Against the Ideology of Connection

In recent years, “connection” has become a central term in cultural and political discourse. It is invoked as a remedy against fragmentation, polarization, and social anxiety. Culture, in particular, is increasingly called upon to “connect”.

This appeal appears self-evident. Yet it rests on an unexamined assumption: that connection is inherently emancipatory. This intervention challenges that assumption.

Not all forms of connection are politically neutral. On the contrary, connection can function as a powerful mechanism of alignment, normalization, and control. It can suppress conflict by framing disagreement as a failure of relation rather than as a structural or political antagonism.

Historically, reactionary and fascist movements have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to produce intense forms of collective attachment. They do not lack connection; they mobilize it. The problem is therefore not the absence of connection, but the forms it takes and the structures it reinforces.

When culture defines its role in terms of connection, it risks displacing conflict instead of articulating it. It risks transforming political contradictions into interpersonal deficits, and structural tensions into communicative problems.

A critical practice cannot be grounded in connection alone. It must be able to sustain disjunction, disagreement, and forms of non-relation. It must recognize that not everything can, or should, be reconciled.

Connection is not a solution in itself. It is a form that can either reproduce or contest existing structures of power. To treat it as an unquestioned good is to abandon critique at the very moment it is most needed.

This text marks a first articulation of a position that will be developed in subsequent interventions.