Abstract

What Immanuel Kant considered "a mere appendage to the aesthetic judgment," "far less important and rich in consequences" than the judgment of beauty,1 was in fact to play a crucial role in the formation of ideologies of the twentieth century, as demonstrated by a number of studies revealing the ways in which political regimes generated sublime experiences to exercise mass control.2 Analyses of the aesthetic side of politics invariably point to the fact that the kind of aesthetic experience dominating the sociopolitical discourse indicates the kind of subjectivity required by this discourse for its self-sustenance. In the early years of the People's Republic of China, it was the Soviet sublime with its industrial...