The name is Feuilleton Jones. It’s of French origin. Like New Orleans. Like Le Roi. It’s of black origin, like Jenkins and Jefferson. Yeah, my mama named me funny. Leastwise I don’t look funny. What’s your excuse? Don’t talk about my mama.
The name is Feuilleton Jones. It’s of French origin. Like New Orleans. Like Le Roi. It’s of black origin, like Jenkins and Jefferson. Yeah, my mama named me funny. Leastwise I don’t look funny. What’s your excuse? Don’t talk about my mama.
December 23, 2000
REVIEW: Fight Club
The following was written in December 2000 for Race Traitor #15; it was published in Fall 2001, just after 9/11.
I. Introduction
A. Jack Blackcloud
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others . One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.1
What is this doubleconsciousness but the holding-pattern residue of the dialectic of master and slave? Our adaptation to JimCrow unReconstructed limbo? Three years after San Domingo, in 1794, Mme. Marie Laveau, the mustee2 Queen of New Orleans, was born; she popularized an AfroCatholicoIndian synthetic cultural form, but the next movement was one of sometimes-violent selfassertion in another strand of West hemisphere culture, the AfroAnabaptistIndian current:3 Denmark Vesey, Henry Highland Garnet, Nat Turner, John Brown, Frederick Douglass; all this time, there were those of the spoken word, who remembered The People Could Fly: these men and women kept Brer Rabbit alive. The lesson “for slaves listening to the Brer Rabbit tales” was that while “the rabbit provided an acceptable outlet for an overwhelming hostility,” it “could lead to self-destruction if openly expressed.”4 State power forced the development of a line of folktale-clever fellows like Jelly Roll, Garvey, Booker T. and W.E.B., Armstrong, Malcolm and Martin, the blues and jazz artists.5 This dialectical moment, spanning centuries, is the American spiritual avant-garde, from which come voodoo (via the Spanish and French colonies), river baptisms, Great Awakenings, holyrolling, glossolalia, shouting, blues, rocknroll, funk, hiphop. We’re still waiting on Legba at the crossroads, but white America gets badder6 and blacker.
Fight Club, the best popular movie of my lifetime, is one result. This judgment is not idiosyncratic.
You wake up at SeaTac
SFO, LAX
You wake up at O’Hare
Dallas-Fort Worth
D.W.I.7
Pacific, Mountain, Central
Lose an hour
Gain an hour.
This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.
You wake up at Air Harbor International.
If you wake up at a different time in a different place
Could you wake up as a different person?
Everywhere I travel
Tiny Life.
Single-serving sugar
Single-serving cream
Single pat of butter.
The microwave cordon bleu hobby kit.
Shampoo-conditioner combos
Sample-packaged mouthwash.
Tiny bottles of soap.
The people I meet on each flight
They’re single-serving friends.
Between takeoff and landing
We have our time together,
and that’s all we get.
WELCOME!
This bit of freeverse poetry—delivered in masterful actor Edward Norton’s deadpan, ironic, thoroughly whitebread voice—is set to music: a Dust Brothers’ rendition of Florida-bass booty music, the kind Luke Skywalker (Luther Campbell) and 2 Live Crew popularized in the 80s, in defiance of obscenity laws everywhere. Later in the movie, a clockbeating travel junket goes with the Dusties’ reconstruction of the bassline of a 1991 Tribe Called Quest song, “Excursions,”8 which itself contains a sample from the 1971 Last Poets song, “Time (Is Running Out).”9 While this shows us what we’re working with, the black-culture references are, as a rule, as mediated as that, so that they appear unconscious, cirrus-cloud transient, as subliminal as characterologically-expert Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden himself before the break-beatdown, the parking-lot battledance.
B. Born of Capital Culture
This is not the first time director David Fincher has taken up such challenging material. In
The Game,
he directed a disarming look into the heart of the spectacle, an “adventure game”—imagine a paintball retreat dropped into “real life”—psychologically tailormade to allow Michael Douglas’s wealthy character the opportunity to deceive himself about his life and its meaning; selfhelp materialized for a couple million dollars. In
Seven,
Fincher extrapolated bourgeois values to the point of negation, in the form of an ultramoralistic serial killer who thinks it his duty to impose that which he sees disintegrating, which inspires him to the plan of enacting the deadly sins he hates, forcing his victims to commit them, characters in his pedagogical drama.
Fight Club
surpasses both these in scope and intensity—it is a fully-characterized cultural critique of capitalism,
both
spectacle
and
wage slavery,
both
culture
and
economy, simultaneously, whereas most such attempts can only do one or the other.
Fight Club is able to do this only because it is a rendition of that dialectic of lord and bondsman, and the resultant hitherto exclusively black thang: the postschizocatastrophic approximation of doubleconsciousness.
II. You always hurt the one you love
Self-consciousness is, to begin with, simple being-for-self, self-equal through the exclusion from itself of everything else. For it, its essence and absolute object is “I”; and in this immediacy, or in this (mere) being, of its being-for-self, it is an individual.10
The movie, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name, which it far outshines, is set in Any City, USA. It presents the experience of one individual member of what, till about 2 years ago, was popularly known as Generation X, having come of age in the Reagan years, gone to college, and assumed his place in the nonproductive workforce, now consuming to his heart’s discontent, confronted with his hollow, selfish, and therefore selfless, character. The unknown quantity he represents is at least one of the reasons the term fell out of use, why sometimes it’s better for individuals to remain nameless; why it’s better for certain others for us—“the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash. We connect your calls. We drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep”—to remain nameless. “It was on the tip of everyone’s tongue “
Edward Norton’s main character, “Jack,” is going, at age 30, through a crisis formerly reserved for midlifers. This is less rare an experience than one might imagine, for the same reasons as those of midlifers: work, sexual frustration, inhuman relationships. Jack also has a sleep disorder, for which his doctor refuses to give him drugs.
At such a point in real life, you might meet an Amway distributor, armed with promotional material designed specifically for the atomized individual’s sick desperation. You might be told that success is the great equalizer; that on the other side of the economy there is no race, color, religion; there are no hyphenated Americans. You can’t feed the world with poverty. You can’t help anyone else until you put on your own oxygen mask. To do otherwise would be selfdestructive, suicidal. You need to learn How to Win Friends and Influence People.
But in the world of filmed fiction, this clutch-at-a-straw is as foreclosed as real life: Jack above all needs to grieve his loss of life, sexuality, hope, direction. He needs to feel his own pain, no matter how much Bill might. A friend referred here to Danny Hoch’s Whiteboys: wiggers have no way to connect to their own rage, anger, pain, hurt, grief, unless they come at it through black culture; whites are not dissatisfied; whiteness means happy with life in America. “In a society where no one is any longer recognizable by anyone else, each individual is necessarily unable to recognize his own reality.”11 Not even becoming an angry white man allows the necessary selfrecognition, because they don’t feel their own pain but blame others for it. Likewise, Jack can only recognize his pain via identification with neardeath. The Last Poets might call this a distinction without a difference, though, ‘cause if there’s one thing about niggers, it’s that it’s always “almost like they’re dead.”12
Jack has been emasculated, and falls into a correspondingly womanish situation of pseudocommunal interdependency. After his doctor told him to go and see some
real
pain, he enters the world of life-affirming deathhelp groups, the only space in which he has seen the sanctity of human life and its remaining time to be respected: support groups for the prematurely dying, with names like Triumphant Tomorrows, Certain Resolve, Glorious Day, Taking Flight, Learning to Fly, Positive Positivity, and, of course, Remaining Men Together, the support group for men with testicular cancer, in which everyone has had their balls removed, Jack figuratively. This is the first group Jack visits.
“This particular commodity is explicitly presented as a moment of authentic life whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to.”13
The macho-entrepreneurship pimps have their selfhelp régime as well, but one somewhat less pathetic, no less false—”hitting bottom is not a weekend retreat; it’s not a goddamn seminar”—but certainly less humorous. Under the false pretense that he is dying, Jack encounters people from all walks of life, on their way out; from all ethnic groups and from both races. Of course, Jack is basically a tourist, on vacation, checking out the scene. But he knows that he is also a victim. Otherwise, he would never have been able to set foot in any one of the groups, out of guilt, himself. He feels himself to be dying, if not physically, then at least in the Sylvia Plath, Tibetan-philosophy sense of the word. The spectacle of death makes his living death easier. The groups allow him to grieve, to cry, and to sleep. He looks forward to them.
