DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume V, Number 01 (2022): 40-55

Political Paradoxes, Art, and Homo Sacer

THE SYNTHETICO-PARADOXICAL CHARACTER OF FASCISM:CAN ART DISRUPT THE FASCIST PROJECT?
David Casciola

Abstract
In this paper, I interrogate the question of how aesthetics might be used in terms ofan antifascist project. The exposition includes two main steps. First, drawing on
the work of Umberto Eco and Sven Reichardt, I introduce a perspective on fascism,in which I identify its character as synthetico-paradoxical. Then, I utilize Jacques
Rancière’s conception of aesthetics as politics to show how a decentralized
understanding of what makes good art can disrupt fascism by appealing to the senseof re-recognition of the individual political subject.
Keywords: Fascism, Aesthetics, Populism, Umberto Eco, Hierarchy

I: Introduction
There is a sense in the popular imagination that ever since the fall of the fascist empires ofGermany, Japan, and Italy at the end of the Second World War the threat of an extreme rightwing authoritarianism is a thing of the past and that the liberal democracies of the West would
usher humanity into a new age of freedom and prosperity. This view is entrenched to such an
extent that even Umberto Eco, an Italian philosopher and witness to Benito Mussolini’s regime,
claimed that, “if we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before theSecond World War, we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same
form in different historical circumstances.” 1 Eco’s point here is that the fascist nation-empire
regimes were largely products of the specific conditions of the early 20th century, even as heremained “concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there inEurope.”2
And yet, a closer look today reveals that the specter of fascism still haunts the modern
post-industrial society. In response to the recent rise of right-wing authoritarian movements,
Bat-Ami Bar On fittingly reminds us that “according to Arendt, it is mistaken to construe the12

Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 42, no. 11 (1995), p. 2.
Ibid., p. 2.

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

40

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

Allies’ military victory over the Axis as a victory over fascism.” 3 The second decade of the 21st
century brought the presidency of Donald Trump, whose campaign had made allusions to the“anti-interventionist movement in the early 1940s to keep the US out of World War II that was
associated with Charles Lindberg and American fascist and anti-Semitic forces.”4 At the very
least, the sentiment of fascism is still thriving in the discourse of the conservative far-rightparties in the United States and Europe. Whether this sentiment is well articulated or not, it has
become obvious that right wing populists today are raising the fascist torch in contemporary
politics.
A discussion of fascism is notoriously difficult due to the problem of defining fascism
itself. Here I will take as my point of departure several points articulated by Eco in his “UrFascism,” as well as from the idea of fascism as a movement and process-concept, as developed
by Sven Reichardt. I further develop this characterization of fascism into what I call its‘synthetico-paradoxical’ character, meaning that fascist movements are synthetic insofar as
they assemble their ideology from different aspects and standpoints of other movements, andthat they do this in a way that is necessarily paradoxical. In my view, characterizing fascism inthis way will reveal and help understand the nature of the difficulty one faces when dealing
with fascism from a traditional liberal standpoint. As I see it, the difficulty in question is in thatregardless of how acutely one exposes the paradoxes of fascist movements or disrupts theirpolitical programs in a logical way, these movements keep finding ways to co-opt (that is, totake up or appropriate) and synthesize these disruptions within their own perspectives, thus
maintaining a fundamental paradoxicality as part of their essential nature as movements’.
One can legitimately ask here, “If logic cannot disrupt fascism efficiently enough, thenwhat else can?” I argue that art and the aesthetic sphere can become an alternative avenue
through which fascist ideological and political perspectives may be challenged and disrupted.
For the purpose of this paper, I will draw on Darlene Demandante’s interpretation of Jacques
Rancière’s ‘aesthetics as politics’ in order to explore the realms of aesthetics and artistic
expression.5 For Demandante, aesthetics has to do with our perceptions of the social world,
whereas artistic expression points to the ways we might disrupt social, political, or economic
realities.6 We will keep in mind that, due to its synthetico-paradoxical character, fascism allows
for its advocates to ‘co-opt’ and accommodate within its perspective the practices of artistic
expression that can disrupt it, thus showing a capacity to turn art also into an instrument of its
own. But we will seek to get the better of fascism and its notorious adaptability via
Demandante’s perspective on Rancière’s conception of art, if we can only safeguard the latterfrom the conservative cultural elitism of the likes of Roger Scruton. For, cultural elitism canonly play into the hands of the ethno-nationalist project of fascism and can crystalize into an
aesthetic regime of artistic hegemony. In this relation, the Italian Marxist and social theorist
Antonio Gramsci writes,
Bat-Ami Bar On, “But is it Fascism?” Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 50, no. 4 (2019), p. 412.
Douglas Kellner, American Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism(Rotterdam: Brill, 2016), p. 42.
5Darlene O. Demandante, “Aesthetics, Politics, and the Embodied Political Subject,” Kritike, Vol. 14, no.1 (2020),
p. 141.
6
Ibid., p. 142.
3
4

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

41

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

The separation of powers, together with all the discussion provoked by its realisation and the legal
dogmas which its appearance brought into being, is a product of the struggle between civil society
and political society in a specific historical period….the Church is taken as representing the totalityof civil society (whereas in fact it is only an element of diminishing importance within it), and theState as representing every attempt to crystallise permanently a particular state of development, aparticular situation.7

