Weekly Readings #30 (08/29/22-09/04/22)
to make the world again
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
First, I was honored to write a guest post this week for the great Katherine Dee AKA Default Friend. There I report on the conflict between the dissident right and the “art right,” the latter’s banal adoption of “racist liberalism” and their newfound adoration for Hillary Clinton, and, most importantly, the true meaning of art. It’s a subscriber post, but Kat and her collaborators offer a guide to our online world that is well worth $5 a month.
Second, I wrote about the most notorious novel in Cormac McCarthy’s generally notorious oeuvre—and of his being a fundamentally religious writer—as we await his next two books, which will be published in October and December of this year.
Below I offer three small essays on the meaning of humanity in politics, aesthetics, and erotics: a speculative examination of fascism today read through Mussolini’s fascist manifesto, a caution about the complexity of objecting to A.I. art, and a citation from Alain Badiou on love and poetry in response to a viral Tweet about the superiority of dating apps to chance encounters.
Anti-Individualistic: On the Fascist Conception of Life
O latent right of insurrection! O quenchless, indispensable fire!
—Walt Whitman, “Songs of Insurrection”
When fascism comes to the United States, it will be called anti-fascism.
—Huey Long, apocryphal
With the Biden administration’s Hitler-hued detour this week into rhetorical anti-fascism coupled with fascist aesthetics in what his center-left champions hailed as “a wartime address” and his further-right critics disparaged as “The Red Sermon,” I thought I might place here some paragraphs I excised from my rumination on fascism last week. (What century are we in, anyway?) I wrote:
As for the definition of fascism, I’m not a political theorist; I only know that the political theorists never stop quarreling about it while ordinary people (I include myself) use it imprecisely as a synonym for other pejoratives from “racist” to “evil”—often to exempt their political enemies from protection against civic violence. Then there’s the fact that calling everything on earth “fascist,” as leftists always do, is a mysteriously durable legacy of Stalinist propaganda.
Even as an amateur I read Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism back when Bush was president—Bush being then regarded by the bien pensant as a Nazi, not as a flawed and rather goofy but nonetheless treasured guardian of our norms and values—as well as Eco’s theses, Sontag on Riefenstahl, some of Theweleit, and, more recently, Camus’s Rebel and Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, among others I’m probably forgetting. But for the lay reader, it never hurts to return to the primary sources. And because political actors now don’t boast of their fascism but only of their having fascist enemies, no one is ever held accountable for fidelity to the founding manifesto the way partisans of other faiths get arraigned by their fellows when they betray Burke or Marx or Mill. Here, then, is what Mussolini thought he was doing:
Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.
To my amateur eye, this state cultus is so clearly derived from Hegel that I understand why American progressives and pragmatists were initially attracted to Mussolini and why Pound spoke of him in the same breath not only as Jefferson but also as Lenin. With only Mussolini to go on, the idea of fascism as a left-wing movement, or at least a kind of right-wing progressivism, seems less like a libertarian slur than it otherwise might. Contra Walter Benjamin’s famous charge that fascism aestheticizes politics, fascism, like the very communism Benjamin advocated, politicizes aesthetics—and everything else, the whole fabric and substance of life, which becomes mere materia poetica for the state’s awesome shaping power.
Mussolini insists that fascism is statist but not nationalist—i.e., not the organic organization into self-government of a pre-existing ethnos—first because nationalism is inextricably tied to democracy (and, like it or not, vice versa) and second because order is inherently inorganic and uniquely creative, a shaping technological affordance imposed from above on the herd of humanity:
In so far as it is embodied in a State, this higher personality [of a people] becomes a nation. It is not the nation which generates the State; that is an antiquated naturalistic concept which afforded a basis for 19th century publicity in favor of national governments. Rather is it the State which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity.
Where do Mussolini’s formulations appear in our contemporary world? I don’t know if his essay anticipates Putin’s Russia. Isn’t it too crudely authoritarian and atavistic to resemble Mussolini’s ultramodern spiritual statism? Xi’s China, with its techno-domination of everyday life, might be the major power closest to fascism as Mussolini defines it. I hope I won’t be accused of “conspiracy theorizing” if I say that both tech barons from Gates to Musk and influential transnational NGOs like the World Economic Forum echo this worldview as well. And then even Canada, that progressive model of the post-nation, proposes to cull the ill and the elderly for the health of the state.
