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.