Gramsci here suggests that the State crystalizes as a hegemony of power and control over civilsociety. I draw a parallel between how the State bureaucracy becomes ‘entrenched’ and how
normative aesthetics – i.e. what counts as ‘good’ art – becomes entrenched in the same way
when it is co-opted by fascist movements as they crystalize into a State hegemony.
Still, it is also through art that a true disruption of fascism can occur. I argue that aradical decentralization of normative aesthetics – by rethinking art as a sort of political speech– would undermine the concept of ‘gatekeeping’, so that as a society we might be able to comeup with a more genuine sort of art qua art. In terms of theory, I will seek for the possibility forsuch a decentralization through the thought of Walter Benjamin, who alludes to a visceral,personal reaction of the audience to a piece of art, 8 which is consistent with Rancière’s
conception of aesthetics as a political perception. My aim will be to show that disrupting thebarriers of what counts as ‘art’ through decentralization and leveling all aesthetic hegemony
will allow art to subvert the fascist State hierarchy and reveal paths of resistance to it.
II: Fascism and Populism
As I indicated above, fascism is a difficult term to define. Is it just authoritarianism?
Totalitarianism? Or any political ideology with a distinct, far-right conservative positioning?
As a beginning, I will focus on the fourteen common features of fascism identified by Umberto
Eco, as well as on Sven Reichardt’s characterization of fascism as a movement (as opposed toa particular form of government with specific features). In terms of a historical analysis, thesetwo perspectives on fascism are complementary: Eco’s input is based on a first-hand experience
with Italian fascism, whereas Reichardt’s expands beyond its Western European instances toinclude Japanese fascism. In “Ur Fascism,” Eco calls fascism a “fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage
of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.” 9 For his part,
Reichardt characterizes fascism as a process-concept that relies on “global relations among
fascisms [which] has drawn out its character as an inter-imperial phenomenon subject toradicalization.”10 For him, fascism is characterized not by a static monolith of a specific (thoughpossible contradictory) ideology, but instead by interrogating fascism-in-action “as a genre –an ensemble of overlapping and intersecting practices and attitudes…. [rather than] as a strictly

Antonio Gramsci, “Selections from the Prison Notebooks,” In On Violence: A Reader eds. Bruce B. Lawrence
and Aisha Karim (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 168.
8
See Jules Simon, “Aesthetics and Politics: Reflections on Love and the Origins of Fascism,” Filosofia, Vol. 63,(2018), pp. 133-145.
9
Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” p. 4.
10
Sven Reichardt, “Fascism’s Stages: Imperial Violence, Entanglement, and Processualization,” Journal of theHistory of Ideas, Vol. 82, no. 1 (2021), p. 88.
7

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

42

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

logical ideology [emphasis added].” 11 Subsequently, Reichardt goes on to develop thisconceptualization of fascism out of the historical context of the interconnections between theGerman, Japanese, and Italian fascist empires of the first half of the 20 th century.12 Thus, while
Eco focuses on the sufficient qualities of fascism as a political regime, Reichardt focuses on
how we might identify and analyze fascism as a political movement. For our purposes here,
these two conceptions will help us gain some insight into the contemporary features of fascismand how these might play into fascism’s appropriation of different sorts of aesthetic regimes
and artistic practices.
For Eco, fascism is a distinctly nationalist and totalitarian enterprise. 13 As a movement
it can be taken up in different national contexts, but the specific ideologies and theories that it
might embrace locally do not matter as much as its dedication to the ethno-nationalist State. To
explain why distinct fascist regimes might resemble each other despite their apparent
differences, Eco appeals to the notion of Wittgensteinian language games, which work basedon similarities such as the ones exemplified in the letter sequences abc, bcd, cde, and def.14 Econotes “a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between [def] and [abc].”15 The firstand last term resemble each other only insofar as they relate to their intermediary terms [bcdand cde] to which they bear a strict resemblance. In the same way, fascist regimes bear theirresemblances to each other not necessarily by the nature of the strict resemblances they have interms of their constituent parts (for example specific ideologies or certain sorts of state
institutions), but because of this sort of intermediary mediation of relations. They bear a sort oftranscendent recognition: “Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate froma fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist.” 16 In fact, thisview of the similarities between various sorts of fascisms complements with Reichardt’s
conception of fascisms as movements. The conjecture here is that we do not need to identify(perceive) different specific qualities of fascist regimes to define fascism; rather, we canidentify fascism as an aesthetic regime that is represented by how it presents itself. In different
historical, social, and economic conditions this presentation will be different, but we could still
identify it by pointing to the similarities between different fascist movements. Here I do notmean to relativize the character of the fascist movements, but to point to the various distinct
ways in which they might arise. Fascisms are not limited to right armed salutes and jackboots;
their formation is dependent on the social and cultural context in which they take shape. But
besides their cultural contingencies, we must still be able to recognize them as fascisms basedon the structural and conceptual frameworks they utilize.
Reichardt identifies seven ‘tipping points’ that characterize the progress of a fascist
movement toward a new stage in its development. 17 There are similarities between this sort ofdevelopmental framework and Eco’s characterization modeled on Wittgenstein’s language
games based on family resemblances. Fascist movements begin as movements in “small
11

Ibid., p. 88.
Ibid., p. 88.
13
Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” p. 4.
14
Ibid., p. 5.
15
Ibid., p. 5.
16
Ibid., p. 5.
17
Sven Reichardt, “Fascism’s Stages: Imperial Violence, Entanglement, and Processualization,” p. 90.
12

