Journal articles on the topic 'Nihilism – Political aspects'

The aim of this article is, based on Jacques Derrida’s and Roberto Esposito’s reflection, to articulate a philosophical paradigm that would be able to face with what I propose to call the autoimmunitarian logic of nihilism. Dealing with this logic means, first and foremost, to face “the negative” that runs through our experience without rejecting or absolutizing it. It means to think the relation between life and politics, society and institutions not in a merely oppositive way but rather in a constructive and affirmative manner. Even if in many of his works Esposito criticizes Derrida precisely for his conception of autoimmunity, in this article, I intend to show that both the philosophers orient their analyses towards what I consider the most appropriate ontological political paradigm for reading the actual political events – what they both call “co-immunity”. In the first section, I establish some methodological coordinates useful to define the approach I consider the most appropriate for the purposes of this research, namely political ontology. In section two, from a diagnostic point of view, I analyse the autoimmunitarian logic of nihilism. To investigate this logic, I firstly concentrate on Esposito’s definition of nihilism, and then I refer to his analyses of the relation between community and immunity. In the third section, with the intention of taking a closer look at the political aspects of the question, I focus on the Derridean analysis of the aporias that are inherent in the very concept of democracy. In the last section, I briefly try to test the heuristic capacity of the co-immunity paradigm with respect to the biopolitical problems arising from the management of the pandemic crisis caused by COVID-19 (and discussed in the field of the Italian biopolitical debate).

Introduction: the paper considers the conceptual and methodological interpretation of legal nihilism as a complex interdisciplinary and intersectoral phenomenon. The purpose of the study is to show legal nihilism as a result of the deformation of state-legal reality and to identify ways to combat it. The objectives of the work are to give a terminological characterization of legal nihilism as a dialectically contradictory integral socio-cultural phenomenon; to identify its nature, meaning, forms, and causes generating consequences. Methods: the convergent methodology combining general, general scientific and specific scientific research methods. The main methods are the methods of dialectical materialism, the synergetic, interdisciplinary methods, analysis, synthesis, interpretation of the law, comparative studies. Results: legal nihilism as a direction of socio-political thought and legal practice is a catastrophogenic factor of society, due to its mass character, oppositional power, and destructiveness. The authors believe that the results and consequences can be foreseen, they need to be managed with the help of information and communication technologies, artificial intelligence. The hypothesis of the natural “predisposition” of Russians and Belarusians to legal nihilism has not been confirmed, however, it has shown a historical, national, cultural peculiarity of the perception of state and law. Conclusions: the growth of the omnipotence of the state in the conditions of an external military threat, sanctions, and pandemics leads to the growth of legal nihilism at all levels of social reality. The way out is to improve objective and subjective factors related to the legality, legitimacy, social orientation of the state, social cohesion, the improvement of ideological, patriotic, civil, legal education. It is required to develop doctrinal, legislative, law enforcement aspects of the problem at the state level; to create a digital monitoring mechanism for the objective, representative determination of the level of legal nihilism in society and a list of urgent measures to overcome negative consequences.

The purpose of the article is to study a number of topical issues related to the relationship between international and Russian law in political, social and psychological aspects. It is emphasized that even extraordinary foreign policy circumstances don’t give grounds for a complete denial of international legal regulation, since this is a manifestation of international legal nihilism condemned by modern morality. On the other hand, it is stressed that the requirements of international law shouldn’t be absolutized. As a result of the research, the authors draw conclusions that in case of divergence of international legal regulations with foreign policy interests of the country, Russia has an opportunity to challenge the universal recognition of certain principles and norms of international law. In addition, the authors conclude that it is possible to abandon the previously assumed international legal obligations in the procedures established by international and national law and to use the tools of constitutional justice according to the current situation.

In 1971, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter introduced his study of Nietzsche as an investigation into the history of modern nihilism in which “contradiction” forms the central thread of the argument. For Müller-Lauter, the interpretive task is not to demonstrate the overall coherence or incoherence of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but to examine Nietzsche’s “philosophy of contradiction.” Against those such as Karl Jaspers, Karl Löwith and Martin Heidegger, Müller-Lauter argued that contradiction is the foundation of Nietzsche’s thought, and not a problem to be corrected or cast aside for exegetical or political purposes. For Müller-Lauter, contradiction qua incompatibility (not just mere opposition) holds a key to Nietzsche’s affective vision of philosophy. Beginning with the relationship between will to power and eternal recurrence, in this paper I examine aspects of Müller-Lauter’s account of Nietzsche’s philosophy of contradiction specifically in relation to the counter-interpretations offered by two other German commentators of Nietzsche, Leo Strauss and Karl Löwith, in order to confirm Müller-Lauter’s suggestion that contradiction is indeed an operative engine of Nietzsche’s thought. Indeed contradiction is a key Nietzschean theme and an important dynamic of becoming which enables the subject to be revealed as a “multiplicity” (BGE §12) and as a “fiction” (KSA 12:9[91]). Following Müller-Lauter’s assertion that for Nietzsche the problem of nihilism is fundamentally synonymous with the struggle of contradiction experienced by will to power, this paper interprets Nietzsche’s philosophy of contradiction in terms of subjective, bodily life (rather than in terms of logical incoherences or ontological inconsistencies). Against the backdrop of nihilism, the “self” (and its related place holder the “subject”), I will argue, becomes the psycho-physiological battlespace for the struggle and articulation of “contradiction” in Nietzsche’s thought.

O corpo é objeto de disputa política, religiosa, artística e, mais recentemente, científica. Neste sentido, este ensaio trás uma linha histórica apontando como o tema é encarado, bem como delineando o conjunto de significados, mitos e interditos relacionados ao corpo. No processo, tendo por bases autores da filosofia e sociologia clássicas de diferentes épocas, aponta para a possibilidade de uma retomada do niilismo, na busca de um ideal de corpo. Isso porque, ao se utilizar de técnicas ascéticas, os sujeitos envoltos na dinâmica dão uma dimensão sagrada ao corpo, além de negar certos aspectos da vida, como a decrepitude e a impermanência, condições inalienáveis à dimensão humana. De acordo com a proposta do ensaio e baseado em diversos autores, o corpo volta a ocupar lugar central na sociedade – como já ocorreu na Grécia Clássica –, só que agora esvaziado de sua dimensão política e social. PALAVRAS-CHAVES: Corpo; niilismo; fotografía; ensaio. ABSTRACT The body is the object of political, religious, artistic and, more recently, scientific dispute. In this sense, this essay draws a historical line pointing out how the theme is viewed, as well as delineating the set of meanings, myths and interdicts related to the body. In the process, based on classical philosophical and sociological authors of different epochs, it points to the possibility of a resumption of nihilism in the search for an ideal of the body. This is because, when using ascetic techniques, the subjects involved in the dynamics give a sacred dimension to the body, besides denying certain aspects of life, such as decrepitude and impermanence, conditions inalienable to the human dimension. According to the proposal of the essay and based on several authors, the body returns to occupy central place in the society - as already occurred in Classical Greece -, but now emptied of its political and social dimension. KEYWORDS: Body; nihilism; photography; essay. RESUMEN El cuerpo es objeto de disputa política, religiosa, artística y, más recientemente, científica. En este sentido, este ensayo tras una línea histórica apuntando como el tema es encarado, así como delineando el conjunto de significados, mitos e interditos relacionados al cuerpo. En el proceso, teniendo por bases autores de la filosofía y sociología clásicas de diferentes épocas, apunta a la posibilidad de una retomada del nihilismo, en la búsqueda de un ideal de cuerpo. Por eso, cuando se utilizan técnicas ascéticas, los sujetos envueltos en la dinámica dan una dimensión sagrada al cuerpo, además de negar ciertos aspectos de la vida, como la decrepitud y la impermanencia, condiciones inalienables a la dimensión humana. De acuerdo con la propuesta del ensayo y basado en diversos autores, el cuerpo vuelve a ocupar un lugar central en la sociedad -como ya ocurrió en la Grecia Clásica-, sólo que ahora vaciado de su dimensión política y social. PALABRAS CLAVES: Cuerpo; niilismo; fotografia; ensayo.

