Refiguring the Public, Political, and Personal in Current Danish Exclusionary Reasoning

Abstract

Hervik uses the new concept of “fractal logic” as a way to explain how scaling takes place in Danish exclusionary reasoning, in news articles, web commentaries, blogs, and Facebook about Muslims. Through two incidents in Denmark, an amusement park controversy and a missing handshake panic, he shows how participants and other commentators move from small-scale particularity to a generalizable pattern that is understood to. This leads to the argument that the reproduction of a specific fractal logic called “the nation in danger” and works as an exclusionary reasoning that reinforces the political subjectivity of Danish neonationalism. In addition, the argument opens up for a refiguring of the public–private in both psychological and political anthropology.