Shanie Tomassini, Solar Lamentation, Fonderie Darling, Until 15 November 2026

“And how you feel can make it real,
Real as anything you’ve seen.”
—Peter Gabriel, “Steam”

In the BBC documentary series Century of the Self, director Adam Curtis chronicles Sigmund Freud’s influence on Western cultural logic throughout the 20^th century. Freud’s structural psychoanalytical concepts animated the circulation of ideas about identity and agency and were harnessed over the past hundred years by powerful forces in politics and industry. Curtis paints a picture of a kind of conspiracy where experts in Freud’s theories manipulated the masses as puppet masters pull the strings of a marionette.  

Curtis for example cites the use of subliminal sexualized imagery in advertising following the publication in 1973 of Wilson Bryan Key’s book entitled Subliminal Seduction. Covert symbols embedded into ads, Keys claimed, acted subconsciously upon consumers, arousing them into associating products like automobiles and whiskey with sexual stimulation. These techniques were deployed in ad campaigns for everything from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to endorsements for Ronald Reagan’s U.S. presidential bid.

In addition to Freud’s theoretical framework, the political philosopher Ayn Rand’s system of Objectivism, articulated in works of fiction like The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, influenced the 20^th century emphasis on the individual as the key constituent of Western civilization. Society would naturally regulate itself, Rand speculated, if individuals acted in their own extreme self-interest, unconstrained by government and legislative regulation. Rand’s ideas were embraced by Britain and America’s political right who believed in unrestricted financial markets and neoliberal industrial capitalism built upon a foundation of autonomous private industry.

Les Vespérales #20 – Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go with Michael Cloud Duguay and Estelle Schorpp, Église du Sacré-Cœur-de-Jésus de Montréal, 19 September 2026

“A song is not a lyric. It’s not a melody. It’s not chord. It’s not a bridge. It’s not a chorus. It’s an emotion.”
—Terry McBride

It was subconscious libidinal manipulation that undergirded all of this furious economic activity, according to Curtis. But in the 21^st century, the focus shifted away from appealing subliminally to people’s desires and more overtly toward affectively appealing to people’s emotions. Particularly, fear became an important motivating factor following the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. Terror replaced pleasure as the lever of Western power, and politicians and cultural producers alike realized that they could exert far more control over their audiences with affective rather than unconscious attractions.

If the 20^th century was the century of the self, the 21^st so far is the century of the hive, the faction, the squad. This is because the individual has been rendered powerless against the forces of terror, and individuals have regressed to a more tribal, animalistic form of social organization. Affective triggers drive this behaviour. And various combinations of affect — fear, hatred, arousal, nostalgia — will organize and reorganize individuals into adjacent and recombinant factions.

This is why, for example, Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, who superficially should be diametrical opposites, came together to oppose the advent of A.I. Or why the ultra-conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson has promoted Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive U.S. Senate candidate. Naomi Klein calls these opportunistic allegiances “diagonalism,” a useful designation for contrasting pairings for immediate mutual benefit. Additionally, diagonalism is the opposite of individualism in that it thrives within albeit loosely formed communities. Diagonalist politics is at once highly social and niche.

At the avant garde of the diagonalist turn in the 21^st century was fashion and culture. Music scenes around the beginning of the new millennium became more permeable and permissible. Previously disparate genres joined forces to become unlikely allies manifesting in hybrids like electroclash and hyperpop. Clothing, too, ceased to predominantly reflect unique individual identity and became more about asserting omnivorous sartorial tastes: gym shorts with cowboy boots; a shoulder-padded blazer paired with cinched barrel jeans. Atypical was the new typical in self-expressive terms. But what of a society comprised of atypicality, one that appears designed to discourage consensus?

Élise Lafontaine, Colorature, Pangée, Until 31 October 2026

“To think of capitalism as other than unified also means thinking of some exchange markets as more repugnant than others, and therefore some capitalizations as themselves preferred lines of flight.”
—Patricia Ticineto Clough, Auto-affection: unconscious thought in the age of teletechnology

I visited Librairie Paragraphe this week to buy a copy of End Times Fascism, the new book co-authored by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. While there, I also picked up Liberal Fascisms, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s latest collection of essays. I remarked to the store manager, Andreas, that it seemed like lots of people recently were using the word “fascism,” to which he replied, “yeah, it’s very popular right now — fascism and protein.”

This unlikely combination of microtrends struck me as fascinating for two reasons. First is their oppositional stance toward those tendencies which immediately preceded them: socialism and fibre. For the past 30 years, we might recall that a steady diet of left-wing politics and oat bran characterized the Western cultural elite. But the second is their apparent diagonalism: two evidently unrelated things improbably merging — like punk and electro, or cowboy boots and gym shorts.

The Awaited Return of Lang Lang, Maison Symphonique, 23 September 2026

“Limits or virtual attractors, in and of themselves, remain recessively, superempirically untouched. It is the abstract movements they govern that mix.”
—Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual

The bottom line is affective sway. Fascism and protein both hold intense emotional attraction, the former because of its uneasy and heretofore forbidden status, and the latter because of its promise to surpass the 20^th century individual’s potential. Furthermore, fascism and protein are congruent with the cultural current of “-maxxing” and the tendency toward cryptic jargon in forming diagonal communities, especially online. I have not yet started reading End Times Fascism, but I would not be surprised if eating Paleo was an end-times fascist hallmark.

Invoking overtly fascistic and posthuman tropes is also the antithesis of subliminal seduction. It might be described as supraliminal friction. Young people nowadays possess a strange penchant for aggravation that the previous generation tended to avoid at all costs, like flip phones, insolent commercial interactions, and lining up for brunch.

For Blood and Soil book launch with Amarnath Amarasingam and Stephanie Carvin, McGill University Faculty Club, 14 September 2026

“For the Nazis, their war was the war ‘against the alliance of bolshevism and plutocracy.’”
—Slavoj Žižek, “Altona, Los Angeles: from the nearby to the neighbour”

Are fascism and protein simply symptoms of youthful rebellion, like the running gag on Family Ties in which Michael J. Fox’s Alex P. Keaton character was a sweater vest-wearing republican just to piss off his hippie parents? At least two existential threats to humanity exist today that did not at that time: artificial intelligence and the climate crisis. In this moment, there is more at stake.

The project is to make sustaining life seem edgier than inevitable annihilation. And to make it emotionally affective. This entails nothing short of moral evolution, a convergence of every national and political stripe in defiant unity. It might be the unlikeliest diagonal alliance so far.

Come to NicheMTL’s Glitch Issue launch party October 1st 2026 at the SAT. Featuring live performances by Courant Zéro, HRT, and Seulement. Get tickets here.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

_{Cover image: Christopher Gambino, Hysterical Margaret (2026), Vanity, stockings, shoes, shelf, 6 x 8 x 8 inches. Photographed for NicheMTL.}