By SAMIR GANDESHA*

The standardization that lies at the heart of the culture industry harmonizes perfectly with a key attribute of authoritarian personalities, namely: “stereotypy” and “childish desire for endless and unchanged repetition.”

Fascist propaganda is built around the basic concept of the “‘little-great man’, of a ‘subject’ who suggests both omnipotence and the idea that he is a simple, red-blooded, immaculate ‘type’, one of the people themselves.”

This is how Theodor Adorno presents the guiding concept of the “authoritarian personality”: that type of personality characterized both by subordination to the “strong” (suburban barber) and by domination over the “weak” (King Kong). In this, the structure of the social character reproduces the contradiction that lies at the heart of bourgeois society between autonomy or freedom in theory, but heteronomy and lack of freedom in practice.[I]

According to Theodor Adorno, the image of the “little-great man” responds “to the follower’s dual desire to submit to authority and to be authority himself. This happens in a world in which irrational control is exercised, even if inner conviction has already been lost, through universal enlightenment. People who obey dictators feel, moreover, that the latter are superfluous. They reconcile this contradiction by assuming that they themselves are ruthless oppressors.”

This is perfectly expressed in Hitler's motto “Verantwortung nach oben, Autorität nach unten”, that is, “responsibility to those who are above, authority to those who are below”. This motto, you see, exposes the essence of the ambivalence inherent in the typical authoritarian personality, that is, it constitutes the “subject” as a sadomasochist. In the book the authoritative personality, Theodor Adorno asserts that “the identification of the 'authoritarian' character with force is concomitant with the rejection of everything that is 'below'.”

The more superfluous the idea of ​​the dictator is in formally democratic societies — since they are sources of growing inequalities precisely because they are based on private property and control of the means of production —, the more emphasis will be placed precisely on ersatz quality.[ii] of the dictator.[iii] Now, this falsehood, even if detached from context, is the same that exists in the hollow shell of the “congregations” artificially constructed through religious institutions.

The hierarchy established by religion, stripped of its spiritual essence, is copied by fascism. It creates a negative libido when it emphasizes the distinction between “sheep and goats,” people inside and outside the group of the same faith. In other words, if the emphasis on love within the religious congregation was also based on hatred towards those who remained outside the faith, now, with fascism, the corporation created is stripped of even the appearance of agape or camaraderie. Its almost exclusive function is to produce a negative integration [that is, one that is defined only by being against others].

This allows fascism to play an “identity trick,” that is, to elide differences within the group (thus maintaining the existing hierarchy) while emphasizing the differences between the group and those who remain outside it. This trick culminates in what Adorno calls “regressive egalitarianism”: individual pleasures must be equally denied to all members of the “national community.”

The social bond is, so to speak, solidified through a shared introjection of sacrifice or renunciation of the aspiration to a sensually fulfilled life. The repeated and hyperbolic demands of the Nazis for sacrifice for the “Fatherland,” which echo in all forms of nationalism, particularly when it comes to war, confirm this.

Theodor Adorno points out a key technique by which fascist propaganda emphasizes the difference between in-groups and out-groups: namely, the repeated use of images of inferior animals, such as insects and worms, to characterize foreigners, in particular Jews and refugees. Drawing not only on Freud but also on observations by Otto Rank, he considers that in dream symbolism insects and worms apply to younger siblings, indeed to unwanted babies.

Such symbolism therefore hardly conceals a negative cathexis. At the same time, however, the brothers and sisters who make up the fascist group identify with each other through a shared object of love, namely the leader. Therefore, they must direct or project this negative cathexis outwards, beyond the group.

Here, one might argue, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno did in Dialectic of Enlightenment, that it is not only the contempt experienced by the followers themselves that is projected outwards through images of inferior animals; it also occurs, in fascist propaganda, through a direct evocation of powerful and affectively charged tropes of abjection. As Julia Kristeva suggests, this is ultimately associated with the pre-Oedipal relation to the maternal body and thus with the transgression of a boundary and thus, consequently, with the production of disgust.

