In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin (1969/Reference Benjamin and Zohn2007) famously invoked a Paul Klee painting. “Angelus Novus,” he wrote:

Questioning the seductive narrative of progress, Benjamin prompts us to acknowledge how we are swept along by the horrors of a destruction that we humans also help to perpetrate, while also suggesting provocatively that the future begets the past. It is as if Benjamin were saying that our narrative efforts at repair presuppose a backward-looking perspective on the calamities that propel us forward, so to speak, back to the future.

Similarly, it is impossible for me to read Ambiguities now without thinking about the Syrian uprising of 2011 that was then yet to come—and about the book that emerged from those exhilarating days of revolutionary energy and looming catastrophe, Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (Reference Wedeen2019). Whereas Ambiguities of Domination (written in 1999) captured the conditions of a durable autocracy maintaining stability through single-party rule, an omnipresent security apparatus, and—most crucially for the book’s purposes—a steady stream of flagrantly fictitious claims about the president, Authoritarian Apprehensions explored additional modes of compliance inducement in changed circumstances—that is, first a decade of neoliberal autocracy and then civil war. The main questions in this transformed setting of the 2000s concerned how the regime was able to bear the brunt of the challenges raised against it while explicating what the Syrian example tells us about the seductions of authoritarianism more generally. In both books, however, I attend closely to how language matters and, in the case of Ambiguities specifically, to how the patently unbelievable rhetoric and symbols of the leader’s “cult of personality” bore far-reaching implications for our understanding of compliance. No one believed of President Hafiz al-Asad (1970–2000) that he was the nation’s “first pharmacist” or that he would “live forever” or win elections with 99.2% of the votes. The hyperbolic rhetoric had become routinized, lending a discernible drabness and asceticism to those years more generally—and leading to widespread fatigue, as Adria Lawrence notes in this symposium. The question that needed to be answered by Ambiguities was why an authoritarian regime would spend scarce resources on a cult of personality whose rituals of obeisance were transparently phony.

The book concluded that Syria’s cult of Hafiz al-Asad operated not to produce belief or emotional commitment—as the oft-invoked concepts of legitimacy, charisma, and hegemony presuppose—but to specify both the form and content of civic obedience. As my commentators all highlight, Ambiguities was an attempt to show how authoritarian politics (indeed, all politics) operate most efficaciously when regimes are able to “economize” on overt coercion. In the Syria of Hafiz al-Asad, citizens’ performances of obedience were not embellishments of a domination independently existing but rather the constitutive dimension of domination itself. Viewed from the perspective of the “disciplinary symbolic,” Asad’s cult served as a disciplinary device, generating a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens acted as if they believed the nonsense. By inundating daily life with instructive symbolism, the regime exercised a subtle yet effective form of power as the cult worked to enforce obedience, induce complicity, isolate Syrians from one another, set guidelines for public speech and behavior, and tire people out—rendering language that had been meaningful patently absurd.

The challenge to Bashar al-Asad’s rule (2000–present) that arose with the uprising in March 2011 is adumbrated in the potentialities for rebellion that I explored in the popular-culture products featured in Ambiguities, as Lawrence also notes. The illicit jokes, tolerated comedy skits, and transgressive cartoons—borrowing from Butler (Reference Butler1993, 75, 181)—“worked the weakness” of the dictatorial system. One advantage of ethnographic research, as Amaney Jamal suggests, is that the immersive quality of fieldwork involves researchers witnessing and participating in everyday life in ways that attune them to phenomena that otherwise might dodge their purview. In my case, it allowed me to see how Syrians under Hafiz al-Asad recognized the disciplinary aspects of the cult while simultaneously devising ways to undermine them. The fact that so many politically critical cartoons, films, and television comedies were published or circulated raised an additional question, however: namely, why a regime would tolerate symbolic affronts to its official claims of omnipotence. This specific question prompted me to ask more generally: To what extent could such individual artistic “victories” be understood as politically effective ways to resist the regime’s politics of as if?