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

43

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

intellectual circles, usually oriented toward the tenets of Italian fascism,”18 and develop in the
direction of a violent opposition to the “prevalent forms of government.” 19 These movements
go on to develop further as working to destroy and appropriate the state against which they
violently rebel. Reichardt describes the stages of fascism as follows,
In the first phase, we can identify initially small intellectual circles, usually oriented toward thetenets of Italian fascism… This second stage, involv[es] militancy against prevalent forms ofgovernment…
In the third stage, in which events in Italy and Germany set the global tone, mass movements arose…
Once a regime, fascism in the fourth stage was characterized by what tended to be a brief period ofseizing power…
The fifth stage saw the development of fascistic ‘mediatory dictatorships…’ [which] aestheticized
the sacred exaltation of the leader, the awe-inspiring uncanniness of the repressive apparatus, andthe popular, carnivalesque spectacles of their base-oriented mass organizations…
[The] sixth stage coupled tendencies to disempower domestic conservative allies and effect a selfperpetuation of fascist machinery with pressure toward radical colonial wars of destruction…
In its last, seventh stage, finally, fascism removed all limitations on genocidal policy.20

As fascist movements progress through these stages mutating from ideas in the enclaves ofconservative intellectuals into the street violence of mass movements, they eventually findthemselves in the structures of the states which they initially opposed. The transitory and pliable
nature of fascist movements is what makes providing a concrete definition of just what it means
for a movement or individual to be fascist or fascistic so difficult. It is also this nature thatenables fascist movements to co-opt so many different strategies, practices, and aesthetics. This
allows fascism to easily permeate through different social groups and to become the very natureof a social organization, especially in our age of mass media. In particular, the ubiquitous
character of mass and social media in our age provides an environment for the fascistic ideas
to flourish and disseminate, even as the aesthetic character of fascist movements leaves them
open to and susceptible to interrogation by artistic disruptions.
Despite its definitional ‘fuzziness’, Eco delineates fourteen characteristics which are
typical of fascism and can be considered as determining the sense of something like an ‘Eternal
Fascism.’ Each of these characteristics alone is sufficient for the qualification of a movement
as fascist; but at the same time none of them is individually necessary for such a qualification.
Taken together they form a popular view which manifests itself as a heuristic for identifying
fascistic tendencies and movements. They also point to the synthetico-paradoxical character offascism as drawing on social frustration (of the middle class), popular elitism, and selective
populism.21 And finally, they explain why fascism is a pliable and malleable political force
which can uniquely co-opt the features of other political, social, and economic ideologies into
its own perspective.
Eco describes one particular feature of Ur-Fascism as “individual or social frustration,”
pointing that “one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a18

Ibid., p. 90.
Ibid., p. 90.
20
Ibid., pp. 90-93.
21
Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” pp. 6-8.
19

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

44

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of politicalhumiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.” 22 Fascism appeals to
individuals who have been disaffected and as a result feel that their society has left them behind.
Thus, fascism reaches out to the dominant social or economic class which sees its dominanceas threatened by policies that seek to redress the failings of equality, equity, and justice.
Subsequently, this appeal to frustration crystalizes into a popular elitism. As Eco notes, “elitism
is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology…. [which] cruelly implies contempt for the
weak.”23 What characterizes the elitism of Ur-Fascism is that it places the citizen of the nation
above all other citizens. At the same time, the party members are above the citizens, whereas
the party leaders are above its members. Thus, the fascist movement advances a hierarchy thatengenders a disdain in its members not just for the Other, but also for those immediately aboveand below each individual’s own position within that hierarchy. This is indicative of one of theparadoxes that fascism maintains and utilizes: a fascist movement demands a mass of people
who are simultaneously weak enough for a leader to conquer and at the same time the greatest
people in the entire world. “For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights,
and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will.
Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be
their interpreter.”24 Thus, in fascist movements, individuality melts away into the totality of
their social identities; whereas the ‘Common Will’ becomes aestheticized in the realization of
the Leader as the people’s voice. In a statement that seems much more prescient today than in
1995 Eco said, “[t]here is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional
response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of thePeople.”25 This means that the ‘Voice of the People’ becomes an aesthetic representation of the(supposed) ‘will of the people.’ We must note, however, that this is a false actualization becausethe ‘people’s will’ can never be agreed upon due to the diversity of interests in the society. In
this way, we come to another paradox of the fascist project: the fascist Leader uses this false
crystallization of the Will of the People to become the Voice of that which cannot form a
coherent voice. Fascist dedication to the Leader as personification of peoples’ will demonstrates
the anti-parliamentarianism and anti-democratic nature of fascist movements, as well as their‘populist turn’.
Federico Finchelstein says that populism “is a form of democracy that is nonethelessauthoritarian.”26 For him, the tension between the radically democratic nature of populism andthe threat of authoritarianism as a dictatorship of the majority is characteristic of thecontemporary version of populism. Finchelstein contends that contemporary populism began
to take its shape after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 pointing that “populism has been often
a democratic consequence of the fall of dictatorships rather than the creator of a new
dictatorship.” 27 These contemporary strains of populism give rise to a paradox: “the new22

Ibid., p. 7.
Ibid., p. 7.
24
Ibid., p. 8.
25
Ibid., p. 8.
26
Federico Finchelstein, “Populism without borders. Notes on a global history,” Constellations, Vol. 26 (2019),
p. 419.
27
Ibid., p. 419.
23

