Legibility and Contestability: Opaque Power, Misattribution, and Fascist Closure
Hannah McHugh
Ethics, Utrecht University, Netherlands
Far-right politics often succeeds by making complicated social conditions look simple. In recent years, far-right movements have increasingly organised this simplification as a struggle over appearance: over what is made visible as threat, what is made palpable as belonging, and what is rendered intuitive as authority. This is especially clear in contemporary online mobilisation: hyper-saturated national imagery, militarised masculinity, “before/after” montages of national decline, AI-generated tableaux of an imagined homogeneous past, and rallies staged for algorithmic circulation. These forms do more than communicate a message. They make economic insecurity, gender backlash, declining public services, and loss of control appear as the work of identifiable enemies. Belonging is attached to flags, bodies, landscapes, and stylised memories; authority is made visible in leaders, uniforms, gestures, and disciplined crowds. The result is a political world that feels legible: power has a face, injury has an enemy, and action has direction.
This article asks why this kind of politics is so powerful under conditions of opaque power. Power is opaque when those subject to it struggle to identify what makes them vulnerable, how that vulnerability is sustained, or where challenge might be directed. A food-delivery rider may know that her livelihood depends upon ratings, algorithms, and the possibility of sudden deactivation without knowing what exactly should be challenged. A caregiver may experience exhaustion as a personal failure while living within a social order that systematically distributes care unequally. In each case the vulnerability is real. The difficulty lies in grasping it as a relation of power that can become the object of political action.
I call this problem political legibility. By political legibility I mean the practical intelligibility of vulnerability as something that has a source, is sustained by social arrangements, and can become an object of challenge. This is not a success term. A politically legible account may track the relevant structure, capture only part of it, express an injury before a settled diagnosis exists, or misattribute vulnerability to a false object. Accuracy is therefore one form of legibility, not part of the definition itself. The normative question is whether a given form of legibility supports contestation in a truth-tracking and politically adequate way.
This article argues that the answer depends partly upon the aesthetic dimension of political life. Every political order organises appearance. It shapes how authority is encountered, how belonging is staged, which injuries become publicly visible, and what forms of action appear possible. Liberal democracies possess their own aesthetic forms, although political philosophy has generally devoted more attention to their principles and institutions than to their modes of appearance. Fascism provides a particularly revealing case because it is a highly aestheticised politics. It organises perception and affect with exceptional intensity, transforming dispersed vulnerability into visible enemies, embodied authority, and scenes of national restoration. The aesthetic dimension does not itself create domination. It shapes how domination is encountered, interpreted, and contested. I refer to this mechanism as perceptual-symbolic framing.
Fascist politics therefore illuminates a more general problem. It supplies political legibility in a false form. It condenses complex relations of power into an immediately intelligible world populated by heroes, enemies, betrayal, and redemption. Its success suggests that contestation depends upon more than institutions, rights, or information. Political agency also depends upon how power becomes perceptible.
The article proceeds as follows. Section I develops the concepts of political legibility and the Attribution Problem. Section II distinguishes accurate, partial, expressive, and distorted forms of legibility. Section III develops the idea of perceptual-symbolic framing and distinguishes it from ideology, norms, and institutions. Section IV argues that fascism produces a distinctive form of political legibility through organic holism, palingenetic myth, and expressive form. Section V concludes by considering the implications for theories of domination and democratic contestation.
I. POLITICAL LEGIBILITY AND THE ATTRIBUTION PROBLEM
Power can be opaque. People may be governed by arrangements that shape their options while making it difficult to identify where power lies, how it operates, or how it might be challenged. Opacity is compatible with experience, knowledge, and complaint. Agents may know that work is insecure, rent is unaffordable, care is exhausting, bureaucracy is punitive, or policing is threatening. The difficulty lies in connecting those experiences to the sources, mechanisms, and sites of contestation that sustain them.
Structural domination is one important form of opaque power. Here vulnerability is produced through standing social arrangements: institutions, legal classifications, market dependence, bureaucratic procedures, platform designs, and social norms. The power at issue may be exercised by particular agents, but its force also comes from the positions those agents occupy and the rules that empower them. A manager, landlord, official, employer, or platform may exercise power in a particular case. That power is often made possible by a wider arrangement that gives some agents control over others’ options.1
App-based delivery work provides a simple example. A food-delivery rider may be vulnerable to sudden deactivation, opaque ratings, fluctuating pay, and algorithmic allocation. The relevant power does not lie in one place. A customer may give a low rating. A manager may refuse an appeal. An algorithm may allocate work. A company may design the system. Employment law may deny ordinary protections. Market conditions may make exit costly. The rider’s vulnerability is produced through these elements together. She may know that the situation is bad and still lack a clear account of what should be challenged.
I call this a problem of political legibility. Political legibility is a modest practical standard. A relation of power is politically legible when agents can grasp the vulnerability at issue, understand enough about how it is produced or sustained, and locate some possible mode of challenge. Agents need enough understanding to guide contestation. A complete causal theory of the whole structure, a single responsible person, and final assignment of moral responsibility mark stronger forms of understanding; they are not required for political legibility. Agents may grasp a relevant object of challenge even when they cannot identify every contributing agent. That object may be a rule, institution, norm, infrastructure, market relation, platform design, bureaucratic procedure, or social practice. The question is practical: have agents grasped the relation of power at a level that can guide contestation?
Political legibility has three dimensions. The epistemic dimension concerns how agents understand the source and reproduction of vulnerability. The normative dimension concerns how they evaluate that vulnerability: as domination, necessity, misfortune, deserved hierarchy, betrayal, or something else. The perceptual-affective dimension concerns how vulnerability is made salient and felt: as urgent, ordinary, shameful, shared, threatening, or actionable. These dimensions can come apart. A political account may provide practical direction while misidentifying the source of vulnerability. It may make injury vivid while corrupting judgement about who is responsible. This is why legibility can be accurate, partial, expressive, or distorted.
