Re: <nettime> Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

I don't know about all of you, but from time to time the US situation
overcomes me, plunges me into painful depression. Never more intensely than
in this moment, as crimes against humanity unfold against the background of
unaddressed ecological breakdown. But you have to engage, you have to work
with the tools you've got and find new ones.

I have two convictions about politics. The first is that the ultimate
political dispute will always be over control of the state. The second is
that the current figure of the corporate state is not only totally corrupt,
but worse, it has taken over civil society in an attempt to literally
program people's thinking and behavior. I think one should withdraw from
this debased field of really-existing civil society (which is now being
reduced to AI slop), abandon any shred of belief in the political
mainstream, and create-sustain-strengthen whatever form of intimate
conversation is possible. First, to recover the capacity to think and feel,
and then ideally, use those capacities to act on the threats and potentials
of the time. People are doing this in many different ways, trying to find
out who they are or could become when the future is curtailed, yet we live
on.

To act is to confront the capitalist state, which never ceases to act on
you. Analyzing the current figure of authoritarianism and its embrace by
large numbers is essential. Earlier debates about "whether this is fascism
or not" may have missed the mark, first by assuming that fascism is
something known and recognizable from history, second by assuming it is
essentially different from (neo)liberalism, and third, by underestimating
the psycho-social damage that the latter has done to everyone, enabling
social decay. Anton Jaeger's book Hyperpolitics goes some way toward
characterizing today's atomization and dissociation, but only from an
objective viewpoint, chiefly with statistics. But that places you at a kind
of neutral, abstract remove, and it culminates in self-objectification
(which statistic am I?). Jaeger spurred me to read Alberto Toscano's more
significant philosophical book, Late Fascism (2024).

Writing in advance of Trump II, Toscano does something very compelling.
First, he rehearses the most probing analyses of historical fascisms,
particularly in the writings of Ernst Bloch, Georges Bataille and Theodor
Adorno, with a constant movement between their ideas and context and what
one can see in the present. This is stunning, because if you're like me,
you read all those authors, but long before these specific aspects of their
writing became so applicable to the present. Adorno's "Freudian Theory and
the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda," supplemented by Jairus Banaji’s
analyses of serialized alienation and sectarian violence in India, is the
most intense read, because it gets at how a hollow simulacrum of belief can
be performed by its nihilistic adherents, as if in a reality show I'm
tempted to add, but to the point of bloodshed. Toscano actually minimizes
the interpretations of Bloch and Bataille, but to me they illuminate
particular strands - like the Christian longing for some utopian community
outside the degraded forms of the present, and especially Bataille's idea
that fascism integrates and channels the unruly violence of people who
could never be integrated to the smooth, rationalized, law-governed world
of liberal industrialism.

After that tour de force, Toscano says there may be a better way to
understand contemporary authoritarianism - by looking at the concrete and
steel of the US carceral state, and by reading the analysis that Black
radicals like George Jackson and Angela Davis produced inside those prisons
in the 1970s. This is where he gets the notion of a hyperbolic preventative
fascism that is triggered by the actions of a weak and undeveloped left -
pretty much exactly what we are looking at in the US, not only because of
the backlash against the scattered and ineffectual "decade of protest" in
the 2010s, but also the perceived threat to capital represented by
half-assed climate-change mitigation strategies or hypocritical DEI
initiatives in the corporate workplace. From behind bars in the 70s, Black
prisoners theorized the "anti-state state" that exalts the freedom of
capital while throwing huge organizational resources into war, policing and
carceral repression. Toscano delves into Du Bois and other Black radicals -
George Padmore, Walter Rodney, Cedric Robinson, Ruth Gilmore - to
substantiate Jackson and Davis. As Toscano writes: "The lived experience of
state violence of Black political prisoners and its theorisation grounds a
theory of US fascism and racial capitalism capable of interrupting narrow
and clichéd images of fascism in mainstream political thought."

