How to Perform an Anti-fascist Collective From Sound

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Abstract

This essay engages in the notion of the collective and collaboration with an ear to their relationship with fascism and populism, or its resistance. Can we work collectively without exclusions and discrimination, or does every collective effort always and necessarily imply an excluded other as well as a closed off us? Is the common always a populist common, always producing a community of power, always already undermining the resistance against? Or, can sound making and listening produce a plural and embodied political understanding that can capacitate anti-fascist actions, together?

What are the inevitabilities of the together - and can we perform a different collectivity from sound?

I engage these questions by drawing on Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s ideas on humiliation and postmodern fascism; I discuss them through Simone Forti’s physical sculptures; I think them with Étienne de La Boétie’s notion of obedience and servility and finally consider them in relation to Rosa Klee’s investigation of German choirs. And come to wonder whether we need to be quiet. Not mute, but to perform as silently diffuse and expansive voices, unboundaried, everywhere.

“Can we work collectively without exclusions and discrimination, or does every collective effort always and necessarily imply an excluded other as well as a closed off us? (...) Can sound making and listening produce a plural and embodied political understanding that can capacitate anti-fascist actions, together?”

Introduction

As far as I know: there is no way out.
As far as I know!
But I do not know everything. My ignorance is my force.¹

At the beginning of writing an essay there is the suggestion or at least an assumption that the writer believes that things, the things written about, are possible or valid in the sense of making sense and having the potential to make an impact on the matter discussed. There is hope that what is reported and written about inspires new thought and makes a contribution to discourse in a constructive and expansive way, even if highly critical. In other words there is the assumption of a desire to persuade the reader of the worth and legitimacy of the writer’s argument and ideas. What if that is not the case? What if the writer herself does not believe (anymore) in the power of what she writes about? Is the writing then still valid, relevant, readable?

What I mean to say or ask is, whether, if the author of this essay does not actually believe that the collective holds any positive potential against a current fascism rising anymore, can her writing still hold some communicative function and worth? Or, if the writer is so overwhelmed by a sense of despair and resignation, can her thoughts still count and conjure something despite herself?

I have until very recently been extremely hopefully invested in collective sound making and listening as a potential tool against political authoritarianism, populism, and generally against political extremes that are extreme because they have lost the body as the centre of empathy, togetherness, responsibility and the ability to think beyond simple promises and abstracted desires. I felt confident that making sound and music together can reinvigorate this body and inform a democratic subjectivity; that is a subjectivity aware of its relationality, its interdependence with other human and more-than-human bodies. Where, as toucher and touched, by the resonance of our collective utterances, we can sense our being as a being-with, responsible and response-able – with all voices present, plural and contingent.²

More recently I have started to doubt this possibility. Or rather I have come to believe that the very ability of sound to create a collective, to demonstrate and make us sense the indivisibility and relationality of bodies and things, is more powerfully agitated in hate and violence than for a caring, empathetic and response-able togetherness.

The question then I hope to ask in this essay is, whether there is a way to sing and sound a collective powerful enough to perform and effect an anti-fascist movement and believe, as much as songs of hate and violence arouse the fascist fervour. Whereby I am not taking fascism as a historical term, but in its contemporary restaging. Animated by wealthy right-wing leaders, oligarchs, as a side show and diversion tactic, for those whose dignity and sense of identity have been stolen through capitalist exploitation, the flood of wealth washing upwards, and the techno-neo-liberal replacement of working bodies by automation, AI, and robotics.

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Käthe Kollwitz. The Mothers (Die Mütter) from War (Krieg). 1921–22, published 1923.

Humiliation

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi talks about the humiliation of the (white) working class by neo-liberal and centre-left governments, and their subsequent re-identification as a white race³. To this I would like to add their re-identification or re-confirmation rather, as a white masculine identity that seeks to control women’s bodies because they have lost control over everything else. This racist-sexist collective, stoked by millionaires, billionaires and now even trillionaires, sings together to shut out all doubt about who they are supposed to hate, and sounds a violence strong enough to hide their humiliation, confidence growing in the resonance between their voices, steps and cheers.

