Reactionary Forms Research Articles

After truth, after shame … after information politics? Rethinking the epistemologies of human rights in the digital-authoritarian conjuncture

ABSTRACT Since the contemporary, mainstream human rights movement rose to prominence in the late-1970s, both knowing about and doing human rights has been marked by a very particular mode of activism, information politics, which mobilises ‘brute' facts with the aim of shaming governments into reform. However, this article suggests that the global rise of the far-right has intertwined with reactionary forms of digital culture, engendering both the retreat of shame as an operative concept in global affairs and nourished a growing ‘post-truth' suspicion of facts. The article theorises this problem as a conjunctural shift that represents both a political and epistemological crisis for human rights. Following the lead of debates within Science and Technology Studies (STS) and media studies, I contend that the present conjuncture requires us to consider what comes after information politics by re-imagining its epistemological basis. The article brings together Donna Haraway's theoretical work on ‘Situated Knowledges', with Maurizio Lazzarato’s political epistemology to develop a more perspectival, combative approach to human rights knowledge-making. I argue this epistemic framework is able not only to navigate key problems posed by the digital-authoritarian present but also to address many issues with information politics identified by earlier critics.

Media Culture, Politics, and Society

From the 1960s to the present, media culture in the United States has been a battleground between competing social groups with some artifacts advancing liberal or radical posi­tions and others conservative ones. Likewise, some artifacts of media culture promote progressive positions and representations of gender, sexual preference, race or ethnicity, while others articulate reactionary forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, and rightwing values and beliefs, thus many films articulate a contradictory matrix of liberal, radical, and reactionary representations, discourses, and narratives. In this article, I argue that media culture can provide important insights into the psychological, socio-political, and ideological make-up of U.S. society at a given point in history. Reading culture diagnos­tically allows one to gain insights into social problems and conflicts, and to appraise the dominant ideologies and emergent oppositional forces. This approach thus involves a dialectic of text and context, using texts to read social realities and context to help situate and interpret key artifacts of media culture in the 21 st century.

Playing in the Team of Five Million: Conformity and Nonconformity to the New Zealand Covid-19 Pandemic Response

The New Zealand Covid-19 strategy received praise at home and abroad. However, despite the epidemiological success of the strategy, it amplified social inequalities and exclusion, highlighted existing frustration and mistrust of the government, and in turn produced reactionary forms of conformity and noncompliance as well as prosocial forms of resistance. This article focuses on three types of social responses to the pandemic in New Zealand between 2020 and 2022. It looks at hostile conformity exemplified in antipathy against Pacific Island communities dealing with Covid-19 outbreaks, reactionary noncompliance seen in the anti-mandate protests and parliament occupation, and prosocial resistance to the state’s neglect of Indigenous public health seen in the Māori organized effort to protect communities left out of the pandemic preparedness plans. The article presents a critical understanding of the limits of New Zealand’s Covid-19 strategy and the resulting social responses of conformity and nonconformity.

The Tunneling Metaphor in Networked Technologies

This article explores the metaphor of tunneling to illustrate how the emancipatory language of border resistance can become co-opted in transnational technocultures. Drawing on specific instances of tunneling in science fiction film, video games, and digital platforms, I reveal how this metaphor has been mobilized to cast vanguard forms of online connectivity and networked transgression in terms that are distinctly white, masculine, upper class, and adhering to liberal tenets of individual mastery. This analysis suggests why we must question what kinds of politics and which subjects are privileged or undervalued in the metaphorical discussions of online borders and so-called border resistance. Only then can we respond to dominant and reactionary forms of transmission and connectivity across the internet.

Supporting men or male privilege? Women's progressive and reactionary collective action for men

AbstractCollective action for other groups, such as men's action for women, has usually been analysed as social protest advancing equality of disadvantaged groups. In the current research we extend collective action literature by applying SIMCA predictors—identity, injustice, efficacy—to investigate action in support of an advantaged group (women's action for men) and by distinguishing its progressive and reactionary forms. Across three online samples of women (Study 1: N = 1825 US; Study 2: N = 679 UK; Study 3: N = 429 US), we show that support for reactionary action reinforcing male privilege is associated with outgroup identification and outgroup injustice. Conversely, progressive action supporting men in adopting egalitarian gender roles is associated with outgroup identification, outgroup‐focused efficacy, and ingroup injustice. Importantly, some of these associations depend on the content of outgroup‐focused variables. We discuss the implications of our findings for collective action and gender research.