A third chapter - which is as far I've got - develops the notion of the
"anti-state state" by looking into the mid-twentieth century relations
between authoritarianism and liberalism in Italy and Germany. This is not
only about the well-known convergence between Italian and German
industrialists and their respective authoritarian political parties -
reduxed today by a vast swathe of US capital - but more incisively, it
zeros in on the heavily racialized Nazi ideal of freedom, which builds out
and rationalizes the contradiction between the individual's total
submission to a leader and his or her simultaneous self-deputization as a
violent autonomous agent on the ground. If you've had to confront anything
like the Proud Boys or the Three Percenters, you're gonna recognize that.
More surprisingly, Toscano quotes a French historian, Johann Chapoutot, who
unearths a whole Nazi managerialism based on these ideas of racially
granted freedom. "In the managerial register that, according to Chapoutot,
was promoted by the Nazi non-state, ‘German freedom’ was defined by a
performance principle (Leistungsprinzip). The individual SS officer was
given maximum initiative and flexibility in executing their mission, while
the community of the people was defined as a Leistungsgemeinschaft, a
‘community of achievement’." This is the dark affiliation between Nazism
and contemporary corporate managerialism, which continually proclaims its
absolute distinction from authoritarianism while extinguishing human
self-awareness in the pursuit of meaningless productivism. Toscano
comments: "The very possibility of a fascist freedom – and the unsettling
imperative to reflect on the abiding potentialities of white,
settler-colonial, propertied, masculinist figurations of freedom – is
excised by the discourse on ‘totalitarianism’." Now, as the leftwing DSA
surges in the US and Muslim candidates start entering politics, breaking
the stranglehold of the Israel lobby and the grotesque verbiage about the
"defense of the free world," we will see whether the totalitarian boogeyman
can still disguise whatever we call the new authoritarianism, so profoundly
illuminated by the critiques of the past, yet so refractory to simple
categorical analysis.

Late Fascism is a lot better than anything by Timothy Snyder or especially,
Anne Appelbaum. Anyone who thinks that the structure of liberal democracy
has not produced the current authoritarianism has apparently missed the
career of Elon Musk. Sure I want Ukraine to escape domination by Russia.
But not in order to reinforce a social order that condemns us all to
repression, war and climate change.

OK, 'nuff said. Anyone else who wants to comment on or refute this book, or
raise some other, better interpretation, you have a reader.

best, Brian

On Sun, Aug 2, 2026 at 5:14 AM Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de>
wrote:

