Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (3)

 STILL WITH ME? Okay. According to Bataille, the homogeneous, when it feels threatened, will resort to the heterogeneous to put down the heterogeneous.

To expand that a bit: Capital, which tends to represent itself as Good Decent Ordinary People, will resort to certain kinds of old weirdness, such as tribal loyalties and would-be übermenschen who have no investment at all in enlightenment notions like rule of law or representative democracy, if it fears that the unruly working class can use the rule of law and representative democracy to take control. Capitalism was married to representative democracy and rule of law for a long time, but if its survival requires throwing them aboard...over they will go, and capitalism will gladly marry authoritarianism.

In its bones, this looks a lot like the classic marxist analysis of fascism. Bataille has woven into it, though, a lot of new ingredients, since his idea of the heterogeneous includes not just the classic proletariat, but also a variety of unassimilable and even alarming folks--all kinds of folks who are not exactly Good Decent Ordinary People. This is an interesting development, I'd say.

Bataille took a lot of criticism, though, for suggesting that the workers' movement could learn a trick or two from the fascists--by which he meant, I think, trafficking in the heterogeneous. He writes (in  the Lovitt translation): 

Not only are the psychological situations of the democratic collectivities, like any human situation, transitory, but it remains possible  to envision, at least as a yet imprecise representation, forms of attraction that differ from those already in existence, as different from present or even past communism as fascism is from dynastic claims.

Fascism is not just a simple  revival of the ancien régime--it has added some powerful updates; it is juiced up with some powerful heterogeneous mojo.  But why couldn't the workers' movement work in its own new mojo, creating new and powerful "forms of attraction"? 

He gives no examples, just as Walter Benjamin (writing a couple of years after Bataille) gives no examples when he calls for communism to politicize art in response to fascism's aestheticization of politics. Presumably Bataille did not have in mind drum circles at union meetings, just as Benjamin presumably did not have in mind WPA-style Post Office murals. But what did Bataille have in mind?

Whatever he had in mind, there may be a problem, as Richard Wolin discussed long ago. I'll try to sort that out tomorrow.

Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (2)

 “TODAY WE KNOW,” writes Michel Foucault in his 1970 introduction to Bataille’s collected works, “Bataille is one of the most important writers of his century” (“On le sait aujourd’hui: Bataille est un des écrivains les plus importants de son siècle”). Not sure how well that statement holds up fifty years on, even coming from Foucault, but “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” is original and interesting and maybe even true, in spots.

Bataille draws on Marxism—as I mentioned earlier, the piece first appeared in a French journal that was Marxist but anti-Stalinist—but also on Freud, and quite a bit on anthropology. For a time in those days Bataille was running with the Surrealists, and he also attended Alexander Kojève’s lectures on Hegel. The man got around.

The crucial distinction in Bataille’s analysis of fascism is between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous. The homogeneous are the Good Decent People of the World, who largely agree on all important questions and are the bedrock of society, etc. The heterogeneous are everyone and everything that does not fit into the homogeneous. This has two zones, shall we say. One zone holds all the abject and despised: “trash, vermin, etc.,” “dreams or neuroses,” “mobs,” “impoverished classes,” “madmen” and “poets.” The heterogeneous needs to be kept out of sight, repressed, cleaned up, stuffed away somewhere. But—a big but—the heterogeneous also includes everything that transcends the normal, as well as that which fails to attain the normal. That is, the pure, the sacred, the noble, the exalted. In short, the revered and the despised have a kind of secret kinship (here we see  the anthropological dimension of the argument).

We’re not done, though. The heterogeneous also includes the working class, which homogeneous society (a) requites for its labor but (b) would rather not acknowledge as a reality or share power with. 

And this is where Freud comes in. “The exclusion of heterogeneous elements from the homogeneous realm of consciousness formally recalls the exclusion of the elements, described (by psychoanalysis) as unconscious, which censorship excludes from the conscious ego.” This helps account for why a certain cruelty and remorselessness will enter into the efforts of the homogeneous to extirpate the traces of  the heterogeneous. Bataille is willing to call this “sadistic”—sadique.

Bataille asserts that “the fascist leaders are incontestably part of heterogeneous existence”—that is, part of the elite, exalted zone of heterogeneity, the realm of the pure, the forceful, the disciplined, the elite. The homogeneous is not itself the elite—it’s Good Decent Normal People, remember. However, the Good Decent Normal People may feel the need of the forceful and disciplined to keep the dodgy end of the heterogeneous—the vermin, the diseased,, the queer, the alien—under inescapable control. 

…Mussolini and Hitler immediately stand out as something other.Whatever emotions their actual existence as political agents of evolution provokes, it is impossible to ignore the force that situates them above men, parties, and even laws: a force that disrupts the regular course of things, the peaceful but fastidious homogeneity powerless to maintain itself (the fact that laws are broken is only the most obvious sign of the transcendent, heterogeneous nature of fascist action),

This is starting to sound a little like Trump, no? His base does not mind that he breaks the rules or crosses lines or violates the Constitution. The important thing is to have the sheer brutality needed to put the heterogeneous back into the outer darkness. Then all we Good Decent Normal People will be safe again.

