Male Fantasies

“the question of fascism, or rather the question of why might people vote for their own oppression, has never ceased to haunt political philosophy”

“Marxist theory, according to Reich, consistently depicts fascism as a mistaken choice resulting from false consciousness: the masses are ignorant and gullible, and thus easily led into contradictions. Refusing to absolve those who cheered for Hitler, Reich proposes an alternative theory. Marxism, he contends, was “unable to understand the power of an ideological movement like Nazism” because it lacked an adequate conception of ideology’s “material force as an emotional or affective structure.””

“The masses did not mistakenly choose fascism. Rather, there is a more fundamental nonidentity between class consciousness and mass movements. Fascism was not a Falschkauf (mistaken purchase) followed by buyer’s remorse. The people fought for it, fiercely and stubbornly—though this desire for fascism is also a desire for suppression, a “fight for servitude,” if you will, or an “escape from freedom,” as Erich Fromm put it in the title of his 1941 book.”

“The answer to this apparent paradox—how can desire desire its own suppression?—was, in Reich’s view, tied to thwarted sexual development.”

“The rhetoric of social revolution ran afoul of the centuries-old association of transgression with social shame and punishment. Taught to suppress the natural expression of their sexual instincts, the masses conflated social and sexual convulsions in images of tides, floods, undercurrents, disorder, and chaos: everything which represents a fear of dissolution or threatens to swallow the subject. Fascism, from Reich’s perspective, constitutes the paradigmatic form of ideological displacement: the social antagonism diagnosed by communism (class struggle) is displaced “to the site of phantasmatic antagonism,” as the archetypal conflict between the Germanic Aryans and the Semitic Jews.”

“The literature of anti-Semitism—fascist or otherwise—is marked by the putative illegitimacy or unnaturalness of interest-bearing capital, whose ability to generate money from money is represented as a kind of parasitical, or deviant sexuality, generating like from like. Patriarchal, land-based accumulation is threatened by both the “cheating” wife and by the “cheating” moneylender. Hence the all-pervasive anxiety about the potency or authenticity of the male issue, whether this issue is a child or a currency.”

“Writing in 1936, Walter Benjamin also saw fascism as a mock revolution”

“Fascism, he noted, gives expression to the masses’ “will to power” while preserving capitalist class structures and keeping property relations intact.”

“The outcome of this revolutionary carnival is the spectacularization of politics: the mass rallies, the histrionics, the paranoid discourse, the need to turn the lack of material resources into a drama of presence and absence charged with sexual intensity.”

“For all its merits, Reich’s account has a blind spot. While rejecting the dichotomy between “false consciousness” and “real conditions,” he ends up introducing another binary distinction: between the “rational” political agent and the “irrational” desirous subject—the foolish passions of the latter undercutting the material interests of the former. Whereas Marxism would solve the problem of fascism by tackling misinformation, Reich would solve the problem of fascism by tackling psychic hindrances and inhibitions; yet both see fascism as a deformation (either intellectual or sexual) whose hold on the subject can be dispelled by introducing less skewed educational programs or a different mode of socialization.”

“As Deleuze and Guattari point out, this distinction between the social and the psychic is difficult to sustain, since “there is no particular form of existence that can be labeled psychic reality.””

“In contrast to Reich’s emphasis on fascism as a psychosexual disorder, they stress that desire is social in nature: “It is not possible to attribute a special form of existence to desire, a mental or psychic reality that is presumably different from the material reality of social production. Desiring-machines are not fantasy-machines or dream-machines, which supposedly can be distinguished from technical and social machines.” Desire invests the entirety of the social field, thus the libido has no “need for mediation or sublimation,” nor for any other psychic operation, in order to permeate all forms of social reproduction—even the most repressive and deadly.”

“In 1977, five years after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, German sociologist Klaus Theweleit published Male Fantasies, his seminal work on the psychology of the “white terror.” Though Theweleit hadn’t read Anti-Oedipus before he began writing Male Fantasies, the latter could in many ways be described as the sociological counterpart of the former. Echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s argument for the coextension of rational and irrational forms, Male Fantasies sets out to describe the dialectical entanglement of social, political, and fantasy machines.”

