‘The Dictator’ (2012) by Sacha Baron-Cohen plays on the fact that kitsch is used by dictators and fundamentalists to redefine our world. Zennie Abraham/Flickr, CC BY-ND

What is the predominant aesthetic of the twenty-first century? According to sociology professors Ruth Holliday and Tracey Potts, “we are on the point of drowning in kitsch. A casual survey of the British metropolitan high street offers ample evidence of the kitschification of everyday life.”

Kitsch can also be called cheesiness or tackiness. Specialists have defined kitsch as a tasteless copy of an existing style or as the systematic display of bad taste or artistic deficiency. Garden gnomes are kitsch, just like cheap paintings for tourists, which are technically correct but express their “truths” too directly and too straightforwardly, often in the form of clichés.

Some people play with kitsch by using irony, which can lead to interesting results. However, most of the time, kitsch has negative connotations.

Terrorism prefers kitsch 

In politics, most dictators have attempted to reinforce their authority with the help of kitsch propaganda. The former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was called “the kitsch-dictator and Saddam Hussein, who designed his own monuments in a Stalinist spirit, is one of the few turn-of-the-century leaders able to debate his title. The tastes of the nouveau riches in Russia, China, the Middle East, and the US excel in a kind of conspicuous vulgarity that perfectly matches academic definitions of kitsch.

Terrorism, graphic images of which have invaded our lives in the past two decades, prefers kitsch. Al-Qaeda propaganda indulges in romantic presentations of sunrises, pre-modern utopias, as well as Gothic presentations of skulls and bones. Sociologist Rüdiger Lohlker, who analysed jihadist aesthetics, wrote that the jihadi magazine Al-Qaeda Airlines displayed "a fascination with gothic elements (skulls and bones) and kitsch”.

Videos put out by the so-called Islamic State (IS) offer even more explicit kitsch expressions as they cultivate the art of violence for its shock value.

Cultural identity theft

So why is there so much kitsch? Is there more kitsch now than there’s ever been? A lot of cheesiness has been around in popular religious art, and Caligula is probably the kitsch champion of all times. Enlightenment brought kitsch (then contained in Baroque art) to a temporary halt but it seems that we are catching up again. American screenwriter Kevin Williamson has called Donald Trump in the National Review “the worst taste since Caligula.”

Trump goes back to the pre-Enlightenment taste of Absolutism: his gilded Manhattan penthouse is replete with marble, Louis XIV furnishings, and haphazardly assembled historical themes.

According to my analysis, this attraction for kitsch has to do with the phenomenon of “deculturation” a phenomena in which a particular group is deprived of one or more aspects of its identity“. The term emerged in sociology in debates about the effects of colonialism and subsequent loss of culture, for example in Pierre Bourdieu’s early work Sociologie de l'Algérie.

Humans have always needed truths to believe in. Whereas in the past those truths tended to be transmitted through cultures, they are now increasingly produced instantaneously without cultural mediation. Kitsch employs this mechanism in the realm of aesthetics. In today’s world, kitsch is redefining our perception of truth; it is a truth devoid of culture or context.

The production of immediate, pure, and decultured truths is most obvious in the sphere of fundamentalist religions. Islam scholar Olivier Roy has shown that religious fundamentalism arises when religion is separated from the indigenous culture in which it was embedded.

Radicalisation occurs when religions attempt to define themselves as culturally neutral and "pure”. When religions are disconnected from concrete cultural values, their truths become absolute; fundamentalist religions tend to see themselves as providers of scientific truths.

Narcissistic impulse 

Studies have shown that kitsch has its roots in an intrinsically narcissistic impulse. That’s why it thrives particularly well in neoliberal environments determined by the dynamics of the information society. Social media are narcissistic because they enable individuals to recycle their own selves without being confronted with the culture of the other.

Algorithms tell us which books we like, based on previous choices. The narcissist structure of this model is obvious. Through algorithms, signs are quantified and classified along the guidelines of abstract forms of excellence. In a decultured world, the self becomes the only remaining ethical reference.

When there is no cultural other, only the “I” will be taken for granted. In the worst case, this system produces self-centered “alternative truths” and conspiracy theories, which are “kitsch-theories” because of their narcissistic, self-confirming structures.

Narcissus was so obsessed with himself that he died contemplating his own image. Between 1594 and 1596. Caravaggio/Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica/Wikimedia

“Kitsch truths” establish themselves autonomously by narcissistically affirming their own truth. Along the same lines, alternative truths and conspiracy theories do not misinform (misinformation being the holding back of an existing truth) but they kitschify truth. In the end, this leads to the total loss of truth.

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Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is a German philosopher specializing in aesthetics and intercultural philosophy. Currently he is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Gulf University for Science and Technology

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Clamdigger 1935 by Edward Hopper. Courtesy Sharon Mollerus/Flickr via Aeon Magazine

In 1840, Edgar Allan Poe described the ‘mad energy’ of an ageing man who roved the streets of London from dusk till dawn. His excruciating despair could be temporarily relieved only by immersing himself in a tumultuous throng of city-dwellers. ‘He refuses to be alone,’ Poe wrote. He ‘is the type and the genius of deep crime … He is the man of the crowd.’

Like many poets and philosophers through the ages, Poe stressed the significance of solitude. It was ‘such a great misfortune’, he thought, to lose the capacity to be alone with oneself, to get caught up in the crowd, to surrender one’s singularity to mind-numbing conformity. Two decades later, the idea of solitude captured Ralph Waldo Emerson’s imagination in a slightly different way: quoting Pythagoras, he wrote: ‘In the morning, – solitude; … that nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company.’ Emerson encouraged the wisest teachers to press upon their pupils the importance of ‘periods and habits of solitude’, habits that made ‘serious and abstracted thought’ possible.