The modern Epimetheus: Carl Schmitt's katechontism as reactionary chronopolitics

This paper deals with the reactionary form of chronopolitics that characterizes the work of the German jurist, political theorist, and radical conservative intellectual Carl Schmitt (1888–1985). Called both the latest classic of political thought and the Crown Jurist of the Third Reich, Schmitt remains a controversial figure, not least because of his practical support of the Nazi regime and his authoritarianism. Another controversial aspect of Schmitt's work are his unabashed and outspoken references to theology as a resource for legal and political thought. Many commentators regard Schmitt's support for the Nazi regime, his general authoritarianism, and his recourse to theology as expressions of an apocalyptic worldview that is taken to form the basis for his alleged decisionism. This in turn matches an analysis of twentieth-century totalitarianisms as constituting innerworldly forms of radical millenarian faith. However, the structure of Schmitt's politico-theological reason should be understood in a very different way. Rather than affirming the apocalyptic and millenarian energies of totalitarian movements, Schmitt attempted to formulate a theory aimed at containing them and averting their revolutionary fervor in defense of the state. At the heart of this endeavor was the Biblical figure of the katechon, “the restrainer” of the Antichrist and lawlessness as described in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians. Focusing particularly on a short but dense essay published in 1950, the paper lays bare the basis for Schmitt's avertive apocalypticism, or katechontism, which can be regarded as the politico-theological emblem of what Schmitt himself in contrast to decisionism described as concrete order thinking. The form of reactionary chronopolitics Schmitt expresses there is analyzed with the help of theories of modern historical temporality and contextualized through his own references to contemporary conservative thinkers like Hans Freyer, Karl Löwith, and Konrad Weiss.

Debunking migration and development. A dispossession and displacement studies approach

Building on but extending the critiques of concepts of development and migration and development, this article offers a political economic analysis of dispossessive «growth and development». It speaks to contemporary crises including displacement actuated by the interlinked processes of physical mobility and downward social mobility. The article challenges the assumption that migration dynamics can be understood as separate from a global history of human mobility and settlement and the growth of imperial structures and networks of power, past and present. This analysis of multiscalar processes of accumulation by dispossession allows us to go beyond statistical or ethnographic descriptions of impoverishment and inequality and make sense of multiple contemporary forms of political rage including both racist reactionary forms of despair and anti-racist decolonizing social movements for equitable justice.

The Joy of Following: Network Fascism and the Micropolitics of the Social Media Image

This article deploys Spinoza’s ethic of joy alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s exposition of micropolitics to expose how fascist desires and affects bloom and circulate through digital communications ecosystems that generally promote a diffusion or decentralisation of power. Beyond the steady barrage of alt-right content conscientiously documented by liberal journalists and progressive watchdogs, a more persistent and widespread fascist impulse permeates the very forms of some of our most banal digitally mediated acts and encounters. Rather than a sole looming authoritarian figurehead, the network itself – particularly with the new image paradigms propelled by apps such as Instagram and TikTok – has become the rallying point for the circulation of fascistic affects, burnished through the art and ethos of following: of rules, routines, protocols, accounts. I contend that a joyful passion accompanies much of this everyday experience of keeping up with one’s feeds, engaging the platforms, participating in the spectacles. This is what Sontag, interrogating the appeal of the Third Reich, calls the ‘joy of followers’, a joy in fascist belonging, which is to suggest that fascist movements thrive not only on the circulation of negative affects like hatred and fear, but also on the profusion of pleasure and affiliation. Deleuze’s Spinoza, resolutely anti-fascist, helps us parse this situation as it plays out in the social media sphere. Spinoza offers a bipartite conceptualisation of joy that allows us to diagnose the pleasures particular to fascist belonging and network belonging alike as passive, partial and indirect. Ultimately, what we today share with historical fascisms is a ubiquitous aesthetic that merges art with life and bodies with information, and a corresponding ethos that cultivates conformism, barbarises critical thought and redirects joyful impulses into reactionary social forms. As fascistic power relations spread anew through digital cultures’ newly evolving modes of visuality, hapticity, vibration and expression, one can observe something of what Deleuze calls ‘sad joy’, a sort of joy rooted in conquest and domination. The aim of this article is to root out such sad joys, to appreciate their appeal, and ultimately to reject them in all their various forms.

