Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura

Saladdin Ahmed

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438472935
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

We live today within a system in which state and corporate power aim to render space flat, transparent, and uniform, for only then can it be truly controlled. The gaze of power and the commodity form are capable of infiltrating even the darkest of corners, and often, we invite them into our most private spaces. We do so as a matter of convenience, but also to placate ourselves and cope with the alienation inherent in our everyday lives. The resulting dominant space can best be termed totalitarian. It is space stripped of uniqueness, deprived of the "spatial aura" necessary for authentic experience. In Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura, Saladdin Ahmed sets out to help us grasp what has been lost before no trace remains. He draws attention to that which we might prefer not to see, but despite the bleakness of this indictment of reality, the book also offers a message of hope. Namely, it is only once we comprehend the magnitude of the threat to our spatial experience and our own complicity in sustaining this system that we can begin to resist the totalizing forces at work.

1

Notes on Totalitarianism

The word “totalitarianism” evokes a very particular type of imagery. Reflecting the despotism of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, we associate the term with tyrannical one-party rule, ostentatious celebrations of force, and incendiary propaganda. At the center of it all is a larger-than-life dictator simultaneously feared and revered by the masses. While once considered far-flung for those living in liberal democracies, some of these political attributes are now hitting uncomfortably close to home with the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the United States. We have seen the protofascist underbellies of political systems long purported to be the bastions of freedom, ushering in a resurgence of militarism, misogyny, xenophobia, and charged rhetoric intent on fabricating an alternate reality. Indeed, the campaign and subsequent election of Donald Trump to the United States’ highest office has garnered direct comparisons with totalitarian regimes of the previous century. Following his administration’s dissemination of “alternative facts” regarding the size of the crowd at his inauguration in January 2017 (Conway 2017), Amazon even temporarily sold out of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and saw George Orwell’s 1984 top the best-selling book list (Griswold 2017). However, we must be cognizant of the fact that the regimes to which Trump’s administration is being compared are just one manifestation of totalitarianism, and they are a crude one at that.

Those who see Trump’s ascent to power as an abrupt totalitarian shift in American politics have failed to account for the reality that totalitarianism has inevitably grown more sophisticated since the end of World War II. Disturbing parallels can be drawn between Trump and other autocrats, particularly insofar as his bullying tactics, fragile ego, and disdain for independent media are concerned. Yet conflating such parallels with totalitarianism in the contemporary context speaks to our fixation on the Cold War binary that has immortalized twentieth-century versions of totalitarianism. To be clear, totalitarianism is not, in itself, an ideology or an ideological doctrine, but rather a systemic approach to achieving unlimited domination. As such, it can be adapted by any ideology regardless of whether the ideology’s core doctrine is founded on racial hierarchy, universal equality, or individual liberty. Totalitarianism amounts to the use of whatever means proves to be most effective for realizing maximum domination over all domains of public and private life. It would be naive to think that such totalizing forces have lain dormant up until the recent rise of right-wing populism. As an article by the Hannah Arendt Center notes, “The appearance of totalitarianism in the world is not a singular event, signaled by one moment — it is a collection of elements that emerge together under particular historical and material circumstances” (2016). In fashioning Trump and other right-wing populists as isolated threats intent on reviving a political system thought to be dead, we blind ourselves to the more pervasive ways in which totalitarianism has evolved over time.

If we view totalitarianism as a formula for unlimited domination, we can explore the ways in which it has been adapted in increasingly sophisticated ways to systems long considered its antithesis. Although I am not able to fully explicate this here, I would argue that fascism invented and unsuccessfully practiced totalitarianism, state communism further refined it, and liberal capitalism has mastered it. In other words, the new totalitarianism is the totalitarianism of the so-called free market, and in place of Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin, we have capital. The United States in particular has seen the entrenchment of political power among economic elites who are zealously committed to a “hostile takeover” of American democracy in the name of profit (MacLean 2017, xxxi). According to historian Nancy MacLean, this coalition of billionaires and millionaires “maneuvers very much like a fifth column, operating in a highly calculated fashion, more akin to an occupying force than to an open group engaged in the usual give-and-take of politics” (2017, xxxi). Informed by neoliberal and libertarian ideologies, this fifth column is indicative of the totalitarian underpinnings of capitalism, insofar as it must constantly conquer new spaces yet untapped by the capitalist machine or risk complete collapse.

