Affective authoritarianism as joyful ‘oeuvre?’ Godly Subjects and Suburban Gladiators

Abstract

This paper presents the spatial experience of authoritarianism as a dynamic atmosphere with the seductive potential for radical joy. For Lefebvre (1996), joyful co-creation of space – an ‘oeuvre’ – was a vital facet of everyday urban life. As such, the paper challenges normative portrayals of authoritarianism as an inherently joyless, bleak and oppressive operation of power, and delves deeper into its variegated, contextually contingent and complex P/political spatialisations, conflicts and contradictions. Affect emerges as a productive lens through which to explore the complexities, range of emotions, identities and world-makings of authoritarian space, and its paradoxical capacity for joy. The paper draws from ethnographic reflections and spatial vignettes from three comparative experiences in different parts of the world: a mega-church service in suburban Singapore, and visits to two suburban hardcore gyms (in Northern England and Southeastern United States). These experiences are thematically framed as spaces of ‘Godly Subjects’ and ‘Gladiators’. They are spiritual, exhilarating spaces; spaces of radical possibilities. They are also inherently hierarchal, patriarchal, disciplined and oppressive. Thus, conjunctural subjectivities are affectively embodied in these spaces resulting in conflictual experiences. Though joyful, these are spaces of ‘cruel optimism’, where desire and aspiration are caught in a loop of un-achievability. Such is the contradictory nature of authoritarian power/space. However, whilst critical, the paper avoids an easy taxonomy of authoritarianism into clear binaries, framing it as both an open and closed socio-cultural-political space, and highlighting how and why more affective and spatialised readings of authoritarianism are needed across contextual cultural geographies at this moment.

Strongmen are making a comeback. The hyper-libertarian Javier Milei in Argentina and the anti-immigration Geert Wilders in the Netherlands are among a growing group of recently elected leaders who promise to break a few rules, shake up democratic institutions and spread a populist message. Is it a reaction against the failures of liberal democracies? Or is there something else behind the appeal of these misbehaving men with wild hair? ¹

. . . A new social character is emerging in modern Western societies: the libertarian-authoritarian personality – a dark by-product of late modernity. ²

Introduction

Once again, half of America seems enraptured with an orange-tinted man claiming to ‘Make the Country Great Again’, again. Though he never really stopped campaigning since his 2020 electoral defeat, which a fair number of his supporters refuse to believe was a defeat, the notorious Trump political rally is back. This time, better attention must be paid not only to the spectacle of Trumpism (as Geographer Jacob Miller suggests ³ ) but more granularly, to the textures of authoritarian atmospheres in other facets and rhythms of everyday life. Perhaps rather than the microscope being focused squarely on Trump (or other leaders in of his ilk), it is worth thinking about the ambience, the vibe, the uncomfortable terrain of authoritarian affects, or, as Natalie Koch ⁴ suggests, ‘by reflecting on the multiplicity of authoritarian space-time, political geographers might find new ways to identify our unnoticed assumptions about freedom and agency, space and time, victims and villains’. Assuming a critical stance in opposition to authoritarianism, as this author, and many readers of this paper will do, therefore requires a close-scrutiny of how and through what processes authoritarianism ripples across and produces daily life. This includes addressing the uncomfortable questions of why authoritarianism seduces, and why so many seem drawn into its political, social, cultural and spatial grasp.

Popular culture, media and press paint a picture of a contemporary society, notably, in the West, that is increasingly drifting towards an authoritarian future, underpinned by a ‘new authoritarian personality’. ⁵ This ‘new’ authoritarian personality, an update of Adorno’s (et al.,) seminal outline ⁶ of the kinds of underlying characteristics that cause some people to drift towards authoritarian power – seems rife with contradictions. On the one hand, it is portrayed as deeply atomised, individualised, competitive and even anarchic; an outgrowth of late capitalism and austere neoliberalism. On the other hand, this personality is drawn to hierarchal structures, subservience, discipline, order and routine; a dialectically conflictual subjectivity. Paradoxically, various populations seem pulled inexorably towards authoritarian power structures, represented by certain elected (and unelected) political/cultural/religious leaders around the world, while also seeking affirmation, individuality and distinction. Questions arise as to why authoritarian personalities and spaces proliferate, given the oppressive and disciplinary nature of these power structures and flows. Authoritarianism would seem to be antithetical to a fully realised self, and yet, its resilience and continued contagion continues apace.

These contradictions and paradoxes invite a re-framed conceptualisation of authoritarianism and its complex spatialisations, which are likewise contradictory and paradoxical. Anderson and Secor ⁷ suggest that far-right populism indeed offers an enticing opening in today’s society partly due to the optimism it allows, even if such optimism is misplaced. While they [ibid] respond to the Trumpian age, others have previously noted how erstwhile democratic societies can easily succumb to authoritarian tendencies: Stuart Hall ⁸ for example, poignantly articulated the authoritarian populism of Thatcher’s Britain and the resulting spatial configurations of racial capitalism and territorial stigmatisations.

There is something spectacular about authoritarian space and power (Closs Stephens, ⁹ Miller, ¹⁰ Koch a ¹¹ and b ¹² ) insofar as it can offer an exhilarating and tantalising series of visual, discursive and affective promises. The spectacle always has a certain allure: witness the collective energy of a large political rally; the monumental urban plans of a Saudi mega-city; the teeming masses of the annual Hajj, or a Russian military parade. But beyond these mega-events, authoritarianism runs through and across micro-spaces and moments, too, helping to produce and produced by the fabric of daily life, the daily ‘oeuvre’. It need not come in the form of a Trumpian directive, a prison wall or military violence. Authoritarianism can also be whispered in a prayer; it can be invited into the body, wilfully and earnestly; it can seep and ooze as an ‘atmosphere’ (McCormack ¹³ ; Edensor ¹⁴ ) into which one becomes enveloped.