Political legibility can therefore take accurate, partial, expressive, or distorted forms. Accurate legibility tracks the relevant sources of vulnerability well enough to support effective contestation. Partial legibility identifies something real while leaving other mechanisms obscure. Expressive legibility makes a relation of power visible or shareable through images, slogans, stories, rituals, or public action, often before agents possess a settled causal account. Distorted legibility connects real vulnerability to the wrong source or directs contestation towards an object that protects the relevant structure. These distinctions matter because fascist politics often succeeds by giving people a politically usable account of their vulnerability. Its danger lies in the kind of account it gives.
Attribution is one part of political legibility. To attribute a vulnerability is to connect it, rightly or wrongly, to something taken to produce, sustain, authorise, or enable it. The Attribution Problem arises when agents lack such a connection or when the connection they make is politically disabling. The concept therefore covers both first-person uncertainty and politically disabling misattribution. In the first case, agents are unsure what makes them vulnerable or where challenge should be directed. In the second, they have an account, but it privatises the injury, naturalises it, or redirects contestation toward a false object.
Care work illustrates the second case. Someone carrying disproportionate care responsibilities may experience exhaustion and constrained options. She may attribute this to her own inadequacy, to the needs of particular family members, or to the moral demands of love and duty. These descriptions may contain truths. They can also privatise the vulnerability and make the social organisation of care harder to see. A politically enabling attribution connects the vulnerability to gendered norms, workplace design, inadequate public care provision, and the economic devaluation of reproductive labour. It changes the object of judgement. The issue becomes how to contest the social organisation of care.
This distinction also separates political legibility from recognition. Recognition concerns whether agents understand themselves as injured, subordinated, or dominated. Political legibility concerns whether they can connect that injury or vulnerability to a relation of power that can be challenged. A person may be dominated while misunderstanding her situation. She may understand arbitrary app-based control as flexibility. She may understand gendered constraint as personal failure or family duty. She may anticipate racialised state violence while being told that the relevant institutions are neutral. These descriptions can help reproduce domination by making it appear natural, deserved, unavoidable, or privately bearable. Feminist and critical theories of oppression, structural injustice, social practice, and symbolic power have long shown how vulnerability can be sustained through dispersed practices and shared categories of perception.2
The connection with contestability is direct. If domination consists in vulnerability to arbitrary power, freedom requires some way of challenging the power to which one is exposed. Republican theory gives this point a sharp normative form: power can hardly be contestable for agents who cannot grasp what power they face or where challenge should be directed. The point reaches beyond republicanism. Any theory concerned with structural injustice, domination, or democratic agency needs some account of how power becomes available as an object of judgement and resistance.
Political legibility also has a perceptual and expressive dimension. Information alone rarely makes power contestable. Agents may possess facts about wages, rents, care burdens, police violence, or algorithmic management and still fail to see how those facts form a political problem. Images, slogans, rituals, stories, interfaces, and styles of address help organise what stands out, who appears responsible, which injuries feel shared, and where action seems possible. This is the point at which the aesthetic dimension of the argument enters. I call this perceptual-symbolic framing: the organisation of appearance and affect through which relations of power become perceptible, salient, and politically intelligible.3
Political legibility belongs to the broader problem of political orientation. Orientation concerns how agents locate themselves in a political world: what stands out, whom they identify with, what they fear, which institutions they trust, and what forms of action feel possible. Legibility is the part of orientation concerned with contestable power. It asks whether agents can grasp a relation of power as bearing on their vulnerability and as open to challenge. I use “fascist reorientation” later in this broader sense: fascism changes how the political world is perceived, felt, and inhabited. “Fascist closure” names its more specific effect on legibility: vulnerability is fixed as injury to a collective body, enemies are made responsible, and authoritarian restoration appears as the required response.
The next section develops the four forms of political legibility in more detail. The distinction is needed because contestation rarely begins from complete understanding. Some forms of legibility will open domination to challenge, while others make vulnerability vivid while directing action towards false targets.
II. FORMS OF POLITICAL LEGIBILITY
The previous section distinguished four forms of political legibility: accurate, partial, expressive, and distorted. These forms differ according to how they combine the epistemic, normative, and perceptual-affective dimensions of legibility. The distinction matters because contestation rarely begins from complete understanding. Agents may act with a partial diagnosis, a vivid symbol, or a provisional account of what has gone wrong. They may also be wrong.
The clearest case is accurate legibility. A relation of power is accurately legible when agents identify the vulnerability at issue, connect it to relevant sources or mechanisms, and locate plausible modes of challenge. Accuracy here is practical. A food-delivery rider need not understand every line of code or every contractual arrangement behind the platform. She must grasp enough to see that deactivation, ratings, pay, and allocation are connected to company design, legal classification, and the absence of effective voice. Such an account is accurate enough when it tracks the relation of power well enough to support contestation.
Many political struggles begin from partial legibility. A tenant facing eviction may rightly blame a landlord. That attribution may be correct as far as it goes. The landlord issues the notice, refuses repairs, or raises the rent. The tenant’s vulnerability may also be sustained by housing finance, planning rules, state policy, wage stagnation, and the treatment of housing as an asset. Partial legibility identifies something real while leaving other mechanisms obscure. It can still support contestation. Its limitation lies in treating a proximate target as if it exhausted the structure.
