fragilekeys

Patterns of fascist demagoguery and propaganda:

1) The fascist wins support by playing on unconscious mechanisms, rather than by presenting ideas and arguments. Compared to the emotionalized, psychological stimuli applied to the crowd, the ‘content’ of the propaganda, the ‘platform’, plays a minor role.

2) The fascist agitator focuses on personal lives and personalities, not on objective social structures and tendencies. They frame themselves as making a big sacrifice to save the people and as outsiders to the system. They announce a band of ‘good guys’ who are just about to save the day.

3) The fascist message is REVIVAL– of religion, nation, patriotism, race, etc. – but in terms that only glorify the activity of reviving. Means are substituted for ends. The ‘goal’ is left unstated or deliberately unclear, thus it is ready for an uncontrolled flood of repressed content, resentment, racism, protection, etc.

4) Propaganda becomes content: the audience suddenly feels privy to information about the hidden workings of society: they have the ‘scoop’, they know the dirt, etc. Knowledge about scandals (fictitious or true) proliferates, producing the pleasure of ‘participating’ in the goings-on of society.

5) Fascist leaders avoid positions they will have to stick to because a) their followers are only useful for the consolidation of power, after which it is easier to cheat and abandon them, b) repressive measures will go much further than the announcement; no definite limit is set because there is no intention to stay within any limit.

6) The masses are not seen as self-determining, but as objects of administration; the expectation is for self-effacing, obedient, non-resistant, conformist behavior.

7) The fascist attacks bogeymen, not real opponents. The chosen foe is an imaginary one that need not be grounded in reality whatsoever, or in exaggerations that reality does not bear out.

8) The fascist ‘discourse’ operates not on logical premises and inferential reasoning but on ‘similarities’ and ‘associations’. This not only makes it resistant to rational examination: it also makes it much easier for the listener to follow. Exact thinking is not required, one simply flows passively with the stream of words.

9) “The fascist agitator is usually a masterly salesman of his own psychological defects.” The structural similarity in mentality between follower and leader turns neurosis or lunacy into a commodity that can be sold to the afflicted. Propaganda’s goal is to establish this concord: a fellowship of pathological thinking.

10) The fascist agitator knows how to put on a show, how to entertain, how to produce pleasure and gratification in the listener: out of gratitude the listener accepts the ideology of the speaker.

11) The fascist leader differs from the follower only with respect to uninhibited expression: they do and say what the followers would never have the gall or courage to do or say. By risking making a fool of themselves, they break through norms of middle-class discourse, increasing the effect of the propaganda.

12) The fascist leader is beloved for their “false tones and clowning.” It is not true that the mass audience has a subtle taste for ‘authenticity’ and disparages the fake; rather fictitiousness, like a drunk’s tirade, appeals for its affectation.

13) The fascist orator redeems the masses’ inarticulateness. This redemptive act requires the RITUAL of rallies, ceremonies, public statements, and so on. These reveal to the masses the identity they want to have but cannot express, and sanction emotions they would have otherwise concealed. (At the center of the ritual is often the symbolic murder/sacrifice of the chosen foe.)

14) “This loosening of self-control, the merging of one’s impulses with a ritual scheme is closely related to the universal psychological weakening of the self-contained individual.” The fascist ritual applies the mechanism of religion emptied of religious content, sanctioning a ‘community’ or ‘cult’ around a leader or ideology that, in essence, prohibits and eliminates critical, individual, divergent, self-determining thought.

15) Fascist propaganda is characterized above all by stereotyping and cliché and the amazingly incessant repetition of stereotypes and clichés, which are ritually ‘drilled’ into the skull. Rigid repetition and mechanical application is craved and standardized. The fascist leader makes a fetish of reality, of the status quo of established power relationships.

16) The fascist spirit is essentially destructive, both selling and enjoying warnings of impending doom, for friend and foe alike. Underneath it lies the unconscious desire for self-annihilation, which is why it ultimately turns its followers into victims.

—Adapted/summarized from Adorno et al. “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda,” printed in From the Stars Down to the Earth

SPIRITUO-MATERIALITY

It’s difficult to countenance the divide between atheism and theism as a real one any longer, given the degree to which things have sunk into opinion on these matters, and when those preparing the next stages in thought are already working on both sides.
The question would have to be: what operational difference is there across this divide? How do different beliefs shape different worlds and, are these worlds actually different?

