The critics, and a reply

The oldest warning

In the autumn of 1935 Walter Benjamin was living in exile in Paris, where he had fled from Berlin in 1933. On 3 October Italy invaded Ethiopia. Later that month the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, who volunteered for the war himself, published a manifesto on the “aesthetics of war.” (Benjamin credits the Turin newspaper La Stampa. Scholars say it appeared in a Futurist magazine instead, so “late October 1935” is the safe date.) War is beautiful, Marinetti wrote, because it brings the machine under human rule. He had said as much in 1909, on the front page of Le Figaro, where he called war the world’s only hygiene.

Benjamin was rewriting an essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility,” and between December 1935 and February 1936 he decided to end it on Marinetti’s text. He called the manifesto clear. Fascism, he concluded, was introducing aesthetics into political life, and the Latin tag that sums it up is fiat ars, pereat mundus: let art be made, though the world perish. “Communism responds by politicizing art,” he wrote. The essay first appeared in French in 1936. Benjamin died at Portbou, on the Spanish border, on 26 September 1940.

This is the oldest sense of the charge, and it differs from the one in this course. Benjamin’s worry was about fascist politics and war made into spectacle. The later worry, which Featherstone and Welsch map, is about ordinary life. The word “aestheticization” has carried both, and they should not be confused. The scholar Susan Buck-Morss, in an essay of 1992, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” read Benjamin as saying that a numbing of the senses lies beneath such politics, and that fascism manages the numbness more than it creates it.

A gentler cage

The lectures turn to a family of critics they call Western Marxists, a label that usually covers the Frankfurt School: Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Benjamin. Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) used it for thinkers whose work was divorced from political practice. Their shared suspicion is that a life that looks free and playful may be controlled more tightly than one that looks controlled, because the control cannot be seen.

Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (a mimeograph in New York in 1944, a book in Amsterdam in 1947) has a chapter, “The Culture Industry,” whose best-known sentence says that amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. We seek it as an escape from the machine, they argued, only to recover the strength to go back to the machine. Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) gave two names to the same idea: repressive desublimation, a controlled loosening of pleasure that ties people to the system, and happy consciousness, contentment with the way things are, sustained by needs that someone else has made. Guy Debord’s La Société du spectacle (1967) went further: the spectacle, he wrote, is not a collection of images but “a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacres et simulation (1981) took the last step, to signs that no longer copy anything.

None of these writers is named in the lectures, and the “three controls” the lectures list, capital, technology, and beauty, are their own frame, not a quotation from any of them. Here is each, with what can be checked.

Capital. The lectures describe paying to play, subscriptions you forget to cancel, and a treadmill of upgrades. The cleanest historical case is the light bulb. A meeting in Geneva on 23 December 1924 founded the Phoebus cartel, whose members included Osram, Philips, and companies linked to General Electric; an agreement of January 1925 set the standard life of a bulb at 1,000 hours, down from perhaps 1,500 to 2,000, and members were fined for bulbs that lasted longer. Letters in Osram’s archive document the scheme. The average rated life fell from about 1,800 hours in 1926 to 1,205 hours in 1933–34, and the cartel ended with the war. What is documented is a written agreement to shorten bulb life. What is not documented is a suppressed “eternal bulb”: the one in Livermore, California, which has glowed since 1901, now burns at about four watts and is a curiosity, not a proof. A British report of 1951 called a bulb’s life a compromise between competing factors, which is a fair thing to say as well.

A modern case is Apple. In December 2017 the company confirmed that it had slowed some older iPhones, in software updates, to stop them shutting down as their batteries aged. It apologized and cut the price of a battery replacement from $79 to $29 for 2018. In February 2020 a U.S. class settlement was announced, with at least $310 million and at most $500 million, at $25 per eligible phone, and on 7 February 2020 French regulators fined Apple 25 million euros for not telling users. The careful wording is “quietly slowed,” and not “designed to wear out.” On subscriptions, the Federal Trade Commission’s final “click to cancel” rule of 16 October 2024, which required canceling to be as easy as signing up, was struck down in its entirety by the Eighth Circuit on 8 July 2025 on procedural grounds. The commission had reported about 70 complaints a day, up from 42 a day in 2021. Older laws still apply, and we did not check later developments.