Writing “against the grain” of the scholarly tendency in the 1990s to romanticize resistance, I argued, on the one hand, that these artistic practices counteracted the atomization and isolation that public dissimulation fostered. Whereas seeing others obey isolated individuals in their experience of unbelief, a shared giggle, the popularity of a comedy skit, or the circulation of cartoons and transgressive stories enabled them to recognize that their condition of unbelief was widely shared. Thus, both permitted and prohibited methods of registering resistance could be effective to the extent that they reasserted this widely shared skepticism. In the moment that a joke is told and laughter resounds in the room, people overcome (at least to some extent) the concrete isolation and atomization manufactured by a politics of as if. They affirm to themselves and to others their shared status as unwilling conscripts.

On the other hand—and paradoxically—it is precisely in this shared acknowledgment of involuntary obedience that a cult’s power is laid bare. Or, stated differently and in answer to Ambiguities’ initial question, Asad’s cult was powerful in part because it was unbelievable. Acts of transgression might counteract political atomization and isolation, but they also shored up the cult in its reliance on the external obedience generated through each citizen’s unbelief. Asad’s cult disciplined citizens by occasioning continual demonstrations of external obedience that, unlike good judgment or conviction, depended on a self-conscious submission to authority predicated on not believing. Recognizing the shared conditions of unbelief thus reproduced this self-consciousness without which a politics of as if could hardly be sustained. Such ambiguous conditions of domination may not be optimal for regimes holding on to power but, as Ambiguities showed, they can be coherent and stabilizing. As Žižek (1989/Reference Žižek2008, 30) pointed out, even when people keep their ironical distance, even when they demonstrate that they do not take seriously what they are doing, they are still complying—and compliance is what ultimately counts politically.

Ambiguities is largely about demonstrating how rhetoric and symbols—or the mechanisms of the “disciplinary symbolic”—reproduce political power. In doing so, it not only takes on so-called materialists, who insist that politics are all about material interests and the groups articulating them, but Weberian “ideationalists” as well. One of the book’s aspirations, as Robyn Marasco notes in her commentary, was to unsettle certain Weberian assumptions that are central to comparative politics and parts of political theory by convincing scholars to abandon legitimacy as an especially illuminating explanatory concept for regime durability. And although Marasco rightly points out that Weber often is more nuanced and sophisticated than Weberians tend to allow, recourse to the mushy concept of legitimacy remains a profound problem in social science research. The difficulties with legitimacy begin with the way the term subsumes at least three different meanings: it can connote a moral right to rule; it can serve as a synonym for popularity; and it can mean, following Weber more strictly, a belief in the general appropriateness of a regime, practice, or leader. Even the third definition, perhaps the most widely intended, poses problems. Whose belief? How precisely does a scholar gain access to this putative belief? How, in short, can we know that it is legitimacy that is doing the work being ascribed to it? These conceptual troubles are linked to assumptions embedded in our theories of legitimation: assumptions about the nature of and differences between authoritarianism and democracy, about what belief entails, and about what counts as knowledge about the political world. Studying autocratic rule in particular has taught me that regimes can do without legitimacy in all three senses of the term—and often do not even attempt to cultivate it.

