Personality Cults from a Communicative Standpoint

Abstract

Drawing upon a wide variety of personality cults in religion, culture and politics from Ancient Egypt to our times, the author attempts to present a summary view of this phenomenon from a communicative standpoint. Personality cult is seen as an attribution of universal and eternal socio-cultural significance to certain beings, messages and interaction scenarios in defiance of changes in and diversity of the surrounding reality. The communicative implementation of such a cult involves the suspension of some of the most basic mechanisms of social coordination. Thus, deification of political, cultural or religious leaders eliminates the subordination of individuals to their social roles, whereas canonization severs the ties of certain selected texts with the contexts of their production and reception. Last, but not least, random signaling between the subject of cultic adoration and his or her subordinates runs counter the standard cooperation rules in interaction (‘turn-taking’). Illustrating these points, the article points out at specific communicative pathologies accompanying personality cults and jeopardizing the stability of their socio-cultural environments.

1. Introduction

It is not immediately obvious why anyone would want to add his or her two cents to the seemingly boundless discussion of personality cults. However, a close look at the body of work featuring the term in question offers a few reasons for dealing with the seemingly worn-out subject. Upon close observation, the wide and steady stream of publications devoted to the cults of personality breaks down into many smaller creeks running parallel to each other. Not only the cults of gods, kings/queens, saints, heroes, luminaries and dictators are studied apart from each other, but the specialists on, say, Ancient Egypt, Roman Empire, Christian religion, Middle Age monarchy and twentieth-century totalitarian politics rarely look across time periods, areas and forms of cultic adoration (for notable exceptions, see Frazer [1890] 1994; Brehier and Batiffol 1920; Bloch [1924] 1983; Seltman 1953; Kantorowicz 1958, pp. 180–87; Gagé 1961, pp. 47–68; Tucker 1971; Valensise 1986; Zobermann 2000; Gordon 2001; Auffarth 2003; Assmann and Strohm 2010). It seems like some preliminary contextualization of political personality cults among the related phenomena in religion and arts might facilitate interchanges within the scattered field.

Furthermore, the persistent vagueness of the term, invented by Karl Marx in 1877 as a negative “asymmetrical concept” (Blos 1919, p. 286; Koselleck 1989, pp. 212–15; Plamper 2004, p. 25; Kirchner 2011, p. 883), calls for some terminological clarification. To date, following in Marx’s footsteps, quite a number of scholars have used the word combination for the condescending othering of religious, cultural and political backwardness (see analysis in Zakharine 2020). This state of affairs has led to the questioning of the term’s scholarly value (Odesskiī and Fel’dman 2004, p. 77; Apor 2017, pp. 27–30). A case for sticking to the old terminology, despite all its flaws, could arguably be made if a certain branch of scholarship was capable of overcoming disciplinary boundaries and socio-cultural biases (see Pittman 2017, pp. 535–36). In my opinion, communication science, integrated into social systems theory, stands a good chance of cleansing the notion of personality cults from its fuzziness and implicit arrogance (for the first communicative approaches to the topic, see L. Marin 1983; Burke 1992; Wintrobe 1998; Buschel 2004; Rolf 2006; Riall 2007; Kirchner 2011; Leese 2011; Plamper 2012; Halder 2013; Kolb and Vitale 2016; Postoutenko and Stephanov 2020a, 2020b; Zakharine 2020). In the past, communication and interaction studies have been instrumental in explaining socio-historical changes, while steering clear from ideological generalizations. Thus, both the formation of empires and their downfall were convincingly related to the relative strength of networks exchanging information between the center and the periphery: the vast and diverse super-states were reasonably stable as long as they could timely process both commands and feedbacks by means of efficient symbolic codes (such as writing), channels with adequate throughput capacity and networks with sufficiently wide coverage (Neumann [1942] 1970; Innis [1950] 2007, p. 137; McLuhan 1967, p. 40; Inose 1972, pp. 117–18; Krippendorff 1986, p. 64; Flusser 1996, pp. 27–28). The model of imperial communication jointly created in these studies appears to be valid for such disparate societies as Ancient Rome, Mughal India and Nazi Germany (Junge and Postoutenko 2021, p. 906), so I do not see why media and communication science should fail scholars in the study of the closely related phenomenon of personality cults. In any case, the studies of personality cults in broad spatio-temporal perspectives have helped to track down their genealogy (see, for instance, Cohn 1970; Kantorowicz 1958). The further expansion and generalization of this approach on the basis of the ideologically neutral methodology will soner or later shed the light on the working mechanisms of personality cults across historical epochs, regions and socio-cultural systems.

Of course, a short article of a single author could do little more than offer some provisional scaffolding for the future studies, drawing upon some empirical findings and examining previously outlined hypotheses.

2. Creation of Personality Cults: Deification

Personality cults could be understood as the selection and promotion of certain living beings whose presence, activities and artefacts are attributed universal and eternal socio-cultural significance. This allegedly absolute value is deemed invariant to its surroundings: neither the unstoppable time nor the boundless variety of the environment are claimed to have any bearing upon the meanings generated in conjunction with the objects of personality cults. In this vein, the distinctive features of Joseph Stalin’s cult of personality are his alleged presence in every part of USSR, his projected life expectancy beyond all Soviet citizens and his ability to find a key for every lock (Postoutenko 2020, pp. 171–72, 179).

