Anarcho-Primitivism and the Festival of Fascism

[AnyaRupert@xxxxxxx]

"One of the most interesting things about revolution and social
change struggle is the relationship between external and internal
change. It's not an either/or process. You are transformed and opened
to the possibility of who you can become, in the process of getting
involved in justice and fairness for other people."   Bernadine Dohrn

"There is no fertile soil without traditions [but] traditions in
themselves do not create higher forms of an art." Zoltan Kodaly,
ethnomusicologist, cellist and colleague of Bartok

"How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich born,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree." -Thomas Cahill, preface to 
_The Gifts of the Jews_

Hegel inherited from classical philosophy what is known as the
problem of Being and Becoming, or "Should I be the person I can
become, or should I remain the person whom society has deemed me to
be." Well, the American army answers that in its television ads: Be
All You Can Be - a trained killer in the pay of psychopaths.
Aboriginal cultures tell us: be whomever the Spirit reveals you to be
when you go on your spirit quest or walkabout (males only, of
course!). Calvinists and other types of fatalists tell us: it's all
predetermined: you're going to hell and I'm not. Ancients and
moderns alike sought to find ancestral imprints in the souls of
newborns, imprints that would ensure continuity of cultural
archetype. And the proponents of identity politics tell us that
identity is inviolable, a primordial given.

Hegel, and Marxists, tell us something entirely different. Your Being
is in the constant process of modification and replacement by your
Becoming. Hegel, if I'm reading the argument correctly, postulated
some kind of world historic spirit upon which events of history leave
their mark.  Marx rejected such idealization, "stood Hegel on his
head", and postulated the primacy of material reality over the
phantoms in our brains. Dialectic logic, however, tells us that this
is not an either or process: we are not crude determinist
materialists, as Freud was in his younger years, seeking to tie
specific psychic processes to specific nervous impulses. Nor are we
crude dialecticians, as symoblized by the Yin & Yang symbol that
safely harnesses change within the confines of the closed circle.

"Most of the human constructed material existence of any generation
is in the form of accumulated innovations from past generations. It
is not thereby "reactionary". The vast majority of our material
"advantages" over other species consists in this accumulation of
past innovations , not the relatively few innov ations that the
living generation makes." Charles Brown

The above comment was a response by Charles to my remark that meaning 
is determined by living beings and is a product of their lived 
experience. Charles has here gotten ahold of the wrong side of the
equation: I have been discussing inherent meaning as opposed to
sterile form. What is handed down intergenerationally is not
value-free data, but asserted meaning meaning encased in rigid form.
The enforcement of worshipfull attitude toward ossified thought is in
fact the very definition of reaction. The worshipfull attitude
precludes free and open examination of ideas and the ossification of
thought hinders apprehension of meaning.

Charles went on to suggest that when we opperate an automobile, we
are having a relationaship with the ancestors who created it. This
tired old argument has been going the rounds of the internet for some
time. I don't know who started it, but whomever it was totally
misrepresentts the character of human relationship. We may appreciate
inanimate objects, but we cannot have a human relationship with
non-sentience. When we drive an automobile, we enter into a
relationship with other drivers, with whom we form a consensus that
following traffic ordinances is usually a good idea. (The laws
themselves are imposed through the establishment of institutionalized
governance. For this reason, the consensus thus formed cannot be
considered an instance of democracy in action.) If we were indeed
having a social relationship with dead people, as the oxymoron
Charles proposes suggests is the case when we drive a car, we could
learn valuable principles of metalurgy or thermodynamics inside the
infernal combustion chamber simply by means of opperating the
steeringwheel.

