by Mindy Clegg
In a recent video by Damien Walter about the Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem, the role of the Holocaust is brought front and center in Lem’s body of work. According to academic and author Elena Gomel, his work demanded that we grapple with that incomprehensible event. It’s a question that matters still since in the modern era we continued to see violence with seemingly little reason. But, Walter argued, we have refused to learn a critical lesson from the Holocaust which is a form of denial of that horrific event: Lem’s insight that the Holocaust was not a deviation from the march of history, but a byproduct of modern history itself. One particular aspect of the Holocaust that Lem explored was the kitsch culture of the Nazis. Lem believed that kitsch had its worst expression in Nazi culture. Was Lem correct? Was there a direct line between kitsch culture and destructive states? Lem honed in on a key aspect of mass society and how it shapes us and is shaped by us. I would agree to a degree. Kitsch, a critical byproduct of modernity, has been both a means of reinforcing and resisting oppressive forms of power. At its worse it can be used to motivate awful forms of violence. But kitsch can also be wonderfully subversive.
First, what is kitsch? In an essay about kitsch by Maranda Bennett, the origins of the term emerged in the 19th century to described “cheap artistic stuff” often sold to tourists. Bennett quotes Matei Calinescu, who argued it described “fake art” and more provocatively an “aesthetic form of lying.” As such, Bennett argued that it “smooths the edges” of art to make it more broadly palatable and emotionally evocative, hence manipulative by inducing sentimentality. The homogenizing effect of kitsch separates it from high art, Bennett noted. The point was to make money from bland culture that induced sentimental emotions in many consumers, as Baudrillard argued about places like Disneyland or Ceasar’s Palace, which “replicate and commodify original subjects” such as the Eiffel Tower or the iconic Italian city Venice. Bennett also argued that kitsch reinforced stereotypes, such as feminine ideals found in advertising. Not everyone agreed. Ed Simon mounted a defense of kitsch, in part based on his belief that kitsch emerged in part out of Catholic culture, and criticism often rests on classist, religious, and ethnic basis. He noted that “kitsch can’t be disentangled from society, culture, and economics, even while we tend to conflate it with garish maximalism.” He noted that we should think about “why we make this distinction” in the first place. These two writers imagined very different political contexts for attitudes about kitsch. Bennett argued that kitsch culture served to undercut real emotion, while Simon maintained that the sneering at kitsch had a strongly bigoted element, ignoring how people bring meaning to kitsch art. Both views indicate a political angle to kitsch.
We can see that the political understanding of kitsch has strong foundations and there is a kind of kitsch in politics. Catherine Lugg argued that “political Kitsch is a type of propaganda that incorporates familiar and easily understood art forms (Kitsch) to shape the direction of public policy.” Such culture is meant to “comfort the observer.”1 She argued that kitsch was a form of “cultural anesthesia” as it “build[s] and exploit[s] cultural myths—and to easily manipulate conflicted history—makes Kitsch a powerful political construction.” Kitsch working its political rhetoric, rather than the more difficult work demanded by other types of art, when people expect “routine patterns and forms” from the culture that they regularly consume. In other words, “what makes Kitsch “Kitsch” is its simplicity and predictability.”2 Lem connected political kitsch with the worst aspects of political modernity. He was nearly killed by the Nazis during the Second World War, and he lived in communist Poland as an adult (until the fall of communism). As Ezra Glinter argued, Lem found ways to work around government censorship. According to him, “the crackdown on free speech was an obstacle, but not a life-threatening one.” Much of his work was published in the more open post-Stalin era. His popularity no doubt insulated him to some degree. Lem had criticized the communist system he lived under but he pointedly criticized the west, too. Glinter noted that Lem believed Orwell misunderstood the nature of Stalinism. Rather than merely a byproduct of “cruelty,” it was “the logical outcome of turning politics into faith.” Lem was not silent on the problems plaguing the first world. He pessimistically divided the world into “bad and even worse,” Glinter noted. American pop culture came in for special scrutiny by Lem. Despite writing sci-fi novels himself, Glinter said Lem called western sci-fi nothing but “pseudo-scientific fairly tales.” He celebrated getting kicked out of the organization the Science Fiction Writers of America. Overall, Lem believed that vapid, kitsch culture represented by sci-fi novels popular in the west constituted a distraction which could give space to a more oppressive culture.
Both the American and Soviet systems had inherent flaws in Lem’s view and he addressed that in his work. We can understand the various outward expressions of politics under moderntiy as a kind of kitsch performance art. In his video on Lem, Walter makes that connection with regards to fascism and the Nazis specifically. The Nazis made bland, mass produced goods into an avatar of violent terror. They elevated the bland and everyday into a means of making people feel as if they are on a grand mission via acts of mass violence. The violence deployed, often by very pedestrian individuals believing that they were acting on behalf of a great historical mission, was an outward expression of that blandness. The embrace of Nazi kitsch was really nothing more than the mediocre believing themselves as masters of the future, shaping a new mission for human kind (or at least the ones deemed part of the ingroup). Much like the MAGA movement today, Nazis thrived on a ecosystem of grifting via cheaply produced goods that shored up their sense of community, bound by grievances against an imagined other. The Nazis and the Germans who embraced the movement were built on empty symbols and hate aimed at the “other” in their midst.