Might, as uncomfortable as it may be to consider, authoritarianism, and its spaces, practices, materials, affects, be capable of producing and providing certain answers in a world full of ‘precarious structures of feeling’, (as Jamie Hakim ¹⁵ phrases), hard questions and difficult truths? And might this catalyse a kind of individualised and collective joy and thus productions of joyful space? Furthermore, might this capacity for joy partly explain, following Lauren Berlant, ¹⁶ the seductive ‘cruel optimism’ of authoritarian power, whereby individuals seek fulfilment through buying-in to the power structure, but are denied fulfilment by that same oppressive power?

Koch ¹⁷ suggests that ‘the field needs more – and more critical – geographic perspectives to move beyond the territorial trap and simplistic Western approaches of mapping Good and Evil onto Democracy and Authoritarianism’. Responding to this call, in the following I approach the question of how authoritarianism can be perceived to be an affectively joyful, but ‘cruelly-optimistic’ experience, through the juxtaposition of two short ethnographic vignettes, based on visits to sites on opposite ends of the world which represent different types of urban environments. Both sites, I suggest, point to the presence, practice and embodiment of authoritarian power in a way that is affectively joyful. By choosing two sites across the world – a mega-church service held inside a shopping mall in Singapore, and suburban ‘Gladiator’ gyms fashioned after the Roman coliseum in England the United States – I illustrate how authoritarianism is both place/context-contingent and a relational assemblage of power, operating in a multitude of ways and by/through various materials and infrastructures. These vignettes are preceded by a conceptual overview of how I approach the authoritarian turn through a cultural geographical perspective, and then followed by a concluding discussion.

Framing the authoritarian turn through cultural geography

Authoritarianism seems to be proliferating, and as political geographers like Luger^18,19 and Koch^20,21 have argued, this proliferation is global, transcending territorial-traps like the nation-state or global regions (e.g. ‘East’ vs. ‘West’). Far-right authoritarian-populist leaders like Trump (in the USA), Wilders (in the Netherlands) or Milei (in Argentina) and other bloviating Svengalis offer keywords, slogans and dog-whistles in their speeches and policies that are easily digested and promise a false simplicity, false truths, in our complex and crisis-laden, post-truth paradigm. But there is something else, beyond these strongmen and their governments, that seems to lubricate the operation of authoritarian power across scale, territory and space, a certain je ne sais quoi. There is a certain appeal and magnetism, the currents of which run through the cultural geographies of everyday life.

This raises critical questions and demands broader understandings of why and how authoritarian power, in various forms, spatialises across contexts. For Koch, ²² authoritarianism can be defined as ‘a political relationship defined by univocality and subordination of difference to a central authority or vision’. However, this would imply a kind of singularity, which, Koch ²³ warns, is too simplistic an appraisal, arguing that, ‘for all its orientation toward singularity, authoritarian space-time cannot be understood only through this impulse. Authoritarian political relations cut across space, time, scale and bodies in ways that are both unexpected and predictable’. Just because it can exist anywhere does not necessarily mean it exists everywhere: contextual explorations are required to understand the different densities, intensities and spatial textures of authoritarian space-time, but correspondingly, its conflicts, contradictions and resistances (within and against). In this paper, I maintain a critical perspective, and I do not seek to justify or minimise the real problem of what Cooper ²⁴ calls global ‘authoritarian contagion’ and the acute threats to democracy it poses. Rather, I follow Koch’s ²⁵ timely call to demystify authoritarian power and build a broader understanding of its spatialisations, and suggest there is value in undertaking this effort through a cultural geographical lens.

There are two significant gaps in the cultural-geographical understanding of authoritarianism. One is the degree to which authoritarianism entices; how it can be an affectively pleasant, appealing, even joyful, experience. Moving away from the ‘moral geographies’ ²⁶ for a moment of the frequently unpleasant and uneven outcomes of illiberal power structures, it is important to critically consider how and why authoritarianism can offer optimism (as Anderson and Secor ²⁷ suggest about far-right populism’s ‘available’, ‘excessive’ and ‘optimistic’ capaciousness), hope and the human-unifying sense of joy. This is not to be mistaken for an apology for authoritarianism and its often brutal, uneven, and undemocratic outcomes, but rather, to more effectively understand how and why it circulates, penetrates, attracts. We can positionally disavow affinity for illiberal power structures, but this does not negate the importance of deconstructing and better understanding them. Culturally mapping authoritarianism thereby offers clues to how it can offer a harsh kind of joy, a ‘cruel optimism’, ²⁸ where satisfying outcomes are yearned for, but rarely achievable, resulting in a Sisyphean loop of futile hope and aspirational insecurity.

For Berlant, ‘cruel optimism’ was a feature of neoliberal life. Berlant argued that,

a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project. It might rest on something simpler, too, like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being. ²⁹

Berlant framed optimism as ‘cruel’ when ‘the object that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving . . .’. ³⁰ In this case, authoritarianism is the political, ideological, spatial and cultural project which is simultaneously seen as desirable and promising but also serves as an obstacle to the realisation of desires, resulting in moments of spatial conjunction and disjunction. Authoritarian cruel optimism can be activated bio-politically, as I present next, through activities like worship and working-out.

Recent political insurrections and transformations necessitate a broader understanding of authoritarianism that goes beyond strong-men political leaders and easy-to-read displays of state power. What Ibrahim calls ‘everyday authoritarianism’ ³¹ is a deeply affective experience (Closs Stephens^32,33) and therefore, affect emerges as a productive critical lens through which to explore the complexities, paradoxes, range of emotions, materials, identities, subjectivities and world-makings, of the authoritarian turn through which society progresses. That authoritarianism in urban life can be joyful, an ‘oeuvre’ of art-making and affirmation, is one such paradox. However, critical Anthropocene scholars like Stephanie Wakefield ³⁴ allow space for such paradoxes and indeterminacy in the variety of futures dreamt up and erupted by the loops, discordance, and chaos of late (late) capitalist modernity. So, too, do critical geographers such as Eden Kinkaid ³⁵ who are keenly attuned to Lefebvre’s concepts of everyday life as a space of difference, and possibility.

