{"id":941,"date":"2025-09-15T14:28:57","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T13:28:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/statesofculturalanalysis\/?page_id=941"},"modified":"2025-11-04T10:39:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T10:39:24","slug":"fascist-immediacy-fascist-mediations","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/statesofculturalanalysis\/fascist-immediacy-fascist-mediations\/","title":{"rendered":"Fascist Immediacy, Fascist Mediations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n
The Cultural Location of Fascism<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

By Charlotte Fraser<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Javier Milei, the far-right President of Argentina, rode to power wielding a chainsaw. The prop, which came out at rallies and appeared on campaign materials, functioned as an environmental metaphor. To Milei\u2019s supporters, it equated state bureaucracy with a wild, overgrown forest: land in need of improving. Regulation, it suggested, must be felled in a noisy and petrol-fumed blaze of action (this chainsaw was not electric). In January 2025, Milei gifted a chainsaw to Elon Musk in honour of his work at the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE). A month later, the power tool was invoked, if not wholeheartedly avowed, by Keir Starmer as he unveiled plans to cut bureaucracy and encourage investment in the UK. The chainsaw has become a symbol of what Richard Seymour calls \u2018muscular national capitalism<\/em>\u2019: a capitalism \u2018stripped of entitlements for minorities, or of trading or migratory arrangements that benefit non-nationals\u2019 and in which \u2018the ethic of popular war against national enemies limns, rather than replaces, the war of all against all in the pursuit of self-interest\u2019.1<\/a><\/sup> Like those of Milei\u2019s policies that gut the welfare state and deregulate trade, the chainsaw is phallic, dynamic, and no nonsense. After all, with a chainsaw, one man can bring down a 200-year-old tree in under ten seconds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like many political symbols, the chainsaw operates at a metaphorical level. The hammer and sickle are metonyms, bread and roses synecdoche, while the dead metaphor of \u2018making cuts\u2019 was brought back to life in the scissors that were waved at anti-austerity protests. Nevertheless, there is something particular about how Milei\u2019s chainsaw slowly erodes the figurative gap between violent destruction and administrative streamlining. What must be eliminated, in Milei\u2019s playbook, is not just regulation but state employees too \u2013 and the chainsaw communicates this with a side helping of intimidation. It makes what Milei calls the \u2018political caste\u2019 \u2018tremble\u2019, such that Milei\u2019s press team have been forced to deny that there is any literal content to the prop.2<\/a><\/sup> The power and agency delivered by Milei\u2019s chainsaw, which makes his political platform possible, thrives on his closing of the gap between the tenor of the metaphor and its vehicle, between wild-eyed demagogue and heavily armed vigilante.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If welfare reduction, deregulation, and militarisation are the chainsaw\u2019s political conscious, this curving towards literality reveals its unconscious. Fredric Jameson\u2019s concept of the \u2018political unconscious\u2019 approaches the implicit politics of texts at three distinct horizons of interpretation, the third and most encompassing of which concerns \u2018the ideology of form, <\/em>that is, the symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of production\u2019.3<\/a><\/sup> In Immediacy: or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism<\/em>, Anna Kornbluh argues that our moment of \u2018circulation-forward capitalism\u2019 has produced a dominant cultural style that negates mediation, prioritising \u2018affective transfer\u2019, the illusion of the real, and the dismantling of narrative frames and boundaries.4<\/a><\/sup> As always-on communication and ever faster digital exchange compensate for secular stagnation, so the circulation of immediate images compensates for our underlying anomie. Kornbluh ties this into a wider body of writing on what Jodi Dean, building on Lacanian theory, has called the \u2018decline of symbolic efficiency\u2019.5<\/a><\/sup> Immediacy style eschews the institutions, norms and mediations of the symbolic realm in favour of the temporary visions of wholeness and identification found in the imaginary \u2013 itself more vulnerable to, and often punctured by, the illusory reals of affect, the body, and the unarticulable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following Kornbluh, we might say that Milei\u2019s chainsaw operates in immediacy style: \u2018Directness and literalism are the techniques; immersiveness and surety are the effects\u2019.6<\/a><\/sup> It resolves the problem of secular stagnation in much the same way as the emojis, NFTs, and immersive artworks that Kornbluh enumerates in her book. That this is so, is unsurprising. Alberto Toscano approaches late fascism as a technique or \u2018fix\u2019 for capitalist crisis;7<\/a><\/sup> the political economy it reaches for is often deregulatory, riven with fantasies of faster trade and speedier accumulation. Indeed, immediacy style is everywhere in far-right political cultures. Donald Trump\u2019s sentences trip from one fragmented image to another, eschewing punctuation