In the 20th century, the idea of solitude formed the centre of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States, Arendt spent much of her life studying the relationship between the individual and the polis. For her, freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – the vita contemplativa – and the public, political sphere – the vita activa. She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act spontaKitschneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate her actions and develop her conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd – to finally hear herself think.

In 1961, The New Yorker commissioned Arendt to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS officer who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust. How could anyone, she wanted to know, perpetrate such evil? Surely only a wicked sociopath could participate in the Shoah. But Arendt was surprised by Eichmann’s lack of imagination, his consummate conventionality. She argued that while Eichmann’s actions were evil, Eichmann himself – the person – ‘was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions.’ She attributed his immorality – his capacity, even his eagerness, to commit crimes – to his ‘thoughtlessness’. It was his inability to stop and think that permitted Eichmann to participate in mass murder.

Just as Poe suspected that something sinister lurked deep within the man of the crowd, Arendt recognised that: ‘A person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment.’ Eichmann had shunned Socratic self-reflection. He had failed to return home to himself, to a state of solitude. He had discarded the vita contemplativa, and thus he had failed to embark upon the essential question-and-answering process that would have allowed him to examine the meaning of things, to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, good and evil.

‘It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong,’ Arendt wrote, ‘because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.’ It is not that unthinking men are monsters, that the sad sleepwalkers of the world would sooner commit murder than face themselves in solitude. What Eichmann showed Arendt was that society could function freely and democratically only if it were made up of individuals engaged in the thinking activity – an activity that required solitude. Arendt believed that ‘living together with others begins with living together with oneself’.

But what if, we might ask, we become lonely in our solitude? Isn’t there some danger that we will become isolated individuals, cut off from the pleasures of friendship? Philosophers have long made a careful, and important, distinction between solitude and loneliness. In The Republic (c380 BCE), Plato proffered a parable in which Socrates celebrates the solitary philosopher. In the allegory of the cave, the philosopher escapes from the darkness of an underground den – and from the company of other humans – into the sunlight of contemplative thought. Alone but not lonely, the philosopher becomes attuned to her inner self and the world. In solitude, the soundless dialogue ‘which the soul holds with herself’ finally becomes audible.

Echoing Plato, Arendt observed: ‘Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about … when I am one and without company’ but desire it and cannot find it. In solitude, Arendt never longed for companionship or craved camaraderie because she was never truly alone. Her inner self was a friend with whom she could carry on a conversation, that silent voice who posed the vital Socratic question: ‘What do you mean when you say …?’ The self, Arendt declared, ‘is the only one from whom you can never get away – except by ceasing to think.’

Arendt’s warning is well worth remembering in our own time. In our hyper-connected world, a world in which we can communicate constantly and instantly over the internet, we rarely remember to carve out spaces for solitary contemplation. We check our email hundreds of times per day; we shoot off thousands of text messages per month; we obsessively thumb through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, aching to connect at all hours with close and casual acquaintances alike. We search for friends of friends, ex-lovers, people we barely know, people we have no business knowing. We crave constant companionship.

But, Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’, as she put it, ‘by what everybody else does and believes in’ – no longer able, in the cage of thoughtless conformity, to distinguish ‘right from wrong, beautiful from ugly’. Solitude is not only a state of mind essential to the development of an individual’s consciousness – and conscience – but also a practice that prepares one for participation in social and political life. Before we can keep company with others, we must learn to keep company with ourselves.

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Jennifer Stitt

Jennifer Stitt is a graduate student in the history of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This article was originally published in Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

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Patricia & Howard Farber Collection, New York ©Archive Raúl Martínez
“Rosas y Estrellas” (“Roses and Stars”) by Raúl Martínez depicts 19th-century Cuban revolutionary José Martí (center) flanked by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, with Latin American freedom fighters including Simón Bolívar behind them.

Those last few turbulent years, it's as if we don't have feelings - guided perception- of any sort anymore. Because of this benumbed sensation we can't even properly articulate, though in non-elitist terms, the myriad of disenchantments we've to go through on a daily basis for we're mostly left with no memory of their very occurrence. Universalized disenchantment with the Order - the Dominant Group, the Political Regime, the Capitalist Economy, the Fake News, the Subaltern Cacophony, the Mediocre Public Service, the Higher Education that Principally serves as the Industry of the Precariat to state just few of our objet petit a of an existentialist frustration - is the rule rather than the exception. As a desperate act of escaping this contagious affliction, we've come to espouse fanfaronade - swaggering, empty boasting, the ostentatious display of our poorly constructed, empty-shell persona that feigns invincibility - and molysomophobia, an excessive fear of contamination - by old or new alien modes of thinking, unorthodox use of language, "dangerous" yet meticulous prognosis of the fragility of the immanent contingency of a single object - narrative or praxis - , simultaneously. Hence, we committed an inconsiderate act of concocting a mélange out of oil and water.

The only palatable way out of this conundrum, at least for the time being, apparently appears to be a massive "inoculation" campaign by way of a recumbnetibus, a sudden, wake-up knockout punch both verbal and physical. But this metaphysical vaccination outreach must carefully be under the aegis of personalities with the prerequisite courage and knowledge to call a cunt a cunt, in lieu of a stunt performance for the incurably ultracrepidarian, individuals or groups with an irresistible urge to give opinions and advice on matters of supreme importance such as this, outside of their minimalist, parsimonious, bookish knowledge (or "expert advice" as they prefer to refer to their apparent pseudo-intellectualism and the accompanying insatiable thirst to carpe the troubled diem in light of their "forethought").

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