Postfascist Styles of Organisation

This thesis focuses on the contemporary phenomena of ‘postfascist styles of organisation’. Postfascism as a concept encompasses all of the current structures of a wide body of movements, actors and scenes of organising, more commonly known as the far-right and alt-right. Adopted from Traverso’s The New Faces of Fascism (2019), ‘postfascism’ emphasises the phenomena’s ‘chronological distinctiveness and locates it in a historical sequence implying both continuity and transformation’ (Traverso, 2019: 4). This thesis looks to the uses of the past, and postfascism’s adoption of historical and mythic tropes that transform the images and ideas of historical fascism into contemporary ideology to meet new historical conditions. It looks beyond ‘left-right’ distinctions, turning instead towards culture to find the ideological sign systems that construct the postfascist style of organisation, that is, its particular way of doing things.
Through development of Barthes’ Myth (Barthes, 1957) and social semiotics, this thesis explores the cultural ephemera of postfascism to uncover its hidden ideology. That, through certain aesthetic tropes, constructs a distinct reality in which postfascism can proliferate in the shadows as well as normalise and naturalise its beliefs to mainstream audiences. It looks for the signs within both popular and postfascist subculture that contain the ideological impositions that attach meaning to form, and pass it off as ‘natural’.
This thesis develops a theory of a postfascist style of organisation drawing from Serres’s concept of The parasite (Serres, 1980). It finds this style to be hidden and disruptive as well as mythical, irrational, tribal, and violent. It draws on organisation theory to better understand new, hidden and alternative forms of formal and informal organisation. It adopts a critical exploration through considering postfascist organisation as an element of the postmodern condition, and asks ultimately what style of organisation postfascism is doing and why this matters.