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Sebastian Schädler Roland [X] Superhero. Towards a New Relationship between Art Scholarship and Concepts of Political Education though the Example of the Topic of Sex/Gender This text focuses on the figure of the Bremen Roland in two respects: Firstly in relation to the discussion of masculinity as a cultural construction, in which one specific hegemonic model is always based on the exclusion of others. Thus Roland is compared and contrasted to other representations of masculinity, such as Saint Sebastian and Muhammad Ali, and the possibilities are explored of using the theme of "superheroes" to educate children on the topic of sex/gender stereotypes. From another point of view, Roland is discussed as a research subject in art scholarship. Here we discuss the potential of a scholarly approach that does not reduce an "image" or "sign" such as Roland to mere "facts" about the historical context or its function(s) in specific cultural formations of masculinity. Since these perspectives never seem to converge, there has been little interest in drawing a relationship between them. Adapting a proposal by W.J.T. Mitchell, the possibilities of such a relationship are revealed through the performance of an encounter. The slash "/" in this text is chosen as a sign that opens up the space that such an encounter creates. Referring to the different points of view, the slash changes: first it becomes a backslash "\", then it is combined to form "\/" and "/\", as are used in computer languages, and finally it is converted into an [X]. The new relationship – as a proposal for further discussion – can be written as: art scholarship [X] political education.

This volume explores comics as examples of moral outrage in the face of a reality in which precariousness has become an inherent part of young lives. Taking a thematic approach, the chapters devote attention to the expression and representation of precarious subjectivities, as well as to the economic and professional precarity that characterizes comics creation and production. An international team of authors, young and senior systematically examines the representation of precarious youth in graphic fiction and autobiographic comics, superheroes and precarity, market issues and spaces of activism and vulnerability. With this structure, the book offers a global perspective and comprehensive coverage of different aspects of a complex and multifaceted field of knowledge, with a special attention to minorities and liminal subjects. The comics analyzed function as examples of "ethical solicitation" that bear witness of the precarious existence younger generations endure, while at the same time creating images that voice their outrage and might move readers to act. This timely and truly interdisciplinary volume will appeal to comics scholars and researchers in the areas of media and cultural studies, modern languages, education, art and design, communication studies, sociology, medical humanities and more.

Winner, 2021 Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award, given by the Society for Cinema and Media StudiesWinner, 2021 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for Best Academic/Scholarly WorkHonorable Mention, 2021 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, given by the Popular Culture AssociationWinner, 2020 Charles Hatfield Book Prize, given by the Comic Studies SocietyTraces the history of racial caricature and the ways that Black cartoonists have turned this visual grammar on its headRevealing the long aesthetic tradition of African American cartoonists who have made use of racist caricature as a black diasporic art practice, Rebecca Wanzo demonstrates how these artists have resisted histories of visual imperialism and their legacies. Moving beyond binaries of positive and negative representation, many black cartoonists have used caricatures to criticize constructions of ideal citizenship in the United States, as well as the alienation of African Americans from such imaginaries. The Content of Our Caricature urges readers to recognize how the wide circulation of comic and cartoon art contributes to a common language of both national belonging and exclusion in the United States.Historically, white artists have rendered white caricatures as virtuous representations of American identity, while their caricatures of African Americans are excluded from these kinds of idealized discourses. Employing a rich illustration program of color and black-and-white reproductions, Wanzo explores the works of artists such as Sam Milai, Larry Fuller, Richard "Grass" Green, Brumsic Brandon Jr., Jennifer Cruté, Aaron McGruder, Kyle Baker, Ollie Harrington, and George Herriman, all of whom negotiate and navigate this troublesome history of caricature. The Content of Our Caricature arrives at a gateway to understanding how a visual grammar of citizenship, and hence American identity itself, has been constructed