When a ‘case’ can be made for both sides, what’s wrong with ‘both’ being the case?
A case, grammatically, is just a tense of a verb, which can ‘fall’ into many cases. It just depends on situational pragmatics, to decide what to say. That’s a lot easier than choosing, in some fantastical moment of conversion, ‘once and for all’, how to talk henceforth, which ‘side’ to belong to.

That doesn’t mean that, ‘innerly’, there isn’t an intuition, conviction, choice, or guiding/grounding orientation. There can be hidden convictions and responsibilities, what the soul receives. Only that, whatever that may be, it has nothing to do with the surface talk and its supposed necessities of logical opposition, operation, and predicative combinatorics.
Listen first, then decide what to say, in a strategic manner, getting at the unclosed truth of things. Otherwise there just the nasty ‘handling’ of the other like an overlord: leading questions that drive them to a side, into mental and linguistic prison.
The other’s language comes ‘first’ in any equation of saying. It gets in us ‘innerly’, too, and ‘shudders’ our hidden convocation, so that at no time is there cessation to the need of novel language.

There is normally a fruitless obsession with pre-dicted ‘grooves’ in the logos, so that thought is funneled down given lanes, to regions known and mapped. Thus ‘debates’ become brain-dumbingly dull and predictable.
One pretends its a different liquid in the various grooves and that there can be no contamination across them; but in fact it doesn’t matter, the liquid is the same – obligatorily conceptualizing and metaphoring language.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but once ‘soaked’ in it, the notion of sides and options becomes comical, given the range that opens up.

Wisdom wants to resolve the madness of poetry, but poetry sticks to the contingency of things, dreams, words, ideas, situations, durations, persons (don’t stop there).
That’s why a generic, unallied practice of thought-words 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑡 signification follows the age of religion and ideology-production. The trouble is, as a practice, it doesn’t look like anything. It doesn’t ‘recall’ anything, exactly, because it can’t. Its movement is anti-referential, free to use any reference. Nothing covers its range.
The ideal is to match mind and matter exactly–almost as if language would then disappear from language. Such would be the revelation of mystery as mystery.

If there’s spiritual considerations, these can and must be dealt with materially, not as ideology or belief, not even as ‘vision’.
But the minute I concoct a term like spirituo-materiality, I both open a field of potential semantic exploration, and show the folly of running through it with my head chopped off.
I would like to do that, and why not? Who could stop it?
But the term is irrelevant and needn’t ever be said again. It will never be of any help, on its own, to guide any sense of anything whatsoever.
All that would matter in this ‘case’, is running.

Ironically, words are no longer obvious and must never be obvious anymore. They no longer communicate anything to anyone–except of course in exchanges of information, as in debates over beliefs. Words with clear reference are, obviously, still useful for pragmatic situations. But, for ‘truth’ in the momentous sense, ‘words’ are helpless and help only by indirection, by refusing obviousness.
There is nothing to ‘tell’ anyone at the spirituo-material level.
It’s a case of ‘put up or shut up’ in raw description of thought-matter that lacks outcome, accumulation, even memory. None of that’s needed anymore–not intentionally; and in not being needed, the whole play of thought and imagination is liberated away from conceptual and imagistic capture, into the contingency of experimental gestures complete in themselves and forever unfinished.

The secret boils down to: give no information about God. But also, there’s no information to give: there is no secret held by anyone. “God is love.”
This is how one might successfully ‘exhibit’ how it might be that ‘everything is out in the open’.

Of photographs, only the ‘click’ remains. This does not mean we stop taking, looking at, and cherishing photographs. After all, we’re only human.

—April 16, 2019

ENLIKENMENT
(after Wallace Stevens)

1
Some call the opacity of reality ‘God’, some call it ‘matter’.
If you dig down deep enough, what do you find? Top-spinning quarks or Ishvara’s playing cards?

A category like ‘quarks’ is made of resemblances between entities.
A quark resembles other quarks, other subatomic particles, other quantum mannerisms.
By extension: quarks might resemble any teensy-weensy thing (especially if fast and invisible).
Moreover, though they can be calculated similarly, no quark identical to any other.
A pin, for example, could fit about 20 million million (different) quarks on its head.
That’s a fun fact: so many resemblances! But even more pleasurable to think is:
The stars in the heavens that night were as numerous as quarks on a pinhead.

