Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 11:14:20 +0200
From: "Tahir Wood" <twood-AT-uwc.ac.za>
Subject: Re: AUT: re: Deleuze and fascism


>>> messmer-AT-endpage.com 08/29/04 04:16AM >>>
All this says to me is that "people often tend towards 
authoritarianism", why do we need all the nonsense about "abstract 
machines" and so on? Thats a lot of needless avantegarde gibberish if 
you ask me. Which you didn't.

The trouble with this gibberish is that it kind of universalises fascism within a crypto-psychological discourse, thereby deflecting attention from its more specific co-ordinates. In my opinion these are:

A nation (or effective substitute).
A national humiliation, i.e. humiliation of all those who identify strongly with the nation.
A hostile and nefarious Other, usually a 'foreigner', which is represented internally by fifth columns, traitors and decadent elements.
A crisis of culture.

This combination of elements, I would submit, is always present in those phenomena that are commonly discussed as fascism. In the case of fundamentalist Islam, whose fascist nature has been clear to me for a long time (and which is denied by the opportunistic elements of the Western left), the Islamic Ummah takes the place of the nation, no doubt due to the weak and peripheral nature of the states in which muslims tend to live. One sees the same elements at work in Italy, Spain and Germany, as well as in third world countries such as Zimbabwe.

The symptoms of fascism that have recently been seen manifesting themselves in the US are similar. While these have been triggered by the events of 911 (national humiliation), one can predict that they will increase dangerously with the perception that America is gradually losing its pre-eminent place in the world economy. The crisis of culture in this case is reflected in the growth of millennial sects and the polarisation of American society between the religious right and liberal values. As far as the role of the Other is concerned, this is assumed variously by communists, Islamists and whoever fits the bill of being un-American.

An analysis that takes the phenomenon of fascism out of its context of modern (capitalist) nation states and attempts to insert it in a universal and ahistorical discourse of the psyche or desire or whatever distorts the nature of  fascism and then discovers it in all sorts of people that are disliked for some reason or other. This is not to say that individual (or whatever the latest approved word for the indiviudal is) emotions and psychological dynamics are not involved; they are of course implied in the notions of humiliation and identification that I mentioned. But they are mediated by the historical context to produce fascism.

Tahir





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