According to the free-market model, capital must be enabled to overcome all would-be barriers to accrue profit at virtually any cost. We have seen the state in liberal democracies assume the role of facilitating capital’s domination, securing a degree of control that no single totalitarian leader could reasonably hope to achieve. This could seem unfathomable if brute force alone were taken to be the primary indicator of totalitarianism, but this chapter demonstrates that advanced totalitarianism relies far more on hegemony than on outright coercion. Against this backdrop, Trump harkens back to an earlier era of totalitarianism, and his wealth afforded him the ability to shun Wall Street with his populist rhetoric. On this level, his campaign was demonstrative of Arendt’s observation that the “isolation of atomized individuals provides not only the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the very top of the whole structure” (1979, 407). Trump appealed to the mass individuals whose social bonds have been shattered by the instrumental rationality of capitalism, and he epitomized the mass leader. His outsider posturing, however, was not to last. As Greg Valliere, chief global strategist at Horizon Investments, remarked on Trump’s first hundred days in office, “The Goldman Sachs faction in the White House has won” (Long 2017).

The Trump era also signifies the ultimate triumph of the culture industry, which has politicized everything that is nonpolitical and depoliticized everything that is political. This ideological manipulation at the hands of the culture industry has reached such a point that a mass-culture star can now swiftly transition to political stardom. In this brazen merger of mass culture and politics, more tangible signs of totalitarian have surfaced, but nothing substantial has changed. The capitalist system, which both mass culture and official politics mask, has, as a whole, always been totalitarian. Rather than biding our time until things go back to normal, until the real politicians resume the stage, we must ruthlessly interrogate that very sense of normalcy and lay bare the ways in which it is totalitarian. First, however, it is important to unpack the Cold War binary that shapes our understanding of totalitarianism to justify the use of the term to describe the dominant space in today’s world.

A Critique of Dominant Understandings of “Totalitarianism”

Admittedly, scholars are deeply divided when it comes to the scholastic usefulness of the term “totalitarianism.” While there are many reasons for this divide, a major one is that the term ultimately allowed for communism and fascism to be grouped side by side. Given totalitarianism’s historical association with fascism, it became an especially strong propaganda weapon for anti-communists to discredit the communist doctrine with a single stroke (Hobsbawm 1995, 393). The idea is simple: if two entities are paired together frequently enough to create a pattern, people will start perceiving them as similar or at the very least comparable entities. Associating communism with a term that is definitive of fascism inevitably cast doubt on the fundamental legitimacy of the former as a universalist egalitarian doctrine. Furthermore, grouping communism with fascism proved especially disquieting for communists, who saw fascism as their opposing ideological pole, and this served to obscure their prolonged struggle against fascism.

To put it very plainly, as a doctrine, (Marxist) communism rejects elitism, sectarianism, nationalism, and other forms of stratification of human society that would create or sustain exploitation. From the Marxist point of view, the fundamental conflict in societies is not between good and evil, as theologians believe, or between hierarchical “races,” as fascists believe, but rather between social classes that have conflicting interests. Because history essentially progresses toward the realization of reason, per Hegel, and given that exploitative inequality is irrational and thus historically unsustainable, progressive movements, as most Marxist movements would self-identify, seek to end exploitative inequality. Marxism views the state as a class instrument that is used to protect the interests of the ruling class, while the proletariat is considered the largest and most progressive social class in the capitalist society. In Marxist thought, it is the proletariat who will eventually take over the state, only to abolish it altogether after creating the foundations for a classless society.

The fascist doctrine, on the other hand, is founded on the premise of racial hierarchy among different nations. As the highest manifestation of the power of the nation, the fascist state is total and supreme. To Mussolini, for instance, “the foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State” (1932). The fascist worldview maintains that conflict is inevitable when the power and purity of what is purported to be the innately superior “race” are challenged by “inferior” races and universalists, such as communists and liberals. It is because of such fundamental ideological differences that communists have always seen communism as diametrically opposed to fascism. Grouping communists with their mortal enemies is therefore considered a grave offence.

From Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922, marking the beginning of the fascist reign in Europe, to the Nazi Third Reich (1933–1945) and Franco’s coup in 1936, communists were the prominent force of resistance against the hegemony of fascism. Their antifascist history was arguably the most important component of their self-identification, to the degree that opposing communists was often taken to be akin to aligning with fascists (Dallas 2005, 363).¹ Communists played a significant role—if not the most significant—in countering fascism as an ideology and eventually succeeded in rendering fascist a pejorative term. Even now, leftists are often accused of branding all their rivals fascists. While the label was once relatively popular among both ultranationalist mass movements and right-wing artistic and literary elites from Italy to Romania, now it has such negative connotations that even most fascists have forgone it, at least in the public sphere. Yet although fascism’s falling out of fashion may have contributed to the popularity of communism as a victorious movement that was definitively antifascist, this was not to last. In the latter half of the 1940s, just as Marxists were looking to build on their symbolic and political victory that resulted from the disgraceful fall of Mussolini and Hitler’s regimes, the emerging popularity of the term “totalitarianism” among opponents of communism marked a turning point.