> folks,
>
> thanks for this interesting discussion. It's good to see that there is a
> debate about developing a more differentiated understanding of the
> current political regimes––one that differentiates between the various
> countries and spheres of relations (and one that recognises that
> "fascism" is not necessarily the most appropriate term for everything
> that is going on).
>
> It was curious that after reading Brian's post this morning, I heard a
> radio interview with the Russian oppositional politician, Yulia
> Galjamina, who claims that, in her view, it is important to understand
> that the current Russian regime is not totalitarian, but authoritarian.
>
>
> https://share.deutschlandradio.de/dlf-audiothek-audio-teilen.html?audio_id=dira_F9BFDCAA8CC611F17BDEB883034C2FA0
>
> [orig. Russian with German translation; this particular section starts
> around min 14:00]
>
> 'Galjamina explained that, like any authoritarian regime, the Russian
> system is based on two pillars: the depoliticisation and atomisation of
> citizens. That is why every form of collective action and community ties
> is needed. “Consequently, simply setting up a book club or organising a
> neighbourhood festival is already a political act,” added the
> 53-year-old Muscovite.' (DLF editorial)
>
> She also makes the point that people outside of Russia should be
> thinking of Russia not as a homogeneous block: she says that it is Putin
> and his regime who are everybody's enemy, and his party now probably has
> a mere 16% of support in the population.
>
> ... another take on a different kind of hegemonic situation...
>
> best,
> -a
>
>
> Am 01.08.26 um 20:54 schrieb Brian Holmes via nettime-l:
> > Hello all -
> >
> > I too noticed that Guardian article, and because of this discussion I
> just
> > read the short book in a single sitting. I can see why it is being
> devoured
> > by the young British left, because it recounts generational (or really,
> > decadal) political experiences that are probably almost impossible to
> > reconstruct for people in their twenties today. If you lived through all
> > that, however, it makes for a queasy couple hours...
> >
> > There is no new theory here, unfortunately, in a book whose most
> important
> > reference is Putnam's Bowling Alone. It is a sober and detailed
> examination
> > of political disaffiliation on both left and right, paralleled by the
> rise
> > of purely electoral parties that raise money from the corporate/financial
> > sector to produce simulacral majorities - so if you never understood
> that,
> > read it. It does contain the important observation that the conservative
> > right, in the US at least, has been able to partially revive some of the
> > old civic forms. But it was published too recently to offer any insight
> > into the nascent resocialization, particularly of neighborhood life, that
> > the left has started carrying out in resistance to ICE. And it has
> nothing
> > at all to say about the strategies and organizational forms of
> oligarchical
> > capital, especially but not only coming out of Silicon Valley, which are
> > the most astonishing and threatening developments of the last decade.
> >
> > If you want to go further with the understanding of contemporary fascism,
> > Alberto Toscano has a better theory, which does basically confirm
> Jaeger's
> > undeveloped notion of Bonapartism (see
> > https://communispress.com/vectors-of-fascism). Toscano finds a relative
> > absence, today, of the mass adherence to the productivist and
> > redistributive policies that characterized Italian fascism as a national
> > hegemonic project (I mean, one that convinces large numbers of people
> with
> > a relatively coherent ideology). Instead he sees the current repressive
> > violence in the US as directly generated by the state, raising the
> specter
> > of "domination without hegemony." Well, that's not even a specter
> anymore,
> > it's a plan. What's fortunately not happening is ideological
> consolidation
> > and a willingness of half the country to go out and do what, for a while,
> > it looked like they might. Namely, go out and shoot at the left in the
> > streets. That would be real adherence to the extremist ideology that is
> > being overtly promulgated by the state (NSPM-7 etc). It could still
> happen
> > after the next elections, but it looks decreasingly likely.
> >
> > Toscano speaks about a preemptive counter-revolution, giving a lot more
> > emphasis to the threat to capital that was posed by the 2010's "decade of
> > protest." That's more realistic and more pertinent than Jaeger's
> > Baudrilardean portrait of febrile political excitement undergirded by
> > nothing at all. It's obvious now that there are three solid legs to
> > Trumpian Bonapartism: old school extractivist militarism, the bid for AI
> > dominance and the cryptocurrency exit from national economies. All these
> > things have cost Trump the wobbly fourth leg of populist conservatism,
> > which is kinda reassuring - except that the whole point of Bonapartism is
> > to use the populist media and the electoral process as a stepping-stone
> to
> > the authoritarian takeover of the state. That's clearly the plan in the
> US
> > now.
> >
> > Jaeger is totally right about the disaffiliation. He's also right that
> > political parties dependent on oligarchical funds for the "big tent"
> > simulacra of electoral campaigns are too hypocritical to chart any course
> > for the future. Yet it's strange that he doesn't look into that future -
> > really not at all. Democratic societies are presently confronted with
> > enormous threats: domestic polarization, global war, climate change,
> > frantic movements of distressed populations, the list goes on. Until
> > recently, these were conveniently solved by denialism. But in the US
> today,
> > war and genocide, murderous militias generated directly by the state and
> > the staggering corporate attempt to ram AI down our throats as the
> ultimate
> > tool of subjective fragmentation and perfected mind control have finally
> > given very concrete present-day features to the broader historical
> critique
> > of racialized class society that marked the 2010s and culminated in the
> > George Floyd uprising. There is both subjective desire and material need
> to
> > overcome the Putnam-Baudrillard quandary of hyperindividual withdrawal
> > agitated by networked passions. Multiple and expanding crises - from
> > droughts and wildfires to wars and coming food shortages - offer
> political
> > opportunities. The only way forward is to use these crisis situations to
> > break the paralyzing hypocrisy of pseudo mass parties piloted by
> oligarchs.
> > Otherwise it's state of emergency and authoritarianism forever.
> >
> > Jaeger's book is not a bad one. It's kind of a primer in recent political
> > sociology, bravo for that. But it has no analysis of future crossroads,
> no
> > vision and therefore no capacity to help generate the new organizational
> > forms that we desperately need. In short, it's an explainer. And being so
> > short itself - well, it's another fascinating easy read. Give it two
> hours
> > and see what you think.
> >
> > best, Brian
>
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