AbstractBuilding on recent research into the religious aspects of the Cold War and the humanitarian efforts of the American Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in early twentieth-century Europe, this article locates the historical origins of religious anti-communism in late imperial Russian reactions to the revolution of 1905–07. It explores the interactions of Russian Orthodox Christian intellectuals, especially Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev, with prominent YMCA leaders such as Donald A. Lowrie and Paul B. Anderson, both of whom were mainline Protestants. Using Russian and US archives, the article documents the networks and mechanisms through which Berdyaev influenced his YMCA contacts. It shows that he shaped their efforts to fight communism in the interwar period and early Cold War through the promotion of religious values, or what Anderson referred to as ‘a Christian solution to international tension’. This concept was derived from early twentieth-century Russian ideas about the opposition between Christianity and ‘nihilism’ or ‘humanism’ as integral worldviews.

The purpose of the article is to consider the negative aspects of postmodernism and study how post-post modernity can help humanity overcome the modern socio-cultural crisis. In their research, the authors used various scientific methods of cognition, such as analysis and synthesis, in particular meta-analysis and meta-synthesis, generalization, and induction. The authors analyze the stages of development of civilization from the point of view of social progress, highlight their main characteristics and typological differences. The considered key points characteristic of postmodern, such as pluralism, negativism, relativism, denial of binarity in thinking, the extreme degree of nihilism, etc., lead to the understanding that the crisis that arose in the political, economic, socio-cultural life of society, at the turn of 20 21 centuries, inherent in the very nature of postmodern. The values and perception of the postmodern are less and less consistent with the present time, and in its depths, a new worldview begins to crystallize, conventionally called post-postmodern, as a response to overcoming the current socio-cultural crisis. Post-postmodern, postmodern, like modern before them and similar phenomena are links of one chain, interconnected with each other and logically following from the processes of previous eras. The main components of the post-postmodern, which are formed from the problems of the postmodern, are highlighted and characterized. As a result, the study showed that the currently being formed new worldview - post-postmodernity came close to the search for a new spirituality for the all-round development of a person and turning him into a socially mature being, as well as for resolving the internal contradictions of the postmodern worldview

Western thought has a clear impact on Arab and Islamic arena. Western ideas, philosophies, and visions have an impact on the world today. Therefore, this research addresses and identifies the concept of postmodernism, and its most prominent characteristics that distinguished this philosophy, as well as the most prominent foundations that resulted from it, and which led to the transformations that took place in the contemporary world today, from solidity and stability to fluidity and permanent change, and from certainty to suspicion, and from Optimism into nihilism, and these great transformations that occurred in the history of Western thought led to the production and foundations of relativism, which became a feature of postmodernism, as the truth and the tendency to uncertainty and uncertainty were undermined, and it became a saying that there is no single fixed measure of right and wrong, which is the most prominent statement in This thought, and as a result of it, all mental and cognitive axioms were questioned, such as religion, man, beauty, the universe, politics, history and so on. The feature of nihilism also emerged as one of the most prominent features of this thought, as the absurdity, darkness and loss of meaning made life a general feeling and perception about this world, and this feeling we find. According to most postmodern philosophers in their writings, the characteristic of deconstruction came as a given that the philosophers of this thought relied on to deconstruct the certain axioms and knowledge that are central and stable, and these foundations were generalized to include Ga Political, economic, social, cognitive, and other aspects.

Introduction. In March 2022, the Home Office of the United Kingdom of Great Britain published the Statement on New Immigration Plan according to which persons having no right to reside on its territory would be removed to “safe third countries” according to the agreements with such states. On April 13th, 2022, a Memorandum of Understanding between Great Britain and Rwanda was signed prescribing that persons whose applications for asylum were not considered by Great Britain be removed to Rwanda for those applications to be considered by the latter. Incompatibility of the contemporary immigration policy of Great Britain with its international law obligations justifies the topicality of the assessment of its implications for codification and progressive development of international law. Materials and Methods. The assessment of the contemporary immigration policy of Great Britain from the standpoint of international law includes the matching of the provisions of the international and national acts adopted by Great Britain as well as official statements of its state bodies and officials and the provisions of universal treaties and “soft law” acts. The writings of the publicists studying international law aspects of forced migration, asylum and human rights served as theoretical framework of the present study. Research Results. The assessment of the Memorandum of Understanding reveals the incompatibility of its provisions with the international law norms on asylum and human rights. Such international law policy of the state should be regarded as an example of rejection of international law which is referred to as “international law nihilism” in Russian legal doctrine.Discussions and conclusions. The authors argue that further adoption of legal and political measures contrary to states’ obligations under treaties and international custom as well as the absence of expressed official positions of states with regards to such measures may have an impact on construction and application of international law norms governing legal status of forced migrants.

Along with Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche may be considered a great theorist and critic of Art Nouveau, negative life aspects of modern culture considered. Nietzsche developed one of the first sustained critiques of mass culture and society, the state, and bureaucratic discipline that later deeply influenced discourses of Art Nouveau. Nietzsche perceived mass culture central to modern social reality as the forces of decadence and nihilism that undermines the authentic culture and creates a mediocre culture. Nietzsche was “anti-politically” oriented, believing mass politics led to herd conformity, the loss of individuality, producing mass manipulation and homogenization harmful to vital life energy, creativity, and superior individuality. Moreover, Nietzsche thought modern democracy, liberalism, and enlightened social movements contributed regression of “modern man”, especially through press and mass culture, focusing on the trivial, superfluous, and sensational, creating homogenization and conformity. The project Skopje 2014 may also be seen from the perspective where the state and political elites are hiding behind culture and national identity trying to build an identity based on culture with no individual but only improvised collectivity. Individual, lost in ideology, system, and environment changes become lost in the collectivity, unsuccessfully trying to find his place, not realizing there is nothing beyond deception. Santrauka Greta Karlo Marxo, Friedrichas Nietzsche gali būti vertinamas kaip didis Art Nouveau teoretikas ir kritikas, gilinęsis į moderniosios kultūros negatyviuosius gyvenimo aspektus. Nietzsche išplėtojo masinės kultūros ir visuomenės, valstybės ir biurokratinės disciplinos kritiką, kuri yra bene pirmoji tokia nuosekli kritika, vėliau turėjusi didelės įtakos Art Nouveau diskursams. Nietzsche masinę kultūrą suprato kaip esminę moderniosios socialinės realybės atžvilgiu – kaip dekadanso ir nihilizmo jėgą, paveikusią autentiškąją kultūrą ir kuriančią vidutinybių kultūrą. Nietzsche's orientacija buvo „antipolitinė“ – jis tikėjo, esą masinė politika veda link minios konformizmo, individualumo praradimo, produkuoja masinį manipuliavimą ir homogenizavimą, žalojančius vitalinę gyvenimo energiją, kūrybiškumą ir aukščiausiąjį individualumą. Be to, Nietzsche manė, kad modernioji demokratija, liberalizmas ir švietėjiški socialiniai judėjimai prisidėjo prie „moderniojo žmogaus“ regreso, ypač dėl spaudos ir masinės kultūros įtakos, sutelkiančios ties banalybėmis, nesaikingumu ir jutimiškumu ir produkuojančios homogeniškumą bei konformizmą. Projektas Skopje 2014 taip pat gali būti vertinamas iš tos perspektyvos, kur valstybės ir politinis elitas prisidengia kultūra bei nacionaliniu identitetu, siekdamas sukurti identitetą, kuris būtų grįstas kultūra be individualumo – vien tik improvizuojamu kolektyviškumu. Ideologijoje, sistemoje ir aplinkos permainose nuskandintas individas, bandydamas surasti savąją vietą ir nesuvokdamas, kad nebėra nieko, išskyrus apgaules, buvo kolektyviškumo sunaikintas. Reikšminiai žodžiai: Friedrichas Nietzsche, individas, Makedonija, masinė kultūra.

