On the Reissue of The Authoritarian Personality

Review of Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson & R. Nevitt Sanford in collaboration with Betty Aron, Maria Hertz Levinson, and William Morrow (2019) The Authoritarian Personality. With an Introduction by Peter E. Gordon. London/New York: Verso.

Neoliberalism as Frankenstein and an Unfinished Monster

Review of: Wendy Brown (2019) In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press. 249 pp.

Sensing the ‘Contemporary Condition’: The Chronopolitics of Sensor-Media

The article discusses the relevance of sensor-technologies as media. Beyond technical affordances sensors act as agents of implementing and activating a more-than-human sensorium within encompassing technoecologies of sensation. Outlining the onto-epistemological implications of being ‘in touch with’ sensor-media, the contribution raises questions of what it means to be included in an infrastructure of sensorial interfaces - not only of tech-assisted human-to-human or human-to-machine communication, but of unmanageable processes of machine-to-machine exchange. Delineating sensors as media necessitates reflections on the temporal relations that define the ‘contemporary condition’ of intensified global computation, technological interconnectedness and the ontogenesis of sensor-media milieus, their respective temporalities and concomitant (an)aesthetics of experienced time.

Crisis as the New Normal

Review of Jürgen Link, Normalismus und Antagonimus in der Postmoderne. Krise, New Normal, Populismus, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2018.

The "Primal Pseudos": Adorno's Concept of Nationalism

Even though the term “primal pseudos” appears only once in Theodor W. Adorno’s lecture History and Freedom, it is the key for the understanding of Adorno’s concept of nation and nationalism. In the aforementioned lecture the term “primal pseudos” describes the contradiction immanent in the concept of the nation. The critical investigation into the immanent contradiction of the concept of the nation discloses the impossibility of what nationalism wants rather than its falseness.

Instrumentalizing Antisemitism: Review of The Politics of Unreason

Review of Lars Rensmann. 2017. The Politics of Unreason. The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism. Albany: State University of New York Press.

The Post-Depressive Constellation: From Political Effervescence to the Rise of Right-Wing Authoritarianism in Brazil

On the basis of an analysis of Brazil’s political history from 2013 to the present, this essay advances the idea that the current rise of the far right – in that country and possibly elsewhere – can be understood as one among various political expressions of a ‘post-depressive constellation.’ Such a diagnosis takes its cue from analyses which, in the 1990s and 2000s, recognised in the rapid increase in the depression rates an index of major social transformations occurring in the last decades of the 20th century. The foregrounding of depression in clinical diagnoses was considered, then, the sign of a new social order: one in which individuals were faced with ever stronger requirements of self-responsibility and authentic self-realization (i.e., the demand of ‘being oneself’) in a context of declining social support and escalating inequality, competition and precariousness. Today, however, we seem to have reached a point at which the tensions of this order – which can be designated, metonymically, as the ‘depressive society’ – intensified to such an extent that its persistence appears to be seriously compromised. It is in this sense that we may speak of a post-depressive constellation: a situation in which the social psychological tensions of the depressive order have reached a peak, leading to a variety of reactions and struggles but not yet to the establishment of a new consensus and a stable institutional framework. While suggesting that such a diagnosis might be significant for understanding contemporary political processes in many parts of the world, this essay will focus on how these dynamics have unravelled in Brazil’s recent political life – from the mass demonstrations of June 2013 to the rise of new right-wing movements that culminated in the election of Jair Bolsonaro. The Brazilian case seems, indeed, particularly well-suited to examine the contours and outcomes of this possibly broader process. It allows, in particular, for the distinction of two political forms that have taken centre stage in the past years and can be understood as reactions to core tensions of the depressive order: ‘post-depressive effervescence’ (as it emerged in key moments of the June 2013 protests and their continuation in the following months) and ‘post-depressive authoritarianism’ (as it has progressively built up from the 2013 demonstrations to the election of Bolsonaro).

Over het belang van een politieke data-ethiek

Recensie van Miriam Rasch Frictie: Ethiek in tijden van dataïsme. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij (2020).

Belief Beyond Belief: On Fashwave’s Esoteric Future Past

This essay looks at the use of vernacular web culture by the new right. Specifically it focuses on how, in recent years, the new right appropriated a genre of web aesthetics known as ‘vapourwave’ to create the sub-genre of ‘fashwave’. Like vapourwave before it, fashwave taps into web cultural imaginary that is nostalgic for an imagined ‘cyberpunk’ past future — but while the former has been the subject of a monograph (Tanner 2016), very little has yet been written on the latter. Largely ignored within mainstream popular culture, these ‘—wave’ aesthetics flourish on the ‘deep vernacular web’ (de Zeeuw & Tuters 2019) of imageboards and web fora. As trivial as many fashwave memes may appear, this paper argues that they can be understood as the aesthetic manifestations of a contemporary renaissance in esoteric “traditionalism” — a discourse that posits an alternative theory of western culture, and which was influential on 20th century ideologues. The essay argues that fashwave transposes traditionalism’s fantasy of imagined past glories into an imagined future — one that is informed by the vapourwave’s distinctly vernacular nostalgia for masculine cyberpunk aesthetics.

The Rise of Neo-Illiberalism

This paper expands on the notion neo-illiberalism, signifying a symbiosis between neoliberal capitalism and variegated illiberal nationalisms, offering deeper reflections on its geopolitics, key drivers, and conceptual puzzles. It is argued that the West has entered an age of political illiberalization, replicating political operating logics of variegated illiberal(izing) regimes elsewhere, corroding domestic institutions and the western-dominated international liberal order, constituting an historic geopolitical shift. Although centrist parties have been variably attracted to the far right, particularly seeing center-right parties reinvent themselves as nationalist challengers to the ‘globalist’ status quo, in power they mostly radicalize the neoliberal encasement of capital, transforming a range of liberal-democratic institutions, procedures, and rights into illiberal political fortifications. Neoliberalism’s illiberal mutation is being realized amidst the intersections of rampant financial offshoring and digitization defining contemporary capitalism, allowing billionaire-class factions to ‘hack’ liberal-democratic governments and operating systems. With the rollout of data-driven technologies increasingly requiring the rollback of liberal protections by design, the fusion of digitizing capitalism and illiberal nationalisms is increasingly escaping accepted notions of liberalism.