The second gap that this paper addresses are a lack place-based, granular, material and affective explorations of how ‘everyday authoritarianism’ ³⁶ operates in specific local sites, in comparative urban environments. Research on the geographies of authoritarianism often overlooks the mundane, ordinary, small spaces of openings and closures in everyday urban life, ³⁷ and thus explorations of these spaces are important to understand how affective registers – for example, joy – spatialises through the interstices of various contextual environments. In appraising everyday authoritarianism, the material matters. P/politics, power and ideology are an assemblage of languages and slogans, practices and attitudes, bodies, performances, buildings and infrastructures (see e.g. Catherine Nash ³⁸ on the affective-assemblage of dance practices). Everyday authoritarian spaces and spatial practices can be approached as affective assemblages, even joyful ones. Thinking again about joy, or jouissance: for Lefebvre, everyday life, as it happens in various geographies, takes place ‘where the perpetually-transformative conflict occurs’. ³⁹ Indeed, for Lefebvre, ‘[daily life] is itself “oeuvre”’. ⁴⁰ Thereby, evaluating the potentially-joyful, everyday authoritarian oeuvre demands an exploration attuned to affect, and ethnographic experiences are a useful method to accomplish this task.

Informed by cultural geography, I conceptually frame authoritarianism through three vectors. The first is that of the affective, thinking through atmospheres, following from recent geographical explorations which have mapped affect alongside authoritarianism and the far-right topologically in spaces. The notion of atmospheres here follows McCormack’s ⁴¹ depiction of ‘something distributed yet palpable, a quality of environmental immersion that registers in and through sensing bodies whilst also remaining diffuse, in the air, ethereal’ while, for Böhme, ⁴² atmospheres are ‘something which can come over us, into which we are drawn, which takes possession of us like an alien power’ (see also Edensor, ⁴³ where these are cited). Authoritarian space, then, contains atmospheres which can draw one in, and religious and fitness spaces in particular have certain possessive elements.

In affective readings of everyday politics, I take inspiration from Closs Stephens^44,45 and her observations of affective nationalism in everyday spaces through looking, listening, sensing, with an eye to landscapes, urban environments, popular culture and social difference and encounters. These contextual readings – with an eye to local environments, histories and socio-cultural conditions – importantly address a longstanding critique of affect-as-ontology as overlooking locally-situated textures, a point Tolia-Kelly ⁴⁶ drives home. The affective lens also draws from Lefebvre’s notion of ‘oeuvre’ – the collective art-making of everyday life and urban worlds – but posed in a way to also understand the authoritarian affective experience. Perhaps authoritarian praxis, too, can be an oeuvre – a joyful, collective artwork, or performance, even if it comes from being yelled at, told to be submissive, regulated into a disciplinary subjectivity (e.g. closures). This may seem contradictory to those who read Lefebvre’s work as a manual for democratic rights-demanding and urban emancipation (e.g. openings); but perhaps thinking affectively through authoritarian power points to the potential for surprising openings alongside closures.

The second vector is that of the discursive, where I draw from Adorno et al.’s ⁴⁷ notion of the ‘authoritarian personality’. For Adorno, authoritarian tendencies ranged on a scale around indicators like aggression, discipline, conventionalism, anxiety over sex, superstition and the desire for submissiveness under power. This work has been critiqued from a Marxian perspective for its shift away from class superstructures; it has likewise been critiqued by post-structural scholars for its reductionism, not allowing for contextual specificity and situated complexity. Partly to remedy this, I also draw from the linguist George Lakoff’s ⁴⁸ work on political language indicators, for example, the way that authoritarian power is visible through rhetoric, slogans, symbols, brands, adverts and propaganda. Lakoff deconstructs authoritarian rhetoric/discourse as a deliberately constructed web of signposts and dog-whistles aimed to exploit, and appeal to, the authoritarian personality in mainstream populations. Examples of Lakoffian authoritarian linguistic signifiers include themes around self-discipline and control; greatness and power or Manichean expressions of all-or-nothingness, winner takes all, loser sucks. Trump’s one-liners are thereby an instructive case. W.E. Connolly’s ⁴⁹ idea of the ‘resonance machine’ is also useful for thinking discursively, where disparate elements of authoritarianism like slogans and rhetorics, policies, places, behaviours and materials join together into a machine-like configuration of power. Connolly notably referred to the entanglement of capitalism, evangelical Christianity and right-wing politics as ‘resonance machine’; this can be extended to think about how authoritarianism is constructed and reified in different contexts.

The third vector is that of the spatial, and here I draw from political geographer Natalie Koch’s work on spatialised and networked authoritarianism as it manifests across landscapes.^50,51 Koch has explored the spectacular and fantastical architectures of authoritarianism in settings like the Gulf States and Central Asia, through examples of mega-events and nationalistic and triumphalist sport infrastructures. This work importantly divorces authoritarianism from the ‘territorial trap’, or, the idea that it must belong to particular world regions like the envisioned illiberal ‘Global East’. Rather, Koch stresses the relational nature of authoritarian infrastructures and holds the mirror to the West, where such urban-landscapes proliferate. An eye to the spatial takes into account aspects like architecture and geographical environments; local settings and contextualities; and the relational connections between sites. Koch attends to a spatial interrogation of authoritarian power through framing some key questions, such as:

how do authoritarian practices define, shape, or result from specific spatial and temporal configurations? How is authoritarian space-time expressed, experienced, and embodied? At and across what scales? How do certain actors conjure or resist forms of authoritarian space-time? To what extent do authoritarian relations unfold through the imagined spaces of fiction, nationalist mythologies, utopias and dystopias, and aspirational or anticipatory politics? How and when does the materiality of authoritarian space-time matter? How do pasts, presents, and futures merge with one another in authoritarian visions and practices, and how do they touch down upon diverse spaces and bodies? ⁵²

Thinking through the spatial in ethnographic settings with an eye towards affective atmospheres thereby enables the critical consideration of these questions.

