the places and showed them in new angles and shapes which were hitherto away from reputable spheres of representation. The explosive potentiality of this expansion of perception and distribution through new mechanics and mass reproduction the narrow channels of Aristocratic and Bourgeois art are replaced with broader interests in making of sensibility and representation.

The post-World War 2 use of the pejorative term, fascist, equates it with extremely repressive political disposition which eclipses historically productive character of Nazism. Emotional categories such as enthusiasm and anger were acting as political media for the mobilization of the masses. This active aspect of modern power will later be theorized more in depth as discussed in earlier chapters by Michel Foucault drawing on Nietzsche’s fundamental analytics of will to power in reevaluating values. Active generation of desire, and not just its repression, and utilization of mythology—non-modern points of reference—are dropped in the conceptual afterlife of fascism. While scholars point out bodily, sensory and affective channels through which digital power manifests, the resonance of affective politics with totalitarian fascism is not analyzed at the level of apparatus and networks but often proposed haphazardly at the level of person.

Any serious critical commentary on survival and metamorphosis of the fascist propaganda in contemporary politics has to critically address its actively mythological character of its political messaging delivered often in the presence overwhelming monuments within gigantic spaces in order to account for its hold over the population. Fascism left its mark on the civic and political culture. Its ideological strategies became forces to be reckoned and at times copied by its adversaries just as one enters into an arms-race, willy nilly, to compete with an adversary. Fast development of respective tank-technologies and cryptography during the Second World War by Allies in response to Nazi military might demonstrates this historical dynamic. Totalitarian society is inherently linked with an endless total war, it has to seek new adversaries to keep its apparatus alive —inside or outside (Arendt, 1976, p. 424). 

On this point, there is no distinction between so-called 1st, 2nd and 3rd world countries. Yet with the supposed end of Cold War, it became war didn’t end but proliferated as endless series of its burial rituals. During the decades of 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s, the 20th century meta-stable equilibrium between capitalist centers with its liberal democracies, socialist bloc and third-world non-aligned nations continues to collapse producing immeasurable catastrophes. 

In the aftermath of World War 2, the public discourse have never fully moved away from total logistical and cultural deployment of population as if societies are in states of infinite and indefinite warfare (Hardt & Negri, 2000) where imperial power expands through networks. As a political structure, empire does not require articulation of population in terms of homogeneous national identity and conversely expands but rendering itself flexible to montage extremely varied types of political ideologies with which it can conflict at some level of public discourse while cooperating at another strategic or tactical level. This renders problematic what Arendt termed as banality of evil to describe participation of so-called low and middle-level bureaucrats or so-called average citizen into the fascist project.

If Nazi’s operated not in the mode of Empire but racist nationalism with the popular party-bureaucracy being its arm of branching into the population, the networked structure of power in the age of post-biopolitical empire makes it ambiguous what subjectivities are reproducing the ‘banality of evil’ as seemingly contradictory logics can be montaged to one another depending on geopolitical, strategic, tactical, personal and communitarian needs. Through networks with the use of political branding, dissonant political agendas can function together. This counterintuitive co-functioning becomes a recurring problematic of 21st century politics as a result of entanglement of local and global networks (Issevenler, 2024).    

In the work of architect-turned-social theorist Paul Virilio this entanglement encompasses not just local and global actors but with more ontologically differential way encompasses aesthetic and military devices and registers that shape late modern political processes. Generals need cinematic techniques to visualize the terrain. As the terrain of warfare gets more mobile, the creation of every more dynamic apparatus of visualization becomes necessary. Here, the cinematographic questions of how to frame, how to edit and montage becomes military questions. On the other side of the equation (cinema=war), cinema, in narrativizing history, takes on either deliberate or implicit propaganda role. The recruitment effort as well as the control of population morale in the war-effort calls in aesthetic capacities of the cinematic art.

Virilio, by analyzing co-emergence of modern cinema and modern warfare, draws out not mere parallels but also co-constitution of these fields as he offers unique analyses of how speed becomes an essential category of agonistic politics. Differences of speed—as manifested in the access to information, agility with which military might is mobilized and overall developmental capacities—become the privileged analytic through which to articulate the political meaning. In fact, Clough’s highlighting of exposure and speed, taken as orienting axes for our description of event analysis in this part, are borrowed from Virilio’s study of speed and politics across cinematic and logistic techniques of movement and representation. Politics operate in a zone projected by visual devices of the militaries. These devices in return are emergent materialities reflective of historical needs of political powers. Development of satellite and internet technologies are prime examples of this entangled process (De Landa, 1991, p. 207).  