On World Philosophy Day, November 15, 2018, the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences organized the international conference on the Russian classic writer I.S. Turgenev (“Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev: A Philosophical Writer and Political Philosopher. On the 200th Anniversary of the Birth”). During the plenary and two breakout sessions, speeches were given by philosophers, cultural researchers, historians ofRussia,USA,Germany,Austria. The conference’s attitude to the consideration of the multifaceted heritage of the great Russian writer made it possible to highlight in the modern historical and cultural context many aspects of Turgenev’s work, to rethink stereotypes existing among researchers and in the mass consciousness regarding Turgenev. At the conference, Turgenev was presented as a political thinker, a liberal who embodied spiritual asceticism, a supporter of the dialogue of cultures, a “Russian European” who does not accept “new barbarism” in all its manifestations from radicalism to Russian exclusivity idea. In the reports and speeches, attention was drawn to the cultural bilingualism inherent in Turgenev, his ability of non-biased artistic and philosophical observation, which enabled him to analyze the then state of minds in Russian society, to foresee many collisions inherent in the national historical process in the 20th – early 21st centuries and world cultural trends engendered by the “uprising of the masses,” to anticipate the drama of the absurd. At the conference, among the discussed topics were the themes of nihilism and loneliness, viewed through the prism of the existential experience of the writer and world literary characters.

La hermenéutica de Vattimo se ha caracterizado por su crítica a la metafísica. Así se ha definido desde su postura como pensamiento débil, aunque también desde su compromiso con la posmodernidad, llegando a afirmarse como hermenéutica nihilista. La intención del presente texto es mostrar cómo los conceptos de emancipación y democracia en la filosofía de Vattimo toman un cariz nihilista desde una propuesta hermenéutica determinada, siendo estos vistos a la luz de tal crítica a la metafísica. Al tratarse de términos de la filosofía práctica, harían de tal hermenéutica una hermenéutica política. Sin embargo, la crítica de Vattimo se mostraría incompleta, pues ve la autonomía y la emancipación solo por el lado de la libertad negativa (presuponiendo someramente la reflexiva), dejando de lado la libertad social. Revisando la propuesta vattiamiana, y con ello su misma hermenéutica, propondremos una mirada postmetafísica que apunte a una libertad social que no tenga que comprometerse con el nihilismo. ---- Vattimo's hermeneutics has been characterized by his criticism of metaphysics. Thus it has been defined from its position as Weak Thought, but also from its commitment to postmodernity, reaching the point of affirming itself as a nihilistic hermeneutic. The intention of the present text is to show how the concepts of emancipation and democracy in Vattimo's philosophy take a nihilistic aspect from a certain hermeneutical proposal, being seen in the light of such criticism of metaphysics. As they are terms of practical philosophy, they would make such a hermeneutic a political hermeneutic. However, Vattimo's criticism would be incomplete, since he sees autonomy and emancipation only on the side of negative freedom (superficially presupposing reflexive freedom), leaving social freedom aside. Reviewing the Vattimo’s proposal, and with it its hermeneutics, we will propose a post-metaphysical view that points to a social freedom that does not have to commit to nihilism.

China’s ability to regulate and control the situation in the ideological sphere has increased markedly during the recent decade. At the same time, Chinese society is becoming more and more diverse, which makes social thought more and more heterogeneous. The article focuses on the changes that have taken place in relations between the ideology of CPC and non-official trends of thought. Through publications of Chinese researchers the article analyzes the key aspects of the CPC policy aimed at strengthening the leadership of the official ideology and preventing radicalization of public sentiment. In China experts are especially concerned about the ability of non-mainstream ideas to challenge the “national ideological security”. The increase in the influence of official ideology led to weakening of neo-liberalism, universal values, and historical nihilism. However, the mode of interaction between the official ideology of the CPC and other ideological currents cannot be reduced to confrontation between “Chinese authoritarianism” and “Western liberalism”. The full picture can be seen only by taking into account the complex relationship of Party ideology with the diverse ideas of the “gray” zone. Intense debates in China are focused on trends that have no clear theoretical basis and political orientation, but are capable to mobilize masses and radicalize public sentiment. The authorities search for optimal response to outbursts of radical Internet-populism while seeking to put nationalism and consumerism into reasonable limits. The reaction of Chinese society to the coronavirus epidemic has demonstrated that at a time of crisis and decrease in people’s confidence in the effectiveness of the work of the state there was an explosive growth of pro-Western and populist sentiments. The task of combining the leading role of the normative ideology of the CPC with the diversity of social ideas will remain relevant over a long time.

The growing political influence of religious communities and beliefs, the growing presence of religious discourse in public sphere require a rethinking of the role of religion in modern society. A number of mutual accusations in a metaphysical way of thinking leads to the fact that the whole philosophy of the XX century turns out to be a philosophy thinking in a “post” situation. Formation of the “post“ states is entirely explained in the field of social philosophy, which tries to “keep pace with time”, but the intrigue lies in the fact that in the first place these transformations touched the most fundamental and “eternal” field of philosophy – ontology. After Heidegger's thesis on the ontoteological structure of metaphysics, the discourse at the end of metaphysics and post-metaphysical philosophical thinking not only inevitably affect the problem of theology, but connect the problems of updating philosophy and theology in the XX-XXI centuries as well.Along with the decline of metaphysics as a system philosophy that is able to propose a coherent, unified, well-grounded picture of immutable structures of existence, the very possibility of philosophical refutation of the existence of God is exhausted. It defends the possibility of religious experience. The pluralism of the post-metaphysical era eliminates the possibility of any theoretical distinction between metaphorical and non-metaphorical languages. On the other hand, the famous statement by F. Nietzsche about the death of God, which is inscribed in the context of the critique of metaphysics, symbolically means the final decay of the religious way of thinking and the flowering of secularization, which means the rejection of appeals to other levels of being, except in the focus of today and everyday life. The specificity of hermeneutics, which is practiced by Caputo and Vattimo, is directly related to the key moment in the constructs of both thinkers – the concept of weakening thinking. For Vattimo, a weak thought (pensiero debole) refers to the gradual weakening of being, which turned the modern philosophy from its "obsession" with the metaphysics of truth to the local rationality and awareness of the hermeneutic nature of any truth. There are two aspects of weakening opinion. The first process – the weakening of being – from the objective metaphysical structure to the interpretation (“events” in the Heideggerian sense). It is described in the Nietzschean language of nihilism, which means the historical process, within which objectivistic claims of metaphysics, absolute grounds have become false (or reduced to “nothing”), weakened, and replaced by “prospects” or interpretative schemes. The second process is the weakening of God in the world, described in the language of the apostle Paul in terms of subtlety – kenosis, which is a paradigmatic expression of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, birth and death of Jesus. Kenosis is not a one-time event that took place in the life and death of Jesus, but the continuing history or tradition initiated by this event. This process is called “secularization” by Vattimo, which doesn’t mean a rejection of God, but a kind of “transcription” of God in time and history (saeculum). Thus, nihilism and kenosis are parallel processes. Nihilism is the devastation of being in an interpretative structure; kenosis is the ascension to nothing of God as transcendental deity. Kenosis is understood as transcription, translation or transfer of God into the world, a means to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. This idea, the political correlation of which is non-authoritarian democracy, and the epistemological correlate, is a Gadamer's understanding of dialogue.On the positive side Vattimo’s “weak thinking” and the ontology, seek to be hermeneutical and nihilistic in the spirit of the Heideggerian ontology. Vattimo's philosophy seeks to save ontological discourse without making it metaphysical in the traditional sense. To speak more specifically, this philosophy recognizes the world of symbolic forms, the world of action, recognizes different practices, perceiving them as different languages of the mind. Describing postmodernity as a “more enlightened Enlightenment”, where there is no longer a dream about pure objectivity, Caputo emphasizes that the modern rebirth of religion returns its original meaning – faith, not less form of knowledge. Therefore, religious truth is characterized as truth without knowledge, and modern religiousness as “religion without religion”.By reducing the ontological and theological thought there is a convergence of theology and philosophy, which now do not contradict each other, but are found in some new space, which we call post-secular philosophy.

