Hatred, Identity and Difference

The authoritarian character is a key concept of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, which was developed in broad empirical studies in the forties. As an analytical concept, the authoritarian character encompasses various forms of damaged subjectivity in modernity, which are not psychologically individualized, but are located politically and socially in a larger context - the "anti-democratic ideological syndrome". Karin Stögner asks about the topicality of the authoritarian character under the changed social conditions. How do individualism and authoritarianism relate to each other and what is the significance of difference in current forms of identity politics of the right and left camps?

Essay by Karin Stögner

Authoritarian character and individual

An essential characteristic of the authoritarian character is thinking and acting in rigid, predetermined categories and thus the inability to experience life, which undermines the formation of an autonomous and reflected moral, political and aesthetic judgment. The concept of the authoritarian character is not limited to an individual trait, nor does it refer to a political expression of a psychological disposition. Rather, it means the other way around, as Peter Gordon emphasizes in his essay "The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump," a structural characteristic of social order and political culture that is reflected in personality development.

In the comprehensive empirical study "The Authoritarian Personality" the authoritarian character is described in detail and by means of types. The counter-draft, on the other hand, remains conspicuously vague. Unlike the high scorers, i.e. those who achieve high scores on the fascism scale and thus have a high authoritarian anti-democratic potential, the low scorers cannot be so easily categorized into types, but are different in each case. This leads to the assumption that the counter-image to the authoritarian character is autonomous individuality - a character that cannot be traced back to a rigid and rigid rule structure, is capable of living experience and is not subject to stereotypical thinking. Adorno and Horkheimer spoke of "free people not blindly bound to authority". The essential distinction, therefore, lies in the question of whether a person thinks in a standardized way, or whether he or she has developed true individuality, allows introspection and self-reflection, and thus resists social pressure for identity as egalitarianism.

As early as the 1940s, however, Adorno and Horkheimer discovered that this form of individuality was not the social rule, but rather in decline, because standardization was becoming more and more widespread in society and producing standardized types of people who contradicted reflective individuality. Adorno did not describe the high scorers as autonomous individuals who made far-sighted and reflective decisions that were important for themselves and for society, but as "compliant reaction centers" that oriented themselves to the conventional "do it this way" and went opportunistically with the masses.

In the late thirties, Walter Benjamin also described a profound change in the human capacity for experience that was characteristic of modernity. The social process affects people more than it would consciously experience from them. Experience disintegrates into isolated experiences and perception takes on a shock character, which increasingly prevents people from integrating the individual moments of their subjective perception into a whole, from condensing individual experiences into experience. Benjamin, like Horkheimer and Adorno, located this alienation from experience in Modernism as an epoch that is at the same time the birthplace of the "lonely individual". From the very beginning, the individual thus carried his own negation in the form of isolation in himself through the certain form of socialization in the commodity-producing society in which it originated in the first place. Robinson Crusoe is the early literary reproduction of this development. Benjamin analyzed modern patterns of perception as entangled in the commodity fetish and as an echo of the industrial production of goods: social reality is experienced as a sequence of incoherent events, just as in the industrial production of goods the individual production steps appear isolated from one another.

For Benjamin, this development leads to a "kind of new barbarism" in which the individual is less and less able to create a unity of life, but rather life disintegrates into a series of unconnected sequences. They cannot live their lives consciously, but merely live them. Benjamin, however, was not in search of a supposed authenticity, which is why his criticism was not nostalgically directed against modernity itself, but against the split nature of modernity, in which the transition from technical innovation to human and social innervation is largely blocked by the social organization of production. Instead, the technological veil lies over the perceptual world of the individual. The authoritarian character is the result of this one-sided progress. It is the epitome of adaptation to society as it is and prevents its qualitative change. By willingly adapting, authority-bound individuals do not form individuality, act much less than they react, and thus meet the requirements of the given form of division of labor. They fit better into the lack of experience of work and leisure under the conditions of mass society than autonomous individuals, who from this point of view become anachronistic, an ideal that, due to the power of the culture industry and the stereotyping of daily life, is increasingly becoming a marginal phenomenon or even a utopian impossibility.