"Always be yourself. Unless you can be Batman, then always be Batman." (Tagline zu The Lego Batman Movie, 2017) DC Comics' dunkler Ritter zählt zu den bekanntesten und profitabelsten fiktionalen Charakteren weltweit. Ein Grund für Batmans langanhaltende Beliebtheit liegt in seiner archetypischen Konzeption, die über die Jahrzehnte eine immense Vielzahl an verschiedenen Interpretationen und Medienadaptionen ermöglichte. Für Jeffrey A. Brown stellen Batmans multiple Identitäten potenzielle Zugänge zu verschiedenen kulturellen wie gesellschaftlichen Diskursen dar: "What, for example, does the modern Batman reveal about current racial issues, sexual identities, and gender politics?" (S. 12). Seine Untersuchung von überwiegend comicbasierten Iterationen der Figur bündelt bestehende kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf den Fledermausmann und ergänzt sie durch gegenwärtige Comic-Beispiele seit den DC-Relaunchs 'The New 52' (2011-2016, DC Comics) und 'DC Rebirth' (2016-2017, DC Comics). Eine kenntnisreiche und inspirierende Studie, die mit zahlreichen Tropen und Konventionen der Figur wie auch des Superheldengenres aufräumt, in Anbetracht der überwältigenden Materialfülle jedoch oft nur an der Oberfläche der komplexen Thematik kratzt. Browns Arbeit folgt einer klaren Struktur: Nach einer kurzen Einleitung stellt der Autor im folgenden Kapitel 'Batman and Multiplicity' seinen grundlegenden Ansatz zur Vielseitigkeit der Figur vor. Grundlage bildet der von Henry Jenkins in seinem einflussreichen Aufsatz Just Men in Tights: Rewriting Silver Age Comics in an Era of Multiplicity (erschienen in The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, hg. v Angela Ndalianis, New York/London 2009, S. 16-43) geprägte Begriff der multiplicity. Dieser beschreibt eine selbstreflexive Tendenz in modernen Superheldengeschichten, in der verschiedene Versionen desselben Franchises gleichzeitig rezipiert werden und ein intertextuelles Netzwerk bilden: "Meaning becomes layered on top of variations, and continuity is derived through a ready acceptance of multplicity." (S. 29) Wie auch andere Superheldencomics bewegt sich Batman in einem Spannungsfeld zweier Extreme: Auf der einen Seite steht die Kanonisierung von Erzählsträngen, Ereignissen und Charaktereigenschaften, die die vom Verlag streng überwachte, bindende Continuity des Superhelden und seiner Storyworld ausmacht und sie vor auftretenden Unstimmigkeiten bewahrt. Auf der anderen Seite steht die Diversifikation der Figur in alternativen Erzähluniversen, die entweder innerhalb des DC-Multiversums zu übergreifenden Crossover-Events konvergieren oder als einmalige 'Elseworlds'-Geschichten bekannte Superheldenerzählungen in fremde Zeit- und Genresettings transponieren. Diese Variationen werden zwar meist nicht dem Kanon zugerechnet, doch erweitern sie das übergeordnete Bild des Superhelden und ermöglichen neue Lesarten. So zählt Frank Millers The Dark Knight Returns (1986, DC Comics) zu einem der prägendsten Batman-Comics aller Zeiten, doch wird die in der Zukunft der Figur angesetzte Geschichte nicht als Teil der offiziellen Batman-Continuity angesehen. In einem Abriss der wesentlichen Inkarnationen innerhalb von Batmans mittlerweile 80-jähriger Mediengeschichte stellt Brown die verschiedenen transmedialen Passagen des Superhelden im Kontext ihrer produktions- und zeitgeschichtlichen Entstehung gegenüber – erweitert durch einen Ausblick auf durch Batman inspirierte Nachahmer, Doppelgänger und Parodien erster und zweiter Ordnung sowohl in DC Comics wie auch in anderen Comicverlagen. Dass diese gegensätzlichen Identitäten und Storyworlds dennoch alle als Batman erkannt werden, liegt für Brown an Batmans paradoxem Wesen, zugleich extrem flexibel wie auch fest umrissen zu sein. Der Argumentation von Roberta Pearson und William Uricchio in ihrer bahnbrechenden Arbeit The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media (New York 1991) folgend bilden bestimmte Schlüsselkomponenten für Brown den kleinsten gemeinsamen Nenner der Figurenkonzeption, zu denen Batmans Geheimidentität als Milliardär Bruce Wayne und der tragische Mord an seinen Eltern gehören, sein ikonografisches Fledermauskostüm, seine Ausrüstung und Fertigkeiten, die Stadt Gotham City sowie das wiederkehrende Figurenensemble aus Verbündeten und Feinden. Daraus setzt sich für Brown eine Art Proto-Batman zusammen ('Batman Prime'), der ausgehend von den Comics der 1980er Jahren Batman als düsteren, ernsten und erbarmungslosen Vigilanten einer dystopischen Ausnahmegesellschaft zeichnet. Alle anderen Versionen würden sich an dieser Schablone abarbeiten, indem sie das Bild des Batman Prime bestätigten, variierten, invertierten, karikierten oder ganz aufgäben. Dieses verlockende Konzept des Batman Prime als Basis-DNA der Figur stößt jedoch an seine Grenzen. Pearson und Uricchio selbst scheinen diesem Konzept zu widersprechen, wenn sie Batman als 'floating signifier' bezeichnen, der weder durch einen bestimmten Autor, noch durch eine spezifische Zeitepoche oder einen Primärtext definiert ist. Der 'dark and gritty'-Batman stellt zwar die gegenwärtig dominante Lesart der Figur dar, doch ist sie nicht die endgültige. In seiner Untersuchung Hunting Down the Dark Knight Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman (London/New York 2012) macht Will Brooker darauf aufmerksam, wie im Kampf um die Deutungshoheit des dunklen Ritters die multiplicity der Figur durch einen offiziellen Kanon heruntergespielt wird, der eine bevorzugte Lesart der Figur über andere Versionen favorisiert, die nicht den Interessen der Produzent*innen und den Vorlieben des Publikums entsprechen. Im Herzen dieser Hierarchie aus Batman-Texten stehe für Brooker die binäre Opposition zwischen dem dunklen und humorlosen Vigilanten und einem fröhlichen, spielerischen und bunten Batman, die sich in einem konstanten Dialog