Frieder Vogelmann
Contemporary Authoritarianism:
Dialectics of Positivism?
The Return of the Authoritarian Character?
Crises of Neoliberal Biopolitics
Frankfurt am Main
21st April 2022
Overview
I. Horkheimer on “Authority”
II. A Dialectics of Positivism?
II.1 Authoritarianism as Bourgeois Law
II.2 Authoritarianism by Nihilist Regression
II.3 Authoritarianism against Phantom Dispossession
III. Authority and Reason(s)
“Authority as accepted dependence can thus imply a relationship which fosters progress, is in the interests of all parties, and favors the development of human powers. But it can also sum up in one word all those social relationships and ideas which have long since lost their validity, are now artificially maintained, and are contrary to the true interests of the majority. Authority is the ground for a blind and slavish submission which originates subjectively in psychic inertia and inability to make one’s own decisions and which contributes objectively to the continuation of constraining and unworthy conditions of life.”
Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family” (1936), 70 f. (emphasis added)
“Bourgeois thought begins as a struggle against the authority of tradition and replaces it with reason as the legitimate source of right and truth. It ends with the deification of naked authority as such (a conception no less empty of determinate content than the concept of reason), since justice, happiness, and freedom for mankind have been eliminated as historically possible solutions.”
Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family” (1936), 72
“Because the individual was regarded as wholly isolated and complete in himself, it could seem that the dismantling of the old authorities was the only thing required if he was to exercise his full potential. In reality, the liberation meant, before all else, that the majority of people were delivered up to the fearful exploitation of the factory system. The self-dependent individual found himself confronted with an external power to which he must accommodate himself.”
Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family” (1936), 78
“In disciplined work men will take their place under an authority, but the authority will only be carrying out the plans that men have made and have decided to implement. The plans themselves will no longer be the result of divergent class interests, for the latter will have lost their foundation and been converted into communal effort. The command of another will express his personal interests only because it also expresses the interests of the generality.”
Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family” (1936), 97
“On the one hand, tolerance means freedom from the rule of dogmatic authority; on the other, it furthers an attitude of neutrality toward all spiritual content, which is thus surrendered to relativism. Each cultural domain preserves its ‘sovereignty’ with regard to universal truth. The pattern of the social division of labor is automatically transferred to the life of the spirit, and this division of the realm of culture is a corollary to the replacement of universal objective truth by formalized, inherently relativist reason.”
Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947), 13
Overview
I. Horkheimer on “Authority”
II. A Dialectics of Positivism?
II.1 Authoritarianism as Bourgeois Law
II.2 Authoritarianism by Nihilist Regression
II.3 Authoritarianism against Phantom Dispossession
III. Authority and Reason(s)
“The basic definition of bourgeois law is that it authorizes subjects’ self-will. This is bourgeois law’s positivism, since legal authorization of self-will makes subjects’ willing into a ‘fact,’ on the basis of which law must proceed.
The basic definition of self-will is that it is the capacity to author decisions as facts that found law. Self-will is the power of positivizing one’s own, since it is the power to be normatively indifferent and to privatize the social.
Bourgeois law is therefore a normative order that produces normative indifference. It is a social order that permits the privatization of the social–the normative and social authorization of an a-normative and asocial positivization of one’s own.”
Christoph Menke, Critique of Rights (2020 [2015), 186
“Behold the aggrieved, reactive creature fashioned by neoliberal reason and its effects, who embraces freedom without the social contract, authority without democratic legitimacy, and vengeance without values or futurity. […] It cannot be appealed to by reason, facts, or sustained argument because it does not want to know, and it is unmotivated by consistency or depth in its values or by belief in truth. Its conscience is weak, while its sense of victimization and persecution runs high. It cannot be wooed by a viable alternative future, where it sees no place for itself, no prospect for restoring its lost supremacy. […] Having nothing to lose, its nihilism does not simply negate but is festive and even apocalyptic, willing to take Britain over a cliff, deny climate change, support manifestly undemocratic powers, or put an unstable know-nothing in the most powerful position on earth, because it has nothing else.”
Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein: Authoritarian Freedom
in Twenty-First Century ‘Democracies’” (2018), 36
“Phantom possession is a reified mark of propertized social relations. And it is more than mere ‘naturalization’- not a certain set of norms wrongly taken to be immutable and ‘natural,’ but the specific kind of objectification necessitated by a reproductive system anchored in dominion. As in Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, one could say that what phantom possession treats as individual property is in fact a reified reflection of (deeply flawed) social relations.”
Eva von Redecker, “Ownership’s Shadow: Neoauthoritarianism
as Defense of Phantom Possession” (2020), 53
Overview
I. Horkheimer on “Authority”
II. A Dialectics of Positivism?
II.1 Authoritarianism as Bourgeois Law
II.2 Authoritarianism by Nihilist Regression
II.3 Authoritarianism against Phantom Dispossession
III. Authority and Reason(s)
Proposal
interpret the “dialectic of positivism” as a (local) criterion to demarcate irrational authority. Naturalisation of normative demands/principles or positivism as a disavowal of reflection is, after all, a classic sign that something has been removed from the reach of reason.
Advantages
- explain irrational authority without reference to the “real interests” of those subjects that bow to authority
- requires the reference to a formal idea of reason and its reach instead of a substantive account of reason
- has no need for any idea of a necessary progression of history
Questions
- How do we deal with these subjects if reason(s) cannot reach them?
- Should reason indeed rule supreme – is nothing that should escape its touch, nothing that should be left alone, nothing that should not be transformed by reason?