Much has been written of late about the causes of our new authoritarian moment. In many corners of the academy—including some of my own recent work (here, here, and here)—the consensus is that one of the main causes is the alienation and economic degradation of neoliberal capital. I think this is basically a correct reading of things overall but sometimes it is lacking in helping us understand all the ways we see authoritarian movements expressing themselves in relation to a variety of movements and political and social issues. It also is not always super helpful in allowing us to see the ways that authoritarian politics can express themselves even in folks who claim more liberal or progressive values. This involves understanding, at a more micro-level the ways authoritarian subjects and affects are produced and reproduced by other material formations and institutions. These are more proximate than economic and policy structures found in neoliberalism as a political ideology and set of policies but they also have authoritarian interpellative effects on individuals.
I have recently been thinking about this more micro-level process in the realm of climate politics and more specifically around the problem of GHG emissions from our transportation systems and the reaction to ways folks who work on this both in a research capacity and a policy capacity are trying to reimagine those systems and move us away from the structure of the personal, fossil fuel powered, automobile. I think that the backlash to policy and advocacy for less cars (or less fossil fuel driven cars) is an example of one of the ways authoritarian politics creeps into our everyday lives and does so in ways that effect all of us.
I think Althusser, Deleuze, and Guattari are useful in helping understand this theoretically as they all give us ample tools for understanding the ways that our own identities and affective lives are conditioned by the larger social world that pre-exists us as individuals and plays a determining role in those identities and affects.
This is new(ish) work for me and I have just started putting some of it out into the academic public in hopes of getting some feedback and moving this work forward as a part of a larger project linking some of the more standard work on neoliberalism and authoritarianism that I and others have been engaged in to thinking this in more micro-level examples.
I gave a talk last week on some of this for the CSU Fresno Ethics Center’s speaker series. Here is a link to the recording of that talk (and thanks to Andy Fiala and other folks at the center for the invitation along with folks who attended):
Geoff Pfeifer 