There is also expressive legibility. Here agents make a relation of power visible or shareable before they possess a precise causal diagnosis. A giant puppet of a billionaire at an election rally may make the capture of political life by money perceptible as a shared problem. A slogan such as “care work is work” may redescribe private exhaustion as a political injury. Expressive legibility matters because agents often need to recognise a problem as shared before they can agree on its causes or remedies.
This point is important for social change. Political legibility can be produced through action, not only before it. Movements often begin with partial claims, vivid symbols, and provisional diagnoses. Through struggle, agents may revise what they take the object of contestation to be. They may begin with a manager’s decision and come to see an employment model. They may begin with a landlord and come to see financialised housing. They may begin with a demand for flexibility and come to see the gendered organisation of care. Legibility is therefore part of political practice.
Expressive forms help make this possible. They can coordinate agents before doctrinal agreement exists. A march, slogan, occupation, meme, or shared gesture can make dispersed injuries appear as instances of the same problem. These forms help agents identify one another as potential allies. They mark some harms as public. They make some targets of action available. In doing this, they organise attention, affect, and collective uptake.
The same features make legibility politically dangerous. Distorted legibility occurs when agents connect real vulnerability to the wrong source, or when they identify a source in a way that blocks adequate contestation. The vulnerability may be genuine while the account of it is false. A worker facing wage stagnation may be told that migrants are responsible. A man experiencing status loss may be told that feminism has humiliated him. These accounts provide direction. They identify enemies and forms of action. Their practical force depends on their distortion.
Distorted legibility differs from ignorance. Ignorance leaves agents without a political account. Distorted legibility supplies one. It can be emotionally powerful because it makes vulnerability feel intelligible, shared, and actionable. It can also be politically effective because it reduces complex relations of power to visible figures of blame. Agents are given a bad account of what they suffer and why.
These forms of legibility can overlap. A movement may combine accurate and expressive legibility when it identifies a real structure through simplifying symbols. It may combine partial and distorted legibility when it identifies a genuine institutional failure while wrongly attributing that failure to a scapegoated group. The distinction between kinds of legibility is analytical. It helps us ask what a political account does: whether it tracks real structures, captures only part of them, makes them publicly shareable, or misdirects attention away from them.
The standard for evaluating political legibility is therefore twofold. First, does the account enable agents to identify a vulnerability, connect it to some source or mechanism, and locate possible modes of challenge? Second, does the account track the relevant structures of power and direct contestation toward appropriate targets? Fascist politics often meets the first standard while failing the second. It can make vulnerability vivid and actionable while misidentifying its source and corrupting the form of response.
This is why the aesthetic dimension of legibility matters. Accurate, partial, expressive, and distorted legibility are produced through the forms in which power appears. An interface can make managerial power look like neutral calculation. A bureaucratic office can make state power feel like suspicion or humiliation. A protest image can make dispersed exploitation appear as a shared injury. A nationalist spectacle can make social dislocation appear as betrayal of the people. The next section explains this mechanism as perceptual-symbolic framing.
III. PERCEPTUAL-SYMBOLIC FRAMING, IDEOLOGY, NORMS, AND INSTITUTIONS
All political orders have an aesthetic dimension. They organise how authority appears, how belonging is staged, which injuries become visible, and what forms of action feel possible. This is not peculiar to fascism. Liberal democracies also depend on forms of political appearance: courtrooms, parliaments, constitutional ceremonies, civic architecture, public memorials, rituals of equal citizenship, and images of restrained public authority. These forms help citizens experience political power as public, impersonal, answerable, and shared. Nussbaum’s work on political emotions captures one part of this point: liberal democracies require public forms of attachment and concern as well as principles and institutions.4
The aesthetic dimension has its force in uptake. It does not allocate property rights, classify workers, police borders, assign care burdens, or design algorithms. It affects how these arrangements are encountered: as arbitrary power, technical necessity, natural order, personal failure, benevolent authority, or enemy action. For that reason, the aesthetic dimension belongs alongside institutions, norms, roles, and ideologies in an account of how domination is stabilised and contested. It shapes how power appears and how agents respond to it.
I call this perceptual-symbolic framing: the organisation of appearance and affect through which relations of power become perceptible, salient, and politically intelligible. The term captures the political work done by forms of appearance without treating aesthetics as a freestanding source of normativity. Perceptual-symbolic framing shapes political legibility. It affects what agents notice, what they ignore, which harms feel serious, who appears authoritative, and which sources of power seem available for challenge.
This claim draws on familiar work in critical theory and political aesthetics. Bourdieu’s account of symbolic power shows how domination can operate through socially shared categories of perception, making hierarchy appear natural or deserved. His account of habitus also shows how social coordination often works through embodied dispositions rather than explicit rule-following. Rancière’s account of the distribution of the sensible gives a political formulation of a related point: political orders allocate what can be seen, heard, and recognised as part of a common world. These accounts differ, but they support a shared thought: power is stabilised partly through the organisation of appearance.5
The app-based delivery example introduced earlier can now be extended. In Section I, the example showed how vulnerability may be produced through several connected sites: ratings, deactivation, algorithmic allocation, company design, legal classification, and market dependence. The same case also shows why political legibility has a perceptual-symbolic dimension. A food-delivery rider’s experience of power is shaped by how app-based work is presented and inhabited. The app may display performance metrics as neutral feedback. Branding may describe dependence as flexibility and entrepreneurship. Gamified interfaces may turn managerial control into targets, rewards, and optimisation. Public imagery may present the rider as independent, mobile, and self-directing. These forms shape how the underlying arrangement appears. They can make domination look like opportunity, technical necessity, or personal failure.
