The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge–unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. –Walter Benjamin
Paul Feyerabend—a half-forgotten Calibanal apostle straddling the right-wing Vienna side of European modernism and California anti/pseudo-science counterculture—was shot three times by the Red Army while retreating from the Eastern Front. His injuries left him neuralgic, prone to a particularly (in/post-)fertile depression, and impotent.
Nevertheless, he was a serial, compulsive, theoretical adulterer: a proudly adulterated character who no more believed in experiments in science than he believed in the unconscious in the adrift, the metem-psychotic realm of sex. Science and the libido, according to Feyerabend, are pure play, the difference being that one performs science in (Hegelian) isolation—the limits of his leftist critique—and one performs sex also in (Lacanian) isolation, but that isolation runs up against the border of the body-psyche and also the borders of other body-psyches, and the impossible, porous, peripatetic terrain of the border itself.
Which is to say that in sex, unlike in science, there’s always something non-ludic, something tragic and humiliating: the indissoluble bodies of Feyerabend’s unappeasable women—bodies from which it was impossible to turn away, impossible todétourne into Dadaist collage—and the alien, suffering, objective body that was given to Feyerabend as a young Wehrmacht lieutenant by a Russian sniper one day while he was directing traffic.
The irony that he lost his virility, his Nazi-Cartesian belief in the body as a vessel or a bulwark or a hyper-phallic machine, his teleological-spatial sense of direction, and his orgasm-suicide while he was directing traffic should not be overlooked. Nor that this was all lost while the Wehrmacht was on retreat, at the end of the war, and while he was abandoned, successively, by three of his superior officers. If one loses one’s fascist-phallic power on retreat, the only remedy is a melancholic and permanent rearguard action, a kind of heterosexually aggressive topping-from-the-bottom. The only option is to become a California Pynchon character: ex-Nazi, now-hippie. If you’re blocked, if you’re depressed, if you can no longer command, you’re liberated. But only to fight the old war under new terms and with novel, more esoteric, higher-ups.
Feyerabend taught at Berkeley, where he quickly became the most Whitmaniacal American and the most enlightened Anglo, and spelled out the Silicon Valley ideology of creative disruption while believing he was liberating humanity from science. Human rights plus individual-democratic-Gnostic jouissance. Masquerading as if he were facing reality with macho, invincible pride. The practical application of Feyerabend’s hybrid liberalism/anarchism is Uber’s carcinogenically aggressive post-national expansion and the violent reimposition of the neo-State.
For a long time Feyerabend was reviled by the scientific establishment because he was an anti-racist, anti-positivist, and anti-authoritarian. But those things pass, and the technocratic postmodern sophistry of Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz, the amoral bitchy neoliberalism of Peter Thiel, comes to be born again.
Pseudo-anarchism—the anarchism that pretends to be more radical but also more rationalist than real anarchism (Feyerabend claimed to be with the Dadaists against the “serious anarchists,” the former not being able “to hurt a fly”)—always has new avatars. Pseudo-anarchism roots itself in the “intellectual sphere,” which is to say the margins of the media and the academy. That’s where you find the spectacle of the “free-thinking” Errol Morris interviewing Rumsfeld and subjecting him to a series of non-sequitur pseudo-Wittgensteinian lucubrations about “unknown unknowns,” while Rumsfeld puffs up his chest and half-cryptically grins, knowing he’s gotten away with something and that he’s found his perfect dupe, the courtier who wants to treat him as a macho demiurge or a law-giver, as a shamanic Zarathustra and as an intellectual equal. (No, not as an intellectual equal but as a primus inter pares, a statesman whose every act is an avant-garde rupture, more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
The influence of Brecht and of Tzara on Feyerabend was decisive but incomplete. Feyerabend was impotent, like Kafka, who also flirted with the avant-garde from afar. But Kafka was impotent as a probable homosexual (a fully repressed but complete being) whereas Feyerabend was impotent and a heterosexual for whom there was a rational obstruction.
When Feyerabend got the news, while he was stationed in Croatia in 1943, that his mother had killed herself, he reacted with an ultra-fascist misogynist stoicism, and his fellow soldiers respected him for it. He was as much influenced by Hitler as by Nietzsche, though there’s not that much difference. Mother killed herself today and we killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs.Later, his humanity (his love of his mother) reimposed itself, but it was too late.
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Burroughs, in his later life, was rumored to be a cat-lover and an anti-authoritarian/anti-imperialist, but he spent most of his time in the now-ultra-fashionable Roma Norte neighborhood of Mexico City torturing cats with a dull repetitiveness and bitching about Mexicans. Even when, drunk or high out of his mind, he pulled his perennial gun on Mexican cops, he did it not because they were cops, but because they were Mexican. This is before he’d killed his wife, whom he’d reduced through drugs and the peculiar charisma of the anti-charismatic to a feline schizoid passivity and to melancholia.
Alexander Cockburn, whose Anglo-American Leninist-libertarian spirit is sorely missed, especially these days (especially these days: as if thought could be reduced to a new media-driven “state of emergency”), said more or less that Burroughs was the leftist or post-War version of T.S. Eliot: from a half-fallen Midwestern gentry family, patronized while he pursued every quixotic and mock-bourgeois adventure that stalked his would-be masculine spirit, failed-Harvard-educated through neuroses that had fundamentally to do with a psychotically repressed homosexuality, incapable of deciding whether he was a top or a bottom (he and Ginsberg just giggled trying to fuck each other in the ass, Ginsberg on his way from anal prophecy to the grave anus, Burroughs a boy who, in a letter from Mexico to Ginsberg, told him he was full of shit for having sex with a woman, boasting that he’d fucked hundreds of women, but there’s a difference between a tortilla and a steak, and Joan, scratching her own footnote, to the effect that at the end of the month, when his parents’ subsidy ran out, Burroughs deigned to eat tortillas), torturer and murderer of his own wife. And there’s more: the belatedly romanticized expatriation, the traditionalist turning against the avant-garde, the conservative corruption of generations of well-meaning poets, the echolalia that turned into complacency, the willing isolation and rejection of history.
Burroughs has a hipster restaurant named after him in Roma Norte (Naked Lunch, obviously) and Malcolm Lowry has a bookstore named after his work in the even-more reactionary/dystopian neighborhood of La Condesa.
I walked for about two hours looking for the bookstore, called Under the Volcano, pacing around absurd circular relics from when the time that the entire neighborhood was owned by a 19th-century aristocrat who was an aficionada of horse-racing, until I realized the bookstore was in the American Legion building, which is modeled after a Wild West saloon, naturally. The Wild West: the Ur-gringo fantasy of Mexican genocide. (One of the best Western films ever made was funded by the Sandinistas, by the way, and shot in Nicaragua, and the script was edited by high-level goverment functionaries, including Ernesto Cardenal).
Inside the American Legion building, every wall was painted with epic homages to the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1848, and on the first floor I could only find dutiful servants, sweeping and fussing. On the second floor, groups of hideous, Chris Kyle-like white American soldiers were drinking whiskey at four in the afternoon. I walked into the bookstore, where a gringo military employee was in the middle of getting a blowjob from a probably underage Mexican prostitute. He giggled and winked at me, pulling up his pants, as if to say that we all know American literature is full of shit, is a predatory excuse to get your Kerouac thing on without even having read the Beats, those Greek ancestral demigod poets who invaded Mexico, those Aztects or Toltecs, depending on your views on American poetry, raping young girls and expropriating primordial hieroglyphs, leaving behind a violent, orphic, simple-minded prophecy, a sacred violence that later became secularized horror.