Crisis status of the contemporary Western civilisation and the processes of its secular spiritual decay as the main reason for conflict state with the Russian world with its Christian Orthodox tradition. Inability for Russia to acknowledge the modern neoliberal order, enforced in Europe and initiated by an Anglo-Saxon non-Christian ideology. Its impact and of its secular values on general situation around European and global diplomacy, international law marginalisation as a legal nihilism as a result of it. Attempt to substitute traditional diplomatic notions and values in favour of liberal supremacy as the main reason for weakness and ineffectiveness of today’s diplomacy and nullity of international law. Given the historical part of Russian Europe in forming European and Europe-Asian identity, an obvious task is to save the historical Europe, to protect its Christian identity from Anglo-Saxon antihumane ideas and from cancel-culture policy in Europe. In this regard historical school of European diplomacy preserves its major role, which had been formed with the Russian foreign policy involvement during the last centuries. The very diplomatic factors must ensure the European cultural identity, the century traditions of unity and alliance between Russia and European countries. With Anglo-Saxon protectorate in Europe, US interests dominance, preserving Russian role in European expanse is crucial in Western European conscious, as well as impeding the decline of Russia’s activities in relations with European states and prevention of vacuum in such cooperation, despite the rise of interest towards East and Asia. It’s important not to allow a revision of geopolitical role of Russia on the Western direction due to costs of the turn to the East. Both in cultural and civilisational aspects Russia remains to be a European state, and a geopolitical view on cooperation with Asia must not lead to the destruction of Russian positions and infl uence in Europe. With the de-facto transformation of the EU into a military-political power, a NATO affix, it’s important to put eff orts into the rise of the level of bilateral relations and a partnership with the European countries, securing a reduction of the EU negative role, which doesn’t represent the whole Europe, with Russia being part of it.

Abstract Wilhelmina Wittigschlager’s novel, Minna: Wife of the Young Rabbi, published in 1905, serves as a case in point for characterizing a young audacious Jewish female protagonist who, against all odds, by breaking societal conventions and exercising a strong will and remarkable determination, attains individual freedom and struggles for political and social justice This study has yielded some important insights regarding the key role Minna’s multiple racial, religious, and national identities play in the construction of her fictional self. By examining the cultural, historical, and societal influences upon Wittigschlager, as she was in the process of writing the novel, this paper aims at showing how the fictional portrayal of a Jewish defiant female protagonist is interlaced with the factual lifestyles, culture, and representations of some actual contemporary female rebels such as Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, and Hesya Gelfman Minna’s Jewishness serves as the central point of her characterization, while the exploration of the pertinent socio-historical, cultural, political, and economic aspects outlines the environment in which her character was conceived

INTRODUCTION. A specific feature of the current state of international relations is the existence of elements that reflect the growing antagonism between the leading countries that make up the world order, as well as between such countries and those international associations that are supposed to regulate and sometimes directly manage the cooperation among the subjects of international relations. The totality, the acuteness and the complexity of these antagonisms determine the phenomenon which is defined as a “crisis” by the experts who analyze the nature and the development of international relations. The article below analyzes different opinions of legal experts in relation to the objective needs of legal regulation of international affairs expressed from the view point of prospects and new forms of such regulation, as well as the legal instruments used by the countries when faced with encroachment on them on the part of other players, i.e. states and their associations. The author mentions the fact that the political, economic and legal development of the system of international relations in the last few decades has become sustainably dependent on the integration processes taking place within the framework of the world order in whole, i.e. on something commonly defined as the “globalization”, while the objective prerequisites for the harmonious integration with interests of all countries taken into account are often absent in the designated processes and the main drivers of globalization efforts are those subjects of international relations that get most of the benefits from these processes, such as states, public organizations, specific public figures. As a result, the customary and efficient forms and contractual relations in international law are being re- placed with the ideas of “global law” or “supranational law” based on the intent to implement the “denationalization” of law by way of submitting the legal systems of some sovereign states to the will of international institutions. The activities of such institutions established numerously in the post-war period are of increasingly administrative nature in cases when such organizations are vested with authoritative, supervisory or other similar powers whilst the specific features of national legal order are ignored. A separate issue in the development of international law, both at the doctrinal level and in terms of practices of international administrative and judicial bodies, is the trend towards the stimulating of the loss of the so-called “national legal identity” in favor of various network-based, surrogate and culturally unspecific forms of regulating relationships, first and foremost economic ones. The dilution of legal norms, standards and rules that are customary for the population of the developed countries makes a notable impact on the public con-science, creating the objective preconditions for a boom in “legal nihilism” and the public negation of the necessity to abide with the rules of law, all this going in parallel with such inadequately working principles as the “supremacy of law”, “observance of civil rights”, “democratic basis of social structure” etc. In the opinion of the author, the fact that the Western countries and their closest allies have lost the perception of the necessity to preserve the distinction and the independence of the legal concepts and institutions created during the centuries of the world development and have made their choice in favor of the expansion of the functions of international organizations and associations is the historical phenomenon that characterizes a certain stage in the development of the world order. The creation of economic and political forms at this stage is followed by the development of law that is cyclical, uneven and not always logical from the viewpoint of historical process. The return of the law to its traditional, system-level basics that are clear to everyone taking part in the social relations is often facilitated by crises, such as the one in place today when the existing challenges and problems are complemented by the objective force majeure events like the virus attack in 2020 which the amorphous “network-based” instruments or not entirely just and efficient elements of the “international legal order” cannot cope with, as opposed to the active governmental and legal mechanisms of sovereign states capable of ensuring the balance of legal instruments and administrative levers of management in crisis situations.MATERIALS AND METHODS. The methodology of the analysis is comprised of the system-based and formally jurisprudential methods that analyze not only the theoretical works of the leading Russian and foreign scientists, but also a considerable bulk of legal standards, judicial acts and sources pertaining to the activities of international organizations. This allows to look upon the general trends in the development of Russian domestic law and international law institutions, statutory acts and relevant legal doctrines, as well as to demonstrate their interdependence and the similarity in some of the lines of their development. The issue of conflict interaction of national (in particular, Russian) legal systems and the activities of international judicial bodies is discussed separately in the article. The obvious dependence of the activities of international judicial bodies based on the relevant international agreements and conventions on the political situation in the world is also shown in the article. A conclusion is drawn as to the advisability of revision of the key provisions of international acts adopted in different times and regulating the procedure for the formation and operation of international judicial bodies, such revision required so as to provide for the supremacy of the Russian Constitution in cases of conflicts between the court orders and the provisions of the fundamental law of Russia.RESEARCH RESULTS. The articles outlines the results of the analysis of the issue of state sovereignty and national jurisdiction from the viewpoint of the efforts taken by the leading Western countries with a view to ensure the advantages of their legal and judicial systems in the process of international, first and foremost, economic cooperation. Conclusions are drawn in the article as to the ways and forms of competition in the sphere of law whereby the separate groups of countries, seeking to constrain its economic rivals, impose such ways of regulating the economic activities that give advantages to specific economies to the detriment of the others. One of the aspects of such competitive practice, as the author believes, is the set of anti-offshore measures extensively implemented at the initiative of the US tax agencies and the international tax agencies marching in their lockstep in order to undermine the reputation of major Russian companies and create the conditions for the worldwide persecution of Russian businessmen and government officials.DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. Based on the examination of new phenomena in the international law practice, the author concludes that the efficiency of legal instruments aimed at the protection of Russian national interests, including those of the Russian private business, against various abuses and discriminatory acts on the part of foreign laws enforcement agencies and judicial bodies, must be enhanced. The application of the principle of “extraterritorial jurisdiction” intensively applied in the US courts is demonstrated by the examples of UD doctrines, such as “arm’s length” and Alien Tоrt Statute that are actively used in the American judicial system contrary to the principles and rules of application of the decisions of national courts enshrined in the relevant international covenants. A conclusion is drawn in respect of the growing influence of the social and political processes on the development of international law institutions and mechanisms for the regulation of public processes. As noted by the author, it is necessary to integrate the efforts of legal experts from different law schools and traditions in order to preserve the role of the main public regulator played by both national and international law.