So these are the dark diagnoses of time that were put forward both in the "Studies on the Authoritarian Character" and in the "Dialectic of the Enlightenment" in the forties or in Benjamin's cultural critique of the thirties. A precise contextualization into the social, cultural and economic developments of the time took place - not only measured against National Socialism, but also against one of the most advanced democratic societies, the USA.

But what does the authoritarian character mean nowadays? Does the concept still have relevance for the analysis of social and political developments under the changed political and economic conditions? And if so, where are the necessary conceptual updates to be made?

It should be noted that adaptation as the ultima ratio of social survival is a central feature of the authoritarian character - in contrast to the non-authoritarian character, in which the pressure to adapt has a lesser effect and which has a greater capacity to resist fascist propaganda and to develop individuality. Against the background of the transformation of economy, society and state since the 1980s, commonly referred to as neoliberal, numerous authors such as Wendy Brown ask whether the distinction between authoritarian character and individuality can be maintained or whether the concept of the individual itself is not authoritarian. What is the relationship between an emphatic concept of individuality, as a counterposition to the authoritarian character, to the self-regulating and self-optimizing individuals who became the ideological center of neoliberalism? With Susan Buck-Morss Adorno's unrelated adherence to the potential of the individual's critical reflection and judgement, do we have to regard it as compromised and thus rethink the individual's emphasis on the collective?

The first view paradox to be emphasized is that the neoliberal hype of an abstract individualism coincides with a social and political gain in significance of collectivisms and nationalisms, i.e. a "fusion of radicalized individualism with essentialized communities" takes place, as Paula-Irene Villa writes. These connections make it necessary to understand the authoritarianisms that are currently increasingly appearing in Europe and the USA in the form of apocalyptic delusions and excessive social exclusion mechanisms as well as the permanence of nationalism, anti-Semitism, racism and sexism against the background of "post-industrial social patterns of domination" (Lars Rensmann). These patterns include a social Darwinism that crudely operates in reified economic categories of winners and losers, success and failure, and that produces the discourse about modernization losers as a diversionary maneuver.

As Samir Gandesha explains, neoliberalism implies at least three dimensions: Redistribution upwards, deregulation and privatization as well as the dismantling of the welfare state. The state is geared to maximizing the utilization of self-optimized and self-organized individuals. In this he follows Michel Foucault's concepts of governmentality, understood as leadership to self-management. Neoliberalism shifts responsibilities that were previously within the scope of the state to individuals who are now to assume an entrepreneurial relationship with themselves. These have completely become an extension of the social institution and are increasingly losing the potential to oppose the system. If the individual was an expression of a capitalist and patriarchally organized society from the very beginning, it now becomes the epitome of system preservation par excellence. All this happens in ideological recourse to the Enlightenment ideals of autonomy, dignity and self-realization and is combined with rhetoric and the practices of freedom of choice and self-change. The ideological trait of this rhetoric becomes clear in the contemporary neoliberal forms of "government at a distance" (Rogers Brubaker), which function on the basis of regulated decisions of individual citizens, understood as subjects of decisions and aspirations for self-realization.

The neoliberal individual reads like the antithesis to Adorno's emphatic concept of the reflective and discerning individual. Neoliberal individualism proves to be an ideology that stabilizes power and leads straight to collectivization as a substitute. Therefore, the question whether the central significance of individualism in neoliberal ideology implies an objection to Adorno's emphasis on the individual in relation to the collective is wrongly posed. For the nationalistic and ethnocentric collective is in fact only the flip side of this neoliberal fake individualism, which consists in isolation and social atomization. The individuals thus targeted can no longer agree on a common meaningful goal. They are only abstract and scattered particularities that authoritatively cement the break with the whole by identifying with a collective that promises to abolish its own loneliness and insecurity. The more individualisation is propagated in a society that permanently and sustainably devalues the individual, the greater the need for collectivisation and the call for the strong leader.