It was used in reference to fascism and Stalinism in the mid-1930s (Christofferson 2004, 4), but only after WWII did totalitarianism come to be viewed as a defining characteristic of the USSR (Hobsbawm 1995, 112; 393). The publication of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, followed by Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1956, further cemented the popularity of the term in anti-Soviet discourses (Christofferson 2004, 5). Of course, if not for the oppressive politics of Stalin’s USSR, totalitarianism may not have become so closely associated with communism in the popular imagination in the West. It often has been retrospectively argued that Stalin’s totalitarian rule should have been more widely condemned by Marxists long before the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. Indeed, the Gulags, purges, mass deportations, and political assassinations were prevalent throughout the 1930s. Enzo Traverso explains that many leftist and liberal intellectuals refused to criticize Soviet totalitarianism for primarily pragmatic reasons, insofar as the USSR was indispensable in the war against the Nazis, particularly after the latters’ invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 (2016, 267–68). He writes, “A complex (and perverse) dialectic between fascism and Communism lay at the root of the culpable silence of a large number of intellectuals towards the crimes of Stalinism. First the threat of fascism, then the immense prestige and historical legitimacy gained by the USSR during the Second World War, led a large section of their number to ignore, underestimate, excuse or legitimize Soviet totalitarianism” (2016, 265). Traverso then highlights several more points that are of essential importance in the historical context:

It is certainly possible to criticize the intellectuals who maintained the myth of the USSR for having lied to themselves and contributed to deceiving the antifascist movement, making themselves propagandists for a totalitarian regime instead of the antifascist movement’s critical conscience. But we can also be certain that in Europe (the New Deal in the United States remains a separate case) no mass mobilization against the Nazi menace would have occurred under the leadership of the old liberal elites. The struggle against fascism needed a hope, a message of universal emancipation, which it seemed at this time could be offered only by the country of the October Revolution. If a totalitarian dictatorship like that of Stalin became the embodiment of these values in the eyes of millions of men and women, which is indeed the tragedy of twentieth-century Communism, this is precisely because its origins and its nature were completely different from those of fascism. That is what liberal anti-totalitarianism seems incapable of understanding. (2016, 206; 270)

The resulting reputation of Stalinists was soon generalized to all Marxists in the West, while none of the crimes liberal governments had committed during or after WWII were generalized to all liberals. Marxists found themselves being grouped with their most dreaded enemy based on a notion that historically had been associated with fascists. The term swiftly found a place in the liberal and rightist anticommunist discourse, not so much because of its explanatory or analytic potential, but rather for its obscuring and damning effects.² Those whom Marxists had accused of being complicit with fascism during the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War and with Hitler from 1933 to 1939 now placed Marxists in the same camp as fascists.

Yet in the 1966 preface to Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt noted the significance of Stalin’s death and the “authentic, though never unequivocal, process of detotalitarization” that followed (1975, xxv). With some reluctance and skepticism, she concluded that “the Soviet Union can no longer be called totalitarian in the strict sense of the term” (Arendt 1975, xxxvi). To Michael Scott Christofferson, Arendt’s reading of the post-Stalin USSR can be seen as an attempt to distance her work from “the Cold War misuse of the concept” (2004, 7). Friedrich and Brzezinski’s book lends itself to anticommunist propaganda more easily. Philosophically, their account of totalitarianism is invalid because it stipulates “criteria” that amount to an abstracted description of Stalin’s USSR, rendering the notion predeterministic. They posit that all totalitarian regimes have “an official ideology,” “a single mass party led typically by one man,” “a system of terroristic police control,” a party-controlled means of mass communication and armed forces, and a centralized economy (1956, 9–10).