“Yet even in such special moments, ostensibly moments of
life,
the only thing to be seen and reproduced, is the spectacle—albeit at a higher-than-usual level of intensity.”14
Jack’s figurative castration has not left him without a sense of humor: he is able to make fun of his feminine “Ikea nesting instinct,” which has cathected his masturbatory libido: “We used to read pornography. Now it was the Horchow collection.” He polishes his furniture instead of choking his chicken. It’s his only comfort in his particular drawer of his “filing cabinet for widows and young professionals.” Not only does Jack have a commodity-fetish for Fürni: in the airport, just before he discovers his exploded condo, “a houseful of condiments and no food,” a metaphorical dildo in his suitcase requires him to be detained for security measures. “But I don’t own a dildo” in the usual sense, although he was packing a substitute penis: his A / X ties and DKNY shirts. After Jack’s condo explodes, Tyler mocks him, implying that Jack thinks losing his condo and furniture is as bad as a woman “cut[ting] off your penis while you’re sleeping and toss[ing] it out of the window of a moving car.” It was!
Things just get worse for the dickless Jack when Helena Bonham Carter’s surprisingly potent and well-developed Marla Singer15 stomps into Remaining Men Together. “It’s cheaper than a movie and they have free coffee.”
The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural relationship of the sexes man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relationship to nature—his own natural function. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature has to him become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. It follows from the character of this relationship how much man as a species being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself .16
Jack is attracted to her, but precisely that by which Jack has been castrated prevents him from initiating a “normal” romantic relationship with her. Besides, he has other priorities: she is a tourist like him, “her lie reflected [his] lie,” and he “can’t cry with another faker present.”
What is “other” for it [the subject] is an unessential, negatively characterized object. But the “other” is also a self-consciousness; one individual is confronted by another individual. Appearing thus immediately on the scene, they are for one another like ordinary objects, independent shapes, individuals submerged in the being (or immediacy) of Life—for the object in its immediacy is here determined as Life.17
Marla is Jack’s indifferent other, not even a sex but an ordinary object, for whom there is no place in his “life.”
The reason Jack takes such extreme measures to feel his pain? There are no other viable options. Jack never even
attempts
reactionary macho independence—not least because it’s impossible. The strong, silent type is out of the question, having been transformed into the silent utterly destroyed type, demanding not the distance accorded noble souls but the most overwhelming display of empathy and support. There are certainly no role models. Don’t all one of the modern Marlboro men live on a multithousand-acre ranch in Montana? Jack’s father left when he was 6. Jack: “Married this other woman, had some other kids. He like did this every six years: he goes to a new city and starts a new family.” Tyler: “Fucker was setting up franchises”—the original multilevel-marketing program, genetic licensing
avant la lettre.
(Despite the fact that she raised him, Jack’s mother was never as important to him as was his absent father.) And Jack’s “boss,” for instance, a figure who in Dale Carnegie’s time might have been an avuncular guide to the adult male world of action, life, and commerce, is a muscular, husky punk, with all the personal power of Tony Robbins in the womb, whose cultural fluency is restricted exclusively to one of the narrowest dialects of bureaucratese, and this in the symbolic-analyst stratum of the cutting-edge private sector, the dynamic financial-services “industry”—not even auto insurance
per se,
but the recall division of a major auto manufacturer.
Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.18
Neither Jack nor Marla can acknowledge one another as human beings, because their lives and consciousnesses have been determined by inhumanity. Marla may not be a respectable young lady, but she keeps open her option to check out at any time and make her false pretenses true. Jack may not even remotely resemble a real man, but he can keep Marla at a distance. The world already has him by the balls; he doesn’t need a woman adding insult to the injury, like she did in the secondhand-clothing store. And although Jack is sexless, the exclusion of reactionary macho independence does not foreclose the exclusion of women or a kinder, gentler misogyny, that perhaps of the gangsta-rap-listening whiteboy, who would never call a woman a ho to her face, but can talk the worst shit about once-a-month-bleeding bitches when there are none around and he doesn’t feel like sportfucking. “Niggers fuck, fuck, fuck. / . / They ain’t fucking for love and appreciation.”19 Jack even describes Bob (Meat Loaf Aday’s Robert Paulson, former weightlifting champion and now-ballsless former steroids junkie) misogynistically: “Bob had bitch tits.” Later Jack says “ Can’t get married. I’m a 30-year-old boy.” Tyler responds “We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.”
There is a certain type of small-group relationship among men. It can be very intense, sometimes competitive, sometimes extremely satisfying and rewarding; it is something other than friendship. A friend of mine remarked at this point on the Bund mentality, where men remain men together, specifically by excluding women except in the case of a good fuck—“Niggers would fuck ‘Fuck’ if it could be fucked.”20 This was widespread among the hiking Klicken of interbellum Germany,21 and one finds it today among young men and adolescents, especially young black men and wiggers, in “my crew,” among “my homies,” “my niggas,” and, of course, in “the set.” Zizek, trying to explain military resistance to gender integration, once put it down to group repression of homosexuality.22 Among otherwise heterosexual men, this dynamic could only arise from the exclusion of the possibility of sex, i.e., women, which is why these groups appear constitutionally homoerotic / homophobic. “Niggers fuck white thighs, black thighs, yellow thighs, brown thighs. / Niggers fuck ankles when they run out of thighs. / Niggers fuck Sally, Linda, and Sue, / And if you don’t watch out, / Niggers will fuck you!”23 Jack’s jealousy of Tyler’s attention to AngelFace is a good example. Jack’s homoerotic jealousy, through a convoluted selfrelation we have yet to develop,24 is actually homophobia, which leads Jack to destroy AngelFace as such. After Jack has beaten AngelFace senseless and ugly, Jack and Tyler have an argument over what is going on in Fight Club. Upset that he has been left out of Project Mayhem, Jack pleads friendship: “You and I started Fight Club together, you remember that? It’s as much mine as it is yours, you know.” Tyler asks, “Is this about you and me?” Jack still believes, even after he has helped to destroy its foundations, that simple friendship could be the basis of the group. Not to apologize for the Citadel and its mass-murderous function, but this is exactly the sort of conflict—personal relationships interfering with collective action—against which the ritual rearticulation of the maleness of such small groups is meant to protect. “You’re missing the point! This does not belong to us. We are not special . Fuck what you know! You need to forget about what you know, that’s your problem. Forget about what you think you know, about life, about friendship, and especially about you and me.” Jack’s destruction of AngelFace’s beauty is not only a violation of the rules of Fight Club but also his determinate negation of the relationship of man to man—friendship—, of man to woman—homoeroticism / homophobia block his heterosexual libido in this all-male environment—, and therefore also of man to nature: “I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species. I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all those French beaches I’d never see. I wanted to breathe smoke.” Where there should be love indifference appears, converting heartache into hatred, the source of the hurt; all is inverted, and for now, like punk rock and gangsta rap, the Fight Clubbers make a virtue of vulgar negation of negation.
III. You lookin’ at me? You must be lookin’ at me, ‘cause I’m the only one standing here
There are two works that illuminate
Fight Club—the novel
Reckless Eyeballing
and the movie
Angel Heart,
the one for which mulatto temptress Lisa Bonet got into trouble with the oldline raceman Bill Cosby—, specifically the master-slave dialectic in Jack’s further development, in terms of the disintegration of the personality along the faultline of the man-woman relationship; they do this by reinserting the race problem. A third work will reveal just how far Fight Club has traveled along its path.
A.
Reckless Eyeballing
Ishmael Reed’s
Reckless Eyeballing
(1986) is a brilliantly ruthless satire of the New York City literature / theater scene in the breakadawn of American postmodernism. Its dramatic engine is the accursed consciousness of Ian Ball, a black playwright from the fictional Caribbean island of New Oyo; his curse is that of Ham in a new hemisphere, catalyzed by multigenerational gender conflict among slave descendants: not only to be “black and elongated” like the son of Noah, but to be
doubleminded,
“a twohead, of two minds, the one not knowing what the other was up to.”25
Ian is the son of voodoo priestess Martha Ball and black-nationalist Caribbean political leader Koffee Martin, a midcentury Marcus Garvey. The curse was laid by Koffee’s wife, Abiahu, a coalblack woman, against Martha Ball, a redbonebronze woman; a lightbright / highyellow by comparison. “She and Martha were the only people in New Oyo with the Indian gift, the gift of second sight, but because [Abiahu] was blacker and had better public relations she had a bigger following.”26 Abiahu was jealous of Martha, and when she found out about Martha’s impregnation by Koffee the night before his death, she spoke the bad word. Martha never told her son about the real conditions of his birth or that Martin was his father. The boy Ian—like the young C.L.R. James, joining Maple cricket club over Shannon27—was a sort of pseudoaristocrat, a quasinoble, riding horses and learning Latin in a postcolonial outpost, one of the few natives, like James, to be admitted into the educational ranks of a specially selected stratum of future state civil servants.28 The specific difference of his curse remains submerged in New Oyo’s all-black environment until, in the mid70s, Ian leaves for New York City, the land of opportunity, where he quickly succeeds as a slimy opportunist playwright, a satirical extreme much worse than Harold Cruse’s Ellison or Wright, or even his “civil-writist” Artists for Freedom.29 One of Reed’s characters, a critic, writes, “Mr. Ball has a way of talking out of both sides of his mouth, as though he were of two heads or of two minds. When misogyny was in [back in the 70s], he wrote Suzanna, the play about the sugar cane worker who regularly took the cutters into the fields in order to pay her gambling debts and buy rum.”30 Whereas Jack was sexlessed, Ian was “sex-listed”31 in feminist theater newsletter Lilith’s Gang: neither black nor white women can stand his play.