These examples allegorize the inescapable paradox of personality cults, which, in practical terms, might be called deification: the living being immanently present (i.e., sensually perceptible) in a certain specific location for some naturally limited period of time is ascribed transcendent significance extending beyond all temporal and spatial limitations (Luhmann 2000, p. 77). This ascription loses much of its verve if applied to dead objects, distant physical systems or simple creatures uncapable of grasping their own distinctiveness. The sun, snakes or stones could well be objects of cultic adoration (Weissenborn 1904, p. 34; Nakamura 1992, pp. 27–28; van der Toorn 1997), but their observable fluctuations are far too dependent on the respective environments to allow for any significant interplay between the abstract and the immediate, let alone its strategic deployment in the social field (Schrödinger 1968, p. 44; Luhmann 1987, p. 197). Simply put, deification under normal circumstances requires at least some sort of dialectic relation between the discernible independent behaviour of a single organism hic et nunc and its compulsory implications urbi et orbi. The reflexive awareness of the cult should not necessarily antedate deification, but could hardly be absent altogether: at 14, Jiddu Krishnamurti was not yet convinced by Charles Leadbitter and other leading theosophists that he was about to save the mankind, but in a few years the future world guru felt fit for the purpose and acted accordingly (Williams 2004, p. 46). All things considered, the chances of non-human individuals to be deified appear slim, which may be due to the socio-cultural conventions regarding individuality rather than the actual functioning of human systems (Gilbert et al. 2012).

Before discussing the special relation between transcendence and immanence in personality cults, it is worth casting a brief glance upon their production in natural and socio-cultural systems. Generally speaking, if the scope of variations in the syntagmatically ordered successions of systemic states is too small to be grasped from within each individual standpoint, the system would be perceived as largely invariant to time and space, and occasionally spotted alterations would acquire the status of anomalies. Thus, the exact transmission of genetic information from one generation of a species to another is commonly seen as the norm, whereas the mutations of DNA, harmful or not, are brandmarked as “typos” (Pray 2008; Flusser 1996, pp. 309–10). Hegel’s contradistinction between the “unchanging” natural law—the law “as such” (überhaupt)—and the fickle “legal law” transposes this antonymy into the social realm: whereas Naturgesetze are claimed to be always “right” (richtig) and sort of evergreen, Rechtsgesetze are subject to the mortals’ limited worldview and general human falibility (Hegel [1821] 1996, p. 16).

In social systems, the transcendence of power has hardly ever been a merely quantitative extension of its immanence: even in pre-historical hereditary kingship, the ruler’s change normally implied the handover of communication channels linking an incumbent to the everlasting higher spirits (Mair 1964, pp. 180–81). Later on, the otherworldly dimension of the highest political authority was incorporated into the job description of a monarch: already the Zoroastrian xᵛarənah (‘glory’) could be read as the divine source of a king’s infallibility (Boyce 1975, p. 66), and Alexander the Great’s attempts at enforcing the divine charisma of kings in the provinces were clearly aimed at decoupling the transcendent foundations of kingship from local circumstances and personal qualities of ruling individuals (Boak 1916, p. 296). At least since 13th century, the relation between the transcendence and the immanence of princely rule acquired in theology and legal scholarship decidedly platonic traits: the stainless and everlasting dignitas of the crown was contrasted by legal scholars and theologists to the fleeting, fallible humanness of its bearer, and the defence of the first from the second in medieval English courts was not unknown (Kantorowicz 1957, p. 370; Jussen 2009, p. 106). For the modern reader, this neat dichotomy resembles a textbook sociological differentiation between roles and persons (Luhmann 2003, p. 41): the social order is considered stable as long as the performance of major societal functions does not depend on the performers’ individual traits (Dahrendorf 1971, p. 33; for a general perspective see also Luckmann 1979, p. 296; Atlan 1984, p. 115). In this sense, the dignity of a crown, a school district or a public transportation company does not depend on the tastes, habits and talents of kings, teachers and drivers: governing, teaching and moving people remain honourable occupations even if the postholders are not up to their tasks. Perhaps the clearest formulation of this idea is to be found in The Leopard of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, where Ciccio Màlvica—a self-appointed spokesman of the 19th century Sicilian nobility—is credited with the following defiant statement: “A single sovereign may not be up to his task, but the monarchic idea remains the same—it is “cleansed from people (svincolata dalle persone)”. Tomasi di Lampedusa ([1957] 2002, p. 14). In democracies, whose secular version of transcendence elevated voting to the status of natural law (Sozen 2019), the same indifference to the immanent representation of dignitas was expressed by Walt Whitman after the U.S. presidenaital election in November 1884: “the heart of it not in the chosen—//the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing” (Whitman [1884] 2008; compare Luhmann 2002, p. 369). The last example highlights the dream of perfect political succession resting on the unfailing institutional foundations: albeit the leap from ‘before’ to ‘after’ is a crucial step in making political successions work (Luhmann 1987, p. 388), its informational value, ideally, should be kept to a minimum.