This article is about the present day value transformation of Western European civilization, happening through production of alternative models of identification in different subcultures. Subcultural creativity is reviewed as an important differentiating factor of the previous ideological integrity, turning into some contradicting parts. We made an emphasis on black metal subculture, which actively sets itself in opposition to the dominant culture. The main ideological sources of black metal subculture are The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey and neo-paganism. The analysis reveals that neo-paganism is a more important identification factor of the rebels coming out against the dominant culture, than their commitment to LaVey’s ideas, which align quite well with the goals and aims of the late capitalist society. In black metal subculture neo-paganism sometimes combines with extreme right-wing ideologies, transferring anti-Christian nihilism, adolescent misanthropy, and aesthetical radicalism into political aspect.

Studies of marginality have examined how individuals or groups are distanced from a hoped-for life as a result of structural, economic, or political circumstances, and how this may result in unwanted experiences of boredom. Th is article critically reexamines this perspective by juxtaposing it with an empirical description of a group of young Georgian nihilists who live in a sphere of disengaged repetition where turning the future into something that “doesn’t matter anyway” becomes a way of handling boredom in the present in an inactive manner. I use this to examine the temporal aspects at stake among marginal groups who deliberately disengage. In the article, I deploy the term “joyful pessimism” as an analytical device to capture an alternative configuration of marginality and boredom.

The article looks at the main groups of measures to prevent deliberately false messages about threats to citizens’ security, destruction or damage to property at the social level. Social prevention includes a system of economic, political, legal, cultural and educational measures aimed at overcoming crisis processes in society, in particular, such as unemployment, social inequality, political tension, legal nihilism, moral decline and the spiritual crisis. The implementation of such measures also influences the factors that cause crime, which can reduce the level of the latter. It is emphasized that general social prevention has an important criminological aspect, because it is the foundation, the basis of special criminological prevention. Socio-economic measures to prevent deliberately misrepresenting threats to the safety of citizens, destroying or damaging property are analyzed. It is emphasized that these measures occupy one of the central places in the system of preventive activity of the general social level. It is stated that, according to the constitutional approach, socially oriented policy is a part of internal state policy. It is summarized that practically all socio-economic transformations of our society at the present stage belong to all-social crime prevention measures. The general social level of crime prevention is largely determined by the state of the state’s economy, political situation, and the level of material state of the population. Among the socio-political measures are highlighted overcoming the political crisis, resolving the military conflict, overcoming corruption in public authorities. The most important cultural and educational activities are the organization of leisure, educational work, promotion of healthy lifestyles and sports. As a conclusion, it is stated that socially oriented and economically justified state policy by itself contains a set of general social measures for prevention of crimes, including – deliberately false reports about threat to the safety of citizens, destruction or damage to property objects.

TOTAL NEGATION OF THE INTELLIGENTSIA. IDEAS BY JAN WACŁAW MACHAJSKI AND MICHAŁ BAKUNINThe article begins with a discussion on the main views expressed in the literature concerning the origins, the essence of the intelligentsia and its features. Against that background, it reconstructs a critical understanding of the intelligentsia as a social stratum as expressed by Bakunin and Jan Wacław Machajski. Both were the representatives of the radical, leftist thought of the 19th and the turn of the 19th and 20th century. It is indicated that neither of them defines the intelligentsia in their writings. They commonly use the term intellectual worker, which is quite accurately described.The issue of the intellectual worker and, more broadly, the intelligentsia, is clearly part of the doctrine of Bakunin. It is also important in the thought of Jan Wacław Machajski. They were both representatives of the intelligentsia in the sense of their social status. Both supported the instrumen­tal perception of the intelligentsia as a specific social group. The path of intellectual development and political activity of both writers and political activists, which led them to extreme revolutionary radicalism, was evolutionary. It led through a fascination with different, often conflicting, ideologies at various stages in life, eventually aiming at that radical revolutionary attitude. The political tho­ught in both cases was dynamic and subject to evolution. Both lived in literary and political circles. They considered their intellectual and political activity as a kind of liberation mission aimed at the enslaved society. They expressed similar views concerning the function of the intelligentsia both in terms of its social and political role in exploited and enslaved societies and, above all, its ambiguous place in the future revolution. Bakunin formulated anti-intellectual and anti-intelligentsia proposals, whereas Machajski — mainly anti-intelligentsia ones. The possible thesis about the identity of the anti-intellectualism and anti-intelligentsia seems to be at least questionable. Insofar as Machajski’s concept of the intelligentsia only has a political aspect based on the Marxist phraseology, Bakunin’s previous ideas and his anti-intellectualism have a mainly philosophical, and only then political, dimension. However, ultimately, they both represent the attitude of political nihilism. For both of them the critical characteristics of the intelligentsia generally applies to the revolutionary intelli­gentsia which claims the right to care of the proletarians, yet most often it does so in their own in­terest. Against this background, a conclusion is made that education is a kind of property and hence a source of exploitation, class exploitation, in fact. However, the arguments of both political writers concerning this issue are different, and so are the derived conclusions.

The author addresses the subject of the opposition of “free-thinking” and belief in God in the domestic liberal thought and draws parallels between modern Russian society and similar philosophic discussions a century from the present time. In both cases liberalism in Russia kept to aggressive atheistic position, supporting in that aspect radical materialists. The author examines the historical preconditions for such worldview on the basis of the polemics inside the “Religious and Philosophical Society” that existed in St. Petersburg at the beginning of the 20th century. According to the author, in that period there existed a very promising direction in Russian liberal thought, when the representatives of Russian liberal ideas (along with the representatives of other intellectual directions) were the architects of the renascence of Russian religious philosophy on the eve of the Russian empire collapse. Their intellectual activity dealt with relieving the ideological hostility of liberalism towards religion and spiritual life traditions. The representatives of that direction supposed that without solving that problem of antagonism, liberalism would inevitably degenerate into culturally and politically destructive nihilism. The author stresses the relevance of similar antagonism and confrontation nowadays, drawing attention in that regard to the importance of studying and further development of all directions of thought that we inherit from Russian religious philosophy of the beginning of the 20th centu

Abstract In the first part of this article on Žižek's recent book Pandemic! I show how he develops a political theology of the spirit through a discussion of social distancing. In this argument Žižek connects the idea of physical distance to the biblical story of the resurrection, in which Jesus says to Mary Magdalene “noli me tangere” (“touch me not”), in order to imagine the emergence of a community of spirit from the social, political, and economic ruin caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Contrasting this community of spirit to the Chinese Communist Party's Foucauldian response to the outbreak of the virus, Žižek suggests a turn away from Prometheanism and the logic of domination toward a new posthuman humanitarianism based on a recognition of human weakness, vulnerability, and fragility. In Žižek's view, this turn toward a new form of humility would emerge from the final disenchantment of the spirit of capitalism and a recognition of the difference between human work, which contributes to a meaningful world, and bestial labor that dehumanizes and means nothing. Thus, the article shows how Žižek thinks about the pandemic in terms of a crisis of late capitalism and the possibility of a new spirit of communism. While the presexual nonlife of the virus is comparable to the drive of capitalism in respect of its unthinking will to replication and reproduction, Žižek founds the basis of humanity in our (human) mortality and being toward death that open out onto a new horizon of releasement (Gelassenheit) beyond biotechnoeconomic nihilism. The conclusion of the article, therefore, shows how Žižek imagines that the pandemic presents humanity with an existential choice about the way we organize social life. This choice is between the biopolitical domination of Chinese authoritarianism that seeks to control every aspect of life, American disaster capitalism that accepts the brutality of the state of nature, and finally Žižek's utopian spirit of communism based on a recognition of human and planetary finitude.

