Aesthetic Murder?

Can murder be aesthetic?

My immediate response is no. This is in terms of a conception of aesthetics that is fundamentally concerned with social realisation – for establishing the ethical grounds of society and looking ultimately towards a basis for agreement, for acceptance, for community. Murder wrecks all that so cannot be aesthetic.

Yet the notion of aesthetics is plural and slippery.

I had avoided watching any of the ISIS films, not wishing to be in anyway complicit with them, but I watched the first minute or so of the execution murder of the Jordanian pilot. I wish I hadn’t watched any of it all, but I did, partly because I felt I owed it to the pilot to not turn away. But there is nothing simple about any of this and watching something that you cannot effectively change/intervene within is inevitably voyeuristic and compromising. What upset me most was the quality of the filming – the multiple camera angles, the close ups, the crane shot. The thought of somebody setting up the film shoot, making sure the batteries were charged, turning the camera on, doing a white balance, making sure the sound was ok and then later editing the sequence of camera shots together was simply appalling. It was the thought of aestheticising a brutal murder, of thinking carefully about how it could best be represented, that seemed particularly offensive. Beyond the murder itself, it was the way that it had been conceived in aesthetic terms as spectactle (which also involved the mise en scene of wrecked building, cage, masked jihadists and burning torch) that was deeply disturbing.

So aesthetics can also mean something else – a Kantian disregard for questions of interest, a capacity, in this case, to step back from the horror of murder and regard it formally.

Within Kant, this capacity is linked to the very basis of community, the discovery within each of us a deep layer of universal agreement, a common recognition of beauty that is born of suspending all appetitive, destructive, instrumental relation to things. But the film of the Jordanian’s murder demonstrates that this suspension can also be aligned with disregarding the lives and interests of others.

I feel the need then to deny this stepping back from interest, to insist that aesthetics cannot be aligned with murder. I’m not sure that I can make this argument at a simply logical level.

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