Spectacles of Disintegration
By David Golding
We are entering a time when words must be backed up by actions.
1.
In May of 2013, Dominique Venner, the former OAS terrorist turned semi-respectable historian and paladin of the French New Right (although there's nothing new about it, really, it's the same old Action française Catholic-monarchist bullshit, the same pompous argot of bourgeois murderers, the same hybrid of decadent rationalism and plagiarized German Romanticism, a style some say was inaugurated by Charles Maurras but may actually extend back to Ernest Renan or even Descartes), walked up to the altar of the Notre-Dame Cathedral and shot himself. He left a suicide note, and, in case the note was lost to the depredations of chance or the iconoclasms of the police, he left a blog post. Venner's swan song is at turns sentimental, Heideggerian, and filled with an adolescent Sturm und Drang. That is, it's a fairly typical product of the mentality of the European Right, which has always been addicted to longwinded manifestos, manifestos that are like a pier of middle-class piety over an abyss of nihilism. Think of those puffed-up Adonises like Anders Breivik or the hero of Bresson's The Devil Probably. They talk until their hoarse and flensed glottises become testaments to their own impotence, and then they succumb to mass murder or are killed by a junkie friend who can't stand them any longer. What makes Venner different, and maybe even interesting (interesting as a zoological specimen), is that he was an old man. Like every good crusader, he'd fought his battles (the massacre of Algerians, attempted assassinations of de Gaulle and Sartre). He'd been persecuted (an 18 month prison sentence, the kind of luxurious discipline applied to right-wing terrorists, who are the overly fastidious and yet anal expulsive children of decent society). He'd renounced, for a time, the carnal glory of youth. He'd settled down and started a family, written a number of books on insipid topics like the history of French hunting and the heroic Vichyites, and become a dissident blogger. But at the end of his life he must have gone a little stir-crazy. He must have been reading and thinking about Yukio Mishima (at the time of his death, he was working on a book, A Samurai of the West: The Breviary of the Unsubdued). Clearly, though, he must have also realized the differences between him and Mishima. For instance, that Mishima had been working out for the last fifteen years of his life, lifting weights and practicing kendo. Or that Mishima had formed a milita, the Tatenokai, comprised of his students and disciples. Or that Mishima still had blood pumping through his veins (he never thought to give up his attendance at gay bars, although if we're to believe his novels, he was a voyeur, like all good Proustians). Or that his suppuku had the aura of religious tradition to back it up, while Venner's suicide is merely a vintage act, a throwback to Young Werther or to Austrian cafe society. Or that Mishima was an artist.
Venner's suicide was greeted as an act of protest against the legalization of gay marriage. An Algerian blogger had this to say about Venner's spectacle: In twenty years, when we've conquered France, we'll overturn that law anyway. The blogger was having a little fun at the expense of the Right, which sees itself as the last bulwark against the twin barbarisms of Islam and liberalism, and at the expense of liberals, who justify their wars by scapegoating the Right, as if to say, We're not racists, we also have white-skinned barbarians in our midst, barbarians wearing black masks (a fanonement, in case you missed it). But the European Right, which hasn't forgotten how to think historically and a fortiori hasn't forgotten how to strategize, has outflanked its liberal enemy. When necessary, it flaunts its friendliness towards gay rights and/or its philo-Semitism. The English Defense League, those brownshirts currently terrorizing Britain's Muslim population with relative impunity (the impunity takes the form of occasional police crackdowns and impartial debate in the media) have Jewish and gay divisions. Breivik recuperated the Israeli state for his Knights Templar political theology. Haider was gay, although he was stuck in his obsolete romantic affection for the Gaddafis and Saddam Husseins of the world, so Israel never warmed to him (don't think this has anything to do with moral squeamishness on the part of Israeli leaders, it didn't stop them from warming to Vorster, the Gemayels, Abbas, Sadat, the patently and unregenerately Nazi Adenauer government). Pim Fortuyn was gay and a Zionist before he was assassinated. On the other hand, Venner seems to have remained loyal to his roots in French anti-Semitism, while adopting a superficial anti-imperialism. This all may sound incoherent, like the chatter of schizophrenics, to contemporary ears, but that's only because we've oblivious to politics. The neoliberal state suffocates us with its spectacle of ideological silence, from which all Leninist Realpolitk or Situationist gypsyism, that is from which all slang and calculation and initiation, have been excluded. Ideologues of the neoliberal state don't have to learn a language in order to speak an ideology. They just have to be left alone, like those Egyptian babies who were isolated in a house for the first fifteen years of their lives so that the Pharaoh could prove that the Egyptian language was the language of the gods. Fifteen years later, they were discovered bleating like sheep. The authorities hadn't noticed that next to the house was a sheep pen.
