Jean Baudrillard’s highly controversial book America (published in French 1986, English translation 1988) constitutes the point of departure for an undergraduate class writing project which began in 2020. Students were encouraged to respond to the following prompt: what would an America 2.0 look like today in the midst of the Trump presidency? Here we have assembled and arranged the numerous fragments contributed by the students and the editors as a collaborative enterprise in thinking and writing differently.
This article focuses on two examples of sociological writing that have attracted wide public interest: Didier Eribon’s best-selling memoir about his working-class origins, Returning to Reims, and Hartmut Rosa’s door-stopper work of social theory, Resonance, featured on the cover of the German news magazine Stern. These two very different works – one indebted to Bourdieu and Foucault, the other located in the tradition of the Frankfurt School – share certain qualities. First, a formal feature I’ll call scale-shifting: a leavening of theoretical claims with vivid examples and resonant details. And second, a commitment to doing justice to the phenomenological depth of ordinary persons’ self-understanding. Both writers, in other words, approach the world as deserving of a poet’s attentive and appreciative eye as well as a theorist’s critical gaze.
How to move against the rise of the far-right and seemingly unstoppable autocratic leaders in many Western liberal democracies? Antifascism’s interest in the built environment is often limited to the collection of address data of right-wing extremists with the aim of locating its enemies. In this piece, I write with fascism and violence through vignettes of urban situatedness. I adopt an eclectic approach, engaging with diverse theories of violence and establishing loose connections between classical sociology and fascist urbanisation, liberalism in practice and historical fascism, and material aesthetics and right-wing spaces. In so doing, I highlight endemic forms of state and capitalist violence and their spatial manifestations of ghettoisation, beautification and overcoding. Acknowledging the limits of factual knowledge and liberal appeals to the truth in breaking through fascist worldviews of domination, the architecture of the text uses a circular infrastructure that connects various parties: ‘they’ (Twitter users), ‘I’ (author), ‘you’ (Walter Benjamin), and numerous ‘we’ who are thrown together in urban environments. Rather than developing a linear argument that tries to persuade fascists, I explore writing as a collective political practice that refutes totalising accounts. With the aim of opening meaning-makings through returning to and reworking numerous views, I respond to a spiral of violence with a movement that is organised around a shared commitment to an anti-oppressive, non-hierarchical world; a movement that is out of someone’s control and that spirals towards collective liberation.
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