Gregor von Rezzori, _Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories_, trans. Joachim Neugroschel

 FIVE RELATIVELY FREE-STANDING novellas (the stories tend to be sixty-some pages), all with the same narrator at different ages, and all of them seemingly drawn from Rezzori’s own experience, so these days “fictionalized memoir” or “autofiction” might be the handier descriptor, but the book was published in German almost fifty years ago, so, sure, “novel,” why not? It’s an interesting book, however we categorize it.

Rezzori’s family was part of the nobility of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with holdings in Romania, but Rezzori was born in 1914, just five years before the Treaty of Versailles did away with the Austro-Hungarian empire and (as a side effect) his family’s place in the world. His parents and grandparents never quite leave that vanished world, with its dueling scars and hunting in the Carpathians, but Rezzori has to figure out how to live in post-war world with not much beyond charm and upper-class manners. 

The first four stories track him from boyhood in the 1920s to young manhood in the late 1930s, with a final chapter on his life after World War II. The settings shift, as do his circumstances, but a unifying element is, as the subtitle indicates, the narrator’s anti-semitism. He is not an ideological anti-semite, not at all fanatical about it, but it’s how he was raised, and it seems perfectly natural and understandable to him, persisting even as he has friendships and even love affairs with Jews.

And then, after the Anschluss, with Austria now bound to Nazi Germany, anti-semitism is state policy. The narrator isn’t a Nazi, does not exactly approve of the Nazis, but he’s no dissident, and on some level the policy seems not exactly wrong to him if a little exaggerated. 

In this way the book is a subtle and perceptive study of how our own unexamined assumptions, given a little family and social encouragement, can lead us to acquiesce in evil. 

The prose has a somewhat over-stuffed, Victorian-Beidermeier style at times, but the whiff of the 19th century novel in the languor of the descriptions seems deliberate and ironic, given the 20th century horrors hovering unstated in the background.

George Bataille, "The Psychological Structure of Fascism" (1)

 THE TRUMP YEARS have (all too understandably) seen a lot of writing done on the question of what fascism was and is, and I have read a fair-sized chunk of it. Often writers who grappled with the phenomenon in its first manifestation get brought into the discussion--Gramsci, Arendt, Benjamin, Adorno--as they should be. But I haven't come across anyone mentioning Georges Bataille or his essay "The Psychological Structure of Fascism."

But why not? Michel Surya, Bataille's biographer, notes that "He was the first person in France [...] to introduce the effective methods of psychoanalytic analysis into the body of political analysis, methods that, even more remarkably, had been filtered through his own personal experience." Since Trumpism seems to come red, wet, and howling right out out of the American Id, why not a little psychoanalysis? 

Surya notes parenthetically that Wilhelm Reich also has a claim to being first to the party in using psychoanalysis to understand fascism, but Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism does not seem to be getting revived either. 

Back when I was in grad school [sound of creaky rocking chair], Bataille's essay had a certain currency. A translation by Carl Lovitt that appeared in 1979 in the journal New German Critique kicked things off; I remember reading the essay in a xerox of a xerox, which I promptly xeroxed. The need for further xeroxing was circumvented by the essay appearing, again in Lovitt's translation, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, a selection of Bataille's shorter pieces skillfully assembled by Allan Stoekl and published in 1985. 

Visions of Excess was number 14 in the University of Minnesota Press series "Theory and History of Literature" when that series was just about the coolest thing going in the humanities [creaky rocking chair audible again]. 

The essay's original publication is a story with some interesting angles. It was published in two parts in the last two numbers (November 1933 and March 1934) of La Critique Sociale, a journal edited by Russian emigré and anti-Stalinist Marxist Boris Souvarine. (I don't know whether Souvarine would count as Trotskyist, but his journal is roughly comparable to the Partisan Review of the 1930s.) 

Souvarine republished the whole contents of the journal in  the early 1980s, at which time he had some sharp criticism of Bataille. Back in the 1930s, Souvarine's wife had left him for Bataille, so personal animosity may have entered into the question. But Richard Wolin's The Seduction of Unreason (2004) had some pointed criticism of Bataille's argument as well.

Another interesting detail: between the publication of Part I in November 1933 and Part II in March 1934, Paris saw the violent far-right near-coup of February 6, 1934. Part II was no doubt already written when that event occurred, but I wonder if Bataille revised in the light of what had just happened. The events of February 6 were a very big deal for right-wing intellectuals and eventual collaborateurs Pierre Drieu La  Rochelle and Robert Brasillach.

This is already too long. I'll write about Bataille's argument itself in another post.

G. C. Waldrep, _Feast Gently_

 THIS IS THE fifth collection by Waldrep that I have read, and it’s my favorite so far (he has published another since this one, I should mention, with another coming out shortly).

I kept thinking of Hopkins—and let me immediately qualify that and emphasize that Waldrep does not sound like Hopkins at all (no one should try to sound like Hopkins). What I have in mind is that Hopkins had an astonishing, even preternatural gift for presenting sensory details but at the same time a kind of mistrust in the body, a suspicion that it was too easily snared. Waldrep likewise serves up an astonishing array of sensory imagery (“From waxy cells bees tender their last dances”) but feels a degree or two of anxiety about the body (“We are all cages / of meat”).