By the 80s, however, the “feminists,” i.e., white women, have taken over this scene, and Ian has to adapt to Reed’s fictionalized version of the PC circus of the Reagan-years artworld; Reed’s raw material is the controversy surrounding Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), and he takes great pleasure in the absurdities of race / gender authenticity-exploitation. Reed even explores the intraethnic conflicts among the white-women patrons (antiSemitic Establishment vs. liberal Jewry), although this is not most important for us. In real life, some Black Males lined up against a caricature of Walker and her novel, accusing her of race treason, collaboration with the enemy; some black-woman lit-types sided with the “feminists,” i.e., white women, even going so far as to defend the caricatures. Reed shows us the “fellas” who resent the Walker figure, Tremonisha Smarts, and her appropriation of scarce patronage dollars from the allied bourgeois and petit bourgeois white women (the “feminists” and the old rich white women from Long Island and points north, with mansions, foundations, and lots of time on their hands). Tre is riding high from the recent success of her smash-hit BlackMalebashing play, WrongHeaded Man: “By the end of WrongHeaded Man, the lead villain has screwed his children, sodomized his missionary wife, put his mother-in-law in bondage, performed bestial acts with pets, and when the police break down the door he’s emptied the fish bowl and is going after the fish.”32 Reed also shows us a black woman character, Johnnie Kranshaw, Smarts’ predecessor, who, before Reed’s story begins, grew tired of being BlackMaled into joining the “feminists,” or else.
The key to Reed’s story in both its Caribbean and NYC settings, is the man-woman relationship: in the first case, between black proletarian men and women, which results in the curse Ian carries; in the second case both between black petit bourgeois men and women, and between their patrons, white bourgeois and petit bourgeois women (some of whom are Jews), all of whom use one another in various proxy wars and sexual games in the incestuous NYC theater world. For several reasons, even the venomous Harold Cruse was incapable of pulling Baldwin’s card specifically for participating wholeheartedly in this sort of bullshit, even going so far as to attempt to justify his denunciation of Richard Wright and his Native Son33 psychoanalytically, with the comment that every generation must kill its fathers. Ian has been doing the same thing, in relation to a composite Richard Wright / Ralph Ellison figure, Jake Brashford, who wrote only one play, The Man Who Was an Enigma, which was performed in the 50s and which was a little too corny, “universal,” and accomodationist for the taste of the black-power people coming up when Ian himself came up, and much too naïve for the sophisticated pomo 80s art scene. “[T]he only reason they’re still backing him is because of that long monologue in the middle where the character renounces militancy and the end where that black guy comes out dressed in drag. And then in the epilogue all of the black male bar patrons go off and register for World War Two so’s they could fight Hitler.”34 Ian treats him badly, twofaced, and shabby, though never neglecting to drop his name all over the place in order to establish himself as the heir of his single-permissible-Black-Male-writer spot.
He also cranks out a play, Reckless Eyeballing, to get on the good side of the “feminists” and get unsexlisted. We don’t know exactly what is in the play until the end, but we do know that it is about a woman for whom a black man was lynched in the JimCrow DeepSouth—he was lynched for reckless eyeballing. We also know that the woman—then a slut like the one in Ian’s first play, now a radical-feminist lesbian-bookstore owner—will go back to the town in order to give the black man his due-process trial 20 years postfactum. They exhume his skeletal remains to try him in front of a jury of her peers, a jury box of black and white women, sisters all. He is found guilty, of course. Unfortunately for Ian, his producer, Becky French, is a white woman, part of the antiSemitic Establishment. She wants to humiliate Ian by showing his play in a second-rate house and by having the united white-woman Establishment’s new “It” girl, Tre Smarts, direct it. French moved him out of the first-rate theater because she wants to produce a play about how Eva Braun, Hitler’s wife, was merely a victim of male chauvinism. French has some problems with Ian’s lead white-woman character. Tre has some problems with Ian’s black-woman characters. Tre also has some problems with Becky, and is by now going through the same thing Johnnie went through before.
Reed mentions that Tre owns a picture by one of the “leading black Lower East Side painters,” and he had to be thinking of Jean-Michel Basquiat in particular, el otro de Dos Cabezas,35 who was also “half” Caribbean and, despite his great aesthetic success and the explosive social content of his work, was roundly and pretty much rightly accused of exploiting what authentethnicity he brought to the NYC artworld in those days, to reinvigorate Warhol’s quickly decaying husk of a nearattempt at pseudoart. He disintegrated under the pressure, becoming a serious drug addict with an obsessive compulsion to pick at his face in the mirror. Today Basquiat’s friends accuse his “friends,” those responsible for his success, of helping to kill him. He died of a heroin overdose at 27 in 1988. A Citibank art dealer delivered the eulogy. His memorial service was held in Citicorp Center. Afterward there was a party in a nightclub converted from a bank.36 Under similar pressure, Johnnie Kranshaw, predecessor of Tremonisha Smarts, took to snorting Scarface-sized bowls of cocaine before she gave up the game and moved to New Oyo. Tre herself prefers prescription pillpops.
Meanwhile, one Angry Black Male has declared a war of vengeance upon black and white woman intellectuals all over town: he cuts off all his victim’s hair, like the French did woman Nazi collaborators after WWII, ties them up, perhaps slaps them a few times, and always leaves a chrysanthemum. “A Jew, Pole, and a black man arrive at the pearly gates and are told by Saint Peter that they can only enter the Kingdom if they spell a word. The Jew and the Pole are asked to spell God. They do so and are admitted. The black man is asked to spell chrysanthemum.”37 They call him the Flower Phantom. He wreaks terrible vengeance upon the defamers of The Black Man and their collaborators, the latter being black women. In Fight Club, there are MONKEYS FOUND SHAVEN and PERFORMANCE ARTIST[S] FOUND MOLESTED, but in Eyeballing, there is TREMONISHA SMARTS, WELL-KNOWN BLACK PLAYWRIGHT ACCOSTED BY PSYCHO and FLOWER PHANTOM STRIKES AGAIN and again. Tre was first, of course. Second was “a feminist revisionist who had written that all of the black men in the South who had been accused of rape were actually guilty, and had deserved to be lynched.”38 The third was a woman who said the typical rapist is a black man, and finally the Phantom gets Ian’s theater producer, Becky French.
All this time, we think that Ian is doubleminded in the way Du Bois explained; we think he is just a black man stressed by the alternating currents of amused contempt and pity, until, in the end, in a crescendo of cleverness taking only 4 large-print pages, we discover the truth about Ian, although he apparently does not. All he knows is that he hasn’t has a good night’s sleep in several days, but Ian is the Flower Phantom. He used to raise chrysanthemums as a genteel child in New Oyo.
Ian’s doublemindedness even seeps into his dominant consciousness: strictly speaking, Ian did not even write Reckless Eyeballing. As bad as it was already, Ian allowed Becky French to make it worse: the black man’s lascivious glance is morally equivalent to his lynching by the mob; hostile-environment sexual harassment = castration and execution. Ian gave up his creativity in order to get off the sexlist. His success was vicarious, and his attacks were unconscious. One is corruption, the other curse.
There is no solution to this; Reckless Eyeballing is a satire, a comedy of errors, a verbal assault on the pompous artsy fartsies who populate my metropolis and think they are important. Reed himself lives in Oakland.
B.
Angel Heart
In
Angel Heart
(1987), Mickey Rourke’s main character, private detective Harry Angel, gets to see and understand his curse of doublemindedness; he appears to be a random victim, no victim of systemic prejudice and torture, no racialized slavery, or anything remotely like that—but the actor Rourke, like all of his characters, is obviously Irish, and thus an indirect though
implicated
victim: the Irish-studies-teacher son of Reed’s cop character says
“That’s right. Be their Dirty Harry Callahan. You’re the fists for people who spit on your kind protecting their property by beating up people. You and your father, both mercenaries. At the turn of the century they used your father against the Jews on the Lower East Side and against other Irish. And now they use you against the blacks and the Puerto Ricans.”39
In 1943, some wandering practitioners ran the voodoo down on Harry: one Toots Sweet, a black guitar player from New Orleans; one Madame Margaret Krusemark, the Witch of Wellesley, white bourgeois debutante turned voodoo priestess; her father Ethan Krusemark, Louisiana old money; and one Johnny Favorite, who broke Margaret’s heart, a white singer who had made a deal with black powers—both natural and supernatural; both the devil and Toots Sweet, who wrote his major hit—sometime before WWII to grant him his heavenly voice and crossover status—“maybe your soul you’d sell to have mass appeal.”40
Robert De Niro’s character, Louis Cyphre, hires Angel, veteran victim of posttraumatic amnesia, to find Johnny Favorite, to follow Johnny’s trail from Brooklyn to Poughkeepsie to New Orleans, where he encounters Krusemark and a historical gender conflict similar to that in
Eyeballing; Mme. Krusemark appears to have taken the place of mustee Evangeline Proudfoot as the preeminent voodoo priestess of New Orleans, but Proudfoot, now deceased, was the one who bore Johnny’s child, Lisa Bonet’s Epiphany Proudfoot. Murder and mayhem, up to and including the murder of Epiphany Proudfoot, follow Angel wherever he goes, and he is the prime suspect. He deduces that Favorite is still alive, killing anyone who could possibly identify him or help Louis Cyphre track him down. Angel is not wrong: he is Johnny Favorite, victim of both amnesia and a possessive sort of metempsychosis. Favorite tried to get out of the deal by stealing Angel’s body, mind, and memories, but Cyphre tracks him down regardless, to enforce the contract. By Angel’s own mercenary efforts, Lucifer corners him into this epiphany. Angel protests that he knows who he is, but he protests too much. He recognizes the truth in Krusemark’s vanity mirror.
