On cultural stupefaction, visual saturation, and the unbearable position of artists as barometers in a time when authoritarian horror circulates as spectacle.
There is a particular sensation circulating among thoughtful, intellectually alert and creatively engaged people at present that is difficult to articulate without sounding melodramatic, paranoid, or exhausted. It is the feeling of watching something structurally violent reassemble itself in plain sight while being asked to continue as if this were simply the texture of contemporary life. In the western world, fascism does not arrive with a singular rupture but through visual acclimatisation. It enters through posture, costume, repetition, and tone. It appears not first as ideology but as styling. This produces a psychic contradiction where horror is both visible and unspeakable, known and disavowed, present yet somehow unreal.
The images circulating alongside this text exemplify this condition with disturbing clarity. We see Greg Bovino, then Chief of Border Control and most notably, responsible for the murders of civilians, Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, USA. Here there is an adoption of a visual language that extends far beyond functional or regulatory uniform. The long military overcoat, the deliberate stance, the rigid posture, the centred body, leather strap, the severe skin fade haircut with centre parting, and carefully controlled facial expression operate together as a choreography of authority. This is not neutral. It is not accidental. It is a visual syntax with historical memory. When placed alongside masked paramilitary formations and militarised policing scenes, the effect is unmistakable. These are not merely clothes but gestures. They signal allegiance to a lineage of power that relies on spectacle, fear, and aesthetic coherence to normalise domination.
Visual culture scholars have long argued that fascism is first and foremost an aesthetic project. Walter Benjamin warned that fascism aestheticises politics while denying politics its substance, turning power into image and obedience into spectacle. What is striking now is the brazenness of this process. The visual cues are no longer subtle. They are almost didactic. When coupled with the Republican Partyโs documented reuse of Fascist slogans1 and the now widely circulated images of Elon Musk performing what can only be read as Nazi salutes, the semiotics become explicit to the point of absurdity. The language of fascism is no longer coded. It is declared.
And yet this declaration does not produce the expected shock. Instead it produces stupefaction. The horror is so distilled, so sterilised, so visually overdetermined that it flips into a strange normality. The grotesque becomes parody. We find ourselves asking not only how this is happening, but why it does not fully register. This is not because the signs are unclear. It is because they are arriving within an image economy that overwhelms our capacity to metabolise them. The saturation of media, the endless scroll, the proliferation of AI generated images that mimic reality without accountability all contribute to a flattening of significance. When everything is extreme, nothing feels exceptional.
For artists, this produces a uniquely destabilising bind. Creatives are often hyper empathic, acutely sensitive to shifts in cultural temperature and visual language. They are not simply observers but barometers. Gilbert Simondonโs proposition that the individual is not a finished entity but a phase within a wider field of forces is useful here. Artists do not stand outside this moment. They are embedded within it, carrying its unresolved tensions in their bodies and practices. The demand to respond becomes both vocational and unbearable.
Historically, artists have turned to the grotesque, the parodic and the carnivalesque in moments of political terror. Mikhail Bakhtinโs writing on carnival describes a temporary inversion of power where authority is degraded through excess, humour and bodily distortion. Carnival laughter, for Bakhtin, is ambivalent and destabilising. It reveals that what claims permanence is in fact fragile. But what we are witnessing now is a mutation of this dynamic. Fascism has learned to inhabit parody. It circulates as meme, joke and AI generated spectacle. The grotesque no longer automatically undermines power. It can also numb it. Laughter becomes frictionless. Irony becomes a delivery system.
This leaves the contemporary artist in a precarious position. How do you deploy parody when power itself is already performing as parody? How do you expose horror when horror presents itself as content? Jean Luc Nancyโs insistence that being is always being with reminds us that these images are not consumed privately. They are shared exposures. Fear, disbelief, and fatigue circulate communally before they are ever articulated critically. This shared condition produces a sense of collective paralysis that is often misrecognised as apathy.
Criticality in this context cannot be reduced to commentary or amplification. It must involve an interrogation of how meaning is being diluted through repetition and speed. รdouard Glissantโs concept of opacity becomes crucial. Glissant argues for the right to remain partially unknowable, to resist the demand for immediate legibility. In an era that pressures artists to respond instantly, to produce clarity on demand, opacity can be a form of resistance. It allows space for thinking that is not immediately consumable.
Across disciplines we see similar warnings. In complex science, systems under extreme stress generate false patterns that appear explanatory but collapse under scrutiny. Karen Baradโs work on entanglement reminds us that observation is never neutral and that representation participates in the reality it describes. This raises uncomfortable questions for artists working in an attention economy. At what point does repeating the image of fascism, even critically, contribute to its normalisation? When does exposure become rehearsal?
There are historical precedents for practices that resist this trap. Hannah Hรถchโs photomontages during the Weimar Republic did not simply mock authoritarian figures. They fragmented bodies, genders and symbols to reveal the violence embedded within nationalist fantasies. Goyaโs Disasters of War refused narrative closure. They insisted on unresolved horror. These works did not soothe audiences or offer clarity. They unsettled perception itself.
What unites these practices is a refusal to rush toward meaning. They linger in discomfort. Theodor Adorno argued that artโs ethical force lies in its negativity, its resistance to reconciling suffering into something palatable. In our current moment, where authoritarian aesthetics circulate as entertainment and AI accelerates the production of visual noise, this refusal becomes vital.
The exhaustion many creatives feel is not personal failure. It is evidence. It tells us something about the saturation of threat and the inadequacy of existing cultural frameworks to contain it. To be overwhelmed is to be accurately attuned. The task is not to outproduce horror with commentary, but to interrupt its digestion. To slow it down. To make its mechanisms visible rather than merely its surfaces.
If fascism thrives on simplification, acceleration, and visual coherence, then critical artistic practice remains one of the few spaces capable of introducing friction. Not by offering answers, but by sustaining questions that do not collapse under spectacle. The images we are confronted with now demand not only outrage, but a recalibration of how we see, how we respond, and when we refuse to respond at all. That refusal is not passive. It is an act of care for thinking itself at a moment when thinking is under aesthetic attack.
References
Adorno, T. W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory. Translated by R. Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum.
Bakhtin, M. (1984) Rabelais and His World. Translated by H. Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Benjamin, W. (2003) Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938โ1940. Edited by H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Glissant, ร. (1997) Poetics of Relation. Translated by B. Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (2000) Being Singular Plural. Translated by R. D. Richardson and A. E. OโByrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Simondon, G. (2020) Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. Translated by T. Lamarre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Considerable misinformation has been shared online since the first use of the podium slogan “ONE OF OURS ALL OF YOURS” in the January 8th press conference hosted by the U.S. Secretary of Homeland security, Kristi Noem. Many critics jumped to state this was a Nazi slogan and therefore egregious in its use. This was quickly challenged by supporting commentators with evidence to suggest this wasn’t a Nazi slogan, which, is technically correct. It is in fact a tightened version of the slogan used by the Spanish Falangist Movement in Spain “Uno de los nuestros vale por todos los vuestros” translated to English as “One of ours is worth many of yours” and was used as a Fascist rallying cry during the 1930s and the Spanish Civil war. โฉ๏ธ