Although it is most frequently on political–ethical grounds that Weber is correctly criticized for attempting to use legitimacy—whose signaling functions are about moral authority and external judgment—as a technical term, as a “pure label, neutral with respect to the speaker’s position and commitment” (Pitkin 1972/Reference Pitkin1993, 281), my concerns were more methodological and epistemological.Footnote ¹ Methodologically, defining “legitimacy” in Weberian terms as “belief in the appropriateness of the system” or that which is “considered binding” begs the question: Considered binding by whom? By what means can a researcher know what people consider binding or which populations do and do not? Few scholars invoking legitimacy ask themselves these questions or perceive them as in any way thorny. Yet, if a cult’s flagrantly fictitious claims of regime powers, for example, are demonstrably not doing the work of cultivating belief, applying the term in such a context can only obscure the mechanisms of social control most in need of scrutiny. Closely related is the epistemological challenge: the general understanding is that subjects can be regarded as considering a government or a law legitimate if they act as if they do. As I contend in Ambiguities, these views fail to distinguish between public dissimulation of loyalty or belief, on the one hand, and genuine loyalty or belief on the other. That citizens routinely reproduce a regime’s formulaic slogans, for example, indicates mainly that a regime is capable of enforcing obedience on the level of outward behavior. At the same time, this does not mean that citizens under autocratic rule cannot be devoted to the regime, attached to (if not actually believing) even its patently absurd claims. It is meant to say that invoking legitimacy to these ends forecloses attention to the various ways in which language is operating, including how it can be used to secure order independently of belief.

The Trump era has made it more important than ever to think beyond the concept of legitimacy. Ambiguities was arguably too focused on cognition and questions of belief and unbelief, ignoring affective investments that also are central to politics, to consider one of Lawrence’s provocative suggestions underscored as well in Marasco’s comments. As I show in Authoritarian Apprehensions, it can be fruitful to probe questions related to less strictly cognitive phenomena such as political ambivalence—the toggle between desires for change and attachments to order. In the United States, we might want to explore the rage that motors white supremacy and efforts to revitalize patriarchal control. We might focus on the rapaciousness of capitalism, class contradictions, and the ways that ordinary citizens are affectively tethered to practices no longer doing affirmative work for them (see Berlant’s Reference Berlant2011 take on “cruel optimism”). In relation to Trump specifically, we might examine how ludic aspects of leadership can be lethal, both undermining the moral authority of the office and regenerating it by prompting longings for what is not to be had. Moreover, moral authority (one version of legitimacy) is only one of the possible descriptions of these lamentations of lack. Neither do the other connotations of legitimacy, in terms of popular support or “belief in the general appropriateness” of a leader, capture how Trump’s populism produces an intense identification with the candidate’s/president’s emotional freedom, as Berlant (Reference Berlant2016) and Schuster (Reference Schuster2017) stated it. Concepts like legitimacy block our access to the libidinal charge and fantasy registers needed to understand matters such as Trump’s popular appeal and his titillating emancipation from presidential gravitas, the rule of law, diplomatic decorum, the need to respect facts, or even literacy (cf. “covfefe”). Without the language of ideology critique, Ambiguities was not particularly good at helping us think through such examples of fantasy investment, although Lawrence’s intervention does gesture toward these concerns, so perhaps they were already in the book in nascent form. I did not yet have the familiarity I needed with long-standing debates in cultural Marxism, post–Louis Althusser, to address them adequately. In any case, the book, in part through its limitations (some of which are noted by James C. Scott and others by Marasco), helped me get there.

In addition to the book’s foregrounding of the ways in which rhetoric and symbols induce compliance and its critique of legitimacy, Ambiguities interrogates the distinction between materialist and ideational orientations, as Elisabeth Wood suggests. In the new preface in the 2015 edition of Ambiguities, I discuss the way the book invites a dialectical rethinking of this split, which has informed so much of Western thought from philosophy to physics to political science. The book favors the view in which ideas are inscribed in material practices (to invoke Althusser Reference Althusser and Brewster1971) while viewing material practices as always already structured by and laden with ideas. (For example, there can be no such thing as a police force in the absence of ideas of enforcement and punishment; and the practice of schooling cannot exist without an understanding of what counts as pedagogy.) Ambiguities remains an invitation to analyze political life without reimposing the split. The material and the symbolic may be analytically distinct, but there is a materiality to the symbolic and a symbolism to the material. An analysis of language and other symbolic systems with an emphasis on their materiality and structuring effects is what I have sought to produce in Ambiguities and my subsequent work.