This movie is incredibly reactionary, however spooky and moving: its effectiveness lies in audience horror at the fundamental, irreducible injustice of the theft of a random white man’s soul, literally on (the devil’s) account of the cultural debt whites owe to blacks, which then justifies white resentment at efforts on the part of our earthly powers to improve the lives of American blacks. At best, the movie exploits a selfserving confusion over the source of “soul,” as in American music, to begin with. Angel’s soul was condemned to wander the earth, and although Favorite, via Angel’s body and memories, tries three times to reach out to Angel’s soul for forgiveness, Favorite is never quite able to reach him. Whatever the reason, the niggerlover can’t be forgiven. We get only one look at the face of Angel’s soul, and he is mad as the hell to which both he and Favorite are going. Angel Heart raises more philosophical and social questions than it could ever hope to solve or even to clearly articulate: this is why it required the intervention of Satan himself.
C.
Godfather II
Godfather II
was the last best popular movie of my lifetime, released in 1974, the year of my birth. Satan was secularized in the worship of Mammon, and the race question went underground, imperceptible beneath the veneer of ethnicity, hiding under cover of the immigrant tale: the tale of whiteness joined, the American Dream underside, corrupt and dysfunctional, the wages of whiteness, sweet as
cannoli
in the mouth but bellybitter. Coppola and Puzo made use of two consciousnesses, although on sequential timelines—Robert De Niro’s Vito and his youngest son, Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone—one attempting to make it in America, with work and then by hook or crook, the other the end result of these first-quarter-century efforts. No movie has ever more effectively expressed the despair at the center of the American Dream—perhaps
Five Easy Pieces
came close, but it didn’t convey the
movement:
it was more a recapitulation of the static existential myth: the noble and beautiful soul made heartless by a heartless world.
Godfather II
shows the degradation of community and family, beginning with the tale of forced exile and émigration, ending with the heartache of fratricidal ambition in the land of opportunity. The heartache of inhuman, incredible cruelty. This masterpiece ends simply and quietly, the most heartrending 27 seconds in American film, with Al Pacino’s Michael looking rather intently offcamera. What is he looking at? Who is Michael looking at? Coppola shows us onscreen. He is looking at
himself,
Sonny, Fredo, their sister Connie, and her first boyfriend Carlo, around the dinner table, back in 1941 after the Japanese dropped the bomb on Pearl Harbor; he is looking at how he was the first in his family to go to college, how his American education enabled him to supersede the rigid, old-world patriarchy with the concept of the nation-state, how he voluntarily enlisted in the Marines to fight in WWII, how he wanted to be a businessman, and how he, the best of his brothers, became a patriarch anyway, though a businessman as well. He is looking at his father Vito, leaving Sicily on a train.
Godfather II is the story of a single character: the Italian Ethnic. It is not insignificant that this movie is one of only two41 in which these two Italian-Americans, De Niro and Pacino, two of the three greatest actors alive today (the other being the Jew Dustin Hoffman), have ever shared the silver screen; like Wright and Baldwin, like Brashford and Ball, like Kranshaw and Smarts, like Favorite and Angel, they occupy the same space at different times. This single place held, this single character, this single consciousness, this single history, undergoes a transformation, a revaluaton of all values, but it is hardly liberatory for the macho Michael, the American superman, the independent entrepreneur, who finds he hates what he has become; he does not make his own laws but has become an enforcer of the laws of supply and demand; in the course of being strong for his family he has destroyed it, and this is not a question of the corruption of family values, but, as in Seven, of the corruption at the heart of the bourgeois family anyway. His quasiincestuous relationship with his sister, Talia Shire’s Connie, reveals the truth of the development ending in Michael’s murder of his brother, John Cazale’s Fredo. The whiteness to which Vito devoted his entire life forces Michael into a role in which he destroys himself and almost his children and wife, Diane Keaton’s Kay. Not even in Godfather III does Michael relinquish his status, although he is finally able to beg forgiveness of a priest; meanwhile, his criminal machinations help to destroy the institutional integrity of the Church. Michael, an immigrant fairytale, a best-case scenario, is Midas.
IV. The Phenomenology of White-Slave Spirit
A. A Twice-Told Tale
1. First Pass
The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood.42
Du Bois meant the black would-be savant, but he wrote something just as profound. Our would-be black revolutionary, Jack, confronts a different paradox, but one with similar results, because he is traveling the well-worn path of the master-slave dialectic, whether known as Middle Passage or Trail of Tears.
In immediate self-consciousness the simple “I” is absolute mediation, and has as its essential moment lasting independence. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience; through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself but for another, i.e. is a merely immediate consciousness, or consciousness in the form of thinghood. Both moments are essential.43
Jack begins as a white slave. He has the consciousness of a thing. He is an object upon which the spectacle works.
Since to begin with they [lasting independence versus thinghood] are unequal and opposed, and their reflection into a unity has not yet been achieved, they exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord, the other is bondsman.44
At first glance, the independent consciousness Jack confronts is actually unconsciousness; it is the world of anarchic capitalist production, of which Jack is a part. There is no overarching plan except profit. So it cannot quite be called a consciousness, although it is indeed something for itself: exchange value, toxic distillate of alienated labor, forever seeking new markets; IBM in deep space, Planet Starbucks, Microsoft planting flags in faroff galaxies. On second sight, Tyler is this consciousness for himself. In either case, Jack is the dependent consciousness.
The lord is the consciousness that exists for itself, but . it is a consciousness existing for itself which is mediated with itself through another consciousness, whose nature it is to be bound up with an existence that is independent, or thinghood in general. The lord puts himself into relation with both , to a thing as such, the object of desire, and to the consciousness for which thinghood is the essential characteristic. 45
Tyler can do nothing without Jack; Tyler is dependent upon Jack throwing the first punch.46 Tyler mediates himself to himself as Head Nigger In Charge only by taking charge of Jack. Tyler is tied up with a consciousness whose nature it is to be dependent.
The lord relates himself mediately to the bondsman through a being (a thing) that is independent . Equally, the lord relates himself mediately to the thing through the bondsman; the bondsman also relates himself negatively to the thing, and takes away its independence; but the thing is independent vis-à-vis the bondsman, whose negating of it, therefore, cannot go the length of being altogether done with it to the point of annihilation; in other words, he only works on it. For the lord, the immediate relation becomes through this mediation the sheer negation of the thing, or the enjoyment of it. 47
After Jack and Tyler start Fight Club, the various projects like Mayhem and Latté Thunder become Tyler’s objects of desire, and he can only relate himself to these objects with the cooperation and work of the members of Fight Club, and Jack in particular, at least at the beginning, before Jack’s contribution is submerged with that of all the other space monkeys in their social labor. Their labor becomes independent of any one of them. “Now, no one was the center of Fight Club except the two men fighting. The leader walked through the crowd, out in the darkness,” enjoying the action he has set in motion.
In both of these moments the lord achieves his recognition through another consciousness . In neither case can it be lord over the being of the thing and achieve absolute negation of it. 48
Tyler cannot dominate Fight Club. Tyler cannot fight every fight, do every project, and therefore be lord over the being of the object; in order for the thing to be done at all, and for Tyler, the leader of the group, to have any enjoyment at all, the object and the consciousnesses working on it, must be independent. This is reflected in the cellular organization of the national network of fight clubs. But their independence is ambiguous:
[W]hat the bondsman does is really the action of the lord. The latter’s essential nature is to exist only for himself; he is the sheer negative power for whom the thing is nothing. Thus he is the pure, essential action in this relationship, while the action of the bondsman is impure and unessential. 49
Tyler is pure bottomhitting. Jack attempts throughout the entire movie to emulate Tyler’s pure activity. “We all became what Tyler wanted us to become.” But everything he does is somehow corrupt, impure. He’s fucking pathetic; he tries to call off projects; he breaks the rules; he tries to change the rules.
