Aesthetics, politics, images

I hope this post will be somewhat relevant...

The film that was running before lecture on the 28th (the Nazi Germany film - I've forgotten the title), reminded me of a book I read last year. Otohiko Kaga's A Summer Long Gone (Kaerazaru Natsu) is a Japanese novel about a boy in a military academy, leading up to the summer of 1945.

Anyway, the film reminded me of this novel due to the 'aestheticization of politics' as mentioned in class. For example, the exclusively male sphere of politics (in the film, there were speeches, marches, and scenes which I assume were depicting the daily lives of soldiers) emphasized a homosocial appeal with a certain type of White, Aryan masculinity. With the novel, I was drawn to the similarly exclusive male environment of the military academy. In both cases, the extensive attention paid to looks and appearance was striking, as the 'style' or 'fashion' of the politics was expressed in the physical, material sense, bordering on obsessive. Politics (and the army) was aestheticized as hyper-masculinity binds belief (politics) with a certain image, where politics becomes masculinity to an extent. I found it frightening, with both the film and the novel, because it was so rigid and strict and forced so that it almost felt like brainwashing. In the novel, it was worse, because you gradually synchronize with the protagonist's train of thought (a boy whose mind is completely taken over by Imperialist indoctrination over the course of the book).

I guess what this resonates with in life today is how the aestheticization of politics continues (Nazi uniforms seem to be quite a fetish market) as arenas for various art forms, whether it may be satirical or even pornographic. But in any form, it seemed to hint at a longing for characteristics such as heightened fashion style, the homosocial arena, and a distinct homosexual culture (which is rather explicit in A Summer Long Gone).

'Aestheticizing' politics and making it a 'style' or 'fashion', I think, means that the type of politics in question becomes attached to a certain set of images. Therefore it becomes something like a phase, fixed in a certain place, ideology and time so that people can go back and refer to it, literally, like a history of fashion trends. People can look back on the extremely stylized and fixed 'culture' of Japanese Imperialism and take that to different realms via reproduction, resurrection, and imagination. I believe the novel A Summer Long Gone is an example of such reproduction.

In that sense, it sort of ties back in to the idea of images (original vs replications and 'aura') as discussed during class and tutorials. In this case the 'original' form of politics (Nazi Germany, Imperialist Japan) cannot be truly resurrected because it was 'politics', not a concrete, visual image like the Mona Lisa, the original still intact today. But the material manifestations such as clothes can be regarded as 'art' (culture), since the sole existence of an army uniform, I think, can embody the stylized, aestheticized politics itself. So the original ‘art’ (ex. a uniform, or even architecture), is already very political in the case of aestheticized politics, such as the 'Fascist Chic'.

This is as far as I got... I just rambled on aimlessly, didn't I?

On a side note, A Summer Long Gone is a beautiful, haunting book which I highly recommend, but unfortunately I don't think it's translated in English. Such a shame.