To be sure, this seductively simple hierarchy faced a barrage of criticism from the start. Already Plato’s pupil Aristotle was reluctant to accept the very subordination of the imperfect matter to the perfect form (Colingwood [1945] 1960, p. 68), and modern social sciences insist on the circular causality between types and tokens, roles (crowns) and persons (kings/queens) (see Sargent and Beardsley 1960, pp. 66–70; Goffman 1961, p. 139; Turner 1978, pp. 1–23; Argyle et al. 1981, p. 177; Kaufman and Umpleby 2018, p. 4). Fabrizio Corbera, Màlvica brother-in-law and confidant, clearly had the upper hand (and the last word) in the argument with his relative, pointing out that the kings falling short of expectations would eventually damage the idea of monarchy as such (Tomasi di Lampedusa [1957] 2002, p. 15). The belief in the ultimate wisdom of political transcendence was further undermined by the unstable and confused mechanisms enabling the rotation of divinely or ortherwise selected chief executives. For all the paeans to the sacred invincibility of hereditary monarchy (or democracy), coupled with the occasionally warm invitation for the political opponent to partake in rotation—“have their turn” (Churchill [1941] 1974, p. 6403)—the instability at transition points from one ruler to another has been quite common (Kurrild-Klitgaard 2000, pp. 63–84; Boureau 2006, p. 25; Kokkonen and Sundell 2014, p. 440; Márquez 2017, p. 126). Given these formidable uncertainties in mind, the authority lent to the transcendental framework of personal power is all the more remarkable: thus, most of the definitions of tyranny coined after the rise of democracy in Antiquity stress the violation of the term limits, popular will or other general rules of leader selection (Schmitt [1921] 1994, p. 19; D. V. J. Bell 1975, pp. 49–50; Perlmutter 1981, pp. 1–2). Still, the perpetually contested primacy of the transcendent in securing the foundations of political leadership resulted in the sporadic personality cults of empowered individuals. It could be now worthwhile to go over the most productive scenarios of deification laying the foundations of such cultic veneration.

It has been mentioned before that deification upsets the relations between the transcendent significance of executive political roles and the immanent presence of individuals personifying them. Shaky from the start in non-cultic personal rule (Roth 1968, p. 195; Jackson and Rosberg 1984; Guliyev 2011), the dominance of the everlasting and universal abstract roles over their local, sensually perceptible embodiments is virtually turned upside down in personality cults: while the inimitable traits of an object of adoration are considered essential for the power execution, its official designation becomes accidental, secondary and, in some cases, easily replaceable (Ursprung 2010, p. 153). For example, the common characterization of Queen Victoria as the “mother, wife and queen”—in that order—was clearly, if allegorically, promoting personal affection toward the closest relatives as the foundation of successful imperial rule (Plunkett 2020, p. 81; for other similar examples see Blakemore 1988, pp. 31–33; Postoutenko and Stephanov 2020b, p. 254). Alternatively, the bare masculinity of the early Benito Mussolini and Vladimir Putin, stripped of official titles, household responsibilities and (some) clothing, was sold to the more alienated followers impervious to family tales (Eatwell 2006, p. 152; Sperling 2016; Swan 2016). The lavish celebrations of ruler’s birthdays as national holidays in Ancient Rome, Victorian Great Britain, imperial and Nazi Germany, Socialist Yugoslavia and Vietnam, Communist Romania, the Soviet Union and late-20th-century Liberia might be another example of inalienable personal feature elevated to the status of the foundational state ritual (Ennker 1987, p. 543; Kieh 1988, p. 15; Kraaz 1993, p. 47; Gabanyi 2000; Herz 2003, p. 51; Sretenovic and Puto 2004, p. 211; Wieviorka 2010, pp. 160–61; Dror 2016, p. 448; Giloi 2020, pp. 107–14; M. Marin 2020, p. 220; Plunkett 2020, p. 66; Postoutenko 2020, pp. 187, 191; Stephanov 2020, p. 65; Tikhomirov 2020, p. 127; Gill 2021). The most consistent inversion of type-token relation could probably be registered in non-hereditary autocracies: in the political careers of Nicolae Ceaușescu and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the endurance of a single individual at the helm of a state was favourably contrasted to the turnover of his political roles, which were all of limited importance and duration (Joppien 2020, p. 243; M. Marin 2020, p. 218).

Expectedly, this turnaround of transcendence and immanence in the composition of political leadership has often been accompanied by the respective reassignment of their attributes. For instance, beginning with the reign of Augustus in Rome, the worshipped leaders were quite often considered eternal and universal during their lifetime, and it was this property of the chosen individuals that conferred timelessness and totality upon the Pax Romana (Charlesworth 1936, p. 123; Instinsky 1942, pp. 317–18; Étienne 1986, p. 445; Balbuza 2014, pp. 49–66). In a similar vein, the rule- or custom-based heredity securing legitimacy via institutional channels was often replaced by selective inventive genealogy, based on personal likeness (real or staged) with the prominent deified individuals of the past: depending on crcumstances, the lacking or deficient pedigree was borrowed either straight from the otherworldly realm (Augustus portrayed as Jupiter) or metonymically inferred on the basis of the past successful deifications (Bokassa I imitating Napoleon I, see Ward 1933; O’Toole 1983). This linear ordering was accompanied by attributions of specific superhuman properties the individual objects of cultic veneration: the list included the abilities to stop running elephants (Emperor Jahangir), offer instant solultions for all imaginable problems on the spot (Mao Tse-tung, Ceaușescu and Hugo Chávez), set standards for cultural and economic goods (Ceaușescu and Wilhelm II), summarily fulfill the national ideals of all times (Mátyás Rákosi), predict the future (Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, M obutu Sese Seko and Francisco Franco), possess all thinkable knowledge (Emperor Jahangir and Joseph Stalin), reign over the whole universe (Elisabeth I), heal the sick by touch (Vespasian, Henry IV, Charles II and Alexander I) and even live longer than any of their followers (Joseph Stalin; see Bloch [1924] 1983, p. 614; Rougier 1959, p. 614; Gandhi 1975, p. 47; Hasler 1980, pp. 482–83; Ziethen 1994, p. 182; Belsey and Belsey 1995, p. 12; Apor 2009, p. 55; Tarasova 2009, p. 24; Anooshahr 2020, p. 56; Giloi 2020, p. 109; M. Marin 2020, p. 226; Márquez 2020, p. 31; Postoutenko 2020, p. 179).