Despite the claims of the backyard mechanic to the effect that his
bike is more loyal than his woman (and other such rot), we do not
have a relatinship with machinery. Machinery is a resource which we
use. Our hypothetic backyard mechanic invests in his bike a
significance which does not naturally inhere within the object. This
is so because social relationships, particularly in modern societies,
are so vastly unsatisfactory. The backyard mechanic believes he has
the ability to make the bike over into his own image.  He does not
find a sufficient degree of pliability in the character of his woman;
so, he denigrates the quality of her loyalty, and on this basis
incrementally circumscribes the allowed parameters of her
inter-reaction with himself. This circumscription further erodes the
possible manifestation of her loyalty, the only quality by which such
macho men typically judge their woman, their dog, their truck, and
his denigration of her becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  By this
we see that he is quite obviously incapable of having a relationship
with his woman, either. (Yes, folks, I am speaking from personal
experience here.)

In received culture, meaning is imposed through the medium of
creative performance, as discussed by Crossan:

   "By contrast, it was still possible in those days to find persons
    illiterate in both Irish and English, who had received orally and
    passed on orally the ancient epic poetry of Ireland. Such a
    process was, in the fullest sense of the word, oral tradition. It
    was the tradition repeated in creative performance by individuals
    who had learned their craft not as students from books but as
    apprentices from masters. There was no single or archetypical
    version, but a multiform or pluriform performance from a
    traditional narrative matrix." John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of
    Christianity

In his discussion of Balkan folklore, Crossan notes that observance
of key story elements is rigidly adhered to in the construction of a
given version of a story, there is considerable leeway in
arrangement.  Considerable licence may be taken with chronology, even
of key events, and detail both large and small may be manipulated or
left out entirely. Despite this divergence in form, however, bards
still aver that each individual telling is faithfull to the
traditional narrative matrix. It is the creative performance, as
Crossan calls it, that gives meaning to the story,

In an exchange with William E.
Gladstone, Robert Ingersoll defended the following proposition:

"The truth is that no one can justly be held responsible for his
thoughts. The brain thinks without asking our consent. We believe, or
we disbelieve, without an effort of the will. Belief is a result. It
is the effect of evidence upon the mind. The scales turn in spite of
him who watches. There is no opportunity of being dishonest in the
formation of an opinion. The conclusion is entirely independent of
desire. We must believe, or we must doubt, in spite of what we wish."
Ingersoll explains prejudice as the result of ignorance. "Ignorance
is the soil in which prejudice must grow.  Touched by a ray of light,
it dies."

Ingersoll is technically correct on both counts. Freedom of 
conscience, a freedom defended by the inclusion of the separation of 
church and state clause in the American Constitution, is a freedom 
that can be argued entirely from natural law. When a person, or more 
to the point a church or state, attempts to impose meaning on
individual perception, that attempt is a usurpation of a natural
process that connects meaning to lived experience. This is why the
hegemonizing effect of any dominant ideology can be achieved only
through non-rational means, and why the institution of the family is
of central importance to conservative and reactionary politics.  It
is not the conveyence of accumulated data that concerns me; it is the 
investiture of ancient cultural forms with pre-packaged meaning that 
is reactionary.

It is for this reason that the Cult of Family Values flourishes in 
rightist, and particularly fascist circles. It is during our 
formative years that we learn the attitudes that are requisite to the 
effective promulgation of the propaganda of authoritarianism. If that 
were not so, the myth-making attempts of fascist propaganda would not
be effective. The spectacle would be entertaining, but that's all.

   " 'The special character of the nineteenth-century spirit lay in
   its neglect of this relation of rationality to the depths of
   consciousness. In its self-sufficiency it imagined that
   developments were progressing on a level determined by itself, in
   an enclosed juste milieu which it had created and exercised
   control over, and which it defined as consciousness. Given this
   state of affairs, the awakening was bound to occur. It happened at
   the very moment that the rational roots had reached the sub-soil
   of myths. This can be verified in words, imagery, ideas and even
   in  the sciences. They all became stronger than befitted human
   proportions, human decorum.  Mythical figures now advanced upon
   the rational ones in a series of terrible battles, and the new
   worlds of myth, dream and nocturnal magic stood revealed in the
   glow of the conflagrations.' [Ernst] Junger thus joins the ranks
   of ideologists like Jaspers, Heidegger and Schmitt who, as
   'opponents' to Hitler, offered irrational myth as a weapon to the
   new imperialism, and themselves as the soldiers. ' Georg Lukacs,
   Destruction of Reason p.  842-3