Ambiguities also challenged explanations citing “preference falsification” because this seductive rational-choice formulation seemed to get only half of the story right. Works celebrating preference falsification, as Jamal points out, on the whole eschewed the engaged fieldwork that makes it possible for a scholar to grasp forms of ambiguity and ambivalence (which are also at least in part in plain view), as well as recognize that people can be both aware of and subject to the structuring logic of preference falsification. That people make a practice of falsifying their preferences does not mean that they are unable to gauge what others think; citizens routinely resort to various signaling mechanisms to make life less disoriented and anxiety inducing than scholars such as Kuran (Reference Kuran1991) suggested. Scott’s (Reference Scott1992) also oft-cited distinction between hidden and public transcripts makes some sense, as Christian Davenport and Jamal point out in this symposium, but the bifurcation, I argued, was exaggerated (as Wood notes)—again, with much of what is supposedly “hidden” also readily observable.

Often by way of analyses of compliance, my work continues my commitment to think politically about the potential that societies have for political transformation. Although it is true that the iterative nature of social control places at risk the very practices through which it operates, much important transgressive, agentive work falls short of being politically transformative—which is not to say that it is not significant in its own right as an instance of political vitality, registering where politics resides and how we cope and flail in our efforts to change things, nevertheless stretching genres in meaningful ways. Rather than overemphasize either agency or structure, we need to think dialectically about their relation. Moreover, I consider Scott’s gentle critique of Ambiguities to imply as much—taking into account the important forms of irreverence, “fissures” (his word), social-movement activism, protests, and alternative world-making practices with liberatory potential, while also analyzing the formidable challenges to effecting social and political change.

Reading Ambiguities retrospectively identifies its ongoing relevance as well as certain limitations. Three points seem worth making. First, the book’s argument continues to have purchase on questions of both authoritarian resilience and vulnerability for the reasons given and tackled in Lawrence’s intervention. It was never my claim that disciplinary-symbolic power stifles resistance indefinitely, as she nicely states it. On the contrary, the book highlights forms of transgression that can serve as possible incubators for an oppositional consciousness to develop.

Second, the challenges posed by Syrian revolutionaries, initially through largely peaceful protests, registered the ideological importance of image-making for regime durability. However, as Authoritarian Apprehensions (2019) makes clear, the success of Bashar al-Asad’s rhetoric and symbols was premised on a more sophisticated image world and more varied forms of political uptake than was the case with Hafiz al-Asad’s cult specifically. For example, it was not uncommon for activists to imagine in early 2011 that their calls for change would be embraced by the regime. Initial demonstrations demanded not the toppling of the regime but the implementation of institutional reforms. Claims were made even in the first months of protest, with apparent conviction, that the president and first lady were well-intentioned advocates of transformation who were being constrained by more ruthless family members. In place of the flagrantly fictious claims and hagiography of Hafiz al-Asad’s cult, in other words, there emerged—in the first decade of Bashar’s rule prior to the uprising—a partially successful public portrayal of a young, enlightened, reform-minded, and chic first family. In place of the outmoded and wooden vocabulary of the old Ba’ath party was the celebration of first-family sophistication and urbanity.

