Axiom 1: Neofascism is too much
There are something between 7.000 and 20.000 screenshots on the hard drive of this computer which I received on loan from my employer. They are screenshots of memes, twitter conversations, snippets of various plattform occurances, video stills, chat logs, articles, blogs. Those are the details I work with, each screenshot representing some form of network event, a snippet embedded in a situation, a platform, an interface, an exchange about this or that, and – to my mind – some form of evidence or illustration of what I provisionally call the „fashosphere“: the vast landscape of rightwing-reactionary media culture that one can find online. My archive is only a snippet, a time-lapse foto of this landscape between 2017 and 2024. How miniscule this collection is can be inferred from the internet’s convenient and permanent metricization of everything: when Parler, a social network used to plan the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021, was hit by a massive data scrape, 70 terabytes of data relating to the rightwing riot of January 6 were leaked to the public. My hard drive holds one terabyte of data, and Parler was just one (medium sized) platform used by rightwing activists, among many others.
In my research, I do like to shorthand this discrepancy between reactionary data and storage capacity into the axiom: the fashosphere is too much. This concerns of course only a „data“ or data processing discrepancy; if you figure a scholar’s analytical capacity into the equation, the disparity escalates. How to analyse a mountain range of data, or the culture it represents? Such discrepancies are only one indicator why the far right, the fashosphere, or the contemporary culture of rightwing reaction are hard to research. And not only hard, but somewhat impossible to do research on, because – as an active cultural, political media practice – it to a certain extent resists analysis, by sheer volume and mass, by its speed of accumulation, by its own tactics and dynamics. In this essay, I’d like to propose four further axioms on the contemporary fashosphere to delineate 1) why the resistance to analysis is characteristic of this particular research object, and 2) how it takes the form of a literal destruction of knowledge. When I speak of „we“ in the following, I do not mean scholars of the humanities per se, but those whose knowledge is being destroyed.
Axiom 2: Neofascism does not like being researched
What is the work when the object resists analysis? When the object of research or inquiry seems to be characterized by obfuscation, by chaos, by shifting its Gestalt, by undermining the descriptive language you work with, or by simply overwhelming the person approaching it theoretically (by way of theorization) by being too much, or too fast and too furious? I don’t want to say that this is the case with the object of the contemporary fashosphere – the discursive force or energy currently pushing or nudging democracies towards their illiberal others – for many people have managed to say smart things about the current constellation of social and political forces, its toomuchness notwithstanding. What I do want to say is that a particular feeling or affect might grip the scholar working on or about this constellation. There is a certain hum in the back of your brain while at work, indicating that the object does not appreciate your research of it. Or more generally there is the sense that, while scholarship is being done on this moving object provisionally called „the fashosphere“, something is being destroyed at the same time. This might be because the object of analysis is not indifferent (as, say, a novel might be) to what a scholar might say about it, or because one of its features is to actively search and destroy what a scholar is said to produce – oh ever elusive knowledge. Henry James, in my imagination because I have never worked or written on him, is not on the internet or in Congress attacking and discrediting what your literary theory has to say on „The Ambassadors“. NK Jemisin might be on social media or speak at universities, but I have not yet seen her intervene into syllabi, faculty decisions, or advance provisions of how to root out „dangerous woke tendencies in higher education“ and what Donald Trump called „the far left fascism in our institutions“ in 2020. Unlike Henry James, neofascist actors are clearly and actively engaged in such resistance to theorization, or in the active destruction of its possibilities.
