Bodily Stresses, Cultural Drives, Fascist Contagions

Abstract:While appreciating the role systemic shocks play in setting the stage for fascism, this essay focuses on molecular processes that help to turn systemic upheavals in particular directions. The idea is to explore how a fascist cohort coalesces, for its membership is never entirely reducible to an aggregation of race, class, gender or faith positions. To start, I review recent work in neuroscience and cultural theory on how embodied precursors to perception, judgment, and action unfold below cultural awareness. That account is then linked to bodily stresses and social binds faced by specific cohorts. Such a conjunction, under the right conditions, can be the formation of a spiritual assemblage ripened to embrace and enact fascist takeover attempts. Such an assemblage expresses the armored male syndrome, even when it overflows the class of angry white men who provide its basis. After drawing upon the film Glengarry Glen Ross to portray multimodal features of fascist contagion, I suggest that such processes are not only involved in fascist formations. Since there is never a vacuum on the visceral register of cultural life, the inversion of these influences at multiple social sites is essential to negotiating a democratic ethos within cultural institutions that both feed and exceed electoral politics.