In the ethnographic vignettes that follow, I demonstrate the loop of authoritarian ‘cruel optimism’ through the examples of attending a mega-church service in Singapore and visiting hardcore gyms in the UK and US. In these three examples, the inherent desires – spiritual fulfilment and heavenly grace, and the attainment of the ideal physique – are mediated via affective authoritarianism which is masked by momentous experiences of joyous optimism. Authoritarian space-time thus limits the realisation of these desires insofar as it is inherently antithetical to individual actualisation and human affirmation (openings) through its architectures of oppressive discipline and power hierarchies (closures).

Notably, by focusing on comparative spaces of everyday life – for example, worship and working out – this ethnography offers a more granular, micro-exploration of authoritarian spatial power at a scale that is sometimes overlooked in studies of more spectacular, larger-scale events and sites (e.g. political rallies, national parades, mega-events, etc). Secondly, I have selected the examples of worship and working out because of the ways they demonstrate the ‘cruel optimism’ of authoritarian life. To worship a higher power (whatever form that power takes) entails perpetually seeking something: grace, forgiveness, fortune, health, in this life, or the next. But, often, these aims remain unrealised under the strain of late capitalism. The pursuit of physical fitness, especially at the more extreme-ends of the gym spectra – is similarly an ongoing task of seeking bodily perfection which often has no end, remaining just out of reach, perpetually impossible. Therefore, these pursuits are cruel, but to undertake them, requires optimism. To be commanded to do these things (worship, workout) by pastors or personal trainers, and then through the biopolitics of self-discipline, is thus an authoritarian operation of cruel optimism. Nonetheless, the collective energy of a church service, or the rush from a hard workout, can induce much joy.

Finally, the comparison I present is notable in its contextual juxtaposition of East and West, looking at one place (Singapore) that is often characterised as ‘soft authoritarian’ (see Luger ⁵³ and Tan and Preece ⁵⁴ ) alongside sites that may not be considered authoritarian (England or Southeast United States). In addition to responding to Koch’s ⁵⁵ call for more relational explorations of authoritarian power, I also draw inspiration from Closs Stephen’s ⁵⁶ use of ethnography as an affective lens to understand the workings of P/politics in everyday life a variety of mundane, quotidian urban spaces. ⁵⁷

Substantively, through the following brief ethnographic vignettes, I aim to bring these three vectors together – emotion and psyche; linguistics and signposts; space, built environments, materials and atmospheres, in order to probe the question of how affective authoritarianism can be a joyful experience. Each of these spatiotemporal experiences exemplify the ease with which authoritarianism circulates by and through daily space, practice, and society, and its seductive capaciousness. Especially troubling is the juxtaposition of what authoritarian power offers, and restricts, at a time when democracy seems under threat in many contexts and circumstances.

Methodological approaches and reflections

In this section I reflect upon my experiences visiting a mega-church service in an auditorium within a suburban shopping mall in Singapore, and my visits to warehouse-style bodybuilding gyms in industrial parks outside of Durham, UK and Charlotte, USA. These sites, I suggest, can be multitudinously joyful for the user, imbued with a certain religiosity and life affirmation; but the sites are also decidedly authoritarian in their operation and affective atmospheres of submission, aggression, discipline, and control.

The ethnographic vignettes offered in this paper are drawn from a longitudinal (and still-ongoing), globally-comparative study of the nature of authoritarian, and more broadly, illiberal urban space. This research project has encompassed sites of study from Singapore to the UK to the Southeastern United States, following a ‘comparative urban’ framework, or more specifically, an urban ‘comparative conversation’, ⁵⁸ whereby as Jennifer Robinson suggests ‘the researcher leverages the shared features of different cases as a starting point for comparison’. ⁵⁹ Using authoritarian space as a critical lens for comparison is therefore one way to generatively converse across different urban sites which share some characteristics, but diverge in other ways. This comparative research project is conceptually scaffolded by a Lefebvrian framework of the production of space,^60,61 and political-geographic frameworks for deciphering power relations and signifiers and the textures of illiberalism (Adorno et al., ⁶² Pinker and Lakoff ⁶³ ; Koch ⁶⁴ ). I also follow nonrepresentative approaches to understanding atmospheres, affects, P/political encounters and difference across ‘ordinary’ and everyday space, inspired by the phenomenological and embodied work of Sarah Ahmed, ⁶⁵ Lauren Berlant, Kathleen Stewart (e.g. her explorations of ‘ordinary affects’ ⁶⁶ ), Miller and Laketa (e.g. their exploration of the micropolitics and fascistic tendencies of shopping malls), ⁶⁷ Eden Kinkaid, Angharad Closs Stephens and others.

The research began with a focus on Singapore, as one case study of authoritarian socio-spatial relations, involving site-based fieldwork there (in 2012–2014) and ongoing digital ethnography and ethnographic content analysis (ECA). In Singapore, the methods have included urban site observations, urban walks, semi-structured interviews and walk-along interviews (N = 35) taking place across a variety of urban spaces. These spaces have included parks and plazas, university facilities, museums, natural areas, theatres and art spaces. Interview participants have included artists, activists and performers; urban planners and policy officials and passers-bye (e.g. users of various spaces). Thematically, the research aimed to understand how space was produced, practiced, contested and debated, and what these spatial practices and conflicts said about authoritarian operations of power from the scale of the grassroots to the digitally-networked planetary cyber-sphere. One of the spaces I investigated was a weekly-occurring mega-church service, held in a large auditorium located inside an upscale suburban shopping mall. I approached this evangelical church service as a performance and public co-created artwork, but also, as a notable example of authoritarian production of space, insofar as the pastor delivered a disciplinary sermon to a recipient ‘flock’ of parishioners. The church service represents a rich affective tapestry of hierarchal/patriarchal power, spirituality, art and space, and, through its location buried in a glitzy shopping mall, atmospheres of the consumerist spectacle.