befänden. Zusätzlich zu den von Pearson und Uricchio aufgezählten Merkmalen definiert Brown seinen Batman Prime über implizite Merkmale: "The baseline Batman Prime is also 'pinned down' as a rich, white, heterosexual, American male in his 30s. It is these implicit characteristics of Batman (and most superheroes) that naturalize a persistent valorization of racial and gendered privilege" (S. 28). Diese Erkenntnis bildet die Grundlage für die weiteren Kapitel des Buches. Ausgehend von Pearsons und Uricchios Beobachtung, dass Batman als rechtschaffener Verbrechensbekämpfer und Bewahrer des gesellschaftlichen Status quo extratextuell die dominante hegemoniale Ordnung unterstütze, betrachtet Brown den dunklen Ritter als fiktionale Verkörperung des Konzeptes der hegemonialen Männlichkeit nach R. W. Connell und J. W. Messerschmidt ("Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept". In: Gender & Society 19/6, Dezember 2005, S. 829-859), die die Dynamik einer sozial übergestellten Position von Männern über Nicht-Männer beschreibt: "Batman is an idealized heroic figure who conforms to a very traditionally privileged social category. While Batman may be the toughest, smartest, and most determined alpha-male in a fictional world filled with super-men and wonder-women, in his civilian guise as Bruce Wayne, he is also conventionally portrayed as an able-bodied, white, heterosexual, male billionaire." (S. 80) Entsprechend setzt sich das dritte Kapitel 'Batman and Sexuality' mit den verschiedenen Variationen auseinander, in denen Batman sich mit sexueller Repräsentation auseinandersetzt. Von der queeren Lesart des dynamischen Duos aus Batman und Robin über die hypermaskulinen und hyperfemininen Darstellungen des Dunklen Ritters und seinen weiblichen love interests und femme fatales (insbesondere Catwoman) beleuchtet Brown an einer Reihe von Beispielen offene Anknüpfungspunkte für homo- und heterosexuelle Interpretationen. Das vierte Kapitel 'Batman and Sons' begegnet Batmans Rolle als sowohl symbolische wie auch tatsächliche Vaterfigur innerhalb seiner Bat-Family aus Sidekicks und (Ersatz-)Söhnen, denen er seine über alle Zweifel erhabene, hegemoniale Ideologie aus Gerechtigkeit und sozialer Verantwortung aufdrückt. Wie das Beispiel seines leiblichen Sohnes Damian Wayne zeigt, der heimlich von der Schurkin Talia al Ghul zum Assassinen ausgebildet wird, steht der väterlichen Ordnung in Superheldengeschichten sehr oft das Klischee der bösen Mutter gegenüber, die Unordnung und Gefahr birgt: "The subsequent struggles over Damian's allegiance with either Batman's paternalistic authority or Talia's maternal symbolic authority represent an ideological struggle […] with a clear preference for the Law of the Father" (S. 84). Das Kapitel 'The Batwomen' verfolgt die bewegte Geschichte der beiden Frauenfiguren Batgirl und Batwoman, die zwischen sexualisierten Stereotypen, Reflexionen progressiver Genderrollen und den Herausforderungen der männlichen Welt von Batman stehen. 'The Other Batmen' (Kapitel Sechs) betrachtet anschließend ethnische und postkolonialistische Fragestellungen innerhalb des Batman-Universums. Die Idee, dass Batman seine kämpferischen Fertigkeiten bei seinen Reisen durch den exotischen Osten erlernte, wird im Sinne des Orientalismus-Diskurses als kulturelle Appropriation identifiziert, während in aktuellen Storylines über Batmans weltweite Rekrutierung von ausländischen Verbrechensbekämpfer*innen in Grant Morrisons Batman Incorporated (2010-2013, DC Comics) unbewusste neokoloniale Untertöne ausgemacht werden: "The cumulative result of Batman's appropriation and colonization of Otherness is a strained attempt to incorporate diversity within the character's fictional world, and an unintended perpetuation of America's assumption of normative whiteness as the pinnacle of achievement" (S. 143). Dagegen werden mit den Batman-Protegés Batwing und The Signal afro-amerikanische Perspektiven in die Welt des Superhelden eingeführt. Kapitel Sieben setzt sich mit Batmans dunkler Seite auseinander und seinem manichäistischen Kampf gegen seine Doppelgänger-Schurken wie auch seinen Superheldenkollegen Superman, wobei in der binären Gegenüberstellung von Gut und Böse Batmans liminale Rolle als Held, Antiheld und Schatten noch stärker hätte ausgebaut werden können. Im letzten Kapitel 'I'm the Goshdarn Batman! ' steht die ungewöhnliche Darstellung des dunklen Ritters als kleine, niedliche Gestalt im Geiste der japanischen 'kawaiii'-Ästhetik etwa in Comicbuchreihen wie Lil' Gotham (2012, DC Comics) oder der Zeichentrickserie Teen Titans Go (seit 2013, Cartoon Network) im Vordergrund, die das Bild des düsteren, allmächtigen Vigilanten konterkariert. Abgerundet wird das Kapitel mit einer kurzen Betrachtung des The Lego Batman Movie, in der subversiv Batmans hegemoniale Männlichkeit sowie seine überdramatische Ernsthaftigkeit und Hypervirilität der Lächerlichkeit preisgegeben wird. Am Ende bleibt Browns Buch ein Fazit schuldig, das alle Gedankenstränge des Buches zusammenfasst und einen Ausblick in die Zukunft wagt. Batman and the Multiplicity of Identity macht den Eindruck einer Aufsatzsammlung, die sich zwar an manchen Stellen zu wiederholen droht, im Ganzen jedoch ein erfrischendes Kaleidoskop kulturwissenschaftlicher Analysen gegenwärtiger Batman-Comics bildet, das durch tiefe Materialkenntnis besticht und vor allem durch die Fokussierung oft vernachlässigter Nebencharaktere überzeugt.