In mainstream U.S. politics, the so-called liberals are formally closer to Mussolini’s ideal than the so-called conservatives, since the liberals extol management by the state and its pseudo-private proxies like big tech as absolutely essential to individual flourishing. The left’s identity politics and hereditarian traumatology, too, recall Mussolini’s statement, “Outside history man is a nonentity.” But as a matter of sensibility, today’s aspiringly all-inclusive liberals share little with Mussolini’s austere insistence that life is a brutal struggle for supremacy. Conservatism, shot through with libertarianism, at least claims to want to empower not the state but local elites and institutions, usually private ones; yet its emphasis on competition, sacrifice, and tradition brings it closer to Mussolini in spirit. So both the Democrats and the Republicans might be described, to borrow Biden’s characteristically senescent phrase, as “semi-fascist.”
Outside the mainstream, much thinking on the intellectual far left today, especially where it touches on the pandemic and environmental catastrophism, seems openly fascist to me—e.g., Benjamin Bratton. The intellectual fringe of the right is a similar case. Curtis Yarvin and his theory of unified sovereignty, to take only this tendency’s central figure, is quite close to Mussolini.
That’s what I wrote last week. Make of it what you will as you meditate this week on the dark facies or fasces Hippocratica at the present head of the United States government. I speak here of symbols and affects, not politics and policies. (James Joyce to his brother, anent Mussolini’s Italy in 1936, quoted in Ellmann: “For God’s sake don’t talk politics. I’m not interested in politics. The only thing that interests me is style.”) Trump was “semi-fascist” too, if more in the style of Clinton’s third term than Bush’s, but at the level of symbol and affect his rumbustious Falstaffian humanity and the sheer camp of his flagrant aestheticism prevented his ascent from registering spiritually as a true nightmare (as anything, in fact, other than carnival) to any but the Morning Joe circle and its epigones, the Inner Party of the neolib/neocon imperium, whose Trump Derangement Syndrome was nothing less than a psychotic break of the kind miscegenation once incited in the racial purist, because a man from the wrong class and the wrong culture and all his gross flesh had breached their circle, their secrets.
Even if this politics was and remains a staged drama—not a possibility we should ever neglect—its passion play instructs us in the need for excess humanity to be mortified in our most austerely anti-human time. As the self-styled Jupiterian Macron proclaimed, “The age of abundance is over.” Hence the poetic truth, whatever its dubious literal veracity, in the MAGA meme’s ode to the shield that is Trump’s prolix flesh: “In reality / they're not after me / they're after you / I'm just in the way.” I hasten to repeat that I speak of and in symbols, that for the purposes of this little essay all that interests me is style—style being the individual’s very signature in the realm of culture. And what is the state but the tomb where the individual is interred?
Artifice of Eternity: On Inhuman Art
Hands I never tired to look at. Shaped in the image of God. To make the world. To make it again and again. To make it in the very maelstrom of its undoing.
—Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said. “I felt like it was demonically inspired — like some otherworldly force was involved.”
—Jason Allen, qtd. in the New York Times
I posted the following seven paragraphs to Tumblr back in May in response to this excellent Substack essay on A.I. art by Erik Hoel, specifically to the moment in the essay where Hoel quotes Leo Tolstoy, John Berger, and Walter Benjamin on aesthetics. I’ve gained many readers since then and nobody comes to Tumblr anyway, so I repost it below, lightly edited, now that a work of A.I. art, Jason Allen’s Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, pictured above, has won an art prize. That the winning piece is a pleasant piece of kitsch, at least for those of us reared on a certain type of genre fare, proves my point below.
A.I. art confronts us with a truth we might prefer to deny: human-made commercial art has long been “inhuman,” because it was tailored by and for the ever-more-specified demands of the market. The artist was just a set of hands operated from on high by what was almost already an algorithm of the if-you-liked-this-then-you’ll-like-more-of-the-same variety. I think of one of the pulp writers who would bang out a novel a week by consulting the plot chart tacked above his typewriter, itself presumably based on what had already worked; for an updated reference, there is Save the Cat! And much of the pleasure serious audiences have always taken in mass art comes from detecting signs of the artist’s irrepressible spirit in the otherwise automated production, i.e., the human touch, what the famous auteur theory was developed to describe in the case of commercial cinema.
But then consider modern high art’s more and more desperate, strenuous, and indeed absurdist evasion of the “word coined by commerce.” Eliminate depth, eliminate sense, eliminate human interest, eliminate humans—or so says the avant-garde. With the human element removed, then implement one or another formal protocol—Impressionist, Cubist, Fauvist, Imagist, Suprematist, Abstract Expressionist, Serialist, et al.—to make art in the absence of either organic mimesis or organic self-expression, lest you be suspected of a commercial appeal. The work the avant-garde produced was inhuman too, then, even less human than some of the mass culture they’d fled.