However, this is not an individual inadequacy, but a general social disposition. Through its abstract individualism, neoliberal society itself produces the anti-individualistic need for full identification with a group. This is also adaptation to the existing irrationality. The individuals basically act rationally in irrationality when they run after populist leaders in authoritarian rebellion against weakened "elites" in order to establish a new self-proclaimed "elite".

In this respect, the "neoliberal personality" (Gandesha) is the last incarnation of the authoritarian character in the 21st century. In it, the universalist ideals of the enlightenment of autonomy, freedom and equality are reversed in ideology. This also manifests itself in the fact that it is precisely right-wing parties that freely attach the label to themselves and thus do not actually demand universally valid freedom and equality, but propagate the limited freedom of ethnically equal, ethnopluralism and nationalism. The equality, freedom, unity and identity demanded in these movements and parties become mass fraud.

Hatred on difference and identity compulsion

The hatred on difference remains the constant in the authoritarian character. This hatred manifests itself in an overemphasis on difference in identitary, nationalist, anti-feminist and racist currents. Difference here is a disgrace that must be eradicated, or at least, in ethnopluralism, has no place in one's own ingroup. The unity of the ingroup is guaranteed by its inner purity. Mixophobia is the associated syndrome. The only difference that is accepted within the authoritarian ingroup, and that is even overemphasized within one's own ranks, is the binary, heteronormative gender difference. The unity of the group is based on the maintenance of the strict boundaries between the sexes. This unity covers ideologically actual socio-economic inequality.

The universalism of classical humanism as well as liberal and socialist approaches and the tradition of Enlightenment in general are repulsed. The identitary emphasis on the particular in relation to the general has always been a strategy of anti-Enlightenment reaction. Already in the late 18th century, the Counter-Enlightenmentists launched a fundamental attack on the generality of the Enlightenment and used an empirical understanding of cultural identity against liberal democracy, pluralism and socialism. What constituted the unifying bond between individuals, in their eyes, was not a common meaningful goal, not emancipation and the rational establishment of society, but - as Stephen Eric Bronner points out - mythical, romantic and existential roots that they shared and that strictly distinguished them from others. To this day, any identitarian attitude, right or left, refers to such pseudo-concreteness and pseudo-experience against universalist ideals.

Universalist basic assumptions of the Enlightenment are also increasingly regarded as inadequate and exclusive in left-wing social movements. Here, too, a one-sided emphasis on difference from the common can be observed. However, it takes place under the sign not of exclusion, but of awareness and recognition of the experience and situation of marginalized groups. The recognition of difference does not necessarily exclude the demand for equality, as feminist theorists in the tradition of critical theory have shown. In practice, however, solidarity is often formed on the basis of attributes such as ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nation, religion or culture. This promotes the formation of isolated identitary groups whose members are to speak for themselves and their situation-specific experiences. According to Bronner, however, this emphasis on the allegedly direct experience leads at the same time to an intellectual provincialism and to a self-referentiality and self-righteousness with which any criticism from the outside can be crushed.

The rejection of universalism and the tradition of the Enlightenment are a common characteristic of left and right identity politics. This left thus wants to assert the particular against the general and claims to strive for an end to injustice and exploitation by helping marginalized groups to pursue their own interests. However, it often withdraws identitarily to group positionalizations and, according to Paula-Irene Villa, sometimes falls for a "positional fundamentalism as a political surrogate": a "cultural or positional, sometimes simply biologistic reification operates the business of essentialism in critical-left-green.

The often sweepingly expressed defense against the idea of the general as merely and always repressive, as Judith Butler puts it, mixes with a hymn-like veneration of diversity - and usually implies a fading out of economic inequality, as Walter Benn Michaels explains in "How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality". Paradoxically, diversity concepts have this fading out of class structure in common with right-wing identitarian ideologies: in the case of the right, identity becomes compensation for economic inequality, while the notion that differences can move egalitarian within the framework of a pluralistic generality is fended off.