Every adaptation mining the vast troves of memory that we recall as our lives as readers of books and comics and watchers of film and television, but is known by its owners simply as intellectual property, always runs up against the singularity of the memory in adapting the generic nature of the property. Much of the politics of culture hinge on the conflict over the singular and generic nature of the memory. At times this politics takes the form as an attempt to retain some singular experience, a memory or attachment, against the commodification of culture  and at other times it takes the form of an attempt to insist on this singular memory or experience as the only correct one.  We are constantly trying to retain what is singular against what is interchangeable, which is, to some extent, a doomed project under capitalism. All of this is a set up of sorts to a very particular memory. I was not a huge fan of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, and to be honest I am not sure if I ever read the whole run, but I do have a very particular memory from a collected volume. In the story Dream, or Morpheus, tracks the Corinthian, the fugitive nightmare to Serial Killers convention, or as they call it, in a thinly veiled disguise a "Cereal Convention." After dispensing with the Corinthian Morpheus turns his attention to the audience of serial killers, or collectors, and offers the speech detailed in the following panels. I am not sure why this particular bit of pop culture stuck with for so many years. Maybe there is no real reason, it is baggage without inventory as Gramsci would say. However, I can offer two reasons, one old and one new. For the old I have never really found serial killers interesting. The serial killer who taunts the police through a series of clues has to be one of the most tired cliches of popular culture. Beyond the cliches I was always disgusted by the way in which actual serial killers, from Jack the Ripper to Jeffrey Dalmer, became pop culture figures in the there own right, even to the point of having their own trading cards. I just find that stuff to be distasteful to the point of offensive. In the Sandman the killers are frightening, but as the dialogue makes clear, they are nothing to look up to or emulate, just damaged people with delusions of grandeur. That is why I first liked the panel.As I have occasionally thought about this scene from time to time the way one does with the odd and accumulated bits of popular culture that make up our "tertiary retentions" (to use Stiegler's phrase) it has taken on a different meaning, one that hinges on the line "fantasies in which you are the maltreated heroes of your own stories." This formulation of a kind of day dream or, dreaming with one's eyes open, appears in Spinoza. For Spinoza the formulation is reserved specifically for those who believe that the mind controls the body. As he writes "Those...who believe that they either speak or are silent, or do anything from a free decision of the mind, dream with open eyes." One could argue that in general this formulation in which one is caught in a kind of dream in which one is at the center describes what Spinoza calls superstition, and what Althusser calls after him ideology. On this reading, and if one wanted to simplify things considerably, one could say that ideology is a matter of what the "kids today" on Tik Tok call main character syndrome, the belief that one is at the center of their own little universe, a cause and never an effect.  The idea of all of us walking around in our own little daydreams is not only an interesting way to think of a kind of spontaneous ideology, but Dream's removal of that Dream suggests ideology critique as a kind of superpower. Although to be honest, after watching the series I am a little unclear on what Dream's powers are and how they work, but as the panels above indicate I have pulled my collection out of the closet to reread it. I am not going to offer a full consideration of The Sandman series here, or talk about how it differs from the comic. I am confident it has been analyzed to death elsewhere. I will say briefly that I think that one of its strengths is that it borrows the pacing of the comic, following the arc of the first dozen or so issues. It always seems strange to me that comic books have had better success with movies when their serial form lends itself to television or streaming. Stranger still that the turn to streaming of recent MCU shows has tended to write them more like long movies than episodes of in an ongoing story. The Sandman has more of the structure of the comic in which there is an ongoing story, but there are also stories that are contained more or less within an episode. When it comes to adapting the panels in question. The dialogue is retained, albeit extended, and to some extent, as the clip below demonstrates, the scene is as well. We get to see the effects of Morpheus intervention as the collectors wrestle with their newfound conscience and consciousness of their situation. In that sense the scene is well adapted from the page to the screen. However, one cannot be struck with a certain flatness to the initial shot. In the place of the graphic play of color and line we just get a man standing in front of a curtain. I do not love the art, and there are many panels in comics that would stand out more, but the panels work better than the moving image. One