Syndicate: Re: traumatic aesthetics

["Ivan Zassoursky" <iiz@cnt.ru>]

>Indeed, in a complex (democratic?) world perhaps one should not
>consider the primary function of politicians to be practical...
>The art of negotiating the practical relationship between different (and
>potentially conflicting) aesthetics is traditionally called "Politics".
>
>Trevor Batten
>


Aesthetics is a nice word, and it is very compelling to view politics as at,
because it makes the questions of consequences and responsibilities quite
irrelevant. It is an extremely optimistic view of the world by the way.
The escalating and disastrous war in Balkans, NATO versus Serbia, is going
to become one of the traumatic experiences for people in Europe, I believe,
and maybe even a formational one. If you have never noticed it before, this
war will provide you with a rough illustration of a peculiar nature of
political aesthetics: sometimes it hurts.

Huge monumental figures of the Soviet social realism, although seemingly
immobile and bronze, sometimes started to move their tremendous weight and
you could find yourself under the happy worker's boot. Pushing ahead, into
the future, all those idols were leaving huge marks in the soil - a
concentration camp here, a political exile there. Mass media was also purely
aesthetic until the middle of eighties - at least you could not find facts
and information there. In fact, these aesthetics were so dominating that
perhaps you were not safe until you'd learn to like them. But even being a
spectator never really excludes the possibility of becoming a victim or an
executioner in any historical setting.

Well, that was Soviet, totalitarian past. Too many people have used this
allusion already in a very simplistic way -
Miloshevich-Hitler-Stalin-Saddam-Clinton-Blair - so forget about it. My own
experience comes with the nineties. In Russia these were republican,
democratic times. Freedoms and promises - but the decade of anarchy and
greed. A fascinating era. The style had won. Politics were aesthetics.
Recently we were a classless society in a way - now there is so much poverty
that we're going to have tremendous amount of bad neighbourhoods,
American-style, you know. I don't care about the stolen property (in other
case I'd probably steal a lot), so privatisation can be overlooked. What is
more important is that the level of impoverishment is so low and so spread
that perhaps 60 to 70 percent of the population can barely meet their living
costs and lots of people are turning to agriculture just to be able to feed
themselves. A position of teacher will not be enough to buy you a weekly
supply of food. If you work with the university, your salary would be $30
per month.
I am not complaining. We're discussing aesthetics here. So let's go back to
Balkans. It's style over substance - see what I mean?

Trained in the aesthetic of human rights and supported by self-arranged
drama on TV-screens, both Europe and America are waging war. If there is
light in the end of the tunnel, it's not where they are heading.
This war is not only another slaughter, but a clash of aesthetics. None of
them is purely novel, both were researched exhaustively in the last decades.
The aesthetics of global versus the aesthetics of national. And as long as
this conflict is interpreted aesthetically there can be no way out of this
mess because these styles are produced for different audiences, growing
hostile on both sides.

Human rights, Albanian and Serb refugees are not only style, but substance
too, although not treated as such except in political rhetoric, which is
pure style. And as long as politics remains 'the art of negotiating the
practical relationship between different (and potentially conflicting)
aesthetics' at the expense of simple troubleshooting and long-term problem
solving, there are always dangers ahead.
There are thousands of people out there, whose job is to give you the style.
But when you surrender to aesthetics and start climbing on the tower of
expectations to plunge bravely into the future, there might be no water in
the pool.

I.





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