It is not for nothing that Adorno sees identity as the "archetype of ideology" and the "archetype" of the exchange principle. This represents a false universality, which is not so much a particularity that has become hegemonic as it is elsewhere, for example with Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, but consists primarily in the unification of society in the exchange of goods: Everything and everyone is reduced to the point of interchangeability. Money as the embodiment of value was named by Marx as the universal leveller that brings the manifold and the living to a common denominator and makes them identical. The true universal, however, is perhaps nowhere described more forcefully than in Adorno's note "Melange" in the "Minima Moralia": as the "better situation (...) in which one can be different without fear". Like the critique of the exchange principle, the critique of universalism also wants the promise contained in the concept to be realized. It is precisely certain negation that clings to the idea of the universal and criticizes its false, repressive manifestations. This is something other than the mere emphasis on difference and the particular against the subsuming power of the universal. In certain negation, both the universal and the particular are recognized as equally damaged.

The relationship between the universal and the particular has also been widely criticized in feminist theory and critical race theory. The answer, however, often consisted in a mere advocacy of marginalized particularities and a blanket rejection of the universal. The justified concern for something special is confused with particularism. Thus, parts of the women's and civil rights movement served identity politics that took up the negative categorizations by the majority society and upgraded them politically - as points of reference for fixed group identities that were supposed to counteract the unequal and discriminatory practice in society. Identity politics creates an understanding of identity on the basis of cultural, ethnic, racialized, gender-specific, sexual, religious and other peculiarities that are increasingly seen as authentic expressions of marginalized groups in radical opposition to society.

This authentic expression is regarded as genuinely valuable and in need of unconditional recognition, as Francis Fukuyama states in "Identity".

Identity, therefore, is no longer bound to the individual in the sense of an identical subject that would be able to create a contradictory unity of personality that can endure ambivalence, criticize (even itself), and reflect on judgments that transcend the immediate situation. In identity politics, the focus is on collective or group identities that are formed in specific situations or positions, but which in turn are hardly transcended. While individual identity is linked to the recognition of the dignity and autonomy of the inner self, group-based identity politics emphasizes the dignity of particular communities and collectives.

Francis Fukuyama therefore describes the liberal-individual form of identity as universalist in the sense that it deals with the equal rights of the dignity of all human beings on the basis of their potential for inner freedom. The fact that the practice has never caught up with this ideal of the concept is not external to the concept, however. Collectivist identity politics reacts to the limited universality of the individual concept of identity in practice by focusing on the dignity of a particular group that is marginalized or disregarded. The inner self that should be made visible is not that of a universally understood human being, but that of a particular person as a member of a particular community, be it nation, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, religion, etc. The inner self is not the inner self, but the inner self. The group bond is not transcended in collective identity politics. That is why Fukuyama calls collective identity particularist, individual identity universalist.

However, this ideal-typical juxtaposition of individual and collective identity must be countered by the fact that both are part of the same problem - namely the lack of mediation between society and the individual. The liberal conception of individual identity does entirely without social embedding and regards the subject as abstract, context- and bodiless, thus repeating the norm of the respective rulers. The collectivist notion of identity, on the other hand, sees in the individual only the representation of a genre. Both are therefore particularistic in a bad sense.

What does not take place in identity politics is a critique of the authoritarian compulsion to identity and of the social categorization of people. Rather, identity is elevated to an authoritarian principle, contrary to the promises of queer theory, which allowed identity-logical thinking in the category of genderqueer to overturn. While genderqueer is itself a category - and thus might be subsumed under the notion of a neo-categorical stance - it is expressly understood (like ungendered) as what might be called an anti-categorical category: a category to end all categories, as it were.