of the things that I find striking in the sheer number of comic book films and television shows is not just how they fail to function as movies, that point has been made again and again, but they often fail to live up to the comics, there are striking visuals in so many different comics, and over the years there have been talented artists working on all of the different superheroes that have made it to the screen, and while these visuals are sometimes gestured to in individual scenes in the various films there is still a kind of translation problem in which the color and composition of the panel is lost when it is put into motion. In fact these visuals become one more easter egg, one more thing for fans to pick up on such as Martha Wayne's pearl necklace from The Dark Knight Returns returning again and again in nearly every filmed version of Batman's parent's death. This is an aside, but I would argue that one of the reasons that Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse stands out as a film is that its animation captures the visual sense and sensibility of comics better than CGI. I have more thoughts on The Sandman, about the representation of dreams in popular culture, but my focus here has been just on how an image from popular culture can linger like the remnant of a dream, and how that image might make it possible to think about how one's memory is shaped and formative, and what an adaptation misses. 

 The Best Joke in Barbie Years ago I remember encountering Félix Guattari's little essay, "Everybody Wants to be a Fascist." At the time its title seemed more clever than prescient. (Although it is worth remembering how much fascism, and the encounter with fascism was integral to Deleuze and Guattari's theorizing, well beyond the reference to Reich). Now that we are living in a different relation to fascism the problem posed by Guattari (and Deleuze) of desire seems all the more pertinent and pressing. One of the problems of using the word fascism today, especially in the US, is that it is hard to reconcile our image as a politics, a politics of state control of everything, and the current politics of outrage aimed at M&Ms, Barbie, and Taylor Swift. How can fascism be so trivial and so petty? This could be understood as the Trump problem, although it is ultimately not limited to Trump. There are a whole bunch of pundits and people getting incredibly angry about the casting of movies and how many times football games cut away to Taylor Swift celebrating in the expensive seats. The Fox News Expanded Universe is all about finding villains everywhere in every library or diverse band of superheroes. It is difficult to reconcile the petty concerns of the pundit class with the formation of an authoritarian state. I have argued before that understanding Trump, or Trumpism, means rethinking the relationship between the particular and universal, imaginary and real. Or, as Angela Mitropoulis argues, the question of fascism now should be what does it look like in contemporary captitalism, one oriented less around the post-fordist assembly line than the franchise. Or as she puts it, "What would the combination of nationalist myth and the affective labour processes of the entertainment industry mean for the politics and techniques of fascism?"It is for this reason (among others) that Alberto Toscano's Late Fascism is such an important book. As he argues in that book fascism (as well as in an interview on Hotel Bar Sessions) fascism has to be understood as kind of license, a justification of violence and anger, and a pleasure in that justification. We have to give up the cartoon image of fascism as centralized and universal domination and see it as not only incomplete persecution, unevenly applied, but persecution of some coupled with the license to persecute for others. Fascism is liberation for the racist, sexist, and homophobe, who finally gets to say and act on their desires. As Toscano argues, "...what we need to dwell on to discern the fascist potentials in the anti-state state are those subjective investments in the naturalizations of violent mastery that go together with the promotion of possessive and racialized conceptions of freedom. Here we need to reflect not just on the fact neoliberalism operates through a racial state, or that, as commentators have begun to recognize and detail, it is shaped by a racist and civilizational imaginary that delimits who is capable of market freedoms (Toscano is not referring to Tosel, but that is an important part of Tosel's work) We must also attend to the fact that the anti-state state could become an object of popular attachment or better, populist investment, only through the mediation of race." Toscano's emphasis is on race in this passage, but it could be argued to apply to sexism, homophobia, etc., to the enforcement and maintenance of any of the old hierarchies. As Toscano cites Maria Antonietta Macciochhi later in the book, "You can't talk abut fascism unless you are also prepared to discuss patriarchy." Possessive includes the family as the first and most vital possession. At this point fascism does not sound too different from classical conservatism, especially if you take the definition of the latter to be the following: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."  