This ideal of the moral neoliberal ruling couple, disseminated in glossy magazines for a globally oriented Syrian and European audience, also found expression in local advertising campaigns, television shows, schools, so-called civil-society initiatives, and cultural events pitched at the local level. As a vision, it created a new basis for public dissimulation: for an acting as if the glamorous neoliberal autocratic regime was not personalistic, patronage-based, kleptocratic, and violent; for acting as if its lip service to individual voluntarism and civic empowerment was actually a promise of a politically acceptable moral solution to the problems of governance in Syria, which the corrupt, tired, crude, overtly brutal developmentalist party state of old had not. It is important, however, that the regime did not rely on public dissimulation alone. Indeed, a key area that Authoritarian Apprehensions focuses on was how the regime’s new lexicon generated ambivalence, complicating the straightforward assessments of belief and unbelief within Ambiguities’ relatively narrow concern with analyzing the patently spurious rhetoric. A broader, more ambitious account of the neoliberal autocratic discourse under Bashar reveals how people can be both invested and disgusted. They can know and not know something at the same time. They can know very well that a practice they undertake routinely has something dubious about it but nevertheless continue doing it. In other words, alongside persisting modes of public dissimulation came new ideological strategies for managing conflict and contradiction; for displacing anxieties onto a fantasy Other (e.g., rural country bumpkins or Sunni gangs or foreign rabble rousers); and for producing the everyday ideological circumstances of disavowal, or what Mannoni (Reference Mannoni1985) called the “I know very well and yet nevertheless…” of political existence. In contrast to the relatively simplistic strategy of acting as if, there appeared—as previously noted—a complicated form of citizen ambivalence. For the first decade of Bashar al-Asad’s rule, the fiction of impending reforms—in reality, forever deferred—provided an alibi for status quo conventionality.

Third, with the reemergence under Bashar of farcical so-called presidential elections, the image universe in Syria is beginning to look more like the cult of the father. As Ambiguities tracked, Hafiz al-Asad’s cult has gradually become a constituent element in the fabric of political life. It has evolved and, even under Bashar, continues to wax and wane. As underscored in Authoritarian Apprehensions, the sophisticated techniques through which the regime’s neoliberal autocratic messages were aestheticized in the first decade of Bashar’s rule did not eliminate party rallies or cultlike practices altogether—but they did work to relativize them. In the (uncontested) 2007 election, for example (i.e., four years before the uprising and seven years after Bashar came to power), the president supposedly garnered 97.6% of the vote. The ridiculous outcome seemed at the time an especially blatant “blast from the past,” but the demonstrations of outward allegiance required by the regime were noticeably confusing in a way that they were not in the 1980s and 1990s. The displays of enthusiasm for Bashar al-Asad’s victory did suggest a wellspring of support and an excess of emotion—an attachment that arguably continues to characterize committed loyalists and to inform, at least to some extent, the distinct ambivalence experienced by many others who remain unsure or fearful of what an alternative to the existing regime might look like. It is, nevertheless, worth emphasizing that in 2021, as opposed to 2007, cultlike events such as phony elections are being revived under conditions that did not obtain in 2007—namely, circumstances of more profound disenchantment: the economy is in shambles; the promise of reforms is transparently empty; and the veneer of a kinder, gentler despotism is stripped off, revealing a naked will to power with the corruption and the atrocities that attend it. I suspect the regime’s efforts to re-instantiate its power through practices such as bogus elections will occasion not only enforced obedience and induced complicity but also new possibilities for transgression and resistance—ultimately honoring what in 2011 were hitherto unheard voices of fury, piety, and camaraderie. What will come out of the grief, anger, and sorrow remains to be seen, but renewed efforts to market Syria as a tourist destination and rehabilitate the image of the first family have thus far proved disappointing (for the regime). These efforts are marked by the failure to attract major foreign direct investment and by the return of cultlike practices the efficacy of which, as one mechanism among many coercive modalities of social control, remains—in this era of civil-war devastation and pandemic horror—acutely vulnerable to subversion and novel forms of irreverence.

Let me conclude by expressing how humbled I am by the scholarly attention that my colleagues have devoted to Ambiguities in this anniversary symposium. Their careful readings and intellectual generosity are a gift. I also am gratified by the imaginative provocations and resonances that the book appears to have generated—from citations of Étienne de la Boétie and Paul Dunbar (Davenport), to invocations of Jean-Paul Sartre and Ned Cobb (Scott); from fitting examples from the Frankfurt School (Marasco) to the equally pertinent and wildly suggestive invocations of Burger King and Trump’s America (Lawrence); and the wide array of literatures on political violence (Wood) and behaviorist methods (Jamal) to which Ambiguities attempts to speak. Thank you, colleagues.