Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism

Commentators across the political spectrum have argued that the future has been absorbed by an ever-expanding present to which we cannot imagine alternatives. The notion that we have lost the ability to imagine change-culturally, socially, and politically-has become one of the defining problems of our time. But what is the difference between the populist narratives of those who promise to solve this problem by returning us to a glorious past and those who promise to lead us into a glorious future? Often, this book argues, not very much at all. Revealing neo-authoritarianism and capitalist hyper-innovation as two sides of the same coin, Mathias Nilges shows that today's reactionaries and futurists both harness and profit from the same temporal crises of our present. Looking to design, popular culture, literature, and recent theoretical and political discussions, Nilges offers ways of understanding the re-emergence of familiar and disturbing forms of right-wing politics and culture (authoritarianism, paternalism, fascism) not as historical repetition but as dangerous consequences of the contradictions of capitalism today. Using critical theory, in particular the work of Ernst Bloch, this book recovers a politics and culture of hope, which it locates beyond a future that is colonized by capitalism and a past that becomes the mystical playground for the new Right:in that which was never allowed to be and thus demands realization. Do we have Time for radical progressive change? Nilges charts the rise of "no future" sentiments within far right-wing nihilism and, surprisingly, also within the current Left. Interlacing Ernest Bloch's writings on temporality with readings of contemporary culture, Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism provides a sorely needed compass to help navigate today's crisis. -- Stephen Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK This is a bold and brilliant analysis of recent reconfigurations of deeply conservative thinking in the present. In clear and precise prose Nilges offers new perspectives on the logic and expression of Right Wing culture. Arguing against the "long now" of contemporary capitalism and its apparent timelessness, Nilges elucidates vital interpretive lenses on the displacement of radical futurity alongside the Right's nostalgic invocations of a stable past free from actual social, political, and economic change. By closely examining conservative race, gender, and class prerogatives in terms of temporal logic, Nilges provides a fresh and forthright understanding of where we are and glimpses of a utopianism that has not yet been allowed to be. -- Peter Hitchcock, Professor of English, City University of New York, USA

1. Introduction: All We Have Is Now 2. Looking Backward: Nonsynchronism in the Long Now of Capitalism 2.1 The Long Now, A Crisis of Capitalist Temporality 2.2 The Temporal Demos Undone 2.3 The Dialectic of Aesthetic Form and Anticipatory Consciousness 2.4 Nonsynchronism and the Distribution of Time 2.5 Bloch Now: Tracing Hope in a Time of Crisis 2.6 The Untimeliness of Bloch: Utopian Thought and Critical Theory 3. The New Paternalism: Anti-Capitalism and Right-Wing Nostalgia 3.1 Why Anti-Postmodernism Now? Angry Young Men and the Desire for Fathers 3.2 Sentimentalism for Men, the Musty New Scent by Contemporary Capitalism 3.3 Right-Wing Agitation, Anti-Postmodernism, and Anti-Marxism 4. Mystifications or, Lumberjacks Without Forests 4.1 Identitarian Attacks on Identity Politics: A Right-Wing Veil for Capitalism's Contradictions 4.2 Fascism: Capitalist Crisis Management 4.3 Romantic Anti-Capitalism 4.4 Getting Back in Touch with the Homeland 5. Completing the Thought of the Past: Literature as Utopian Method 5.1 Hope: Material Hunger for What's Missing 5.2 "To Speak of the Unspeakable": The Novel as Utopian Thought 5.3 Occupy Dreaming: Decolonizing the Future