If political sociology to identify totalitarian society not merely by ideas but the effective apparatus and networks of power, the relevance of fascism as a mode of totalitarian society that mobilizes art, science and myth without respecting the boundaries of state and civil society, peace and war, is far from an exceptional occurrence distinguishable by party-affiliation or identifiable through only singling-out repression as operative bodies exceed and predetermine activities of political parties which are often secondarily driven by grass-root social movements while the totality of aesthetic and affective production is networked with economical and military projects. Its operation cannot be understood through a negative theory of power that understand its effectivity only through repression, oppression, exclusion in short brutality.  Social theorists emphasized a parallel and not binary process of development of violence and civility.

Heidegger in his reflections on technology offers the term gigantic to describe its historical movement that’s visible through modification of size. While Nazi party erected domineering monuments to assimilate the individual into a transhistorical spirit fascism and rallied through stadiums filled with enthusiasm, in the aftermath the gigantic for Heidegger showed itself in different dimensions such as the shrinking of space by telecommunication and transportation technologies. What may at first seem a defense against emergence of massive centralized bureaucracies and anonymized populations through empowerment of horizontal communication devoid of censorship in fact also leads to disappearance of perceptibility and criticizability of power. With the becoming micro-physics of power, most paradigmatically symptomatic in the struggle over semiconductor chips, graphicness of relations of power becomes problematic. Just as Heidegger conundrum that we do not think in this thought-provoking age, we might argue that we do not have an image of power in this age of images.

Krugman’s and Chinese Embassy’s acts are not simply semiotic statements, they are affective modulations, rhythmic interventions, an engagement with historical temporality. They are symptomatic of mixing of visual genres and circumstantial, sporadic yet algorithmically distributed production of political messages. Thus, individual instances might seem minuscule while the combined effect of networks is elusive. To compensate for this gap in inherited language inadequate for the development of asignifying logic of power and affect in 21st century, new narratives are composed often drawing on familiar genres as examples demonstrate.

Both political performances are undercut by the potentiality of the data —the rates of infection, dates as well as economic and cultural variables interlinked with one another. Since this potentiality—its capacity to affect emergent present and future— is actualized through through  political modulation, probabilistic ontology becomes the primary ground of political articulation. The Financial Times graphic with its ideological ornaments and further contradictory yet assuring narrativization by Krugman is a prime example of how politics operate between potentiality and actuality. Articulation and public legitimation of what’s deemed likely or unlikely, what’s arguable seeming reasonable versus what’s product of ‘hatred’ becomes central political maneuvers to establish consensual participation larger populations.

One might argue that the reality is independent of how each commentator represented it whether that be a financial newspaper, an academic or an embassy. Yet since we take reality to be a processual event that involve cybernetic feed-back processes between observer and observed, representations become the condition of possibility of further communicative action in the field. Pandemic response has been a prime example of how facticity can be politicized through aesthetic performances in digital milieus.

In the last decades, there has been a turn towards greater understanding of the performativity of the speech while also reckoning with the the indeterminacy of protocols that ensures the frame of communication (Clough, 1998). Theory of performativity of language argues that language is not merely denotative, language doesn’t just point out, gesture towards a reality that’s independent but under right circumstances, and this speciality is of the essence of performativity, language can make reality. For instance a judge sentencing someone to death-penalty in the very act of writing the sentence is also producing the sentence. Yet, in the absence of right set of conditions and relations, speech-acts can fall flat, as performative, as in the popular meaning of the term which is exactly the opposite of its meaning in linguistic terminology. Then, where does that leave the question of facticity if probabilistic registers are gaining dominance over strict determination of causality?

Instead of designing protocols that control the rules of communication and enforces strict subjective identities through discipline and ideological interpellation, there is a probabilistic logic which can operate with population capacities without relying on causal links to structure it towards desired ends. Thus, there is noise in the mediation and the redistribution of the material across points in the networks. As Clough notes:

With the intensification of datafication, these tendencies produce what Patricia Clough called as aesthetic causality driving the creativity instead of mere blurring of the field of knowledge based on probabilistic correlation of events (2015). While on the one hand, probabilistic aesthetic causality opens up space for different categories of engagement based on what’s interesting or what’s alluring thereby freeing thought from mechanics of necessity, it also gives way to aestheticization of politics dangerously exploited by Nazis. With the intensification of datafication, these tendencies produce what Patricia Clough called as aesthetic causality driving the creativity instead of mere blurring of the field of knowledge based on probabilistic correlation of events (2015). While on the one hand, probabilistic aesthetic causality opens up space for different categories of engagement based on what’s interesting or what’s alluring thereby freeing thought from mechanics of necessity, it also gives way to aestheticization of politics dangerously exploited by Nazis.

