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Conclusion
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Conclusion In a famous essay written during the Battle of Britain in 1941, George Orwell wrote what I ‹nd to be a very ‹tting quote with which to commence the ‹nal chapter of a book on aesthetics and power. Orwell’s essay begins by discussing the cultural differences that existed, at that time, between the English, on the one hand, and the Germans or Italians, on the other. One difference he mentions is that the English “are not gifted artistically . . . [and that] they are not intellectual. They despise abstract thought.” While this lack of artistic talent, in turn, breeds a resistance to aesthetics, Orwell observes that the English possess a “love of ›owers.” Rather than a love of aesthetics, the love of ›owers is instead a symptom of the English’s love of liberty, with the “privateness of English life” being no different than the English’s preference for a “nice cup of tea.” Yet Orwell writes some of this tongue in cheek, for while the English may not have been capable of producing the beauty found in Italian and German art, they must have appreciated beauty enough to know what it was not. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an af‹rmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally , is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is “Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me,” like the bully who makes faces at his victim. (Orwell 1941, emphasis added) What I ‹nd interesting in this particular passage is how it represents, quite nicely, some of the analytical themes that were discussed in this 193 book. Power itself has an ontology, even an aesthetic manifestation. It must have this aesthetic element, for when it is “naked,” it is ugly. It cannot have the effects or in›uences it does without such aesthetics. Eventually , such naked power facilitates its own resistance. Orwell’s ode to “ugliness,” as stylistically as he presents it, is by no means the only reference of its kind—for whether it be the allusions to “sickness” and “stains” issued by U.S. politicians regarding Abu Ghraib, discussed in chapter 4, or the “foul stain of our species” that Kant mentioned regarding radical evil in his work on aesthetics (Lilla 1998: 12), the reaction that follows beauty’s de‹lement exhibits an impressive shock that needed to be explicated . Hopefully this book has gone some distance toward doing that. By utilizing insights from several theorists and philosophers, this book has suggested that the subjectivity of power seeks out an aesthetic sense of self-integrity through constant creation and innovation. Put another way, the Nietzschean “will to power” comes coupled with a “will to beauty.” This need for creation and modi‹cation of the Self and the idealization of such aesthetic integrity make such power inherently vulnerable to particular practices of counterpower such as re›exive and ›attery discourse, parrhesia, and self-interrogative imaging. These manipulations , occurring in moments or days, cannot be predicted or preempted, and they give no warning, because it is the Self of power that facilitates, in part, their occurrence. By revealing this Self in an aesthetically unfavorable light, counterpower entails a shock that forces power to re-act to reestablish some form of aesthetic integrity. The illustrations used throughout this book, especially those of chapters 2–4, sought to demonstrate how this activity obtains through a variety of U.S. foreign policy practices. The thesis that power seeks out an aesthetic totality that can never be realized and thus can be manipulated was largely developed as an analytical position. While I disclosed in the introduction to this book some of the contemporary events that have fueled my interest in this subject, gone mainly undisclosed is my own normative view on whether such insecurity is a positive condition in global politics. If my thesis about counterpower , aesthetics, and insecurity is correct, how should we go about resolving or at least constraining some of the more ethically knotty avenues down which counterpower takes us? We may not, for instance, easily embrace the ethos of counterpower if it manifests itself in the form of constant insurrection, where an authority that could provide order to a community is instead constantly delegitimized and therefore reacts to these challenges in...