To be sure, the task of confining lofty transcendent properties of cultic rule to the beings of flesh and blood, however extraordinary, has been anything but easy (Nilsson 1978, p. 298): the ability to reach out to the distant past and future, make universally valid judgments or perform magic tricks was sitting incongruously with familial lovingness. As a result, many, if not most, images of the cultic personalities were heterogeneous combinations of acquired otherworldly transcendence and retained down-to-earth immanence (Zakharine 2020, p. 13; Giloi 2020, p. 107; Postoutenko 2020, p. 174): for all his tireless self-promotion in the “new” media (Kohlrausch 2009), the last German Emperor was for some of his admirers first and foremost “the most personal personality (die persöhnlichste Persöhnlichkeit,” see Mann [1914] 2021, pp. 138, 142). (Even before Wilhelm II applied this formulation to Jesus (Mann [1914] 2021, p. 320), it popped up in Hegelianistic references to the Christian God revealing His universal divinity through particular humanity (see Michelet 1852, p. 118)).

Depending on context and customs, this binary could be played out in public sphere in two distinct ways. The first scenario, close to—but by no means identical with—“the king’s two bodies” (Kantorowicz 1957), consisted of staging and, whenever applicable, perpetually reproducing in the media the face-to-face interactions between rulers and their subjects on equal terms (chatting, parading, working together, etc.) concurrently with the followers’ deferential upholding of the leaders’ unsurpassed greatness (from ceremonial uses of oversized portraits and insignia to overblown praise and applause). Alexander I’s patient and apparently cordial conversations with ordinary subjects, Joseph Stalin’s humble marching with workers (on a photomontage poster) or Adolf Hitler’s meal with soldiers at the field kitchen ran more or less parallel to the magnificent fireworks surrounding Alexander’s monogram, Stalin’s gigantic monuments at squares and memorials and Hitler’s deus-ex-machina-like descent from the skies to the Nuremberg Party Rally at the beginning of Leni Riefenstahl’s staged documentary Triumph of the Will (Stephanov 2020, pp. 66–77; Postoutenko 2020, pp. 176–77). The second option of consecutively combining the otherworldly and the down-to-earth images in the performance of the same cultic personality worked best with the unscrupulous (or desperate) chancers capable of self-invention: the list of examples could stretch all the way from Caligula (who switched from humility to self-deification) to Erdoğan (who proceeded from the role of a conversation partner eagerly feigning interactional parity to that of a confrontational tribune angrily reproaching and threatening his absent interlocutors; see, respectively Márquez 2020, p. 36; and Joppien 2020, p. 239).

Another obvious difficulty lies in the solipsistic curtailment of role transcendence in its subordination to personal immanence: how could a temporal and spatial infinity of a ruler be packed in—let alone derived from—his or her finitness? In early religion and art, the reflexive statements of cultic individuals were often offset by pointing finger at therelated otherworldly agencies: whereas Jesus in the Bible insisted on his coming in his father’s name (John 5.43; see Postoutenko 2013, pp. 146–47), Horace’s unashamed self-promotion to eternity—exegi monumentum aere perennius—was said to be ordered by the Muses (Hor. Od. 3.30, 4.8). However, many cultural, religious and political leaders were ready to embrace cultic solipsism more openly (Schulz-Buschhaus 1998, pp. 152–53). In the concurrent version of deification, the objects of cult were frequently spotted venerating their own transcendent hypostases: whereas Ramses II did not mind worshipping his own image, Joseph Stalin scolded his critics for their (laughable) attempts to precise “Stalin’s formulations” (Kantorowicz 1957, p. 498; Postoutenko 2019, p. 371). As for the consecutive scenario of cultic (self-)empowerment, the rulers in question, in fact, were acting as emergent autopoetic systems, creating more semantic organization out of less (Padgett and Powell 2012): in self-coronation rituals, pervasive in Russia after 18th century and best-known in the case of Napoleon I, the venerated leaders were effectively generating divine preordainment with their bare hands (Chernyavsky 1969, pp. 89–91; Aurell i Cardona 2020, p. 299). Truth be told, albeit Napoleon’s self-coronation greatly contributed to his personality cult, the recurrent autogenetic manipulations of Russian tsars in most cases failed to establish any noticeable cultic adoration (Hughes 2012, p. 147). This state of affiars once again underscores the heightened probability of deification at the points of potential risk for the well-oiled rotation mechanisms: whereas the power of roles over persons playing them remains strong, this likelihood, however, fails to turn into certainty. Inversely, deification could well be a starting point for the “routinization of charisma” resulting in more or less orderly executive successions with or without personality cults, as was the case of many tyrannies from early Ancient Greece to North Korea (Weber [1919] 1972, p. 142; Perlmutter 1981, pp. 1–2; Tertitskiy 2015).

