Empire-Slop
Walter Benjamin #1: The political transformation of Dream-kitsch
Calling it “slop” no longer adequately captures the crisis facing contemporary art.
On March 27th, 2025, the official X (formerly Twitter) account of the White House tweeted an AI-generated image, mimicking the art style of Studio Ghibli, mocking Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, whom they claimed wept while being arrested for illegally entering the United States.
In his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera defined kitsch as artistic works which seek to obscure reality’s worst aspects.
Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
—Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Part 6, Chapter 5.
Kundera’s observations on the nature of kitsch include:
its preclusion of the unusual or the repulsive,
its attempted appeal to mankind as a whole, and
its inherently unifying political agenda.
“Kitsch,” Kundera contends, “is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements,” since it affirms the “the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love,” etc., all towards a “brotherhood of man on earth”.1
Kundera emigrated to France after the Communist government of his native Czechoslovakia banned his novels.
Holocaust survivor Saul Friedländer (also Czechoslovakian), noted the difference between Communist Kitsch and Fascist Kitsch, the former of which Kundera claimed was “a folding screen set up to curtain off death”.2 Friedländer called kitsch of this sort “the Soviet ideal, where the iconography of singing tomorrows avoid themes of death and destruction.”3
Friedländer centered his analysis of the Fascist variant of kitsch, and, in particular Nazi Kitsch, in observations of pro-Hitler art featuring “the juxtaposition of the kitsch aesthetic and of the themes of death”.4
The Third Reich deployed kitsch in a manner that especially beautified annihilation. Friedländer emphasized in his study Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death “the constant identification of Nazism and death; not real death in its everyday horror and tragic banality, but a ritualized, stylized, and aestheticized death.”5
Walter Benjamin recognized the association between authoritarian regimes and horrible art in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, which quotes from, among other sources, Emilio Marinetti’s 1909 “Futurist Manifesto” to demonstrate how, in Benjamin’s words, “The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.”6
A major example Benjamin employs in that essay is Futurism, an art movement obsessed with death. Its founder insisted “For twenty-seven years, we Futurists have rebelled against the idea that war is anti-aesthetic. … We therefore state: … War is beautiful because—thanks to its gas masks, its terrifying megaphones, its flame throwers, and light tanks—it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machine. War is beautiful because it inaugurates the dreamed-of metallization of the human body.”7
Exclamations like this one by Marinetti provide Benjamin with ready evidence for his conclusion that “All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war.”8
The futurist art movement had not yet, in its promotion of war and death, grasped the political utility of wielding the saccharine idylls of kitsch.
Walter Benjamin attacked kitsch directly in a separate essay, “Traumkitsch,” published in 1927, nearly a decade before his “Work of Art” essay. Its title’s common translation into English as “Dream kitsch” loses the connection between dreams (träume in German) and Sigmund Freud’s then-recently expounded concept of painful memories suppressed by the unconscious mind, coined as “trauma”.
That Benjamin essay, upon its publication in Die neue Rundschau, became attached to a more direct title referring to its immediate target: “Gloss on Surrealism”. The Surrealist art movement used poetry and visual art to bring awareness of Freudian psychoanalysis into the French-speaking world. Benjamin indicts several of the French surrealist poets as merchants of verbal kitsch.
Benjamin located within interwar surrealism a fundamentally kitsch quality. The surrealists rooted their productions in the trafficking of imagery between the waking and dreaming worlds. The hazards that Benjamin found in such dream-operations are far worse than injuring one’s hand on the mind’s obscure refuse, insofar as “Dreams are now a shortcut to banality.”9
The more acute danger Benjamin warns of is the inexorable association between dreamland and the battlefield: “Dreams have started wars, and wars, from the very earliest times, have determined the propriety and impropriety—indeed, the range—of dreams.”10
To understand kitsch, Benjamin plumbs its origins in the human mind:
Technology is in the process of cancelling the exterior appearance of things—never to be seen again—in the same way as banknotes, scheduled for invalidation, are cancelled. In a final farewell, our hand grasps the exterior appearance of things in dreaming and runs its fingers over their familiar shape. It touches the things where they are most worn. This is not always the best place to touch things, however: children do not clasp a glass, they grasp it by putting their fingers in it. And which side does a thing present to dreams? What is this most worn place? It is the side that has been worn thin by habit and is garnished with cheap maxims. The side that things present to dreams is “kitsch”.11
Benjamin is making a statement here about the role of technology in kitsch production. Benjamin, who handwrote everything in a refusal ever to buy a typewriter, traces the path from the simulated form found in the technological world to the real form found in the dream world. The memory of that which technology has cancelled appears in the dream as the real artifact, though only accessed through memories of our handling its most overused side. These worn-out techniques from a world of older things form the roots of kitsch.12
Benjamin cites Louis Aragon’s essay Une vague de rêves (Wave of Dreams), in which it’s observed:
The mania for dreaming spread throughout Paris. Young people believed they had found one of the secrets of poetry. But in fact they gave up on composing poetry.
Likewise, in our moment, a mania for the proliferation of generative kitsch has spread throughout the internet. Young people believe they have found a secret to art. But in fact those using it admit to having given up on creating art.