Their attacks on higher education, on the humanities in particular, and on critical anti-racist approaches in very particular, are part of their idea for a cause. They talk about „cultural marxism“ (xiv), „woke extremism“ (8), „the noxious tenets of critical race theory“ (5), „transgender ideology“ (5), „climate fanaticism“ (60), the „DEI agenda“ (616); some send out memes saying „feminism is Judaism“ if they feel antifeminist and antisemitic, or „woke is Hamas“ if they feel anti-palestine and anti-woke. Some evoke eminent scholar Judith Butler and burn them in effigy if they feel pitchforky about all of these things at once. What they do with such speech acts, is they lump together, making it hard to suss out what is meant at all. The larger target of such invectives or talking points is – inevitably and very clearly – critical humanities scholarship and the intellectual academy per se. According to the rightwing thinktank Heritage Foundation, the humanities are the core of a „woke-dominated system of public schools and universities“ consisting largely „of Marxist academics“. I have copied the above phrases from the 900-page (again, too much) conservative manifesto entitled „Mandate for Leadership“ (often called Project 2025), a popular and comprehensive policy proposal published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023. The document is currently rumored to influence Donald Trump’s imminent second presidency, which may or not be true, but the freely-distributed text is effectively a culture war signpost: it presents a rather detailed vision articulated by conservative to ultranationalist leadership in the USA. This leadership writes on higher education:
„… many institutions of higher education […] are hostile to free expression, open academic inquiry, and American exceptionalism. […] Rather than continuing to buttress a higher education establishment captured by woke ‚diversicrats‘ […], federal postsecondary education policy should prepare students for jobs in the dynamic economy, nurture institutional diversity, and expose schools to greater market forces.“ (Project 2025: 320)
With the current abyssal bifurcation of so many discussions over what used to be called the „Middle East“-question, such denunciations have gained traction in more pedestrian avenues of political commentary than, say, InfoWars, FoxNews, or the Heritage Foundation. Major parts of the electorate, in the US and in Germany, have for example been won over by the ostentatious linking of postcolonial theory to Islamist terrorism, or of gender/queer theory and pedophilia – both mere adaptations of formerly extremist positions that claimed feminism or queerness to be a „Jewish project to undermine Western culture“ or anticolonial critiques being synonymous with Black/Brown terror. Nowadays such accusations and malevolent linkages have not only given rise to a mass-market of „antihumanities scholarship“ in the tradition of Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990), but further to a broad common-sense refusal and devaluation of most things the critical humanities produce – including but not limited to the study of radicalization, fascism, racist regimes, and so forth. Of course, no one should accept all the things the humanities like to think of as „our knowledge production“, and criticism of what we do is necessary from all venues and standpoints. However, the critical humanities are currently working against a constant noise of populist anti-intellectualism turned bestseller (e.g. Lindsay/Pluckrose, Cynical Theories), turned policy proposal/state legislation (such as DeSantis’s Florida), turned conservative or neofascist vision of a world gone bonkers:
„This is evident today: Whether it be mask and vaccine mandates, school and business closures, efforts to keep Americans from driving gas cars or using gas stoves, or efforts to defund the police, indoctrinate schoolchildren, alter beloved books, abridge free speech, undermine the colorblind ideal, or deny the biological reality that there are only two sexes, the Left’s steady stream of insanity appears to be never-ending.“ (Project 2025: 19)
As the academy and especially the humanities are almost without exception denounced as the well of this „steady stream of insanity“, the work of critical analysis inevitably also becomes the work of tracking its own destruction.
Axiom 3: Neofascism combats critical knowledge by making the possibilities for knowledge production unsafe, unfeasible, and exhausting.
Knowledge destruction is a central activity of the culture war – or rather cultural warfare – which rightwing actors have adopted as main strategy, or pastime, or business opportunity for several decades now. The culture war is after all also an epistemological undertaking, a change in what and how we know things, which might be evidenced when all branches of critical theory are denounced as „cultural marxism“ (which evokes an antisemitic genealogy). The far right’s cultural warfare in other words is very materially about „ways of knowing“. It is a battle (if we adopt the militarized language of the right) or a struggle (if we adopt the identitarian language of the right) for how one knows things, and how this knowledge is reproduced. It comes as no surprise that the fashosphere’s interventions into the knowledge factories called universities target the very ways we go about things, how we ask, how our categories work, and how we share knowledge.