3. Sustainment of Personality Cults: Canonization

In the discussion of deification above, the power agents—kings, presidents and other magicians—effectively worked as messages taken out of context and sent across the social systems in which they belonged. Rather than faithfully impersonating their executive roles, the deified individuals interiorized the ostensible transcendence of their noble offices, styling themselves as unique embodiments of absolute power and infallible rightness. Many early personality cults worked reasonably well without external communicative devices: some Egyptian pharaohs and Mesopotanian kings were deified without a noticeable recourse to any special texts (Assmann 2001, pp. 57, 137; Shupak 2001, p. 545). However, more often than not, deification is accompanied by a rather similar communicative practice, which migh be called canonization. It could be described as the social selection and promotion of messages invariant to the state of the system they come from, including its internal (other senders and recipients, habitual codes, preexisting messages, preferred channels, etc.) and external (time and space) parameters (Postoutenko 2016, p. 204). Generally speaking, canonization is a legitimate and popular practice in its own right, often detectable in socio-cultural areas far away from personality cults: such as a profoundly and pointedly decontextualized genre as proverbs survived and flourished across cultural traditions, languages and political systems without ever relying on any deified agencies (Mieder 2004, p. XII; Tannen 2007, pp. 50–51). Still, in many cases, neither deification nor canonization is strong enough to secure the cultic veneration of leaders and texts in a changing, diverse world (J. Goody 1998, p. 15).

The relations between deified individuals and canonized messages varied depending on socio-cultural systems in the background, epochs and pure chance (Dović and Helgason 2016, p. 75). Indeed, the objects of personality cults could form the content of the respective messages (Jesus in the Bible), be their authors (Homer with the Odyssey and Iliad) or work somewhere in between, turning non-encoded—“Divine”—energy flows into signs (Prophet Muhammad in the Qur’ân; see Postoutenko 2020, p. 164). Although digital codes allowing for a long-term preservation of information could be seen as a necessary precondition for canonization (von Neumann [1945] 1992, pp. 1–4; Luhmann 1987, p. 223; Hahn 2000, p. 241), the non-interactive media of writing and print are probably not essential: the literal meaning of śruti, the Hinduist analog Scripture, is “the heard [word]” (Colpe 1987, pp. 81–82), and the frantic speeches of one of the Sybils—the famous female oracles at Delphi—were credited by Heraklitus with a shelf life of 1000 years (DK B92).

It is easy to register further similarities between the semantics of canonized messages and the significance of its deified correlates. In both cases, the paradigmatic presuppositions proscribing the semantics of individual tokens were suppressed in favor of their alleged transcendental significance: although the rules of creating and perceiving epic poems, hagiographic recollections and theological pamphlets could hardly be more different, Homer’s heroic poems, the Bible and the Qur’ân were, at various times, regarded as the sources of all thinkable knowledge (Stern 2003, pp. 237–38; Assmann and Assmann 1987, pp. 20–21). Furthemore, for all their periodical reshuffles, protracted formation phases and muddled origins (Flesseman-van Leer 1964, pp. 404–5, 416–17; Ritter 1987, p. 95; Goldberg 1987, pp. 203–4; Zymner 1998, p. 35; Stordalen 2007, pp. 17, 19), canonic messages were often expressly treated as sensually perceptible manifestations of their absolute significance: the alleged ability of the Torah scrolls containing the name of God to spread sanctity through tactile contact with its readers exhibited the same conflation of symbolic, iconic and indexical codes as the French royal thaumaturgy (Friedman 1993, p. 126; Lim 2010, p. 514; Taylor 2012, p. 294; Barton 2017, pp. 86–87). Last, but not least, the emancipation of canonized messages from any traditions, environmental causes, communicative contingencies and even respective messengers gave a mighty boost to their predominantly autogenetic interpretations within respective socio-cultural systems. In this sense, it is only fitting that the Qur’ân effectively proclaims its own canonicity (Boisliveau 2011, p. 166).

The neat structural parallelism between canonization and deification should not, however, distract from the complexity of their interrelations in personality cults. A vast majority of the aforecited (and other) studies devoted to the production and use of canon draw upon religious and cultural communication. In those social subsystems, the relations between transcendence and immanence are usually markedly different from politics: whereas the abstract significance of the venerated individuals is continually upheld in canonic messages and derivative meta-messages, their immediate presence either remains temporarily suspended until some sort of Second Coming (religion) or has been canceled altogether due to the inavoidable mortality of the messengers (art). To be sure, many religious narratives emphasize the interplay of some invisible abstract principals of the Divine and their earthly human animators, such as Moses, Muhammad or Jesus (Crüseman 1987, pp. 63, 67–68; Watson 2018, p. 48; for the terminology see Goffman 1981, p. 144). Nevertheless, the canonic texts of art and religion are typically used as the principal, incontrovertible and final sources of information about the deified writers and prophets, unendingly communicated around the globe by means of symbolic (telling about X), iconic (depicting X) or indexical (created by X) signs. How could these strict, long-standing, wide-ranging chronological and causal orders grow and function in political personality cults with their subordination of the global and the eternal to the local and the situational?

