SEX and WAR

It’s a long journey from how war became an art form, and then how an art form became a sexual fetish. But it’s an important one, particularly since Freud arrived at the very moment this journey began.

The supreme authority on this subject was (has always been) Walter Benjamin. His famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) remains the definitive “go-to” reference. It all harkens back to the idea of authenticity. What is it? What’s happened to it, and because of what? If there’s one word that encompasses Benjamin’s thesis more than any other, it’s the problem of “authenticity.”

Until the introduction of modern technology in the Industrial Age art retained its full authenticity. Technology changed that because, first, it looked at the original thing through lenses that allowed for different perceptions. One could interpret it from new angles. It gave interpretations wider latitude. Second, technology allowed original art to be reproduced in a way that allowed it to travel. Original sculptures, statues, architecture and even original paintings could not move. Art now had mobility. And moving it into unnatural environments made authenticity virtually irrelevant.

The result threatened the value of art because “value” had to be redefined. Art’s very physicality was jeopardized by reproduction, hence also the “authority” of the object. In art’s own defense came the idea of “art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art) which defended the idea of “pure” art, as opposed to reproduction. The real danger of reproduced art was that it could also be used in other (social, political) contexts. Even the artist could find himself as a pawn for non-artistic interests – causes, agendas, etc. Pure art rejected all social-political connotations.

Interestingly, the whole reproduction phenomenon also happened to surface at the time Marx and socialism became turbulent topics. Marx was all about recovering and protecting “economic” purity – the laborer identifying with and taking pride in his work — as opposed to working in factories, being reduced to a number, making parts for other parts to things he couldn’t even recognize, being a cog in a huge impersonal factory wheel. The “purity” of one’s craft (and his identity) was disappearing.

But there was no stopping technology. Photography was the most obvious game-changer of all. With the photographic plate one could make prints, and then one could ask for “authentic” prints, and any number of them. The very criterion of authenticity began to change, and with it the “social” function of art. It now took on more political ramifications and contexts. – Then came film: “the first art form whose artistic character is entirely determined by its reproducibility.” From the time of the Greeks art was defined by its “eternal value,” it inability to be altered or improved upon. Photography and film changed that.

Enter the dilemma of self-alienation coming with new factory jobs, mass-migrations to urban areas, the merging of cultures, mass-appeal for “heroes” in the cinema (as citizens used cinema to escape miserable conditions) — and with that the loss of knowing (existentially) who/what one was anymore. In other words, the reproduction of the human being himself. “[T]he mirror image has become detachable from the person mirrored, and is transportable. And where it is transported? To a site in front of the masses” (i.e., movie heroes, postcards, posters).

Enter the screen actor as the ideal American stereotype – a total fabrication tailored to the interests of “markets” owned by private companies. Like the new propaganda model itself, it was a new way to exploit the masses (via fashion, trendsetting, and status). Here was, said Benjamin, the “cult of the movie star” which was fostering the “cult of the audience” at the same time – “reinforcing the corruption by which fascism is seeking to supplant the class consciousness of the masses.”

Thus began the 20^th century “reproducible man” – a widespread system tailor-made for social indoctrination, one so embedded and thorough that we still defend it today as part of “the American Way.” Aldous Huxley wrote about tyranny from “the bottom up,” while George Orwell wrote about tyranny from the “top down.” Both recognized the symptoms of social indoctrination. From this, even today, we need to step back and examine our notions of freedom and pleasure – still labeled “subversive.”

Along with art now as a commercial product, the idea of “progress” itself has been reinvented to mistake quantity for quality. “Conspicuous consumption” (Veblen) has become the standard of human happiness. Art has been reduced to an instrument of entertainment, distraction, and escape. When we look at classical art in museums we stand in a time-lock, confused, because we look at it through consumer filters and wonder how to place a value on it. Objects which cannot be priced (or privately owned) are forced upon by an arbitrary monetary standard. We want to put a price tag on it because it’s the only way we can understand “value.” We want a “number” to compare with other numbers. But amazingly, the art refuses to be boxed in.

