WLC Seminar 17 November 12n – Geoff Boucher

Title:  What Is Authoritarian Literature?

Associate Professor Geoff Boucher is working on a project around the role of fiction in the resurgence of authoritarian populism. This flows from his recent book Habermas and Literature: The Public Sphere and the Social Imaginary (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). He has just published a series of articles on the authoritarian personality and contemporary culture in Thesis Eleven, The Berlin Journal of Critical Theory and International Critical Thought. 

When: Wednesday 17 November from 12.00 noon to 1.00 pm.

Where: https://deakin.zoom.us/j/81907515653?pwd=UnRvT055dGZ2QjluZ1M1TlhzUlhwZz09

Meeting ID: 819 0751 5653    Password: 08759851

Abstract:

This paper intends to open a discussion aimed at specifying the form and content of authoritarian literature. What motivates the inquiry is the fact that authoritarian mobilizations today in the English-speaking world seem to rely to a perhaps surprising degree on self-published fictions. The point of such a project would be to work out how these fictions contribute to political authoritarianism through propaganda for authoritarian ideologies and recruitment to authoritarian movements. In the paper, I begin by very briefly doing the necessary definitional things and by restricting the scope in ways that make it possible to speak somewhat meaningfully on the topic. The key point that I want to make here is that although all fascists are authoritarians, not all authoritarians are fascists–fascism adds something (a social dominance orientation and a belief in the ethical regeneration through political violence); when thinking about the difference between fascists and authoritarians, think, leaders and followers, Dr Evil and the henchmen. Authoritarians, for present purposes, are rightwing individuals with authoritarian personalities, characterised by rigid conventionalism, unquestioning obedience (kiss up) and authoritarian aggression (kick down). Fascists, by contrast, are quite unconventional. Pro-fascist literature tends to reflect this, and there is quite a lot of scholarship on fascist modernism. But this is not a paper about the contemporary epigones of DH Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Ernst Junger.

By contrast with fascist modernism, authoritarian literature looks like nothing at all. It’s conventional–of course; rigidly so.

Maybe that’s why there is nothing at all written on post-Enlightenment authoritarian literature. But authoritarian literature is hiding in plain sight. It can do so because it is disguised as “bad writing”. It is time to stop thinking about authoritarian literature as something that it is not, namely, a bad attempt to write innovative fiction. On the contrary: they are beautiful evil. Beautiful, because there is a perfect consistency between aesthetic form and social content. Evil, because they are all about unquestioning obedience towards established authorities and harsh punishments for violators of conventions. Authoritarian literature is first and foremost an imaginative communication about how important conventions (aesthetic and social) are: disturb them, and everything falls apart. The terrifyingly delicate equilibrium between conventions (aesthetically, cliches and stereotypes; socially, hierarchies and exclusions) and violence is both supported and subverted by unquestioning obedience and authoritarian aggression. I want to suggest that the formal signature of authoritarian literature is the dynamic between the necessary moment of inverted carnival (not the aestheticised uprising of the powerless, but the thrill of the lynching) and its resolutely reified conventionality; the blank mask of empty utterance that every so often cracks into a ferocious snarl or a disgusting leer.