For the past 10 years, a variety of socalled „hoaxes“ have for example tried to discredit the infrastructure of theory journals and disciplinary methodologies, essaying to prove through farcical article submissions based on jargon-mimicry that our publications in gender studies, queer studies, performance studies, and many other fields are merely self-serving gibberish. „Is there any idea so outlandish that it won't be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/‚Theory‘ journal? Helen Plucrose et al. submitted a dozen hoax papers to find out“ tweeted Steven Pinker in order to promote the socalled Grievance Studies Affair in 2018. The hoax, conducted by Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian, confirmed nothing except that anybody could write papers that sound like queer studies (but weren’t), and try (but mostly fail) to get them published in minor academic journals. The mere act of the hoax however – its particular technique of imitating jargon in order to make it suspicious and unusable, the social media show to promote the maneuver, its daring gesture – were enough to sway public opinion on these fields in particular and higher education in general: critical humanities are for the most part just about the jargon-ladden minor grievances of „those people“. While public opinion might have been leaning anyways, confirmation bias still proved a powerful tool in the hands of culture warriors, leading to an exhausting and largely unwinnable struggle to „rescue“ our critical vocabularies, our ways of writing and publishing, and the general sense of being able to „do our jobs“.
Similar concerted attacks, mostly conducted for public attention, target invariably the very infrastructures our disciplines work with: vocabularies, archives, methods, venues of publication, recognition or at least toleration by university administrations and the public, and most importantly: cognitive space and time. If for example „gender studies“ is consequently framed as „gender ideology“ (as the Republican Party, the German AfD, or the Netzwerk Wissenschaftsfreiheit propose) and such monickers hold public and political credibility, the fruitless work of arguing otherwise (its not an ideology, but an epistemology, a field, a method) consumes valuable ressources and puts scholars into increasingly unsafe positions: one ends up wasting time defending the very existence of the discipline. The effects go beyond mere struggles for recognition: Consider this recent proposal, again found in the pages of Project 2025, which vows to combat a number of very different things under the umbrella term „pornography“:
„Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.“ (Project 2025, 5)
While some humanities scholars might also issue extreme critiques on the porn industry or see indeed an increased sexualization of children e.g. in the media, such proposals do a very different kind of work: they lump all sorts of phenomena under one illicit heading and propose to persecute them with ostentatious indifference to the details. Trans* visibility, queer critique or performance, trans* studies, free speech, sexual abuse, drugs, and education on these subjects all become part of the same „crime“; archiving, teaching, researching, publishing, performing, being, or allowing these things to take place on electronic platforms become part of the „crime“. The scandal here, or the point of attack, is the proposition’s very lack of specificity and coherence, the absence of specific meanings: if being transgender makes you into an addictive drug of corruption, and if archiving queer literature makes you akin to a child molester, then it at least becomes unclear what all these words even mean. Though historians of queer cultures are well versed in publically negotiating subjects and texts frequently outside of social or legal permissibility, such populist provisions make it harder to legitimize your work to an administration, a politician, a funding agency, an audience. They make it impossible to uphold basic differences: there are things that are not pornography.
The Heritage Foundation’s proposals illustrate what Judith Butler wrote some years ago on the anti-gender movement – it employs a large-scale technology of de-differentiation, or weaponized incoherence:
„The anti-gender movement mobilizes a range of rhetorical strategies from across the political spectrum to maximize the fear of infiltration and destruction that comes from a diverse set of economic and social forces. It does not strive for consistency, for its incoherence is part of its power.“
This is plainly what I mean by unsafe, unfeasible, and exhausting: countering such strategic incoherences becomes impossible or simply too much work invested in the wrong place. The often precarious structures of academic work and public education (on gender, trans* issues, porn, sexual assault, power, asf.) are overwhelmed with the unnecessary work of correction, clarification, sorting out, reading, argumentation, defending, or pure save-your-skin refusal. This is also what I mean by the fashosphere: increasingly, I find the differentiation between its actors (academics, politicians, activists, think tanks, social media figures, „the discourse“) simply too tedious and almost beside the point – lumpy terms like fashosphere or neofascism offer themselves to counter incoherence with generalization, by sacrificing the details my own work would like to focus on in order to be able to talk about cultural warfare, and its highly effective incoherence. Because this has become important too: amid the attacks and in the arena of attack, one has to save time and cognitive space. Only so many hours in the day, only so many words to transmute anger and precarity.
