Published in full on the Transmediale Journal
transmediale.de/resource/journal
…...The Revenge of Folk Politics……..
2016 witnessed the revenge of “folk politics”. Of all the assumptions that were
overturned by the success of the Alt-right insurgency, one of the most
surprising
is the widespread belief on the left that we have outgrown grassroots media
activism.
Increasingly, activists have come to be seen as victims of “communicative
capitalism’s
perfect lure in which subjects feel themselves to be active, even as their
every action
reinforces the status quo. A general assumption has taken root along the lines
that if
these interventions posed any genuine threat to the status quo, they would be
immediately suppressed. However, the success of the Alt-right in using the full
armory
of tactical media in the meme wars of 2016 not only repudiated this assumption
it also
reminded us that there is nothing intrinsically progressive about transgressive
subcultures
or the disruptive aesthetics of the avant-garde….
Background
It is important to see the rise of the Alt-right against the background of a
profound political
reorientation based on two parallel strategies; firstly, the US far right has
effectively occupied
established leftist counter-cultural territories, deploying tactics of
subversive humour and
transgression while moveing to replace the traditional conservative Right. This
was the point
empahsised by Florian Cramer in the discussion as he described a new kind of
politics in
which the "fire walls separating traditional conservatism from the new
generation of far right
extremism as part of a larger tendency to effectively replace mainstream
conservatism”.
These short paragraphs are extracted from an essay building on earlier
reflections on the
issues raised in Better Thik Twice: Subcultures, Alt-s and the Politics of
Transgression a
conversation between Florian Cramer and Angela Nagle in Transmediale 2018 face
value..
read full text https://transmediale.de/content/the-revenge-of-folk-politics
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