• Preliminaries The rise of fascist and fascist-leaning politics in the West today is itself a complex product of the postwar period. As Cas Mudde points out, during much of the second half of the 20th century, extreme-right movements went partially underground, and were not officially represented in most of the political landscape at a significant scale. 1 This has gradually changed with the rise of what was, initially, labeled “populism”; a politics, usually but not exclusively right-wing, which derived its name from their leadership’s and programs’ alleged connection to “the people.” Populism invokes the people as a mass whose interests have been allegedly ignored by professional politicians, and deemed under threat from such things as loss of (national) identity, multiculturalism, migration, arts and culture, climate science, declining birth rates, globalization, unemployment, economic crisis, and more. The complexity of fascism, already visible in Umberto Eco’s approach, is that a seemingly fragmented variety of movements and outings today, many of them populist or former populist, bear some of the marks of fascism, but not always under all circumstances all of them. For their antimodernity, many actors today are using technology and especially social media. For their liking of autocracy, some of them paradoxically appear (and perhaps, only “appear”) as products of democracy. In order to avoid to this becoming a game of “checking boxes,” how does one read the often contradictory signals of extremism now that these are increasingly normalized, often through uncritical repetition by the media? • Klemperer’s warning In this workshop, we will look, as an example, into a remarkable book by the German philologist Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), “Lingua Tertii Imperii”—“The Language of the Third Reich.” The book was published in 1947 as Klemperer worked on it in secret during the Nazi years. Klemperer—who was Jewish, and survived the War in part because of the inadvertently fuzzy handwriting of his name on a doctor’s note—looked at the ways in 2which the Nazi regime changed the German language to normalize its operations. Klemperer’s work presents an example of how (the manipulation of) language creates the preconditions for an actual politics. In many ways, Klemperer’s book is about literacy about the signs of fascism. • Signs of hope In this workshop, we will also look at the importance of alternatives; of voicing dreams, ideas that are about bringing people together, words and signs unapologetically See Cas Mudde, The Far Right Today, London: Polity, 2019. 1 See Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, trans. Martin Brady (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 86. 2 devoted to hope. This may sound naive. It’s never quite the right moment for hope, and yet we need it. We want to give students the opportunity of working on something constructive for a world they want. Hope is not based on a theory that could predict it, so we have no assigned readings for this prompt. • Workshop prompts There are two directions along which outcomes could be structured and you are invited to pick one and make it your own. The options are “Words” and “Worlds.” The first is concerned with reconstructing, the second more concerned with dreaming and proposing. • Words We invite the students to choose a number of words from the recent and recent-ish Austrian and/or European political discourse, and trace their usage on the basis of both online and offline examples, from the internet, social media and/or the streets. The students are then asked to create a new (graphic, communicative, experiential, or otherwise) work with this research that shows the change in how they were used. The way in which you communicate this can be entirely experimental, and the work you do can reflect on the ways in which language normalizes modes of thinking. • Worlds We invite the students to, on the basis of our analysis of today’s political landscape but especially on the basis of their hearts’ desires, create (graphic, communicative, experiential, or otherwise) outlets for a world they want. A new world is first born from the desire to live in it, and the current landscape too easily makes us forget about this. Propose, dream, create—don’t justify it. The fact that you want this world could, one day, make it happen. • Workshop Program The workshop days will be devoted to having group discussions, doing some readings, possibly some walks for input or for clearing our minds, and in-depth making sessions around the prompts. Building a group energy, critical yet joyful. • About the instructors: Metahaven Metahaven is an Amsterdam-based artist collective working in filmmaking, writing, and design. Metahaven’s film works include Capture (2022), Chaos Theory (2021), Hometown (2018), and Information Skies (2016). Their books include Digital Tarkovsky (2018), and Uncorporate Identity (2010, edited with Marina Vishmidt). The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) (2024) is Metahaven’s forthcoming film on poetry and AI, based on a poetry collection by Eugene Ostashevsky. Metahaven’s new book, on the future of the beholder’s share in art, is out with Verso in Spring 2025. Metahaven has presented solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, ICA London, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Asakusa, Tokyo, Izolyatsia, Kyiv, e-flux, New York, Tick Tack, Antwerp, and State of Concept Athens, among others, as well as participated in group exhibitions at Artists Space, New York, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, the Gwangju Biennale, the Sharjah Biennial, the Busan Bienniale, Ghost:2561, Bangkok, and many others. Metahaven are artistic advisors at Rijksakademie, affiliate researchers at Antikythera, and heads of department at the Geo-Design MA at DAE.