Axiom 4: The neofascist project is a media project
Campaigns like Grievance Studies Affair indicate not only an attack on the knowledge infrastructures of the humanities, but further exhibit a specific media technology that is lavishly applied in the culture war: the fashosphere repeats our own words – or distorted version of them – back to us, with the malevolent intent of emptying them of meaning, of throwing their frame of reference, their context into oblivion. While „taking things out of context“ is a familiar quarrel happening also in the humanities themselves, the era of hypermediated public discourse and an incessant datafication of all things through media platforms has enabled the right to weaponize repetition, quotation, and decontextualization into a technology of destruction. While this is a daily occurance – rightwing social media figures milking academic events or publications for scandalizeable snippets – I’d like to offer the second failed impeachment of Donald J. Trump as a textbook case for this specific media technology.
The large-scale Senate trial, conducted in February 2021, was intended to prove that the president, who was still in office at the time, had triggered the so-called storming of the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021. The prosecuation’s main piece of evidence was the speech Trump had given to his supporters on the morning of January 6th: “We will fight like hell, if you don't fight like hell you won't have a country anymore”, Trump had announced to thousands of listeners, most of whom then proceeded to storm the Capitol building in order to disrupt the electoral process. Senate manager Diana Degette argued that Trump’s speech act had incited people to the direct violent attack („fight“) on the institution of democracy – his words had ordered the Capitol storm. Without Trump as authoritarian leader, the prosecution argued, there would have been no violent uprising: a top-down model of accountability, where speech acts from positions of power, contexts, and consequences matter, was the basis of the prosecution’s argument.
Trump's defense team undercut this line of thinking – that things are done with words – with a somewhat astounding response: at the beginning of his defense, attorney Michael Van der Veen showed an eleven-minute video collage of various Democrat politicians using the terms “fight” or “fight like hell” hundreds of times in unclear contexts. Some of the individual video snippets lasted a fraction of a second. What exactly the defense wanted to prove or argue with this collage remains unclear. Had Trump merely used a conventional political phrase that was to be shown in its ordinariness? Did the video prove that Democrats also use incindiary rhetoric and should be held accountable as well? Maybe the collage was supposed to prove or argue something along these lines, but failed to actually prove or argue anything. Van der Veen presented no related argument but chose to continue his opening defense with attacks on the sincerity of the prosecution. The video in this sense is not interesting as ideological strategy or populist argumentation, but as a calculated media intervention or audiovisual assault: a targeted flooding of the prosecution's argument with the intent of obliterating all context. The video collage placed an overwhelming echo effect on the neuralgic point of the conventional view of rightwing populism and the prosecution’s underlying argument: the Führerprinzip, meaning that “fight” in the mouth of the populist Trump constitutes a “marching order” for the radicalized masses – i.e. that words from political leaders have consequences. The collage, amassing identical and decontextualized speech acts carried out by Democrats, shattered precisely this point: populist rhetoric – “fight like hell” – can mean anything, anywhere, without consequence. „Fight“ is the drone music of political discourse. This is to be taken literal: the video collage creates a dizzying effect on the viewer, individual contexts and situations disappear, a flow of somehow meaningful (but inconsequential) calls to „fight“ capture the attention and wear it out at the same time. A disorienting effect ensues: the constant repetition of the same phrases causes discourse analysis or contextual assessments to be overwhelmed by the sheer noise of decontextualized similarity. Its too much to analyse, and too little to argue against.
