The Trembling Continuity of an Express

Where political kitsch is taking us

What I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself) [and] all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously).

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I will begin this post by saying something that I think will gain almost universal acceptance amongst my readers, irrespective of where in the world they live or what their opinions are: something truly dreadful has happened to politics. We are now living in Milan Kundera’s nightmare; our governing classes have become almost totally swept up into ‘fantasies, images, words and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch’. There is no longer anything resembling sensible, rational discussion of policy in public life - there are merely atavistic contrasts between us and them, in-group and out-group, goodies and baddies, four-legged and two-legged.

Voters, in this environment, find themselves being cast in the role not of reasoning actors but rather simply as bundles of instinct, whose job is to determine which side, red or blue, is most fittingly aligned with the angels or demons. What will actually happen as a result of an election is considered to be an issue which only a pedant or hopeless nerd would find interesting - what matters is (it is fitting to use an entirely inane word at this juncture) the identification of the better set of ‘vibes’. And this, as you will no doubt have noticed, extends far beyond electoral affairs - our entire political lives indeed now seem to revolve around whether or now we are able to tune in, at any given moment, to the appropriate mood music and act accordingly.

We have a vague sense of what the underlying cause of this disastrous state of affairs is: the technology, stupid. But technology, I would like to here argue, is in itself not the real problem. Our crisis is properly understood as an aesthetic one. And we need to be clear-eyed about what this means: there is no technical fix. Things will get worse before they get better. Indeed, they will likely get much, much worse before we see a recovery. The appropriate metaphor to use for our predicament, as we shall see, is a train: we are going in one direction, and we cannot deviate or reverse. At some point, we’ll crash. So, at the risk of overextending that metaphor - make sure you’re sitting close to the emergency exit and that you’ve got your luggage ready for when things come shuddering to a halt.

The fin de siècle French constitutional theorist Maurice Hauriou is hardly a household name even amongst French constitutional lawyers, but he long ago gave us the tools to understand our predicament. Writing in ‘The Theory of the Institution and the Foundation’, Hauriou described human social movements and purposive associations (what he called ‘institution persons’) as being imbued with ‘directing ideas’ - relatively fixed concepts which pass from individual to individual, and ‘from one mind to another’, by their own ‘force of attraction’.

Purposive human associations, then - whether a political party, company, church, and so on - are characterised by moments of ‘communion’ in which a group of human individuals gets together to proclaim their shared commitments to such directing ideas, and thereby interiorise them. These ideas are then ‘refracted into similar concepts’ in their minds, and this unites the group in a sense of shared ownership over the ideas in question. Once the moment of communion is over, the individuals involved all then go out into the world and put those ideas into effect in acts of power, in anticipation of the next communal moment of shared feeling. And this is what gives the relevant ideas continuity across time - sporadic meetings of communion during which the participants jointly ‘obsess’, linked together by the actions which those participants subsequently undertake, in the name of those ideas, in the interim.

The result, for Hauriou, is something like ‘the couplings thrown between rail-road cars to establish the trembling continuity of an express’. Human social movements are driven forward. They are directed by ideas. Those ideas have an independent existence, and individual human beings imbibe them at communal meetings, and make them concrete in their own minds through action in between. Human associations, therefore, almost literally, have lives of their own; with apologies to Jung, individual people do not drive their associations, but rather associations drive people.

The classic, stereotypical example of this would be the religious movement, wherein on a weekly basis a congregation gets together to interiorise, and re-interiorise, a common set of concepts and feelings, and then (ideally) puts them into effect in between. No individual believer originates those concepts and feelings in question himself - they rather come to him, in relatively fixed form, for him to swallow and digest. And the same pattern, for Hauriou, can be seen in any sort of purposive association in the very broad sense - from labour unions to companies to charities. People are not animated by their own ideas, and such associations are not amalgamations of the individualised visions of all of their participants; rather the opposite. Ideas, if you like, are, to use modern parlance, memetic. They spread like a ‘mind virus’. And purposive associations are therefore to be understood, to return to the metaphor of the train, as akin to a railway express: the human individual gets on board and is swept along. He does not steer - he is carried to a destination.

Hauriou’s admittedly schematic analysis shows remarkable insight into the basically aesthetic nature of political preferences. For most people, most of the time, ideas are interiorised during moments of shared feeling. It is not that people are reasoned into what they believe. Rather, what they believe comes to them through ‘communion’ with others who they know to have a similar emotional response to the world around them. The individual feels something, and becomes aware that others around him feel the same thing. And this causes everybody involved to drink from the same conceptual well, and take in the same conceptual cocktail, not in the manner of a debate club who arrive at a conclusion about a discussion topic, but in the manner of a crowd of dancers raising their hands in unison at a rave.

To return to Kundera, this is why it is important to understand politics as rooted in ‘kitsch’ rather than in reason. Kitsch, for Kundera, is in essence to be understood as an emotional response to a work of art or set of circumstances that a person, crucially, knows himself to be sharing with others. Seeing a group of children playing in the sunshine on a patch of grass, a person is moved and sheds a bittersweet tear. But he also knows that the rest of mankind, seeing such a scene, would react in the same way - and, therefore, he also knows that, in shedding his tear, he is partaking in a communal feeling. This, Kundera tells us, is the heart of kitsch: not the feeling of being moved by seeing children playing, but the feeling that, in being moved by such scene, one is thereby united with all of right-thinking humanity in being so moved.

