Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 20:07:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: AUT: re: Deleuze and fascism



I see the Tahir “be vewy vewy qwiet I’m hunting pomos” season has opened again…  oh goody, break out the champagne…

 

I don’t think “everyone is a fascist” is meant quite as literally as you mean, Tahir.  (“Everyone want to be a fascist” is a sloganistic title meant to provoke.  A bit like the title of my little piece on the anti-social a few weeks back).  Perhaps it would be easier to say that everyone (or at least, a lot of people) has/have microfascist attachments, but of differing degrees and intensities, and in various articulations and conflicts with different structures of desire.  The people with a greater preponderance of microfascist elements are more likely to become racists, to engage in violence against people different from them, to support fascist parties, etc., although they can also channel their microfascism in other ways.  It’s all about structures of desire – certainly not any biological predisposition for humans to be fascist.

 

You know I don’t agree with you about poststructuralist “gibberish”, but in this case I think your right that there’s nothing especially original in D&G’s formulations which would make it worthwhile to hunt it down if you don’t like their style of writing (though I might be wrong about this).  It’s very derivative from Reich actually (as I said before).  The only real addition is the idea of “abstract machines”.  The articulation is of specific “machines” of desire, whereas in Reich it is an articulation of unconscious attachments, neuroses, etc.

 

But D&G don’t have a generic theory of fascism as deriving from ahistorical features of desire.  This kind of psychological reductionism is precisely the basis for their critique of psychoanalysis!  They view desire itself as changing through history, so that new formulations of desire arise alongside new social forms and generate new types of social relations.  But they would resist a simplistic reductionism which ignores articulations of desire, because they think it’s important to ask why people accepted fascism and joined fascist movements.  Not that you’re advocating any such reductionism.  Actually, your point about people who “identify strongly with the nation” is absolutely crucial.  It is in this kind of identification, to the extent that the “nation” is conceived as the state or is conceived hierarchically, that D&G would see as the “fascism” which is pervasive (though it need not be the nation; it can be any collective or organisation).

 

I don’t actually know how the references to fascism got into the intro Tom.  Foucault usually doesn’t use the concept at all, and insists on distinctions – there’s a longer discussion of fascism I think in “Society Must Be Defended”.  John is quite right by the way, there’s plenty of “micro” analyses of fascism (I could list Grunberger, Peukert, Kershaw  and Broszat off the top of my head, and Theweleit, who of course uses a Reichean model to assess the Freikorps).

		
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