But anything natural that has not been absorbed as useful as it has passed through the cleansing channels of the conceptual order—the squeak of the stylus on the slate that makes the teeth grind, the high taste which brings to mind dirt and corruption, the sweat that appears on the forehead of the different — everything that is not fully assimilated, or infringes the rules in which the progress of centuries has been sedimented, is felt as intrusive and arouses a compulsive aversion.

The “compulsive aversion”—to what is taken as abject—that is evoked has to do with the fear of self-dissolution. This constitutes the drive to eliminate the non-identical or what cannot be conceptually grasped without remainder; in the attempt to bring nature under the sway of technical control and mastery, any residue of uncontrolled or uncontrollable (non-identical) nature that remains provokes an automatic response of repulsion. The very signs of destructiveness that fascism substantively embodies are projected outward onto its victims; fascism, in this sense, is the paranoid performance of the victimizer who compulsively assumes the role of victim.

Abjection is employed as a propaganda technique, in other words, to portray the other as a dangerous contagion that threatens the health and very life of the body politic and must be excluded spiritually and physically, by force if necessary. Traits of an offensive but secretly desired “nature” are projected onto the stranger that become his or her stigma. Once thus projected, the “other” can then be contained, excluded, and in extreme cases finally “liquidated” or “exterminated” like pests or vermin. Through the process of extirpating the non-identical, the identity of the ethnonationalist “community” is confirmed and stabilized.

Theodor Adorno addresses the question of how agitators came to such precise knowledge of group psychology without having the intellectual means to access it. The answer is that, given the psychological identity between leader and followers, the agitator accesses mass psychology through his own psychology. The main difference, however, is that the former, even if “they have no natural superiority,” demonstrates “an ability to express without inhibition what is latent in them.”

The authoritarian leader is an “oral” personality type who, according to Freud, seeks gratification through eating, drinking, and other oral activities, including talking. The aggressive oral type is hostile and verbally abusive toward others. The agitator demonstrates a “capacity for incessant talk and deception.” The incessant nature of such speech empties it of meaning and makes it magical; the speaker casts a spell over his listeners and plays with the “archaic heritage” of his followers.

The power he wields is, paradoxically, indicative of his impotence in that it suggests ego weakness rather than strength, exposing his unconscious impulses. Yet at the same time, it plays into the very image of the leader as the amplification of the follower’s own ego. “In order to successfully cater to the unconscious dispositions of his audience,” Adorno argues, “the agitator, so to speak, simply turns his own unconscious outward.”

The adjustment between the agitator’s techniques and the “psychological basis of the individuals who listen to him” is aided by a major transformation in contemporary modern society. The consolidation of the culture industry as a whole contributes to the increasing passivity of the individual, that is, to the decline of his ability to experiment. The standardization that lies at the heart of the culture industry harmonizes perfectly with a key attribute of authoritarian personalities, namely: “stereotypy” and “childish desire for endless and unchanging repetition.”

The link between European high culture and the culture industry, for Theodor Adorno, can be found in the easily remembered leitmotif produced by the proto-fascist composer Richard Wagner. His music assembles “component parts as products are assembled in a factory: it is a musical Fordism”. In order to mobilize the masses against its own interests, fascist propaganda tends to bypass “discursive thought”, “mobilizing irrational, unconscious and regressive forces”. In this, it is greatly aided by the culture industry which, as it developed, produced a significant decrease in the human capacity for autonomy and spontaneity.

*Samir Gandesha is a professor at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.

Excerpts from the article “A composite of King Kong and a suburban barber — Adorno's Freudian theory and pattern of fascist propaganda”. In: Specters of fascism: historical, theoretical and international perspectives. London, Pluto Press, 2020.

Translation: Eleutério FS Prado.

Translator's note

[I] This contradiction creates a weak/strong “subject”, that is, one that is weak in the face of the forces of the economic system, but that has to be strong to succeed in life.

[ii] replacement is a German word whose literal meaning is substitute or substitute. Although it is used as an adjective in English, in German replacement only exists as a noun or in agglutination with other words such as Spare Parts (replacement parts) or Substitute player (substitute player).

[iii] Thus, only the dictator/mass duality — this is how things are configured for the weak/strong subject — can solve the problem that the individual faces without success.

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