White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism

Using #MeToo as a starting point, this paper argues that the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears. This in turn depends on the dehumanisation of people of colour, who were constructed in colonial ‘race science’ as incapable of complex feeling (Schuller, 2018). Colonialism also created a circuit between bourgeois white women’s tears and white men’s rage, often activated by allegations of rape, which operated in the service of economic extraction and exploitation. This circuit endures, abetting the criminal punishment system and the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ by the various border regimes of the right. It has especially been utilised by reactionary forms of feminism, which set themselves against sex workers and trans people. Such feminisms exemplify what I call ‘political whiteness’, which centres assertions of victimhood: through these, womanhood (and personhood) is claimed to the exclusion of the enemy. Through legitimating criminal punishment and border policing and dehumanising marginalised Others, claims to victimhood in mainstream feminism often end up strengthening the intersecting violence of racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy.

Institutional and political development of the Russian state in the context of the theory of A. Greif

The purpose of this article is to test the concept of A. Greif for the operation of the principle of establishing a balance of interests in Russian society in the face of increasing external threats. The article reveals the significance of the Veche as an institution that reflected the desire to establish a balance of interests of elites in Russian society. The author traces changes in the significance of the traditions of self-government in Russian lands with the increase of military threats. The content of the balance of interests in medieval Russian society is determined. The problematic method of historical analysis is applied to the study of the political processes of medieval Russia, and the problem of narodopravstvo is brought to the fore. The conceptual idea of A. Greif is confirmed in Russian medieval history. Deviations from the rule deduced by A. Greif under certain external conditions lead society to crises. The authors point out that the easing of military pressure from the nomads on North-Eastern Russia (1408) allowed the Moscow princes to concentrate their efforts on fighting potential internal opposition and other branches of the Rurik dynasty that occupied the great tables, as well as against the Novgorod Republic, which embodied the ancient Slavic state order. In the course of this struggle, the balance of interests between strata of Russian society was disrupted, which eventually resulted in the establishment of a brutal serfdom and a reactionary form of centralized government - autocracy. In South-Western and North-Western Russia, such conditions did not develop, so the old Slavic order was preserved there for a long time, but, due to military and political reasons, the States in these regions did not manage to maintain independence.

Hijacking MeToo: transnational dynamics and networked frame contestation on the far right in the case of the ‘120 decibels' campaign

ABSTRACT This paper presents a case study of a digitally enabled mode of transnationally networked framing by far-right actors. We analyze the reach and strategic aims of the ‘120 decibels’ campaign, launched by members of the Austrian Identitarian Movement via social media in early 2018 in an attempt to latch onto the prominence of the MeToo hashtag (#MeToo). We argue that this constituted a form of discursive ‘hijacking,’ marked by a narrowing of the scope of the problem definition and a reformulation of the political demands. We draw on user-generated Twitter data and focus on geolocation markers and language clusters in order to investigate the transnational scope of these coordinated efforts. We employ content analysis to investigate the campaign’s strategic use of #MeToo. Our findings show distinct clusters of German-Austrian – and UK-US-based user groups, from which we infer directionalities in the transnational spread of the campaign. We demonstrate how the initial dissemination of the hashtag was driven by influential individual nodes within their respective networks and tied to #MeToo. The results point toward transnational networking activities among the far right and illustrate emerging dynamics between progressive and reactionary forms of digitally enabled networked framing.

Divergent Refugee and Tribal Cosmopolitanism in Dharamshala

This article analyses the divergent, and occasionally overlapping, trajectories of Tibetan refugee and Gaddi tribal cosmopolitanism in Dharamshala, North India. In a place self-consciously branded as cosmopolitan, where Tibetan ethnocommodification is the primary symbolic currency, practices of inclusivity can broadly give way to Gaddi exclusions. Cosmopolitanism as an ordering ideology and set of intercultural competencies, often predicated on the dyadic relationship between Tibetan refugees and international tourists, propels Gaddi resentments and coarsens intergroup sociality. This does not mean, however, that Gaddis are forever consigned to tribal backwardness and reactionary forms of communal aspiration. Gaddis have forged an alternate, grounded cosmopolitanism based on cultural skills fostered through pastoral transhumance, seasonal labour migration corresponding with foreign tourists and ongoingethnopolitical redefinition of what it means to be tribal itself. By seeing past utopian propaganda and dystopian exaggerations about Dharamshala, a richer tapestry of group relations emerges which reveals divergent cosmopolitanisms in the promotion of shared struggles for state recognition and cultural preservation.

