Modernity, trust and Identity
Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self. (Cornell University Press,
1997) pp. 11-38.
Hobsbawm: Fascist movements
The mobilization of masses
- Reclassifying victims to superiors
- Total transformation of society: adaptation of revolutionary rhetoric
The resentment of the little men
-Anti-modernism and pro-technology
- Mass migration leading to xenophobia and anti-Bolshevik nationalism: blood and soil
What are identities about?
Identities are forms of knowledge that we use as orientation devices.
Identity is constituted by a particular relationship between an individual human being and a specific form of knowledge consisting of
- Identity categories (names, titles)
- Identity theories
- Identity narratives
Self-identity and social identities
Self-identity designates one's self-knowledge formed by reflexive discursive practices.
The self-identity of a person is always constituted as a mosaic of various identity types.
Social identity is a specific form of identity type that describes persons as elements of collectivities.
Basic sociological presuppositions
Self-identity and social identities of the person are held to be constitutive of social reality and not merely derivative features of biological, economic or political processes
Identities cannot be formed and performed outside structural conditions of language, knowledge and power.
- Discourses and institutions
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Interpreting fascism
Culture and ideology as mobilizing devices and conversion mechanisms
-Fascist movements vs. fascist regime
-Fascist ideology vs. fascist state
Totalitarianism as fascist fiction and political reality
olitical Construction o Identities
The fractionalization of individual and collective identities into public and private
-Mulitplicity of identities
The recognition of difference and the conversion of difference into and otherness
Ritual and Communication
Identities that generate powerful emotions
Death and mass political commitment
The public spectacle as as arena of political emotion, a community of feeling
-Liminal space
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Modernity and Fascims
The sense of new beginnig
The signigicanceof apocalyptic time as centralmetaphor of the modernist imagination
The myth of rebirth and creative destruction
The translation of extatic experience into political projects
Homo Faber
Collaboration in the perfecting of matter while at the same time securing perfection of himself
The war had brought forth a new type of human being, the Worker, a hybrid of soldier and technocrat.
Creating a newpostwar world by through the power of design, planning and technology.
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Figure 1.8.   Boris Zvorykin, "Bor'ba krasnogo rytsaria s cemnoi siloiu" (Struggle of the Red Knight with the Dark Force), 1919