How to Aesthetically Build a People: On a Certain Dark Modernism and its Relevance Today

Abstract

We are used to talking about fascism and its contemporary variants as “enemies of culture”, as a political force animated by disregard for the arts. However, the extreme importance given by fascism to the field of culture is evident; its cultural battles are central constituent processes of its struggles. I believe that we will miss fundamental dimensions of the fascist phenomenon if we don't understand it as a battle for the formation of social sensitivity, for the cultivation of affections and for the production of the sensitive horizon of politics. The sensible order is the foundation of the social imagination, of its limits and forms, and the control of imagination and sensibility is the foundation of any and all power.  Because it is aware of this, fascism is an aesthetic project, a reconstruction of sensibility that defines the limits of the visible and the perceptible within the social order. What I propose here is to understand the dynamics of the actualization of such a fascist cultural revolution, taking into account the current stage of the material processes of cultural reproduction in capitalist societies.