The great ceremonials upon which fascism cemented its propaganda
efforts were a deliberate continuation of the tradition of ruling
class propaganda of the deed by which rulers have manipulated human
consciousness throughout the ages. And, as we would expect when we
know that class arose through social processes set in motion in
pre-class society, we can see this tradition arising from elements of
culture found in pre-class society. We find, for instance, that the
Greek concept of monumental time arose during its tribal pre-history.

  " Our word 'monument' (which is the same in most European
  languages) derives from the Latin "monimentum", meaning "reminder".
  In the Roman world, inscribed monuments guaranteed the memory of
  events of lasting significance, such as treaties and acts. But
  there were also more visibility personal monuments by individuals
  who saw aspects of their own identity threatened by public oblivion
  and thus erected public reminders of their loyalty and patriotism,
  of the public offices which they had held, or of their military
  victories and triumphs (Woolf 1996; Wiseman 1985; Barrett 1993).
  Similarly, the Greeks distinguished between 'human time' and
  'monumental time' (Foxhall 1995). While human time refers to a
  time-span of three or four generations and is normally expressed as
  a kinship relationship, monumental time is truly permanent and
  connected with posterity and the realm of the divine Gods. Lin
  Foxhall argued that Greek citizens were very interested in 
  achieving fame for posterity. Poetry, drama, historiography, 
  sculpture and architecture are all to be seen as the Greeks' 
  attempts to create memories-to-be; they were meant to act as 
  signifiers which trigger off the words of humans, in which truly 
  permanent memories reside.  Likewise, the Greeks built grave 
  monuments in order to achieve for their dead perpetual remembrance: 
  the dead did not become ancestors but monuments themselves 
  (Humphreys 1980: 269f.). In [3]Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, burial
  mounds function as permanent reminders of the glory of heroes (e.g.
  [4]Iliad VII, 85ff.; [5]Odyssey 11, 76; [6]24, 80; cf. Andronikos
  1968: W33f.).

Linkname:Prospective memory
        URL: http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/CITDPress/Holtorf/6.6.html


And from a paper by Prof. Roger Griffins:

   "In 1935 Mussolini declared to his biographer De Begnac `I first
   had the feeling of being called to announce a new era when I
   started corresponding with the Voce circle.' The writings of some
   Syndicalists of a theory of Marxist revolution conceived in terms
   of myth, voluntarism, and the nation rather than socio-economics,
   determinism, and the Communist International had also helped
   convert him from an internationalist to a national socialist well
   in time for him to become an interventionist in the spring of
   1915."

   "Some two decades ago Mona Ouzof's Festivals and the French
    Revolution[1] provided impressive testimony to the centrality of
    myth and ritual to the dynamics of even a `modern', `rational'
    revolution purportedly carried out in the name of Enlightenment
    principles. Now that at long last some scholars are taking
    seriously the proposition that Fascism[2] as well as Nazism[3]
    attempted to create a new type of culture, it seems an
    appropriate moment to consider whether the conspicuous ritual,
    theatrical component of both Fascism and generic fascism can be
    illuminated by the concept of `the revolutionary festival'. This
    paper explores the thesis that the temporal dimension of such a
    concept has a particular heuristic value when applied to fascist
    ideology and practice, despite the radical differences which
    clearly separate the largely spontaneous explosion of populist
    mythic energies unleashed by the French Revolution from those
    deliberately engineered in ordinary citizens by Fascist and Nazi
    elites, whose attitude is epitomized in Hitler's statement that
    `Mass demonstrations must burn into the little man's soul the
    conviction that though a little worm he is part of a great
    dragon'.[4]"

    The cult of sacred time in neo-fascism

   1945 may have signalled the end of Fascism and Nazism as regimes, 
   but the palingenetic longings which fuelled them have proved 
   remarkably persistent and adaptable in a post-war climate which, 
   at least in liberal democracies, has remained profoundly 
   inhospitable to revolutionary ideologies of left or right. Since 
   the concept of `festival time' is so deeply bound up with 
   fascism's myth of national regeneration, we should not be 
   surprised if it continues to recur in various guises as part of 
   its crusade against the Enlightenment concept of history.