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

45

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

populists are extreme nationalists”, “form a new international right-wing bloc based on thesimilarity of their xenophobic politics,” and “share a common enemy in the democratic legaciesof the Enlightenment.”28 Eco’s Wittgensteinian games come handy here again – to characterizethese new right-wing populist movements, which may differ in their national peculiarities but
still bear a number of similarities that allow to classify them as populist. Finchelstein denies
that populism is fascism, despite both being similar insofar as they both have populist leaders
who “equate their voice with that of the people,” 29 while appealing to a notion of direct
democracy that is not to be mediated by supposedly corrupt institutions of liberal democracy.
However, Finchelstein notes, “when populism becomes a power regime the crisis of politicalrepresentation is not reduced but often increased.” 30 Thus, despite claiming that it represents
radical democracy, when populism ascends politically it is the populist leader, not the people,
who takes control. As fascist movements adopt a populist agenda to serve their popular elitism
they dovetail with right-wing populism forming a synthetic regime that uses a proletarian
aesthetic in service of a fascist agenda. As Finchelstein puts it: “Populism is the opposite ofpluralism in politics. It works in the name of an imagined majority and dismisses all views thatit considers come from the minority.” 31 This definition of populism indicates that it is an
essential part of fascist movements and that its paradoxical nature serves more or less as thefoundation for these movements. In this sense, it also becomes clear that fascist movements
cannot achieve their goals if they remain purely intellectual or ideological trends in the halls of
academies or think tanks – what they need is to actualize themselves as social movements
driven by real people.
A good sense of the connection between contemporary populism and fascist movements
can be found in Cas Mudde’s definition of populism: “an ideology that considers society to be
ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté
générale (general will) of the people.” 32 The connection here must be clear: Mudde’s
conception of populism offers a broad understanding of the ideology as it is used by different
kinds of political organizations. What I want to highlight here is how Mudde’s definition points
to the development of fascist movements today. As discussed above, some of the characteristics
of fascist movements are appeals to a (supposed) will of the people, and potentially theconnection between populism and fascism is indicative of how the ‘populist zeitgeist’ allows
for the creation of an illusory will of the people. In this regard, Mudde very indicatively notes
that, for populists, “perceptions seem to be more important than facts.”33 This links directly towhat I intend to show in my discussion of the aesthetics of the political process below, namely,that perception is integral to how we understand the individual political subject’s connection totheir political and social world. I will specifically maintain that contemporary fascist
movements create an image or perception of themselves – perhaps an aesthetics – which appeals
28

Ibid., p. 420.
Ibid., p. 420.
30
Ibid., p. 420.
31
Ibid., p. 422.
32
Cas Mudde, “The Populist Zeitgeist,” Government and Opposition 39, no. 4 (2004), p. 543.
33
Ibid., p. 553.
29

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

46

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

to contemporary populism and enables them to take on the populist zeitgeist to advance theirown political project.34
The different versions of fascism seek to create a monolithic society that reinforces thestate structures they have taken over. They take an ‘aesthetic turn’ by creating a paradox that
focuses on the body of the subject of social action now understood as political individual ofmass movement. As Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi puts it, “the body, along with intellectual
symbols and moral rules, i.e. psyche and society, equally participates in many of the social facts
that make up the human world.”35 The body is thus part of the movement of the social-politicalpractices which integrate aesthetics into the fascist political project. Falasca-Zamponi brings
this thought even further, drawing on “Walter Benjamin’s notion of aestheticized politics” andarguing that “fascism’s aesthetic understanding of politics was founded on the sublimation of
the body and the alienation of sensual life.” 36 By aestheticizing politics, fascism turns thegeneral totalitarian project of the complete domination of the social realm into a project that it
actualizes at the level of each political subject’s individuality. In this sense, fascism becomes
truly totalitarian not just because it puts the political or social realms into the service of the
fascist state, but because even at the individual level the very aesthetic conception of the self
begins reinforcing the logic of the authoritarian fascist project.
In the remainder of this paper I intend to show that conceptualizing fascisms as
movements and processes as opposed to static regimes is appropriate, as it will help revealing
their synthetico-paradoxical nature. Fascisms have displayed a unique capacity to appropriate
different concepts, practices, and aesthetics, which do not necessarily require logicalconsistency other than in their own specific ideologies. This consistency is built as anorientation into a total ethno-nationalist reformation of the State. Whether this state ismonarchical, democratic, or parliamentarian is of little concern to the fascist movements, solong as such a reformation serves their larger project of total political domination.
III: Aesthetics
At first glance, it does not seem that there is a clear-cut connection between aesthetics andpolitics. But Darlene Demandante’s analysis of Jacques Rancière makes a different point:
Aesthetics is the sense perception of social realities – ways of perceiving, doing, and making of thevarious actors involved in the social and political realm, the part of those who have no part, theworthy and the unworthy subjects, those who are counted and those who are excluded...37

The sensible (or the aesthetic) realm is integral to the political realm because it is through thefaculty of sensibility itself that political subjects are perceived. Indeed, it is through this act ofperception (or recognition) that political subjectivity is constituted. As Demandante puts it,“Aesthetics is politics in as much as it has to do with the move to be perceived and recognised
as subjects who were not originally counted as parts of the community and thus it challenges
I am indebted to one of my anonymous reviewers for suggesting the connection with Mudde’s scholarship.
Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, “Fascism and Aesthetics,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and
Democratic Theory 15 no. 3, (2008), p. 351.
36
Ibid., p. 353.
37
Darlene O. Demandante, “Aesthetics, Politics, and the Embodied Political Subject,” p. 141.
34
35

