Thread by @joergscheller1

My essay "Civilizationist Invectivity. The Sophistication and Hybridization of Right-Wing #Populism in Times of Post-Democracy, Post-Photography, and #SocialMedia" was published in this reader, edited by @LKInvectivity & Thorsten König: @mlewandowsky

Key aspects:
1. The hybridization of right-wing populism correlates with the hybridization of #photography and is reinforced by social media.
2. Precursors to hybrid right-wing populism can be found in the hybrid aesthetics of #Fascism when avant-garde art dynamized politics.

Like today’s alt-right, the early 20th century Italian Fascists despised traditional conservatism and stressed that their #ideology was all about movement. It is salient to underline that avant-garde art is not left-wing by origin, as it is often assumed. That's wishful thinking.

3. The divisive communicative style of right-wing populism is superimposed by a playful, hybrid aesthetic. Of all things, the typically postmodernist, purportedly antitotalizing strategies of quotation, pastiche, appropriation, mash-up, hybridization are revaluated as means

to transcend the confines of traditionel right-wing milieus and thus influence culture at large in a possibly totalizing manner. In this regard, the identity-bending aesthetics of e.g. #CindySherman reappear in Identitarian visual propaganda with a view to fortifying #identity.

4. Whereas the binary logic of right-wing mentalities is intact on the ideological level, the "us" that is pitted against "them" has become more elusive with "#civilization" not replacing, but complementing and complicating the "#nation" (cf. @wrbucla's concept #Civilizationism).

5. Due to their intellectual and artistic cultural connotations, #cats can be interpreted as the appropriate totem animals of contemporary Civilizationists & Alt-rights. Cf. de Benoiat's appreciation of cats or Desmond Morris' one-liner: "artists like cats; soldiers like dogs".

6. Metadata, in a literal as well as metaphorical sense, is the new index. Metadata is key in the analysis of recent Civilizationist populist movements as well as contemporary (post-)photographic images: the relation between signifier and signified, between image and meaning,

between cause and effect, is less stable, less "evident" than ever before. Just like modernist and avant-garde art affords extensive research and interpretation, the new, hybrid populist imagery affords strong competences in art (history), visual culture, and media studies.

"Benoist's", obviously.