Lem believed that modernity was the problem and led directly to the Holocaust, not a break with modernity and progress. In an article on Lem’s essay called “Provocation” (a review of a book that did not exist) Elana Gomel noted that “genocide is a kitsch parody of ultimate justice.” The fictional author that Lem reviews (as a stand-in for the actual Lem) argued that “genocide is a kitsch appropriation of death.” Gomel noted how that was driven in part by death becoming invisible in the modern era. People have become separated from the places where the dying and dead exist, making the process of death strange. Death no longer held spiritual significance for many. But death became commodified and even glorified in our mass culture making acts of mass violence and murder easier to justify. The people who carried that violence out, Gomel argued, really just wanted to murder others and they invented a justification to do so—the need to preserve racial purity for example. One can see from Golem’s argument why Lem rejected modernity as an improvement over the pre-modern past. He questioned progressive teleology, but perhaps embraced a kind of regressive teleology instead. Mass culture and modern politics are an outcome of that backward march to hell maybe. Mass culture helped to make this reality possible and has become part and parcel of modern politics, as we can see with the Nazis and with the MAGA movement today. We can see it in the general authoritarian bent of some culture which glorifies specific kinds of violence. Kotaku recently reported on a recruitment ad for a police department in Peoria Illinois which referenced the first person shooter game Call of Duty, a naked appeal to an authoritarian mindset that glorifies state-backed violence.
But, as Simon argued above, we do ourselves a disservice to assume lock-step thinking caused by mass culture. Actual people rarely blindly embraced the hegemonic messages of kitsch culture. Making that assumption merely flattens out the complex social, cultural, and historical reasons for people’s interactions with mass culture. Cultural phenomenon and how they shape society needs historical consideration, as does the agency of people acting as consumers. In the era of mass cultural production, there are plenty of counterexamples of culture we might call kitsch being embraced and used in less problematic ways. We should consider the distinction between camp and kitsch. Many point to key difference being the motivations behind each. Kitsch was produced out of sincerity but in bad taste, while camp instead self-consciously revels in bad taste. Camp’s embeddedness in queer culture was a major difference, with kitsch largely being associated with the straight world. Is there overlap between the two? One could say that embracing kitsch was itself a form of camp, an embrace of bad taste forged from sincerity. Camp director John Waters has been known for his embrace of kitsch culture. While intentions can help us to understand the line between the two, how culture is made and the intentionality behind it is rarely the whole story. Kitsch, in other words, can easily slide into camp depending on usage.
But what about the kind of culture underpinning Nazi or MAGA culture? Can the kitsch nature of that culture ever slide into camp via usage or recontextualization? Slovenian art collective and martial industrial band Laibach (and the genre of martial industrial more generally) walks that line. From their start in 1980, the band has invoked, in what appears to be all sincerity, imagery associated with fascism, nationalism, and socialism. Rather than sooth the audience with assurances their pose is ironic, they have instead leaned hard into that sincerity. In an interview about their album Wir sind das Folk from a few years ago, they discussed censorship and kitsch. They noted that “all art is ideological and some of greatest works of art are kitsch.”
That can be found in both the “free” west and in authoritarian states like North Korea, where, they noted, “art… is censored to the point of absurdity, and yet that is why it has an aesthetic value.” The band never shied away from promoting state-created kitsch imagery from across the political spectrum. Laibach reminds us that context matters as much as intent of the production of a piece of art/culture. Even fascist symbols can be recontextualized into something more subversive of fascism.
But they also hint at a critique of mass society, whatever the politics. Their work indicts the capitalist states, as much as the fascist and communist ones. They show us just how little daylight existed between the different systems of modernity.
Mass culture emerged in the modern era, and has since been the cause of much, often bitter and divisive debate. While culture that is either widely shared or created by elites for political reasons for consumption by the masses isn’t new in history, the modern era of mass mediated culture added some new dimensions to hegemonic cultures. Rather than deriving legitimacy from religious authority or via a rigid set of social castes, we’re meant to understand mass culture as authentically democratic. And many sought to make it so. Still, corporate interests and governments, as well as wealthy and powerful people tend to have a larger role in shaping mass culture, creating a kind of tension in the production and consumption of culture. We can see that more clearly when we study societies from the outside, especially a society that we see ourselves in opposition to. We’re far less likely to examine our own biases and how those are shaped by hegemonic forces. As Gramsci argued, certain ideologies are normalized over others. In the case of the Nazis, that was genocidal rage built around a particular sort of family structure, which people were told were under threat. Our modern culture wars, were and are a byproduct of this debate, not just a manifestation a divisive political system. Because despite the arguments Gramsci and others put forward about hegemonic culture and its pervasiveness, people find ways to resist, even through hegemonic culture. Lem’s insights into how the Nazis deployed kitsch demand our attention, but so does the camp resistance to the hegemonic use of kitsch.
Footnotes
1 Catherine Lugg, Kitsch: From Education to Public Policy, (London: Routledge, 1999), 3-4. Capitalization in the original.