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Does the brutalization of sensory life lead us to fascism?

I have the impression that sensory life is increasingly less felt. Beneath my steps, asphalt; on my back, concrete; against my skin, plastic; in my retinas, the continuous bombardment of LED photons.

I am experiencing what the thinker Paul Klotz called a :"progressive desiccation of reality."

This phenomenological numbing, wherein the flesh rubs almost exclusively against impassive and aggressive materials, raises a political and sensory question for me:

If the violence exerted by our physical environment deprives us of our capacity to feel in connection with objects and subjects and therefore to act collectively can this "brutalization" pave the psychic and social way for fascism?

From Earth to Milieu, From Milieu to Rigid Space

I would like to start here from the observation that contemporary human beings have gradually replaced the "milieu" (the relational, living, and perceptual world in which we evolve) and "place" (inhabited space, a bearer of memory) with "space" (a geometric abstraction) and the "environment" (an objective framework, beyond the self).

In my view, this physical and conceptual artificialization of our living framework is not merely a matter of semantics: it establishes a brutality akin to a form of mesological rupture (the discourse on the milieu in which one lives).

This fracture thus provokes what geographer Augustin Berque terms a loss of "mediance" (médiance): the structural, symbolic, and harmonious relationship between the human and the Earth.

I feel that the brutality of this phenomenon leads me to no longer naturally deploy my intentionality toward the surrounding world; I now collide with the inertia of an objectified space, and the subject that I am is relegated to its own muteness:

"The wasp’s sting elicits my recoil; the branch that scratches me bends under my weight. In the wounds inflicted by the living, there remains a dialogue, a response from matter. But strike against a steel fence, stumble against an administrative algorithm running in an endless loop: matter, my matter, no longer quivers there. Metal cuts without yielding; the webpage rejects without blinking.”

Faced with this impassive brutality, any attempt to inscribe my humanity into an 'I' or a 'we' most often simply shatters. Interacting with this inertia condemns me to silence, under the constant threat of cold reprisals from various privatized mechanisms or machines...

It is this physical and spatial impossibility of making intentional contact with matter that prepares me, psychically, for the atrophy of empathy and collective action.

Sensory Isolation

This "desiccation**" of "contacts**" can also drag me toward a profound sense of intimate loneliness.

Deprived of rich, reactive, and negotiable physical interactions, the individual that I am finds itself gradually atomized.

As Hannah Arendt explained in The Origins of Totalitarianism, isolation (the loss of political and social ties) and loneliness (the loss of the relationship to the world and to oneself) are the absolute preconditions for totalitarian domination.

When the experience of sensory life erodes, the capacity to anchor oneself in a shared and carnal reality also disappears. Of course, we are digitally connected; however, more often than not, we are physically separated by screens, compartments, and soundproof walls.

The citizen, deprived of the organic texture of the world, is nothing more than a reactive monad, bathing in a latent frustration that their immediate space allows neither to be expressed (except through the simulacrum of networks) nor appeased.

The brutality of this material world stifles empathy, for empathy requires feeling vulnerability an impossibility when faced with flat and sterile surfaces.

Yet, this phenomenological anesthesia does not extinguish the life drive:it represses it.

Deprived of a malleable world upon which to exercise their agency, the atomized individual develops a desperate thirst for intensity.

To ward off this psychic "little death" to which the bureaucratic and material coldness of the environment confines them, the subject is more prone to abandon themselves to whatever might make them feel something again, even if it be dread, shock, or gigantism.

The Spectacular Compensation of Fascism

It is precisely into this gaping void, where the flesh has fallen silent, that the totalitarian promise rushes in.

Faced with an everyday life that has become impermeable, Fascism does not propose a return to the negotiable "milieu" (the bending branch), but rather offers compensation through fantasy and sacralization: it saturates the sensory void with hyper-stimulation.

Since authentic experience (Erfahrung, founded on sedimentation and living political contact) has been destroyed by modernity, fascism replaces it with the sacralization of the spectacular and the ephemeral (Erlebnis).

This is what Walter Benjamin posited as the aestheticization of politics.

Fascism captures these masses of isolated monads (individuals) and offers them, in the absence of genuine political agency, the illusion of participation through aesthetic fusion:

• the sacralization of the founding myth,
• the violent purging of social bodies deemed 'deviant' for more or less explicit sanitary and economic purposes, most often aiming at the rebirth or return to a fantasized nation or people.
• the cult of the leader(s).
• the glorification of the machine.

The logical culmination of this aestheticization, from Benjamin's perspective, is war both outside and within its own territory.

Waging war (against one's neighbor, the foreigner, the queer, other nations) is the only thing capable of mobilizing all technical resources and providing an aesthetic goal to alienated masses, finally supplying them with the nervous intensity they lack in their daily lives.

Benjamin cited the Futurist Marinetti, who found the war of conquest in Ethiopia "beautiful" because it created new architectures of smoke and metal.

"Fiat ars - pereat mundus [Let art be created, though the world perish], says fascism [...]. Mankind's self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order."

Landing, or Reconquest Politics ?

Against this morbid intoxication in which I might arrive and even if I am at the height of my potential alienation at being able to enjoy my own destruction, how then can I restore a voice to my flesh?

If fascism thrives on this phenomenological anesthesia by saturating the void with aesthetic shock, the antidote does not seem to me to consist in a simple return to a romantic "Nature," any more than in the mere technical management of our "environment." It seems to me that it requires reopening the intimate question of my material attachments.

Drawing on a rereading of political ecology as articulated by Bruno Latour:

not as a science of distant equilibriums, but as a genuine reconquest of sensory life.

Faced with the fascist illusion of a spectacular and destructive fusion, Latour proposes that we land (atterrir). Against the "desiccation of reality," this political ecology asserts itself as the learning of a new vulnerability.

It demands that I relearn to be affected: "If the smooth surface of the screen does not quiver, the 'critical zone' that I inhabit (the soils, the atmosphere, the living) is, for its part, intensely reactive; it responds to my agency with concrete, implacable feedback loops, with which I must learn to compose, up close (my body) or from afar (the relationship to my technical object and its construction)."

Resistance to the fascist aestheticization of politics thus requires the building of what Latour calls a "*Parliament of Things*": a personal intention toward the meticulous description of, and listening to, my terrestrial dependencies, in order to recover the capacity to feel the roughness of the world.

For nothing remains rough when one absolutely wishes to smooth over politics.