Estética y antiglobalización / Aesthetics and anti-globalisation

Yet these deteriorations or desertions do not mean that some of the key aspects of the fascist programme are not still hot points on the political agenda in metropolitan countries and their swarm of satellites. The most relevant, and certainly the most important in view of its powerful effects, is the aesthetisation of politics Benjamin referred to, which no longer appears via methods we currently consider frankly archaic. We no longer conceive the effectiveness of those strictly geometric paramilitary parades, those nocturnal torch marches, those massive choreographies in stadiums, designing, with the precision of a clockwork mechanism, the mottos and capital figures of the Ordine Novo . No, there is no longer room for those ways of "mass ornament" denounced by Sigfried Kracauer, just as there is no room for the rhetoric used by Joseph Goebbels or even Hitler himself to articulate their incipiently media-related discourses. The aesthetisation of politics is currently performed differently, at a different cost. Perhaps the key to the multiple differences lies in the dissolution of those crowds whose overwhelming presence disturbed its adversaries so, especially Elías Canetti, who dedicated a reflection to the subject in Masa y Poder (Crowds and Power) .

Nowadays, the people rendering politics aesthetic do not gather crowds except on the very few occasions when their reasons for convening demonstrations coincide with the desires and interests of most of the citizenship -as occurred with the demonstrations arranged on March 13 th ( 13 - m) this year in Spain to condemn the terrorist attacks perpetrated on March 11 th ( 11 - m) in Madrid. On "normal" days, the aesthetisation of politics acts on disperse and diffuse crowds, the tele-audiences generated by the media, especially by radio and television, which are the genuine alternatives to the in corpore crowd gatherings of the past and the present [ 6 ] . They are the receptors of the multimedia shows political party's conferences or conventions have become, using the model implemented in rock concerts. And of the offer of drills and surreptitious replacements of parliamentary lives embodied in continuous opinion polls and, most of all, the great variety of television and radio talk shows that appear as alternatives, often scandalous and provocative, to effective parliamentary debates [ 7 ] . Fascism consciously opposed crowd gathering to the parliament in the Black Shirts' paradigmatic March on Rome in 1922. Yet nowadays instead of forcing parliament or assaulting it violently, those who aesthetise politics prefer to devaluate parliament systematically in front of mass audiences, concealing its visibility or repeatedly presenting it as an archaic, pachydermal, boring place, with little or nothing in its implacable ritualism in common with the changing impressions and sensations of everyday people. Whilst on the contrary, they can act on these people timely and effectively with sophisticated technical measures and a vast repertoire of persuasive resources, used and selected by the show business sector for decades and based on the hegemony of the image. The aesthetisation of politics tends to fascinate citizens so as to transform them into mere spectators. Enthusiastic or bored, satisfied or suspicious, critical or ironic, we are always spectators. In all, their programme envisages displacing the classical parliamentary representation with that "sensitive identification with the State" which Hegel favoured so much in his time.

The devaluation or neutralisation of the parliament and the subordination of the activity of the political parties articulated around it to the domineering demands of the media image experienced its epiphany or emblematic moment immediately after the terrorist attacks that took place on s - 11 2002, when the Congress of the United States of America in full gave president George W. Bush a standing ovation and undisputedly attributed him the archaic role of saviour of the threatened nation. American parliamentarians then accepted that they did not have to fulfil the role they had been appointed, supposedly to analyse, deliberate, negotiate or agree, and that instead they merely had to endorse a decision imposed by the strength of incontestable evidence. Yet the extreme behaviour of a parliament subjugated to muteness by the power of images abruptly gave notice of the fact that the Parliament -with a capital P and in general- is no longer the privileged locus of Power, and even less so of the determination of its distribution. Power is elsewhere. It is not even in the head of the Executive, as the liberal critics could think of the way the modern State is drifting towards authoritarianism. If we are to believe the people who take part in the "movement of movements" called the Anti-globalisation movement [ 8 ] , power belongs to the network or structure of transnational companies, whose privileged debate and decision locus are the periodical meetings of the g 7 , the wto or the Davos Forum. Their main instruments are the imf and the iadb . This is where the decisions that affect our lives determinedly are made and executed, the decisions that seriously condition the specific policies that the governments of different nations could adopt regardless of their political nature. Or should we say regardless of their media image? This consequently led those movements to decide to fight their first global-scale battle with a demonstration against the g 7 meeting in Seattle in 1999, convinced that their true adversaries were gathered at this event, and not in the parliaments of their own countries. The fact that they genuinely were their adversaries should be known to the entire world. Obviously, the demonstrations and protests that took place on the streets back then, and those which have been staged subsequently in Washington, Prague, Barcelona, Genoa and so many other cities, could perhaps be classified simply as extra-parliamentary , in view of the direct action methods these movements usually turn to on order to oppose to these singular meetings gathering the masters of neo-liberal globalisation. Yet if we left it at that, we would be missing the crucial role played in said gatherings by that politisation of art Benjamin referred to as the communist answer to fascism's aesthetisation of politics.