[T]he object in which the lord has achieved his lordship has in reality turned out to be something quite different from an independent consciousness. What now really confronts him is a dependent one. He is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself. On the contrary, his truth is in reality the unessential consciousness and its unessential action.50
The inbred dependency of slaves everywhere, no matter the rules of their activity, the techniques of their work, the means by which the leader tries, through them, to mediate his essence as pure negativity—despite all this, he cannot help but discover the dependency of his bondsmen. Tyler discovers Jack’s dependency, and at the end Jack’s uncertainty about his identity is resolved:
The truth of the independent consciousness is the servile consciousness of the bondsman.51
It is resolved precisely through the dependency of the bondsmen: those Fight Clubbers who break the rules upon the strength of their personal relationship with their trusted leader, and answer questions that were never supposed to be asked. Of course, the master is something different for the slaves than he is for himself; through him the slaves also mediate themselves to themselves, and realize their own essence, their own independence of him, his superfluousness.
2. Second Pass
That which structures Jack’s life is capital, a global master-slave relationship. His immediate selfconsciousness is that of being an object. But his frustrated desire for human relationships, namely for a romantic relationship with Marla, creates the vague awareness that he has a self-for-itself, somewhere.
[S]ervitude has the lord for its essential reality; hence the truth for it is the independent consciousness that is for itself. However, servitude is not yet aware that this truth is implicit in it.52
Tyler is Jack’s implicit truth. Tyler appears implicitly / subliminally before he appears; almost invisible upon first sight, especially in an actual movie theater, several single frames of Tyler—mugging and clowning, in support groups, on the street, and in offices—have been spliced into the film. If you rent the videotape or DVD you can see these better. This is an exceedingly clever, three-times selfreferential joke. We experience Tyler in the same way Jack does, unconsciously, because we are in Jack’s point of view. And the movie does to us what Tyler does in the movie. This doubling-up presses home the critique of our spectacular slavery, via the détournements both depicted in and performed by the movie. By inserting pornographic frames into family films, Tyler shocks spectators out of their passivity, reconnecting them, if even in a questionable way, to active desire and passion, e.g., sex. This is an attack on one of the major instruments of capital, that which prevents one facing “with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.”53 The third selfreferential joke: Tyler inserts penises into children’s films; but Tyler is Jack’s alien penis, also inserted into the film.
Lest we get bigheaded about our intelligence in deciphering the movie’s methods, the fact that Tyler is Jack’s implicit truth is also why Tyler insults Jack’s cleverness upon first meeting him in the airplane, after hearing Jack’s single-serving-friend joke. “Oh, I get it. It’s very clever. How’s that working out for you?” “What?” “Being clever.” “Er, great.” “Well. Keep it up then. Right-o. And now, as I pass, a question of etiquette; do I give you the ass or the crotch” as I squeeze between you and the seat in front of us? Tyler gives the clever ass the ass. As he makes his way into the first-class section to grab a better seat, he gives a bentover stewardess the crotch.
The convoluted selfrelations portrayed in and performed by the film are basically empty without the quite simple insight into selfalienation. Jack is Tyler. Jack’s real name is Tyler Durden. Tyler, answering the phone: “Who’s this?” Jack: “Er Tyler?” Doublemindedness, as in Eyeballing and Angel Heart, is expressed as unconsciousness.
Despite his inchoate desires, Jack’s fear and loathing of his living death emasculate him.[The subject] does in fact contain this truth of pure negativity and being-for-self, for it has experienced this its own essential nature. For this consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal moment, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness. 54
Furthermore, his consciousness is not this dissolution of everything stable merely in principle; in his service he actually brings this about. Through his service he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it. [A]lthough the fear of the lord is indeed the beginning of wisdom, consciousness is not therein aware that it is a being-for-self. Through work, however, the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is.55
In Jack’s case, there is a twist to the classical master-slave dialectic: his labor—which is supposed to allow the slave to free himself from the master by allowing the slave to see that he is the creator of all objects of enjoyment, that he is the master’s essence—is nonproductive; in fact, actually harmful. He participates in the insurance fraud, a mere transfer of wealth to lawyers and his major auto manufacturer. He is not only alienated from his “product,” i.e., destruction of the conditions of social reproduction, but he doesn’t even get the pleasure of seeing this negation as his product, like black slaves could see the bales of cotton on the wagon or, if they could read, their or their exchange value in the commercial papers. What insignificant paperpushing clerk, without special training or a stroke of luck, can know, or believe even if told that his or her work is destructive? Usually we know only that we do nothing of any positive significance. He emphatically does not “[t]hrough his service rid himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail by working on it,”56 although he does, unconsciously, bring about the dissolution of everything stable, both in his job and through Tyler. His nonproductive, destructive labor prevents him from recognizing his creativity. This nonproductivity determines the specific course of development of our fictional slave’s consciousness, although we can still say
just as lordship show[s] that its essential nature is the reverse of what it wants to be, so too servitude in its consummation will really turn into the opposite of what it immediately is; as a consciousness forced back into itself, it will withdraw into itself and be transformed into a truly independent consciousness.57
How, if the slave can no longer identify his negation in the fruits of his labor? If all this is invisible or imperceptible? What can pressure this withdrawal into a sense of self at all?
The social organization that can “afford” to keep so many slaves nonproductive has been tightly organized and regimented throughout: in the social factory the pressure simply never lets up. Our slave can either go home, go shopping, or perhaps to a movie. That Jack has nothing at hand with which to determine his refusal of this world, his “prefer[ence] not to,” is why he eventually cracks under the pressure, his dogged strength insufficient to keep him from being torn asunder: Tyler is Jack’s extreme self-withdrawal; the nature of Jack’s work determines this development both in its destructiveness and in its unconsciousness.
The single consciousness has broken in two under the pressure of life as a nonproductive slave—the actually contradictory conditions of Jack’s existence have been taken up into his mind. Jack has been driven stark-raving mad, and we have leapt totally beyond the realm of selfhelp projects and deathhelp support groups. Jack’s independent object, that object upon which he works, is now to be himself as an other. And because Tyler is Jack’s alien essence, it looks like Tyler works on Jack: Tyler is lord, whose action is essential; Jack is bondsman, whose action is impure, and Tyler does indeed ride Jack like a slave, using his very body as a vessel: “It’s called a changeover. The movie goes on, and no one in the audience has any idea.”
Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self.58
The first independent consciousness opposing Jack was unconscious exchange value, blocking his becoming self-for-self, filling him with the fear of God; in the first pass, Tyler immediately appeared to be the second, the personification of his self-for-self and the supersession of the first independent consciousness. But Marla was the first independent consciousness to appear before Jack. His desire for her and his impotence in the face of it was the catalyst for his disintegration.
A blocked practice and its corollary, an antidialectical false consciousness, are imposed at every moment on an everyday life in thrall to the spectacle—an everyday life that should be understood as the systematic organization of a breakdown in the faculty of encounter, and the replacement of that faculty by a social hallucination: a false consciousness of encounter, or an “illusion of encounter.”59
Broken, Jack mediates himself as object (Jack) to himself as essence-as-an-other-being (Tyler) via his desire for Marla, the original other being.
They are, for each other, shapes of consciousness which have not yet accomplished the movement of absolute abstraction, of rooting-out all immediate being, and of being merely the purely negative being of self-identical consciousness; in other words, they have not as yet exposed themselves to each other in the form of pure being-for-self, or as self-consciousnesses. Each is indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and therefore its own self-certainty still has no truth.60
Neither Jack nor Marla could treat each other or expose themselves to one another as beings-for-self, because they were not, although both were rather quickly electric-sliding toward the absolute bottom. We don’t know how Marla feels, but Jack knows that “All of this—the gun, the bombs, the revolution—has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer.”
B.
Die Whitey!
or, Brer Rabbit Gets Mean
1. Slide Down the Slippery Soap
That
Our Nig
had nothing with which to determine his refusal of this world is also why
the negation Tyler brings is general and omnidirectional—indeterminate destruction, free-floating nihilism, at least in principle.61
Tyler is Jack’s “Black Rage”:
There are bombs standing
on the corners of the cities
waiting to explode
at the slightest touch
baggy shadow street boys
stand cocked ready to fire
their eyes are grenades
and the pin is about to be pulled
BOOM!
the Brother went off
pressure pulled the trigger
and the brother became a nigger
and no one could figure out
how it happened
what went wrong?
He had a chance
somebody even loved him
even told him that he was better
than most
but he went off
There are bombs standing
on the corners of the cities
waiting to explode
at the slightest touch
baggy shadow street boys
stand cocked ready to fire
their eyes are grenades
They are warriors looking for
a Rite of Passage
They are young lions
enchanted by the sound of their roar
They are diamonds
treated like worthless stones
They are Rivers
with nowhere to run
They are dreams unfulfilled
desires buried in the remains
of an abandoned soul
.62
Which means more than rage: passion, flamboyance, desire, sexuality. Jack relates to Marla via Tyler. Tyler actually procures Marla for Jack. Tyler is Jack’s inner pimp.63 But this is not OK.