At the far-right protest in London on the 13. of September 2025, stoked and prodded by Tommy Robinson (aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) and Elon Musk, the crowd at one point chanted Charlie Kirk’s name, the evangelical hate-priest pro-life and gun ownership advocate, who had just weeks before been killed by a lone gunman. I have no idea how much these protesters would have known about the man whose name they formed into a rhythmic mantra, but that mantra nevertheless gave them a presence, a rhythm, growing in stature, gaining back respect and making themselves great again. At least for a short moment.

The point here is not to belittle their desire for self-respect but to understand what had robbed them of it in the first place, and whether self-respect, gained on the back of hate and confidence won through racial, religious and nationalistic identification and the oppression of women and trans people, is sustainable? And most importantly I hope to understand the role of sound in gaining it back in the first place. Thus, for this essay, the focus is on understanding how, if sound and singing grant right-wing self-respect and confidence, rallies the troupes of billionaires against an alien or even pretend enemy, can it at the same time produce an anti-fascist momentum? Can the same collective chanting provoke an opposite force, or is the mindlessness of chanting always powerless, a performance of the right and the left to keep the billionaires in charge and humiliate us all?

…I am having such a bad feeling about it, and I’m sick with it again now, we just had a mid-term election, and this country went with this man, I have a very bad very dark feeling about how much this president has the character of a dictator, and that people go for that, how people seem to like a man with that character, and about how people who don’t like it are afraid to speak.⁴

Huddle!

Simone Forti's Huddle, 1969. Photo credits: Peter Moore

“Huddle” is a work by Simone Forti staged for the first time in 1961. It is a ‘dance construction’ or a ‘physical sculpture’ made from people that literally huddle together, always touching while slowly moving across a space, their bodies tightly entangled, climbing over each other, holding onto each other, reforming and never really breaking contact. The performances are quiet but not mute. The movements of bodies, the increasingly laboured and concentrated breath of the participants, the sound of feet squeaking on rubber floors, tapping on parquet, or scratching on concrete surfaces. The sound is that of a mass, of a body sculpture without a certain form trying its own reach and direction. In that sense it is a very political piece. Quietly performing what bodies can be together: what shapes they make and space they take; what collective the huddle performs.

We live on the circumference of a hollow circle, We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism.⁵

All the images of “Huddle” found online are very photogenic. The participants are always young. It’s a selected huddle of dancers, with very limber and athletic bodies. But there is another sound, that of the other bodies, those who watch. They make another huddle, less concentrated, less nimble, more diverse. This is a huddle whose whispered voices and quiet footsteps resonate the infrastructure of the environment the performance takes place in. It presents itself as volume rather than as form. Their sound is more elusive, troubling the edges of the image, because there is no form seen to anchor it in. It is not a framed but an expansive sound even if extremely quiet, even hushed. Its quietness bleeds into what we cannot see and makes that imaginable and connected.

What is the political possibility of that huddle?

According to the website of the New National Gallery Berlin, where the huddle was performed in 2022, ‘Simone Forti's performances are based on the need to take advantage of one's own physical discomfort.’ - What is this discomfort, and what advantage are we trying to gain? In other words, if the huddle is motivated by discomfort in one’s own position, the need to strain and move to find a different form, does it matter what caused this discomfort? Is the politics of collective movement dependent on the source of pain. What then about the discomfort of the humiliated white worker who has been robbed of his identity and potency by neo-liberal exploitation and his own technological obsolescence. What huddle does he make to regain his confidence and comfort? What does it look like, how does it move? And what is the pain of the left-wing, socialist citizen, who is also a worker, what pain and discomfort motivates their huddles? And who is able to find the more powerful form?

I guess what I am trying to understand are the nuances of collectivity. What beings-with we can perform or whether they are always already given? and whether they always and necessarily fail the individual, the particular, as they abandon the understanding of the in-between and our co-dependency.