Friedrich and Brzezinski’s account can be invalidated quite straightforwardly, namely by determining whether a regime that lacks any one of the criteria could still be called totalitarian. If so, then the criterion in question is false, indicating the invalidity of their account. Taking the first criterion as a case in point, suppose a regime does not officially adopt an ideology “covering all vital aspects of man’s existence to which everyone living in that society is supposed to adhere,” to use Friedrich and Brzezinski’s words (1956, 9). That was the case in General Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, yet it would be absurd to exempt it from the class of totalitarian regimes for that reason alone. There was of course an ideology of domination at work in Chile, but only behind the scenes, not officially. Indeed, none other than Milton Friedman, the godfather of neoliberalism and the most influential teacher of the Chicago boys, was Pinochet’s adviser (Klein 2007). To the Cold War theorists of totalitarianism, however, the term was never to be applied to liberalism, but only and always to opposing ideologies. In terms of perfecting totalitarianism, ideological hegemony, whereby the dominant ideology becomes internalized and normalized, is far more effective than imposing an official ideology. When ideology is presented, propagated for, and executed as the ideology of the state, this alone suffices to distance people from it, even if they pretend otherwise on the surface. An official ideology that is imposed on people necessarily fosters hypocrisy and public performance, as opposed to anything resembling total domination. As in Romania, the destruction of such a totalitarian state can happen within a matter of days. On the occasion of former President Nicolae Ceausescu’s last public speech on December 21, 1989, many in the crowd were still carrying his pictures and banners praising his regime, but the initial warm reception suddenly shifted to booing. Everything started to collapse, and Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed four days later. No one defended them; no masses poured onto the streets to mourn their deaths. Ceausescu’s Romania, as an exemplary Stalinist state, met all of Friedrich and Brzezinski’s criteria of a totalitarian state, but it was nowhere close to achieving total domination.

This leads into Friedrich and Brzezinski’s second criterion, a mass party typically led by a dictator. Would domination not be more totalizing and efficient in the long run if the totalitarian system were not dependent on a single leader? Needless to say, no matter how strong the dictator, eventually s/he either would be killed or die naturally. Especially after Stalin’s death, Arendt became aware of the inevitable successor crisis that follows a single totalitarian leader’s death, but she saw this as a flaw of totalitarianism as such, rather than attributing it to a pre-advanced stage or type of totalitarianism. Even a slightly more advanced totalitarian regime would be designed in such a way that it would not to be dependent on a single leader or his/her family. As one example, in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran established a system that has proven far more successful than its predecessor, the Shah regime, in actualizing extensive and prolonged control over society. Having avoided the traditional formula of a leading political party and dictator when Khomeini died in 1989, ten years after founding the regime, the totalitarian functioning of the system continued without disruption.

Friedrich and Brzezinski’s third criterion, “terroristic police control,” is also central to Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism (1956, 9). The intuitive question this raises is whether the need for terror is indicative of a system that has not achieved total domination. Is it not the case that total domination would rely on indoctrination, rather than resorting to physical force as the primary means of control? Arendt almost reached this conclusion; however, she only went as far as claiming that a totalitarian regime could reach a stage of domination that would no longer require extensive terror and propaganda (1975, 341). In other words, she did not anticipate further development of totalitarianism beyond the existing totalitarian regime of the time, Stalin’s USSR.

“[A] technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly of control, in the hands of the party and its subversive cadres, of all means of effective mass communication” is Friedrich and Brzezinski’s fourth criterion (1956, 10). Indeed, a monopoly of mass communication does seem to be essential for totalitarianism insofar as it is deemed necessary for ideological indoctrination. However, would it not be even more effective if other agencies were to carry out this indoctrination on behalf of “the party,” as we can see in more advanced totalitarian systems? As with an overt state ideology, a totalitarian party’s monopoly of the media merely turns the media into a sham that most would only find reliable for relaying state announcements of national holidays, curfews, and the like. On the other hand, when mass communication is left to corporate monopolies, people tune in even during their so-called free time. In other words, while most view party-controlled mass media—much like Trump’s Twitter feed—with a healthy dose of skepticism, the corporatization of media is often considered benign, at least comparatively. In a paper he was supposed to present in 1961 at a UNESCO symposium (Kellner 2001, 37), Marcuse noted that “the totalitarian rationality of advanced industrial society makes the problem a purely theoretical one. The transplanting of social into individual needs is so effective that any distinction seems impossible or arbitrary. For example, can one reall...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Notes on Totalitarianism
• Chapter 2: The Production of Space
• Chapter 3: Spatial Technologies of Power
• Chapter 4: Conceptualizing Aura
• Chapter 5: The Destruction of Aura and Its Political Implications
• Chapter 6: Images and the Production of Totalitarian Space
• Chapter 7: In the Absence of Aura: Spatial Dialectics of Despair and Hope
• Notes
• References
• Index
• BackCover