Imagination stepped up to bat there, and swung itself over the moon.
Poetry and reality have one structure: resemblances that give pleasure.
Where nature keeps resemblances to its natural level, poetry oversteps those levels.

That is poetry’s pleasure: to intensify the sense of reality through extended resemblances.

2
The eye sees, at nature’s level, a text of life it did not write.
The mind however “begets in resemblance,” seeks a world within a world, like a painter.
When that world resembles reality, it satisfies our sense—
But the resemblances we’ve imagined, in the meantime, have added to reality a reality of their own.

In the Great Chain of Likening, the poet’s faith, fact, and practice is that:
Reality, extended through ‘resemblances’, intensifies reality’s sense;
Intensified reality is not just part of the structure of reality: it is its increase, has its own reality;
Increased realization brings pleasure: it suits our desire to enjoy reality at its height.

Poetry epitomizes our aptitude for this: to heighten and enlarge the sense of reality
By adding imaginative, ambiguous resemblances to it—
Pleasing to see pleasures to carry.

3
With Ishvara’s playing cards, you don’t know where the limit of resemblance is drawn.
They could be quarks, pigeons, DNA, bars, fingernail clippings, and so on.
But who is Ishvara? Doesn’t matter—resembles a card player, gambler, lover, friend.

Any resemblance chosen will shade the metaphor, and so the reality, some way.
One must be wise, therefore, in deciding the metaphors whereby reality is lensed.
Playing cards, after all, is not limited to solitaire. Maybe they are someone else’s cards too.
Maybe the hearts are dark cut at the corners. Maybe two holes are punched through them.

Reality and its reading coalesce. It factors in, not as ‘reading’, but as metamorphosis.
Starting from natural resemblances and their extension by metaphor, ‘logic’ is widened
And this widening, opening fully in poetry, increases reality itself.

Ishwara dances on the dealt cards, need not read the scattered face.

4
They say, using an architectural metaphor: DNA is the building blocks of life.
Can someone be dealt bad genes, bad DNA ‘cards’, bad blocks? Perhaps so— but then who dealt them?

Objection: nobody dealt anything, it’s all by chance. —But how else to deal cards?
Objection: the cards aren’t anyone’s, aren’t Ishwara’s. —OK, ‘matter’s cards, then?
What is matter? What is the matter? Why are there bad cards? (Or for that matter bad apples?)

Is this an inappropriate metaphor? How else describe life’s fortune?
Of course, at any point, the poetic play can be stopped and they say: no, reality cannot be understood this way.
Or: that’s just a metaphor, not science or logic.
But how could you lecture someone in such a fashion, saying: don’t make things worse with your silly playing card analogy?
Did you ever try to convince someone they weren’t dealt a bad hand?

How could modes of reaching resemblance—gaining sense of reality—be controlled?
For resemblance is not sought only in lab coats, but in hospital gowns, lingerie, army uniforms…

What is it like and not like? That is the never-ending question, changing with it what is and what is not.
Such modes are as unique as each mind’s quark-spasm.

How could the extensions of things (of natural resemblances) occasioned by metaphor (poetic imagination) ever be limited?
Who could delimit the possible senses of reality in all the worlds within worlds?
The extensions reach as far as… a fill-in-the-blank that never gets filled.

5
To say ‘that is out of bounds’ is a metaphor.
To say ‘that way of speaking is meaningless’ is to police the borders of the senses of reality.

Poetry and reality share the lived sense and realization that is ours.
God’s hour is not a bear’s hour, probably, but they are ‘hours’ all the same.

What is ‘a good long while’? What does it mean that intelligence ‘lumbers’?
How many trees does it take for Ishwara to produce a playing card with your name on it?
How many fingernails will you clip before your fingers are DNA-modifying angels?
Where is the holy strand, quark’s color, nobility of bear?

These are all questions resembling questions about the structure of reality. To formulate them so
Is not a frivolous game of words, but Ishvara’s
Poetry: which the material mind, in material lines, can save.

―April 24, 2019
―Cf. Wallace Stevens, “Three Academic Pieces” in The Necessary Angel