'The strategic adversary is fascism...the fascism in us
all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to
love power, the desire that the very thing that dominates us exploits us'
Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus
For a preface apparently written in jest this is quite a
serious claim. If it were so that we all harbor such minimal fascism, then does
that not precisely lead us into a realm where a person, even within a left
network, might begin to exhibit signs of fascism, but perhaps even worse to a
fate where the left is perpetually internally divided playing the game 'tu
fascist', 'tu fascist'?
Here I attempt again to dispute the idea that fascism is an
identity or ideology, to argue that it is a form of material semiosis that
functions through certain abstract machinic traits. This poses a further
problem since this blog series is specifically designed to portray fascism,
which brings my question to: what about the abstract machine escapes
representation?
Foucault's '"Society must be defended'" of course
one must minimally remember places the title for this series of lectures in
quotes. This is the clearest articulation in Foucault's ouvre of an examination
of nazism.
Foucault begins by wondering whether politics should
be understood as the continuation of war. He then spends much of the course
reconstructing a largely forgotten tradition of historical writing in which
society is divided by conquest and perpetual struggle. Finally, he shows how
this discourse of struggle undergoes a transformation, becoming associated with
state racism and the biological management of populations.
We can state its central historical problem as follows:
How does a discourse that originally exposed the violence
concealed beneath political sovereignty become a discourse through which the
state legitimates violence against its own population?
The unfortunate outcome of this is of course that political
struggles are inherently given to being coopted by state.
Any form of political subjectivity is simply fodder for
fascism. And yet the recent Delhi protests were indisputably revolutionary. The
point isn't that the fascist state should fall, but rather that we create a
memory of revolutionary consciousness in every generation.
Dissonance and Memetic Language
While for Hegel the movement of consciousness itself is
history, Foucault recognises interiority as historically produced around the
turn of the nineteenth century. Foucault argues that the madman, for example is
produced as a consciousness of unreason around this time. What we really see in
the Delhi protests is an incipient revolutionary subjectivity which recognizes
itself tat subjectivity is born and not pre-given.
I feel like an anachronistic denotational machine in
comparison with Gen-Z and the elements of Gen-Z registers of speech that have
entered Millennial language. What Gen-Z does is connote wildly; their language
is auto-memetic. They are precise with their use of psychoanalytic linguistic
markers; they define territories, and long hours spent on a social media page
mean they manage incredibly well to dissociate from various relationships.
Goffman gets this. Mauss doesn’t because he’s basically imitating Hegel in The
Category of the Person. Memetic language is auto-revolutionary; it is an
attack on human language as significatory; it launches calvacades of meaning,
each word erupting from the mouth like a thing-in-itself.
A meme is never quite the repetition of another meme. Its
existence consists in its capacity to be repeated without retaining an
identical meaning, to pass from one situation to another, acquiring a different
force each time. One might say that it is a language whose fundamental unit is
the refrain rather than the signifier. Its repetitions establish territories,
produce recognitions, attract bodies, and occasionally undo the very conditions
that made them recognizable.
Guattari's distinction between signifying and a-signifying
semiotics becomes especially important here. A signifying semiology organizes
signs through their relation to meaning, representation, and interpretation. An
a-signifying semiotics operates directly within material and social
arrangements. A meme may communicate an intelligible joke, but its efficacy
cannot be exhausted by explaining that joke. The same image repeated across
hundreds of screens begins to organize a certain manner of speaking, looking,
gesturing, and anticipating the reactions of others. One recognizes a meme
before comprehending its particular variation. Its recognizability is already a
practical competence. Its repetition becomes a way of occupying a territory.
Consider the Cockroach Janta Party. The cockroach begins as
an imposed designation, an attempt to reduce a population to a particular
identity. Yet something peculiar occurs when the designation is appropriated as
a refrain. The cockroach acquires innumerable supplementary traits: it dances,
sings, paints, protests, puts on costumes, and eventually appears in the
streets as an embodied collective figure. We witness what Guattari calls a
process of deterritorialization. A sign that previously functioned within an
assemblage of humiliation begins to enter other assemblages, acquiring
relations that its original enunciation could never have anticipated.
But the cockroach is also a faciality machine. Its
immediately recognizable features provide a surface upon which an indefinite
number of identities can be inscribed. Each variation retains enough of the
cockroach to remain recognizable while modifying the relations through which it
can appear. The figure proliferates across bodies, images, placards, and
performances. Here the important thing is not simply that a negative stereotype
has been transformed into a positive identity. That would merely reverse the
signification while leaving its logic intact. Rather, the multiplication of
cockroaches makes the identity itself increasingly difficult to stabilize.
There is no definitive cockroach to which all the others must conform.
This brings us to Guattari's concept of redundancy. In
conventional information theory, redundancy appears as the repetition of
information already transmitted. For Guattari, however, repetition is itself
productive. He distinguishes redundancies of resonance, through which different
signs reinforce an established regime of recognition, from machinic
redundancies of interaction, through which heterogeneous components enter into
new operational relations. The cockroach can function in either manner.
Repeated as an emblem of collective identity, it can consolidate a new
territory of belonging. But when the image passes into a costume, a chant, a
theatrical performance, or an improvised encounter with political authority,
its recurrence may produce relations that were absent from the original image.
A meme is therefore not inherently revolutionary. The same
mechanisms that permit its proliferation can also produce conformity,
compulsive repetition, and new forms of collective subjection. A refrain may
become a black hole around which every utterance is compelled to circulate. The
political question concerns the capacity of repetition to generate new
connections rather than merely securing an already established identity.
The importance of memetic language lies in its capacity to
interrupt such redundancies of signification. A sign can be repeated in a
manner that alters the conditions of its own recognition. The accusation can
become absurd; the insult can become a costume; the identity can proliferate
until it is no longer capable of enclosing the bodies to which it was assigned.
Perhaps revolutionary consciousness is precisely this
peculiar experience of a collective discovering that the signs through which it
has been constituted do not exhaust what it can become. The cockroach continues
multiplying, producing new gestures, new encounters, new territories. The
exterminator, meanwhile, is left explaining the joke.
Dissonance and Ephemeral
Subjectivity
Let us return once more to the game 'tu fascist' 'tu
fascist'. Even here on will have to admit the potential of revolutionary
consciousness is alive. In many modern urban and humanities leaning groups,
charges of political consciousness form a major part of the deepest roots of
friends groups. At any point political consciousness can knock you out of the
group on charge of being a fascist or on the other side charges of being
revolutionary in a right oriented group.
While such games as well as territories of psychonalaytic
and psychiatric language to measure subjectivity: ragebatiing, gaslighting etc.
All these territories of subjectivity are however inherently fragile and I
would like to conclude by arguing fundamentally revolutinary.
Dissonance in modern incipient subjectivity is the basis for
its revolutionary capacity.
The extraordinary thing about these new territories of
subjectivity is that they can be constituted and dissolved almost
instantaneously. A friendship can become an ideological antagonism through a
single utterance, just as an accusation can become ridiculous through its
repetition as a meme. The subject who was a fascist yesterday may become a
revolutionary tomorrow, without either designation exhausting the conditions of
their existence. Dissonance is precisely this inability of subjectivity to
coincide with the identities through which it is recognized. Its revolutionary
capacity lies in the fragility of every apparatus that attempts to make such
recognition permanent. The subject is perpetually escaping its own designation.
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