Interesting drug

In the wake of the fascists’ electoral victory in Italy, I saw this quote from Toni Morrison’s 1995 “Remarks Given at the Howard University Charter Day Convocation” circulating on Tumblr:

Fascism only talks ideology but it really is just marketing, marketing for power. It’s recognizable by its need to purge, the strategies it uses to purge and its terror of truly democratic goals. It changes citizens into taxpayers so individuals become rife with anger at the notion of the public good. It changes citizens into consumers so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity, nor our compassion, nor our generosity — none of the virtues that human beings aspire to claim, none of that but what we own. And in so doing it produces the perfect capitalist: one who is willing to kill a human being for a product — a sneaker, a jacket, a car, a company.

Often fascism is represented as a desperate and lamentable response to a crisis in the capitalist status quo, an anomaly. But Morrison’s claim here is that it is already embedded in consumerism, where its smooth reproduction of inhumanity often goes unremarked upon. Fascism is not only “marketing for power” but also points to marketing as power. Advertising is where social exclusions begin to be articulated and enacted, rationalized in terms of the personal benefits that viewers can imagine they will reap. It organizes people into “masses” or “demographics” for purposes of control, which plays out in terms of status fears and pleasures. Coercion and obedience are mediated through entertainment, so that they appear as their opposite. Not thinking appears as “mindless fun”; conformity appears as “self-expression” or “fandom.”

Of course, fascism promises “purges,” but these have in effect already long been maintained through routinized and tolerated forms of violence, from “microaggressions” on up, that are embedded in society as a form of order. As John Ganz suggests here, open recourse to thuggery may indicate that fascists have yet to “achieve actual hegemony, that is persuade the masses that they were the true inheritors of national destiny.” Advertising may be more effective than naked brutality because it masks its coerciveness in forms of flattery and vicarious indulgence; it doesn’t need to overtly make the case for fascism, as Morrison points out, or understand itself as such. If advertising — the sort of discourse we are most consistently exposed to, that we engage in whenever we look at a screen — “changes citizens into consumers,” it does so mainly through its ubiquity and its form: It presupposes competitive acquisitiveness as the core of human motivation and addresses us accordingly. It naturalizes the role of consumer and associates it with whatever other satisfactions the screen provides.

Advertising is in a sense meta-propaganda, an endless paean to the condition of persuadability, of the rewards latent in personal pliancy. In complacent times, the comportment that advertising works to inculcate is its own anti-politics, but when convenience and accustomed entitlements are put under pressure, the selfishness and envy built into consumerism smoothly translate into more confrontational forms of reaction.

If advertising in itself is a kind of fascist conditioning, and the appeals of consumerism are at the core of that conditioning, it would refute the idea that there is something transgressive about fascist posturing. In her 1974 essay “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag suggests that fascist aesthetics “are perhaps only a logical extension of an affluent society's tendency to turn every part of people's lives into a taste, a choice ; to invite them to regard their very lives as a (life)style.” Yes. But rather than being linked to the explosion of mundane lifestyle-oriented advertising that came with new 20th century forms of media, this claim comes at the culmination of a somewhat prudish account of S/M practices, which Sontag describes as “a drama that is all the more exciting because it is forbidden to ordinary people.” Rather than situate fascist longings at the center of the routine functioning of consumer society — which is confirmed by its many forms of discrimination, stigmatization, and social exclusion — Sontag writes as though they were alluring because they are “exotic,” fundamentally risqué, a result of people being bored with bourgeois life and its restrictive behavioral codes.

Fascist propaganda is “aspirational,” but it would be more fruitful to understand this in terms of the prevalent aspirational fantasies about consumer goods and luxurious lifestyles, of what gets represented as “ordinary” life in affluent societies, than to associate it with the historically conditioned motifs that Sontag catalogs in the work of Leni Riefenstahl:

Fascist aesthetics include but go far beyond the rather special celebration of the primitive to be found in [Riefenstahl’s photography collection] The Last of the Nuba. More generally, they flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain … The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry : the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, "virile" posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.

Little of that seems to ring as true in the era of dank memes and 4chan, let alone garden-variety influencer culture and reality television. Sontag evokes a utopian dimension in fascism — “ideals that are persistent today under the other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect; the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders)” — and this persists, but in contemporary media such ideals appear in a far different form than The Triumph of the Will (or the ersatz “Dimes Square” scene modeled after the thesis of a fascist avant-garde). It looks a lot more like the Marvel cinematic universe, or MrBeast, than some sort of velvet underground. Those ideals already animate most advertising.