Technology as rules. The lectures say that software gives you rules you must follow, such as a button you must not press. The classic argument is Langdon Winner’s essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” (Daedalus, 1980), which says that about two hundred overpasses on Long Island, some with as little as nine feet of clearance, were built by the planner Robert Moses so that twelve-foot buses could not pass. Winner relied on Robert Caro’s biography of Moses (1974). It has been challenged. Bernward Joerges, in 1999, called the story counterfactual, and Steve Woolgar and Geoff Cooper printed a bus timetable. The bridges are low. Moses’s intent, and the effect on buses, are disputed. There is also a fair reply: interfaces get friendlier, as the lectures themselves note in contrasting the old text-only DOS with Windows, and open standards leave no single owner.

Two pills, one face

The lectures’ third control is beauty itself. They cite a book by Francis Fukuyama, whom they call a Japanese-American thinker: he was born in Chicago in 1952, an American political scientist of Japanese descent. The book is Our Posthuman Future (2002). Its argument is that biotechnology may erode a “Factor X,” the whole of qualities that make a person distinctively human. For evidence he points to two drugs already in use. Prozac, he said, was prescribed heavily for women who lacked self-esteem, and Ritalin mostly for boys who would not sit still, and the two together nudge both sexes toward “that androgynous median personality, self-satisfied and socially compliant.” He compared mood drugs to the soma of Huxley’s Brave New World. The legal scholar Cass Sunstein, reviewing it in The New Republic, called the worry daft.

The lectures name neither drug, and they say that the pills need no prescription, which is wrong: Prozac was approved in the United States in December 1987 as a prescription drug, and Ritalin is a controlled substance. They then take the idea one step further than Fukuyama does: if appearance can be adjusted as easily as temperament, everyone could be equally handsome and equally beautiful, a “wasteland of beauty.” We could not find that in the book. What Fukuyama proposes is regulatory agencies, with international coordination and real enforcement, steering biotechnology toward therapy and away from enhancement, with Britain’s fertility regulator as a model. That is more modest than “the world’s governments unite.”

The worry about sameness has a recent and checkable version. In “The Age of Instagram Face” (The New Yorker, 12 December 2019) Jia Tolentino described “a single, cyborgian face”: poreless skin, high cheekbones, catlike eyes, a small nose, full lips, “distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic.” She named the drivers: Instagram (2010), photo filters (2011), FaceTune (2013), fillers and Botox. In China “internet-celebrity face” (网红脸, wǎnghóng liǎn) was the most discussed buzzword of 2016, according to a 2018 article by Dippner in the journal ASIEN, and set off a national debate on beauty and surgery. In South Korea the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery counted 980,313 cosmetic procedures in 2014, about 4.8 percent of the world’s total, fourth after the United States, Brazil, and Japan. A popular claim holds that Korea’s double-eyelid surgery was an American import. The short true version is that the Japanese surgeon Mikamo Kotaro began the operation in 1896, and that the American military surgeon Ralph Millard, working in Korea, wrote it up in English in 1955, in a paper that called the monolid an “expressionless eye,” and helped popularize it. He did not invent it.

Is a convergence of faces unnatural? A classic study says there is something to it. Judith Langlois and Lori Roggman found in 1990 that composites made by averaging many faces were rated more attractive than almost all the faces that went into them. Later work complicated the picture. Perrett, May, and Yoshikawa found in 1994 that the average of attractive faces was rated better than the average of all faces, and that exaggerating the difference made it better again. So averaging pleases, but the most attractive faces are not the average ones. A pull toward sameness may be old and natural, and the pull away from it equally so.

So what is the reply to sameness? The lectures give one, in the question period of the last lecture, and it is a good one: widen your taste. A beauty that has become a standard, they argue, asks nothing of the viewer: it is a kind of massage, pleasant and lazy, and it dulls the senses it satisfies. Something that does not fit the standard wakes the judging faculty up. When you learn to see what is good in it, your range has grown, and so has the number of things that can please you.

History has examples of beauty that arrived as insult. The Impressionists got their name from a mocking review: in April 1874, after their first group show, Louis Leroy wrote in Le Charivari that wallpaper in its embryonic state was more finished than a seascape. The Fauves, the “wild beasts,” were named by the critic Louis Vauxcelles after the Salon d’Automne of 1905. And Vincent van Gogh’s The Red Vineyard was sold in March 1890 to the Belgian painter Anna Boch for 400 francs. It is the only painting that can be identified by name as sold in his lifetime, but he made other sales, so “only one” is too strong, and the buyer was not his brother. The German philosopher Karl Rosenkranz gave ugliness a serious treatise, Ästhetik des Hässlichen, in 1853.

