This week’s Landscape Surgery was organised by Dr Thomas Dekeyser (British Academy Post Doctoral Fellow), who invited Professor Chris Philo of the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow to present his paper, ‘Authoritarianism, astrology and Adorno’s anti-fascist geography’.
For this session, Chris focused on a project that he will start in December 2021, titled ‘The Anti-fascist Geographical Imagination’, tasked with imagining anti-fascist thought geographically, and conversely, of imagining geography anti-fascistically. Chris shared his directions for the project, at the heart of which is the work Theodor Adorno, a leading figure of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.
The discussion began by looking at QAnon shaman Jake Angeli (Jacob Anthony Chansley), made infamous in the storming of the US Capitol on the 6th of January by Trump supporters challenging the outcome of the 2021 Electoral College vote. After discussing Angeli’s blend of Native American spiritualism, occultism and a belief in QAnon conspiracy theories, Chris drew parallels with Paul Routledge’s 2011 paper, ‘Sensuous Solidarities: Emotion, Politics and Performance in the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army’.1 In this paper, Routledge discusses affective politics and embodied possibilities of resistance, suggesting that pantomime can be used as a mechanism to speak truth back to power, and Chris questioned whether there are parallels with Jake Angeli’s actions at the Capitol.
Chris then introduced the 1950 book, The Authoritarian Personality, and presented to us the qualities Adorno and his team had found to pre-dispose Americans towards authoritarianism and fascism.2 The authors combined survey data from seven thousand people with a smaller number of clinical interviews and numerical analyses to produce a series of propositions comprising their “F Scale” (or “fascist” scale) personality test. Chris discussed the array of propositions developed for the test, including beliefs in supernatural power, mystical determinism, astrology, conspiracy theories, stereotyping and a predisposition to think in rigid categories. Notably, the “F Scale” allows for inconsistencies in personalities; for example, there are those who waiver toward authoritarian submission while others are characterized by authoritarian aggression. As Chris points out, there are important parallels between Adorno’s surveys and contemporary American politics.
The discussion then turned to Adorno’s essay, “The Stars Down to Earth”, which features a detailed analysis of the contents of an astrology column produced by the LA Times’ Carroll Righter in the 1950s.3 Chris discussed his preliminary findings from Adorno’s essay and data, noting that Righter’s column encouraged readers to adopt a “bi-phasic” or “two-sphere” approach to organising their time, space, activities and relationships. For instance, readers were encouraged to divide their time between workdays and evenings and space between work and home, an approach that Adorno suggests masks the irrationality of labour in a capitalist economy. Chris proposed that Adorno’s work points to people’s acceptance of astrology or “big” authority rather than engagement in the complexities and irrationalities created by the systems they live, in this case, in America’s emerging capitalist mass society. To encourage an anti-fascist geographical imagination, Chris proposes that we build from Adorno’s conclusions and resist the reduction of the complex to the simple that is inherent to the mechanisms of fascism, authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
The paper’s final part explored Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life.4 In this book, Adorno builds on broader Marxist critiques on how intellectual life and science are perverted and subverted under capitalism. Referring back to Jake Angeli’s beliefs, Chris noted that Adorno’s work highlights a tendency for people to displace the difficulties of life onto the stars – that are not analysed critically or scientifically – to get advice on moving forward. The end of Adorno’s essay touches on a discussion of the irrational displacement of the here and now into another realm of being as a very problematic move, which connects to his prolonged debate with Hegel and Heidegger about the nature of being. Adorno’s concern is that theories of being contain irrationalism and mysticism that continually turn these issues into another set of problems that ultimately have no purchase on what is real. From this, Chris suggested that we might use Adorno’s critique of astrology’s relationship with authoritarianism to develop our own critique of phenomenological and existential geographies.
Chris’s paper drew attention to the relevance of Adorno’s work in the wake of the US Capitol insurrection on the 6th of January and raises questions about whether these protestors and rioters’ authoritarian beliefs arise as much from their own predispositions as it does from individual leaders. We want to thank Chris for a thought-provoking exploration of the continuing relevance of Adorno’s work, the forces that are driving historical events in US politics, and how we might learn from them to configure an anti-fascist geographical imagination.
Written by: Katie Vann
Edited by: Will Barnes
References
1 Routledge, P. (2012) ‘Sensuous solidarities: emotion, politics and performance in the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army’, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 44(2), pp. 428–452
2 Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J. and Nevitt Sanford, R. (2019). The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Verso Books
3 Adorno, T. W. (2001) “The Stars Down to Earth” and Other Essays. Abingdon: Routledge & CRC Press
4 Adorno, T. W. (2005). Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life (Radical Thinkers): Reflections on a Damaged Life. New York: Verso Books
Landscape Surgery News Items:
- On the 27th of January, the Department’s Angela Chan and Emily Hopkins spoke at the event, The CCIs: pathways beyond economic growth – webinar 4, organised by Pathways Beyond Economic Group. Find out more.
- On the 27th of January, Dr Oli Mould joined CCIMSS for a discussion on the ills of self-interest and the merits of a collective common creativity in a talk organised by SOAS.
- Congratulations to Professor Veronica Della Dora, The Department’s Chair of Human Geography, for her newly published book, The Mantle of the Earth: Genealogies of a Geographical Metaphor.
- Professor Harriett Hawkins shared her work with the Chilean group, BioGeoArt, a project investigating relationships between nature and humanity. Find out more.
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