The distinction from norms is analytic. Norms guide conduct by structuring expectations about what agents should do and what others may sanction or criticise. Bicchieri, for example, analyses social norms in terms of conditional preferences and expectations about others’ behaviour and approval. That model captures an important part of social coordination. Perceptual-symbolic framing concerns another part: what agents experience as salient, admirable, shameful, threatening, or feasible. A workplace culture may never state a rule that workers should always be available. The layout of the workplace, the rhythm of notifications, the celebration of “hustle,” the visibility of rankings, and the admiration attached to overwork can still make constant availability feel normal. Norms and perceptual-symbolic framing often work together. Norms concern expectations and sanctions; perceptual-symbolic framing concerns salience and uptake.6
The same point applies to institutions. Institutions allocate roles, rights, duties, powers, and procedures. Searle describes institutions as systems of status functions and deontic powers: they make it the case that someone counts as authorised, obligated, entitled, or responsible within a public rule-governed order. Rawls’s account of the basic structure also treats institutions as public systems of rules that assign rights and duties and shape expectations over time. Institutions can therefore structure domination by allocating authority and vulnerability. A welfare office can impose conditions, delays, sanctions, and evidentiary burdens. A platform can allocate work and deactivate accounts. A border agency can decide who may enter, stay, or be removed.7
Institutional design still leaves open how institutional power appears to those subject to it. A welfare assessment may appear as neutral administration, moral suspicion, humiliation, or arbitrary state power. A platform deactivation may appear as technical error, personal failure, managerial control, or legal vulnerability. A border checkpoint may appear as public protection to some and racialised domination to others. The institution allocates powers and procedures. Perceptual-symbolic framing shapes how those powers and procedures are encountered, interpreted, and contested.
Ideology raises a harder question because many theories of ideology already include perception, affect, and practice. The term has no single canonical use. Some accounts treat ideology as explicit doctrine. Others treat it as a social framework through which agents interpret, justify, and reproduce social relations. Freeden understands ideologies as configurations of political concepts that stabilise meanings such as freedom, authority, equality, and responsibility. Critical theorists such as Geuss, Shelby, Celikates, and Haslanger analyse ideology as embedded in social practices, justificatory vocabularies, and forms of self-understanding that can block critique or make domination appear natural. Gramsci’s account of hegemony adds the idea of common sense: the everyday assumptions and moral languages through which existing relations appear reasonable.8
The distinction between ideology and perceptual-symbolic framing is therefore narrow but useful. Ideology organises meaning and justification: which explanations seem plausible, which concepts are available, and which social relations appear legitimate. Perceptual-symbolic framing organises salience and affective uptake: what draws attention, who appears powerful, which injuries feel urgent, and how authority or vulnerability are encountered. Ideology and perceptual-symbolic framing are different dimensions of political mediation. They usually operate together.
National membership provides a useful example because ideology and perceptual-symbolic framing are so closely intertwined in this case. An ideology of the nation may articulate claims about sovereignty, history, ancestry, citizenship, or shared obligation. These claims organise meaning and justification. The nation also becomes politically salient through perceptual-symbolic forms: flags in public space, anthems, monuments, maps, military ceremonies, school rituals, commemorations, sporting events, and images of sacrifice or betrayal. These forms make national belonging visible and emotionally available. They help nationalist meanings become vivid, ordinary, and affectively compelling.
Political coordination can occur even where ideological agreement is weak. Agents may disagree about doctrine while converging around shared images of threat, admiration, injury, or decline. They may use the same ideological vocabulary while feeling its objects differently. One person may endorse “freedom” as market choice, another as civic self-government, another as national sovereignty. Yet a shared image of the self-reliant entrepreneur, the humiliated taxpayer, the dangerous migrant, or the corrupt elite can coordinate attention before agreement on political concepts has been reached. Perceptual-symbolic framing helps explain this form of coordination. It aligns attention and affect.
This also helps explain why domination can persist when justificatory frameworks become unstable. In conditions of media saturation, institutional distrust, and competing narratives, people may lack a settled ideology. They may still converge around recurring scenes of authority and injury. Economic power can be presented through graphs, indices, and technocratic language, making agency appear dispersed and impersonal. The same insecurity can be presented through faces of betrayers, symbolic invaders, or heroic leaders, making systemic vulnerability appear as intentional threat. The political effect lies in the reorganisation of salience: who and what stands out as responsible.
Perceptual-symbolic framing contributes to political legibility in two directions. First, it can make real structures of power visible. Protest images, investigative journalism, public testimony, satire, and collective rituals can help agents recognise a dispersed relation of domination as a shared object of concern. A slogan such as “care work is work” does more than state a proposition. It changes what counts as work, what counts as exploitation, and who appears as a political subject. Second, perceptual-symbolic framing can misdirect legibility. It can make false sources of power vivid while pushing real structures into the background. The same mechanism can support emancipatory contestation or authoritarian closure.
This point can be put in terms of political orientation. Orientation involves the way agents locate themselves in a political world. Perceptual-symbolic framing shapes that location by organising what agents see themselves as facing, who they see themselves as standing with, and where they see action as directed. It does not determine uptake. Images, rituals, slogans, and interfaces can fail, be ignored, or be reinterpreted. Their force depends on repetition, institutional setting, social position, background grievance, and available narratives. A national flag at a commemoration may produce attachment in some, suspicion in others, indifference in others. A platform’s language of flexibility may resonate with some workers and ring hollow to others. Framing works when its forms connect with lived vulnerability and available interpretations.
Perceptual-symbolic framing is a social mechanism. It coordinates agents when particular forms of appearance resonate across a group and become attached to shared practices of interpretation and action. It can coordinate weakly, by making a matter noticeable. It can coordinate more strongly, by making people see themselves as sharing an injury. It can coordinate dangerously, by making an enemy appear responsible for that injury. The question is always how a form is taken up, by whom, and under what background conditions.