In the anthologized version of Morrison’s speech, published as “Racism and Fascism,” is her list of 10 steps that a society takes in moving toward a “final solution.” The first eight concern the construction and demonization of an internal “enemy”; the ninth is about how audiences become inured to that process:

Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions, a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press, a little pseudo-success, the illusion of power and influence, a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.

This sounds so much to me like social media that I wonder what she was actually referring to in 1995. This impression is further confirmed by her closing paragraph:

When our fears have all been serialized, our creativity censured, our ideas "marketplaced," or rights sold, our intelligence sloganized, our strength downsized, our privacy auctioned; when the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.

Fascism, on this view, draws its sustenance from what we now call the “content industry,” or what Adorno and Horkheimer previously called the “culture industry,” the system of media platforms that standardizes forms of emotional manipulation and gratification for the “masses,” all of whom nonetheless experience their individuality and uniqueness by these means. “The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification,” Adorno and Horkheimer write. “Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type.” Discover what you like through algorithmic recommendation!

Fascism was once understood partly in terms of “the actual or vicarious gratifications individuals obtain from surrendering to a mass,” as Adorno writes in “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda.” This kind of rapturous conformity would essentially turn the modernist lemons of alienation and depersonalization under the opaque conditions of industrialization and monopoly capitalism into nationalist lemonade. But whereas a “mass audience” once looked like a crowd in danger of becoming a mob, it now appears less as a collective experience than a “For You” page, isolated individuals being brought to the same kind of self-satisfaction through formulaic means that remain superficially different. The conformity has moved to a different level. Stubbornly maintaining your individuality in the face of conformist pressures isn’t a way to resist fascism; it’s become more of an expression of it. It’s how one can currently try to gratify, as Adorno put it, the “twofold wish to submit to authority and to be authority” oneself.

In “Notes on Late Fascism,” Alberto Toscano argues that contemporary fascisms — though they retain some of the nostalgic, “Make America Great Again”–style trappings — are not really proposing participation in the mass as the source of relief or redemption. Instead the alleged catharsis that comes with disinhibition plays out at the individual level, modeled by the fascist agitator’s interminable moaning about petty grievances and the overreactions proposed to deal with them.

In a passage Toscano cites from Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman’s 1949 book Prophets of Deceit — which, as he notes, was much quoted after Trump’s rise to power — the American agitator is defined as “someone arising from [the listening audience’s] midst to express its innermost thoughts,” less someone to hero-worship than to directly identify with. Unlike the reformer or the revolutionary, who try to raise an audience’s awareness of social problems, the agitator’s subject matter is “incidental — it is like the manifest content of dreams … No complaint, no resentment is too small for the agitator's attention. What he generalizes is not an intellectual perception; what he produces is not the intellectual awareness of the predicament, but an aggravation of the emotion itself.”

The agitator doesn’t really have policy prescriptions or cogent explanations of why things are the way they are; rather their discourse works like advertising, isolating and amplifying an irrational feeling for its own sake as the reward for engaging with a particular picture of things. The surrender involved is less about disarming the superego than ignoring causality and explanatory logic, any desire to understand what links feelings to conditions in the world or in oneself.

Accordingly, the agitator, like advertising (advertising is the ever-present agitator in our lives) proposes quasi-magical relations between feelings and conditions. What if the world really worked as it does in TV commercials? “The agitator's solutions may seem incongruous and morally shocking,” Löwenthal and Guterman continue, “but they are always facile, simple, and final, like daydreams. Instead of the specific effort the reformer and revolutionary demand, the agitator seems to require only the willingness to relinquish inhibitions. And instead of helping his followers to sublimate the original emotion, the agitator gives them permission to indulge in anticipatory fantasies in which they violently discharge those emotions against alleged enemies.”

These “enemies” likewise serve as an immediate and intuitive explanation for who is to blame for any disenchantment we experience with consumerism: when products don’t live up to the fantasies spun about them, when it doesn’t seem possible to work toward any material reward worth having, when personalized recommendations make you feel less like a person rather than more. This scapegoating salvages the fantasy that consumerism (and its contemporary “prosumerist” analogue, social media) is a convenient way to anchor the “disappearing self,” to halt the “waning of the subject” under conditions of postmodernity, and so on. Ultimately, the subject secured by social media, by fandom, by consumerism, is already implicated in fascism’s “mass deception”; it’s already refused self-critique and grounded itself in an escape from thinking into automatic feeling, into spontaneous “authenticity.”

