here's an anti-fascist argument i wrote for academic debaters; i'd appreciate any and all commentary.
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hillside over the sea. man sitting there on a cane seat . . . he is dressed in old-fashioned puttees green sport coat of English cut he has a sandy mustache stained with tobacco pale blue eyes . . . near him we now see several convulsed forms, the closest a few feet away outstretched hand clutching a handful of grass . . . the camera pans out convulsed corpses to the sky back to the man sitting there on his cane seat . . . the man takes a chicken sandwich out of a wicker lunch basket . . . "safe at last" he says and starts eating his sandwich . . . the man you see here is Doctor Lee . . . Doctor John Lee . . . he was a sensitive man and it lacerated him to walk streets and enter restaurants where he encountered living organisms manifesting wills different from and in some cases flatly antagonistic to his own . . . "the situation is little short of intolerable" . . . Rock Ape waiter there with the wrong wine . . . he was a timid man in a way you see and not able to fix the waiter with Mandrill eyes and ugly American snarl . . . "bring me red wine you hairy assed Rock Ape or I drink it from your throat!" . . . now the doctor was a man of independent means and could usually avoid such disturbing incidents but the possibility was always there . . . this disturbed him and he was a man who did not like to be disturbed . . . he decided to end the whole distasteful thing once and for all by turning everyone into himself . . . this he proposed to do by a virus an image concentrate of himself that would spread waves of tranquility in all directions until the world was a fit place for him to live . . . he called it the "beautiful disease" . . . his first attempts to activate the image meal failed . . . he realized of course that to administer a dead or weakened strain of the beautiful Lee virus would invite the disaster of mass inoculation . . . he had to be quite sure you understand . . . some of his "canine preparations" as he called test cases died in quite unpleasant ways that disturbed him for he was a humane man and did not like to be disturbed so these unworthy vessels only increased his resolve to make a better world . . . one day it occurred to him if perhaps the image meal were radioactive . . . he painted a culture of image meal with radium paint and put it in an iron box covered on the outside with layers of human skin and now he chuckled "let it steep" and made himself a cup of tea . . . he finished his tea and opened the box . . . "ladies and gentlemen of planet earth introducing 'Johnny 23'" . . . his cat hissed made an abortive attempt to walk on its hind legs and fell in convulsions . . . in its dying eyes he read an almost human hatred . . . he attributed the death of his cat to a short circuit of overburdened synapses occasioned by a too rapid conversion to the human condition . . . "now we must find a worthy vessel" . . . remember the good doctor was a humane man who did not like to harm anyone because it disturbed him to do so and he was a man who did not like to be disturbed . . . he had convinced himself that "Johnny 23" would simply remove from the planet hostile alien forces manifesting themselves through other people that this would come about through peaceful penetration in the course of which no lives would be lost . . . "Johnny 23" would simply make friends of everyone . . . the doctor was not a man who argued with himself . . . the first public appearance of "Johnny 23" demonstrated a miscalculation . . . worthy vessels clutched at an often imaginary mustache and fell in convulsions looking at some invisible presence black hate from dying eyes . . . "Johnny 23" was one hundred percent fatal . . . the good doctor had a spot of bother a narrow escape in fact when the worthy vessels found out who "Johnny 23" is . . . fortunately the epidemic was well advanced by that time and "Johnny 23" finished the job . . . he finishes his sandwich and licks the grease off his fingers . . . he puts a cigarette in a stained bone holder . . . he sits there smoking . . . it is very peaceful there on the hillside nothing to disturb him as far as the eyes can see he gets up folds his cane seat and walks down a path toward the sea . . . his boat is moored by the pier . . . it is a small boat and he can handle it alone . . . last awning flaps on the pier . . . last man here now.
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We quote this full chapter from William S. Burroughs' novel, Exterminator! (1977. p52-4.) not as another debate card, but as a story for us to consider in relation to our lives and our participation in debate. While we don't wish to mock our interlocutors' advocacy, we're trying to recognize how we all engage in risky utopian discourse that ignores the disturbing implications of our own thoughts and actions. The above tale teaches us that sometimes our resolve to make a better world comes attached with a refusal to question ourselves. This may propagate the image concentrate which Doctor Lee called the 'beautiful disease'.