But why do people long for community and identity? Doesn't the mere fact that we are constantly talking about identity and community mean that both are precarious and porous? Fukuyama is what individuals crave for collective identity because they are social beings and therefore want to adapt to the norms that surround them. But if we do not see the problem of identity as an anthropological constant and do not want to individualize it, but rather recognize it as a socially mediated phenomenon, then we have to consider the social contradiction in the sense of the gap between claim and reality: The Western liberal-democratic societies make the normative claim to guarantee the freedom, autonomy and equal opportunities of their members, and yet largely block these ideals through their own organization. Such structural discrepancies manifest themselves in a variety of ways: the increase in autonomy and freedom of choice is countered by increasing availability and a formalization of close social relations. The global and digital possibilities of communication and networking are simultaneously inscribed with isolation and an erosion of communicative reason. Extended mobility as a negative potential also implies vulnerability and exhaustion of the subject. Through such contradictions, individuals experience the society in which they live and often fail to integrate these discrepancies. The result is anomalous tendencies, the dissolution of binding and legitimate values and norms. Anomie, however, promotes the authoritarian character: it makes us susceptible to conspiracy theories as well as to deeply functionalist worldviews in which individuals are only relevant from the point of view of maintaining the system, but not as an end in themselves.

Anomie implies isolation and makes it impossible to negotiate common emancipatory goals. There is no general reciprocal space in which they can be formulated. Now group-specific identity as ideology becomes a substitute for the common goal and offers a simple answer to the question "Who am I?", which demands unconditional answer in the neoliberal market logic that encompasses the whole individual. Identity politics is also so successful because it satisfies the legitimate need of lonely and isolated individuals for community in a distorted form. It is difficult for individuals to evade collective identities as a modern phenomenon of integration, precisely because society demands abstract individualism from them. Here, as already mentioned, the social contradiction becomes apparent: despite all the glorification of individualism today, individuals are constantly shown their nothingness and precariousness. The ideology of the full identity of the individual with the group, as described critically by the psychoanalyst Sama Maani, bridges this discrepancy ideologically by mobilizing the identitarian community against the society of individuals.

The autonomous individual, of course, falls by the wayside. As necessary as the critique of the idea of an unbiased and universal subject is, the dissolution of the subject into naked particularity and immediacy, which lies in the allegedly unmediated, lived experience, is at the same time wrong. There is also another way: experience and subjectivity as universal concepts can be reconciled with pluralism, and lived experience does not have to remain authoritatively attached to a false immediacy. The liberating potential of a rescuing critique of universalism has been demonstrated by feminist critical theory, especially the work of Seyla Benhabib. It was made clear that it is the same society, the same problem, that is experienced differently. Thus lived experience can also mean to experience one's own life and body not isolated, but entangled in patriarchal social structures. It is therefore not immediate, not a first and not a last, but something that originates itself, which prepares the ground for the experienceability of a universal, albeit manifold human condition through the lens of plurality. Universalist feminism is not about the recognition of the dignity of women as women, but about their equality as human beings, which not only demands recognition, but also the redistribution of economic resources, as Nancy Fraser explains. Identity politics, on the other hand, emphasizes cultural struggles before economic and political struggles. Their aim is the recognition of the dignity of difference, which contributes decisively to the disappearance of the horizon of equality.

The authoritarian character proves to be tough and adaptable, but difference is always the issue. It is hated once and worshipped once. Both times the unwillingness to think dialectically through differences is conspicuous. The result in each case is a structurally similar one: a narrow identity politics that starts from exclusions and reinforces them. The focus is not on the happiness of the individuals, but on the consolidation of the group. Emancipatory thinking, however, focuses on the individual and not on group identities and attempts, in the perception of the differences between the individuals, to emphasize what is common not in the sense of a group-specific experience, but in the sense of a unifying interest in emancipation. Such a unifying interest would be necessary to counteract the authoritarian character.

The slightly shortened and revised text is based on a lecture given by the author on 23 January 2019 at the Literary Colloquium Berlin in the series "Schlaglichter" entitled "Vom Hass auf Differenz zum Identitätszwang". The lecture text will soon be published in an anthology on the authoritarian character, edited by Rosa Salon Trier at Verbrecher-Verlag. The original manuscript contains a detailed footnote apparatus.

Karin Stögner is Professor of Sociology at the University of Passau. She deals with social theory, especially critical and feminist theory, political sociology, sociology of social inequality, and sociology of gender relations. She is the author of, among others, "Anti­semitismus und Sexismus. Historisch-gesellschaftliche Konstellationen" and co-author of "AfD und FPÖ. Antisemitismus, völkischer Nationalismus und Geschlechterbilder".

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