   One of its most influential ideologues in Italy, for example, has 
   been Julius Evola. His impact is largely attributable to the way 
   his occultist theory of reality and arcane philosophy of history 
   satisfy the need experienced by post-war fascists for a 
   comprehensive `vision of the world' which allows for the 
   subjective sense of access to a `sacred' time.[69] It is the same 
   need which explains the extraordinary way a number of `fantasy' 
   writers, notably Tolkien have become part of the staple diet of 
   Italian Fascists.[70] Sometimes the call for `festival time' 
   becomes explicit. One of the contributors to a conference held in 
   1981 by the extreme right on the need to create a new culture for 
   the transmission of their ideas was Franco Cardini.  His lecture 
   was entitled `A quest for the roots of a conception of the world 
   to come.  The community is recreating itself: myth, ritual,
   liturgy, play, festival (`festa')'.  In it he asserted that:

   To restore `la festa' means opposing the omnipotence of the
   capitalist-technological system; it means rediscovering an
   `extraordinariness' which acts as a qualifying limit to the
   everyday, and hence recreating the foundations of everyday reality 
   itself so as to resist the temptation to conceive time as a
   homogeneous entity and hence life as waiting for inevitable and
   irreversible destruction, as an anguish which can only be escaped
   through oblivion.  Rediscovering festival time means rediscovering
   the non-primacy of economism and productionism, it means
   rediscovering the whole man.[71]

The above quotes are taken from a paper entitled "I am no longer
human. I am a Titan. A god. The fascist quest to regenerate time."
published online by The Institute of Historical Research, a member
of the School of Advanced Study which is part of the University of
London www.ihrinfo.ac.uk/projects/elec/sem22.html

In a separate paper, Griffths explores the classic Marxist
understanding of spectacle and the state:

   "For example, in the 1960s, Guy Debord, main theorist of the
   Situationist brand of anti-capitalism, explored the essentially
   "spectacular" nature of modern state power, and naturally seized
   on inter-war fascism as the most fully evolved realization of the
   paradigm: Fascism is a state of siege in capitalist society...Its
   decomposed ersatz of myth is revived in the spectacular context of 
   the most modern means of conditioning the illusion. Thus it is one 
   of the factors in the formation of the modern spectacle, and its 
   role in the destruction of the old workers' movement makes it one 
   of the fundamental forces of present-day society. Other fruitful
   Marxist and post-Marxist=/New Left sources of demystification have
   been Freudian psychology, feminism, and post-structuralism, all of
   which in one way or another are used to complement the Marxist
   premise that fascism is ultimately a beguiling mirage or show
   which detracts attention from the realities of class or gender
   interest, of persecution and oppression, and extends its empire
   over the body itself. Its pervasive rhetoric and ritual endow it
   with the same sort of relationship to an actual revolution as
   fantasy football has to the World Cup Final. Thus Fascism is a
   discursive regime, a movement in semiotic overdrive. To cover up
   its ideological contradictions Fascist Rome resorted to strategies
   of self-representation and masquerade. It is only because fascism
   stages the spectacle that it can wield its simulcral power. Yet
   the nagging question prompted by all such high-powered
   intellectual labour to unmask fascism as a quintessentially
   aesthetic and hence reactionary form of politics is whether the
   same analyses could not apply to a considerable extent to any
   communist state state system Did not Stalin, Mao, Ceauscescu, and
   Kim Il Sung', in the grip of visceral fears of chaos, impotence,
   democracy, and the feminine as any Führer, also enact elaborate
   political masquerades by wielding simulcral power over spectacular
   states awash with currents of rhetoric, ideology and social
   fantasy, no matter how revolutionary they were in theory."