However, what Toscano emphasizes is the libidinal pleasure that comes with this, it is not just a matter of who is in and who is not, who is protected and who is not, but in the pleasure that one gets from such exclusion, a pleasure that is extended and almost deputized to the masses. While conservative hierarchies and asymmetries passed through the hallowed institutions of the state and the courts, the fascist deputies take to the streets and the virtual street fights of social media. As Toscano argues, pitting Foucault's remarks about the sexual politics of fascism in the seventies against Guattari's analysis,"For Foucault, to the extent that there is an eroticization of power under Nazism, it is conditioned by a logic of delegation, deputizing and decentralization of what remains in form and content a vertical, exclusionary, and murderous kind of power. Fascism is not just the apotheosis of the leader above the sheeplike masses of his followers; it is also, in a less spectacular but perhaps more consequential manner the reinvention of the settle logic of petty sovereignty, a highly conditional but very real 'liberalising' and 'privatising' of the monopoly of violence...Foucault's insight into the 'erotic' of a power based on the deputizing of violence is a more fecund frame, I would argue, for the analysis of both classical and late fascisms than Guattari's hyperbolic claim that "the masses invested a fantastic collective death instinct in...the fascist machine' --which misses out on the materiality of that 'transfer of power' to a 'specific fringe of the masses' that Foucault diagnosed as critical to fascism's desirability."I think that Toscano's analysis picks up an important thread that runs from discussions of fascism from Benjamin to Foucault (and beyond). As Benjamin writes in the Work of Art essay "The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life."Today we could say that the right of expression includes a deputization of power and the pleasure in exercising it. In a capitalist society, in which the material conditions of existence must belong to the capitalist class, the only thing that can be extended to the masses is the power and pleasure to dominate others. Real wages keep on declining, but fascism offers the wages of whiteness, maleness, cisness, and so on, extending not the material control over one's existence but libidinal investment in the perks of one's identity.All of which brings me to Taylor Swift. I have watched with amusement and some horror as the fringes of the Fox News Expanded Universe have freaked out about Taylor Swift attending football games and, occasionally, being seen on television watching and enjoying the games. It is hard to spend even a moment thinking about something which has all of the subtlety of the "He-Man Woman Hater's Club," but I think that it is an interesting example of the kind of micro-fascism that sustains and makes possible the tendency towards macro-fascism. Three things are worth noting about this, first most of the conspiracy theories about Swift are not predicated on things that she has actually done, but what she might do, endorse Biden, campaign for Biden, etc., I think that this has to be seen as a mutation of conspiracy thinking from the actual effects of an action or event, Covid undermining Trump's presidency, to an imagined possible effect. One of the asymmetries of contemporary power is treating the fantasies or paranoid fears of one group as more valid than the actual conditions and dominations of another group. Second, and to be a little more dialectical, the fear of Swift on the right recognizes to what extent politics have been entirely subsumed by the spectacle fan form. (Hotel Bar Sessions did a show about this too) Trump's real opponent for hearts and minds, not to mention huge rallies, is not Biden but Swift. Lastly, and this really deserves its own post, some of the anger about Swift being at the game brings to mind Kate Manne's theory of misogyny, which at its core is about keeping women in their place. I would imagine that many of the men who object to seeing Swift at their games do not object to the cutaway shots of cheerleaders during the same game. It is not seeing women during the game that draws ire, but seeing one out of her place--someone who is enjoying being there and not there for their enjoyment.I used to be follow a fairly vulgar materialist line when it came to fascism. Give people, which is to say workers, actual control over their work, their lives, and their conditions and the appeal of the spectacle of fascist power would dissipate. It was a simple matter of real power versus its appearance. It increasingly seems that such an opposition overlooks the pleasures that today's mass media fascism make possible and extend to so many. It is hard to imagine a politics that could counter this that would not be a politics of affect, of the imagination, and of desires. Libidinal economy and micro-politics of desire seem less like some relic from the days of high theory and more and more like necessary conditions for thinking through the intertwining webs of desire and resentment that make up the intersection of culture, media, and politics. I think one of the pressing issues of the moment is the recognizing that all of these junk politics of grievances of popular culture should be taken seriously as the affective antechamber of fascism while at the same time not accepting them on their terms; there is nothing really to be gained by rallying to defend corporations and billionaires. 