Hopkins found comfort and meaning in traditional rituals of worship, but also experienced terrible doubt. Waldrep moves into the subjunctive mood of prayer often in the book (“Let my frame be a honey-stanchion then, / a sill, a dry milk” or “Let me be the only / casualty, the waking wound towards which the forest / of my fading heat is climbing”), but serenity is elusive (“In the marriage plot / of faith, I drew the Hanged Man.”)

Like Hopkins, then, Waldrep seems a composition of incompatibilities, an ascetic sensualist, a doubting believer. Joshua Corey captures some of this in a back cover blurb, writing of “an ecstatic sobriety.” Even the title—“feast gently.” Indulge yourself, live it up, but with restraint, tenderness, a delicacy of touch.

One last kinship: Hopkins never sounds like anyone but Hopkins, and Waldrep, even when he is going in for self-abnegation, never sounds like anyone but Waldrep. And I am glad of it.

Martin Amis, _The Rachel Papers_

 OUCH. AMIS’S DEATH gave me a chill, he being only a few years older than I am. Brr.

As I wrote a while ago (6/16/2016), Amis’s oeuvre has an arc roughly comparable to that of Evelyn Waugh, turning from an early run of shorter, snarkier, more satirical novels to longer, more ambitious, more weighty ones. Waugh’s earlier ones have a somewhat higher standing now, it seems to me. Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust capture something of their time that no one else caught as well, but it takes a hardcore commitment to Waugh to get through the Sword of Honour trilogy. In Amis’s case too, I suspect, the bad boy early career fiction will stand a better chance with posterity than the more mature work, and for the same reason—it seems to tune in on something definitive about the moment it was written.

Take The Rachel Papers, for instance, his first novel, published when he was just 24. There he is in the back cover author photo doing his best Jagger-circa-1972, shaggy hair, direct gaze, pouty unsmiling mouth, dangling mostly-consumed cigarette. 

The narrator, Charles Highway, is hours away from turning twenty and saying farewell to youth as he tells us of his preoccupations of the last year, which are mainly about getting into Oxford and bedding a young woman named Rachel. Charles is a highly recognizable character: callow, shallow, horny, and hyperliterate, "having a vocabulary more refined than your emotions” as he puts it. So yes, he is a stereotype, but Amis so perfectly renders that stereotype as it manifested in 1969-71 (e.g., Charles’s conviction that turning 20 makes one irrelevant) that, fifty years on, the book is valuable as a portrait of its era. One doesn’t exactly like Charles Highway, as one doesn’t exactly like Holden Caulfield, but he is as recognizable as your face in the mirror.

And then there’s the style—fast, fresh, funny, a firecracker or two on every page. Amis is a young writer showing off, true, but that can be a lot more diverting than a mature writer trying to be Saul Bellow.

Well, rest in peace, Mr. Amis. I think you have an excellent chance of continuing to be read.

Robert Hass, “A Sunset” and “Meditation at Lagunitas”

 ROBERT HASS HAD a poem, “A Sunset,” in the September 9 issue of the New Yorker, and its final line—“That burned, that burned and burned”—reminded me suddenly and sharply of the final line of what may be Hass’s best-known poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas”: “saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.”

Interesting coincidence, both poems ending with a thrice-repeated word, so I fetched down Hass’s Praise (1979) to re-read the earlier poem and see whether they were related in any other way. I would say they are. 

“Meditation” addresses the inability of language to achieve plenitude, that “a word is elegy to what it signifies,” making the repetition of “blackberry” at the end poignant. Can poetry use language to transcend  language’s limitations? Can it bring us a little closer to the truth that language falls so short of? The poem does not exactly say “yes,” but it does leave an opening for “maybe.”

“Sunset” also begins with a nod to the duplicity of language, claiming that “sordid” can mean “bruise-colored, a yellow-brown.” News to me, and unrecorded in the OED, but certainly a good instance of language being slippery—and if language is that slippery, can poetry be anything but slippery? Can it (Auden not withstanding) make things happen? Could it, for instance, have prevented the school massacre at Uvalde? If the “angry adolescent boy in Texas / Who shot and killed nineteen children / With a high-powered weapon my culture / Put into his hands” had read poetry rather than play first-person-shooter games, would that have made a difference?

The question of whether “culture” in the old sense (books, paintings, and opera, rather than the NRA and computer games) can make anything happen occupies most of “A Sunset.” Ashbery knew better than to try, Hass suggests, not out of indifference but out of modesty. Hitler’s record collection (“Wagner, of course, the operas / Especially, but also Mussorgsky, / Rachmaninoff”) did not stop him from being Hitler, nor did Monet’s painting the waterlilies at Giverny lessen the carnage of trench warfare.

Beauty ought to make a difference, right? But will we ever know that it does? Just as “Meditation” has no evidence that language gets us somewhere other than the uncanny lift of “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry”, “Sunset” has no evidence that beauty gets us somewhere other than our capacity to be brought up short by a sunset: “In the dark / I thought of an ordinary radiance / That burned, that burned and burned.”