In a short 1976 essay titled The Rich Jew on the subject of antisemitism in film Deleuze says the following:

“Oldstyle fascism, however real and powerful it may still be in many countries, is not the real problem facing us today. New fascisms are being born. The old-style fascism looks almost quaint […] compared to the new fascism being prepared for us. All our petty fears will be organized in concert, all our petty anxieties will be harnessed to make micro-fascists of us; we will be called upon to stifle every little thing, every suspicious face, every dissonant voice, in our streets, in our neighborhoods, in our local theaters.” (Deleuze, 2006: 137)

Deleuze is here writing in critique of the banning of the film L’Ombre des anges by Daniel Schmidt’s, and is arguing that the fascism to be feared is not that of the Nazi party, but that which leads us to suppress images of their violence.

What interests me in particular is the notion of the microfascist inside us all. For some time now I’ve been interested in a question on the order of “Why are people often observed to act against their own interests?” because our popular culture seems so replete with examples of this occurring. This concept of microfascism seems to speak, from Deleuze and Guattari’s shared and independent corpuses, to precisely this concern, describing not only a lust for power and domination and a need for rule-following behaviours and general conformity, but a desire that others should also lust after power, want to be dominated, love the rules that confine them, aid in the quashing of non-conformity.

The most salient example that I’ve been able to think of is that we get angry at someone for standing on the wrong side of a London-underground escalator, even if they’re not in our way, we experience a peculiar vitriol because this person has broken the rules.

I’ve been working on a paper that connects this to the notion of the “management guru” within organization studies. What interests me in particular about this genre of writing, which I hope to develop in the paper, is the ways in which the guru’s ability to cultivate and ameliorate anxiety, particularly as they bridge the gap from “management theorist” to “self-help literature or life coach” makes overt plays within and upon the microfascist impulse. Theoretically, the management guru also presents an interesting insight into how far the microfascist impulse can extend, as many- though not all- of these guru’s disguise their pronouncement and advice within a certain rhetoric or discourse of choice, agency, freedom and self-discovery/mastery. That is to say, beyond what I think Deleuze and Guattari think to say, microfascism can come to be disguised as freedom- the freedom to ban a film, to conform, or to follow the rules as a serf.

I’ll keep trying to develop this.