The group is only interested in the formal publishing of individuals for the purpose of establishing their social solidarity. Art, for example, is record not creation. The question of origin is only emphasized in so far as it proves the individual a member of the group, as having a common pedigree with the other members of the group.⁶

The General Strike 1926. Photo credits: Historic UK

Collectivity Is Not Enough

Laura Riding’s text “The Corpus”, published in the collection Anarchism is Not Enough, discusses the gains and limitations of the ordered and institutional collective. She describes its inevitable fiction of belonging and shared truth established for the price of abandoning one’s own. It is an important text to reflect on the difference of a right or left wing collective, pondering innate attractions and shared pains. For her the difference between a democratic and an oligarchic majority, which defines the will of the collective, is determined by whether there is an efficient group mind able to work as one, or a less efficient group mind that favours blind selection of the most weak minded amongst them. Her writing is harsh on both counts. Despondent and mocking. It makes me doubt the merit of any collective and I start to favour the disorganisation of an anarchic world instead.

However, humans, according to Étienne de La Boétie, desire to live in collective servitude. In his short essay Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, first published in 1577, after his death, and re-published in English in 2008 in the book The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, he too seems to mock us for our desire to be servile. Describing a very contemporary situation of authoritarian leadership and collective bondage he exclaims:

But O good Lord! What strange phenomenon is this? What name shall we give it? What is the nature of this misfortune? What vice is it, or, rather what degradation? To see an endless multitude of people not merely obeying, but driven to servility? Not ruled but tyrannized over? These wretches have no wealth, no kin, nor wife nor children, not even life itself that they can call their own. They suffer plundering, wantonness, cruelty, not from an army, not from a barbarian horde, on account of whom they must shed their blood and sacrifice their lives, but from a single man; not from a Hercules nor from a Samson, but from a single little man. Too frequently this same little man is the most cowardly and effeminate in the nation, a stranger to the powder of battle and hesitant on the sands of tournament; only without energy to direct men by force, but with hardly enough virility to bed with a common woman!⁷

I do not even have to discount the obvious 16th Century misogynist view on women to squint his despairing exclamations about servility into a 21st Century picture. De La Boétie’s observations are cutting, pre-phrasing Berardi’s notion of the humiliation and impotence of a contemporary Western worker, and thus giving cause to the dread of inevitability.

However, I like his solution reached at the end of his short essay, that we do not even need political action to terminate this relationship of sublimation and obedience, but that we only need to stop being subservient and ‘merely to be willing to be free’⁸. This is an extremely simple interpretation and solution to a complex problem of why a majority will follow a sickly, cowardly man into servitude, and how to become disobedient. But its simplicity strikes me as a good ideal. Simpler surely than blaming foreigners, trans people or women. It was, at the time, celebrated as a creative and original call for civil disobedience, for mass non-violent resistance, by withdrawing consent. Ironically it was not published during his lifetime for fear of reprisals, but only passed to trusted friends. And yet it had an impact on the definition and scope of political philosophy and anticipates much later writing on totalitarianism and resistance, proving its usefulness for thinking through this discussion on collectivity, fascism, anti-fascism, and whether sounding together is a force to set us free.

De La Boétie’s solution demands a collective performance: the civic together to withdraw its support from the leader, when I am still not sure how this collective is formed and what might enable the unperformance of its servility. What huddle can we make to free ourselves? And is it the huddle within the picture, photogenic, nimble bodied and concentrated, or is it the more diffuse huddle off screen, quiet, expansive, and formless?

In answer, he points to education and the learned, who according to him have managed to keep themselves separate from the servile collective, who have not submitted themselves into tyranny, but stand outside its oppressive pull. He emphasises that these thinkers must be connected, networked, know each other, in order to together enable and support resistance. This at once suggests a great respect for the learned and for education. Understanding the production of knowledge as a vital part of (social and political) governance. But it also puts high expectations on the learned, the academic; that they actually care and are willing to get involved, potentially jeopardizing their privilege and outside position!