2.
McKenzie Wark, whose name sounds made up, like a Joycean catachresis, but isn't as far as I know (he's a descendant of Paul Lafargue, he believes in the Right to Be Lazy, he doesn't find sufficient jouissance in the Oedipal father, Marx, he'd rather eschew revolution and stick to Fourier's queer interplanetary and algorithmic orgies) is a Professor of Media and Critical Studies at the New School in New York. He's known as a post-Marxist, which can mean a lot of things. It might mean that he simply never got around to reading Marx. It might mean that, being Australian (a nation without a revolutionary tradition), he sees Marxism as a matryoshka doll of progressively more terrifying bogeymen: I think Lenin or Mao terrifies him most, but maybe not, maybe it's Zizek or the French theorists, or maybe it's the white or black Jacobins, maybe it's St. Paul, I can't tell. He seems to like the following things: cypherpunks, GPSes, Occupy Wall Street, the Invisible Committee, the imago of Julian Assange, free love except when it's practiced by the wrong segment of the upper class, conspiracy theories about state terror as long as they're sufficiently uncommitted, anecdotes and non sequiturs, church history, and hermeticism for its own sake. He's written two or three books on the Situationist International, which have gotten him some attention in the respectable media but which have decidedly drawn the ire of the remnants of the Situationists themselves. His students and former students, or so they claim, have even started a website called the International Society for the Appreciation of Teacher Wark's Amazing Techniques (ISATWAT). The website features a photograph of Wark, his wife, and young child, naked but tastefully covered by celestial bed sheets, apparently a piece of publicity for his wife's play, Babylove. It dismisses Wark as a subrate postmodernist, a recuperator (a term of Debordian ignominy), an obfuscator of the SI's revolutionary politics, a pro-situ posturer, a curator of decay, a toady, a parasite, a usurper, etc. Basically, it accuses Wark of being the equivalent, for Situationism, of what the Situationists accused the western European communist parties of being for the proletariat: an arm of the police. They even have a fable or two for their grievances. McKenzie's publisher, Verso Books, offered UK readers a chance to win a 3D printed Guy Debord action figure. At a release event for The Beach Beneath the Streets, he bought Nerf guns and distributed them to students, enjoining them to disrupt his speech. He thought the disruption would mark the finale of the event, but no one left the room. The spectacle turned against the purveyor of anti-spectacularism, who had nothing to say. Someone in the back denounced the affair as boring, grabbed a few books, and left. Wark later facebooked about the incident.
The Situationists, who were notorious for their pseudo-ecclesiastical excommunications (eventually it was just Debord and Sanguinetti), would have excommunicated Wark on the spot. But to tell the truth, he never would have been considered for membership in the first place.
3.
American leftists should read Fanon. And I don't mean the way some former First polemicists must have read Fanon, in the heady millennial days of the intelligentsia's self-immolation, its abject toadying disguised as a kind of hysterical neo-imperialist pissing contest (you know the epoch I'm talking about, if you're old enough to remember, which means if you're old enough to take account of yourself). I don't mean invoking the FLN and the French communards and some effigy of Leon Trotsky as justifications for total warfare. I don't mean the peculiar phallic exhibitionism, born out of bourgeois insecurities, endemic to a certain segment of the left. And I don't mean the way Sartre read Fanon, as a fun-house mirror of our own debilities. I mean that leftists should read Fanon to understand the fact of our own colonization, in the same way we should read George Jackson, and maybe even St. Augustine, Pascal, Samuel Beckett, and all the other prophets of emesis. Because if you're a leftist today, you're probably sick, and not in the way you think you're sick. If you were alive and politically conscious in the 1980s and you cheered on Walęsa's celebrity tour in favor of the American Way while Reagan was brutally destroying the last vestiges of the unions, or if you remember nodding somnambulistically along to Václav Havel's endorsement of the Iraq war, or if you judiciously consulted Ezra Klein about the necessity of Rahm Emanuel's strongman policies against the Chicago teachers, or if you vainly looked for an argument from the French left against Hollande's IMF-sponsored adventurism in Mali, etc., then you're mired in the casuistry of the enemy, an enemy that's sophisticated enough to ventriloquize you, to give you the right words to support criminal policies. And who am I to say so? It doesn't matter. I don't work for the Council on Foreign Relations or a prominent human rights organization. It's almost certain that I've been disfigured in more subtle ways. But I'd rather be an underground fedayeen with major neuroses than an unwitting comprador of health and happiness.
From June, 2013
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