Likewise, current debating practices concentrate argument into commodity forms, such as pre-packaged cards and timed speeches, which neurotically fixate on the goal of winning to the detriment of debate's revolutionary potential. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari discuss this in relation to literature in their book, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972. p132-4.) :
Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from D.H. Lawrence to Malcolm Lowry, from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of course they fail to complete the process, they never cease failing to do so. The neurotic impasse again closes - the daddy-mommy of oedipalization, America, the return to the native land - or else the perversion of the exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol - or worse still, an old fascist dream. Never has delirium oscillated more between its two poles. But through the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves, irresistibly; sperm, river, drainage, inflamed genital mucus, or a stream of words that do not let themselves be coded, a libido that is too fluid, too viscous: a violence against syntax, a concerted destruction of the signifier, non-sense erected as a flow, polyvocality that returns to haunt all relations. How poorly the problem of literature is put, starting from the ideology that it bears, or from the co-option of it by a social order. People are co-opted, not works, which will always come to awake a sleeping youth, and which never cease extending their flame. As for ideology, it is the most confused notion because it keeps us from seizing the relationship to the literary machine with a field of production, and the moment when the emitted sign breaks though this "form of content" that was attempting to maintain the sign within the order of the signifier. Yet it has been a long time since Engels demonstrated, already apropos of Balzac, how an author is great because he cannot prevent himself from tracing flows and causing them to circulate, flows that split asunder the catholic and despotic signifiers of his work, and that necessarily nourish a revolutionary machine on the horizon. That is what style is, or rather the absence of style - asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode - desire. For literature is like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression.
Here again, oedipalization is one of the most important factors in the reduction of literature to an object of consumption conforming to the established order, and incapable of causing anyone harm. It is not a question here of the personal oedipalization of the author and his readers, but of the Oedipal form to which one attempts to enslave the work itself, to make of it this minor expressive activity that secretes ideology according to the dominant codes. The work of art is supposed to inscribe itself in this fashion between the two poles of Oedipus, problem and solution, neurosis and sublimation, desire and truth - the one regressive, where the work hashes out and redistributes the nonresolved conflicts of childhood, and the other progressive, by which the work invents the paths leading toward a new solution concerning the future of man. It is said that the work is constituted by a conversion interior to itself as "cultural object." From this point of view, there is no longer even any need for applying psychoanalysis to the work of art, since the work itself constitutes a successful psychoanalysis, a sublime "transference" with exemplary collective virtualities. The hypocritical warning resounds: a little neurosis is good for the work of art, good material, but not psychosis, especially not psychosis; we draw a line between the eventually creative neurotic aspect, and the psychotic aspect, alienating and destructive. As if the great voices, which were capable of performing a breakthrough in grammar and syntax, and of making all language a desire, were not speaking from the depths of psychosis, and as if they were not demonstrating for our benefit an eminently psychotic and revolutionary means of escape.
It is correct to measure established literature against an Oedipal psychoanalysis, for this literature deploys a form of superego proper to it, even more noxious than the nonwritten superego. Oedipus is in fact literary before being psychoanalytic. There will always be a Breton against Artaud, a Goethe against Lenz, a Schiller against Holderlin, in order to superegoize literature and tell us: Careful, go no further! No "errors for lack of tact"! Werther yes, Lenz no! The Oedipal form of literature is its commodity form. We are free to think that there is finally even less dishonesty in psychoanalysis than in established literature, since the neurotic pure and simple produces a solitary work, irresponsible, illegible, and nonmarketable, which on the contrary must pay not only to be read, but to be translated and reduced. He makes at least an economic error, an error in tact, and does not spread his values. Artaud puts it well: all writing is so much pig shit - that is to say, any literature that takes itself as an end or sets ends for itself, instead of being a process that "ploughs the crap of being and its language," transports the weak, the aphasiacs, the illiterate. At least spare us sublimation. Every writer is a sellout. The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form of content.
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Notice that the critical issue here is not the misinterpretation of content, but the reduction of all content to a restrictive format. No one in debate has pointed this out more specifically than Gordon Mitchell. In his Fall 1998 article for Argumentation and Advocacy ('Pedagogical Possibilities for Argumentative Agency in Academic Debate'. v35. p43-4.), he explains how the sterile laboratory model of debate desensitizes participants to human suffering and enslaves our activity within a spectator-mentality :
While an isolated academic space that affords students an opportunity to learn in a protected environment has significant pedagogical value (see e.g. Coverstone 1995, p. 8-9), the notion of the academic debate tournament as a sterile laboratory carries with it some disturbing implications, when the metaphor is extended to its limit. To the extent that the academic space begins to take on characteristics of a laboratory, the barriers demarcating such a space from other spheres of deliberation beyond the school grow taller and less permeable. When such barriers reach insurmountable dimensions, argumentation in the academic setting unfolds on a purely simulated plane, with students practicing critical thinking and advocacy skills in strictly hypothetical thought-spaces. Although they may research and track public argument as it unfolds outside the confines of the laboratory for research purposes, in this approach, students witness argumentation beyond the walls of the academy as spectators, with little or no apparent recourse to directly participate or alter the course of events (see Mitchell 1995; 1998).
The sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture is highlighted during episodes of alienation in which debaters cheer news of human suffering or misfortune. Instead of focusing on the visceral negative responses to news accounts of human death and misery, debaters overcome with the competitive zeal of contest round competition show a tendency to concentrate on the meanings that such evidence might hold for the strength of their academic debate arguments. For example, news reports of mass starvation might tidy up the "uniqueness of a disadvantage" or bolster the "inherency of an affirmative case" (in the technical parlance of debate-speak). Murchland categorizes cultivation of this "spectator" mentality as one of the most politically debilitating failures of contemporary education: "Educational institutions have failed even more grievously to provide the kind of civic forums we need. In fact, one could easily conclude that the principle purposes of our schools is to deprive successor generations of their civic voice, to turn them into mute and uncomprehending spectators in the drama of political life" (1991, p. 8).
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He goes on to connect this lack of argumentative agency to the danger that corporate or statist institutions may recruit debaters to legitimate insidious forms of social control (ibid. p44-5) :
The undercultivation of student agency in the academic field of argumentation is a particularly pressing problem, since social theorists such as Foucault, Habermas and Touraine have proposed that information and communication have emerged as significant media of domination and exploitation in contemporary society. These scholars argue, in different ways, that new and particularly insidious means of social control have developed in recent times. These methods of control are insidious in the sense that they suffuse apparently open public spheres and structure opportunities for dialogue in subtle and often nefarious ways. Who has authority to speak in public forums? How does socioeconomic status determine access to information and close off spaces for public deliberation? Who determines what issues are placed on the agenda for public discussion? It is impossible to seriously consider these questions and still hew closely to the idea that a single, monolithic, essentialized "public sphere" even exists. Instead, multiple public spheres exist in diverse cultural and political milieu, and communicative practices work to transform and reweave continuously the normative fabric that holds them together. Some public spaces are vibrant and full of emancipatory potential, while others are colonized by restrictive institutional logics. Argumentation skills can be practiced in both contexts, but how can the utilization of such skills transform positively the nature of the public spaces where dialogue takes place?
For students and teachers of argumentation, the heightened salience of this question should signal the danger that critical thinking and oral advocacy skills alone may not be sufficient for citizens to assert their voices in public deliberation. Institutional interests bent on shutting down dialogue and discussion may recruit new graduates skilled in argumentation and deploy them in information campaigns designed to neutralize public competence and short-circuit democratic decision-making (one variant of Habermas' "colonization of the lifeworld" thesis; see Habermas 1981, p. 376-373). Habermas sees the emergent capacity of capitalist institutions to sustain themselves by manufacturing legitimacy through strategic communication as a development that profoundly transforms the Marxist political dynamic.
By colonizing terms and spaces of public dialogue with instrumental, strategically-motivated reasoning, institutions are said by Habermas to have engineered a "refeudalization" of the public sphere. In this distorted space for public discussion, corporations and the state forge a monopoly on argumentation and subvert critical deliberation by members of an enlightened, debating public. This colonization thesis supplements the traditional Marxist problematic of class exploitation by highlighting a new axis of domination, the way in which capitalist systems rely upon the strategic management of discourse as a mode of legitimation and exploitation. Indeed, the implicit bridge that connects argumentation skills to democratic empowerment in many argumentation textbooks crosses perilous waters, since institutions facing "legitimation crises" (see Habermas 1975) rely increasingly on recruitment and deployment of argumentative talent to manufacture public loyalty.