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

47

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

structures of exclusion.” 38 Aesthetics and politics are thus linked because our politicalsubjectivity is created when we are recognized. Aesthetics, then, opens up a possibility for a
disruption of the political structures and hierarchies because it allows us to recognize theirparadoxes and inconsistencies. If politics “primarily has to do with what is made visible,
perceivable, and speakable by existing symbolic and material divisions, separations, andhierarchies within society,”39 then aesthetics determines the manner in which we communicate
in the political realm and becomes a language of political discourse. We see the effects of thistype of aestheticization of politics in contemporary discourses, in which the value of a politicalargument is not determined by its logical consistency, but by the extent in which it conforms to
the perception of its fundamental ideology.
For its part, the relation of art to ‘pop’ culture in its more general sense appears
paradoxical, especially when treated of hierarchically. Andy Hamilton notes in this regard that,“although high culture is an elite product, it also has a communal reference.” 40 This apparent
tension between the high culture and the ‘popular’ culture of the broader community becomes
particularly important within the sense of ‘culture’ advanced by Roger Scruton, according towhich “the culture of a civilization is ‘the art and literature through which it rises toconsciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.’”41 What is at stake here is that art
and its aesthetic representation are understood as integral to the cultural identity of a society,insofar as art represents a form of actualization of a tribal self-identity. It must be pointed,
though, that Scruton’s conservative position creates a binary between ‘high’ and ‘popular’culture, which Hamilton critiques because “a simple polarity of high and popular culture
ignores the popular classics, and avant-garde genres arising from popular culture.” 42 In otherwords, opposing high and popular culture ignores the interplay between the two, in which theypull from each other in a shared cultural and artistic ecosystem.
Furthermore, Hamilton takes issue with the elitism and cultural ethnocentrism that arise
from Scruton’s conservative aesthetic position. 43 This criticism is motivated by the effects ofglobalization, which have made it plain that views of strict cultural hegemonies are ultimately
just elitist mythologies. Different cultures borrow from each other just like high and popular
cultures do. Hamilton suggests that the way to disentangle Scruton’s conservatism is todisregard high art and instead to refer to the classics as “excellencies of their kind.”44 Scruton
maintains that a sort of elitism is still required for the developments of these ‘classics,’ but heallows for their accessibility to the common folk, as they are no longer private property of theupper class.45 This is a semi-decentralization of aesthetic products that still maintains a level of
elitism, for while the common folk may benefit from the insight of the arts, it is not produced
for them or about them. What Scruton offers here is an access for the lower classes to the38

Ibid., p. 142.
Ibid., p. 142.
40
Andy Hamilton, “Scruton’s Philosophy of Culture: Elitism, Populism, and Classic Art,” British Journal of
Aesthetics 49 no. 4 (2009), p. 390.
41
Ibid., p. 390.
42
Ibid., p. 391.
43
Ibid., p. 392.
44
Ibid., p. 400.
45
Ibid., p. 401.
39

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

48

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

experience of the upper class, which plays into the hands of the fascist project of melding theclasses into a single class through a singular experience of high art whose sense is defined by
the social elites. Thus, on Scruton’s view, it is ultimately culture in a certain elitist sense that
determines what is allowed as high art and at once acts as a gatekeeper for the kind of artistic
projects which are allowed as ‘relevant.’
Taking into account Umberto Eco’s paradoxes of fascism and the populist elitism whichcharacterizes fascist movements, we can see how they align with Hamilton’s critique of
Scruton’s philosophy of culture. Fascist movements utilize the creation of an ‘aesthetic upperclass’, and without a radical decentralization of such an aesthetic hierarchy, the conservative
cultural hegemony which Scruton appears to advocate essentially becomes the cultural
foundation of the fascist project. The kind of ‘aesthetization’ thus advanced creates its own
logic in which the ‘low’ or ‘folk art’ paradoxically elevates itself to the level of a highest art ofa nation, whereas the ‘high art’ of the elites becomes accessible to all who take a part in thenationalist project. In this way, fascist aesthetics appropriates the artistic process in service ofa continual reconstitution of the fascist movement and state, by formalizing the concepts of‘good art’ and ‘bad art’, “and then forcing them into a hierarchy.”46 Such a hierarchization of
the cultural milieu is only made easier when a culture already has its own established hierarchy,
as fascist movements are ready to co-opt it to justify their ideology and recruit more people toadopt its terms.
Spencer Bradley argues that “fascism functions through binaries, as a moralization andlegitimation of a specific type of humanity… [and] the creation of institutionalized subjectivity
as a member of the accepted social norms or existing as the ‘other.’” 47 In this way, by meansof aesthetics and its peculiar language, fascist movements manipulate and force culture into
conformity with their own hierarchies and systems. They create the binary of good and bad art,
by which they can sanction both all art that is useful for their project as ‘good’ and all art thatis not as ‘bad’. The content of art in this sense is not important; what matters is its conformity
to the fascist system. In this way, as fascism co-opts different sorts of art and aspects of culture,
it dictates the language of culture and frames the future aesthetic conversations and creations.
And as “artistic works are given legitimacy as artistic works when culture accepts it,” 48 fascist
movements thus self-position themselves as the dictators of cultural legitimacy, whereas thecultural elitism of the existing hierarchical social system only serves to enable them.
In effect, the goal of fascist art is to establish its own cultural hegemony. This view
comes from Antonio Gramsci’s conception of political hegemony, which conceives of “theState as representing every attempt to crystallise permanently a particular state of development,a particular situation.” 49 Fascist art works in a similar way: as the State creates a political
hegemony by formalizing a particular position or stage of the complex of political, economic,
and social development, so art, when formalized and forced to conform to a strict structure of