I would presume that Marxists understand that ideology is wielded by
elements of the superstructure in the interests of their own
self-preservation, and that ideology is not, in and of itself, a
source of power. The ability to wield ideological power is a
consequence of privilege of birth order: those born into the ruling
class are born to the privilege of wielding ideological power.
Everyone else must sell their soul for that privilege. So I don't
want anyone complaining that I'm leaving out the class analysis when
I focus on ideology.

Last August, almost a year ago, I tried to raise the possiblity of
distinguishing between reactionary spirituality and progressive
spirituality, if there is such a thing. Subsequently, I was shocked
to discover that the traditionalists on marxmail simply will not
allow their beliefs to be held up to scrutiny. They litter this list
with their reactionary ideology and we are expected to take it with a
smile. There seems to be some kind of dewey-eyed utopian belief that
tribal societies, because they lacked the institutions of class, were
somehow paragons of value-free, coercionless, consensual democratic
self-rule. Such a view ignores everyday realities that can be
perceived by anyone with any social awareness whatsoever. Wherever
small groups gather on a regular basis - whether politically,
socially, or religiously - we see the same group dynamics:
personality cults and consensus coerced through peer pressure. The
reality of tribal politics is that personal, intimate, and domestic
forms of politics gradually become institutionalized as power passes
from pre-class to class forms.

Because ancient wisdom shows every sign of being manufactured into
the new global state religion at the dawn of this new millenia, it
behooves us to review this alleged wisdom.

The epistemology evident in traditional lore serves to reify the
relationship of the individual member of society to the corporate
identity which defines the form and gives meaning to the qualities of
the kinship relationships by which tribal people understand their
social obligations. The tribal lore and mythology tells new humans
how they *should* regard the world around them, how they should
behave, and provides socially approved explanation for the
expectations and anticipations of the group vis a vis the new human.
A review of Sahlin's discussion of the meaning of gift-giving (Stone
Age Economics) shows that activity represented as altruistic is in
fact fraught with socially determined meaning and expectation of
return. Thus, altruism is projected as an absolute value and a given
characteristic of the tribal corporate identity. It is to this spirit
that the individual is expected to believe his obligation lies. It is
in the service of obligation as an absolute that the gift is given,
fullfilling the unspoken wishes of the inescapably present ancestors
andpreserving the coorporate unity of the tribe. The obligation
itself, of course, is the reification of the relationship of the
individual to the living members of the tribe as mediated by the
abstract and amorphous concept of community. At all times, tradition
purports to be merely a conveyence of Revealed Wisdom, for which no
explanation is needed and none is given.

And so we find that ancient mythology abounds in archetype, 
stereotype, trope, cultural motif, and all manner of sketchily drawn 
and empty forms. Let us review, for instance, the story of the 
antelope and the hare in Louis Proyect's eulogy to Indian ecological 
wisdom (in my posts "Romancing the Native: A Study in Ecofascism".  
Both the antelope and the hare are merely archetypes, lacking any 
distinguishing characteristics that would individuate them from the 
amorphous mass of "antelope" in general, or "hare" in general.  In
each case, the character is reduced to its most obvious function, its
ability to run, which in its overemphasized form is elevated to
supranatural significance.