This section has distinguished perceptual-symbolic framing from three neighbouring mechanisms. Norms guide conduct through expectations and sanctions. Institutions allocate roles, powers, rights, and procedures. Ideology organises meaning and justification. Perceptual-symbolic framing organises salience and affective uptake. In practice these mechanisms overlap. Institutions use symbols. Norms are learned through embodied practice. Ideologies are sensuously mediated. The distinction remains useful because it shows how domination can be stabilised at the level of appearance: through the way power becomes visible, injury becomes shareable, and action becomes imaginable.
The next section turns to the political danger of this mechanism. Perceptual-symbolic framing can make domination more contestable by clarifying its sources and sites of challenge. It can also produce distorted legibility. Fascist politics is an especially powerful form of the latter. It makes a political world appear in which vulnerability has enemies, authority has a body, and collective restoration has a visible form.
IV. FASCIST CLOSURE
Fascism is an aestheticised form of politics in Benjamin’s sense. It gives the masses expressive participation while withholding control over the structures that shape their lives. It lets people see themselves as a collective body, experience unity, and inhabit a drama of national destiny, while leaving the sources of their vulnerability untouched. Its distinctive power lies in this conversion of political agency into spectacle. Belonging is staged; authority is embodied; injury is given a face. The aesthetic dimension of politics is not inherently authoritarian. Fascism is dangerous because it organises this dimension through organic unity, enemy causation, and authoritarian restoration.9
Fascism shows the problem of political legibility especially vividly because it organises appearance as well as belief, interest, and institution. It tells people what kind of world they inhabit by showing them who belongs, who threatens, who has betrayed them, and who can restore order. Economic insecurity becomes betrayal by outsiders or internal traitors. Gender anxiety becomes the decline of the family. Status loss becomes humiliation of the nation. Institutional distrust becomes evidence of conspiracy. Structural vulnerability is translated into a visible drama of enemies, symbols, and restoration. Power has a face, injury has a culprit, and action has direction.
The aim here is limited. I set aside classificatory disputes about fascism, authoritarianism, populism, and the far right in order to focus on one question: why is fascist politics especially able to reorganise attribution, vulnerability, and belonging when the sources of power have become difficult to locate?
Two features matter for this purpose. The first is organic holism: the view that the political community is a unified moral body whose integrity takes priority over the equal standing of individual persons. The second is palingenesis: the myth of national rebirth, in which crisis is interpreted as degeneration requiring purification and restoration.10 These features explain why fascist politics is so effective at producing distorted legibility under conditions of opaque power.
Organic holism supplies the moral ontology. It tells agents what the relevant political subject is: the people, nation, race, civilisation, or family understood as an organic whole. Palingenesis supplies the temporal drama. It tells agents that the collective body has declined, been betrayed, and must be restored. Fascist aesthetics make both claims perceptible. Through images, rituals, leaders, crowds, enemies, and scenes of restoration, fascism gives the collective body a visible shape. Together, these elements produce fascist closure. They turn diffuse vulnerability into injury to a collective body, identify enemies as the cause of that injury, and present authoritarian restoration as the appropriate response. I use “fascist reorientation” for the broader restructuring of political experience. By “fascist closure”, I mean a form of political legibility that fixes vulnerability as injury to a collective body, fixes enemies as the cause of that injury, and fixes authoritarian restoration as the required response. Democratic political legibility works differently. It seeks to make power intelligible without closing the field of judgement: attributions remain contestable, remedies remain revisable, and the political subject remains plural.
A. Organic Holism
Mark Reiff has recently argued that fascism rests on a coherent moral order that rejects the Enlightenment premise of equal moral personhood.11 On this view, fascism replaces the individual as the basic unit of moral worth with a collective body whose unity, hierarchy, and purity are treated as intrinsic goods. Moral value is no longer distributed across persons as equal moral agents. It is concentrated in an organic whole whose integrity precedes and grounds the worth of its members. Fascism is therefore not merely anti-egalitarian. It is anti-individualist at the level of basic moral ontology.
I call this structure organic holism. The term names a claim about moral and political standing. In an organic-holist view, the political community is imagined as a living body. Individuals matter insofar as they contribute to its health, strength, destiny, or purification. Hierarchy appears as functional differentiation within the whole. Exclusion appears as hygienic necessity. Violence appears as restoration rather than domination. Many political traditions value collective life. Organic holism makes the collective body the primary bearer of moral value, while individuals receive standing through their assigned place within it.
This moral ontology has direct consequences for political legibility. Structural domination often disperses power across markets, bureaucracies, infrastructures, technologies, and social norms. Organic holism reverses that dispersion at the level of appearance. It posits a unified subject, “the people,” whose will can be embodied in a leader and whose suffering can be represented as a single injury. The political world is no longer made up of complex dependencies and overlapping structures. It is organised around one body, one will, one injury, and one enemy.
This is a form of simplification, but it is not merely rhetorical. Organic holism changes the units of political analysis. Economic precarity, cultural dislocation, gender anxiety, and status loss are redescribed as injuries to the collective body. Diffuse exposure to arbitrary power becomes humiliation, betrayal, contamination, or decay. The problem is no longer structural dependency. It is damage to the organic whole. Once the political community is imagined in this way, the central questions also change. The issue is no longer how power is organised, who is made vulnerable, and where contestation should be directed. The issue becomes who belongs to the body, who threatens it, and what must be done to restore it.
This is why organic holism is central to fascist closure. It provides a false answer to the Attribution Problem. The source of vulnerability is made legible as an enemy of the collective body. The subject of injury is made legible as the people or nation. The remedy is made legible as purification, discipline, and restoration. The underlying structures that produce vulnerability do not disappear. They are redescribed in a moral drama of collective life and death.
