Fascistic Whimsy: Neo-reactionary Sincerity and the Techno-crusade of Smouldering Ressentiment

1 Deep down the dank normal

At the end of 2015, style and trend agency K-Hole signalled the impending invasion of ‘chaos magic’ as the next aesthetic and cultural wave.1 The previous year it had warned the world about the arrival of ‘normcore’. Could there be a stranger shift? Normcore had made a trend out of an anti-trend—of looking not-styled—whereas chaos magic seemed so intentionally outward, strange and nostalgic. How did we go from white sneakers and windbreakers to talismans and crystals?

 

This is a preview of "Fascistic Whimsy: Neo-reactionary Sincerity and the Techno-crusade of Smouldering Ressentiment ". The full article can be found in Art + Australia Issue Two.
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Ben Woodard

Ben Woodard is a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at Leuphana University, Luneburg, Germany. His research focuses on the relationship between naturalism and idealism in Continental and analytic philosophy. He has published two books, Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and the Creep of Life (2012) and On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New GeoPhilosophy (2013).