"The Aesthetic Ideology" as Ideology; Or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?

In 1930, Walter Benjamin reviewed a collection of essays edited by the conservative revolutionary Ernst Junger and entitled War and Warrior. Noting its contributors' avid romanticization of the technology of death and the total mobilization of the masses, he warned that it was nothing other than an uninhibited translation of the principles of l'art pour l'art to war itself (122). Six years later, in the concluding reflections of his celebrated essay The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin widened the scope of his analysis beyond war to politics in general. Fascism, he charged, meant the aestheticization of politics, the deadly consummation of l'art pour l'art's credo Fiat arspereat mundus (244). Like much else in Benjamin's remarkable corpus, the reception and dissemination of these ideas was delayed for a generation or so after his suicide in 1940. By then his remedy-the politicization of art by Communism in the 1936 piece,1 the transformation of war into a civil war between classes in the earlier review-