Replete with athletic bodies, monumental prospects, and incessant callbacks to the idealized past, fascist cultural production is often seen as conservative, derivative, kitschy, or transparently propagandistic—in short, bad. Yet, its effectiveness in mobilizing the masses by rewiring the affective, ideological, and libidinal economy of capitalist modernity cannot be denied. How, then, do fascist aesthetics work? And why do they work so well? While classical aesthetics often sought to uncover a deep connection between beauty, reason, and the good, fascist aesthetics celebrates the irrational, the mythical, the spectacular, and a vision of the world according to which war itself is beautiful. As Walter Benjamin famously argued, fascist aesthetics provide a safety valve for capital in times of crisis. On this view, fascism itself can be understood as the aestheticization of politics while anti-fascism, in turn, entails the politicization of aesthetics. Yet, in the shadow of the culture industry, the boundaries between fascist and non-fascist aesthetics are fuzzy at best, putting the possibility of resistance into question. And as we contend with fascism 2.0 the problem of fascist aesthetics remains a burning one. Are fascist aesthetics modern, anti-modern, post-modern or a complex articulation of all three? Can fascist art be good? Does mass culture necessarily tend towards fascism? How do the aesthetics of contemporary fascism differ from that of the classical period? Is Benjamin’s aestheticization model still valid in an age of widespread depoliticization? And, most importantly, what might an anti-fascist aesthetics of the present look like?
In this course, we will study the aesthetics of fascism from the 1920s to the present. We will look at a broad range of cultural products and practices from fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and imperial Japan before interrogating the continued influence of fascist aesthetics in the postwar period and its current resurgence in the contemporary moment. We will study works across media including literature, film, architecture, the visual arts, fashion, and sports. We will study the Nazi exhibition of so-called “degenerate art”, the remaking of Rome by Mussolini and Berlin by Hilter, the melancholic strain in Japanese fascisms, the movies of Leni Riefensthal, and Italian Futurism. Closer to our own moment we will look at American pop culture, AI slop, and the aesthetics of Trumpism. Authors will include Walter Benjamin, Sigfried Kracauer, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Clement Greenberg, Susan Sontag, Paul Virillo, Guy Debord, Jacques Rancière, Anna Kornbluh and others.