The scarsity of studies addressing these questions in the political realm precludes reliable generalizations, but a few tentative remarks based on 20th-century Soviet history could serve as working hypotheses. First of all, whenever personality cults in politics become dissociated from personal rule, the forced canonization could pave the way to political irrelevance and preemptive memorial veneration. For example, the launch of Vladimir Lenin’s Complete Works in 1920, at the peak of his activity during convalesence in the suburban Gorki residence, was clearly Joseph Stalin’s attempt to relegate the founder of Bolshevism to the backwater of history, shielding his “post-canonic” writings from the general reader (Postoutenko 2019, p. 367). However, canonization in the political realm should not necessarily mimic the production of literary or religious canon: rather, some basic features of canonicity can be successfully attuned to the different systemic parameters. The fuzziness of canon could be the case in point: the post-factum rearrangement of religious canonic texts (see above) legitimizes periodical retroactive adjustments of absolute and eternal truths to the political situation in the cultic environment. The multiple changes of historical chapters in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in accordance with the political demands of the day and the changing cult personnel are just one of many examples (Wolfe 1969, p. 271). The fact that each subsequent version of historical truth about the Soviet Union and its deified leaders was presumed at the time of publication to be the only one that had ever existed anywhere (which in practice meant the banishment of all previous and alternative versions) turned the invented canon—always rhetorically associated with the deified leader—into a handy complement of the everyday managerial discourse. Another strategy for transposing the concurrent transcendence and immanence of the venerated chief executive into the discursive realm was the reflexive ring-fencing of the canon within his own discourse. Stalin’s used of illeisms—the third-person references to his writings—was not unfrequently combined with the remarks suggesting their perfection (for example: “Stalin’s formulations do not need clarifications”, see (Stalin [1927] 1949, p. 152)). Apparently, Stalin was quite pleased with his self-canonizing rhetoric: having forwarded his letter to Lenin’s sister, the well-known Bolshevik Maria Ulyanova, he also saw to its publication, with slight alterations, in his Collected Works (Postoutenko 2019, p. 371). The whole story fits the pattern of autogenetic canonization in religious communication and also appears to match the general self-referential trends in deification observed in Section 2.

Perhaps the most problematic part of political canonization is the production of sensually perceptible authenticity of the messages emanating absolute truths: the aforementioned magic power of the ancient Torah scrolls—whose symbolic content was rather similar in all subsequent versions—was easy to explain, but how could the original of the perpetually updated canon be the foundation, or even a part, of its syncretic veneration? The available examples point at consistency between the periodical reinventions of canonic transcendence and immanence: since each proclamation of one and only absolute, binding, eternal and authentical truth was rendering all previous variants non-existent (or, better to say, never-existent), there were a few obstacles for fabricating ever new sensually perceptible “originals” of canonic messages. In this sense, the Eher publishing house found it fitting to congratulate Adolf Hitler with his 47th birthday by producing in April 1936 the new 35 kg “luxurious” parchment edition of Mein Kampf with the text written by hand (Postoutenko 2020, p. 191). Just a couple of years later, the Laboratory of Conservation and Restauration of Documents in Saint-Petersburg began its work on the “eternal conservation” of the major canonic text of Stalinism—the Soviet Constitution of 1936. Fittingly, the actual manuscript of the canonized message was deemed too fragile to last forever, and had to be created anew (Na vechnye vremena 1937). At some point, the conservationists’ project was quietly abandoned, and Hitler’s perusal of his “own” manuscript before its display at the “Führer-House” in Munich remained an isolated accident in the course of his tireless self-promotion (Mein Kampf in Pergament 1936). Still, the efforts of both Soviet and Nazi leaders to create canonic correlates to their political deifications were wiedely publicized and well received: fittingly, both Mein Kampf and the ‘Stalin’ Constitution were buried in the earth in order to furnish unspecified next generations with the tangible copies of the everlasting truths (Postoutenko 2020, p. 193).

4. Management of Personality Cults: Random Signaling

Having observed the formation of personality cults in politics from the standpoints of messengers (Section 1) and messages (Section 2), it is natural to look at the interactional procedures upholding and servicing the cults on a daily basis. It has been shown above that, in personality cults, the rules regulating executive succession and behavior in office are commonly flouted (Section 1), and the texts upholding such cults are manifestly detached from the situations of their creation and reception (Section 2). Under such circumstances, the gap between the carriers of absolute truths and the rest of society should be even bigger than the usual asymmetries of political and communicative privileges in orderly hierarchical societies (Merton 1969, p. 2618; A. Bell 1991, pp. 70–71; Habermas 1984, p. 242), and the need for a reliable signaling system linking deified individuals to their subjects must be even more dire than in non-cultic environments.