It must supersede this otherness of itself. This is the supersession of the first ambiguity, and is therefore itself a second ambiguity. First, it must proceed to supersede the other independent being in order thereby to become certain of itself as the essential being; secondly, in so doing it proceeds to supersede its own self, for this other is itself.64
The ambiguous supersession / exclusion of the first otherness, Marla, was the also ambiguous disintegration of personality, Jack’s confrontation with himself as an other. “Away back in the days of bondage,” Jack “thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment,”65 but his aircrash deathwish has been replaced by a new task: within the all-male Fight Club, Jack must supersede Tyler.
The presentation of itself, however, as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is not attached to any specific existence, not to the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not attached to life . In so far as it is the action of the other, each seeks the death of the other. [This] involves the staking of its own life . They must engage in this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being for themselves to truth . Similarly, just as each stakes his own life, so each must seek the other’s death its essential being is present to it in the form of an “other,” it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality.66
But Tyler also seeks to supersede Jack, bringing the force of the entire group to bear on him, “[k]aze in dem days Brer Rabbit en his fambly wuz at de head er de gang w’en enny racket wuz on han’ .”67
The duration of the movie comprises the ambiguous negations by which Jack and Tyler together kill both whitey, i.e., Jack, and his inner nigger, i.e., Tyler. Some shallowminded critics call this series of negations simply fascistic—somebody who ain’t never heard of ecofascism,68 the Green wing of the National Socialist Party, or the Wandervögel69 might miss Tyler’s reference to the Boy Scouts. Somebody who ain’t never heard of Ernst Haeckel,70 the Strasser brothers, or National Bolshevism71 might not grasp the significance of Tyler’s antihuman, Malthusian anarchoprimitivism (of the sort sometimes associated with the Detroit journal Fifth Estate). Someone who ain’t never heard of Romantic irRationalism might not understand why Tyler has rejected “the ideal of ‘book learning’ the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man.”72 Regarding Jack’s knowledge of what a duvet is, Tyler responds, “Is this essential to our survival? In the hunter-gatherer sense of the word?” He wants to go back to the Boden, and soon he’ll shed some Blut. Somebody might respond, as I first did, positively-though-naïvely to the anticapitalist aspect of Fight Club, while remaining totally ignorant of the basis of the stupid critics’ judgment. But one thing no one will miss is the human-flesh soap, the sharp point on the fascist tip. This a direct reference to National Socialism, but it’s just as ambiguous as Tyler’s existence. The movie assigns soap a special role, as the yardstick of civilization, but “it was beautiful. We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them” by taking discarded human flesh from a liposuction-clinic dumpster. They are rejecting both civilization and soap, “the yardstick of [bourgeois] civilization,” spitting on both. The genuine protofascism is Tyler’s respect for the foundation of civilization, die Ursprung, the glorious moment when the self-sacrificial hero dies in battle, the lamb is offered up in sacrifice, the potash mixes with melted fat, and the river thus runs foamy. This grounds the space-monkey imagery—those Fight Clubbers “ready to be shot into space ready to sacrifice himself for the greater good“—and this is what is potentially fascist about the brand of anarchoprimitivist ecology with which they cover their general nihilism. This awe of the origin, Adorno’s “ontological need,”73 also grounds the only ritual the Fight Clubbers participate in: the commemoration in a chant of the first martyr to Fight Club, Robert Paulson. “This is a man, and he has a name—and it’s Robert Paulson.” A new liturgy; the sort of vulgar ritualism refined in Catholicism, corollary of Tyler’s vulgar pseudoPromethean atheism, or, rather, antitheism.
Yes, Tyler is antihuman, despite his idiosyncratically, voluntaristically correct objects of attack.
Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not beautiful and unique snowflakes. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world. We are all part of the same compost heap.
No burning leaves of any sort here. Smoking isn’t even allowed inside the Paper Street Soap Company. It’s possible that Tyler is just deprogramming the space monkeys, but the problem remains, as it does in the case of Raymond K. Hessel, the contemporary human sacrifice, Scared Straight—straight back into the bourgeois education system. One can give Tyler the benefit of the doubt again, as in the pornosplices: he wanted to draw some line in Hessel’s mind; the line between his desires and his reality, to tell Hessel that he should take his desires for reality, whatever they were, however corrupt. But then again, Hessel wanted to be a veterinarian, so that may have jibed somehow with Tyler’s otherwise antihuman ecological streak. Hitler loved animals, too.
| Fascist | Revolutionary |
| Violence (terrorism) | Violence (mass violence) |
| Ecology (anticivilization ideology) | Ecology (global reconstruction) |
| Anticonsumerism (dropout ideology) | Anticonsumerism (supersession of exchange value by use value |
| Antispectacle (attack on some of its tools) | Antispectacle (attainment of real life) |
These negations, though potentially fascistic, are also necessary components of any revolutionary activity. The ambiguity intelligent critics have detected is the result of the fact that Jack and Tyler’s negations are indeterminate and generally nihilistic, because of the nature of Jack’s labor, i.e., his work situation. This is a case of the medium helping to convey the message: the ambiguity is a direct result of the absence of a positive vision for humanity, which is impossible to convey in a film, even one of 139 minutes. The film pastes on its politics, and that only in the choice of objects of attack. We see Jack and Tyler choosing, for no necessary reason, certain objects of negation: office buildings, franchises, 1999 VW bugs, cops, credit-card companies; this merely happens to be the whole “anticorporate” line, even though they ramp it up. They’re the Zerzanite black bloc on crystal meth. (Steroids get your balls cut off.) None of that bullshit Adbusters muckraking: they come right out and tell these fools YOU CAN USE MOTOR OIL TO FERTILIZE YOUR LAWN.
But a developed posit-ion grounding the negations is also sorely lacking in the shallow minds that badmouthed the movie. It is why the author of the novel sold out at the end and why the movie can’t depict the transcendence of vulgar negation of negation, even in the Fight Club itself: there is not quite competition in Fight Club; that, in the actual fighting, is secondary. They are united by negation: their work on destructive projects, by degradation in their training, and by ritual repetition of the fact that they are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. It takes years to develop revolutionary consciousness, and one can’t expect a movie substantively to portray it. Besides, vulgar negation makes for one helluvan action film. “Self-improvement is masturbation. Now, self-destruction...”
2.
Tu’n me loose, fo’ I kick de natal stuffin’ outen you 74
This being a movie, the ends justify the means: killing whitey, by any means necessary, is more important than the ambiguous negations it entails. Among those directly concerning Jack, by moving into the Paper Street house “in the toxic-waste part of town,” Jack submits himself to environmental hazards usually disproportionately reserved for blacks and others
bred en bawn in the brier-patch.75
This is a major relinquishment of privilege. Jack gets unemployed, and by putting his mind to it, gets to keep his salary. He also graciously takes a beatdown from a black man.
Those concerning both Tyler and Jack are more charged. The subtext of all Fight-Club activity is Jack’s battle with Tyler; Tyler is stronger, more charismatic, and, in occupying the same space as Jack, annihilates Jack a little more every day for over a year, taking his consciousness away.
This trial by death, however, does away with the truth which was supposed to issue from it, and so, too, with the certainty of self generally. For just as life is the natural setting of consciousness, independence without absolute negativity, so death is the natural negation of consciousness, negation without independence, which thus remains without the required significance of recognition. Death certainly shows that each staked his life and held it of no account, both in himself and in the other; but that is not for those who survived this struggle. They put an end to their consciousness in its alien setting of natural existence, that is to say, they put an end to themselves, and are done away with as extremes wanting to be for themselves, or to have an existence of their own.76
We are dealing with self-alienation, not a battle between two different people, but within one person; this struggle takes place in, or at least over, consciousness; in the mind in any case: it is not “an abstract negation,” but “the negation coming from consciousness, which supersedes in such a way as to preserve and maintain what is superseded, and consequently survives its own supersession.”77 The Fight Clubbers in general, all over the country, grow more independent as well.
After Tyler puts him to bed with a Mad Max future-primitive bedtime story, Jack awakens, after who knows how long, to both the inner truth of exchange value and his own essence as Tyler, in the form of a capitalistic enterprise: labor is the breath of spirit, giving life: “The house had become a living thing. Wet inside from so many people sweating and breathing. So many people moving the house moved. Planet Tyler. I had to hug the walls, trapped inside this clockwork of space monkeys, cooking and working and sleeping in teams.” Tyler has organized the posindustrial Anacharsis Clootz deputation.
