Autonomies

Horror and fears contain us in a world that we do not want, and impede us from acceding to interruptive encounters that regenerate our existence.  To participate in the exercise of clearing obstructions means first to not offer up our fear to those who produce and administer the horror – they do not merit our fear.  Then, it is useful to map the sites where the impossible can come to meet us, to trace the geopolitical and the geopsychic map of the impossible.  Lastly, let us imagine collectively situations in which we could say “The wonder!  The wonder!”, as if these were our first words.

Frédéric Neyrat, Échapper à l’horreur

An illusion may haunt anti-fascism, the belief that fascism is a distinctive form of political organisation mobilised to attack “liberal democracy”.

The illusion is sustained by the false assumption that modern “democracy” and fascism are qualitatively distinct regimes of power, when they are but modulations of one and the same type of power; a power with plural, overlapping and mutually-sustaining centres, that discipline and mould subjectivities, manage life and apportion death.

Leo Löwenthal, a perhaps lesser known figure of the Frankfurt School, engages with the issue directly in an excellent 1946 essay entitled “Terror’s Atomization of Man”.  As one reads the essay, passing through the analysis of the destruction of the “individual” to its social consequences, it is impossible not to read from it insights into our present, to then be taken to the essay’s central thesis, the horror that Löwenthal called “Terror”:

Mankind today has so tremendously improved its technology as to render itself largely superfluous. Modern machinery and methods of organization have made it possible for a relatively small minority of managers, technicians and skilled workers to keep the whole industrial apparatus going. Society has reached the stage of potential mass unemployment; and mass employment is increasingly a manipulated product of the state and state-like powers which channelize surplus mankind into public works, including armies and official or semi-official political organizations, in order to keep it at once alive and under control.

This is to say that large masses of workers have lost all creative relation to the productive process. They live in a social and economic vacuum. Their dilemma is the pre-condition of terror. It provides the totalitarian forces with a road to power and an object for its exercise. For them, terror is the institutionalized administration of large strata of mankind as surplus.*

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