The individual nation’s freedom of movement is heavily restricted by its integration into the large power blocs. One should not, however, draw the primitive conclusion from this that, because it is now obsolete, nationalism no longer plays a significant role; on the contrary, it is very often the case that convictions and ideologies take on their demonic, their genuinely destructive character precisely when the objective situation has deprived them of substance. The witch trials, after all, took place not at the height of Thomism but during the Counter-Reformation, and something similar is probably the case with, if I may term it thus, the ‘pathic’ nationalism of today. This aspect of selling something to people in which they themselves do not entirely believe was, incidentally, already evident in Hitler’s day.
Adorno, Theodor W. [1967] 2020. Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism (trans. Wieland Hoban). Medford, Mass.: Polity
In what may to a complacent eye seem a statistical improbability, the news feels like it’s still getting increasingly stranger. Somewhere I naively thought we’d perhaps have passed a point of saturation, but that doesn’t seem to matter; I don’t think I’m alone in saying I’m not sure how the public consciousness works anymore when it comes to the sensational digital news cycles. Algorithmically formulated desire is tuning its feel for constant arousal and interest; the tide of alerts, clips, and clicks washes over and past me and at this point I’ve given up on fresh air anytime soon. Expert opinions mingle with a seemingly reborn form of the Angry Masses. I bet there’s an evolutionary psychologist ready to explain the phenomenon of the 3x3 talking-head panel presentation on CNN. Talk about working your way backwards down the explanatory ladder. It’s enough to make anyone want to crawl back into the famed primordial soup. As we’ll see today, there’s a reason for this feeling.
In these fervid swells of the dopamine farming American click-cycle machine, a recent wave that flew unsubtly into my poor skull was the publicly released motion filed by Sydney Powell, former Trump Kraken lawyer. It got picked up by many talking heads because it was widely interpreted as an admission that she lied.
This reception makes sense in the context of the current US mainstream, which involves an implied bifurcation that structures the popular understanding of political culture: the Manichean struggle between the fascist (call him Trumpist, right-wing, conspiracy nut, etc.) and the fact checker - an interrogative dynamic similar to the new right's infamous "facts don't care about your feelings." Sarah Palin's nemesis, the notorious Gotcha Question. What we're dealing here could be described as the psychic work of Carl Schmitt as much as of Melanie Klein. A ruthless molding of cultural objects into the Good ones and Bad ones. It’s righteous, it’s certainly entertaining, and it misses the point. If only it were so simple.
First, I have to insist that despite its intentions, there’s something fundamentally pathetic about the American liberal outrage-machine. It pretends to the fantasy of an agreed upon moral and epistemic order, and then is shocked like a small child when, like sharks to blood, the more violent strata of society are drawn to its transgression. The unfortunate have always been welcome targets for those compelled to prey on them. Violence is often in this way tautological. America is currently experiencing a confusion of the powers at play, and this from many perspectives at once. What can’t go unnoticed is that the tumult of this confusion itself is a source of arousal.
As mentioned in the first Fascism and Madness, there is “a very real function to the ‘alternative’ approach to reality which this form of affective populism performs, often much more effectively than its liberal counterpart.” Yet instead of simply speaking its fantasy directly and unfettered, fascist subjectivity still has to reckon with other limiting structures. Particularly, due to the fact that its ultimate wishes lie beyond the bounds of liberal legal and moral limits, much of the work done by fascist action and enunciation occurs in the tension with these limits.
Consider the fiasco of Trump’s infamous “stand down and stand by.” Plausible deniability to some, clear endorsement to others, simultaneously unimpeachable and despicable. And on top of the debates themselves was the glee of many non-Democrats at the outrage. Anything to piss off the libs. The very game of contestation was enough to create the excitement for the next step. Those of you familiar with the far-right will recognize this form of truth-creating in the back and forth of symbolization, action, and denial. Especially in Germany, where the law prohibits direct Nazi stuff. This is nothing new. Even in the days of National Socialism,
a dialectical process was at work, forged in the days when the Nazis often faced police hostility and criminal prosecution for their violence: the leadership announced in extreme but unspecific terms that action was to be taken, and the lower echelons of the Party and its paramilitary organizations translated this in their own terms into specific, violent action. As a Nazi Party internal document later noted, action of this kind, by a nod-and-a-wink, had become already the custom in the 1920s. At this time, the rank-and-file had become used to reading into their leaders’ orders rather more than the actual words that their leaders uttered. ‘In the interest of the Party,’ the document continued,‘ it is also in many cases the custom of the person issuing the command - precisely in cases of illegal political demonstrations - not to say everything and just to hint at what he wants to achieve with the order.