Bob’s death sends Jack chasing his alienated self all over the country, from airport to grimy bar to street corner—”like chasing an Invisible Man“—, and only because the Fight Clubbers everywhere—bondsmen of dependent consciousness in the process of selfliberation—still retain an inordinate respect for him, their leader, do they even give him a clue. “I’m looking for Tyler Durden. It’s very important that I talk to him.” Fight Clubber X shrugs and says, “I wish I could help you. Sir.“ X winks. “Tyler had been busy, setting up franchises.” Confused, Jack asks another Fight Clubber “Who do you think I am?” He calls Marla from an anonymous motel room, and she answers him: “Tyler Durden! Tyler Durden, you fucking freak!” Tyler annihilates Jack again, just long enough to put the finishing touches on the new operation to bomb the credit-card companies. “It’s called a changeover. And no one in the audience has any idea.” As Jack rushes out of the hotel the next morning, heading back to Any City, USA, he wonders, “Have I been going to bed earlier every night? Have I been sleeping later? Have I been Tyler longer and longer?”
Jack’s new awareness of what was formerly unconscious is also awareness of the danger Marla poses to Tyler: he finally sees her exclusion for what it is: his disintegration. He knows that Tyler exists only in the space between him and Marla. In the hotel room, Tyler says “Now you see our dilemma. She knows too much. I think we’re going to have to talk about how this might compromise our goals.” But there is no “we” or “our” about it. Marla is a threat to Tyler’s independent existence as master, HNIC, superpimp. Tyler’s essence is Jack’s thwarted desire; Tyler is Jack’s schizophrenically mediated relation to himself as immediate—not as broken, split—other, i.e., Marla.
But Jack supersedes his alienation: he outwits Tyler. “I can figure this out... I can figure this out. This isn’t even real. You’re not real. That gun isn’t...that gun isn’t even in your hand! That gun’s in my hand!” Here Tyler and Jack also switch places, not only guns-in-hand. “I don’t want this!” “Right. Except ‘you’ is meaningless now.” Besides that, “What do you want? You wanna go back to the shit job, fucking condo world watchin’ sitcoms? Fuck that! I won’t do it.” “You’re a voice in my head!” Nat Turner used to have visions, too. “You’re a voice in mine! You need me. You created me! I didn’t create some loser alterego to make myself feel better. Have I ever let us down? How far have you come because of me? I will bring us through this, as always: I will carry you kicking and screaming, and in the end you will thank me.” Who’s the servile consciousness? Who rides on whose back now?78 Out of a desire to prove to this otherness of himself that he “is not attached to any specific existence, not to the individuality common to existence as such,” that he “is not attached to life,” that he has “staked his life and held it of no account,” Jack commits suicide—Die Whitey! He misses, though, and only blows out his left cheek, ear, and throat. But with this shot to the head, Jack kills Tyler—Die, Nigga!79
Jack has worked himself over throughout the movie, and can now call himself by his own name.
[I]n fashioning the thing, the bondsman’s own negativity, his being-for-self, becomes an object for him only through his setting at nought the existing shape confronting him. But this objective negative moment is none other than the alien being before which it has trembled. Now, however, he destroys this alien negative moment, posits himself as a negative in the permanent order of things, and thereby becomes for himself, someone existing on his own account. Without the formative [i.e., destructive] activity, fear remains inward and mute, and consciousness does not become explicitly for itself.80
True to big-pimpin’ form, Tyler’s final act was one of procurement. He brought Marla to her, next to Jack’s, “front-row seat to this theater of mass destruction,” the erasure of the debt record.
V. Paint a SelfPortrait; Build a House
A picture’ll last longer. You can put it in a single-story dwelling with high square footage, the better to meet big-tent purposes. Though it was devoted to destruction, the movie portrays one precondition of a better world: self-directed social labor among the discarded middle children of history, that generation of coffee jerks and nameless clerks.
This ambiguous supersession of its ambiguous otherness is equally an ambiguous return into itself. For first, through the supersession, it receives back its own self, because, by superseding its otherness, it again becomes equal to itself; but secondly, the other self-consciousness equally gives it back again to itself, for it saw itself in the other, but supersedes this being of itself in the other and thus lets the other again go free.81
Jack is now free to be Tyler, to be himself. But who is Tyler? The second supersession, Tyler’s reintegration of his personality, merely delivers him back onto the ambiguous ground of the first supersession, of dealing with his relationship with Marla. In the diner, the words which begin to heal their wounded relationship are “I really like you Marla.” Love, apparently, remains unreal, but at least they can try.
Neither Ian’s, Angel’s, Michael’s, nor Jack’s doublemindedness was Du Bois’s doubleconsciousness, but Jack reaches a similar state at the end of Fight Club: he “merge[s] his double self into a better and truer self,”82 himself, Tyler Durden. The mass of black former slaves reached this plateau of just-submerged duality long ago, around the end of Reconstruction, after hopes of positive freedom were crushed. It remains in our spiritual forms, and we have been maintaining ever since, but is this the object of our spiritual strivings?
Jack got some of what we got: the ability “to let that which does not matter truly slide.” But this is preserved for us also mediately, only in the cultural results of the supersession of one master-slave relation, which, however, “white” slaves have heretofore never experienced.
It’s a good thing not only philosophers are dialecticians. I know the sublated magic of jazz, and how Miles ran the voodoo down, too83; I have seen Richard Pryor transubstantiate leaden pain and burden into goldenbellied laughter; I have heard the sad clowns of Mingus and Shepard filled with a spirit of whimsy in the music of Monk and Dolphy—all slaves about to be masters, but the schedule’s not a firm one. “[T]he freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.”84
We perish for lack of that positive vision, but Fight Club—though the destruction portrayed remains vulgar and indeterminate, at best extreme anticapitalism—takes us to the point where we have no choice but to formulate one. “Only the real negation of culture can inherit culture’s meaning. Such negation can no longer remain cultural.“85
Then again, perhaps Fight Club is just a case of the spectacle of decay accompanying the decay of the spectacle.
1 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in The Souls of Black Folk, pp. 2-3 (1903) (Bantam, 1989).
3 Loren Goldner, AfroAnabaptistIndian Fusion: The Fusion of Anabaptist, Indian, and African as the American Radical Tradition: A Comment on Paul Buhle’s “US Radicalism: Past and Future” (1987) (Break Their Haughty Power, http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/afroanab.html).
4 Robert Hemenway, “Introduction,” in Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880) (Penguin, 1982).
5 See Michael Ventura, “Hear That Long Snake Moan,” in Shadow Dancing in the USA (Jeremy B. Tarcher, 1985).
6 “Not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good!” Run-D.M.C., “Peter Piper,” on Raising Hell (1986).
9 This Is Madness. The Last Poets were created on May 19, 1968, at a birthday celebration for Malcolm X; they were a group of three poets and a drummer.
10 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) (Oxford, 1977, A.V. Miller, trans.), § 186, p. 113.
11 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) (Zone, 1995), ¶ 217, p. 152.
12 David Nelson, “Die Nigga!!!” 1969, on The Original Last Poets, Right On! (1971).
15 Carter seems upon first viewing to have been slighted in this role, to have been excluded just like her character. While her character gets less time onscreen than Tyler and Jack, Carter has made every second, every word, every facial tic count twice. If Norton delivers impotence and Pitt plays a big swinging dick, she’s a doubedose of Viagra.
16 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) (Prometheus, 1988), pp. 101-102.
19 Umar Bin Hassan, “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution,” The Last Poets, The Last Poets (1970).
21 Eve Rosenhaft, “Organising the ‘Lumpenproletariat’: Cliques and Communists in Berlin During the Weimar Republic,” in Richard J. Evans, ed., The German Working Class, 1888-1933: The Politics of Everyday Life (1982) (Collective Action Notes, www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2379/evans1.htm):
[T]he all-male groups were ordinarily accompanied on their adventures by one or two “clique-darlings,” whose responsibilities reportedly included looking after the “sexual needs” of the boys. One 16-year-old outlined the activities of his group in these words:
We go through the streets and look for girls to take along on our hikes. I am in the hiking clique Stormproof At Easter I go with four other clique-boys to Kloster Chorin [a tourist spot about 35 miles from Berlin]. I want to quit the clique, because they whore around too much with girls.
The programmatic rejection of female company was expressed in such clique names as GirlShy and GirlHaters.
22 Slavoj Zizek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (September / October 1997). He deduced that women must be excluded in order to create homophobia, and that this is constitutive of the murderous rage soldiers must feel in order to kill.
24 Tyler is Jack. So Jack is “jealous” of the attention Jack himself is paying to AngelFace. Jack is unhappy that he is paying so much attention to AngelFace, i.e., Jack is unhappy that he is attracted to Angel Face. Jack is homophobic. But then again, the dickless, emasculated Jack, the “woman,” is upset that the outrageous walking hard-on Tyler is not more attracted to him. “I am Jack’s inflamed sense of rejection.” Jack has penis envy. But because Tyler is Jack, this just means that Jack has no sense of his own sexuality. He has no sexual identity. He is asexual.