and the formal demands of composition \u2013 a sentence as \u2018a \u201ccomplete thought\u201d\u2019 \u2013 in a manner Kornbluh names \u2018archipelagic flow\u2019.8<\/a><\/sup> Incidentally, Kornbluh\u2019s main example of \u2018archipelagic flow\u2019, from Jenny Offill\u2019s 2020 novel Weather, <\/em>itself reads a little like a POTUS tweet: \u2018The moon will be fine I think. No one\u2019s worrying about the moon\u2019.9<\/a><\/sup> Immediacy is also one way to account for the prevalence of AI art in far-right political communications. As Gareth Watkins has recently argued, the images are intended to communicate the right\u2019s hatred of working people, including artists, and its solidarity with big tech.10<\/a><\/sup> Which is to say that the medium of the AI artworks is less relevant than their basic semiotic function: to index the conditions of their production without attempting to resolve them symbolically. Even the far-right\u2019s obsession with free speech can be viewed in these terms. As Gavan Titley notes in his piece for this series, fascism approaches free speech as \u2018expression freed from the burden of interaction<\/em>\u2019. To embrace speech in this way, as an expression that can merely offend, but not harm, is to negate language\u2019s role in the co-construction of reality. Free speech as style elevates shock, queasiness, and the excitement of transgression instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Kornbluh\u2019s work takes aim at a cultural dominant, while fascism is a reactionary element folded into a broader mode of neoliberal capitalism. It is, in Toscano\u2019s framing, a \u2018turbocharging of inherent traits of the neoliberal order [\u2026] under the cover of a challenge to some of its supposedly defining dimensions\u2019. Fascism accentuates neoliberalism\u2019s \u2018authoritarian underside\u2019, its reliance on the mechanisms of prison, police and borders, and avows the racialised basis to the economy that neoliberalism disavows.11<\/a><\/sup> It places muscular, ethno-nationalist checks on the \u2018circulation-forward capitalism\u2019 that Kornbluh argues begets immediacy style. This piece is an attempt, therefore, to think through what follows: that fascism\u2019s distinct economic approach and ideological content inform not only how immediacy style is adopted, but when and where.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s my wager that what Toscano describes as fascism\u2019s \u2018phobia\u2019 of abstraction is at the heart of this question. The fourth chapter of Late Fascism <\/em>examines Nazi discourses that sought to align legal and financial abstraction with Judaism, contrasting it with the supposedly concrete substance of the Aryan race and way of life. On the one hand, this is abstraction in the Marxist sense: as the value that is created when labour power is expended, in dialectical relation to the use-values that are also created when individuals complete particular tasks. Such abstract value is concretised again when money is invested and commodities are bought. Though Toscano\u2019s account doesn\u2019t reach the present day, economic nationalism of the sort embraced by Giorgia Meloni or Donald Trump is intensely focused on this moment of concretisation, ensuring that it takes place according to divisions of nation and ethnicity. This looks like policies that repatriate international profits or that direct domestic investment towards domestic industry. Today, as in the early 20th<\/sup> century, this economic focus is necessarily also ideological. Fascist racism naturalises concrete differences in what type of work is carried out and where as biological fact. It cleaves to what Jason Read has described as the \u2018ethic\u2019 of concrete labour, which emphasises the fitness of particular individuals to particular types of work within a hierarchy of professions and individuals.12<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In light of this, it seems possible that while far-right cultural output symbolically resolves the abstractions of circulation with the concretudes of immediacy style, it resolves the concretisations of fascist political economy with abstraction, mediation, and genre. This takes artistic form in the imperial statues and neoclassical paintings lauded by white supremacist accounts on X. In these works, the painting or statue medium is celebrated for its participation in the ordering of social life \u2013 though only when it is representational. If there is a patterning mindset for this approach to art, it might be Jacques Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s conception of the \u2018representative paradigm\u2019, in which art was understood as an entirely fictive realm with a mimetic relation to reality. Within this paradigm, which came to an end, in Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s periodisation, in the 19th<\/sup> century, the subject matter of art, and the genre presumed fitting to represent it, had an analogous relationship \u2018with an overall hierarchy of political and social occupations\u2019.13<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This warrants more thought than I can give it here. But it is perhaps instructive to observe how fascist visual culture blends mediations into its uses of immediacy style. For instance, though AI imagery styles itself as the instant illustration of a snippet of text, it is in fact heavily mediated, from its kitsch painterly quality to its caricatures of race and gender. As another example, Sita Balani\u2019s piece for this