In origin stories, archetypical ancestors are also given this
supranatural quality, primarily by means of enshrining their defining
actions in what folklorists call Sacred Time, or stymied impulse, as
William Mishler writes in the online journal of Anthropoetics:

   "Generative Anthropology's primary concern is not
   with literature but language, i.e., representation, but because
   literature consists of language that inherently shows the traces
   of the process by which it arose, GA finds in literature an ideal
   interlocutor. And among literary genres, perhaps the one most apt
   to engage GA in dialog is tragedy. As Eric Gans writes in The End
   of Culture: "If the epic converted myth into literature and the
   lyric did the same for choral marriage-hymns and the like, with
   tragedy, literature penetrated into the very heart of ritual: the
   sacrifice whose origin is traceable to the originary event."
   (Gans, 1985, 280)

   In any given epoch, then, whether ancient Greece, Renaissance
   England, 17th century France, or 19th century Scandinavia, one
   might somewhat abstractly understand the function of tragedy to
   have been that of reformulating the originary event in the terms
   of the current culture's ethical understanding. This event, as
   readers of Eric Gans' work recall, is hypothesized to have
   occurred in a moment of stymied impulse when the protohuman group
   was arrested in its hungry convergence on an object of collective
   desire by the countervailing force of that desire itself. Each
   ndividual was prevented from reaching out to take sole possession
   of the object by the assembled force of the encircling ring of
   identical, i.e., mimetic, desires. In that moment of pause and
   rigid attention, the group found itself compelled to designate the
   object to itself--that is, convert it from mere instinctually
   targeted thing to cognized sign by an operation that was both
   magical and radically paradoxical. Indeed, it produced the
   fundamental paradox of which all human culture was to become the
   endlessly complex unfolding. That the object had to be lost as
   thing in order to be recovered as sign is the conundrum which
   religious ritual celebrates--fixing on the aspect of
   transformation, of transubstantiation--and secular ritual, i.e.,
   tragedy, deplores--fixing on the aspects of loss and arbitrary
   victimage."

Primitive art is characterized by an overemphasis on the 
larger-than-life qualities of the figures represented, as though to 
distract from the paucity of detail that might otherwise inform.  We 
see an arbitrary and forced juxtaposition of simple form and 
over-proportioned passion. The ceremonial masks, as we see for 
instance in Levi-Straus' The Spirit of the Mask, are grotesque 
charicatures intended to overwhelm the rational mind and in 
preparation for the impress of pre-formed experiential events of 
ritual and ceremony..  The performance of the great ceremonial 
gatherings obliterates individuation in the participants, giving rise 
to an experience interpreted as a spiritual unification, not unlike
that of a rock concert. The ceremonial thus imposes experiential
meaning on the individual while focusing his attention on the reduced
and adumbrated figures of the masks and the archetypes in the
stories.

Magical thinking is characterized by artificial juxtaposition of 
disparate elements, irrespective of their actual relationship or 
(lack thereof) to each other. Thus, in compendiums of tradtional 
healing lore, we typically find statements of association that appear 
entirely artificial and forced. Typically, we find that the alleged 
healing power of an herb is attributed to its tribal associations: it 
*must* heal because it is sacred to, or associated with, the clan 
totem, the spirit of the place, the constellation under which the 
healer was born, etc. If it were not true that such association is 
arbitrary, it would be found that the specific healing power of a 
given herb would be known to *all* of the tribes to whom the herb is
known. After all, the familiar caveat applied to poison ivy - "leaves
of three, let it be" - applies universally to the most common variety
of this species, precisely because "leaves of three" is its most
obvious defining characteristic. The fact that different tribes
attribute different qualities to the same herb shows that their
observation of any given plant is anything but objective or
systematic, two qualities requisite to scientific endeavour.
Instead, perception in early humans was just as infused with
culturally imposed meaning as it is in modern man. Of course, the
allegedly scientific nature of ancient lore is largely a prop used to
lend authority to the homilitic and simplistic apphorisms being
peddled as "neglected wisdom".

I shall continue my examination of the resurgence on a global scale
of the mixture of magical thinking and politics in a future post. We
will be looking at the neo-tribalism of the New Age Travellers, the
anarkids, and the neo-fascist influence in the fringes of
alternativism.

Joan Cam+ron


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