Evans, Richard J. (2004). The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin
Apropos, the recent US Capitol storming is the best possible example of this mechanism condensed into one clearly visible action. We witnessed speakers call for insurrection, then literally walk away and claim it was metaphorical and who are you to ask these questions anyways? In these cases, especially when it comes to real, physical violence, it becomes clear that factual ‘incorrectness’ is far from beside the point. We’re dealing with something closer to polytonal voices: something for the in-group to hear, something else for the rest.
As political spectators, we find ourselves in position not too unlike that of a therapist faced with a patient’s fantastical outbursts. Contradicting it outright is unfruitful, as is simply accepting it at face value, the trick is to ‘join’ as much as is necessary to be able to approach the underlying motivation for the delusion. In Lacanian terms, we could say we must work with the material of the imaginary in order to confront the symbolic. If we limit ourselves to the role of a liberal police-check, one where we find the bad guys doing the bad things, we’ll miss out on the more perverse reality developing along a certain strain of consciousness in American mental territory. A malevolence which precedes truth and thus takes it to be its own to mold.
A more thorough account of the Powell motion reveals something both more nonsensical and still more sinister. Legal commentators have noted that the spirit of the motion is an insistence that nobody would reasonably interpret her statements as factual while simultaneously insisting they be taken seriously. It’s not one or the other; it’s yes to both.
This is what anthropologist Gregory Bateson called a double bind: a form of communication in which two conflicting messages are delivered and the receiver is expected to accept both. It’s notable that Bateson came up with the term in a description of schizophrenia; this type of communication places us squarely in a space of non-linear logic in which fact and fiction, self and other, in and out, are no longer easily discerned. This is why the liberal ‘fact-check’ mentality always seems to fall flat when countering the fascist double bind. It is attempting to provide a clarification in light of a situation that was from the beginning intentionally and thus irreconcilably paradoxical. Like a kid who can’t read the room and insists on explaining the joke to everyone, what Wolf Blitzer consistently fails to understand is that ‘they’ already know the truth - it’s just that nobody gives a shit.
In their famous Anti-Oedipus, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze recognize the inherently rigid, hopeless nature of the double bind. Despite their notably different stance on the question of schizophrenia, they are right in understanding the double bind as unresolvable: “if a schizo is produced here as an entity, this occurs for the simple reason that there is no other means of escaping this double path, where normality is no less blocked than neurosis, and where the solution offers no more of a way out than does the problem” (1983:80). Without entering in a discussion about the nature of this supposed ‘schizo,’ we can begin to understand the increasingly impotent character of the voices which engage with fascist communication at face level. If we experience the unsettling feeling of our words going one way and the actions before us going another, this is why.
Here we tentatively begin to touch a brutal stratum of madness inherent in rational subjectivity itself. The fascist, who at a certain level retains his use of reason and status as a subject, begins to tear at the bonds of this rationality from within. Like Samson pulling the temple down on himself to bury all those who have wronged him, the fascist subject breaks the classical conception of irrationality as a deviation which is localizable and thus treatable as an external malady. He is among us and has all of our tools at his disposal as well as his own.
The plausibly rational, economic, and political explanations and counter arguments-however correct their individual observations-cannot appease it, since rationality itself, through its link to power, is submerged in the same malady.
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2020). Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment. In Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press.
In a dangerous sense, fascist logic underlying the double bind can be well described as what Freud originally called a primary process: “it is a preverbal, expressing itself in images in images and symbols. It is also pre-logical, having no concept of time, mortality, or limitation, or the impossibility that opposites can coexist. [...] this archaic kind of cognition, which survives in the language of dreams, jokes, and hallucinations” (McWilliams 2020:28). This is different from the later hassles of the secondary processes inaugurated in the reality principle where things are either true or false, extant or not. The double bind is facilitated by a subjectivity - something we can call a ‘perspective’ or ‘logic’ - which operates at the level of these primary processes, something which may take the material from reality and without concern for fidelity to it, bend it to its own desire.