Following from the time spent in Singapore, and partly responding to the political events of 2016-onwards, when authoritarian and far-right populist movements became majoritarian and mainstream phenomena in contexts from the United Kingdom (e.g. ‘Brexit’) to the United States (e.g. the ‘alt-right’, Trumpism, etc.), I have expanded the study to other sites included those where I have lived and visited over the past several years. One trend and pattern that seemed to be emerging in the resurgent authoritarian milieu in the West was the relationship between authoritarianism and everyday spaces of recreation and leisure, the gym being an emblematic example of where these things converge. ⁶⁸

Geographical research has indicated a link between authoritarianism and strength/athleticism. For example, Koch ⁶⁹ explored how and why authoritarian leaders – so-called ‘strong men’, Russia’s Vladimir Putin being an archetype – are often characterised by displays of strength and muscularity, which Koch suggests is a symbolic visual extension of authoritarian spectacle. Recent research argues about the centrality of gyms and fitness both for the ‘new’ authoritarian and ‘fascistic’ personality (e.g. see Edmonds ⁷⁰ and Woolley and Luger ⁷¹ ), but also, as Wakefield ⁷² suggests, dynamic sites of social difference, radical possibilities and novel openings in the Anthropocene. For these reasons, I have spent time visiting a number of gyms and have critically soaked in their atmospheres and P/political tendencies. The gyms described below are two that particularly stood out for the intensity of their authoritarian vibes. One is located near my current home in Northern England; another is located in the Southeastern United States, which is the site of ongoing field research.

Returning to the rationale of comparative urban conversations, ⁷³ I selected these three sites as compelling juxtapositions of authoritarian space-power in everyday life, due to their contextual differences (e.g. across hemispheres and cultural regions), but also for the commonalities and shared themes (see my earlier mentions of Adorno et al., and Pinker and Lakoff, for how I thematically approach and tie-together authoritarianism across space). These are highly disciplinary, patriarchal spaces: the religious rules of following His path, the Ten Commandments; the steps for achieving a strong body, mind, soul. In their own way, they are also joyful; ‘available, excessive, and optimistic’. ⁷⁴ But can divinity be achieved, or, will the perfect body ever be obtained? The hope, the promise, is seductive, tantalising, cruel. I now venture back to these sites of ‘Godly Subjects’ and ‘Suburban Gladiators’.

Ethnographic Vignette I: Godly Subjects at a Singaporean Mega-Church

The first vignette refers to a visit to a Sunday service at a mega-church located in a large auditorium which fills the top level of an upscale shopping mall in suburban Singapore, insofar as it is an area away from the city-centre in what is known colloquially as the ‘heartland’, which, as KP Tan ⁷⁵ has described, is the loci of Singapore’s middle class, largely Chinese, demographic majority. This is also the part of Singapore with the highest levels of support for the People’s Action Party (PAP), which has been in power since Singapore’s independence from Britain and split from Malaysia in the 1960s. The People’s Action Party has been described as ‘soft authoritarian’,^76,77 ‘illiberally pragmatic’ ⁷⁸ and ‘paternalistic’. ⁷⁹ Elections take place and there is, nominally, an opposition party (the Workers’ Party), but single-party, strong rule has been a facet of Singapore’s development trajectory, and governmentality is deeply embedded in almost all aspects of life in Singapore, from the social engineering around state housing ⁸⁰ to the way art and culture are produced (or censored ⁸¹ ). Consumerism is also an important cultural practice in Singapore. One of the wealthiest cities in the world, Singaporeans have a high disposable income, and practically, shopping spaces offer a respite from the oppressive equatorial heat and frequent rain.

Evangelical/charismatic, protestant Christianity has been growing in popularity in Singapore in recent decades, and now forms an important part of mainstream culture. For Chong, ⁸² the spread of evangelism through Singapore represents a sort of aspirational middle-class cultural touchstone, but also helps to reinforce conservative P/politics in the City-State, and pastors like the one I observed have been portrayed as influential voices of state power, structuring mechanisms that bridge together the political arena, the spiritual arena, and the cultural arena in the City-States’s ongoing nation-building project. For all these reasons, I was inspired to visit the mega-church inside the shopping mall on a hot day in early 2013, shortly after the Chinese New Year.

*

Upon entering the shopping mall, I pass beauty shops and clothing boutiques and find myself on an escalator up, up, then another, up, heavenwards. There are many others on this stairway to heaven, dressed more formally than me (in my t-shirt, shorts and sandals). I arrive on the mall’s top floor, above the shopping levels, where the auditorium is located. People file into the entrances. There are men and women handing out brochures, information about today’s service and about the church, and a link to donate money, and I take one, somewhat warily, but smiling. I enter the vast auditorium where thousands are already seated, and I deliberately choose a high seat near the exit, so that I can make an escape without disrupting the service.

Most of the faces are Chinese, with some Malay and Indian representation. Many in the crowd wear white clothes, which in Singapore, has emerged as a populist signifier for religiosity and conservative social values. As a white non-Singaporean, I am likely conspicuous, though attention is focused on the stage below and not on me. Some have their eyes closed, perhaps lost in thought or prayer. I am not a church-goer or a religious observer, nor am I particularly receptive to authority figures. So, out of my comfort zone, I settle in and wait for the service to begin, thumbing through the brochures.

The pastor takes the stage like a rockstar, and he looks like one: bedecked head to toe in shiny black leather, he immediately commands with the charisma of an arena or music festival headliner. From my high perch, the pastor and musicians look very small below on the stage, but they are amplified and hugely visible on the big-screens hanging above. There is a song with electric guitar about love and Jesus and joy. The lights beam and glisten and people rise, dancing, hands in the air. I rise too, following the crowd and not wanting to stand out. Admittedly, despite my scepticism, I am also drawn into the moment, feeling the collective energy in the auditorium.

