Little Fascists Everywhere

Last week I fortuitously stumbled upon the Acid Horizon podcast and I have been slowly catching up on their series “The Anti-Oedipus Files” which is a pretty fucking great and well-timed title. The series is interviewing various scholars, psychoanalysts, and journalists in addition to a (Patreon subscriber) reading group of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus–a Marxist/post-structuralist/psychoanalytic (ie, French) critique of psychoanalysis, capitalism, and…power, I guess? I can confess I have not looked at the text since graduate school and I am certain I did not understand it at the time. I have listened to several episodes from the podcast branching off from Guattari’s 1970s article “Everybody wants to be a fascist.“

The idea of microfascisms here seems so obvious that I am a little embarrassed I had not thought about it, particularly in relationship to micropolitics and biopower as articulated in Foucault with whom I am more familiar. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault famously argues for “cutting off the head of the king”, that is looking for power beyond the state, and finding it not in the top-down imposition of power but in the everyday practices that are the products of self-discipline and/or in the various ways behaviors are shaped from below, individuating subjects, and then having them exercise power over themselves in ways that create effects. I–and most of the biopolitics/governmentality literature I have read–generally examines the way this form of power develops through/within/alongside liberal democracy and ideas that the state may govern less when we govern ourselves more. Rather than power being centralized in the organ of the state, it is now distributed across different institutions (education, medicine, social science, the family, etc.) These ideas have been especially compatible with the rise of neoliberalism where power is largely decentralized and the individual is “empowered” to transform themselves into an entrepreneurial self. You are your own boss. The market is presumed to have natural patterns that are productive, efficient, and rational. This is a vast oversimplification but it is not hard to see how the idea of the individual subject is at the core of liberal individualism, democratic self-governance, and market capitalism in ways that require the analysis of micropolitics, the decentralized but constant exercise of power in relationships that are unequal but not top-town or centralized.

Historically this conjuncture makes sense but there is no necessary relationship between micropolitics (and what Foucault termed biopolitics to capture both the individuation that acts on individual bodies and the collective that acts upon a population) and neoliberalism. Micropolitics could be fascism, especially a fascism that emerges from below. On one episode the hosts note the ways that focusing on macrofascism–or state-centric forms of fascism that existed in the early to mid-20th century–can lead us to miss the emergence of microfascism in which is decentralized in its practice but in which “everyone gets to be a cop,” through everyday exercises of domination. Fascism is not an ideology–a set of ideas that shapes action–but a technology, a practice that acts upon or in the world. Hence the utopian fantasy of techlords interested in having a totally transparent society in which everyone is surveilled and thus we see the eradication of crime. Our algorithms feed us content designed to feed us more of what we want, we engage in self-surveillance, creating a digital subject for judgment, we police and are policed through social channels producing shame.

I have for some time struggled to understand the concept of libidinal economy, arising from Freud and psychoanalysis, but this seems useful here. The libidinal taps into desire, not a rational calculation of self-interest but the production of affect, the jouissance of power, agency, action, the release of energy. In an episode on the male loneliness epidemic one of the hosts described the libidinal economy of microfascisms confronting the material conditions of vulnerability and precarity–we are subject to forces external to us and which we cannot control: the invisible hand of the market, the wishes/desires of other people, changes happening in society and culture, all of the sources of pain, fear, and vulnerability. Since we cannot control these conditions microfascisms offer us the pleasure of “participation in the cruelty that formed us” not unlike Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment. Thus we return to Adam Serwer’s “the cruelty is the point”–we cannot control our own suffering but we can inflict suffering on others we believe deserve it.

The connection of this frisson of cruelty to hegemonic masculinity and domination makes a lot of sense out of the recent performance of power militarily requiring no justification (other than because we can) and the particular masculine ethos of microfascisms. I would like to explore this more deeply and to consider whether the masculinity of macrofascism differs from that of microfascism. Superficially I can see many areas of overlap in the redemption of the failure of masculinity (the mobilization of disenchanted veterans, the divorced dad energy, the pointless violence of militias, nihilist mass shooters, crybullies, etc.) and even in the role of Fuhrers/Daddies. But there is much more to be thought through including, as the Anti-Oedipus Files title suggests, linkages to sexual domination, conspiracy, and rape as fascist praxis.