In the child or psychotic, these primary processes may occur more or less beyond the control of any more sobering psychic forces. They occur automatically. Awareness of its contradictory nature is often missing. Thus the children and the mad may be forgiven. Even for the rest of us, this is not infrequent - we all dream and fantasize. The fascist, however, retains a more serious degree of culpability. As we already noted, he is, in some sense, aware, even if he us momentarily unaware of this very fact. This is important for the rest of us to remember: the fascist knows what he is doing, perhaps more so than almost any other political actor.
Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.
Sartre, Jean Paul. (1995[1948]) Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. Becker GG. New York: Schocken
To answer the more cynical voices, we may split the psychic structure along social lines: the fascist subjectivity divvied up into the different benefiting parties - one one side those few wealthy and powerful enough to actually materially benefit from the fascist collapse of capital, state, and nation, and on the other the masses. Both participate in the creation and execution of its logic, albeit perhaps for different reasons.
The actors in power, who have no loyalty to any cause or idea, may operate with a cynicism that is entirely base in its self service. Direct enrichment, political power, admiration, whatever. For now, we’ll leave them as they are - corrupt and corrupting.
The masses, meanwhile, don’t stand to gain economically from this, despite the slogans to the contrary. What they get from it is the sanctioning of the rage. They get to tap that collective reservoir of boiling blood that is just so fun for them to let flow. Whatever the original cause - some particular national gamble - the parameters will always loosen, expand, lose their grip as the limits of credibility fluctuate to accommodate the almost arbitrary changes in reality. Accusations or defenses will be extended until it is painfully obvious to everybody that there is no way they can be true. It was never about truth anyway.
Uncannily, in a perverse form of projection, they will always recognize that their situation is precarious, that their grip on status and power is slipping, but instead of embodying the place of decay, they acknowledge only external plots and enemies. So slowly the method becomes the madness. Pretenses slip, become quieter, more slipshod, and the gleeful antagonism of the violence of the fascist political project grows louder. Content grows ever transparently arbitrary and aggression ever more total.
But as they remain the dupes they secretly suspect themselves to be, their pitiful rational motive, the theft which was supposed to rationalize the deed, is finally discarded entirely, and the rationalization becomes truthful against its will. The obscure impulse which was always more congenial to them than reason rakes them over completely. The rational island sinks beneath the flood, and those desperately floundering now appear only as defenders of truth, restorers of the earth, which has to be reformed to its farthest corners. All living things become material for their ghastly duty, which now flinches at nothing.
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2020). Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment. In Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press.
For us, it's not enough to recognize the double bind of the sadistic logic at play. So far, we’ve barely had time to touch on the core instability in contemporary rationality which still comfortably places madness on one end and a supposed cool-headed scientific logical rationality at another. As we delve further into the logic of fascism and its increasingly venomous manifestations, we will increasingly understand the threat it contains, as well as how this threat has never been absent from our modern society.
Suffice to say now that fascism must be understood as doing something different from the tired idea of liberal open communication. It's inseparable from a dangerous ontology which imposes the realm of the so-called irrational onto reality, and in doing so challenges the fragile existing civic rationality. Yet this this doesn’t mean that it is mad and unaware of what it is doing, as we often today ask our criminal justice system to determine if a suspected actor was aware that what they were doing was wrong. They know. They always have.
Most crucial of all was the fact that Hitler and the Nazis at every level were very much aware of the fact that they were breaking the law. Their contempt for the law, and for formal processes of justice, was palpable, and made plain on innumerable occasions. Might was right. Law was just the expression of power. What counted, in the words of one Nazi journalist, was not the ‘mendacious hypocrisy’ of Germany’s legal and penal systems, but ‘the law of power that incorporates itself in the blood ties and military solidarity of one’s own race… There is neither law nor justice in itself.
Evans, Richard J. (2004). The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin
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Further References
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.
McWilliams, N. (2011). Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process. Guilford Press.
None of this bodes well for America. Scary we can identify the problem but not do much about it. So who wins in the end?...