The precipice overlooking this abyss of slop imagery has been arrived at because dreams, whether psychological or mechanical, do not produce beauty; they encode the bitter gleanings of the violence underpinning the social order, tracing back before time immemorial. As Benjamin puts it:
They seek out the totemic tree of objects that lies in the thicket of prehistory. On this totemic tree, the topmost, the ultimate hideous face is kitsch. Kitsch is the last mask of the banal with which we attire ourselves in dreams and conversation in order to absorb into ourselves the power of the world of those things that have died out.13
The tribe’s eldest chieftain is honored with his likeness carved into the totem pole’s apex. So in the eternal dialectic of bitter lesson to ineffable puzzle, we use the tired phrases and comfortable aphorisms of verbal kitsch to connect ourselves to history.
For Benjamin, “the ultimate hideous face is kitsch” means that our most well-used traditions stagnate the human spirit. Dreams teach us nothing but an ugliness worn thin by our primitive forebears. Dreams (and therefore kitsch) offer no glimpses into the future, only the debts of past putrefactions.
And so, according to Benjamin, in kitsch we preserve ourselves in the old order. It is not so much that kitsch belongs to an older order, but more that we, by choosing to adorn ourselves in the garb of kitsch, sell ourselves to a more wretched past.
When we carry kitsch’s primordiality back to Friedländer’s analysis of death-kitsch, we can now better appreciate the reasons that Friedländer measures the bucolic dimensions of Fascist kitsch in the units of mythic legend. He writes, “Kitsch is a debased form of myth, but nevertheless draws from the mythic substance— a part of its emotional impact.”14 Nazi-kitsch combined the purity themes of Christian motifs with the heroic legends of European paganism: “an overload of symbols; a baroque setting; an evocation of a mysterious atmosphere, of the myth and of religiosity enveloping a vision of death announced as a revelation opening out into nothing.”15
At this point, the time has come for us to face what for some may be a rather alarming verity, but one which can assist us in confronting the phenomenon of the White House tweeting Ghibilified slop: like the surrealist paintings preceding them, Studio Ghibli films are wealthy in kitsch elements. The Ghibilification trend amplified to bandwagon-strength not only as an ironic slap-in-the-face against Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki for his 2016 comments discarding the horror-animation outputs of a less-developed AI tool as “an insult to life itself”. The Ghibli-mimicry trend’s virality was rooted also in the transposition of photojournalistic images of violence into the enticing colors of kitsch coziness.16
The kitsch of Miyazaki’s Ghibli films abound in their innocent childhood heroines, in their rural countryside settings, and in their mythologically-saturated Nippo-völkisch spiritualities. And yes, the blameless-civilian-perspective tales of the Pacific theater’s harsh wartime unfairness exhibit a Japanese nationalism. The original Studio Ghibli animations, while not slop (they are painstakingly hand-drawn), are kitsch.
The Trump administration’s tweet, depicting an ICE arrest in the style of Studio Ghibli, draws not only from recent trends in social media shitposting, but also from political tactics used by Hitler, Stalin, and Novotny: to soothe the citizens with what is irreal. Irreal in the double sense of the valorization of police action (kitsch), and irreal uniquely in history in the sense of autoregressive amalgamations of digitized images17 (slop). Because Studio Ghibli was already kitsch and because of the computer’s convincing imitation of it, the White House was able to appropriate an existing kitsch into a kitsch-slop promoting its deportation agenda.
A new kitsch reinforcing the interests of American Empire, enabled by a technology circumventing the need for professional illustrators, could not have manifested the same frisson-response by purloining the expressionism of Francis Bacon or Edvard Munch. The use of kitschy-AI slop in the official communications the Trump administration achieves a crafty substitution of the disgust reaction to photographic evidence of mass deportations for the smile of Gemütlichkeit at a wholesome cartoon. Drawing from a tradition of the most manipulative propaganda of the twentieth century, the White House tweet, both kitsch and slop, harkens forth a new image-genre we likely shall encounter again: Empire-slop.
Endnotes
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), pages 241-245.
Ibid, page 247.
Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), page 29.
Ibid, page 26.
Ibid, page 43.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), page 121.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Walter Benjamin, “Dream Kitsch,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1: 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), page 3.
Ibid.
This and subsequent excerpts of this essay quoted from: Walter Benjamin, Dream Kitsch, trans. Edward Viesel, ed. Edward Viesel, published December 8, 2022, https://www.edwardviesel.eu/0056.html, accessed 30 March 2025.
By Benjamin's essay, after any dream, at least three inquiries can be levied against it:
What is the well-worn grasping spot?
Where does the real peak out from behind the simulated?
Which symbol bears the kitsch face of the primordial totem pole's ugly apex?
Ibid.
Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), page 49.
Ibid, page 45.
For more on the theory that the far-right’s increased use of AI-generated imagery fits into a deliberate hobby of amusing themselves at the expense of the triggered, see Gareth Watkin’s article, AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism.
It’s been noted elsewhere that GPT-4o’s capability for close fidelity to the Ghibli visual style must necessarily derive from a training dataset containing extensive shots lifted from Studio Ghibli films.