I am pleased to share this new review of Marcel Stoetzler’s volume Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism (Bloomsbury 2023), in which I have a chapter.
In the review, Mike Makin-Waite writes:
Amongst the chapters in the second part of the volume, which ‘extend the Frankfurt School-inspired perspective to a range of contemporary matters’, this reviewer found Joan Braune’s chapter particularly stimulating (her new Understanding and Countering Fascist Movements: From void to hope will be the next book to be reviewed on this website). Braune’s contribution to Stoetzler’s collection considers the reasons for irrationalism by focussing on bizarre examples of the conspiracy theories which have been ‘a particularly important driving factor in fascist recruitment in the current period’. Braune points out that ‘some of the most whacky conspiracy theories, and the ones that are easiest to laugh off, concern extraterrestrial life’.
Braune explains that, nevertheless, these should not be dismissed and laughed off: they ‘need to be taken seriously’, as they are growing in the ‘conspiritual’ spaces where people combine ‘New Age spirituality with far-right conspiracy theories’. Such blendings ‘often surprise people who tend to associate New Age spirituality and holistic wellness practices with femininity and the left, while associating right-wing conspiracy theories with masculinity and the right’.
Braune draws on Adorno’s early-1950s analysis of the Los Angeles Times astrology column in her consideration of David Icke’s ‘theories’ about ‘reptilians’ and the enthusiasm of some far-right activists for the ‘perplexingly named’ History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series, which offers ‘evidence’ for extraterrestrial aliens’ involvement in past human historical events. One significant resonance that Braune identifies between Icke’s ‘arguments’ and the language of the astrology column which Adorno discussed is the promotion of ‘claims of the individual’s power to control events through “magnetism” and “charm” – as though the individual can direct the course of events merely through the power of belief’, a cruel myth which is similar to that promoted through many of the ‘inspirational’ and ‘motivational’ posters pinned up in our workplaces. When things do not in fact go as the individual had wished, an explanation is needed – and the notion that there are hidden, malevolent, ‘beings’ exercising powers in ways which frustrate your hopes can serve to account for ‘the individual’s sense of powerlessness in late capitalism’. Braune draws out the logic – and attraction – of the conspiracists’ dangerous nonsense about aliens and reptiles, of which we must make sense: ‘if positing their existence constructs a worldview in which you can be a hero fighting a subhuman enemy, then what [the conspiracy theories] provide is less like shallow consolation and perhaps an occasion for violence’.
Read the rest at: http://www.processnorth.co.uk/understanding-responding-extremism/a-bug-or-a-feature/.
Dr. Joan Braune -- News & Updates 