Spencer Bradly, “The Face of Modern Art: The Creation of Fascist Art.” Philosophy in the Contemporary World
22 no. 1, (2015), p. 81.
47
Ibid., p. 82.
48
Ibid., p. 82.
49
Antonio Gramsci, “Selections from the Prison Notebooks,” p. 168.
46

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

49

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

what is ‘acceptable’ or ‘palatable’, becomes totalitarian and serves the ends of the fascist
project.
Rancière’s conception of aesthetics as politics can be seen as suggesting a way ofovercoming the fascist view of art via “what he calls aesthetic modernity or the aesthetic regimeof arts as a period where democracy has become a real possibility.” 50 In particular, Demandanteargues that Rancière constructs a counternarrative to the traditional interpretation of the historyof art as moving “towards the perfection of a medium, for example, from classical to abstract
painting, or the metaphysical/teleological view about the end of art.” 51 On her view, for
Rancière, art is not a teleological endeavor, and there can be no final piece of art that willcomplete the project of aesthetics. The progression of different sorts of artistic expression – forexample, from realism to romanticism – is not a development in the craft in the same way as
something like agriculture would develop. Instead, artistic development is more of a dialecticalprocess 52 which is the manifestation of a conversation between a society or culture and its
critics. Art thus possesses a critical power, which is indicative of its potential to disrupt
hegemony. Art, for Rancière, is not about perfection, but about representing the paradoxes of apolitical hegemony.
The problem that remains here is that paradoxes are fundamental to the nature of fascism
and that fascist movements can thus easily accommodate the paradoxes that artistic expression
could reveal. These paradoxes can just be adopted within the fascist project and art would
become appropriated for that project’s purposes – artistic expression revealing the paradoxesof fascism would fail to disrupt fascist movements because of their synthetic nature. It is thus
not a surprise that the intellectual theorizing which according to Reichardt characterizes thefirst stage of fascism advances an aestheticized populist elitism which is also highly appealing
to the disaffected social groups. By such populist aesthetics, these groups can coalesce into amovement that mobilizes to turn fascism from something conceived in the minds ofconservative intellectuals into a mass social and political movement. What is important for us
here is that fascist movements do not have a specified aesthetics or even sorts of aesthetics;
they would take anything that seems to ennoble the nation and put it to the task of reinforcing
their violent logic. The ultimate goal of these movements is to transform the government which
they initially opposed into a tool for a national-imperial purpose.
IV: Fascist Co-Opting
Fascist movements do not co-opt aesthetic properties and characteristics to simply further theirpolitical ends. I contend that this concept of co-opting – taking on some aspect or property of
another movement (a set of social norms, a cultural sphere, etc.) and utilizing it to further theirown purposes – is in fact foundational for the fascist movements. It is because of thefundamental paradoxicality of fascisms that they are in the unique position to co-opt aspects ofother movements, including ones that pursue goals contrary to their own. This for instance isindicated in the far-right’s apparent obsession with the Russian Revolution and Lenin, as well
Darlene O. Demandante, “Aesthetics, Politics, and the Embodied Political Subject,” p. 143.
Ibid., p. 144.
52
Obviously, there are technological developments that enable new or different modes of artistic expression suchas photography and digital arts.
50
51

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

50

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

as in the pursuit of social recognition (on the part of the disaffected middle class as integral tofascism) to justify political and social violence. 53
Ironically, there is a certain transposition of means and goals within the traditional
oppositions of the broader political spectrum at the moment. The left has seemingly abandoned
the heritage of the Russian Revolution while the far-right has appropriated its anti-status-quo
spirit. 54 As David Ost puts it: “Today Lenin is often appropriated by the right. Not theconservative right but a reactionary, radical populist right that has suddenly burst back into
relevance by the sputtering crisis of neoliberalism.” 55 The populist far-right has looked to thecommunist revolutionary leader and authoritarian figure of Lenin in admiration for his“determination to attain state power… [and] to smash [the system].” 56 It is this sentiment ofwanting to destroy the system and reconfigure state power for their own ends that thecontemporary versions of fascist movements take from Lenin’s legacy. While they certainly
disregard the ultimate goal of leftist revolution this demonstrates that nothing is to be excluded
with regard to what fascist movements might want to co-opt in order to further their goals. And
this is not limited to the sphere of political revolution. As Ost points out, the antiinstitutionalism and anti-intellectualism of far-right movements can be traced back to thecultural revolutions of the Soviet Union in the wake of Lenin’s death. 57 While the Soviets
purged the supposedly bourgeoise intelligentsia from their universities and cultural institutionsin an effort to create a truly proletarian culture, the far-right has worked to curtail the pluralistic
university which enshrines the liberal-progressive left.58
Fascist movements appropriate not only leftist revolutionary strategies; to justify their
violent agendas, they also draw on the liberal ideas of self-recognition. Cécile Lavergne argues
that violence can be a justified and meaningful form of political protest only when it gains a
recognition for those who are oppressed in some way. 59 The point here is that, if all otheravenues for recognition have been blocked, violence is the last resort for political expression.
In this regard, Lavergne notes, fascist movements draw on a provision in the social philosophyof Axel Honneth that “if subjects and groups construct their identities and achieve a degree of
autonomy only through struggles for recognition, then it means that there might be a moral
justification for violence.”60 The justificatory motive here is Hegelian in the sense in which
there is a fundamental struggle for politico-social recognition and when the nonviolent formsof this struggle are exhausted the only option left is violence in some form. Two sides ofviolence are acknowledged here: one that denies the recognition of the self (trauma), and onethat continually asserts this recognition (action). 61 In this sense, self-identity – “the way inDavid Ost, “The surprising right-wing relevance of the Russian Revolution.” Constellations: An International
Journal of Critical and Democratic Thought, Vol. 24 (2017), p. 516.
54
Ibid., p. 516.
55
Ibid., p. 516.
56
Ibid., p. 517.
57
Ibid., p. 522.
58
Ibid., p. 522.
59
Cécile Lavergne, “Questioning the Moral Justification of Political Violence: Recognition Conflicts, Identities
and Emancipation,” Critical Horizons, Vol. 12, no. 2 (2011), p. 211.
60
Ibid., p. 212.
61
Ibid., p. 213.
53