 It has taken me a long time to write a follow up to my first post on Bizarro World. That is because once you begin to think about the strange inversions in which the persecuted are made out to be threats, and the comfortable are made out to be threatened, it is hard to not see it. Our entire world seems reversed and inverted, those who are most subject to violence are made into violent threats, and those who are most comfortable have made the threats to their comfort our central concern with the claims of cancel culture. Bizarro world would be one of those "descriptive theories" that Althusser talks about, something that stops thinking because it seems to be such an accurate description of what one is thinking about. I have decided to approach the topic by breaking it up, by trying to grasp the specificity of the different reversals, following what I did earlier with the inversion of the relation of workers and capitalists to that of the relation of human capital and job providers I would now like to examine the way in which margins and mainstream have also become inverted, and what that inversion means for both terms in question, the dominant culture and the marginal subculture. In doing so I would like to start with a particular philosophy, or spontaneous philosophy, that characterized my life as a young teenager. As a nerdy kid interested in comic books, science fiction, and other things, I fostered the belief, shared by many of my kind, that our rather minor marginalization made us sympathetic to the marginalization of others. This was helped in large part by the fact that many of the dominant comic books when I was growing up, such as the X-Men, Spider-Man, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, were all in some sense allegories of oppression and exclusion. With respect to the first in the list, the idea that the X-Men stand in for an oppressed minority, complete with the conflict between Professor X's integrationist philosophy and Magneto's more militant position, is so entrenched in its reception that it ceases to be subtext (even if it is not true). Comic books were at least in the eighties, both in their culture and in their content, stories of the misunderstood, the maligned, and the excluded. One could raise two questions about this mythology. The first has to do with the allegorical distance of framing the stories of marginalization and exclusion through such science fiction content as genetic mutation, or, in other contexts, alien visitors or androids. In some sense these science fiction elements set up the necessary allegorical distance to make the stories palpable as entertainment. The condition of possibility is the condition of impossibility, however, in that the detouring of exclusion and marginalization through such allegories as the "mutant menace" always made it possible that some readers would miss the point. That people actually did is demonstrated by the twitter posts that ask in all sincerity "When did X become political?" where the X in question is some bit of pop culture such as X-Men or Star Trek that was always steeped in political subtexts. Such posts miss the point, but the possibility of missing the point is inscribed in the text in question and is a necessary condition of its popularity. Of course there are comics, television shows, and books that bridged this allegoric divide, more directly connecting the fictional exclusion of mutants and aliens with the actual history of oppression, but they are to some extent exceptions. There is something awkward, however, when the history of imagined exclusions confronts the real history of discrimination. There are the moments when we realize that the Nazis were an actual political ideology, and not just bad guys that seem ready for the four color word of comics. Second, and more importantly, one could argue that the marginalization I felt at the time was slight and temporary, I was (and remain) a white cis male, after all, and being bullied after school, or made fun of in the back of the bus, is nothing compared to what other adolescents face, nor does it really deserve a place in the ongoing history of persecution and discrimination. However, becoming an outcast of sorts, a nerd, and later a punk, can be understood as a becoming minor in Deleuze and Guattari's sense. For Deleuze and Guattari majority and minor are not simply quantitative matters, but the relation between constant and variable. As Deleuze and Guattari write, "Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it. Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language. It is obvious that "man" holds the majority even if he is less numerous than mosquitos, children, women, blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc. That is because he appears twice, once in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant is extracted."Since we are speaking of comic books, it is worth noting that superhero comics themselves illustrate this majority, not just in the proliferation of various prefixes appearing before the world "man"," bat, super, iron, spider, etc., man is the constant, the norm, but in the fact that white and male is the unstated norm from which the first "black," "Asian," or gay superhero takes their meaning. Marvel comics in particulr does not bother to create new characters and superpowers it is enough to add "-woman" or "she" to Spider or the Hulk to create a new character. The deviations appear meaningful because the norm is assumed. While this is true of comics, and begins to illustrate the limits of the social justice dimension I alluded to above, I think that becoming a comics nerd is itself a kind of becoming-minor. To quote Deleuze and Guattari again, "Minorities, of course, are objectively definable states, states of language, ethnicity, or sex with their own ghetto territorialities, but they must also be thought of as seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority."Not to be too