[D66] Thoughts on American fascism

[A.O.]

http://www.boundary2.org/2017/04/alexander-r-galloway-an-interview-with-mckenzie-wark/

Alexander R. Galloway — An Interview with McKenzie Wark
By boundary2 -
April 7, 2017


...

AG: We’ve been having this dialog over email for a few days now, but 
today is November 9, 2016 and Trump is president-elect. As a final 
question, what are your thoughts on American fascism? It’s an old theme, 
in fact…

MW: It’s curious that the political categories of liberal, conservative 
and so forth are treated as trans-historical, but you are not supposed 
to use the category of fascism outside of a specific historical context. 
There are self-described neoconservatives, and even supposed Marxists 
have taken the neoliberals at their word and used their choice of name 
without much reflection, calling this “neoliberal capitalism.” But 
somehow there’s resistance to talking about fascism outside of its 
historical context. I have often been waved off as hysterical for 
wanting to talk about it as a living, present term.

Even if it is admitted to the contemporary lexicon, it is treated as 
something exceptional. Maybe we should treat it not as the exception but 
the norm. What needs explaining is not fascism but its absence. What 
kinds of popular front movements can restrain it, and for how long? Or, 
we could see it as a “first world” variant of the normal colonial state, 
and even of many variants of what Achille Mbembe calls the “postcolony.”

Further along those lines: maybe fascism is what happens when the ruling 
class really wins. When it no longer faces an opponent in whose struggle 
against it the ruling class can at least recognize itself. And when it 
no longer knows itself, it can only discover itself again through 
excess, opulence, vanity, self-regard. Our ruling class of today is like 
that. They not only want us to recognize their business acumen, but also 
that they are thought leaders and taste makers and moral exemplars. They 
want to occupy the whole field of mythic-avatars. But our recognition 
doesn’t quite do the trick because we’re just nobodies. So they heap 
more glory on themselves and more violence on someone else.

-> Maybe any regime of power is necessarily one of misrecognition. All 
it can perceive is shaped by its own struggles. But the fascist regime, 
the default setting of modernity and its successors, is doubly so. It 
can recognize neither its real enemies or itself. There is some small 
irony in an election being won because Florida voted Republican, when 
the Republican plan to accelerate the shit out of climate disruption may 
start putting Florida under water in our life time. I’m reminded of a 
line from Cool Hand Luke: “What we have here is a failure to 
communicate.” Fascism keeps punching away at the other but never finds 
even its own interests in the process. Hence its obsession with poll 
numbers and data surveillance. The ruling class keep heaping up data 
about us, but because it has expunged our negativity from its perceptual 
field, it cannot find itself mediated by any resistance.