Thousands descend on Downtown Chicago during the No Kings Day protest on Oct. 18, 2025. Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago

Art, Academia and Resistance

I will go with his suggestion and place academia as a potential force of resistance. And I also add the arts as an important learned practice to this freedom force. The artist, whose anarchic creativity will have saved them from subservience too, can contribute to the performance of anti-servitude as anti-fascism, through a sensory-knowledge practice that generates the responsibility of resonance: the understanding of our generative role in what we see and hear and how we sense ourselves in these perceptions as beings-with, inspiring new ways to move together. This all assumes of course that the academic and the artist are willing to take on their role as resistance fighters, and that they are trusted, in their own separate hierarchy and status, by the worker, which presents a small contradiction. But still we can hope that they do, and that their choreography will be accepted and has the power to enable resistance. And that is where the authoritarian is cunning. They know to control and defund academic knowledge and art, portraying it as useless, elitist, another enemy and scapegoat rather than a body with the means to perform the necessary disobedience.

Contemporary, publicly funded, art has to serve the people while defining what that is. The idea is that your gallery visit should satisfy you. That it should live up to your expectations rather than provoking new ones; such as providing cause to examine your servitude in a neo-liberal context and develop the desire to escape it. And so art and knowledge is censored and defunded in an attempt to curtail the unexpected and regain ground and absolute control. The aim is to give the museum’s visitor a sense of choice, while controlling them into acquiescence with an economic, and socio-political status quo that makes them impotent, humiliated, frustrated but with no means to understand the source of this discomfort and pain. While this might sound like a conspiracy theory, the current moves of the Trump administration, for example, against science, against universities and most importantly for this discussion, against cultural institutions like the Smithsonian Institute or the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts, prove otherwise. Other examples are more subtle, maybe even unnoticeable: small conformities, acts of pre-emptive self-censorship, outright compliance absorbed into an overall aesthetics, into habit or a sense of responsible agency, simplicity and populism for the good of the public visitor, who is humiliated a second time by the suggestion that he would not understand anyway. Refuelling the impotence that drives the chant, rather than providing the condition for another tune.

The relationship between knowledge, aesthetics and populist authoritarianism is historic and powerful. And so I want to go back, to revisit the possibility of sound to perform a resisting collective. To enable us to merely become willing to be free.

Do You Sing Along?

At the beginning of her essay Chorgemeinschaften und “Volksgemeinschaften”⁹, Rosa Klee asks us ‘Wenn “Deutschland singt” stimmst du mit ein?’ ‘When “Germany sings”, do you join in?’. She reflects on the equation of singing with goodness and the unquestioned benefits and benevolence of making music together. Amid many interesting observations on the role of the choir in German political history she foregrounds the belief that making music together, singing together, strengthens solidarity because we feel each other in sound. Identifying again touch and being touched as important elements in the formation of collectivity and even its more intense partner, unity; signalling the desire for tightly entangled sonic huddles. Referring to Dorothea Kolland’s research into the Youth Music Movement in Germany, she points to the fact that there were fascist as well as democratic youth choirs active in the early days of the Weimar Republik (1920s), who performed the idea of the collective and togetherness “Gemeinschaft” in their differing ways. Only in the 30s did the fascist notion of collectivity, with its exclusionary and ethnically defined selection alone determine what communality was pursued through song. Reading on I sense her growing frustration at the impossibility of emancipating the choir from its nationalistic undertone and past, which she identifies as its “Grundton”, its base ton, audible all the way through and at all times.