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

51

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

which individuals themselves see their own singularity and worth” 62 – appears as integral to thejustification of violence and fascist movements make use of it for their own ends anddevelopment.
What the apparent popularity of fascist movements points to is a loss of thecharacteristic self-identity of the middle class. If the 20th century was the century of the middleclass, the 21st century now appears to be the century of its disappearance. Here we can recall
the characteristic frustration of the middle class from Umberto Eco’s discussion of fascism.
This frustration is a result of a certain lack of, or violence to, the self-identity of the middleclass individual. Typically, the members of the middle class see themselves as the primarysocial group of a liberal democratic society, and they are the first group whose rights areextended in full. But as the society further liberalizes and more social groups (the working class,
women, racial, religious, and other minorities) have their rights extended, a considerable
number of the members of the middle class perceive this as an assault on their position. Here, I
do not mean to say that this is what makes them fascist but that it provides for theirpredisposition to fascist thought. Thus, looking back to ‘when times were good’, they could
reimagine and see the conservative past through rose-tinted lenses. It is to be noted here thatmuch of what is happening in such a retrospection is a kind of aesthetic perception. In a sense,much of the middle class finds itself in the position of romanticizing both how their world was
before other people started sharing in its socio-political wealth and how they might return totheir dominant social position in that world. This is where the fascists enter the stage to appeal
to the middle-class sense of an average ‘working person,’ despite the fact that they are anything
but such people (we recall how fascism originates ideologically in elite, conservative
intelligentsia). Thus, I am back again to the theme of paradoxes that reinforces the populist
elitism which fascism entails. These paradoxes do not seem to bother much of the middle class,not least because people are not fundamentally logical automatons but are looking for a way toreassert their identity. This reassertion now is not done by way of logical analysis orconstruction but by an assertion of their recognition.
The use of ‘looking back’ with its intrinsic aesthetic aspect is important here. In
accordance with Jacques Rancière’s conception of aesthetics as utilized within our perceptionsof social realities, aesthetics can be seen as integral to politics. It is aesthetics in this sense thattakes on a formalistic character and creates an artistic hegemony which crystallizes in theformation of fascist art. Thus, along the lines of this aesthetics as politics, which promotes aparticular type of artistic hegemony, fascist art advances and reinforces the totalitarian natureof its political project, while also demonstrating that aesthetics and politics together enact acycle of continuous mutual reinforcement. A result of this political appropriation of aesthetics
is that art fails to disrupt fascism because, even if it reveals the paradoxes of fascism, fascism’s
synthetic and paradoxical nature weakens the effects of these disruptions by subsuming thepotentially disruptive art into its own project. The question that arises here is: Is there anythingat all that art can offer for an antifascist project, if art is at the constant risk of being co-opted
by the fascist movements?

62

Ibid., p. 214.

