Act of God. posted by Richard Seymour

Prologue -

Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn't analyze at first and didn't fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very grueling day) until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.

Lots of people disagreed with the use of the term 'Polemicist' in the earlier post linking to Charlotte Street's ruminations. What's being got at here is the career Polemicist (hence the capitalisation), the sort of scribe (or radio shock-jock for that matter) whose entire output is directed at this or that deluded sad-sack, these crooks, that enemy of the people. Well, in the absence of an alternative word, just go with it while I try and hammer something out.

The avenger, masked or unmasked, is the fantasy figure of the Polemicist's role-play. In particular, the figure of Monte Cristo is paramount, or at least the major literary expression of the mythology, which has been repeated over and over - to some extent in Zorro, The Shawshank Redemption, V for Vendetta, etc. The story was popular fiction in its time, released in 18 parts over two years, in similar fashion to much popular fiction to follow, in which the same hero did the same thing in book after book after book. The Sherlock Holmes novels were obviously dispensed in this way, and the triumph of market demand over art was established when Holmes was brought back from the dead in that improbable fashion. Holmes' awesome, superhuman talents, petit-bourgeois social position and aristocratic demeanour mark him out as a figure of the same cut as Edmond Dantes, albeit he acts on behalf of 'society' rather than himself. Moriarty is as much an intellectual foe as anything, but his swinishness and deviance is necessary to keep Holmes moving. Holmes perpetually needs problems to solve, otherwise he's stuck with his smack addiction. (I don't suppose it's accidental that this is what we get in much modern 'gumboots' or crime fiction - Franco Moretti has it that there is often a profoundly authoritarian, organicist ethos at work in such novels, in which the world is eminently readable, solveable, in which one can, or wishes one could, peer right into each little house and hovel, in which deviancy and normality are self-evident terms. Total transparency, the panopticon, is what is yearned for. The detective has an affinity with the criminal to the extent that he has eschewed the individualist ethic, but retains a memory of it - he knows the criminal mind. The contrast is that Dumas' popular fiction was profoundly democratic, and that his superman rebuked God and affirmed the individualist ethic).

Dumas based his tale on an apparently true story described in a memoir by Jacques Peuchet of a man named Francois Picaud who, imprisoned on the schemes of four false friends, later escaped with a treasure map bequeathed him by a dying prisoner and used his wealth to build up his resources in advance of a terrible, cruel revenge. How pleasurable to say that, by the way, to say that one will be terrible, cruel, unremitting, an avenging instrument of God, enacting la justice de Dieu. It is partially a male fantasy in Theweleit's sense, in which the man of steel is part of a macro-machine, an intrument of it, whose most "urgent task ... is to pursue, to dam in, and to subdue any force that threatens to transform him back into the horribly disorganized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines and feelings that calls itself human." But whether there is a 'true' story behind it or not is irrelevant, for what is striking is the appeal of the superman myth. If Picaud hadn't existed, someone would have invented him.

It is a particularly cherished conception of the petit-bourgeoisie, those whose social position disposes them to distrust the working masses while at the same time bitterly loathing and resenting and envying the ruling class. (I don't mean to say, of course, that one can 'blame' this literary production on the petit-bourgeoisie or 'taint' or 'damn' it by association with that social layer). If you only look at an activity, rather than at the rewards it incidentally manages to accrue in a given situation, it is obvious that the role of the freelance commentator, journalist or even, dary I say it, comedian, is petit-bourgeois. So, a comedian whose fantasy is that he personally is Siva the Destroyer, or the Shepherd, or even Christ-At-His-Angriest, reproduces this literary cliche even if it is occasionally to the detriment of his art. A pugnacious commentator-cum-journalist who explains that hatred of this or that fraud, or mountebank, or charlatan is a good reason to get up in the morning so that he can "continue the fight on CNN" could be said to be doing the same. It goes without saying, or should do, that Bloggery is a very petit-bourgeois activity notwithstanding the social class that any particular blogger belongs to - hence the popularity of fiskers, instant-rebutters, exposers, those who are forever trying to catch this or that threatening figure with his or her pants down.

The admiration for the European blueblood evident in this fantasy is intriguing as well. Thomas Harris's Hannibal absolutely ruined the mystery of Lecter by revealing it: he is merely a disdainful aristocrat, an elitist misanthrope, a refined sociopath, snob and sadist. Had this not been revealed (ie had Harris not written his awful bloody book), readers could have continued to admire the mysterious cannibal. Similarly, Zorro is an aristocrat in mask; Holmes is a lower-middle class detective with an aristocratic comportment; the Scarlet Pimpernel is also a masked aristocrat; Batman likewise... What is it about the aristocrat that we admire? His 'cool' inevitably, his capability, his authority, his rich accent, his learning, his disdain, his wit, his cruelty and his sadism. If only we too could be like that.

But beware, folks, beware... who else thought he was an instrument, not of God, but of Destiny? From one of the Chabert pieces above, a quote from Umberto Eco:

Gramsci's idea charmed me. That the superman cult of nationalist and fascist stock was born from, among other things, a complex of petit-bourgeois frustrations is well known. Gramsci explained clearly how this superman ideal was originally given birth, in the 19th century, at the heart of a literature with open democratic and popular intentions and leanings. "The feuilleton replaced (and favoured at the same time) the imagination of the man of the people, the ordinary man, and was a veritable day dream [...] of extended musings on the idea of vengeance, of punishing the guilty for the injuries they inflicted[...]" Thus it is certainly legitimate to interrogate the origins of the right wing superman cult but also of the equivocations of humanitarian socialism of the 19th century. Consider: Mussolini began as a socialist and ended as a reactionary nationalist; the superman of the popular novel begins as a democratic personnage (Sue and Dumas) only to finish in nationalism (Arsène Lupin).

Prophylactically, I should add and re-emphasise that this is not an attempt to 'incriminate' any particular author or comedian by association with fascism or anything of that kind. It simply happens to be 'there' (and 'here' if you like).