At a first glance, the universal mechanism of human interaction commonly known as ‘turn-taking’ should provide for these needs (Schegloff 2006, pp. 70–71). All over the world, since time immemorial, people tend to talk more or less one at a time, routinely and regularly exchanging communicative roles (speakers turn into listeners and vice versa), and strive to cooperate on sustaining conversations, sticking to chosen and jointly ratified topics/codes, avoiding protracted monologues and awkward silences (Dubin and Spray 1964, p. 104; Goffman 1972, p. 198; Sacks et al. 1974, pp. 696–735; Drew 1995, pp. 120–21; Linell 2001, p. 83; Zakharine 2005, p. 581; Levinson 2006, p. 46; Raymond and Heritage 2013, pp. 143–44, 148, 156; Karafoti 2015, p. 88). The equality of communicative chances provided by turn-taking overrides the extreme power disparities even in archaic societies: in Sophokles’ Oedipus Rex, the blind prophet (and shepherd’s son) Tiresias, threatened by the deranged protagonist, invokes and uses his citizen’s right to make a counterstatement (ἀντιλέγω), and even claims to “control” this conversational equilibration (both Soph. OT 408). However, what looks good on stage was not necessarily the fact of social life: in most socially stratified and medially differentiated societies, some more visible individuals (shamans, chiefs, celebrities, teachers, doctors, judges and chairpersons) claimed for themselves, and sometimes obtained, exclusive communicative privileges, such as prolonged speaking turns or the right to ignore questions (Foucault 1971, p. 65; Burton 1981, pp. 62, 64; Heath 1984, p. 247; Newmeyer 1990, pp. 244–45; Drew and Heritage 1992, pp. 5–6; Thornborrow 2002, p. 43; Philips 2006, pp. 479–80; Hanks 2006, p. 301; Heritage 2006, p. 18; Ladegaard 2009; Postoutenko 2010, p. 21; Junge 2011, p. 29; Raymond et al. 2019).

The extreme development of this disparity, noticeable in personality cults, resulted in the suppression of turn-taking in favour of random signaling—the mechanism of interaction in which messages exchanged and duly processed by social and communicative systems are only loosely and partially related to the adjacent (preceding or following) interactional activity or current environment. Most commonly, the departure from turn-taking is manifest in the replacement of the three-turn sequences message A—response B—feedback on relevance A~B with the single pairing stimulus A—reaction B (Goffman 1972, p. 175; Luhmann 1987, p. 212; Drew 1995, pp. 133, 137; Javeau 1996, p. 255; Thornborrow 2002, p. 55): such “genotypically determined signals” (Bateson 1972, p. 419) as spermatozoa are sent to the ovary to elicit the same unidirectional interaction scenario (one sperm cell → one ovum, see Stent 1972, pp. 44–45). At the crossings of nature and society—for example, in various divination practices—such coupling would involve the transformation of environmental changes (or “events”) in the eye of the beholder into coded messages (Searle 1978, p. 16). Sometimes, a simple observation of environmental phenomena was sufficient for deciphering the message of a Higher Being (Bottéro 1974, p. 100). However, in most cases, shamans, priests and agitators were called upon: for example, a Mambila diviner would take a yes–no question from his clientele, and then interpret the trajectory of a spider’s movement as either a positive or negative answer to it (Zeitlyn 1995, p. 198). In a similar vein, the ancient oracle of Delphi emitted a mixture of ethylene and ethane, prompting the priestess Pythia to engage in rambling monologues, which the third party attempted to read as the guidance for present and future events (Spiller et al. 2002). The presence of intermediaries inventively translating cues into symbols does not cause much surprise (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, p. 120; Katz 1975; Assmann and Assmann 1987, p. 14; E. N. Goody 1995, p. 213; Flusser 1996, pp. 22–24, 275; Hahn 2000, p. 242; Kalivoda and Daxelmüller 2011, pp. 768–69). In their absence, the worshippers would have resembled the protagonist of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot who was trying—and failing—to tell the “wind the reeds” from a certain higher being, keeping everybody in trepidation from the beginning to the end of the play (Beckett [1965] 1987, p. 19). However, the objects of personality cult were neither vents nor winds; rather than just making noise or drugging their adepts, they were normally literate and sometimes even eloquent. Why would such a decidedly uncooperative practice, at variance with the basics of human sociality (Tomasello 2009; Skyrms 2010, p. 3), play such a considerable role in personality cults?

The first, and most general, reason could be the relative irrelevance of communictaive coordination for interactions involving canonic messages. Even in standard conversations of equal partners the pair stimulus/reaction is more tearproof than the triad message/response/feedback on relevance (Drew 1995, pp. 114–15). However, if the texts associated with deified individuals are supposedly valid under all cirumstances at all times, even the matching of envornmental stimuli and discoursive responses, or questions and answers is pointless. Hence, the bragging of Adolf Hitler’s acolytes about the “blind discipline” at early NSDAP meetings—which included the total ban on questions to the Führer (let alone any discussion of his speeches)—is less irrational that it may seem (Kracauer [1939] 2013, p. 86; Bosmajian 1966, p. 14). While Hitler’s personality cut was still in the making, the forced canonization of his speeches—to be perceived with silent awe rather than engaged attention—appeared important to its creators.

Another substantial prerequisite for random signaling in personality cults is the acute social and communicative disparity of the interaction partners, exacerbated by the low throughput capacity of the available communication channels. The salvation of the worshippers at Delphi was as contingent upon Gods’ messages as the survival of spermatozoa on their reception in the ovary—but not the other way around: for that reason, the responsibility for creating and sustaining hierarchical communication was mainly resting with the disempowered (Weber [1919] 1972, p. 657; Otto [1931] 2014, p. 69; Merton 1969, pp. 2614–15; Edelman 1988, pp. 37–38; Bechtold 2011, p. 19; Cohen 2013, p. 461). Under such circumstances, sending multiple messages in the hope of an answer has usually been a more sensible strategy than observing standard interaction rules and waiting for a relevant response forever (Pomerantz 1984): the analog of some fifty million spermatozoa sent to the ovary were recurrent divination queries, which, depending on circumstances, could accumulate in expectation of response (Zeitlyn 1995, p. 189).