This article analyzes the socio-philosophical and socio-cultural approaches to law enforcement practices in the sphere of criminal punishment and its reflection in the Russian mentality. The recognition of ideological pluralism and multidimensionality of the social environment with the existence of differences and contradictions indicates the presence of the law enforcement boundaries as a measure of their certainty. This is due to the fact that law enforcement is associated with mutual interest of the society in the formation of citizenship in the balance of incentives and penalties. The dialectic balance of «weak» and «strong» by means of «the middle attraction» allows one to consider equality as an impossible limit, because it is an equality of those who are not equal. Currently, there is a need of awareness of legal reality on the basis of socio-cultural practices and, moreover, of its cultural content. This phenomenon is due to the identification of law enforcement mechanisms, as well as their dependence on the degree of society relaxation of the state permitted and established criminal penalties, when there are negative consequences of legal nihilism in the Russian mentality. Considering the enforcement as an activity, we must notice that this activity manifests itself in the”act of abstinence" and the "act of doing" (P. Sorokin). If a passive abstinence has place in the first case, the patience appears as a virtue in the second one. In literary practice, this idea is developed by F. M. Dostoevsky and is opposed by L. N. Tolstoy. In «The Karamazov Brothers» the «acts of patience» are explained by the example of Christ's command: «Do not resist evil». The moral awareness transforms the life into true Being, i. e. spiritual Being as «any activity out of the spiritual content is only half the battle» (M. Mamardashvili). Therefore, it is to be wished that every individual had an opportunity to harmonize their personality and mind and also had an idea of true spirituality and its significance for themselves and the whole society. The self-definition of an individual and their openness to accept foreign ideological constructions contribute to the achievement of mutually acceptable forms of behavior («self-preservation behavior») in the community. This behavior is based on the active life position of the law enforcement subject, when one’s responsibility for one’s actions and deeds is combined with Kant's categorical imperative of «Duty». The dialectic balance of «weak» and «strong» is based on the legitimization of the equality. The fundamental equality of all before the law is that we can expect a much more effective solution of the social problems, if we stimulate interpersonal exchanges, instead of relying on the implementation of Someone's knowledge. An activity aspect of law enforcement identifies problems of a lifestyle, quality of life and social communication. Outside its activity aspect the law enforcement is transformed into the realm of speculations, subjective estimations, random parameters and indicators. The moral individual valued conditionality of this behavior is a manifestation of the mentality in contrast to an external economic, social and politically motivated behavior. One gets used to (adapts to) a specific situation. This addiction is accompanied by prolonged social expectations or deferred needs, which are reproduced in specific social and cultural environment (mentality).

The article analyzes the influence of F.M. Dostoevsky on Italian literature. In particular, the reception of his oeuvre in the 19th and 20th centuries. The first time the name of the Russian writer appears in Biographic Dictionary of the Contemporary Writers by Angelo De Gubernatis, an Italian indologist, interested in Russian literature. According to De Gubernatis, Dostoevsky was seen more as a moralist, a philosopher rather than a writer. Thanks to Gabriele D'annunzio, Dosotevsky will be recognised as a great writer a few years later. Influences by the Russian author are evident in his novel Giovanni Episcopo, where the monologues of the main character are very similar to the monologues of the protagonist of The meek one. Dostoevsky had a big influence on Luigi Pirandello and Italo Svevo, too. In Pirandello we can find the same use of irony. For Pirandello irony is a way to analyze reality in a very complete way, to search and find in tragedy a reason to smile. Italo Svevo was inspired by Dostoevsky for the construction of his characters, his “inetti”. Inetto is a man who is not able to live in society. Nevertheless, the condition of this man is a sort of reaction to the terribile, false world that surrounds him. Probably, Svevo was strongly influenced by the ideas of Schopenhauer and the common aspects in both authors' works are related to the effect of the German philosopher. Dostoevsky was also one of the most important sources of inspiration for Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini wrote not only critical works on Dostoevsky but was also strongly influenced by him while he was writing his last, fragmentary and incomplete novel Petrolio. © И. Уччелло, 2022 Petrolio is a huge work full of philosophical, political and social lucubrations. It is a novel in which it is possible to read ideas on the function of a writer, but especially it is a novel that wants to show how power can destroy people. The last work of Pasolini wasn't studied enough especially because it was an “inconvient” book for the Italian elite, but also because the scenes of incest and pedophily weren't totally approved by the critics. In Petrolio, Pasolini wants to show a society in which the Demons have won and this is the reason why he takes intere scenes from the Dostoevskian novel Demons and just translates them. The Italian author wants to show that the “terrible” reality in Italy during the “Years of Lead” (Anni di Piombo) is not much different from the nihilist reality shown by Dostoevsky in his book. This article shows that Dostoevsky had an incredible influence on some cornerstones of Italian literature that are still active today. Moreover, it shows that topics, personages and atmospheres expressed by the Russian writer can be translated and transformed in another language and in another culture since they are universal.

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.