series identifies how the right mobilise the themes, characters and binary worldview of melodrama as a mode <\/em>played out offscreen rather than a genre <\/em>framed by the episode or film. <\/em>In 21st<\/sup> century American politics, melodrama\u2019s signature motifs display a complex merging of immediacy style and generic convention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems to me that this merging is the aesthetic response to fascism\u2019s position between the neoliberal dominant and its own particular fix to crisis. Fascism makes distinctions between people on the basis of generic representations. But fascism cannot survive on its mediations alone. In order for these generic representations to read as mimetically corresponding to a given reality, that reality must be claimed and fought for using the tools of immediacy style. We can see this process at work in the way far-right communicators invoke affective and bodily sensations as markers of reality. \u2018My gut tells me [\u2026] people controlling the government were involved in this\u2019, says Alex Jones of the Sandy Hook shooting.  \u2018And it\u2019s not even the gut, it\u2019s the heart [\u2026] It\u2019s right here in my heart: I know<\/em> things, I feel<\/em> things\u2019.14<\/a><\/sup> When Trump invokes the silent majority with the phrase \u2018many people are saying\u2019, he refers to an intangible chain of affect that cannot be articulated through regular modes of expression. Crucially, however, these charismatic leaders position themselves as able to access an affective truth that others cannot see. This is the fascist part: some bodies are better at sensing the real than others. Naomi Klein demonstrates how this notion of superior affective radars intersects with ableism in her description of the anti-vaxxer cultures emerging from Covid-19 and their eugenicist undertones. She cites Naomi Wolf\u2019s claim that the vaccinated people of New York had no bodily presence: \u2018\u201cYou can’t pick up human energy in the same way, like the energy field is just almost not there, it’s like people are holograms … It’s like a city of ghosts now, you’re there, you see them, but you can’t feel them\u201d\u2019.15<\/a><\/sup> This abstract distinction between \u2018healthy\u2019, typically unvaccinated, individuals and the rest, creates categories where immediacy style had none. It remediates immediacy style via the symbolic categories of physical ability and neurotypicality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Understanding this process raises the question of how to oppose it. Watkins concludes his article on far-right AI imagery by suggesting that the best weapons in the face of fascism \u2018may not be strikes, boycotts or the power of dialectics. They might be replying \u201ccringe,\u201d \u201cthis sucks,\u201d and \u201cthis looks like shit\u201d\u2019.16<\/a><\/sup> To do so with Milei\u2019s chainsaw, for example, is to reintroduce a metaphorical dissonance between the tenor of his metaphor and its vehicle, between the muscular lumberjack and the wannabe rockstar playing him.17<\/a><\/sup> It is to critique the choices of mediation: to argue that the caricatures and generic conventions rework reality rather than merely reflect it. But fascism is as syncretic with its mediations as it is with its ideas. Milei\u2019s chainsaw is a little bit cringe, but it is also \u2013 in its sincere literality \u2013 quite scary. It is, as Klein puts it, citing Philip Roth, \u2018too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous\u2019.18<\/a><\/sup> What aesthetic resistances follow?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Next<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
  1. Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization<\/em> (Verso, 2024), 47. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  2. Daniel Politi and David Biller, \u2018A Man, a Plan, a Chainsaw: How a Power Tool Took Center Stage in Argentina\u2019s Presidential Race\u2019, World News, AP News<\/em>, 20 October 2023, para. 3, https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/milei-argentina-chainsaw-fed35a37c6137b951e4adada3d866436. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  3. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act<\/em> (Taylor & Francis Group, 2002), 62. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  4. Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism<\/em> (Verso, 2023), 2. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  5. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism & Left Politics<\/em> (Duke University Press, 2009), 63\u201367. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  6. Kornbluh, Immediacy<\/em>, 5. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  7. Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, <\/em>eBook (Verso, 2023). \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  8. Kornbluh, Immediacy<\/em>, 103. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  9. Offill qtd. in Kornbluh, Immediacy<\/em>, 102. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  10. Gareth Watkins, \u2018AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism\u2019, New Socialist<\/em>, n.d., accessed 1 September 2025, https:\/\/newsocialist.org.uk\/transmissions\/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism\/. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  11. Toscano, Late Fascism<\/em>, chap. 3. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  12. Jason Read, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work<\/em> (Verso, 2024). \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  13. Jacques Ranci\u00e8re, \u2018The Distribution of the Sensible\u2019, in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible<\/em>, ed. and trans. Gabriel Rockhill (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 17. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  14. Alex\u2019s War<\/em>, directed by Alex Lee Moyer (Play Nice Productions, 2022), 01:33:11-18, Prime Video. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  15. Wolf qtd. in Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World<\/em>, eBook (Penguin Books, 2023), chap. 6. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  16. Watkins, \u2018AI\u2019, para. 23. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  17. Facundo Iglesia and Tom Phillips, \u2018\u201cI\u2019m the King and I Will Destroy You!\u201d: Argentinian President Stages Frenetic Stadium Appearance\u2019, World News, The Guardian<\/em>, 23 May 2024, https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/article\/2024\/may\/23\/javier-milei-buenos-aires-argentina. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  18. Klein, Doppelganger<\/em>. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Charlotte Fraser Javier Milei, the far-right President of Argentina, rode to power wielding a chainsaw. The prop, which came out at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"[{\"id\":\"7e312366-e232-4bf5-aed1-b0f7541ac9d3\",\"content\":\"Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization<\\\/em> (Verso, 2024), 47.\"},{\"id\":\"e171d565-39b9-4d40-893f-200f2569d710\",\"content\":\"Daniel Politi and David Biller, \\u2018A Man, a Plan, a Chainsaw: How a Power Tool Took Center Stage in Argentina\\u2019s Presidential Race\\u2019, World News, AP News<\\\/em>, 20 October 2023, para. 3, https:\\\/\\\/apnews.com\\\/article\\\/milei-argentina-chainsaw-fed35a37c6137b951e4adada3d866436.\"},{\"id\":\"bb24bfe0-12b1-4acd-b44c-b05d06dabe01\",\"content\":\"Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act<\\\/em> (Taylor & Francis Group, 2002), 62.\"},{\"id\":\"0c0f665c-bf32-420f-bca1-81b16698eb1b\",\"content\":\"Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism<\\\/em> (Verso, 2023), 2.\"},{\"id\":\"52bf7cd8-e3d7-43de-affe-9bb08c336b48\",\"content\":\"Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism & Left Politics<\\\/em> (Duke University Press, 2009), 63\\u201367.\"},{\"id\":\"8aae2475-b4e2-4b8c-8f65-5bc440c25ed3\",\"content\":\"Kornbluh, Immediacy<\\\/em>, 5.\"},{\"id\":\"e9857ff9-f4a8-4450-bf19-520d7d7d5b3c\",\"content\":\"Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, <\\\/em>eBook (Verso, 2023).\"},{\"id\":\"83d79379-d926-4bdf-b992-894e35d41743\",\"content\":\"Kornbluh, Immediacy<\\\/em>, 103.\"},{\"id\":\"cafc7498-7899-4d3d-90c9-f082552e8e0b\",\"content\":\"Offill qtd. in Kornbluh, Immediacy<\\\/em>, 102.\"},{\"id\":\"54822039-993e-4f10-a269-c39984092681\",\"content\":\"Gareth Watkins, \\u2018AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism\\u2019, New Socialist<\\\/em>, n.d., accessed 1 September 2025, https:\\\/\\\/newsocialist.org.uk\\\/transmissions\\\/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism\\\/.\"},{\"id\":\"382a1ce0-0b1a-40cf-b07c-3c8d15bc536d\",\"content\":\"Toscano, Late Fascism<\\\/em>, chap. 3.\"},{\"id\":\"dc9f5421-d64f-4838-9d2d-62916cd6d01e\",\"content\":\"Jason Read, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work<\\\/em> (Verso, 2024).\"},{\"id\":\"98b64f34-c0ea-4d44-9e73-ad5f94a26d9a\",\"content\":\"Jacques Ranci\\u00e8re, \\u2018The Distribution of the Sensible\\u2019, in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible<\\\/em>, ed. and trans. Gabriel Rockhill (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 17.\"},{\"id\":\"85ab153f-9115-4ec4-b9e7-2642493d84c5\",\"content\":\"Alex\\u2019s War<\\\/em>, directed by Alex Lee Moyer (Play Nice Productions, 2022), 01:33:11-18, Prime Video.\"},{\"id\":\"10c55481-73f9-42f9-b52d-10a156178cb8\",\"content\":\"Wolf qtd. in Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World<\\\/em>, eBook (Penguin Books, 2023), chap. 6.\"},{\"id\":\"cc2a321c-ad66-4366-91c2-ff88fb6dcc0d\",\"content\":\"Watkins, \\u2018AI\\u2019, para. 23.\"},{\"id\":\"ceb8f888-225a-4a4f-98b3-6b3ad4ca264a\",\"content\":\"Facundo Iglesia and Tom Phillips, \\u2018\\u201cI\\u2019m the King and I Will Destroy You!\\u201d: Argentinian President Stages Frenetic Stadium Appearance\\u2019, World News, The Guardian<\\\/em>, 23 May 2024, https:\\\/\\\/www.theguardian.com\\\/world\\\/article\\\/2024\\\/may\\\/23\\\/javier-milei-buenos-aires-argentina.\"},{\"id\":\"c1eb0a47-7807-4606-87bc-7301066f7cc3\",\"content\":\"Klein, Doppelganger<\\\/em>.\"}]"},"class_list":["post-941","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/statesofculturalanalysis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/statesofculturalanalysis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/statesofculturalanalysis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/statesofculturalanalysis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/statesofculturalanalysis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/statesofculturalanalysis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1308,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/statesofculturalanalysis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/941\/revisions\/1308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/statesofculturalanalysis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}