One way this plays out is when online “fans” brigade anyone who threatens their particular understanding of their chosen domain of pseudo-expertise, or their way of enjoying their culture. As Ryan Broderick succinctly put it, “fascists write fanfic too.” He argues that “younger, savvier members of the global far-right movement like Meloni understand … that nostalgia is a weapon. Whether that’s nostalgia for a fictitious national past or nostalgia for Saturday morning cartoons, both can be used to foment division and anger.”

Whereas Toscano, describing the rise in overt fascism as a “nostalgia for the contemporary,” sees it as offering “a utopia without transcendence, without any ‘fanatic-religious’ element, without an unconscious or unspoken surplus of popular energies,” perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it is an archipelago of fan-culture-like anti-utopias engulfed in perpetual “drama” and persisting in a stochastic state of roiling ressentiment, awaiting moments in which disparate grievances can converge in “negative solidarity” (to borrow from Jason Read) and semi-coordinated actions like the January 6 insurrection. But the insurrectionists are those for whom the containment structure of already-existing fascism is insufficient; the everyday fascist remains placated and confirmed by the culture industry apparatus and passively perpetuates the status quo that already delivers massive inequality and political quiescence.

Obviously, no one likes to be told that the programming they are passionate about indexes their susceptibility to fascistic practice. If the pleasure we take in culture — our “culinary” appreciation of consuming, as Adorno describes it — is intrinsically reactionary, then it all must be held in suspicion, treated as an X-ray revealing our vulnerabilities if it can not be avoided altogether. One way to read Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, the book he was trying to finish when he died, is as an elaborate attempt to differentiate the sort of material he preferred (“art”) from the culture-industry detritus that had ensorcelled all the plebes and philistines and organized them as a standing reserve for authoritarianism. “It suits domination if what it has made out of the masses and what it drills into them can be chalked up to their own guilty desires,” Adorno writes.

But what would allow a subject worn down by overstimulation and information overload to resist conditioning within the “administered world”? How could they even know their tastes to be anything other than what has been induced by “reality’s spell” and the demands of the monopoly capitalist system? “The empty time filled with emptiness does not even produce false consciousness but is an exertion that leaves things just as they are.”

For Adorno, “genuine” aesthetic response is not grounded in pleasure (usually a mark of having been manipulated, of advertising having its impact) but is instead characterized by what he calls “the shudder.”

Shudder, radically opposed to the conventional idea of experience, provides no particular satisfaction for the I; it bears no similarity to desire. Rather, it is a memento of the liquidation of the I, which, shaken, perceives its own limitedness and finitude.

But this “liquidation” of subjectivity is different from the one brought on by modernity and fully administered life (which has found an apotheosis in algorithmic forms of control today, where people are “predicted” into being). As Adorno writes, the experience of art

is contrary to the weakening of the I that the culture industry manipulates. For the culture industry the idea of the shudder is idle nonsense; this is probably the innermost motivation for the deaestheticization of art. To catch even the slightest glimpse beyond the prison that it itself is, the I requires not distraction but rather the utmost tension; that preserves the shudder, an involuntary comportment, incidentally, from becoming regression.

What is the “shudder” like in practice? Adorno goes on for pages and pages to emphasize the impossibility of defining it precisely. “To resist the all-powerful system of communication,” he writes at one point, artworks “must rid themselves of any communicative means that would perhaps make them accessible to the public.” This approach, as you might imagine, is not entirely persuasive. I was left thinking of shudder as an attempt to articulate an unquantifiable experience, something that could not be capitalized on or exchanged, or made into data to help synthesize more culture-industry product and pseudo-art.

Adorno wants art to be capable of driving people out of the induced spell of their self-satisfaction without allowing them to congratulate themselves for it afterward. It can’t be recouped as a different kind of value, as a form of “engagement” or “cultural capital.” It doesn’t allow for participation or lead to any specific sort of social practice, let alone a sense of community. If art is to be any sort of bulwark against fascism rather than its handmaiden, it must make us wary of fun, of sensation, of comprehensibility, of other people, and most of all ourselves. It doesn’t really have a chance.