We sit when the music slows, and the Pastor launches into a story about his recent visit to Jerusalem. This then weaves into a parable of Jesus and the fisherman; of making plenty from nothing; which then leads to a very Singaporean story about shopping and the dangers of wanting too much, too many things. The pastor urges simplicity; speaking directly to the Singaporean parents when he commands that children do not need to spend all their time seeking to be the best, at after-school tutors or test-prep centres. He then speaks to the shoppers in the theatre, telling them they don’t have to go to Takashimaya (the upscale Japanese department store), and feel inadequate with the need to buy more. After this parable ends, there’s another song: a slower one, a ballad. I watch as a rock opera unfolds before me, far below on the stage. I scan the auditorium to see the smiling faces: faces enraptured; exultant. Hands in air, captured by an unseen and spectral heavenly grace. Notwithstanding my cynicism toward religion (broadly) and especially, the praxis of the mega-church, I, too, feel the joy of the music, immersed in the collective bond of the crowd receiving these divine messages.

I don’t stay for the entire service, sneaking out the exit during a pause in events, again passing the door guardians with their piles of brochures. As I glide back down the escalators, past beauty salons and electronics stores, I feel renewed, as if I’d been to a spa. I feel soothed and massaged by the authoritarian directives I’ve received, delivered softly by the pastor, and emerge back out into the humidity of the cityscape. I also feel, contradictorily, released from confinement, able to relax, free from the potential judgment of the parishioners sitting around me. Standing on the sidewalk in the afternoon heat, it is then I remember where I am.

It is easy to forget, among the daily rhythm of life in Singapore, that dropping chewing gum on the sidewalk results in citation, fines and possible smacks with a rattan cane, or that bringing hard drugs from Bali can result in death by firing squad. A protest sign in an un-authorised location can result in detention and deportation, or worse, depending on what the sign says. Joy masks these realities, sanitised by realms of air-conditioned malls with superstar pastors dancing in the mezzanines.

The visit to the mall-church was a unique experience among the other sites I visited during my 8-months of field research in the Southeast Asian City-State. While I did not attend a second church service due to scheduling conflicts, I did spend many hours in other spaces, indoors and outdoors. These included parks and public spaces like plazas and libraries; other malls and shopping districts; public transportation networks and stations and art facilities like theatres, galleries, and schools. In each of these site-visits, reflecting upon the affective atmosphere, that thing one can be ‘drawn into’ ⁸³ was a thematic facet of my analysis, alongside semi-structured and walk-along interviews and participation in events like art festivals and activist walks. These experiences and encounters contained the full range of emotions, as I felt myself and as expressed by my research participants, including, quite frequently, different shades of joy.

Singapore is not frequently portrayed as a particularly joyful place. Popular-media surveys reiterating this point abound, including a recent one which claimed Singaporean workers are the least happy in the whole world. ⁸⁴ Singapore is, however, almost universally portrayed as authoritarian, to varying degrees. ⁸⁵ Even in a land-limited City-State where certain civil liberties are highly-restricted – for example, the right to free assembly and protest, anti-government speech and public debate around religion, ethnicity or the death penalty – joy creates openings, or, as Luger framed (following David Harvey’s use of the term), ‘Singaporean spaces of hope’. ⁸⁶

Ethnographic Vignette II: Gladiators in a Suburban Gym

The second vignette moves me from Southeast Asia to Northeast England and the Southeastern United States. In nondescript industrial parks near busy motorways, two warehouses have been converted into gyms which are popular regional destinations for ‘hardcore’ weightlifters. For the research, I have named these ‘Gladiator Gyms 1 and 2’. In one of these gyms, there are murals of Roman gladiators on the wall; in the other, video screens show films of monumental bodybuilders (like Dorian Yates) on a repeating loop. So, ‘Gladiator Gym’ seemed to be a fitting pseudonym for these sites. I gathered from casual conversations and some online research that these places have a magnetic pull, with unique atmospheres that renders them destinations worth travelling to. Some visitors will drive an hour or more to come for a session, which they will then share via their social media channels, for example, ‘visit to Gladiator gym, best leg day ever!’. Whether a suburban warehouse gym beside a highway in a place like England, or the Southeastern USA, can be described as an authoritarian space, is open for debate.

On the one hand, unlike Singapore, these gyms are located in parts of the world not frequently characterised as authoritarian, according to political studies. Gyms of this nature are also spaces of individuality and the practice, art, sport, hobby, performance of doing fitness, which can be read as an expression of freedom, autonomy and a kind of democratic world-making. Wakefield ⁸⁷ explores gym cultures as one example of the radical experimentation and meaning-seeking that occurs in postmodernity, explaining the proliferation of cultish-fitness communities like Cross-Fit as a productive and positive space of alternative trajectories. However, through another reading, gyms, especially those with more hardcore user bases, are deeply political spaces and generate/are generated by a certain authoritarian power architecture and atmosphere. These are also consumerist spaces; as Hakim ⁸⁸ suggested, the gym-body and its newfound prominence in mainstream culture is one profound outgrowth of neoliberalism’s ‘cruel optimism’ ⁸⁹ where body-becomes-capital in a perpetual struggle of self-improvement (and digital representation).

These are masculine spaces, often with strict rules and codes of conduct. They reflect the themes that scholars of authoritarianism, from Adorno to Lakoff and Koch, point to: patriarchal hierarchies; notions of discipline and strength; self-regulation and control. Furthermore, there is a strong link ⁹⁰ between hardcore gym spaces and other far-right and authoritarian signposts, like nationalism/patriotism, white/male supremacism, and conspiracism. ⁹¹ Substantively, I do not aim to paint these places as authoritarian or not, as if that was a clear binary (it is not), but rather, through a comparative conversation, bring to light how authoritarian atmospheres can be observed in these spaces and what these atmospheres might have in common with the Singaporean church.