For instance, in the Bourgeois theater the spacetime of the play was established in distinction from the spacetime of the everyday life through a series of protocols: the raised height of the stage, the movement of the curtain, the insertion of silence, and the seating arrangement. In contrast, the cultural spatio-temporality of timeline where politics is staged can traverse, overcode and undercut that which is its subject-matter. Digital political performances engage the subject at the supposed interiority of spaces of production and reproduction such as work, commute and home. Not as extensions of these spaces of closed interiority and nor always as contributions to the activities animating them but they traverse them in what may termed as creative dissonance.

This new level of determination of the social that is fluid in the sense that the model is decentralized and proximate to the actual multiplicity of elements it permeates. If social fact marks force of external normativity, the very framing of social fact is an extra-normal event, it’s originary yet unlimitable in its determinant factor. Aesthetic causality is then attending to events as tendencies that are always incomplete and selective and therefore in their performativity bears witness to a sovereign aesthetics of composition. All the vignettes engaging with the facticity of the pandemic demonstrate this function which produces what it claims to merely comment upon.

Then, these acts are sovereign because each selection of supplement is an incision and stitching of process closely entangled with emergent life-or-death probabilities given through singular curves moving on multidimensional potential/actual axes produced from machinic nonconscious and subjective unconscious point of view where each transcendentally presuppose and supplement on another’s presence. Symptomatic of a political age where power escapes representation and where no single register can claim meta-authority in organizing data (Issevenler, 2022), data and its image working in concert with the social media timelines as machines of montage carry out local normalizing functions. There is neither chaos nor order but stabilizing and destabilizing vectors in a decentered field. Therefore, normal is simply the inflection of a curve producing a circumstantial sense of presence as it produces alignment therefore relative stabilization or a sense of absence (of norm) therefore alarming intensities. Yet, given any of these points of reference are themselves merely values of different political projections performatively acting as pure functions these senses of presence and absence, these processes of stabilization and destabilization are incomplete representations.

The dubious biopolitical facticity of pandemic is produced in its circulation across the world, it is produced by reference to the surviving and supplemental parameters of nation-state, ideological competition and the intensive regime of new media. Deleuze notes in the Policing of Families:

After the deconstruction of the terms of the social i.e. opening its constitutive elements to indeterminacy and undecidability, facticity of social gives way to first performative political projects, then to aesthetic compositions. The relationship of these dimensions are not necessarily historical vis-a-vis one another, but transcendent as each category presupposes the other.

Philosopher of process and event, Alfred North Whitehead, discussed earlier in the first chapter of this part, wanted his project to be not just a philosophy of conditions of possible experience as in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and but also be an account for the actuality of experience. Therefore, elaborated heavily on the formative function of data in the formation of experience. Throughout this part, we argued that a philosophically complicated thinking of events, what we termed deconstructive event-analysis is appropriate for political sociology of digital sociality.

We argued that organizing concepts of understanding carry the political context of their emergence therefore these seeds animating their function in alternate contexts has to be laid bare. An ethnographic sensitivity to cultural material, social scenes and material environments can provide the singular data acting as crystals through which to see transformation of sociality. We showed there can be no pure phenomena independent of an apparatus—theoretical and material—that makes it thinkable.

As a result, when it comes to most urgent and demanding events formulated around the immediacy of life-and-death this risk of letting go of critique of mediation in the name of attending to immediacy and self-evident could grow exponentially. Echoing Benjamin’s thinking on philosophy of history, we found elaborated commentary on carved out intervals of digital phenomena to be appropriate for its understanding instead of an analysis that takes frequencies as representative significance hasten to take advantage of calculative possibilities of digital technologies. Instead of grouping instances in sets, therefore de-temporalizing their movement in historical time, researcher might offer situated analyses without assumed that this analysis is unitary, final and adequate representation. How situation, what we approached as presence, is claimed becomes the core achievement of this research.  To this end, we argued that a notion of incompleteness is necessary to complicate Whitehead’s philosophy that would open its historical limitation to radical impact of new events, new devices and new languages.

Works Cited

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