Correspondingly, in personality cults, both frenetic messaging to the deified leader and attempts to reconstruct his response from the available environment were quite widespread. Nikolai Bukharin, one of the most reputable Old Bolsheviks, had addressed over a dozen of his letters to Joseph Stalin in 1936–1937, apparently without response, only to be executed the year after (Medvedev 1990, p. 325). In their turn, Hitler’s dispirited correspondents engaged in reflexive pseudointeractional practices, such as mock “conversations” with him, “prayers” in front of his “adorned” portraits and even the delusionary hopes of reply through mass media: in fact, a couple of the Führer’s correspondents thanked him in all earnesty for “answering” their private messages in radio speeches (Postoutenko 2020). Communicative asymmetries, inherent in hierarchical societies, were often aggravated in personality cults by the absence of power rotation (see Section 1 above) and—in the last two centuries—the spread of non-interactive mass media controlled by deified individuals: from the middle of the nineteenth century, the personal messages from Queen Victoria could rapidly reach the remotest corners of the British Empire (Plunkett 2020, p. 81). In their turn, print, photography and the film industry turned not only narcissistic populists (such as Benito Mussolini) but also undemocratic snobs (such as Wilhelm II) into household images (Sturani 1995; Falasca-Zamponi 1997; Giloi 2020). A century later, such non-interactive mass media as radio and television amplified these tendencies, giving cultic personalities (Ceaușescu, Chavez and Erdoğan) unlimited and uncontested time on air (M. Marin 2020; Joppien 2020). In all those and many other cases, the ostensively “global” reach of mass communication capable of transmitting abundant messages from the top straight to the cult adepts created an immediately graspable, tangible simulacrum of transcendence, transmitting the deified leader’s universal wisdom straight to the followers in no time and at little cost to them. At the same time, the discordance between subjects and objects of deification in random signaling resulted in communication pathologies, which, being useful for the deified individuals in the short run, accelerated their demise whenever the ornate edifice of the cult was crumbling.

Since glorified executives have been often saddled with unlimited responsibilities and blessed with the corresponding amount of attention, their immediate availability was restricted anyway, and was further curtailed by the (usually well-founded) followers’ fears stemming from the non-institutional character of the cultic power (Myerson 2008). Similar to George Orwell’s Big Brother, the objects of personality cults were, for the majority of adepts, personages of tales, or “voice[s] on the telescreen” (Orwell [1949] 1977, p. 249). Put off by limited interactional cooperation and overall accessibility, the adepts of personality cults operated in the increasingly self-referential communicative compartments only vaguely related to their projected addressees (Fromm [1936] 1993, pp. 121, 130). The autogenetic growth of the followership in the pre-modern age was the negative function of the physical proximity to the deified leader: while only the inhabitants of the four major cities in seventeenth-century Mughal India had had a chance to gaze at the emperor Jahangir during sunrise, the participation of the others in the ceremony was limited to acquiring some knowledge about its daily occurrence (Tarde [1901] 1989, p. 42). Modernity witnessed the same process reverberated by various print media: the individuals gathering next to the press bulletins to read news about the health of Queen Victoria could become themselves the objects of summary photo portraiture and subsequent press coverage, encouraging mimetic behavior among newspaper readers (Plunkett 2020, p. 86). Whenever the cults were in need of expansion, the relative interactional autonomy of followers was used for the feedback forgery: Rafael Trujillo, the longtime dictator of the Dominican Republic, bombarded newspapers with fake letters of support on his own behalf (Márquez 2020, p. 259), and the real applause accompanying Hitler’s speeches was at some public gatherings supplemented by the recorded ones (Atkinson 1984, pp. 13–14; Thamer 1988, p. 367; Zelnhefer 1992, p. 92; Birdsall 2012, p. 45). However, in less stable curcumstances, this neglect of interactional coordination could spell the doom for the cult and its objects: at any rate, the crowds directed to the Romanian Communist Party headquarters for listening to Ceaușescu’s ill-advised public speech turned in a split second from supporters to the gravediggers of the cult (N. Marin 2011).

5. Conclusions

Aside from drawing attention to significant similarities of personality cults across epochs and socio-cultural systems (including politics, art and religion), the main task of this survey was pointing out at the regularity of the communicative processes creating, upholding and sustaining personality cults at different levels: deification, canonization and random signaling are all seen as procedures inverting transcendent (invariant in relation to individuals) rules in favour of the immanent (autopoetically produced) properties of the venerated individuals. The difficulties arising from this paralogical argumentation are outlined together with the methods aimed at mitigating their effects (duplication of transcendental and immanent images, retroactive updates of canon, invented genealogies). Whereas the instability of personality cults undescores their socio-cultural and political marginality, the spread and persistence of the three practices throughout centuries and continents reveals the considerable cult potential of human societies activated whenever the norms of human governance, long-term messaging and situational interaction appeared frail or irrelevant.