Content warning: although it was kept to a minimum, this text displays instances of (anti-Semitic) hate speech. During the 2016 U.S. election and its aftermath, multiple journalistic accounts reported on “alt-right trolls” emanating from anonymous online spaces like the imageboard 4chan (e.g. Abramson; Ellis). Having gained infamy for its nihilist trolling subcultures (Phillips, This Is Why) and the loose hacktivist movement Anonymous (Coleman), 4chan now drew headlines because of the alt-right’s “genuinely new” concoction of white supremacy, ironic Internet humour, and a lack of clear leadership (Hawley 50). The alt-right “anons”, as imageboard users call themselves, were said to primarily manifest on the “Politically Incorrect” subforum of 4chan: /pol/. Gradually, a sentiment arose in the titles of several news articles that the pro-Trump “alt-right trolls” had successfully won the metapolitical battle intertwined with the elections (Phillips, Oxygen 5). For instance, articles titled that “trolls” were “The Only True Winners of this Election” (Dewey) or even “Plotting a GOP Takeover” (Stuart).The headlines were as enticing as questionable. As trolling-expert Whitney Phillips headlined herself, the alt-right did not attain political gravity solely through its own efforts but rather was “Conjured Out of Pearl Clutching and Media Attention” (“The Alt-Right”), with news outlets being provoked to criticise, debunk, or sensationalise its trolling activities (Faris et al. 131; Phillips, “Oxygen” 5-6). Even with the right intentions, attempts at denouncement through using vague, structuralist notions–from “alt-right” and “trolls” to “the basket of deplorables” (Robertson) – arguably only strengthened the coherence of those it was meant to disavow (Phillips, Oxygen; Phillips et al.; Marantz). Phillips et al. therefore lamented such generalisations, arguing attributing Trump’s win to vague notions of “4chan”, “alt-right”, or “trolls” actually bestowed an “atemporal, almost godlike power” to what was actually an “ever-reactive anonymous online collective”. Therefore, they called to refrain from making claims about opaque spaces like 4chan without first “plotting the landscape” and “safeguarding the actual record”. Indeed, “when it comes to 4chan and Anonymous”, Phillips et al. warned, “nobody steps in the same river twice”.This text answers the call to map anonymous online groups by engaging with the complexity of testing the muddy waters of the ever-changing and dissimulative 4chan-current. It first argues how anti-structuralist research outlooks can answer to many of the pitfalls arising from this complex task. Afterwards, it traces the word trump as it was used on 4chan/pol/ to problematise some of the above-mentioned media narratives. How did anons consider Trump, and how did the /pol/-current change during the build-up of the 2016 U.S. elections and afterwards?On Researching Masked and Dissimulative ExtremistsWhile potentially playing into the self-imagination of malicious actors (Phillips et al.), the frequent appearance of overblown narratives on 4chan is unsurprising considering the peculiar affordances of imageboards. Imageboards are anonymous – no user account is required to post – and ephemeral – posts are deleted after a certain amount of activity, sometimes after days, sometimes after minutes (Bernstein et al.; Hagen). These affordances complicate studying collectives on imageboards, with the primary reasons being that 1) they prevent insights into user demographics, 2) they afford particularly dissimulative, playful discourse that can rarely be taken at face value (Auerbach; de Zeeuw and Tuters), and 3) the sheer volume of auto-deleted activity means one has to stay up-to-date with a rapid waterfall of subcultural ephemera. Additionally, the person stepping into the muddy waters of the chan-river also changes their gaze over time. For instance, Phillips bravely narrates how she once saw parts of the 4chan-stream as “fun” to only later realise the blatantly racist elements present from the start (“It Wasn’t Just”).To help render legible the changing currents of imageboard activity without relying on vague understandings of the “alt-right”, “trolls”, or “Anonymous”, anti-structuralist research outlooks form a possible answer. Around 1900, sociologists like Gabriel Tarde already argued to refrain from departing from structuralist notions of society and instead let social compositions arise through iterative tracing of minute imitations (11). As described in Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, actor-network theory (ANT) revitalises the Tardean outlook by similarly criticising the notion of the “social” and “society” as distinct, sui-generis entities. Instead, ANT advocates tracing “flat” networks of agency made up of both human and non-human actors (165-72). By tracing actors and describing the emerging network of heterogeneous mediators and intermediaries (105), one can slowly but surely get a sense of collective life. ANT thus takes a page from ethnomethodology, which advocates a similar mapping of how participants of a group produce themselves as such (Garfinkel).For multiple reasons, anti-structuralist approaches like ANT can be useful in tracing elusive anonymous online groups and their changing compositions. First, instead of grasping collectives on imageboards from the outset through structuralist notions, as networked individuals, or as “amorphous and formless entities” (see e.g. Coleman 113-5), it only derives its composition after following where its actors lead. This can result in an empirical and literally objective mapping of their collectivity while refraining from mystifications and non-existent connections–so often present in popular narratives about “trolls” and the “alt-right”. At the same time, it allows prominent self-imaginations and mythologizations – or, in ANT-parlance, “localisations of the global” (Latour 173-190) – rise to the surface whenever they form important actors, which, as we will see, tends to happen on 4chan.Second, ANT offers a useful lens with which to consider how non-human actors can uphold a sense of collectivity within anonymous imageboards. This can include digital objects as part of the infrastructure–e.g. the automatically assigned post numbers having mythical value on 4chan (Beran, It Came From 69)–but also cultural objects like words or memes. Considering 4chan’s anonymity, this focus on objects instead of individuals is partly a necessity: one cannot know the exact amount and flow of users. Still, as this text seeks to show, non-human actors like words or memes can form suitable actors to map the changing collectivity of anonymous imageboard users in the absence of demographic insights.There are a few pitfalls worth noting when conducting ANT-informed research into extremist spaces like 4chan/pol/. The aforementioned ironic and dissimulative rhetoric of anonymous forum culture (de Zeeuw and Tuters) means tracing is complicated by implicit (yet omnipresent) intertextual references undecipherable to the untrained eye. Even worse, when misread or exaggerated, such tracing efforts can play into trolling tactics. This can in turn risk what Phillips calls “giving oxygen” to bigoted narratives by amplifying their presence (“Oxygen”). Since ANT does not prescribe what sort of description is needed (Latour 149), this exposure can be limited and/or critically engaged with by the researcher. Still, it is inevitable that research on extremist collectives adds at least some garbage to already polluted information ecologies (Phillips and Milner 2020), even when “just” letting the actors speak (Venturini). Indeed, this text will unfortunately also show hate speech terms below.These complications of irony and amplification can be somewhat mitigated by mixing ethnographic involvement with computational methods. Together, they can render implicit references explicit while also mapping broad patterns in imitation and preventing singular (misleading) actors from over-dominating the description. When done well, such descriptions do not only have to amplify but can also marginalise and trivialise. An accurate mapping can thereby counter sensationalist media narratives, as long as that is where the actors lead. It because of this potentiality that anti-structuralist tracing of extremist, dissimulative online groups should not be discarded outright.Stopping Momentarily to Test the WatersTo put the above into practice, what follows is a brief case study on the term trump on 4chan/pol/. Instead of following users, here the actor trump is taken an entry point for tracing various assemblages: not only referring to Donald J. Trump as an individual and his actions, but also to how /pol/-anons imagine themselves in relation to Trump. In this way, the actor trump is a fluid one: each of its iterations contains different boundaries and variants of its environment (de Laet and Mol 252). By following these environments, can we make sense of how the delirious 2016 U.S. election cycle played out on /pol/, a space described as the “skeleton key to the rise of Trump” (Beran, 4chan)?To trace trump, I use the 4plebs.com archive, containing almost all posts made on /pol/ between late-2013 and early 2018 (the time of research). I subsequently use two text mining methods to trace various connections between trump and other actors and use this to highlight specific posts. As Latour et al. note, computational methods allow “navigations” (593) of different data points to ensure diverse empirical perspectives, preventing both structuralist “zoomed-out” views and local contexts from over-dominating. Instead of moving between micro and macro views, such a navigation should therefore be understood as a “circulation” around the data, deploying various perspectives that each assemble the actors in a different way. In following this, the case study aims to demonstrate how, instead of a lengthy ethnographic account, a brief navigation using both quali- and quantitative perspectives can quickly demystify some aspects of seemingly nebulous online groups.Tracing trump: From Meme-Wizard to Anti-Semitic TargetTo get a sense of the centrality of Trump on /pol/, I start with post frequencies of trump assembled in two ways. The first (Figure 1) shows how, soon after the announcement of Trump’s presidential bid on 16 June 2015, around 100,000 comments mention the word (2% of the total amount of posts). The frequencies spike to a staggering 8% of all comments during the build-up to Trump’s win of the Republican nomination in early 2016 and presidential election in November 2016. Figure 1: The absolute and relative amount of posts on 4chan/pol/ containing the word trump (prefixes and suffixes allowed).To follow the traces between trump and the more general discourse surrounding it, I compiled a more general “trump-dense threads” dataset. These are threads containing thirty or more posts, with at least 15% of posts mentioning trump. As Figure 2 shows, at the two peaks, 8% of any thread on /pol/ was trump-dense, accounting for approximately 15,000 monthly threads. While Trump’s presence is unsurprising, these two views show just how incredibly central the former businessman was to /pol/ at the time of the 2016 U.S. election. Figure 2: The absolute and relative amount of threads on 4chan/pol/ that are “trump-dense”, meaning they have thirty comments or more, out of which at least 15% contain the word trump (prefixes and suffixes allowed).Instead of picking a certain moment from these aggregate overviews and moving to the “micro” (Latour et al.), I “circulate” further with Figure 3, showing another perspective on the trump­-dense thread dataset. It shows a scatter plot of trump-dense threads grouped per week