autobiographical, but I would describe my entire life as a passage through different minorities, different subcultures, comics, punk, philosophy, etc., all of these where very different territories, with different languages and cultures, but the overall movement was an attempt to evade majority, to not be the constant, a position which Deleuze and Guattari argue, is all the more oppressive because it is occupied by no one. If all of this language of major and minor seems a bit baroque, then I am reminded of a passage from Deleuze and Guattari that seems uncharacteristically direct. After a few lines that state "There is no subject of the becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority; there is no medium of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority," they bring up a historical/literary example, writing, "As Faulkner said, to avoid ending up a fascist there was no other choice but to become black." This cuts through the particular neologism to make the stakes clear. Such an assertion has a lot to unpack, but I would argue here that a lot of subcultures, especially those that embrace their deviations and exclusions from the mainstream and are, it is worth saying primarily but not exclusively white, are attempts to avoid becoming fascist, to avoid being part of the majority. You cannot change the color of your skin, but you can change the color of your hair, and that seems like enough especially if it gets the same people to hate you. That is my all too glib summation of some of the politics of punk aesthetics. My main reason for bringing up this little theory of subcultures, as well as the subtext of comic books, now is that it seems to have completely exhausted itself. Comic books, or, more to the point, superheroes, have gone from the margins of our culture to the center. They are the dominant culture, have become majoritarian, and as much as one would like to think that they have carried with it their fundamental minoritarian political aspect the opposite seems to be the case. Love of mutants and other imaginary minorities has not extended to a support for actually existing marginalized groups, but has been mobilized to not only perpetuate exclusions but to become the voice of the majority.In part this happens through the politics of nostalgia, which demands that the present, the film adaptation, identically recalls the past, which in this case means that the film must resemble comics written in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, complete with the racial politics of those eras.  There have been online freak outs over the casting of Idris Elba to play Heimdall in Thor, of John Boyega playing a central role in Star Wars, of Moses Ingram appearing in Obi Wan Kenobi. These deviations from some supposed canon have all been met with vicious online hate campaigns that have led actors to shut down accounts and retreat from the digital public sphere. The demand to preserve the sanctity of one's childhood memories has led to absolute hostility towards any of the social change that has happened since one was a child. Lest this all seem incredibly minor (in the conventional sense) and all too online, I would argue that this cultural nostalgia, the demand that the present match the past, has been thoroughly weaponized into MAGA nostalgia. This hostility is not limited to changes to the canon, but is extended to include even new characters and stories that do not so much recast or change past memories but create new ones. Both Ms. Marvel and She Hulk have been "review bombed" on online review sites, hit with a flurry of negative reviews almost before they air primarily for the crime of casting a muslim woman or a woman in a comic book themed show. There seems to be an entire online niche of people who hate Brie Larson for not only playing Captain Marvel, but for speaking up for diversity in film and film criticism. We live in an age in which a film that was basically an hour and half long recruitment advertisement for the Air Force is seen by its critics as too woke, too concerned with social justice, because of its cast. All of this criticism coalesces in the online mantra, "Get Woke, Go Broke" which threatens companies and brands with boycotts for embracing "social justice."The world of comic book fans has been no less critical of those who criticize their beloved films for their artistic merits. Martin Scorsese famously declared that Marvel films are not cinema, and he has been ridiculed online ever since. It is not enough that these films, the Marvel films, be commercially dominant, being the most financially successful films that are released each year, and culturally dominant, reshaping all of popular culture in their image, they also most be loved and revered by everyone. Dissent cannot be tolerated. Blockbusters must be acknowledged as art. It is at this point that we get our bizarro world inversion of the comic book nerd. The fan of comic book movies is now something of a "sore winner," who continues to act the victim, marginalized, even in his dominance. I would argue that this "sore winner" idea is integral to our contemporary version of the majority, and even fascism to recall the quote about Faulkner. We are far from Deleuze and Guattari's image of a majority that is all the more powerful in being unstated, in being assumed, now dominance, cultural, political, and economic, focuses on its apparent marginalization in order precisely to reassert its dominance. The inversion is not just that comic books have gone  from margins to mainstream, but that marginalization has gone from being the basis of empathy to an expression of dominance. Victimhood is the language of domination. The bizarro world that we are living in is not just that what was once the obsession of a few has become the culture of many, that Moon Knight is now practically a household name, but that grievance against perceived marginalization has become the language of the majority.