Arna Beth

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    The Aestheticization of Politics: Subversive Affirmation in the Post-Truth Era


    Arsenal Gear in MGS2:Sons of Liberty


    The Techno-Political Landscape of Post-Truth


    This reality is starting to feel eerily familiar, with many artists, and writers taking on the absurdity that is post-modernity, nothing resonates, or feels as close to it as the prophesied narrative of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. The game, created by Hideo Kojima in 2001 hits like a blast from the past except it's almost an exact replica of the reality  we now experience in the techno-political landscape. In the game, the world is controlled by AI-driven propaganda, extreme surveillance and automated warfare followed by complete erasure of personal autonomy. How could a game from 2001 so accurately depict what was to inevitably happen in our concurrent reality? Its predictions perfectly describe a post truth era where objective facts hold significantly less influence on emotionally charged narratives or spectacles. Paving the way for consistent and pervasive propaganda rife in what the true king of Aura, Walter Benjamin calls the “Aestheticization of Politics” in his book The Mechanical Age of Production.


    “Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”


    When looking at contemporary media one might find it has become increasingly harder to clock what is conveying truthful information in text _ images _ and videos which are easily fabricated or recontextualized. When the media becomes willingly confusing or deceitful it is a symptom of a much larger problem of control and apathetic individualism. Adam Curtis describes this phenomena of a highly individualist society:


    “We’re in this very funny paradoxical moment in history, which is full of moments of dynamic hysteria, yet everything always remains the same. We get this wave of hysteria – angry people click more! – and those clicks feed the systems and nothing changes. It’s a rational machine model. The idea of artificial intelligence is a very limited, machine-like idea.”





                    

    This is the fundamental principle of Fascist Aesthetics, a confused and frightened populace, where the people have been convinced of their powerlessness _ their freedom handed over to an elitist power veiled in machinic secrecy. Individuals forced to live in a collision of intersecting reality bubbles and echo chambers that further isolate them from each other. 

    The generations of Millenials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha who are now the emerging driving work force got the last taste of the internet which was built on the principle of decentralization. Digital aesthetics are the backbone of nostalgia, replacing the natural world outside. No one can deny the fantastical worldbuilding which replaced it. Memories of childhood were spent in majority exploring digital landscapes, talking to NPC characters and solving anything from small side-quests to uncovering massive potentially world-ending conspiracies. It gave us opportunities to become and take part in various worlds with varying degrees of power through escapism of the IRL.

    Can one approach these themes as a diagnostic of the techno-political frustration? Encompassing both the aesthetic and the ideological as two equally important aspects of understanding the reality in which hypnotizing media is built on. Nothing exists in a vacuum and certainly not today. 



                                                                             


    Mimetic Weapons: Strategies of Subversive Affirmation


    Let’s decode what Fascist Aesthetics mean, and how subversive affirmation which was fundamental to my MA work represents itself.
    Fascist Aesthetics or the Aestheticization of Politics, is a tool that communicates core fascist ideologies such as ultranationalism, militarism, suppression of opposition and hierarchical society, most frequently through symbols or a mythologized past. 
    Its intended effect is to further a state of mindless, uncritical and perpetual consumption of its own ideology. How these authoritarian trends appear through time is in constant shift, often becoming increasingly hard to decipher. It’s seductive, authoritarian visual language embedded in design, propaganda, and modern technology. It is exactly this seductive and evolving nature of fascist aesthetics that begs for strategy beyond a stated opposition. Radical opposition in this current post-truth landscape of undecipherable symbols requires Subversive Affirmation as a means to highlight and undervalue its devouring agenda. We see this prime example in the way generative AI has been pushed into the front-lines of media consumption, prompts fed through biased machines, outputs of hyperaesthetic videos and images, assembling the collective output of images, videos and sound from the entirety of documented human output. 


    “The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone with bullshit in order to erode the intellectual foundations for resisting political cruelty.” Watkins, G. (2025)     AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism, New Socialist, 9 February. Available at: https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/



    Subversive Affirmation (or over-identification) is an artistic performance and political tactic in lieu of rejecting the overarching aesthetic language, instead, mimics and exaggerates it in an effort to expose internal contradictions and mechanisms of power.

    Zizek wrote pretty extensively on the subject in both The Plague of Fantasies and The Mestastes of Enjoyment:



     "The only way to break the power of a hegemonic ideology is to take it more literally than it takes itself—to over-identify with it, to enact its discourse in its utmost consistency, and thus to expose its obscene superego underside."
    - Žižek, S. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, p. 92.