Not to mention academia: whether formalist or historicist, whether regarding the text as an impersonal freestanding structure whose origin is of no concern (New Criticism, deconstruction) or as an impersonal social site where ideologemes converge (Marxism, New Historicism), the scholars professionalized their disciplines by refusing to consider the objects of their study—works of art—as anything so unscientific as the products of individual consciousness.
Two of Hoel’s sources, Benjamin and Tolstoy, are unreliable witnesses for the humanistic defense of art; their own theories lead to art’s automation. The Marxist Benjamin was not lamenting the loss of aura; he was hopeful about the democratization and politicization of art it portended. Similarly, Tolstoy is a forerunner of socialist realism when he claims, in lines Hoel quotes, that the artist “should stand on the level of the highest life-conception of his time,” i.e., should transmit the wisdom of the collective, not the individual consciousness, wisdom that might as well be automated and programmed. Only John Berger among Hoel’s authorities makes the strict case that art, to be art, must be the product of the individual, though here his modernist sentimentality is somewhat at odds with his Marxism (and so much the worse for his Marxism).
I’m not assigning blame for all of the above, for modern aesthetic inhumanism: art really is the place where the human touches the inhuman, where individual consciousness must mix itself with recalcitrant matter and with the calcified social to produce new configurations and totalities. To value this transaction most for what it tells us about individual consciousness is a choice, one I agree with Hoel that we ought to be making, and ought to have made sooner, but one that can’t be reclassified as other than a choice by playing with the definition of art. I would go further and say that in the age of A.I. we will simply have to know whether a given work of art is or is not human-made, how and to what extent, and to decide to value it more if it is.
We should return to the possibility of being moved by inhuman art when we know it was made by human minds and human hands, even if the artists toiled in a commercial cage or reacted so violently against this imprisonment that they caged themselves some other way. This cage or that, we’re capable of being moved all the same before a Jackson Pollock or a Jack Kirby, before a Samuel Beckett or a Lana Del Rey. But that’s because we know someone’s in there, in the one cage or the other, a live soul beating wings against the bars.
If we don’t know, will we respond the same way? And can we tell just from the surface of the work? Just by looking? If you’d never read Tender Buttons before and I showed it to you and said an A.I. wrote it, wouldn’t you believe me? And yet when you know an A.I. didn’t write it, when you find out what a fascinating character composed those lines, aren’t you—not me, I never finished that book, but you—capable of being moved? So knowledge matters first: a human being made this. After that, belief: a human being isn’t just any kind of being. The soul is never a question of evidence but always a leap of faith.
Coup de Foudre: On Love and Literature
Mallarmé saw a poem as “chance defeated word by word”. In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day by day through the invention of what will endure, the birth of a world.
—Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love (trans. Peter Bush)
Finally, a quotation in response to the viral Tweet of the week. Alain Badiou’s political theory, if I understand it, is not my idea of a good time. As his friend Žižek might say, “Platonized Maoism? No thanks!” But I introduce his cogent remarks on love and poetry into evidence against a depressing Tweet that set social media aflame.
Don’t ask me anything about Lacan, but didn’t Lacan somewhere talk about how the meaning of the sentence is retrospectively constructed by the period? And isn’t this the great discovery of 20th-century narrative, formalized as the hysteron proteron technique and generalized to describe the postmodern condition in which effect precedes cause in Gravity’s Rainbow?
Surely Pynchon discovered it in modernist narrative: in Conrad, Joyce, perhaps especially Faulkner, those fictions, like The Sound and the Fury, that have to be read twice even to be read once because only the end can explain the beginning? A modernist technique for representing a universal endowment and condition, hinted everywhere in the older traditions from “character is fate” to “the fortunate fall.”
This literary legacy extends to the present—how could it not, when it was always-already the future?—with Tao Lin in Leave Society imagining that his novel beams him back the very signals of its future fulfillment that will allow him to write it in the present:
Working on the novel daily over the next two and a half years, he would sometimes feel almost able to see the final draft, which from somewhere in the future was bidirectionally transmitting meaning and emotion, backward toward him and ahead to the end of his life.
And so with love. We are human beings and we assemble destiny from contingency—one more parcel of our humanity thieved from us by the dullard machine, which recognizes and perpetuates only what has already been (hence its art even at its prize-winning best is kitsch) and can never therefore engender the new.