Anti-Fascism, Anti-Art, Doubt and Despair

Abstract

Working through the artistic and theoretical contributions of anti-fascists Franco Fortini, Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, the article explores the ways in which a world lorded over by Donald Trump and his alt-right associates mobilises a Benjaminian ‘aestheticisation of politics’ alongside a populist manipulation of popular culture. Strategies developed by Brecht in 1934 to ‘restore truth’ to Nazi speeches by Goerging and Hess are used to correct the outrages of those who are shifting the atmosphere towards demagoguery, as a speech for Trump is ‘corrected’ to reveal its elitist contempt. Fortini’s poetics of doubt are also drawn on to remind the anti-fascist intellectuals of the contradictions of their positions and the dangers of dogmatism as it has been experienced historically in the communist movement. If the question is posed, through this, of the capacities of the avant-garde, it should also be noted that its attitudinal elements of pranksterism, confusionism, irony and mockery are well embedded in the fascist camp, even if the avant garde’s chief theorist, Theodore WAdorno, has become the poster boy for ‘Cultural Marxism’ and ‘snowflakes’, not least through his apparent writing of all the Beatles music. The starting question of the article is how these fragments can be accumulated and, under pressure, re-constellated to make practical sense for contemporary anti-fascist thought.