Autonomies

Fascism attempts to organise the newly proletarianised masses while leaving intact the property relations which the masses strive to abolish. Fascism sees its salvation in granting these masses not their rights, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have the right to change property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression while keeping these relations unchanged. The logical result of fascism is the aestheticising of political life.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility

The fact of fascism, which has thrown the very existence of a workers’ movement into question, clearly demonstrates what can be expected from a timely recourse to reawakened affective forces. Unlike the situation during the period of utopian socialism, morality and idealism are no more the questions today than they are in fascist forms. Rather, an organized understanding of the movements in society, of attraction and repulsion, starkly presents itself as a weapon – at this moment when a vast convulsion opposes, not so much fascism to communism, but radical imperative forms to the deep subversion which continues to pursue the emancipation of human lives.

Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille reads fascism “psychologically” through the concepts of “homogeneity” and “heterogeneity”. Homogeneity refers to everything that is useful and that is grounded in commodity production, while heterogeneity points to what is in excess of the useful, the marginalised, the impure and the pure or sacred.

Fascism, for Bataille, is a political agency that is able to seduce and marshal the heterogeneity of the working classes – not as labour-power, but as what they are beyond proletarianisation – through the fusion of two powers: military and religious; a fusion effected through the heterogeneity of imperative sovereignty, embodied in the leader.

[And if today the “national-citizens” are no longer called to 1930s military style discipline, technologies of consumption-communication offer different modes of “fusion” and control, as we are surveilled and blinded by the flickering screens of algorithmic revelation.]

Yet Bataille also holds out the possibility of a subversive heterogeneity associated with an anti-fascism no longer reducible to merely ideological opposition, but one between heterogeneous forces that seek to enslave humanity and those that struggle for its emancipation.  Bataille’s essay remains retains its urgency – however demanding it can be conceptually –, which is what has motivated our desire to share it, preceded a very good introduction to the essay by John Brenkman.