B. Fascist Expressive Form
Organic holism needs expressive form. If the political community is imagined as a body, its unity has to be made visible. A body can be seen, staged, synchronised, injured, purified, and restored. This is why fascist politics has such a close relation to spectacle. It must give the collective body a perceptible form.
Benjamin’s account of the aestheticisation of politics remains instructive here. His claim is not merely that fascist regimes use spectacle. It is that fascism responds to mass political dispossession by offering expression in place of agency. Fascism, Benjamin writes, seeks to organise the masses while leaving property relations intact; it gives them a way to express themselves rather than transforming the structures that deny them power. In this sense, fascist spectacle is not an ornament added to politics. It is a substitute form of participation. The masses are invited to experience unity, presence, and collective force through ritual, choreography, monumental imagery, and scenes of embodied belonging. They appear as political agents, but their agency is displaced into aesthetic form. Political participation is staged rather than institutionally exercised.12
Sontag helps specify the visual grammar of this displacement. Fascist aesthetics stage discipline, submission, bodily perfection, hardness, sacrifice, and purified collective identity as objects of admiration.13 The recurring images are familiar: synchronised bodies, heroic masculinity, monumental scale, ritualised symbols, purified landscapes, and choreographed unity. These images do not merely decorate a doctrine. They make hierarchy appear ordered, obedience appear noble, and exclusion appear protective.
This expressive form does political work. It makes agency visible. The leader appears as the organ of collective will. The crowd appears as the people unified. The enemy appears as the source of decay. Injury appears as damage to the nation, race, family, or civilisation. Restoration appears as something that can be enacted through discipline, violence, border-making, and obedience. The political field becomes easier to read because its complexity has been compressed into embodied forces.
This is the aesthetic dimension of fascist reorientation. Fascist politics does not only persuade agents that certain propositions are true. It makes a world appear in which those propositions feel obvious. Unity is seen. Threat is seen. Authority is seen. The enemy is seen. The force of fascist politics lies in this combination of moral ontology and expressive form. Organic holism supplies the schema; aesthetic embodiment makes it compelling.
This also clarifies the relation between fascist expressive form and ideology. Fascist images, rituals, and performances do not operate outside ideology. They give ideological claims their perceptual and affective coherence. A doctrine of national rebirth becomes powerful when decline can be pictured, enemies can be recognised, and restoration can be staged. A claim about hierarchy becomes powerful when hierarchy appears as order. A claim about exclusion becomes powerful when exclusion appears as defence. Fascist ideology and fascist aesthetics therefore work together, but they do different things. Ideology organises meaning and justification. Expressive form organises salience, affect, and uptake.
Fascist closure has two main operations. The first is attributional closure. Structural domination disperses effective power across markets, bureaucracies, legal arrangements, infrastructures, and social norms. Fascist politics condenses this dispersion into visible figures. Leadership appears as the embodiment of collective agency. Enemies appear as the cause of decline. The question “what produces our vulnerability?” receives a determinate answer: they do. Migrants, Jews, feminists, communists, Muslims, “globalists,” queer people, bureaucrats, journalists, judges, or internal traitors become the bearers of structural blame. The list varies across contexts. The form is stable. Diffuse vulnerability is attributed to hostile will.
Palingenetic myth intensifies this operation. The nation is represented as a once-vital body brought low by corruption, weakness, betrayal, or contamination, and now in need of regeneration. Economic insecurity, demographic change, geopolitical decline, or cultural transformation are redescribed as the work of identifiable antagonists. The source of injury is made visible. The remedy is made equally visible: restoration under decisive authority.
The second operation is affective binding. Under structural domination, people often encounter power through impersonal systems that fragment experience and weaken agency. Fascist politics stages unity as something sensuously real. Mass rallies, synchronised gestures, ritualised slogans, militarised aesthetics, stylised iconography of strength and renewal, and online images of heroic national identity make belonging immediate. In these settings, belonging is not deduced from doctrine. It is enacted and felt. The collective body appears tangible. Hierarchy is experienced as order. Participation is relocated from institutional control to embodied alignment.
These two operations reinforce one another. Attributional closure fixes who threatens and who can restore. Affective binding makes that fixation compelling. Together they convert structural opacity into a world of visible authority and shared destiny. Their force does not depend on empirical accuracy. It depends on perceptual coherence. Organic holism compresses the political field; expressive form makes that compression vivid.
It would be too weak, however, to say that fascism only stabilises existing structural domination by misattributing its causes. Fascist politics can also transform the form of domination itself. Where opaque power is experienced as dispersed, impersonal, or difficult to locate, fascism offers personified authority, embodied enemies, and visible sites of command. This does not simply make existing power appear differently. It can reorganise power around leader-centred rule, racialised and gendered hierarchy, emergency authority, and coercive state or extra-state action. Fascist false legibility therefore has a double operation. It redirects anger away from many of the structural sources of vulnerability, but it also produces new relations of domination by converting diffuse social insecurity into authoritarian rule over named enemies and subordinated groups.
C. Fascist Closure and Other Forms of Aestheticised Politics
This account helps distinguish fascist reorientation from other forms of aestheticised politics. National populisms also personify blame and simplify agency. They often explain crisis through corrupt elites who have betrayed “the people.” In such cases, the people are usually treated as an existing constituency whose will has been misrepresented or ignored. The political problem is misrule: the wrong actors occupy institutions, distort representation, or frustrate popular sovereignty.
Fascist reorientation goes further. It stages the political community as an organic body whose unity has been damaged and must be regenerated. Structural vulnerability becomes existential injury to that body. Enemies appear not merely as corrupt rulers, but as contaminating forces. Leadership appears not merely as representation, but as the embodied organ of collective will. The political problem is not only that the people have been misrepresented. It is that the body of the people has been weakened, polluted, or betrayed.
