At What Rate, Fascism’s Perceptibility

Photo by Karsten Würth on Unsplash

Here in SW Virginia, it was 81-degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday, the day after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, which yielded a sweeping mandate–a mandate damningly, tragically scored with misogyny, xenophobia, and economic desperation. Woo, don’t catch you slippin’ now. Bracketing momentarily the political climate, the unseasonably hot and dry weather of late tends to slip us into passing small talk about how uncanny it is, this late fall heat, to be sweating in the sun this time of year as the hens roam close gobbing grubs. We haven’t lived through the burning up of this planet before, most of us. We’re in its midst, the changes at a scale (and of an ideological order) imperceptible, what Timothy Morton theorized as a hyperobject, the everywhere all around and in motion planetslide whose signs are rising, whose mildest symptoms tempt us into grimly ironic reflections, “sun sure is warm,” “nice day for shepherding the flock,” “don’t remember the last time it was this hot in early November.”

But laxly waste and exhaust-addled ecocide is just a parallel, intertwined example to grasp the rebound of fascism, in that although perceptible, the most tangible forms of evidence (e.g., stark articulations direct from the mouth of the winning candidate, or concepts of plans drawn up in the Project 2025 report, an especially “rigid discombobulation”) are encased in a squishy frame of might-mean-nothing. In other words, overt threats and grim warnings can be dusted aside as meaningless, forgivable bloviation (“he long-talks and says lots of random stuff he doesn’t mean”). Many of his proxies and surrogates filled the air in the second half of the week with shrugs of uncertainty; “his waste and exhaust, though noncommittal and vague, is notoriously well-received by his supporters.”

But what even is fascism? If only it was as easy as pointing our cell phones at the sky and letting their lenses do the work of casting it in a purple-pink halo, the way we do with the Northern Lights, we’d know-know. See? Look here. The trouble, in part, seems to be from the inexact matches among the variations on fascism, their family resemblances abiding both similarity and alibi; alibi, or that skeptical, dusting-aside loophole that hedges and qualifies, ultimately dismissing the premise that fascism is upon us, queued up and substantively in motion.

In his 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism,” Umberto Eco, who was born in 1932 and who grew up in Mussolini-era Italy, wrote about the common-ish features shared among fascism’s subtly shifted forms. If you, like I do, perceive that something deeply troubling is afoot, something dangerous, misguided, and poisonous, “Ur-Fascism” is a must-read; the contextual resonances add up; the fourteen features of fascism listed in the second half of the essay point a blazing, blinking arrow to the past eight years, to now, to January 2025’s inauguration, to this is US. A friend sent Eco’s essay to me late this week with the purple-pink haloed message, “so we are on the same page.”

An excerpt from Eco:

During those twenty years, the poetry of Montale and other writers associated with the group called the Ermetici was a reaction to the bombastic style of the regime, and these poets were allowed to develop their literary protest from within what was seen as their ivory tower. The mood of the Ermetici poets was exactly the reverse of the fascist cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated their blatant, even though socially imperceptible, dissent because the Fascists simply did not pay attention to such arcane language.

All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant. Gramsci was put in prison until his death; the opposition leaders Giacomo Matteotti and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was abolished, the labor unions were dismantled, and political dissenters were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a mere fiction and the executive power (which controlled the judiciary as well as the mass media) directly issued new laws, among them laws calling for preservation of the race (the formal Italian gesture of support for what became the Holocaust).

The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.

Now go read the whole thing.

A Non-Scientist Would Say

From Eco’s The Infinity of Lists, a book whose recommendation I poached several months ago from Facebook:

But, from its discovery onwards, eighty years passed before the platypus was defined as a monotreme mammal; in the course of that time it had to be decided how and where to classify it, and until that moment it remained, rather disturbingly, something the size of a mole, with little eyes, front paws with four claws of the kind paws, with a tail, a duck’s bill, paws that it used to swim and to dig its burrow, the capacity to produce eggs and that of feeding its young with milk from its mammary glands.

This is exactly what a non-scientist would say about the animal upon observing it. And it’s worth noting that through this (incomplete) description by list of properties, a person would still be able to tell a platypus from an ox, whereas saying that it is a monotreme mammal would enable to one to recognize it should he come across one. (218)

I say “platypus” far too often to mean something is unfit for well-established schema. The platypus identification crisis Eco explains in this selection is not unlike what happens when, whether or not we have arrived yet at the name “amoeba,” Elkins’ scientist puzzles over how to decide upon words for such unexpected visual patterns. Yet a technical-symbolic complex presses ahead, producing totalizing references, such as “monotreme mammal,” that concentrate, reduce, and mystify a glut of describable features. The move to summary-phrase is efficient in the sense that it reduces word counts and also shrinks audience. This is another way of saying it promotes specialization.

Eco visits upon summaries and lists (thick with tropes in the example above…mole-like, duck’s bill) a historical tension:

On the one hand, it seems that in the Baroque period people strove to find definitions by essence that were less rigid than those of medieval logic, but on the other hand the taste for the marvellous led to the transformation of every taxonomy into lists, every tree into a labyrinth. In reality, however, lists were already being used during the Renaissance to strike the first blows at the world order sanctioned by the great medieval summae. (245)

Summae, not quite in the same sense as “summary,” but not far off, either, in its interest in total coverage. Lists, though, are a different vehicle altogether. What summaries seek to contain, lists allow to breathe, to roam. Now, I’m not ready to say these conditions generalize to all summaries or all lists, but the contain-roam distinction–and much of Eco’s “illustrated essay” for that matter, is useful for thinking about what these abstract forms do differently, etc., and how they complement each other.

Platypus