“Theweleit couldn’t help but notice that the word “communism” was never used to refer to a form of political economy entailing the collectivization of resources; rather, “communism” was synonymous with castration, with the fear of being emasculated and rendered powerless—politically as well as sexually.”

“As he repeatedly points out, one cannot talk here about unconscious or repressed anxieties: the Freikorps men openly equate communism and the liberalization of gender roles with lawlessness and anarchy.”

“The Freikorps lore thus combined an element of truth—for the military class, war, however life-destroying, was a means of social reproduction, and the preservation of their own rank and privilege implied the preservation of certain social and gender hierarchies—with an element of delusion: As Theweleit puts it, they “experience communism as a direct assault on their genitals.””

“In his book The Crowd (Psychologie des Foules, 1895) Gustave le Bon had already addressed the crowd as a gendered subject: impulsive, irrational, susceptible, irresponsible, unpredictable.”

“A crowd cannot have political demands because, like women, slaves, or the insane, it exists in the same state as the animal, outside of politics and history.”

“Relations between the sexes, Theweleit argues, are never just sexual, they are socially structured and controlled, “the object of law.” Male Fantasies thus points to a certain type of male-female relation as a producer of fascist “life-destroying reality””

“Fascist sexuality is not so much repressed as it is ideological: it idealizes virility and fertility as political imperatives.”

“the question of gender is always instrumental in defining the “enemy,” as the “act that brings the collective into being.””

“In fascist fantasies, the lack of a totalizing social narrative is masked by the triangulation of potency, technology, and masculinity, expressed in the ideal figure of the male as totality.”

“Capitalism shares the attributes of phallic manhood: it is bold, ambitious, and competitive. Consistent with this hidden gender dimension, only so-called productive labor is remunerated; unproductive labor—i.e., labor that does not yield a product, like domestic or informal labor—is simply appropriated.”

“To paraphrase Matteo Pasquinelli: capital can be regarded as an abstract machine, which, like any other machine, can be analyzed according to its inputs and outputs, and the divisions of labor it engenders.”

“when sexuality adheres to a dominance-and-submission model, any challenge to the social hierarchy will be experienced as a “direct assault on your genitals.””

“Though fantasizing about forcing women to yield does not necessarily mean one votes conservative, there is a continuity between the sexualization of supremacy and the narratives that tie uneven distribution of wealth to economic growth: both see parity as an impediment to potency—the political correlate of dominance and submission is a society predicated on inequality.”

“Capital, as Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan argue, is not a simple economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power, whose logic is inherently differential.”

“There is no such thing as “economic power”; nor is there “political power” that “somehow ‘distorts’ the economy.” Instead, all social institutions and agents—from ideology and culture to organized violence, religion, and law; from ethnicity and gender to international conflicts, labor relations, manufacturing techniques, and financial organisms—hinge on the “differential level and volatility of earnings.””

“As the authors point out, from this perspective we cannot discern “economic exploitation from political oppression.” Instead, there is a dialectical entanglement of capital accumulation and social formation, through which “power is accumulated as capital.””

“One could perhaps invert Lyotard’s formula and say that every libidinal economy is political: gender is the value form of capitalism; sexuality is its mode of representation (men appear as money and power, women as beauty, youth, and sex appeal). The exaggerated masculinity of fascist fantasies is the magnified form of “normal” sexual norms, whose maleness already entails denying that anything coded as “feminine” could be a legitimate dimension of social and political experience.”

“Ana Teixeira Pinto is a lecturer at UdK (Universität der Kunste) Berlin and her writings have appeared in publications such as e-flux journal, Art Agenda, Mousse, Frieze/de, Domus, Inaethetics, Manifesta Journal, and Texte zur Kunst.”

“Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1933.”

“3 Quoted in Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx (New York: Routledge, 2013), 179.”

“Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 74.”

“Matteo Pasquinelli, “Capital Thinks Too: The Idea of the Common in the Age of Machine Intelligence,” Open! Commonist Aesthetics, December 11, 2015”

“Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, Capital as Power (New York: Routledge, 2009), 36–37.”

“19 Susan Buck-Morss, Dream World and Catastrophe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 9.”