Similar tactics of what one may call „parasitic repetition“ have played an important role in rightwing media campaigns for some time and have become a staple of online warfare: shortly after the first debate between Trump and Biden on June 27, 2024, the Trump campaign published a 90-second video compilation which in classic split-screen featured a completely silent and attentive Trump on the left, and a mumbling and incoherent Biden on the right. The democratic candidate seemed overwhelmed by the situation and the very words he was trying to form, just as the collage’s viewers might be overcome with embarassment: it is painful to watch. Similar ridiculing video compilations have emerged of Vice president Kamala Harris, for example a 4-minute collage of her repeating the exact phrase „…what can be, unburdened by what has been“ with great pathos in different situations. Such technologies of isolation and context collapse, enabled by the hypermediated nature of the contemporary political landscape, serve first and foremost to embarass the opposition and weaken their public standing. They also do something else, however: through repetition and the flauting of incoherence, they overwhelm. The decontextualized „evidence“ of the opposition’s incoherence, stiltedness, affective emptiness, and incompetence becomes too much to recontextualize, and content-wise there is too little to defend. In short: it is painful to watch, and one ends up giving up. There is no counterargument to be made, no knowledge to be rescued, besides maybe what the New York Times offered as insight the day after the presidential debate, throwing up their editorial hands: „The split screen damaged Biden“. You don’t say.
Axiom 5: Neofascism overwhelms
I’d like to lastly suggest overwhelming as an overarching term. Overwhelming is a tactic, not only in mediatized campaigning, but also in the way of affective mobilization, i.e. way the emotional collectives of the fashosphere come together. Simply having the numbers doesn’t mean much if you are not bringing them in the right way, something that rightwing strategists like Steve Bannon understood and then successfully transformed a mainly grumpy majority into activated culture warriors who demand their recognition, redress, and resovereignization en masse – whether against „pornography“, „left insanity“, or incoherent presidential candidates – it doesn’t really matter. Lauren Berlant, always prescient and always better attuned than most to the affective transparency of reactionary movements from Reagan to Trump, wrote the following in the introduction to their posthumously published book The Inconvenience of Other People:
„It is predictable that the structurally dominant feel vulnerable about their status and insist that if the historically subordinated deserve repair, so do the entitled. It is as though there is a democracy in vulnerability, and the details do not matter“ (2022: 5).
I quote this passage for two reasons: first, it delineates the emotional core of the current laymen’s version of neofascism, before the technocrats and proper fascists of e.g. the Heritage Foundation transmuted these affects and atmospheres into programs and policy proposals (e.g. save women and children, imprison trans* and friends): the rightwing shift is mainly about hegemonic majorities learning to understand and articulate themselves as „forgotten minorities“. And second: the passage hits the proper point about the overwhelming tactics of the culture war: to unmatter the details in the name of a great and even registering of grievances, or – for lack of a better word – an affective democracy without differences.
What Berlant proposes to attent to here is an epistemological seachange instigated, propagated, or maybe even just joined in by rightwing culture warriors, a seachange that to a certain extent was predictable: if American democracy is built around what Berlant famously called the „intimate public sphere“ and social currency is attained through the recognition of one’s injury by the state, then it becomes likely that a majority would like to attain those avenues of recognition as well. When everyone should be equal and equality consists in the recognition and redress of one’s pain, then everyone should be able to attain recognition and redress evenly. After all, everybody hurts, right? The gestures of representational/visibility politics, of minority critique, of deconstructing universalism’s for their exclusionary and alienating forces – these gestures become then the tools of a majority’s reimbursement for its presumably lost status advantages, or rather: the preservation of hegemony.
My work on radicalized online cultures has often followed the ways and strategies through which the far right offers microdramas of disenfranchisement and colloquial scenes of injury and redress to social majorities, from „feminist dominated societies“ that marginalize men, to „The Great Replacement“ allegedly marginalizing white people in majority-white societies. While these tactics already provide an endless and also overwhelming stream of rather ordinary scenes of „white male vulnerability“, Berlant’s point is also epistemological: what the right currently spreads at mass scale is a rudimentary form of „identity politics“ in which the details – their contingence on long continuities of oppressive regimes – are made to become unknowable, because they do not matter.
