can playanimportant role in reconstructing the historicalconfigurations of so-
cialism and nationalism in the context of culturalnationalism and its progres-
sive andreactionary manifestations; the sameholds true for the hiddenaffinities
between socialism and populism that are evident in the overdetermined function
of terms such as“folk”and“community”and their mass cultural appropriations
in public rituals and spectacles. Lastbut not least,greater attention to the aes-
thetic in the studyofsymbolic politics can even open upaconceptual space for
revisitingthe Benjaminian distinction between the fascist aestheticizationofpol-
itics and the communist politicization of art thatissocent raltoanother critical
cliché in cultural studies, theautomatic identification of the politicization of art
with leftist,progressive causes and the implicit denunciation of aestheticization
as mass manipulation and propaganda.¹²The case studies of this book give a
first indication (to be developedfurther in the secondvolume onTheWorkers’
States) in what ways the aestheticization of class struggle, whether in the regis-
ters of the patheticorthe sentimental, functioned as an integralpart of the po-
liticizationofemotion since the earlysocialist movement.Itcan in fact be traced
back to the legacies of German romanticism and the enormous influenceonpro-
letarian culture ofFriedrich Schiller and his concept of aesthetic education and
his belief in theater asamoral institution.
Socialist claims to idealistaesthetic departed from theKantian definition
(fromTheCritique of Judgment)ofthe aesthetic as disinterested pleasure and af-
firmed its designation asaprecondition of subjectivity.Atthe same time, the
meaning of the aestheticwasexpandedtoward older notions that included di-
dactic and agitational modalities and newer combination of the useful and the
beautiful. In both cases,Einbildungskraft,translated as imagination and fantasy,
was reclaimed asaproductive forceinthe imagination of other worlds,includ-
ing socialist utopias.Aesthetic emotionsassumed new functions asatechnique
of intensification and transformation, with the true, the beautiful, and thegood
madeavailable to the workers through socialistversions of the heroic, pathetic,
and melodramatic, and with the class-based distinctionsreproducedinthe high-
low culturedivide being overcome through the translation of bourgeois tradi-
tions into socialist forms and registers.
These processes of culturalappropriation are particularlyrelevant for ana-
lyzingthe continuous reconfigurations of folk, community,nation, and society
and requireatleastabrief mention of two other eighteenth-century thinkers,
SeeWalter Benjamin,TheWorkofArt in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility andOther
Writings onMedia,eds.MichaelW. Jennings,BrigidDoherty,and ThomasY. Levin(Cambridge,
MA: HarvardUniversity Press,2008).
Introduction 19