Affective Practices and Politics, a schematic Marxist analysis

Gary Tedman

What my research work is mostly about, as in my book Aesthetics & Alienation, is the way aesthetics fits into politics.

A short, materialist, definition of aesthetics is the opposite of anaesthetics.

So, what is the opposite of anaesthetics? Anaesthetics are normally understood to be drugs that dull our senses, which make us less aware of our surroundings. They are of course important in medicine, but if we treat the term more broadly, we can see that it could mean anything that reduces your general awareness of reality. So, when it comes to aesthetics, by contrast it is anything that increases your awareness of things, which heightens your sensory capacities.

However, aesthetics has a long history of being a fairly minor ‘tributary’, of philosophy, where it includes or blends into such things as the philosophy of art; it also surfaces in art theory and criticism, and it even appears as a more everyday term for getting your nails done in a shop. We can ignore these aspects for the moment.

I cannot repeat here what I have already gone over in my book. I merely want to point out what I think is an important aesthetic factor in current politics.

The bourgeois class has always been aware of the usage of aesthetics, mainly because for this class it firstly became important for selling things and for marketing and branding in capitalism. Over the many years of their class rule they have built up this knowledge, partly by default, because it is instrumentally useful, but also in the knowledge that it is something that is influential and beneficial in their class struggle against the working class, in other words, it helps them to succeed in their exploitation of the working class.

How does it do this? In my book I explain the role of aesthetics and the ‘aesthetic level of practice’, as well as ‘aesthetic state apparatuses’ in the process of sublimating the alienation from labour of the working class (alienation as per Marx ,1844, and it makes some references to the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s work). This is not easy to grasp in simple terms, and it requires some foreknowledge of Marx’s work, but there are other less significant but more everyday examples of how aesthetics is a part of politics, but which are ‘hidden’ by the ruling class, or they are rendered morally taboo to draw attention to.

My current work, a new book, is about the bourgeois media and the role it plays in the aesthetic class struggle, and I want to put forward a few ideas drawn from this here. I will state them without much evidence and rather baldly.

The media uses aesthetics, perhaps this is obvious: for instance, politicians are groomed by the media, and with their expertise the media presents them in the way they want, while taking into account the needs of their class’s class struggle. Of course, the aesthetic struggle extends way beyond this aspect, into all forms of entertainment and escapism too, but we will concentrate on just this.

We are supposed, obviously, to understand the media as ‘free’, but we reject this.

For us, the media is a state apparatus.

Now, considering ‘the media’ as a unitary thing, as in ‘media state apparatus’, even though this is what the term ‘the media’ (in English English) already implies, might seem a stretch, I know. A lot of the media is obviously privately owned. However, this ownership does not change things drastically, these corporations are either owned by the bourgeois class, or directed by the bourgeois class through their state (it is therefore much like bourgeois education being private and ‘non state’, but also being the most state state education). If there are small independent creative, media start-ups which do well and become popular (it happens!), these will soon be gobbled up by the bigger media state apparatuses and in any case are always governed by state laws.

Thus, we do not accept that there is any really ‘free’ media. It is always, or almost always, in the control of the bourgeois state.

A lot of people already feel this is true, but now we come to the most interesting aspect of the media considered as a state apparatus. The elected government and parliament is also a part of the overall media state apparatus.

It is not something separate, independent from the media. It is also not ‘free’ and ‘of the people’. - Because this apparatus only deals with appearing to govern in an emotional, affective, or aesthetic sense.

To understand this fully we need to delve into bourgeois democracy and how it functions, which has to be left out of this account for the most part, unfortunately.

We can just note that democracy was not elected, it had to be won in the class struggle by the bourgeois class against the old aristocracy, with its divine right to rule. In the history of its origin and development class struggle has continued. Voting democracy tries to hold this struggle within certain boundaries suitable to the bourgeois ruling class. It has to appear to be rule by consensus. Democracy is the political superstructure that it normally prefers because of its appearance of consensus, ‘everyone has a say’.

Being a system fundamentally based on popularity, however, means that it is not politically scientific, and the vote is always directed by which class holds the media state apparatus, which decides what is popular - it is always push rather than pull, just as class struggle came before democracy. We only know what happens in our democracy via the media state apparatus. The election itself is already a performance played in the media, governed by the media state apparatus. There is no such thing as ‘spontaneously popular’, or at least it is extremely rare.

Voting democracy must always elect a parliament that must have a certain structure, which remains rigid and which is repeatable, and its performance is played out, and can only be played out, as a media performance in the media state apparatus. The structure is always a false dialectic: a to-ing and fro-ing between two sides which constantly balance and repair what the other does wrong. It is the ‘nice cop versus nasty cop’ routine writ large, with the voter as the interrogated subject.

‘The media’ schools the elected politicians in how to appear in the media. Essentially this shows the power relation, these elected politicians are the employees of this state apparatus.

If parliament is a media state apparatus, then what apparatus really does the work of governing the country, we might well ask.

We already know that the real mechanism of governing exists and operates in the background, in the UK it is Whitehall, and permanent under secretaries of state which run the different departments, who are appointed, not voted for. This is also where the echelons of government blend quietly with the military and military intelligence, who of course are also not voted for.

In other words when you vote you are voting for a performance, perhaps, at best, a better performance, but this is all you can vote for.

President Trump of the US is perhaps one of the first big bourgeois politicians to be so obviously from the media state apparatus, so obviously a performer, although there have been others. As we know he always rails against the media and pretends to be against it (he would!), despite him being its most obvious product, a sort of pinnacle of the breed.

One thing that led to the writing of this short piece was noticing that certain affective practices, which can be defined as emotional ways of being, your aesthetic, are set in stone by the bourgeois media state apparatus as preordained slots into which the various figures in politics must fit.

For instance, the typical left-wing politician is almost always shown as a ‘firebrand’, a bit shouty, always admonishing people and vigorously trying to persuade us of his (usually his) moral truth, in other words he is a puritan and a humanist, always. This happens across national boundaries, for instance in France Jean Luc Melenchon performs as this figure. In the past in the UK both Neil Kinnock and the union boss Arthur Scargill performed in this vein. These figures always have a religious-like fervour which is reactionary, despite what they may say which may be rational.

Does this performative aspect mean these figures always act insincerely? It does not necessarily follow. But they will be rewarded for how well they adhere to their roles in the false dialectical contest, and insofar as they ‘like’ these rewards and do as they are directed, it seems likely that they would be swayed, and so they become bourgeois agents, specifically of the bourgeois media state apparatus.