Focus of Our Attention

​

The central question this highly qualified “we” seeks to address is, how acute a crisis does fascism currently present? Of its dangers there can be no doubt. But is fascism an existential risk? Should all  other concerns take second place lest the catastrophes wreaked upon the world by historical forms of fascism be repeated, this time hyper-fueled by nuclear weapons, the climate crisis and artificial intelligence? And, as a corollary, should the output of fascism and the fascist-adjacent be dismissed out of hand? Or, is climate change, inequality, capitalism, etc., etc. equally portentous? And would the corollary then be that all output, properly contextualized perhaps, has value?

To take a current example, is the politics of Trump and his followers a fascist movement, and if so, one that should  be opposed without hesitation, or is it closer to a disgruntled tribe, whose utterances, while undoubtedly sometimes wrong and dangerous, nevertheless be carefully parsed for insights that educated, cosmopolitan liberal/leftists are perhaps unable to apprehend? Our preliminary hypothesis, reflecting our predisposition to be skeptical of either/or simplifications, is “both.”

​

As we test this hypothesis in exploring fascism and our current digital media environment there will be three considerations that are fundamental to this project at its preliminary stage: aesthetics, interdisciplinarity and collaboration.  

 

Aesthetics

​

Our starting point is aesthetics, in the broadest possible sense of that word, a fascination with cultural production ranging from the simplest outsider art to the most magnificent architectural structures; from affixing a Canadian flag to the back window of a pickup truck or making an appearance at a World Wrestling Entertainment match, to art we know was favoured by the Nazi elite in the Third Reich or by crypto-currency traders now. It might be said that our aesthetic interest is closer to that of the cultural anthropologist than the art historian, if we didn’t find such disciplining to be counterproductive.

​

This is quite different from saying we don’t find rich traditions within scholarly and artistic disciplines – ethnography, iconology, ideology critique, cultural history among countless other research fields immediately spring to mind as immensely rewarding, and obviously the art world is fertile critical ground  – but rather it is to emphasize that for us these disciplines are as much cultural artefacts  as tractor pulls or Kwakwaka’wakw mask carving.

​

Like all cultural artefacts, scholarly and artistic artefacts demand translation—however necessarily imperfect (who was it that said any translation that is true is not beautiful, and any that is beautiful is not true?)—for the benefit of  those not indigenous to the artistic and scholarly artefacts’ origin cultures. [translation model: Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, 1984, see esp. 1991 introduction]

 

Interdisciplinarity

​

This emphasis on the importance of translation leads us beyond aesthetics, our natural disciplinary home, to what might be called a radical interdisciplinarity including, but going we hope far beyond scholarly and artistic interchange -  as those tend to present themselves currently. We hope to encourage, enable and support as diverse as possible array of perspectives to be brought to bear on the digital iconography of  fascism and its cognate cultural formations. We are certain that such an interdisciplinary approach will yield significant insight.

 

Moreover we aspire to break out of such “one to many” traditional presentation modes as the lecture or the exhibition to more creative “many to many” formats – bus tours, wrestling matches, whisper campaigns, who knows?

​

 

Collaboration

We recognize that a truly wide-ranging interdisciplinarity such as we are envisioning is far beyond our own capacity – we are overly privileged certainly, yes, but also thereby critically constrained. Thus the nascent-state of our project evident in this website reflects not only its place in a putative chronology of development but also its invitational character: we are not seeking audiences for our own creative output as much as extending an invitation for potential collaborators to join us in an  ongoing interdisciplinary creative development process to identify, evaluate and combat the online fascist threat. In this sense, our web site is merely a placeholder for an indeterminate creatively critical future that we cannot bring into focus on our own, let alone realize.

Of course, digital technologies  famously promise to enable radical collaborative proposals, presumably including such efforts as ours (and here we are, meeting digitally), at the same time as they, just as famously, demonstrably frustrate and even existentially endanger such basic building blocks of collaboration as truth and justice.

​

 We are also acutely aware that phrases such as “national socialism” and “national community”—also at their time and in their way newly technologically-enabled calls for collaboration—litter the graveyards of history. Practically speaking, for us right now, in 2023, these relays between  electronically-assisted emancipatory potential and mass mobilization and murder are embedded just below the surface of the debates over “moderation” in social media, which we both hope to unpack and feel lurking over our shoulders as we consider requests to participate, motivating and horrifying us, Benjamin’s ironic angel of history touching us yet again.

 

The Spectacular State: Fascism and the Modern Imagination  

                   

We ruefully acknowledge that the forgoing might be characterized as follows: that an unrepresentative group  styling itself as “we,” utterly lacking a mandate or accountability, is extending a highly qualified invitation to help them figure out how to invite widespread participation of uncertain form in unpacking/translating/defending against an ascendent fascism that is itself characterized by promises of radicalized, even emancipatory, participation, many of which are demonstrably not merely false but dangerous.

