Criticism and the Far Right (Reflections: Part 2)

    It's the German state of Brandenburg's elections this weekend, and as we are in the middle of this thrilling lurch to the right - where people elect Far Right governments in Europe that have not been seen since the 1940s - it's a good moment to stop and think. What's driving this?

But first, as a lot of media are skipping this point, and we have space here, we should first ask the radical questions of "what is the Far Right?", as that has a direct relationship with why I write criticism these days. Many people think they know what the Far Right is, but if they do, then few actually seem to be remembering why they are so dangerous. So I'll dedicate this first section to an ambitious brief overview.

    The Far Right

    "The Far Right" describes political movements which attempt to genereate societies of authority, control, and hierarchy. They do this though both active and passive promotion of violence, oppression, and exclusion, often through a mix of economic violence, military and institutional violence, and social coercion, using and exaggerating existing structures. Often these have heavily ideological components that inform their power structure, commonly:

- racial or ethnic supremacy (power structure favouring ethnicities, often white supremacy but not only), 

- patriarchy (or power structure favouring an idea of "man", often expressed in misogyny or violence against women and other genders), 

- xenophobia (power structure designed to exclude otherness), 

- religious supremacy (power structure that deploys religious institutions as tools to create submission), 

- nationalism (construction of an idea of state that produces submission and excludes other ideas), 

- "the family" (power structure designed for a particular image of family, especially one that favours child production), 

- ableism (power structure designed to favour an idea of the body or mind as a 'normal' one), 

- classism (here the Far Right can be a confusing mix, depending on what is convenient and to whether they are addressing workers or elites), and 

- sexual discrimination (power structure designed to favour a specific version of sexuality, commonly heterosexuality as this is most convenient for child production). 

(Centre-right or "small c conservatism", which I view as the dominant political force globally from 1991 until now, shares many of these ideas, but uses less direct means to achieve them, and focuses more on the "free market" as a tool).

All of these are normalising factors that create a version of the self that one should aspire to "fit in" to. If you don't fit into it, you are unable to share in the rewards of that structure, and may indeed - under extreme right-wing governments - find yourself accidentally sharing in its punishments. Because no-one actually fits the ideal of the Far Right, their objective is to create an 'aspiring to an ideal', and submission of the subject, who is never quite able to meet that ideal image. Their principle tool is a psychological one: shame, which is a deeply-rooted cause of human behaviour (not-coincidentally the primary tool of pick-up artists and abusers). When this shaming is seen on a wide scale, it creates systems of thinking and patterns of behaviour that define and reproduce that system of violence autonomously within societies, without the need for direct intervention from a state. Because high levels of state intervention are impractical (need too many resources), this "hands-off" approach is often the control mechanism favoured by Far Right governments, although some do make massive state interventions.

"Because no-one actually fits the ideal of the Far Right, their objective is to create an 'aspiring to an ideal', and submission of the subject, who is never quite able to meet that ideal image."

What I have just given is a really brief overview of the Far Right. I would describe this as not particularly controversial, and actually certain figures of the Far Right speak openly about using these tools to manipulate people: Donald Trump, who is a presidential candidate for re-election in the US this year (and a proto-far-right figure in the sense that he does not seem to understand the consequences of the tools he uses, only that they offer power), sometimes speaks directly about it, sometimes accidentally. The "Project 2025" document details these objectives and how it will be achieved. But they are often left unspoken, because of fear. 

Kiosk Festival Day 2.2, Day 3... and an epilogue on masculinity

Well it's a few weeks since Kiosk Festival 2024 subsided, and I'm well and truly sitting back at my desk in Berlin. The sun is shining, but beginning it's long goodbye, the trees' leaves beginning their calm twirl down to the flat floor, ushering in the empty, dark, industrial-strength refrigerator that is Berlin's winter. As people begin to wrap up their summer activities, it's a good chance to stare out the window and take stock, thinking about how the summer unfolded, making plans to protect oneself as best one can from the crisp incisions that winter brings.

I'll take the long-awaited opportunity to update on the second day of Kiosk Festival 2024 now, and in a few days, write the (also-long awaited) follow up to my original "reflections" post in July, this time on the theme of the Far Right and Criticism. It should be noted that Kiosk Festival this year exists among a frenzy of Far-Right activity: recently, the "Culture Minister" of Slovakia's Far Right government fired both the head of the National Theatre and the National Gallery, without any kind of adequate explanation (something about an accident on stage being "improperly handled"). But these are only the tips of icebergs, as Slovakia both flirts with and actualises a phase of shifting to a more authoritarian government, echoing pulses resonating across Europe, as governments trigger their various populations' protectionist impulses using the instrument of fear. 

The fear of 'the Other' is a political reaction that often drives the impulse for "invasion" - the theme of Kiosk 2024. Its justification is that strangeness is threatening, that boundaries must always be defended, that the dividing lines between self and other, us and them, are absolute and uncrossable. Yet we know, if we examine closely our experiences of being human, not only is this untrue, but that it denies the most pleasurable and meaningful parts of existing: those pleasant senses of trust, exchange, and togetherness that perhaps only culture and community can really bring. While it's true that over-extending ourselves can be self-destructive, Far Right proposals bring no answers to dilemmas, instead bringing solutions that are easy and brutal, boring and wrong.

In writing today, and so late, I've decided to pick and choose a little bit, for time allocation reasons. So it's apologies to many great shows: Unkulunkulu, a magical puppet theatre piece about a senile man travelling to the moon, as so often directed at children but - with a little coaxing of our wasted, tired imaginations - equally enjoyable to adults. And the closing show of the festival, Pinkbus, a rawcus queering of Sovak traditional signifiers. It's a novelty to see the Slovak national anthem performed with such genuine masculinity!

The two shows I'll focus on today are both from Slovak artists, one (Tomáš Janypka) based in Prague and the other (Roman Škadra) in Berlin. The shows have some similarities, so I'll put them in conversation with each other sometimes.

Lonesome Cowboy

The houselights dim, the hubbub dies down. The lights on stage go up. There stands the lonesome cowboy: dressed in white, leading against the pillar, his head bowed and covered by his oversized hat, as though masking some unspoken, deep sadness. Does he pine for some lost love? Does he search the desert for his own sense of self, lost among this vast, shifting sands? Or is he just a poser, performing some emotion that he never has the depth to truly feel?

 Photo: Natália Zajačiková

It's an iconic pose to open Lonesome Cowboy, drawn from Sergio Leone's cartoony portraits of Clint Eastwood in films such as For a Few Dollars More (1965), albeit updated for today's online community of aesthetic-driven, trope-obsessed viewers. And that first pose, held by performer/deviser Tomáš Janypka pretty much sums up the whole of Lonesome Cowboy, performed in Žilina following its premiere in Prague. The shallowness of the image is deconstructed and played with throughout the performance, undertaking a kind of 'call-and-response' with composer Tomáš Vtípil, (mostly on violin).