This is of wider reaching consequence for the humanities than the daily irritations of the culture war, such as bumper stickers or seminar questions claiming „all lives matter“, colleagues and students aggrieved by too „minority-focused“ syllabi, administrators touting (or denouncing) stale phrases of diversity and uplift. The line of intellectual and social critique shorthanded as „identity politics“, integral part of the critical humanities at least since the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977, has become coopted or, more aptly phrased, contaminated by the rightwing culture war. Such contamination is visible in the broad success of newer (populist) intellectual histories that attribute the current failures of any leftist and/or universalist political alternatives (vis-a-vis the populist turn) broadly to the fragmentation of the same through divisive „identity politics“. „Identity“ and with it a politics of experience, standpoint epistemologies, situated knowledges, and social movements working against exclusionary forces – all become subsumed under what Yasha Mounk calls „the identity trap“. Fom this, two things happen and have happened: majorities can credibly claim their own vulnerabilities under the „idpol-label“, and both minoritarian and majoritarian identities appear to engage the failed promises of the state and democracy in the same epistemological arena – an unpleasant situation if your field or discipline is centered around the now unmattered details.
Such de-differentiation and flattening is already exhibited in the above mentioned examples, but also leads to very mundane and frustrating exchanges in the university. I have experienced this increasingly in academic talks: when presenting research on racist and exclusionary ideologies of the right and their media strategies, smart men have more than once risen to comment along the lines of „these right identity politics are simply the result of left identity politics“. The increasingly popular argument, popularized by a mass market of anti-wokeness explainers, claims cleverness and an ability to navigate large political and historical projects in one fell swoop. The intellectual stance it offers is alluring: „Hasn’t the right simply coopted the identity and cultural politics of the left (insert Gramsci reference) which in some way already undid the very universalism that we are now struggling to reinstitute in order to criticize the right’s attack on democracy? Aren’t these two mutually enforcing extremes, isn’t the left to blame for the right’s advances yadda yadda?“ Such comments (they are never questions) are somewhat hard to counter as two tasks overwhelm the possibilities of the moment: first, the socalled „identity politics“ of feminism or the Combahee River Collective were never the same as the identity politics of the KKK, white supremacists, or the Republican Party, and in such moments one can only gesture to the amount of (obviously unread) historical scholarship on material and epistemic violences to prove it – aka the details. And secondly, to gingerly use „identity politics“ to denominate large historical trajectories and complex political projects (white supremacy is a project, too) – the very possibility of such shorthand formulas indicates how the academy and its smart men already have bought into and normalized the far right’s greater project: knowledge destruction and obliteration of the details, in this case by formulating an equivalence (black feminist idpol = rightwing idpol) that overwhelms whole disciplines with the forgetting of their objects, their learnings, their epistemologies. Such comments, if anything, signal and perform a willingness to forget.
Giving this second answer is perhaps more impossible than the first, as it puts speaker and commenter into adversarial positions, or rather, into positions of analyst and object: „thank you, your comment beautifully illustrated my argument about the rather pragmatic applicability and widespread success of rightwing narratives“, I might respond. Such an answer would admit to an audience member becoming an object of inquiry, an instantiation of the culture war – a situation I generally try to avoid. But the colleague who made that comment – whether Black feminism in the 1970s and the far right in 2024 are not really the same misuse of identity and anti-universalism – he thinks the details do no matter, there is a democracy of vulnerability where each makes his/her own claim to oppression, and the proper academic stance would be to look for larger principles, set no identity over another, treat white supremacists and feminists the same – in short, to forget and forego. Both answers in this situation seem somehow impossible: to either remind the commenter of „the details“ (aka whole archive, cultures, disciplines, movements, violences), or to talk about how the rightwing culture war set the argument up for him, how the strategic flattening and emptying out of everything speaks through him. Both answers seem to install a barrier, a closure, where an opening, an exchange should take place. Overwhelmed by such academic readiness to forget, I have recently begun to consider a third option: to talk about forgetting, about the destruction of things that were known, about in other words one possible consequence of my arguments so far: dementia.