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Mitchell comes close here to mentioning fascism. We define fascism as an ideal system of total power which emphasizes disciplinary regimentation and seeks to suppress all criticism. On the governmental level, this historically equates to ultra-conservative dictatorships which use left-wing propaganda, but when we focus too much on the state, it can blind us to the micro-political groups and gestures that sustain fascism in the here and now. Deleuze & Guattari again, this time from their book, A Thousand Plateaus (1980. p214-5.) :
Doubtless, fascism invented the concept of the totalitarian State, but there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its own devising: there are totalitarian States, of the Stalinist or military dictatorship type, that are not fascist. The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macrophysical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular forces in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole. There is fascism when a war machine is installed in each hole, in every niche. Even after the National Socialist State had been established, microfascisms persisted that gave it unequaled ability to act upon the "masses." Daniel Guerin is correct to say that if Hitler took power, rather then taking over the German State administration, it was because from the beginning he had at his disposal microorganizations giving him "an unequaled, irreplaceable ability to penetrate every cell of society," in other words, a molecular and supple segementarity, flows capable of suffusing every kind of cell. Conversely, if capitalism came to consider the fascist experience as catastrophic, if it preferred to ally itself with Stalinist totalitarianism, which from its point of view was much more sensible and manageable, it was because the segementarity and centralization of the latter was more classical and less fluid. What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism. American film has often depicted these molecular focal points; band, gang, sect, family, town, neighborhood, vehicle fascisms spare no one. Only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they "want" to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microformations already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination. Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It's too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.
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Micro-fascism in debate has many facets - from paternalistic skools to unrepresentative framers to exclusionary ballots. One is right to immediately notice that we link to our own kritik. Here we are reading cards, appealing to a judge. But we're aware of these links, and we're self-critical. While we don't believe in the panacea of communication, we're adjacent to a debate machine that's continually recreated, one we hope will engender liberatory argument and experimental gaming. We offer a vision of what debate could be when we move beyond performance theater to real inorganization. Deleuze & Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972. p.309.) :
This reverse side is the "real inorganization" of the molecular elements: partial objects that enter into indirect syntheses or interactions, since they are not partial in the sense of extensive parts, but rather partial like the intensities under which a unit of matter always fills space in varying degrees (the eye, the mouth, the anus as degrees of matter); pure positive mulitiplicities where everything is possible, without exclusiveness or negation, syntheses operating without a plan, where the connections are transverse, the disjunctions included, the conjunctions polyvocal, indifferent to their underlying support, since this matter that serves them precisely as a support receives no specificity from any structural or personal unity, but appears as the body without organs that fills the space each time an intensity fills it; signs of desire that compose a signifying chain but that are not themselves signifying, and do not answer to the rules of a linguistic game of chess, but instead to the lottery drawings that sometimes cause a word to be chosen, sometimes a design, sometimes a thing or a piece of a thing, depending on one another only by the order of the random drawings, and holding together only by the absence of a link (nonlocalizable connections), having no other statutory condition than that of being dispersed elements of desiring-machines that are themselves dispersed.
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One may ask, why are you still following the rules? Why aren't you doing a dadaist jig? Why aren't you vandalizing tournaments? Indeed, why haven't you exited debate? We wish to avoid being either generically avant-garde or generically anti-debate, and we know that one of the reasons debate rounds in 2005 look very different from rounds in 1985 is because kritiks won ballots. So we act to sneak explosive creativities through the back-door, using the appearance of a legitimate carded position in order to further illegitimate questions, to light those critical fires that may burn away some of the narrow-minded micro-fascisms of debate. Experimenting with new articulations requires a modest method of lodging oneself in collective assemblages, gently tipping them toward their own self-critique, without causing polarizing violence, and avoiding the dis-empowering alternatives of either total rejection or pseudo-revolution. Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980. p160-1.) :
You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified - organized, signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines.
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So we ask for your support not to certify that we're better debaters, but to assist us in plugging our kritik into the debate machine. You don't have to agree with us, but we hope you agree that two questions are worth discussing in this and future rounds:
How can we unhook ourselves from debate's micro-fascistic practices that nail us down to dominant reality? And how can problematizing the limitations inherent in the current format help mobilize support for new ideas, sowing the seeds of a people yet to come?
Finally, because we believe that insignificant events like debate rounds can entail life-changing experiences, even if this position becomes just another commodified kritik, perhaps it's still better to be a failed Foucault than a successful Doctor Lee. What's essential is trying to root out all forms of fascism in our everyday speech-acts as an ethical art of living. As Foucault explains in his preface to Anti-Oedipus (1972. pxiii-iv.) :
Last but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism (whereas Anti-Oedipus' opposition to the others is more of a tactical engagement). And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini - which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively - but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular "readership" : being anti-oedipal has become a life style, a way of thinking and living). How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body.
Paying a modest tribute to Saint Francis de Sales, * {*A seventeenth-century priest and Bishop of Geneva, known for his Introduction to the Devout Life} one might say that Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.
This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:
Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.
Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.
Do not become enamored of power.
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