25 Ishmael Reed, Reckless Eyeballing (1986) (Atheneum, 1998), p. 146.
27 “The membership of the various clubs was determined by occupation and social class and at that time, even more sharply than now, that discrimination would be virtually the same as differentiation according to color. Queens Park Club, the controllers of cricket in [Trinidad], were white and wealthy; Shamrock, Catholic French Creole traders and cocoa planters; Maple, middle class of brown skin; Shannon, the Black middle class version, white collar office types, and teachers; and then Shango, the tradesman, artisan, worker.” Richard Small, “The Training of an Intellectual, the Making of a Marxist,” in C.L.R. James: His Life and Work (Sojourner Truth Organization, Summer 1981), p. 13-14.
28 “Although from solid ‘Shannon’ stock, his brightness [intellect but also necessarily skin] had got him to one of the two leading secondary schools. It was a path that was expected to release a few Black men in a generation into the rare surroundings of professional life and legislative appointment.” Id., p. 15. “James was advised to go to Maple because they were “people who you are going to meet in life. Join them “ Id.
29 “John O. Killens, novelist; Lorraine Hansberry, playwright; James Baldwin, novelist-essayist; Ossie Davis, actor-playwright; Ruby Dee, actress; LeRoi Jones, playwright-poet; Paule Marshall, novelist; Louis Lomax, journalist.” Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (1967) (Quill, 1984), pp. 193-205.
31 Ebonics-phonics makes a pun in past perfect.
33 “ ‘As long as such books are being published,’ an American liberal once said to me, ‘everything will be all right.’ “ James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son (1955) (Beacon, 1962), p. 19. Of course Cruse was correct that Baldwin never did much more than that himself.
35 Dos Cabezas is a 1982 Basquiat painting, a selfportrait Siamese of Basquiat and Warhol joined at the head. It was Basquiat’s announcement of his arrival on the scene, painted and given to Warhol immediately after their first meeting.
36 Phoebe Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (1998), p. 1-5.
40 Guru, “Mass Appeal,” Gangstarr, Hard to Earn (1994).
41 The other was Heat (1995), a cops-and-robbers drama in which De Niro’s criminal, unfortunately, doesn’t make it.
46 My high school debate coach, a “60s person,” once summarized her perspective on the moshpit pastimes of several of her young charges by claiming that it was a sad sign of the times that young people had to beat each other up while tripping on acid, formerly reserved for more peaceful contexts, in order to have some feelings of their own.
53 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) (International Publishers, 1948), p. 12.
55 Id., § 194-195, pp. 117-118.
56 Id., § 194, p. 117 (italics mine).
61 The movie fudges this point a bit. I discuss this in the text below. It is an inevitable problem of the medium; in Fight Club, this ambiguity makes the movie more successful.
62 Abiodun Oyewole, “Black Rage,” on The Last Poets, Holy Terror (1994), reprinted in Oyewole, Umar Bin Hassan, with Kim Green, On a Mission: Selected Poems and a History of The Last Poets (1996) (italics mine). Oyewole and Bin Hassan are two original Last Poets.
63 Like a prostitute who alienates her sexual activity, while her sexuality becomes the exclusive terrain of the pimp, the sole mediation between her sexuality and her alienated sexual activity; the pimp maintains this relationship by occasionally having sex with her, to reassure her that she does indeed still have access to her sexuality, that her alienated sexual activity has not also alienated her sexuality. Of course, in doing this, she also reassures the pimp that he has control over her sexuality, and another cycle begins. This is the connection between the nonproductive “service economy” and the spectacle, both why spectacle must accompany nonreproductive labor, and the material basis of its effectiveness. The spectacle is the product of such nonproductive labor, but it is also a substitute for our relation to our nonexistent object of desire, the object upon which we would but do not labor out of love. The pimp plays that role for the prostitute; Tyler plays that role for Jack.
67 “How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox,” Harris, p. 62. This is the famous brier-patch story.
68 “[A] peculiar synthesis of naturalism and nationalism forged under the influence of the Romantic tradition’s antiEnlightenment irrationalism.” Peter Staudenmaier, “The ‘Green Wing’ of the Nazi Party and Its Historical Antecedents,” in Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons From the German Experience (1995) (www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/ecofasc.html).
Some of the later Klicken “refer[red] directly to the romance of the Wandervögel movement, which the cliques imitated and caricatured.” Staudenmaier:Perhaps the most remarkable example in modern history of a coherent movement both initiated and led by young people, the Wandervögel was essentially middle-class in character and composition. It originated among students and progressive teachers at a Berlin secondary school between 1896 and 1900, and by 1913 had become a national movement with a bureaucracy of its own and an extensive literary output. Wandervögel became a watchword for the whole of the German youth movement, and provided an impulse for the creation, before the First World War, of groups like the government-sponsored and militaristic Young Germany League and the German section of the Boy Scout movement.
The chief vehicle for carrying [ecofascism] to prominence was the youth movement, an amorphous phenomenon which played a decisive but highly ambivalent role in shaping German popular culture during the first three tumultuous decades of this century. Also known as the Wandervögel (which translates roughly as “wandering free spirits”), the youth movement was a hodgepodge of countercultural elements, blending neoRomanticism, Eastern philosophies, nature mysticism, hostility to reason, and a strong communal impulse in a confused but no less ardent search for authentic, nonalienated social relations. Their back-to-the-land emphasis spurred a passionate sensitivity to the natural world and the damage it suffered. They have been aptly characterized as “rightwing hippies,” for although some sectors of the movement gravitated toward various forms of emancipatory politics (though usually shedding their environmentalist trappings in the process), most of the Wandervögel were eventually absorbed by the Nazis. This shift from nature worship to Führer worship is worth examining.
In 1867 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term “ecology” and began to establish it as a scientific discipline dedicated to studying the interactions between organism and environment. Haeckel was also the chief popularizer of Darwin and evolutionary theory for the German-speaking world, and developed a peculiar sort of social Darwinist philosophy he called “monism.” The German Monist League he founded combined scientifically based ecological holism with völkisch social views. Haeckel believed in Nordic racial superiority, strenuously opposed race mixing and enthusiastically supported racial eugenics. “Haeckel contributed to that special variety of German thought which served as the seed bed for National Socialism. He became one of Germany’s major ideologists for racism, nationalism and imperialism.” [footnote deleted] . The pioneer of scientific ecology, along with his disciples Willibald Hentschel, Wilhelm Bölsche and Bruno Wille, profoundly shaped the thinking of subsequent generations of environmentalists by embedding concern for the natural world in a tightly woven web of regressive social themes. From its very beginnings, then, ecology was bound up in an intensely reactionary political framework.
71 “[T]he Strasser brothers, two 1920s Nazi Party members who took the ‘Socialism’ in ‘National Socialism’ seriously and represented the ‘left’ anticapitalist wing of the Nazis. Today, the Solidaristen and other [National Bolsheviks] regard Otto Strasser in particular as the ‘Trotsky of National Socialism’ because of his 1920s intraparty power struggle with Hitler; Hitler’s ejection of this fascist in 1930 was, for them, a betrayal of National Socialism.” Janet Biehl, “ ‘Ecology’ and the Modernization of Fascism in the German Ultraright,” in Biehl and Staudenmaier.
73 “A fact supporting the resuscitation of ontology [is] the fact that to a great extent the subject came to be an ideology, a screen for society’s objective functional context and a palliative for the subjects’ suffering under society.” You are not going to be a rock star or a movie god. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, and perhaps God hates you. “Ontology and the philosophy of Being are modes of reaction in which-along with other and cruder modes-consciousness hopes to escape from that entanglement. But the truth that expels man from the center of creation and reminds him of his impotence-this same truth will, as a subjective mode of conduct, confirm the sense of impotence, cause men to identify with it .” Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966) (Continuum, 1997) pp. 66-68. The resulting antihumanism in Tyler’s rants is merely more vulgar selfidentification with the negation of the negation, vice claimed as virtue.
74 Brer Rabbit’s words to her in “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story,” Harris, p. 59.
75 “Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Fox-bred en bawn in a brier-patch!” “How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox,” Harris, p. 64.
78 Only “Co’se Brer Rabbit know de game dat Brer Fox wuz fixin’ fer ter play, en he ‘termin fer ter outdo ‘im yer come Brer Fox, saddle en bridle on .en Brer Rabbit he mount, he did, en dey amble off.” “Mr. Rabbit Grossly Deceives Mr. Fox,” Harris, p. 69.
79 “So BLACK FOLKS can take over.” David Nelson, “Die Nigga!!!” 1969, on The Original Last Poets, Right On! (1971). In American Pimp (2000), a documentary, the only Caucasian pimp is a nigger named Whitefolks. Most of his stable is black, of course.
83 See Ventura. Hear also Miles Davis, Bitches Brew (1969).
movies films alienation commodity spectacle
Copyright © Amiri Kudura Barksdale 2006
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