From the growing “arts” of generating mass movements on the grandest scales, mixed with the new industry called “public relations,” comes the new linkage with the social-political applications of art. We’re now talking about the new science of mass mobilization and control. And nothing facilitates both of these more than the institution of war. “Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technological resources.” And thus, from this, we get the new “aesthetic of modern warfare” through technological progress and speed, using human collateral for unnatural agendas. When it comes to indoctrination and exploitation of the masses, nothing puts both to use more completely than war.

Society learns that “happiness” is an intangible that is never realized. It is never fulfilled. Neither is it ever stagnant. It will always disappoint. Hence the need to take, to invade, to sacrifice, and to kill in the name of fulfillment. It’s the only answer we have, to seek El Dorado elsewhere. The nature of capitalism is also eternal dissatisfaction. “Conquest brings progress,” and war is the glue to the perpetuity of civilization.

Add to this the ablutionary component of war. Historians have always said that cultural “success” is a recipe for “violence.” One must take to remain happy, but then too much taking (and having) for too long also breeds guilt. And guilt breeds an ancient need to “appease the gods” in return for so much prosperity. Thus we sacrifice whole generations of young men every 20 years to ritual death for atonement. Technology hastens this along with media propaganda, advertising, and the marketing of ideology. – There is always an “us” versus “them” mentality, along with a sense of who is more deserving and righteous. Art is now fully in the service of this much broader process of entitlement. Fiat ars – pereat mundus, says fascism (”let art be created, though the world perish”).

Art by now has become a completely different institution with its own modern aesthetic, and Benjamin concludes that “self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticising of politics….” Martyrdom becomes as “American” as apple pie and the flag. We learn that it’s an honor to die for one’s country – an abstract idea, a manifesto, a pledge. And of course everyone in a military graveyard is a hero.

We’ve come a long way from the Greeks and “art for art’s sake.” And it’s only a short step from “annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure” to pleasure becoming a sexual fetish. It plays right in to the theme so well explored by Susan Sontag years ago with her essay on “fascinating fascism.” What is it about whips and leather, masks, S&M and B&D, torture, denial, and denied pleasure that renders sexual pleasure? Especially among those very communities (homosexuals) who were most persecuted by the users of that very accoutrement (Nazis)?

Finally, entering stage left – Freud and his psychology of repression, sublimation, and delayed pleasure through punishment. Freud introduces the many forms of shame and guilt learned in childhood and later in society at large. Especially how (delayed) pleasure is only possible through the experience of pain (self-administered or administered by others).

Through attire and staged forms of deprivation and pain come substituted enactments of war. War is “played with” in many forms. It not only defines cultures, it teases out the “subversive” inside those cultures. It keeps the wheels of human predation turning and changing. There is also the sexual element of conquest and dominion (B&D) over whole populations and cultures, as well as the instruments used to achieve it. Dr. Helen Caldicott famously coined the phrase “missile envy,” referring to the obvious parading of “who has the biggest” in the streets of powerful nations.

Again, with cultural success comes violence and war. War is the great purger and purifier(the big orgasm). It actually destroys the technology that built it. It restores a sensory presence in the body-politic, the primal reunion of mind and body – but with a twist. It binds together two polarities – “construction and destruction,” said Benjamin. The destructive is all part of the constructive process, and visa versa. Orgasm is both creation and destruction, birth and death. In the end Benjamin says “The products of war are justified from a distance” (my italics).

And so, what is the point of this little adventure into sex and war? I’m not exactly sure, except for the fact that when I look upon the general mindset of the American nation, I contrast it with the whole Benjamin thesis. What then becomes crystal clear is futility and tragedy. In spite of learning the above, there is no changing the consciousness of the culture. As someone said, “we take comfort in our limitations” – a painful understatement. How does one possibly hope to enlighten so many who are so indoctrinated in a culture of guns, war, patriotism, and simulacra (imitations with no originals)? How does one begin to explain to a gun-toting “patriot” decked out in military olive-drab the intricacies of social indoctrination? The degree to which that remains impossible is the litmus test of a retrograde culture diminished in IQ, literacy, and vision.

I end up in a vacuum of my own making, on an island remote from all the noise of human habitation. It’s a self-imposed exile, and the only way off the island is by stepping back into the noise. At least the museums are still there – marbled tabernacles for getting out of the heat, for communion with art untouched by time.

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