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Aestheticization of politics: The puzzling structure of the visual culture of contemporary environmental movement
The global environmental movement has become an increasingly important factor of contemporary international relations. Many scholars tend to focus on the ethical dimension of global environmental project, but the aesthetic component is no less important in the struggle for people's minds. The article is devoted to the visual culture of the global green project as a central element of its aesthetics. The linear logic of political struggle in this area implies the aestheticization of Self and the deaestheticization of the Other, that is, representation in terms of positive or negative categories of aesthetics – beautiful / ugly, sublime / base, etc. However, our study shows that this binary opposition has little in common with the real logic of the environmental visual culture. Using the tools of formal aesthetics, we analyze 200 images from the official websites of the EU’s main environmental project – the European Green Deal, as well as of the United Nations Environment Programme. Our research demonstrates that in this case we are witnessing such a puzzling phenomenon as the aestheticization of the Other, in other words, the attribution of attractive features to the phenomena of climate change and pollution. Why do supporters of green ideology aestheticize something what they fight against? The author argues that this paradox can be explained by referring to the dichotomy of the politicization of aesthetics / aestheticization of politics, introduced by W. Benjamin back in the 1930-s. The linear logic lies inside the framework of the politicization of aesthetics – the instrumental use of aesthetic means to achieve political goals. Such logic describes the overwhelming majority of cases of interaction between these two spheres, but sometimes we can see the opposite phenomenon of the aestheticization of politics, when the aesthetics determines the forms of the political. Environmental visual culture is built on total aestheticization; therefore, a kind of inertia takes place, which presupposes the attribution of attractive features to objects that are textually delegitimized in the green discourse. It is precisely total aestheticization that constitutes the core of the environmental visual culture, largely providing its popularity throughout the world today.