Feminist solidarities: Theoretical and practical complexities

This article considers the resurgence of interest in feminist solidarity in theory and practice in the contemporary moment in the United States and UK. What does feminist solidarity mean, what forms is it taking, and how might it proliferate? We begin by mapping the changing inflections of solidarity in recent feminist cultural theory, highlighting the range of theoretical components, investments and emphases. Next, we consider the various forms of solidarity presented and created by the Women’s March and the Women’s Strike, analysing the differences in terms of the extent of their reach and their political economy. We argue that both phenomena can be understood as reactions to, firstly, several decades of neoliberal impoverishment, which have now exposed neoliberal iterations of feminism as fundamentally inadequate; and secondly, and relatedly, the arrival of misogynistic and reactionary forms of nationalism. Finally, we show that different approaches to feminist solidarity, as well as an expansion of alliances, are necessary in order to extend contemporary feminism as an effective and large‐scale project. We therefore argue that feminist solidarity needs to retain its genealogical roots in left politics whilst being as plural as possible in practice.

Authoritarian Liberalism in Contemporary Europe: methodological approaches and conceptual models

Abstract The author conducts a comparative analysis of authoritarian liberalism’s concepts in contemporary political theory. The paper deals with the main directions of interpretation of authoritarian liberalism in the framework of methodological approaches and conceptual models of neoliberalism, ordoliberalism, political liberalism, J.-W. Mueller’s ‘restrained democracy’, J. Habermas’ ‘legitimation crisis’, C. Crouch’s ‘post-democracy’, C. Macpherson’s ‘participatory democracy’, M. Wilkinson’s ‘dedemocratisation and delegalisation’, W. Streeck’s ‘democratic capitalism crisis’ and G. Majone’s ‘crypto-federalism’. The basic analytical concept is the idea of authoritarian economic liberalism, first proposed by H. Heller and K. Polanyi. This paper will sub-stantiate that in crisis and transformational periods the actualisation of authoritarian liberalism corresponds to the fundamental tension between market capitalism and representative democracy. The author conceptualises authoritarian liberalism as the practice of dedemocratisation and restrained democracy, which results in the regionalisation of radical protest against the supranational regime of political integration in Europe. Latent political authoritarianism strengthens economic liberalism, which, in turn, reinforces the further EU’s ‘liberal authoritarian transformation’. Authoritarian liberalism restricts traditional forms of representative democracy, contributing to the reanimation of populism and political radicalism. The authoritarian restriction of representative democracy can lead not only to the strengthening of market capitalism, but also to the revival of reactionary forms of ‘new nationalism’ and illiberalism. Today, the EU’s regime is transformed from a nominally rule-based structure supported by market discipline into a ‘discretionary order’ reinforced by bureaucratic power. The EU’s transnational solidarity can become a democratically legitimate tool for a de-escalation of tensions between market capitalism and representative democracy.

The Sublation of Digital Education

In this paper, I argue that teachers’ efforts to defend education against reactionary forms of digitalization and from complete automation should be supported by progressives. At the same time, efforts aimed at creatively transforming or sublating digitalization in non-deterministic ways to forge new pedagogical projects should also be enthusiastically engaged. Drawing on Marx’s conception of sublation is crucial since it represents the process through which an aspect of something is overcome while other aspects of it are preserved in an altered form. Because sublation occurs both within entities as they develop and out of entities as they are negated, I contend that sublating digitized education both within capitalism and beyond capitalism should be pursued simultaneously.

Ressentiment and Grievance

Using material from clinical practice and social research, this paper examines the many connections between the analysis of ressentiment provided by Nietzsche and Scheler and recent psychoanalytic analyses of grievance. Psychoanalysis has been particularly insightful regarding the process of ‘nursing’ grievance, something which illuminates both the righteousness of the anger involved and the yearning for an idealized past. It is argued that in their different ways both analyses explore blocked responses to perceived injustice and, whilst the emphasis in both cases is essentially upon how existential reality itself can be experienced as an injustice, Scheler's analysis also provides us with a way of understanding how ressentiment can be a response to real social injustices. Indeed social ressentiment is now widely regarded as the affective foundation of reactionary forms of populism.