This is why fascist politics produces a more radical form of closure. It does not simply identify bad actors. It fixes the basic shape of the political world. There is a collective body, an injury to that body, an enemy responsible for the injury, and an authority capable of restoration. Once this picture is in place, disagreement appears as treachery, complexity as evasion, and pluralism as weakness. The structure is difficult to revise because it absorbs challenge into itself. Objection becomes evidence of contamination.
Fascist politics therefore intensifies dynamics present in other aestheticised politics. It fuses anti-individualist ontology, regenerative myth, hierarchical naturalisation, and enemy-centred personification into a perceptually unified world. The result is a metaphysical compression of the political field. Dispersed structures are recoded as embodied will. Complex dependency becomes visible struggle. Opacity gives way to sensuous order.
This does not mean that fascism is the only political form that responds to structural disorientation. Nor does it mean that every aestheticised politics is fascist. Democratic movements also use images, rituals, slogans, and embodied forms of collective action. Anti-racist marches, feminist strikes, labour pickets, climate occupations, and disability justice protests all make dispersed structures visible through expressive form. The difference lies in the kind of legibility produced. Democratic and emancipatory forms can make power contestable while preserving plurality and revisability. Fascist closure makes power legible by binding it to organic unity, enemy causation, and authoritarian restoration.
A recent episode illustrates how this can work even when the representation is visibly artificial. In 2024, the far-right activist Tommy Robinson circulated an AI-generated image depicting Allied soldiers landing on the beaches of Normandy during the D-Day invasion. The image contained obvious errors typical of generative AI: distorted figures, historically inaccurate uniforms, and implausible scenes such as soldiers walking directly into the sea. Many observers recognised the image as fabricated and mocked it as “AI slop.” Yet within Robinson’s networks the image circulated as a patriotic symbol.
The disagreement was not mainly about factual accuracy. For critics, the image failed as representation. For supporters, its significance lay elsewhere. It staged a familiar moral drama: heroic soldiers advancing into danger, masculine sacrifice in defence of the nation, and civilisational struggle against hostile forces. These images circulate in media environments where speed, recognisability, and affective force often matter more than fidelity to the represented event. Their distortions can function as part of the style: exaggerated figures, simplified symbolism, and heightened emotional cues make the scene immediately readable. This aesthetic is especially suited to politics that seeks mythic compression and enemy-centred clarity. It sits less easily with political projects that depend on evidentiary authority, structural diagnosis, and revisable claims about social causation. The image did not need to be historically faithful to perform its political function.14
The episode shows how expressive form can coordinate orientation independently of empirical truth. The image condensed complex historical and political material into a field of heroes, enemies, and collective destiny. It did not explain structural conditions. It organised perception around identifiable agents and threats. In doing so, it supplied a small instance of attributional closure: diffuse anxieties were redescribed through a scene in which agency, injury, and responsibility appeared immediately identifiable.
The point is that highly aestheticised politics can stabilise political alignment by organising what appears salient: who acts, who threatens, who belongs, and what demands response. Fascist politics develops this capacity in a distinctive direction. It binds such images to an organic-holist moral ontology and a palingenetic myth of restoration. That fusion is what makes fascist reorientation so powerful. It does not simply misinform. It makes a false political world perceptually available.
V. CONCLUSION: AGAINST FASCIST CLOSURE
This article has argued that opaque power raises a problem of political legibility. Relations of power can be real while remaining difficult to locate, explain, and contest. Structural domination is one important form of this problem. People may be made vulnerable by markets, platforms, bureaucracies, social norms, institutional arrangements, and background inequalities whose operations are hard to grasp as objects of political action. Domination can exist under conditions of misrecognition. Contestation still requires some practical way of making power intelligible: agents need to identify vulnerabilities at issue, understand enough about how they are produced or sustained, and locate possible modes of challenge.
This claim contributes to debates on structural domination and republican freedom. Recent republican theory has developed increasingly sophisticated accounts of structural domination. Feminist and critical theories of structural injustice have long shown how domination and oppression can be reproduced through dispersed practices, meanings, norms, and institutions. This article suggests that these accounts need an account of legibility. Power that is to be contested must become available as an object of political judgement and collective action. This is especially pressing for republican theory, given its emphasis on contestability, and the point reaches any theory concerned with domination, structural injustice, or democratic agency.
The article has also argued that political legibility has a perceptual and expressive dimension. Information alone rarely makes power contestable. Relations of domination are encountered through images, interfaces, rituals, slogans, institutions, bodily styles, and repeated scenes of social life. These forms shape what appears politically salient, which injuries feel shared, who seems responsible, and where action appears possible. I have called this perceptual-symbolic framing. It works with ideology, norms, and institutions while naming a distinct dimension of political mediation: the organisation of appearance and affect through which power becomes intelligible.
Fascism shows the danger of this dimension with particular clarity. It is an aestheticised form of politics that makes vulnerability intelligible in false and dangerous ways. Through organic holism, it redescribes dispersed structural vulnerability as injury to a collective body. Through palingenetic myth, it presents crisis as degeneration requiring purification and rebirth. Through expressive form, it gives that story perceptual force. Enemies become visible. Authority becomes embodied. Belonging becomes palpable. Restoration becomes imaginable. Fascist closure answers the need for political legibility by misdirecting it.
The practical implication is that anti-fascist politics cannot rest on factual correction or moral denunciation alone. Both remain necessary. Neither fully addresses the need that fascist closure exploits. People subject to opaque power need ways of understanding what has gone wrong, who or what sustains their vulnerability, and where collective action can be directed. A democratic response must make structural domination legible without reproducing fascism’s false clarity. It must identify real structures without reducing them to enemy causation. It must build solidarity without organic holism. It must make agency possible without embodying it in a leader. It must make injury shareable without turning it into purification or revenge.