    Mother/Father, 3D Sculpture + Render, 2025



    Though one could argue that subversive affirmation in all its affirming yes-ness and irony is insufficient because it's engaging with a system that allows a distance to it, the over identification closes that distance and can become far more disruptive than simple critique. The Slovenian musical group Laibach was famous for its subversive antics in analyzing ideological dogmas.







    Some would approach this subversion with gleeful irony, as an effort of undermining, there are various ways one can approach this over-identification. 

    Nancy Grossman approaches this rebellion in a restrictive way. Her works are armored in leather_ overrepresenting masculine ideals of power, but there is a fetishistic element, they are constrained, silenced or even imprisoned by the same system that supposedly empowers it. A devoted masculinity that suffocates itself. It is constrained power. The missiles, or stakes in my own work are not only objects of weapons, but through the piercing and the penetration of my characters bodies, the violence inflicted, it over-identifies with an empowerment narrative frequently forced on women in a (male) totalitarian oppression. A literal weaponized body in violation of our own capacity for violence.
    We must criticize that queer body needs to be both perpetually invulnerable and threatened. and by using the weapon of violent masculinity against you, instead for you thus becoming immune to its damage.




    Candelabra, 2025.
    Nancy Grossman, Untitled, 1971.


    The work of David Cronenberg also utilizes this subversion, though he does not necessarily arm his characters against authoritarian systems, he over-identifies with it until they eventually merge with it, physically. Videodrome serves as prime example of this, where the protagonist Max Renn, quite literally, morphs his body with the violent fantasies of the media. His hand verbatim fuses with a gun. Cronenberg plays into these ideas of merging with technologies and instead of overpowering these changes in technological acceleration the director himself and his characters have often chosen to embrace them, in accellerationist fashion. I identify with this process of radical hybridization of the body and technology. Using a technological mimesis in the creation of these hybrid bodies, both fused and violated by the same power systems that they are forced to live under.


    Max Renn in Videodrome(1983) by David Cronenberg
    Self Portrait, 2025

    Logic of Speed and the Ethics of Grievability


    To understand the velocity in which these crises operate and hybridize I have found it helpful to turn to Paul Virilio's concept Dromology, or the logic of speed (Virilio, 2006) . Speed is the form of violence itself in a “dromocratic state” (Virilio, 2006, p. 46) . No longer does the most powerful entity win by size of borders, or the best ideology, but by controlling the points of how fast information, perception and warfare flows. Just as the engine Curtis describes as fuelling the dynamic hysteria and the same reality Kojima prophesied, the world moves too fast for any critical reflection, and we get stuck in mindless, uncritical consumption, which again, is central to the aestheticization of politics and the fascist principle. I want to consider that in my own work I am attempting to capture these glimpses or snapshots of this technological acceleration. Pausing at the second it reflects on the spectacle that is the techno-political hellscape.





    In Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Greivable? We now understand the subversion, the revolt or rebellion that is so essential in this tactic of undermining the existing power structure, but one cannot ignore the ethical dimensions involved. In the book she presents the question of which lives are considered valuable and which can be rendered as disposable. Butler presents the media and current political notions condition us to accept the deaths and violence faced by some as normative. The aesthetics of fascism consistently deframes the “other” as in essentially marking them as ungrievable bodies (Butler, 2010, p. 25) . This could be those who do not fit into the proposed mythology of fascism. To confront this logic of empowerment in resistance but deeply violating, how are we deeming which life is grievable? 







    Caught in these crosshairs I do not consider this essay a form of plea for a return to primitive technologies or even a Neo-Luddite revolution, but an analysis and ideological dissection of a future where the fusion of body and machine does not inherently facilitate violence. Have we breached a point of no return of biological, psychological and technological assamblage? Becoming complete helots to the manifested destiny of eschatological techno-capitalist end. 
    As we are pushed further and further into complicity with the war machine, choice and autonomy continues to be veiled in secrecy and confusion. Outputs are compromised, and exist in relation to the complex and problematic nature of technology and geopolitics.  We must in some capacity be able to confronting the techno-fascist myths and the problematic nature of these subjects and methadologies to find ways of subverting them in the midst of mass surveillance and complete governmental discipline.








    • Virilio, P. (2006) Speed and Politics. New ed. Translated by M. Polizzotti. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
    • Butler, J. (2010) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?. London: Verso. (Original work published 2009)