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

52

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

Fascism’s resilience to artistic disruption reveals fundamental shortcomings of its
liberal critique. As Gramsci puts it, “liberalism’s weakness ... is the bureaucracy – i.e. thecrystallisation of the leading personnel – which exercises coercive power, and at a certain point
it becomes a caste.”63 Artistic hegemonies produce a similar effect: they create their own artistic
bureaucracy that promotes what is deemed socially acceptable, but this bureaucracy in turn
becomes a source of weakness as well. More particularly, in a liberal-capitalist economic
system this weakness is rooted in that such bureaucratized hegemonies are largely motivatedby profit. When art is tied to what will create the most profit (as opposed to the sort of artistic
expression which is motivated by art qua art), it loses its ability to reveal the paradoxes ofhegemony and social order. Likewise, when this ability is lost, fascism can much more easily
turn art into a tool for the purpose of establishing its own political hegemony. Art, then, would
not be in a position to advance the sort of radical aesthetics as politics envisioned by Rancière.
Demandante writes that “the definition of politics as having to do with challenging hierarchies
and changing the distribution of the sensible through the assertion of equality by individual
subjects and communities, as well as Rancière’s focus on the writings of the proletarians in his
archival work, demonstrate the connection that he proposes between aesthetics and politics.” 64
But if fascist movements are able to co-opt art and integrate it into a cultural hegemony, thenart would in fact do the opposite – it would fortify the fascist political project and its totalitarian
status. It is therefore only by extricating artistic work from the motivations of profit andhierarchical hegemonies that art could achieve the kind of political disruption which Rancière
conceived of as proper to democracy. For art to function in the aesthetic-political process it
must be able to disrupt hierarchies, not become subsumed within them.
Now even if art were able to properly disrupt fascist political projects, it would still needto deal with fascism’s synthetic and paradoxical nature. While this may be more difficult for
the totalitarian side, it still poses the question of how we might be able to engage in an efficient
disruption of right-wing authoritarianism. Jules Simon interprets Walter Benjamin’s notion of‘authentic art’ as presenting “experiences indirectly and thereby as resistance to or negation ofa totalizing, fascist political world” pointing that “one of the functions of ‘good’ or authentic
art is to create shock and renewal in such a way that a process of judging of the world begins
to occur.”65 There is still a sense of disruption here but instead of targeting the hegemonic orderdirectly, the disruption is aimed at the audience of art. Because fascism appeals to the selfidentity of its typical political subject, that self-identity is what must be disrupted. Visceral andshocking reactions reveal the problems that are truly unavoidable for fascist movements. Thisis linked to the idea of embodiment discussed earlier – while fascist projects may use embodied
subjects as a means for advancing their own agendas, art that demonstrates to the audience ofpolitical subjects their own embodiment serves to properly disrupt the fascist movements
themselves. Indeed, when its political hegemony is disrupted, fascism would simply venture to
co-opt that disruption within its own synthetico-paradoxical project. But the aesthetic disruption
at an individual level along the avenues of art can disrupt fascism’s very capacity for co-opting
Antonio Gramsci, “Selections from the Prison Notebooks,” p. 169.
Darlene O. Demandante, “Aesthetics, Politics, and the Embodied Political Subject,” pp. 142-143.
65
Jules Simon, “Aesthetics and Politics: Reflections on Love and the Origins of Fascism,” Filosofia, Vol. 63(2018), p. 144.
63
64

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

53

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

because it disturbs the process of recognition on which the fascist movements draw in their
totalizing advances.
Artistic expression will not disrupt the specific hegemonic structure of fascism, becauseeven if art forms its own aesthetic hegemony fascism would quickly co-opt it. This is indeed
an apparent paradox in fascism’s operation that allows it to appropriate something that reveals
its inconsistencies and contradictions to its own advantage. But fascism can and must be
disrupted at the lower level of individuals. Art can possibly achieve this through Benjamin’s
conception of ‘good art’, on the condition that in this process we cannot assign a gatekeepingrole for what is considered good art. For, such a gatekeeping itself creates hegemonies – ofwhat is considered good or acceptable – on its own. That is, when art advances such type ofvalue judgment, even if it does so in its own way, it becomes a part of a totalizing process andthus a totalized tool of a hierarchy. Thus, if good art (or indeed art itself) is to disrupt theaesthetic-political perception of its audience, all the barriers which might restrict it ought to bebroken down, in service of what can thus be called an anarcho-aesthetic project. In our view, itis this kind of decentralized anarcho-aesthetic art that can help reveal the synthetico-paradoxical
nature of fascism at an individual level and that can thus help establish the self-recognition
proper of the subject as such.
V: Conclusion
Fascist movements are not necessarily exemplified by any particular type of regime or statesystem. They are socio-political movements and process-concepts. Their unique syntheticoparadoxical character enables them to synthesize social, political, and aesthetic approaches ofother movements that may even be radically opposed to them. Indeed, the paradoxes that
constitute the character of fascist movements do not appear to disturb them as one might expect
at first. Instead, such paradoxes appear to fuel their advancement in a synthesis that fosters astronger bond with the variety of populations they target. The liberalization of modern
democratic societies feeds into the machine of the fascist movements allowing them tocapitalize on the vulnerability of a middle class that is alienated from its own self-identity.
Fascist movements take advantage of the middle class precisely by co-opting its idealized
aesthetics. This co-opting, which is part of a process of establishing artistic hegemony,completes the fascist project and reinforces its totalitarian logic on a broader scale in society
and culture. While in the perspective of art we backed up with Rancière and Benjamin artistic
expression seems to provide a way to disrupt fascist movements, we also acknowledge that the
totalization of art in a liberal-capitalist hegemony would prevent it from disrupting fascism ina meaningful way and at the same time from safeguarding itself from being co-opted andsubsumed back into the fascist political project.
Thus, the positive answer to the question at issue here can only be a radical
decentralization of artistic expression, in which art has abandoned any possible gatekeeping
function. That is, only when all the barriers on what is considered ‘good art’ are removed, suchthat individuals are free to create and experience art as individuals, only then a visceral andembodied reaction to art becomes possible that disrupts the fascist project without being coopted by it. By liberating art from any artistic hegemony, and thus allowing individuals toengage with art in a kind of personalized artistic experience, individuals can disentangle

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

54

Volume V, No. 01/2022

DAVID CASCIOLAThe Synthetico-Paradoxical Character of Fascism: Can Art Disrupt the Fascist Project?

themselves from the nets of the fascist movements. This disentanglement could lead to arecognition which is not necessarily asserted through an explicitly political movement, but arecognition asserted through expression of individual’s own particularity, a recognition which
as such liberates them from the totalizing conditions of fascism.

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

55

Volume V, No. 01/2022