A specter is haunting the world: the increasing prospect of a new totalitarianism under the extended covid response. Unlike the specter of communism, or the specter of “dissent” to communist dictatorship that Václav Havel ironically identified in his groundbreaking essay “The Power of the Powerless,”1 this specter originates from those in power and not from the revolutionary or the powerless.2 And rather than haunting only Europe or Eastern Europe, this specter casts its long shadow across the future of all humanity, such that one wonders how one might plan, if at all, for this future.
The greengrocer routinely puts a sign in his storefront window that reads, “Workers of the World Unite!” He does so, not necessarily because he believes in the semantic content of the slogan, although he may. But he puts the sign in his window because he would become conspicuous by the sign’s absence if he did not. By posting the sign, he consciously or unconsciously seeks to stay out of the crosshairs of severe repression.
The greengrocer’s sign is ideological because its semantic content is “noble” while its semiotic function works in an opposite direction. Its function is to ensure conformity to a system that has nothing to do with the welfare of “the workers.” (Under communism, it is the Marxist true believers who live in “false consciousness.”) The sign is just that—a semiotic syntagm that signals compliance and complicity.
And the sign feeds into a wider “panorama” of compliance and complicity while compelling others to do the same. The greengrocer’s plastering of the sign is a piece within a system that enrolls its subjects in its own administration, subjects who by their participation ensure the participation of others and who together help to constitute post-totalitarianism at large:
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