This suggests three further lines of inquiry. First, theories of domination should examine the legibility conditions of contestation more directly. Formal rights of complaint, appeal, voice, or participation matter, but they do not by themselves make power intelligible to those subject to it. Second, work on ideology, symbolic power, and political aesthetics should be brought more directly into conversation with theories of domination. These literatures already show how meaning, perception, affect, and common sense shape political life; the further question is how such forms make domination contestable, tolerable, or misattributed. Third, democratic and anti-fascist theory should ask how structural power can be represented in ways that are vivid enough to orient action while remaining plural, revisable, and accountable to truth.
The article began from the thought that far-right politics makes complicated social conditions look simple. That simplicity is dangerous because it reorganises attribution, belonging, and agency. It makes domination intelligible in ways that deepen domination. Democratic politics also needs clarity. The challenge is to build forms of political legibility that allow agents to see what they are up against, who they might act with, and where change might begin, while resisting the conversion of structural vulnerability into fascist closure.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the Utrecht University Ethics Institute Colloquium and the Oxford Centre for the Study of Social Justice, and to participants at the workshop Structural Injustice and Collective Responsibility, organised by ENCODE, for helpful discussion of earlier versions of this article. I am especially grateful to Catarina Moiteiro das Neves, Ingrid Robeyns, Caleb Althorpe, Stuart White and Cécile Laborde for their comments. I am further grateful to three anonymous reviewers and for the editorial guidance at Political Philosophy, which greatly improved this work. This work was funded by the NWO VICI grant Visions for the Future.
COMPETING INTERESTS
The author declares that she has no competing interests.
Notes
- Pettit provides the canonical republican account of domination as subjection to arbitrary power and makes contestability central to freedom as non-domination (Pettit 1997, pp. 52–58, 66–73). Lovett treats domination as a structural relation and helps situate domination beyond discrete acts of interference (Lovett 2010, pp. 34–49). Gädeke sharpens this point by showing that domination depends on socially enabled capacities to interfere (Gädeke 2020, pp. 205–12). Laborde connects domination to the warranted epistemic standpoint of agents living under racialised and gendered vulnerability, while preserving the distinction between feeling unfree and being unfree (Laborde 2024, pp. 31–36). Gourevitch is useful for the point that workplace domination can be personal and impersonal at once: particular employers or managers exercise power within market and legal structures that shape how that power is used (Gourevitch 2024). [^]
- Frye’s birdcage image shows how oppression can be produced by many constraints whose force becomes visible only when seen together (Frye 1983, pp. 4–5). Young develops the structural point by explaining how injustice can arise through ordinary participation in accepted social rules and practices (Young 1990, pp. 39–65; Young 2011, pp. 43–74, esp. 52–64). Haslanger explains how social structures are reproduced through social meanings, classifications, and practices that agents may only partially understand (Haslanger 2016, pp. 113–30; Haslanger 2018, pp. 231–47). Bourdieu is relevant because symbolic power operates through shared categories of perception, making hierarchy appear natural, deserved, or obvious (Bourdieu 1989, pp. 20–23; Bourdieu 1991, pp. 163–70). [^]
- This formulation draws on Bourdieu’s account of symbolic power and Rancière’s account of the distribution of the sensible, while using a more specific term for the mechanism at issue here. Bourdieu shows how power is stabilised through categories of perception; Rancière shows how political orders organise what can be seen, heard, and recognised as part of a common world (Bourdieu 1991, pp. 163–70; Rancière 2004, pp. 12–19). [^]
- See Nussbaum 2013, pp. 1–15, 204–56. [^]
- This claim draws on Bourdieu’s account of symbolic power and habitus, and on Rancière’s account of the distribution of the sensible. Bourdieu shows how power is stabilised through categories of perception and embodied dispositions; Rancière shows how political orders organise what can be seen, heard, and recognised as part of a common world (Bourdieu 1991, pp. 163–70; Bourdieu 1977, pp. 72–95; Rancière 2004, pp. 12–19). [^]
- Bicchieri analyses social norms in terms of conditional preferences and expectations about others’ behaviour and approval (Bicchieri 2005, p. 11). [^]
- Searle describes institutions as systems of status functions and deontic powers; Rawls treats the basic structure as a public system of rules that assigns rights and duties and shapes expectations over time (Searle 2005, pp. 1–22; Rawls 1999, pp. 6–8, 47–48). [^]
- On ideology, see Freeden’s account of ideologies as configurations of political concepts, and critical-theoretic accounts of ideology as embedded in social practices, justificatory vocabularies, and forms of self-understanding that can block critique or make domination appear natural (Freeden 1996; Geuss 1981; Shelby 2003; Celikates 2006; Haslanger 2016; Haslanger 2017; Gramsci 1971, p. 199). [^]
- On the aestheticisation of politics and fascist aesthetic form, see Benjamin 1968, pp. 241–42; Sontag 1980, pp. 73–105; Griffin 1991, pp. 26–36. [^]
- On palingenesis and national rebirth, see Griffin 1991, pp. 26–36, esp. 32–35. [^]
- Reiff argues that fascism rests on a coherent moral order that rejects the Enlightenment premise of equal moral personhood (Reiff 2024, pp. 64–71). [^]
- Benjamin argues that fascism attempts to organise the masses while leaving property relations unchanged, giving them expression rather than rights, and concludes that fascism leads to the aestheticisation of political life (Benjamin 1968, pp. 241–42). [^]
- Sontag 1980, pp. 73–105. [^]
- On this example and the far-right use of AI-generated imagery, see Watkins 2025. [^]
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