Politics is a phenomenon of kitsch, for Kundera, because it operates on the same conceptual basis. People do not by and large arrive at political opinions through the application of reason. Rather, they feel something. And they feel that what they feel is a feeling shared by good people everywhere. This, in turn, sets in motion a force of vast social power. And of course we see its effects all around us - the formation of political belief based not on thought but on the intoxicating and magnetising energy of kitsch: the glee and sense of abandon that results from knowing oneself to be being swept along by a communal march of progress with everybody that one respects and admires.

This analysis is endorsed by a passage in For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which Hemingway lays out a similar dynamic, describing the mood that animated the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War:

[Y]ou felt that you were taking part in a crusade. That was the only word for it although it was a word that had been so worn and abused that it no longer gave its true meaning. You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife, something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrassing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at Leon and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it.

It is the last sentence that is the most important: what matters, and what ignites the magic of kitsch, is the fact that one is giving oneself to a cause and knowing others to be engaged in it too. It is the communality that sets the metaphorical train in motion - not the hearing of Bach or the vision of Chartres Cathedral, but the ‘brotherhood’ one hears or sees along with, and who are similarly moved (and who one knows to be moved in the same fashion as oneself).

There are three things to say about this in the current context.

The first is that while technology is not itself the problem, it is making things vastly worse. This is because it widens the net of communal feeling to the entire globe - it is possible, thanks to the internet, to imagine oneself as being united in a shared emotional response to, say, what is happening in the Ukraine, or Palestine, with literally all of the decent people on planet Earth. And it is also because it rapidly accelerates the forward motion of Hauriou’s railroad express, by shortening the gap between moments of communion to the timespan between the last time one looked at one’s phone and the current second. Now, the meetings when one’s ‘brotherhood’ bands together to ‘obsess’ over directing ideas in light of a shared emotional response can happen whenever one desires. And for many people, this will mean tens or even hundreds of times a day. When one’s ‘brotherhood’ is potentially billions strong, the force of kitsch thereby becomes amplified to truly monstrous proportions, and the ‘current thing’ becomes almost impossible to avoid - it inserts itself into the mind not so much like the infiltration of a virus as like the forceful stomping of the sole of a heavy hobnailed boot.

The second thing is that this all explains why it is that our politics is so fraught. What Kundera sought to emphasise is that political kitsch, like any other form of kitsch, is characterised above all by the ‘denial of shit’. When people are caught up in an idealised aesthetic - when they have become convinced that they, along with their brotherhood of fellow Good People, have aligned themselves with truth and beauty and are partaking in the heady emotional payoff of imagining themselves to be envisioning perfection - the last thing they want is anybody casting flies in the ointment by asking awkward questions or raising points of dispute. And therefore when anybody does cause a disruption of any kind they immediately trigger an absolutely enraged, irrational response. Honest questions are not met with good faith answers or explanations - they are met with aggravated put-downs and loud, red-faced shouting, because honest questions, simply put, spoil the mood. They allow shit to intrude. And fiercely aggressive responses to honest questioning - a style of response with which we are all growing increasingly familiar - is the natural consequence when one has convinced oneself that one is fighting off people who are simply flinging faeces for the sake of it.

The third thing to say is that this also gives us an idea about where things are heading. When people are in the grip of an aesthetic response, they cannot be reasoned out of it: that would be a category error. As Immanuel Kant long ago pointed out, when somebody is gazing adoringly at a beautiful sunset, he does not respond in kind to those who point out that there are more important things to do than to look at sunsets, or who launch into a discussion of the underlying science, or who compare tonight’s sunset with a nicer one a few days ago. Indeed, he despises those people and finds their failure to share his own response to the sunset appalling and small-minded.

Instead, one is only shaken out of an aesthetic frame of mind by the intrusion of reality into one’s reverie and the consequence disruption of it. This is always a distressing experience and can be quite painful. Because one is not argued or debated into a different frame of mind but forced into it, the process is necessarily unpleasant.

And that, I am afraid, is the position that we are in. It seems obvious to me that the reason why our age is so strongly characterised by the aesthetification - or kitschification - of politics is that non- or pre-political associations have so diminished a role in our societies than they did in previous eras. It is not that there were ever distant, halcyon glory days for the human race during which people sat around having reasonable political discussions to resolve their differences and to design perfectly functioning institutions. Rather, it is just that politics matters less when people are devoting their attention to their extended families, religious institutions, and communal activities - and matters more when they do not attend to such matters.

We are now in a position in which very large proportions of the population in our societies do not have extended families, religious commitments, or communal lives to speak of, and in which as a result the political sphere has become grotesquely enlarged. And this means that non- or pre-political forms of association are losing their effectiveness as alternative sources of shared feeling and hence of animating ideas. All that we have - to return to the beginning of this post - is competing political aesthetics. This, depressingly, has the short-term consequence of reducing politics to a struggle between two bitterly opposed ‘sides’. But it has the long-term consequence that people increasingly find themselves, often largely unknowingly, being locked into a kitschified identification with some political movement or other - a state of affairs which will only end when the mood is shattered by reality reasserting itself.

And what is true at the individual level is, as will be obvious, true societally too: we are rattling at increasing speed down a railway line - ‘wrong way on a one-way track’, as the old song used to go - and we cannot be reasoned off course or provided with some sort of engineered alternative. We can only wait for the mood to be dispelled by what is real. We can no doubt go along in this way for some time yet, but we cannot forever - and something big is going to happen when we are forced to a halt and the aesthetic and the actual are finally forced into collision. Get ready for it.