China has its own tradition of the unlovely as a school of looking. Garden connoisseurs prize rocks from Lake Tai for four qualities, thin, wrinkled, perforated, and penetrating (瘦皱漏透, shòu zhòu lòu tòu). The list is traditionally credited to the Song painter and calligrapher Mi Fu (1051–1107), but the earliest text we could verify is the Qing artist Zheng Banqiao’s, so “traditionally credited” is the right wording. And the calligrapher Fu Shan (1607–1684) left a famous set of instructions to his sons and grandsons on writing characters: better clumsy than clever, better ugly than flattering, better disjointed than glib, better unstudied than arranged (宁拙毋巧，宁丑毋媚，宁支离毋轻滑，宁真率毋安排). The sentence before warns against the soft, pretty manner of Zhao Mengfu.

Does exposure to the odd actually widen taste? The honest answer is that it is plausible and not proven. Robert Zajonc showed in 1968 that mere exposure raises liking, and Robert Bornstein’s meta-analysis of 1989 (208 experiments) found the effect strongest for brief exposure to unfamiliar things, peaking within 10 to 20 presentations, declining with overexposure, and weaker for drawings and paintings. Daniel Berlyne proposed in 1971 that pleasure rises and then falls as novelty and complexity increase, but converging evidence is still missing.

Do first, understand later

The lectures’ deeper reply is about knowledge. Beauty, they say, cannot be defined, whether as proportion, harmony, or usefulness, and no one is satisfied with knowing about love. They are not the first to say that taste resists proof. In “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757) David Hume argued that the standard is the joint verdict of those who combine “strong sense” with “delicate sentiment,” improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of prejudice. Kant, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), held that judgments of beauty cannot be proved from rules: nobody can be argued into finding a poem beautiful. There is a famous modern parallel about knowing and experiencing. In 1982 the philosopher Frank Jackson described Mary, a scientist who knows every physical fact about color but has lived in black and white, and asks whether she learns something when she first sees red. It is still debated, and Jackson himself later changed his mind.

The Chinese thinker who built a whole philosophy on this point is Wang Yangming (1472–1529). After a night of insight at Longchang in 1508 he began teaching, in 1509 or 1510, that knowing and acting are one (知行合一, zhī xíng hé yī). In his Instructions for Practical Living he gave an example that fits the lectures’ point about love: seeing a beautiful color is knowing, and loving it is acting (见好色属知，好好色属行). To know and not act, he said, is only not yet to know (知而不行，只是未知). Aristotle had said something close in the Nicomachean Ethics: we become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre, and we become just by doing just acts (translation by W. D. Ross, 1908, public domain).

The lectures illustrate with a joke about Kant. He never married, the story goes, because he could not decide whether marriage did more harm than good, and when he finally decided, the woman had a houseful of children. It is a legend with a root. An account of 1804, from a funeral oration, says that he twice had “opportunity and inclination,” first for a young widow and then for a girl from Westphalia who had come to Königsberg as a noblewoman’s companion, and that he “calculated receipts and expenditures” so long that the widow remarried and the other went home. That is the early version: a budget, not a philosophy of marriage, and the lectures themselves flag their version as an elaboration.

A truer English parallel is Charles Darwin’s list. In 1838, in a note of about July, he set out the reasons for and against marrying: under “Marry,” “constant companion (and friend in old age) … better than a dog anyhow,” and a dread of spending a whole life “like a neuter bee, working, working, and nothing after all.” He ended with “Marry — Marry — Marry Q.E.D.” He proposed to his cousin Emma Wedgwood on 11 November 1838 and married her on 29 January 1839. Darwin did his thinking and then acted, and the thinking did not stop him. The point of the jokes is not that thought hinders action. It is that thought can become a way of avoiding it.

The limit of “do first” is that reflection matters too. Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, says that the life which is unexamined is not worth living (Jowett’s translation, public domain). Acting first does not make reflection useless. Examination can improve what you do next. The lectures’ claim, in this course’s reading, is narrower: that you will never have a complete theory of love or of a good life before you start, because you cannot postpone living until you do.