I want to go back to these quotes also because they really touch on something. Indeed, to write an anti-Nazi song does almost nothing but feed the type of self-satisfied complacency that says, oh, we’re different from them, it can’t happen with us, there’s nothing to worry about.
Almost better to be provocative – to humanize or expose what is attractive about fascism while at the same time undermining that attraction with shock, and to present this as an ambiguity that cannot be resolved in the work.
This move implicates listener and artist alike. It performs the idea: we too can be caught up in this, there’s the potential the very next day that we could turn fascist, or that such fascism has existed all along, latent in our everyday structures. I see this a lot in the early industrial music or in Fassbinder’s films. Putting forth the provocative idea that in the postwar context, nothing had really changed, fascism just got transposed into the “everyday fascism” of personal relations – and presenting this all in a stylistic context that borrowed heavily from 1930’s Nazi/UFA melodramas was the basic concept behind virtually all of Fassbinder’s films, especially the later ones. It was controversial and provocative, and still is.
Unfortunately, what was effective in the climate of the late 1970’s when memories were still very fresh simply doesn’t work today. Shock is impossible and irony itself no longer has a meaning. The alt-right has demonstrated this; they simply weaponize irony as a mask of plausible deniability in which they then promote authentically fascist ideas.
If neither critique or irony work, then what does?
Sincerity, perhaps. Radical sincerity. Sincerity in the guise of innocence and purity and the struggle to maintain these in the face of anything that comes. Innocence as the “innocence of trees” – to be completely nonwilling, and yet to withstand any challenge, to simply root oneself and grow, imperceptibly slowly for hundreds of years.
But radical sincerity is not the comfortable sincerity of the detached observer/critic – it’s a highly uncomfortable act, one of tearing off all the masks, one of making oneself naked and vulnerable and positing something new. Which may simply be oneself. But in this there is the hope of positing the thing that renders fascism no longer thinkable.
We see more of this in politics with Stacey Abrams, Andrew Gillum etc. They didn’t win but they came close (or would have won if it had not been for voter suppression), it was a combination of standing one’s ground, but also sincerely positing a real vision for the future, not just letting it be enough that they were different from Trump. But what I’m talking about is prior to politics and far beyond politics.
Which indeed is already on the path to sincerity, if not sincerity itself.
Radical sincerity, radical innocence, radical purity, love, acceptance, and friendship are perhaps that which are most shocking and destabilizing to the powers that be.
Sincerity and the poetic disposition – perhaps they are the same thing – are our key weapons in our struggle to save the world from its crises and to live as ourselves. We need to put our trust in these; then the words will come. But if not words, there are still so many other ways we can bring forth the new.