Posthumanism and Miss Representation: Scarlett Johansson Is Getting Under the Skin of Men

ABSTRACT Four recent Scarlett Johansson films—Under the Skin, Her, Lucy, and Ghost in the Machine—work in tandem as a subversive, reactionary form of phallocentrism both disguised as and in repudiation of a posthuman ontology that heralds the obsolescence of man. These films, far from being feminist manifestos, are, upon closer examination, a male reaction to the perceived existential threat posed by posthumanism to masculinity, itself. Central to what Rosi Braidotti refers to as the “posthuman predicament” is Scarlett Johansson, whom I will address, not as a singular entity, but as a multiplicity that manifests simultaneously as a flesh-and-blood human being, as a Hollywood actor and icon, as a twenty-first-century female prototype, and, ultimately, as a rhetorical cultural construct. With her come-hither looks, husky voice, voluptuous figure, versatility, and social and political activism, Scarlett Johansson the actor presents as the ultimate liberated woman; Scarlett Johansson the cultural construct, however, performs a much different function. Informed by Johansson’s public persona and embedded in Johansson’s four characters and the fictional worlds they inhabit is an unsubtle threat to notions of male supremacy both implicit and historically manifest under the umbrella of humanism. Whether immolated, unplugged and decommissioned, vanished into the ether as a techno-consciousness, or digitally dissolved, Scarlett Johansson’s characters in these films personify man’s anxiety about the extinction of his humanist self.

Posthumanism and Miss Representation: Scarlett Johansson Is Getting Under the Skin of Men

ABSTRACT Four recent Scarlett Johansson films—Under the Skin, Her, Lucy, and Ghost in the Machine—work in tandem as a subversive, reactionary form of phallocentrism both disguised as and in repudiation of a posthuman ontology that heralds the obsolescence of man. These films, far from being feminist manifestos, are, upon closer examination, a male reaction to the perceived existential threat posed by posthumanism to masculinity, itself. Central to what Rosi Braidotti refers to as the “posthuman predicament” is Scarlett Johansson, whom I will address, not as a singular entity, but as a multiplicity that manifests simultaneously as a flesh-and-blood human being, as a Hollywood actor and icon, as a twenty-first-century female prototype, and, ultimately, as a rhetorical cultural construct. With her come-hither looks, husky voice, voluptuous figure, versatility, and social and political activism, Scarlett Johansson the actor presents as the ultimate liberated woman; Scarlett Johansson the cultural construct, however, performs a much different function. Informed by Johansson’s public persona and embedded in Johansson’s four characters and the fictional worlds they inhabit is an unsubtle threat to notions of male supremacy both implicit and historically manifest under the umbrella of humanism. Whether immolated, unplugged and decommissioned, vanished into the ether as a techno-consciousness, or digitally dissolved, Scarlett Johansson’s characters in these films personify man’s anxiety about the extinction of his humanist self.

The two forms of capitalism: developmentalism and economic liberalism

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the state and the market are the main institutions regulating capitalism, and, correspondingly, that the form of the economic and political coordination of capitalism will be either developmental or liberal. It defines the developmental state, relates it to the formation of a developmental class coalition, and notes that capitalism was born developmental in its mercantilist phase, turned liberal in the nineteenth century, and, after 1929, became once again developmental, but, now, democratic and progressive. All industrial and capitalist revolutions took place within the framework of developmentalism, whereby the state coordinates the non-competitive sector of the economy and the five macroeconomic prices (which the market is unable to make “right”), while the market coordinates the competitive sector. In the 1970s, a crisis opened the way for a short-lived and reactionary form of capitalism, neoliberalism or rentier-financier capitalism. Since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the neoliberal hegemony has come to an end, and we are now experiencing a period of transition.

An Experimental Approach to Buddhism and Religion

Adaptations, modifications, and realignments of religious doctrine and practice can be found in any period of social history. It can be official and highly orchestrated (as in Vatican II) but more often it takes a subjective and reactionary form (as in the Hindutva movement). This paper promotes the idea of “experimental religion” as both an analytical concept and an observable set of behaviors that help identify how contemporary trends (such as individualism, secularity, information technologies, and market economies) reconfigure attitudes and motivations regarding the relevance and applicability of religious resources. Drawing from Buddhist-related case material in Japan and other liberal democracies, we see lay practitioners, priests, and occasionally institutions as well using innovation and activism to reposition and reboot existing paradigms. The intention is to fashion a religious practice responsive to individual concerns as well as to pressing environmental, political, and economic issues.