*

Pulling up in my in car to the Gladiator Gym in England, I saw white vans and sports cars parked in front of the entrance to a warehouse which was only differentiated from the others by the slogan, or I should say, command, on the exterior wall, to ‘Be Ultra’. What does it mean to be ultra? I wanted to know as I went inside and paid the 8 pounds for the day pass.

I heard the music first, even before getting out of my car. It’s high-volume, high-octane stuff, Gangster rap and heavy metal, big Ibiza DJ sets, reverberating around the monumental open-aired space inside. I heard the clang of metal and the groans and yelps of men lifting, pulling, pieces of iron weighing hundreds of kilograms. The music and atmosphere hit me like a punch: a performance was underway in the space, and you have to join that performance the second you walk in, or you’ll find yourself on the margins, fast. Large screens on the walls play videos of monumental men, spartan warriors like the bodybuilders Dorian Yates and Ronnie Coleman, lifting, posing. They bark commands: One more! C’mon! Lightweight! Like father figures, they stare down at the would-be gladiators below, grimacing. Even the stairway between the two floors is emblazoned with commands (Figure 1 above): ‘Work Hard. Stay Focused. Never Stop.’ While referring to workouts, these commands could just as easily apply to other things: hard labour; sex; wartime military manoeuvres, and this transferability is not lost on me.

Figure 1.

Stairs at Gladiator Gym 1, England, with authoritarian directives (Author’s Photo, 2024).

Indeed, the commands are everywhere. They scream from the walls, on painted banners and slogans in font that is larger than the warehouse windows, directing me to ‘Be Ultra’. And that it’s ‘ME VERSUS ME’. And that ‘THERE’s ALWAYS ONE MORE REP’, and that I should ‘NEVER STOP’, and ‘STAY HARD’. And in this atmosphere, I feel compelled to obey, feel self-conscious about not pushing as hard as I can, embracing what I realise is both the ridiculous – and physically risky- effort to raise and lower hundreds of kilograms of iron.

*

On a visit to the United States, I became interested in another Gladiator Gym, located on an Interstate highway exit about 30-miles from a major city in the Carolinas. I had come across this place via its social-media marketing, which was often wrapped in patriotic and nationalist themes and slogans, and made a point to make an in-person research visit.

When entering, I found myself confronted with murals on the walls of actual Roman gladiators. These were painted alongside patriotic imagery like the American Eagle, flags, caricatures of presidents like George Washington, and slogans like “We the People, 1776” coupled with bible verses, like Corinthians 6:19-20, ‘Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?’ A set of rules (which were named ‘Commandments’) posted by the entrance made it very clear what behaviours were acceptable (or not) in the space, e.g., ‘members who do not put their weights away will be banned!’; and ‘Nobody wants to smell you: wear deodorant!’. I proceeded with the workout, checking my cynicism of these larger-than-life displays of American patriotism and harsh directives. Because you have to put these negative feelings aside if you want to be a Gladiator.

In this ersatz Roman Coliseum, anyone can seek to be a gladiator; indeed, the atmosphere compelled me to undertake this mimesis.

Work, harder. Be, better. Strive for more. Never satisfied. Pain is weakness leaving the body. Through pain, there is joy. But it is still painful. Because it will never be enough, and that is the trap.

In the ever-unfinished quest to perfect the gladiator body, mindset, persona – lies the perpetually unrealisable outcome of achieving. And therein lies the seduction of submitting to the journey; increasingly giving into the desire of repression. Gyms like these represent complex spaces of becoming, encounters, and fluid ideologies, but it is perhaps their propensity to catalyse authoritarian atmospheres that have made them such fertile ground for infiltration by the far-right as researchers ⁹² have found was occurring in and beyond North America and Europe ⁹³ ). The authoritarian personality can be activated perhaps by these gladiator atmospheres, and joy is an ingredient of this activation.

Discussion and conclusion: authoritarianism as a joyful, spatial ‘resonance machine?’

In the ongoing rush to explain the authoritarian turn, amidst common explanatory devices like ‘feeling left behind’; or post-industrial ennui, inequality and uneven development, resentment and mistrust of elites, and all manner of crises (economic, climate, cultural), it is worth bringing joy, and the vitality of the daily ‘oeuvre’, into the conversation. Joy is an overlooked sentiment, and joyful spaces – the loci of everyday life’s perpetual artwork – has dangerous potential. Building upon what Anderson and Secor ⁹⁴ suggest about far-right populism, authoritarianism fulfils the need for ‘cruel optimism’ ⁹⁵ during this time of negativity, ennui and late capitalist anxiety. Authoritarianism, too, is available, filling a void in a consumerist and vacant post-industrial society, filling the nooks and crannies between networked medias and daily spatial practices. Authoritarianism is excessive: the excess of the Singaporean Pastor’s glitzy Jesus rock shows; or the exaggerated masculinity of the Gladiator Gym, offer an excess which is fun, radical, and instilled with jouissance.

The ethnographic reflections above map an experiential and affective spatiality to Adorno’s authoritarian personality. Perhaps it is not only the human psyche which contains the potential for authoritarian characteristics, but also the more-than-human materials and spatiality which give authoritarianism its ontic textures, its atmospheres. Buildings, church services, music, gym workouts, the feel of an iron bar – can amplify the desire for subservience and discipline, strength and paternalism (all constituent parts of Adorno’s characterisation of those personalities most likely to drift towards authoritarian power-geometries). There is also something metabolic about the coming-together of authoritarianism, space, and affect, helping to explain, perhaps, authoritarianism’s slippery and creeping appearances. William Connolly ⁹⁶ framed the entanglements of evangelical Christianity, neoliberal capitalism, media and right-wing politics as a ‘resonance machine’ where, ‘diverse elements infiltrate into each other, metabolizing into a moving complex’. If joy is one of the elements of authoritarianism’s resonance machine, then it, along with P/politics, space, materials, behaviours,

morphs into complexities of mutual imbrication and interinvolvement, in which heretofore unconnected or loosely associated elements fold, bend, blend, emulsify and dissolve into each other, forging a qualitative assemblage resistant to classical models of explanation. ⁹⁷

