Performing Populisms and Fascinating Fascisms
Walter Benjamin famously identified fascism with the “aestheticization of politics.” Originating (at least in many accounts) in early 20th century Italy, fascism soon found variants worldwide — from Germany to Brazil to Japan — always marked by a stark nationalist inflection. Like Benjamin, scholars have analyzed fascism as a political style grounded in aesthetics and affects: from oratory to fashion to the “mass ornaments” of crowd formations (Kracauer). In 1975, media theorist and filmmaker Susan Sontag explored its ongoing intrigue and eroticization decades after its ostensibly demise, including its reemergence in art cinema and sexual subcultures. Observing the eager return to fascism in her time, she opens her analysis with Leni Reifenstahl’s photographs of Sudanese people. Far from bracketing the Nazism of her earlier film work, Sontag shows, these photographs demonstrate Riefenstahl’s ongoing commitment to primitivist, imperialist, racialized, and gendered violence as instantiated in color tones and framing. Resisting the whitewashing of Riefenstahl’s cinematic legacy (where her promotion of Nazism recedes to a celebration of her auteurism), Sontag argues that in fascist spectacle, “history becomes theater.”
Our theme for the coming year deploys the lenses of both visual cultures and performance studies to grapple with fascisms old and new and to compare them to the explosion of populisms in recent decades. If historians and political scientists see fascism as emerging in Milan in the early 20th century, other thinkers have provocatively argued that its origins in fact lie in colonial contexts. Populism, for its part, is arguably born in the Global South, with figures like Lázaro Cárdenas (Mexico), Getúlio Vargas (Brazil), or Juan Domino Perón (Argentina). Populism and fascism are modern forms that invent and hail, while purporting to merely describe, a unified People in relation to a charismatic leader. Both, that is, foreground the problem of representation in its doubled and contradictory meanings (per Marx, Spivak, Rabinowitz): who speaks for the many, and how is this speech shaped by artistic and media forms, from the newspaper to the documentary to TikTok? But they also underscore the presentational dimensions that evade representational clarity, demanding an attention to the fraught problems of presence and immediacy. Both fascism and populism, then, invoke figures central to visual cultures and performance studies: from icons to the sonic, choreographic, and pictorial dimensions of crowd, mass, party as spectacle.
Far from equating these two phenomena, however, we wish to explore the textured and historically specific variations of their different approaches to politics and social formation. (In the U.S. alone, populism has been deployed to collapse radically different movements —e.g., those cohering around Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders — and “fascism” is a favored epithet of both the right and left to describe one another.) Per Federico Finchelstein, it is crucial to distinguish between the two, while also understanding their overlaps, both casual/material and conceptual, as modern political forms. Moreover, while historical fascism has been extensively analyzed in terms of its style and forms, we arguably lack such analyses — or artistic approaches — to either contemporary fascisms or the more nebulous, less scripted phenomena of contemporary global populisms. These include traveling icons of the contemporary global-popular in cinema, photography, graffiti (Ghosh; Ghosh and Sarkar); and the visual poetics of crowds as they occupy space the square or plaza, signaled by political theory’s recent return to multitude, mass, and assembly (Hardt and Negri; Butler; Gago).
We invite artistic and scholarly approaches and responses to fascisms and/or populisms globally, in both historical and contemporary iterations. Among the questions we hope to explore: what are the aesthetic categories that help us to understand modern and contemporary political forms: the beautiful, the sublime, bathetic, farcical, ecstatic, grotesque or abject? What is the role of new media platforms and/or global media conglomerates in the fomenting and sustaining of fascist or populist collectives? What roles do speech, voice, rhythm, music, and noise play in constructing these political collectives? Or gendered forms of body worship (e.g., athleticism, virility, fear of feminization)? How do affects and feeling tones undergird and produce fascism and/or populism, or shape forms of living alongside or under them, including major and minor or “ugly” feelings (Ngai): from righteous rage to rebellious mourning to loathing, solidarity, euphoria, enchantment, boredom and what activist-theorist Verónica Gago calls the “vivid tattoo of collective enthusiasm”? Fantasizing futurity: how do messianism and prefiguration subtend fascist or populist spectacle? What models of critique or post-critique help us understand iterations of these political formations today?
Finally, how might the current upsurge in populisms and fascisms alike index unmet needs, utopian promises of collectivity, fantasies of the good life? How might art practice and theory help us explore, challenge, detourn or otherwise rechannel these desires for a much more capaciously-conceived Many? How might counterpolitics, counterpublics, counterfantasies, and/or counterarchives resist the conscription of the crowd to fascist imaginaries – and what kinds of resistance have already emerged? How do we imagine utopian or alternative populisms, describing a collective that has not yet come into being (or that was actively repressed), one that does not promote narrowly essentialist notions of the People? In light of alt-right movements sweeping the planet, what is the role of protest cultures, of “performative theories of assembly” (Butler) of radical democracy and/or the popular in the visual and performing arts?
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.”
Butler, Judith. Notes for a Performative Theory of Assembly.
Finchelstein, Federico. From Fascism to Populism in History.
Gago, Verónica. The Feminist International: How to Change Everything.
Ghosh, Bishnupriya. Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular.
Ghosh, Bishnupriya and Bhaskar Sarkar. “The Global-Popular: a Frame for Contemporary Cinemas.”
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Assembly.
Kracauer, Sigfried. “The Mass Ornament.”
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings.
Rabinowitz, Paula. They Must Be Represented: the Politics of Documentary.
Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.”
Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”