Hot air

In a forthcoming review of an exhibition addressing the rise of “global fascisms,” Jörg Heiser notes that fascism is distinguished from other forms of violent authoritarianism by its fundamental incoherence. It is a “weak” ideology—in comparison to, for example, Nazism or Stalinism—by virtue of the fact that it cannot easily be reduced to a set of foundational principles, however perverse or corrupted, but is instead an essentially rhetorical exercise that depends for its effect upon the speaker’s exploitation of the audience’s emotional triggers. Umberto Eco, who lived under fascism’s original iteration, described it as “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.”1

 This makes it difficult, as Heiser writes, to pin down. And even harder, as the established political and journalistic classes are everywhere discovering, to bring it to account. That fascism is essentially untethered also makes it possible for its adherents to separate themselves from its real-world effects. No amount of cell phone footage of paramilitary forces snatching helpless people off the streets or starving children at checkpoints can unsettle an ideology that subordinates the material world of living bodies to the immaterial realm of rhetoric, in which these events can be dismissed as unreal (meaning either that they didn’t happen, or that their victims don’t, in the most literal sense, matter) or attributed to some invented bogeyman or fictional conspiracy. 

To oppose fascism might then require us, in Heiser’s words, to “move beyond” our own purely rhetorical strategies by, for example, developing a way of speaking that connects impersonal linguistic mechanisms to the physicality of the mortal subject. Writing after the death of Roland Barthes, Italo Calvino (who was himself an active member of the Italian Resistance during World War II) wrote of the great writer’s having “cultivated a science of uniqueness that combined a scientist’s ability to produce general rules with a poet’s attention for what is singular and unique.”2 The production of the rule—such as, let’s say, don’t disappear people—depends on the quality of attention to the specific (the people). Which is another way of saying that no one who inhabits the real world, and who therefore recognizes the inviolable humanity of other people, would ever be able to countenance the abstract convolutions of fascism. “Freedom of speech,” as Eco puts it, “means freedom from rhetoric.”

And it is non-rhetorical forms of speech that publications such as this aim to foster, however small their contribution to the cause. That is predicated on the critic being open to the work of art (and the world) and allowing themselves to be moved and changed by what it reveals to them, rather than judging it by its commensurability with the abstract point that they have decided in advance to make. And it might be this that separates not only good criticism from bad criticism, but democratic and pluralistic forms of culture from totalitarianism in general, and the blithe nihilism of fascism in particular.