Closs Stephens, meanwhile, describes how affective atmospheres can illuminate how political subjectivities and feelings are complex clusters of varying intensities and emotional registers, suggesting that,

. . . ideas . . . can be mobilized through fun and laughter as much as through the politics of fear. Literatures on affect therefore invite us to begin our analyses . . .not with the ‘psychoanalytically informed criticism of subject identity’ or idea of ‘human individuals coming together in community’ but with the ‘the ebbs and swells of intensities that pass between bodies, enabling bindings and unbindings, jarring disorientations and rhythmic attunements’. ⁹⁸

Through these comparative urban ethnographic vignettes, I have followed from Closs Stephen’s explorations ⁹⁹ of everyday affective politics, ¹⁰⁰ and Koch’s proposal that authoritarianism can be a critical lens to understand the operation of power, culture and politics in a relational and variegated sense: it need not be attached to the nation-state; to a specific political leader or movement; or limited to a particular spatial scale. Koch discusses how such explorations ‘. . . deepen our understanding of authoritarian practices as cutting across myriad space-times, scales, bodies and geographies both imagined and real. This research could . . . take the form of less conventional analysis of authoritarianism in classrooms, homes, virtual gaming environments or of individuals who dutifully perform their liberal subjectivity’. ¹⁰¹ Authoritarianism can be conceived as a way of being, seeing, thinking, an assemblage of body, mind, place, discursive structures and rhetorical signifiers, symbols and actions, that can occur anywhere, at multiple scales. Affective authoritarianism is a circular operation of power, multidirectional, pulsing through the body and mind via material infrastructures, signs and symbols, songs, lights, prayers, bench presses.

Reflecting on experiences amongst the energetic crowd of the Singaporean church service, or among the gladiators in the gyms, seeking inspiration in the strong-men above (in heaven or on posters on the wall), therefore does a small part to broaden understanding of the diversity of the authoritarian project and its complexity. Importantly, this understanding reveals how authoritarianism seduces, how it can produce and atmospherically-texture space, and how and why even an anti-authoritarian personality (like my own) can, in certain circumstances, become wrapped and enclosed, drawn-into authoritarian moments and experiences. Authoritarianism, in this expanded framing, is not a stable ‘thing’, place or politics, but rather a series of closures and openings which can operate anywhere, not only in so-called ‘authoritarian’ places (like Singapore). Furthermore, I do not fall back upon a universal understanding of freedom, which is contextually understood and interpreted: freedom from what? For what? For whom?

Joy, as I have suggested in this paper, can serve as an affective glue which binds these experiences, places, materials and moments together. Joy has an activating power that can illuminate daily life and instil amplified meaning and resonance into specific experiences in a way that is deeply political. A joyful experience, even one trapped in ‘cruel optimism’ and not necessarily leading to greater freedom (as freedom is classically understood), can nonetheless still be a joyful experience, although the nature of that experience is personal, differentiated, contextual. How the joy takes hold, and what follows from it, which openings or closures then emerge, is circumstantial and contingent.

Everyday authoritarianism, that operation of power which induces discipline, submissiveness, adherence to structure, aggression and fear – can pulse with, and catalyse, joy. This joy, the joy that comes from daily worldmaking of a collective artwork, or ‘oeuvre’, can be dangerous, unstable and cruel, even if it is life-affirming. Joy is a seductive elixir; a serotonin-spiked gateway into the mainstreaming of far-right-authoritarianism. The kind of joy one might feel at church; mosque, temple or after lifting a bar in an impossible way, is a deeply spiritual and ecstatic kind of joy, and yet, it is a joy that comes from directives, orders, commands. Submission to power can, after all, be joyful: just witness the practices and belief systems of those in fundamentalist religions.

The contradiction of desiring one’s own subjugation, or repression, was not lost on Deleuze and Guattari. For them, ‘what is astonishing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike’, ‘. . . but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike’. ¹⁰² To desire under authoritarianism is, as the ethnographic vignettes illustrate, to raise one’s arms in prayer; or raise the barbell while grimacing, under a giant banner that loudly proclaims: pain is weakness leaving the body. In these atmospheres, there is an art-making taking place, albeit one with strict directives. Ordered to find joy through pain, submission, graft and piety, humans are receptive, all the while produced by and producing the spaces around them. Perhaps the potential for joy in these spaces, even a joy that is ‘cruelly-optimistic’, partially helps to explain the contagion of authoritarian phenomena like Trumpism, which will not seem to disappear, as well as the viral growth of Christian nationalism, white nationalism, Hindu nationalism, and other troubling trends and patterns elsewhere in the world.

Through these cases and vignettes, I propose that sometimes overlooked, mundane experiences like weekly religious events and working out in the gym, and the everyday urban spaces and atmospheres they produce and which are produced by them, deserve greater exploration. Political leaders or dramatic events do not emerge from vacuums. Far-right Christianism (as Durham ¹⁰³ frames it) – a secular, cultish religiosity, is spreading because it is joyful, and it is this joy that political leaders and authoritarian populists exploit in their rise to power. The viral spread of gym culture, especially among Generation-Z men ¹⁰⁴ is another pattern worth further scrutiny, especially insofar as the authoritarian far-right makes inroads into these spaces.

Reflexively pausing for a moment: I conclude with a suggestion that returning to an anti-authoritarian political/ideological position remains important. Doing so may be thought of as an ongoing, deliberate project, given the headwinds facing democratic life in many contexts and spaces. Still, it is a project worth continuing. In the meantime, further understandings and critical explorations of authoritarianism’s multifaceted nature is needed in and beyond cultural geography, so that its seeping/creeping tendencies in daily life can be mapped, laying the groundwork for counter-spaces and democratic openings.