Zoom Invite for Reading Group Discussion on NeoNoir

and some thoughts about the Liberal Authoritarian Personality

At 8:30 am PST this Sunday, October 6, we are going to continue our discussion of Film Noir and talk about two classic NeoNoirs, Chinatown and Bladerunner. We will talk about how the cinematic vocabulary of film noir gave us two of the most extraordinary films of the 1970s and 80s. Zoom Link is below the paywall. These two films provide an absolutely paranoid vision of power and domination, fed by the collapse of trust in the political, social and cultural institutions that marked those two decades. If they represented dystopic visions of Los Angeles, at least these films were based on some kind of utopic disappointment. We seem to have given up on Utopias entirely. I just watched Alex Garland’s Civil War. It just made no sense, but was beautifully shot. It was an ode to the sort of wartime journalism that doesn’t exist anymore. I kept thinking, who are they uploading these photos for? Canada? Australia, the UK? Who even reads newspapers anymore?

The Reading Group started with a discussion of The Authoritarian Personality, the sociological study that tried to determine individual proclivity toward Fascism. We read Sigmund Freud on Moses and Monotheism as well as parts of the Dialectic of Enlightenment in preparation for our discussion of authoritarianism. The recent rumors of dog eating seem to provide a textbook example of authoritarian proclivities — demonization of the other, dehumanization of immigrants, scapegoating, etc., but these rumors are not being pushed by the uneducated or the unwashed, they are being pushed by credentialed elites, like J.D. Vance who understands the power of mediatic suggestion to rile the discontented and inflame the MAGA crowds. It’s almost too easy to identify Vance with classic mid-20th century authoritarianism, which I think would be wrong. His ideas about gender roles notwithstanding, he married a Yale Law School colleague, a South Asian-American and not a white, stay at home tradwife. He is a dangerous provocateur, but his brand of politics is not the only damaging one to the American body politic. His adversary is not the Democratic Party. They are his accomplices in the destruction of any serious politics that would involve building a better future for places like Springfield, Ohio.

One of the questions that I wanted to raise when we first started the Reading Group, that I think is even more urgent now than it was a year ago, haven’t we seen the rise of a neoliberal/or pseudoliberal authoritarian personality in the past four decades when liberalism became dominated by the politics of the Professional Managerial Class. In the 1950s when Adorno and the team from Berkeley studies the proclivity for submission to authoritarianism, they aligned the high scorers on the F scale with the right and the extreme right. Adorno and his collaborators were interested in the relationship between authoritarianism and historical, European anti-semitism, and we discussed the critical theory approach to prejudice, conspiracy theory and reason from this historical/psychoanalytic point of view. Don’t we need to understand how anti-semitism and anti-anti-semitism have changed? It seems taboo to even raise these questions.

I think it has become obvious that the liberal professions and institutions have become the sites of intellectual conformity, censorship and affective rigidity. To dissent from the liberal line on any question, domestic or foreign policy related seems to invite demonization. There is less and less space for the kind of skeptical, materialist even negative inquiry that was the hallmark of the mid-20th century intellectual in a liberal democracy.

In the absence of sustained public discussion of any of the most pressing issues at hand and how they are connected, what kind of paranoid provocation is left or Left to those of us who expect and demand a higher form of reason? What happened to Utopias of the past? And why do the cinematic dystopias of our past have to tell us about our own future?