Her assessment confirms my own sense of hopelessness. Is it truly impossible to sing resistance sustainably, to sing an anti-fascistic collective, to sing against totalitarianism? Does hate and violence, exclusion and tightly entangled nationalistic, ethnic, religious and gender definitions make for more solid sonic communities? Or are fascists just better singers? Klee’s essay ends on the question whether the left has to be louder? And presents a list of other questions that could guide the formation of an anti-fascistic choir praxis. It’s a good list. At its core stands the question, ‘Wer singt hier zusammmen, wer ist nicht dabei?’ ‘Who is singing together, who is not part of it?’¹⁰ Querying accessibility, inclusivity and the comfort of singing exclusively with our own voices.

Her list of questions could serve as the basis for a manifesto for an anti-fascist choir practice, transforming them into instructions: Make sure you know who you are singing with in order to collectively and continually ask who is not here and who should be here and how to invite them!

Drawing on de La Boétie’s liberating potential of education, it would be good to discuss such questions and instructions with every choir. Probing their self-evident formation, their concentrated huddle of breath and movement, as an ‘anti-fascist choir pedagogy’ that thinks about what sounds at the edges, outside the ‘performance shot’, the staged group photograph, off screen, quietly but expansively the volume of its own diversity.

Conclusion

Therefore and as a speculative and provisional conclusion, to be tested in practice, I want to suggest that maybe it is a silent choir that is needed to create an anti-fascist, anti-servitude resistance. I do not mean a choir that does not sing, but one that sings with the environment its unheard or ignored sounds. To produce collectively an expanded and connected silence that picks up on the hushed and quiet sounds at the edges of Simone Fortis’ “Huddle”, and joins in with them, to generate a base tone that is emancipated from nationalistic undertones but engaged in the diverse and mobile collectivity that we are; that unframes the certain definition of what we sing together and who we sing together with; and that does not form a recognisable huddle but expands into the unheard that is everywhere and all the time.

I take inspiration for this performance of collective hushed and quiet sounds that connect, from Benjamin Tausig’s report on the 2010 Red Shirt protests in Bangkok, Bangkok is Ringing, and in particular from his description of Kittisak Janpeng, a protester, who in response to the killing of the Japanese photojournalist Hiroyuki Muramoto, who had been shot while covering the protests for Reuters, designed a character to memorialize him. This character was dressed as Hiro’s ghost, showing his bullet wound, and was embodied to meditate his presence into the protests, connecting and appearing him through silence, as the medium of all the heard and unheard sounds. While there were other elements to the dramaturgy of this particular protest, what strikes me as vital for the purpose of believing again in an anti-fascist sound making together is the idea of the collective as a sonic expanse: as a diverse, indivisible collectivity that can be tapped into and animated when listening to and joining the hushed, quiet, unheard and ignored sounds at the edges and outside of what we are looking at.

Berardi 2018, p. 12. ↩︎
Maurice Merleau-Ponty reminds us that we are always the toucher and the touched, because I sense the touch both through touching and being touched at the same moment (‘Eye and Mind’, Johnson, G.A. (ed.) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Translated by M.B. Smith, 2nd ed. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996, p124.) Equally when singing together we are in the resonance as its producer and recipient, part of its vibrational sphere, singing beings-with.↩︎
Ibid. 13.↩︎/li>
Forti 2021, 195/6↩︎
Ridding 2001, p. 31↩︎
Ridding 2001, pp. 28/29↩︎
de La Boétie 2008 (orig. 1577), p. 42↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Klee, pp. 10-21↩︎
Ibid. 20.↩︎

How to Perform an Anti-fascist Collective From Sound

Written by:

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Abstract

Introduction

Humiliation

Huddle!

Collectivity Is Not Enough

Art, Academia and Resistance

Do You Sing Along?

Conclusion

Further Reading:

About the Author

Salomé Voegelin

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THE ATTIC

How to Perform an Anti-fascist Collective From Sound

Written by:

Share article:

Abstract

Introduction

The Attic Newsletter

Follow @theatticmag on Twitter

Humiliation

Follow @theatticmag on Twitter

Huddle!

Collectivity Is Not Enough

Art, Academia and Resistance

Do You Sing Along?

Conclusion

Further Reading:

About the Author

Salomé Voegelin

Share this Article

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