and plotted according to how similar their vocabulary is. First, all the words per week are weighted with tf-idf, a common information retrieval algorithm that scores units on the basis if they appear a lot in one of the datasets but not in others (Spärck-Jones). The document sets are then plotted according to the similarity of their weighted vocabulary (cosine similarity). The five highest-scoring terms for the five clusters (identified with K-means) are listed in the bottom-right corner. For legibility, the scatterplot is compressed by the MDS algorithm. To get a better sense of specific vocabulary per week, terms that appeared in all weeks are filtered out (like trump or hillary). Read counterclockwise, the nodes roughly increase in time, thus showing a clear temporal change of discourse, with the first clusters being more similar in vocabulary than the last, and the weeks before and after the primary election (orange cluster) showing a clear gap. Figure 3: A scatterplot showing cosine distances between tf-idf weighted vocabularies of trump-dense threads per week. Compressed with MDS and coloured by five K-means clusters on the underlying tf-idf matrix (excluding terms that appeared in all weeks). Legend shows the top five tf-idf terms within these clusters. ★ denotes the median week in the cluster.With this map, we can trace other words appearing around trump as significant actors in the weekly documents. For instance, Trump-supportive words like stump (referring to “Can’t Stump the Trump”) and maga (“Make America Great Again”) are highly ranked in the first two clusters. In later weeks, less clearly pro-Trump terms appear: drumpf reminds of the unattractive root of the Trump family name, while impeached and mueller show the Russia probe in 2017 and 2018 were significant in the trump-dense threads of that time. This change might thus hint at growing scepticism towards Trump after his win, but it is not shown how these terms are used. Fortunately, the scatterplot offers a rudder with which to navigate to further perspectives.In keeping with Latour’s advice to keep “aggregate structures” and “local contexts” flat (165-72), I contrast the above scatterplot with a perspective on the data that keeps sentence structures intact instead of showing abstracted keyword sets. Figure 4 uses all posts mentioning trump in the median weeks of the first and last clusters in the scatterplot (indicated with ★) and visualises word trees (Wattenberg and Viégas) of most frequent words following “trump is a”. As such, they render explicit ontological associations about Trump; what is Trump, according to /pol/-anons? The first word tree shows posts from 2-8 November 2015, when fifteen Republican competitors were still in the race. As we have seen in Figure 1, Trump was in this month still “only” mentioned in around 50,000 posts (2% of the total). This word tree suggests his eventual nomination was at this point seen as an unlikely and even undesirable scenario, showing derogatory associations like retard and failure, as well as more conspiratorial words like shill, fraud, hillary plant, and hillary clinton puppet. Notably, the most prominent association, meme, and others like joke and fucking comic relief, imply Trump was not taken too seriously (see also Figure 5). Figure 4: Word trees of words following “trump is a” in the median weeks of the first and last clusters of the scatterplot. Made with Jason Davies’s Word Tree application. Figure 5: Anons who did not take Trump seriously. Screencapture taken from archive.4plebs.org (see post 1 and post 2 in context).The first word tree contrast dramatically with the one from the last median week from 18 to 24 December 2017. Here, most associations are anti-Semitic or otherwise related to Judaism, with trump most prominently related to the hate speech term kike. This prompts several questions: did /pol/ become increasingly anti-Semitic? Did already active users radicalise, or were more anti-Semites drawn to /pol/? Or was this nefarious current always there, with Trump merely drawing anti-Semitic attention after he won the election? Although the navigation did not depart from a particular critical framework, by “just following the actors” (Venturini), it already stumbled upon important questions related to popular narratives on 4chan and the alt-right. While it is tempting to stop here and explain the change as “radicalisation”, the navigation should continue to add more empirical perspectives. When doing so, the more plausible explanation is that the unlikely success of Trump briefly attracted (relatively) more diverse and playful visitors to /pol/, obscuring the presence and steady growth of overt extremists in the process.To unpack this, I first focus on the claim that a (relatively) diverse set of users flocked to /pol/ because of the Trump campaign. /pol/’s overall posting activity rose sharply during the 2016 election, which can point to already active users becoming more active, but is likely mostly caused by new users flocking to /pol/. Indeed, this can be traced in actor language. For instance, many anons professed to be “reporting in” from other 4chan boards during crucial moments in the campaing. One of the longest threads in the trump-dense threads dataset (4,504 posts) simply announces “Cruz drops out”. In the comments below, multiple anons state they arrived from other boards to join the Trump-infused activity. For instance, Figure 6 shows an anon replying “/v/ REPORTING IN”, to which sixty other users reacted by similarly affirming themselves as representatives from other boards (e.g. “/mu/ here. Ready to MAGA”). While but another particular view, this implies Trump’s surprising nomination stimulated a crowd-like gathering of different anons jumping into the vortex of trump-related activity on /pol/. Figure 6: Replies by outside-anons “reporting in” the sticky thread announcing Ted Cruz's drop out, 4 May 2016. Screenshots taken from 4plebs.org (see post 1 and post 2 in context).Other actor-language further expresses Trump’s campaign “drew in” new and unadjusted (or: less extreme) users. Notably, many anons claimed the 2016 election led to an “invasion of Reddit users”. Figure 7 shows one such expression: an annotated timeline of /pol/’s posting activity graph (made by 4plebs), posted to /pol/ on 26 February 2016 and subsequently reposted 34 times. It interprets 2016 as a period where “Trump shit goes into overdrive, meme shit floods /pol/, /pol/ is now reddit”. Whether these claims hold any truth is difficult to establish, but the image forms an interesting case of how the entirety “/pol/” is imagined and locally articulated. Such simplistic narratives relate to what Latour calls “panoramas”: totalising notions of some imagined “whole” (188-90) that, while not to be “confused with the collective”, form crucial data since they express how actors understand their own composition (190). Especially in the volatile conditions of anonymous and ephemeral imageboards, repeated panoramic narratives can help in constructing a sense of cohesion–and thereby also form interesting actors to trace. Indeed, following the panoramic statement “/pol/ is now reddit”, other gatekeeping-efforts are not hard to find. For instance, phrases urging other anons to go “back to reddit” (occurring in 19,069 posts in the total dataset) or “back to The_Donald” (a popular pro-Trump subreddit, 1,940 posts) are also particularly popular in the dataset. Figure 7: An image circulated on /pol/ lamenting that "/pol/ is now reddit" by annotating 4plebs’s posting metrics. Screenshot taken from archive.4plebs.org (see posts).Did trump-related activity on /pol/ indeed become more “meme-y” or “Reddit-like” during the election cycle, as the above panorama articulates? The activity in the trump-dense threads seems to suggest so. Figure 8 again uses the tf-idf terms from these threads, but here with the columns denoting the weeks and the rows the top scoring tf-idf terms of their respective week. To highlight relevant actors, all terms are greyed out (see the unedited sheet here), except for several keywords that indicate particularly playful or memetic vernacular: the aforementioned stump, emperor, referring to Trump’s nickname as “God Emperor”; energy, referring to “high energy”, a common catchphrase amongst Trump supporters; magic, referring to “meme magic”, the faux-ironic belief that posting memes affects real-life events; and pepe, the infamous cartoon frog. In both the tf-idf ranking and the absolute frequencies, these keywords flourish in 2016, but disappear soon after the presidential election passes. The later weeks in 2017 and 2018 rarely contain similarly playful and memetic terms, and if they do, suggest mocking discourse regarding Trump (e.g. drumpf). This perspective thus pictures the environment around trump in the run-up to the election as a particularly memetic yet short-lived carnival. At least from this perspective, “meme shit” thus indeed seemed to have “flooded /pol/”, but only for a short while. Figure 8: tf-idf matrix of trump-dense threads, columns denoting weeks and rows denoting the top hundred most relevant terms per week. Download the full tf-idf matrix with all terms here.Despite this carnivalesque activity, further perspectives suggest it did not go at the expense of extremist activity on /pol/. Figure 9 shows the absolute and relative counts of the word "jew" and its derogatory synonym "kike". Each of these increases from 2015 onwards. As such, it seems to align with claims that Trump’s success and /pol/ becoming increasingly extremist were causally related (Thompson). However, apart from possibly confusing correlation with causation, the relative presence remains fairly stable, even slightly decreasing during the frenzy of the Trump campaign. Since we also saw Trump himself become a target for anti-Semitic activity, these trendlines rather imply /pol/’s extremist current grew proportionally to the overall increase in activity, and increased alongside but not but necessarily as a partisan contingent as a result of Trump’s campaign. Figure 9: The absolute and relative frequency of the terms "jew" and "kike" on 4chan/pol/.ConclusionCombined, the above navigation implies two main changes in 4chan/pol/’s trump-related current. First, the climaxes of the 2016 Republican primaries and presidential elections seem to have invoked crowd-like influxes of (relatively) heterogeneous users joining the Trump-delirium, marked by particularly memetic activity. Second, /pol/ additionally seemed to have formed a welcoming hotbed for anti-Semites and other extremists, as the absolute amount of (anti-Semitic) hate speech increased. However, while already-present and new users might have been energised by Trump, they were not necessarily loyal to him, as professed by the fact that Trump himself eventually became a target. Together with the fact that anti-Semitic hate speech stayed relatively consistent, instead of being “countercultural” (Nagle) or exclusively pro-Trump, /pol/ thus seems to have been composed of quite a stable anti-Semitic and Trump-critical contingent, increasing proportionally to /pol/’s general growth.Methodologically, this text sought to demonstrate how a brief navigation of trump on 4chan/pol/ can provide provisional yet valuable insights regarding continuously changing current of online anonymous collectives. As the cliché goes, however, this brief exploration has left more many questions, or rather, it did not “deploy the content with all its connections” (Latour 147). For instance, I have not touched on how many of the trump-dense threads are distinctly separated and pro-Trump “general threads” (Jokubauskaitė and Peeters). 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