Dementia
This article is certainly colored by the concurrent US-American election campaign and the connected hectic events, namely the first presidential debate and the assassination attempt on Trump, July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. The contrast between „parties“ couldn’t be any starker, because that is the effect of America’s split-screen approach to the political: here Biden, suffering through memory loss and old age on a world stage, claiming to be the last hope of democracy; there the miraculously bulletproof Trump, defiant fist in the air amid a gaggle of security, mouthing „Fight, Fight, Fight“ to his party, his photographers, his people, his world. One candidate barely remembers the democracy he promised to save from the gravest danger of all time, the other seems to barely register the attempt on his life amid the MAGA-show, proving that he is nobody’s candidate but his own. While one finds it hard to „look alive“, the other breathes life into every falsehood and the most stale political rhetoric, again: „Fight Fight Fight“ the Republican National Convention welcomed Trump, Van der Veen’s video collages of 2021 notwithstanding. The discrepancy was too great to evade being metaphorical, too stark to not illustrate what Lauren Berlant wrote during Covid: „Imaginations stopped trying or got massively creative“ (x). It is hard to suss out however who stands for what: while one furiously works without regard for knowledge or facts at all, the other seems have stopped trying to imagine otherwise.
And this is what happens in overwhelming: thinking is overcoded by false alternatives, flashy gestures, empty affect, and audiences all over the world become tethered to a flat scenario, enacting and even needing a certain dementia of what is going on besides that just to stay afloat. Because after all, two 80-year old white men sparring about abortion rights for 90 seconds is a destruction of knowledge all in itself. Both fussing about their golf game and aceing of cognitive tests on national TV is a destruction of knowledge of what the political means – it consists of more than two ruined white masculinities trying to convince one another of their capacity, their „aliveness“. In recent weeks, this competition was followed by a largely unpleasant race not for who of these gramps was more alive, but who worked closer to death: Biden admitting to the ailments of old age was mirrored by Trump’s ear being touched by a bullet – a literal death race ensued over which candidate better symbolized a democracy close to dying. This is what we were left with until yesterday: two metaphors incessantly presented on all media, embodied by two old white men, similes for the state of the union, for this knowledge landscape, this media democracy. Today, the video collages of Kamala Harris found new reasons to go viral again, it might mean nothing or something, we do not know.
Instead, I might end this with a joke, which I found kind of telling. Its a tweet by Diabetic of Enlightenment@dee_of_e, a sometimes witty and sarcastic commentator of academic habits, parodying academic twitter’s interpretational struggle after the so awful first presidential debate:
„it sucks to see such blatantly sanist takes coming out of the woodwork when the president’s rhizomatic (one may even say “queer”) performance, unassimilable to Western colonial logics of “sense” and “rationality,” may in fact open us up to new ways of understanding the Human“ (3:57 PM, Jun 28, 2024)
The joke hits home on both counts: Biden’s was the „queerest“ performance any American presidential candidate has ever given on television, and this is how humanities scholars might talk and reason on any given topic. The joke, like all not-fascist jokes at the moment, is a tainted one: we are somehow fucked, our knowledges and vocabularies are trivial and unhelpful, not up to the moment’s task. They have become (or always were) indefensible, ridiculous, random. Keep your deleuzian postcolonial dis/ability queer studies lingo out of here because fascism will come to take your job and deport your friends. The joke’s performance – just like Biden’s performance – is also metaphor for a public sphere which already has been damaged by the rightwing culture war, damaged into a necessary forgetting of the details, the contexts, the tasks. Amid the onslaught of cultural warfare, our archives, vocabularies, and methods are given to ridicule and dementia, and people remember only the broad strokes and buzzwords when offering some sort of navigation of thinking otherwise (like a joke). Amid budget cuts, neoliberal research agendas, and rightwing assaults on the ways of knowing and speaking of the humanities, the underlying projects and their details are so much harder to flesh out. One is barely articulating what is going on, and so one starts to mumble. So in a way it makes sense to think about this mumbling, absent-minded presidential candidate, and about how Biden embodied a collective dementia that the culture war necessitates and enforces. His performance should not be forgotten, maybe also as to open us up for new ways of understanding the Human-ities.
Potsdam, July 22, 2024