​

 Our troubled stance toward our own project arises in significant part from our experiences organizing and contributing to a predecessor project in 1995, The Spectacular State: Fascism and the Modern Imagination (SpecState). This project, which was 18 month in development and ran for two months, brought together scholars, artists and anti-fascist activists to study historical and contemporary manifestations of fascism.

​

There were many laudable aspects to the SpecState, not least of which were the powerful and insightful presentations done under the project’s memorable rubric. [examples: my name is scot’s installation presaging Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe by about 10 years, lecture by Krystyna von Henneberg on fascist architecture and planning in Italian colonial Libya, and Andreas Kahre’s  Mercedes Benz performance (its mix of memoir and the mechanics of power and how it tied the grand historical sweep of tragedy to the doggedly picayune appearing a year before Sebald’s first publication in English…)]  Beyond these often startling creative triumphs, the SpecState also in retrospect, exhibited a kind of naïve prescience in calling attention to fascism at a time when neoliberalism was rampantly triumphant, some famously daring to suggest that the end of history was at hand (although even then, this was a self-evidently hubristic posturing).

​

As important as its content may have been, the SpecState also featured multiple formal advances. Its admittedly clumsy efforts at encouraging participation – open discussion sessions at almost every event, an online program and student  discussion space, a drop-in café where non-programmed views could be aired, a senior-level undergraduate course where students were encouraged to map alternate readings of the project materials – in many ways prefaced what some technologists were, to much more profitabl at least financially, developed in Silicon Valley computer labs and on Ivy League college campuses a decade later, social media avant la lettre.

​

 

Lessons Learnt

​

Naturally, we hope SpecData will carry forward the successes of SpecState, both at the level of content and of form. But we would be remiss if two failures or shortcomings of SpecState were not also taken into account. The first of these was the unsustainability of the project as constructed. No project as demanding but at the same time as heavily reliant on volunteer or at best poorly-paid labour as was the SpecState could then or will in the future survive for long.

​

The other major – and perhaps more intractable – problem with SpecState was the lack of lasting impact. While most SpecState events drew capacity audiences, and we received anecdotal appreciation from many who attended, there is scant evidence of the project having any lasting influence. Even one of our first and most important sponsors, SFU’s Institute for the Humanities, organized a “Spectre of Fascism Free School” and “Spectacle of Fascism” conference in 2017 without any reference so far as we know, to our precedent. This is not to carp about proper acknowledgement – we are firmly of the Maoist “let a hundred flowers bloom” school of creative critical development – as to confirm our fear that all the smart creative work and resources that were invested in the SpecState did little to move the critical dial much closer to understanding fascism, let alone signposting a way forward.

​

At root, this lack of impact points to a failure to clearly identify our audience. That is to say, sure, we understood our artistic, scholarly and activist audiences enough to encourage many of them to attend our presentation events, but we watched as these different audiences, often quite sartorially identifiable, streamed in and then, having agreeably enough participated in our event, streamed back out not having  contributed, so far as we could tell, the tiniest bit in our overarching project of translation between these cognate (artistic, scholarly, activist) communities, never mind with the vast critical diaspora  of cultural positions that will certainly need to be effectively mobilized somehow against the threats posed by fascists and the fascist-adjacent.

​

We grappled for sure with entreaties to more firmly place ourselves within our target communities (here we are thinking with gratitude and regret of the Canada Council officer who spent many ultimately fruitless hours on the phone detailing how we might prepare a project catalogue recognized by the cultural community, advice that we were too burned out to really comprehend let alone  operationalize – see Failure #1: Lack of Resources above – or our similarly  inconclusive  efforts to garner ongoing scholarly support to develop other  initiatives.  But for the translation project there was little apparent appetite.

 

​

Moving Forward

​

Perhaps it is our age that makes us feel, while cautioned by these earlier failures, sanguine about how despite our herculean efforts we remain, as some might say, unheimlich in our natural disciplinary spaces, uncanny spectral perspectivists. We should mourn our inability to traverse their disciplinary facades, the scaling of which is minor compared to our bigger  avowed aim of shedding some light—however feeble—down on the Trumpian hordes (or their Canadian, British, French,  Turkish, etc., etc. equivalents). Perhaps it is a hopeless quest. Perhaps the future belongs not to those seeking  understanding such as what our feeble lights might provide, but to whoever can mobilize the largest number of the most heavily armed and AI-infected.

But we cling to an ideal of rationality that our relativistic perspectivism depends upon, certain that there is a Heimlich for us somewhere. If we had to guess, it might be among poets. Or among the truck drivers who ceaselessly patrol their liminal Leviathan of pavement and concrete – oh and as an aside possibly the most significant technological innovation of the last century. They, like us, are probably going to be swept away by a  21st-century technical reshuffling on a world-historical scale. But perhaps among those millions of last drivers a few keep a copy of Rimbaud or Emily Dickinson or Leila Aboulela (whose novel, The Translator, seems particularly apropos to our concerns) tucked under their seat cushions. To those and similar cross-disciplinary nomads, wherever you are, we extend an electronic hand.ungarian, urkish ut