"Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all." –Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007): 463.
To understand Canada, you have to understand the Antienlightenment and recognize the Counterenlightenment. In our Antienlightenment era, it’s important to recognize that the Antienlightenment society is dedicated to maximizing inequality. Antienlightenment societies aim to reproduce themselves. Thus, traditionally, there has always been a distinctive place for women in Antienlightenment societies.
Counterenlightenment societies seek to shift persuasive Enlightenment innovations toward the Antienlightenment justice telos of steep and immobile inequality. Romanticism, the anxious valorization of creative expression, is one means of promoting this shift. Counterenlightenment romanticism charges the Enlightenment with the crime of annihilating what makes us human, reduced to entitled creative expression–a conceptualization of the human borrowed from the Antienlightenment. Affirming the Antienlightenment’s reductive concept of the human, Counterenlightenment romanticism emotionally imagines that only a return to inegalitarian governance can save humanity.
In Alice Munro’s Canadian hero’s-quest short-story collection The Lives of Girls and Women (1971), the author fictionalizes an account of her creative influences, including first, the protagonist’s mother, who is portrayed as discomfort itself, both an inept, betraying mother, and underneath that, a struggling misfit stranded in her husband’s rural Ontario patrilocality. My son’s Canadian high school teacher summed the mother character as “supercilious,” illegitimately arrogant. Within the Counterenlightenment context, the displaced Enlightenment mother cannot protect her child; socially weak, she leaves her own child isolated, vulnerable, and she betrays her child. Hers is a matrimony of propulsion.
If the outsider failed mother is a propelling force, the patrilocality aunties who abject the mother are the creative taproot. Munro’s creative influences also include her paternal aunts, portrayed as the source of the author’s nationalist entitlement to place-rooted storytelling creativity. Satisfied home girls, the rural Jubilee, Ontario aunts bequeath Munro with the gift of auntlore as well as the unforgiving xenophobic perspective on her outsider mother. We are left to infer that Munro’s second-gen fusion of nationalist auntlore and ambition is the complete Canadian creative product.
The Lives of Girls and Women was a savvy way to explode into the forefront of Canadian literature, as Munro’s story collection is a lovely encapsulation of both 1970s Counterenlightenment romanticism (expressed in the US in jaw-droppingly misogynistic film) and how the imperial Anglo Counterenlightenment reproduces itself. In Counterenlightenment and Antienlightenment societies, while sexualized and biologically-reproducing women are reviled, exploited, rejected, and repulsed, patriarchal “aunties” relish their feminine, creative and reproductive communal role, supporting masculine economy and official historiography by transmitting in the margins both exclusionary judgment and chatty, colorful, backstage footnotes on the unruly life constrained within their men’s empire.
I have suspected that as does the Atlantic ruling class’ Anglo-American empire, China, as a large country complementing US capitalist empire with mass labor, mass resources, and a mass consumption market, contributes to the Antienlightenment restoration. The IR (International Relations) political science community’s embrace of Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem story has illuminated how the Chinese adoption of IR ideology helps drive the Antienlightenment restoration.
Cixin’s fiction is built upon the simple IR Realist framework, which poses an idealized symbolic binary: Masculine “reason” versus feminine “morality”, subjecting that cultural binary to a simple game theory calculation. In Cixin’s story and the IR framework, masculine Reason is a brand, which is credibly carried by men, who are ideally disposed to value destruction for brute survival. Amazingly labeled “reason,” this brand value allows men to serve as the proper guardians of the one true, IR game, threat of mutual destruction.
In IR game theory, only the credible threat of mutual destruction prevents a society from being annihilated by an imperial Other. The credible threat of mutual destruction is the one way that societies survive in a world with one or more imperial powers. What makes the threat of mutual destruction credible is men, who are presumed to “reason,” that is to embody one capacity, destruction, requiring one value, brute survival. This is imagined as reason because it is supposed to be the indisputable ace in the hand of international relations. Everything is imagined as a simple game. The human agential capacities that evolved for thriving on a changing Earth are stripped out of this IR imaginary of stupid, algorithmic, inhuman empires.
In Cixin’s story it is shown that feminine “Morality” is code read by the imperial machine as the lack of will to survive. Thus governance according to Morality, democracy, presents a clear go-signal to an imperial power, to annihilate and replace a society. But we have already seen in this IR model that the idealistic labels, supplemented with a host of imperial gendered associations, are doing some work in lieu of logic: Associated with the imperial version of masculinity, the label “reason” we have already seen attempts to distract us from the idealized value of brute survival; it is a morality. It’s clear that “reason” and “morality” are oddly conceptualized in this ideology; to specify, this is an Antienlightenment revision of the reason concept, evident from both male and female societal agents’ total lack of human communication capacity. There is only the rough 1-0 binary of gender replacing human communicative capacity.
What is IR’s feminine “Morality” then? Deploying the IR imaginary, Cixin specifies that it is feminine Morality’s valuation (optimization) of developmental life, thriving, that absolutely opposes and prevents will to survive! Just re-read that for a while. No, you’re not imagining something in your brain breaking. Fucking patriarchy, what a load of gasbags. OK, let’s pop back an Ibuprofen, hear the douches out, follow their logic, such as it is.
Feminine Morality optimizes democracy as a means of supporting developmental life, thriving. Cixin’s story shows that democracy, as feminine policy, signals to the alien, imperial Other that a society is diverted from the one true game of mutual destruction.
Cixin’s tale clarifies that from the perspective of Chinese governance, IR theory provides a simple, self-serving explanation for why imperialism–any imperialism in the world–compels the death of democracy, cast as mere feminine morality. In IR theory, as in Cixin’s story, the choice is stark: On the global stage, it’s democratic annihilation or brute survival. Thus not only do neocon Anglo-American empire IR political scientists celebrate Cixin’s story, but in Chinese public debates, The Three Body Problem series’ Social Darwinist, misogynistic, and totalitarian morality has been identified as a cultural resource for authoritarian techno-nationalists—known as the ‘industrial party’ (工业党, gongye dang)—to delegitimate progressive social change (Zheng 2023).
However its presumption to governance (the replacement of masculine Reason, embodied in a male character, with feminine Morality, embodied in a female character) causes the annihilation of humanity (The imperial power correctly believes that feminine Morality, democratic governance, means the mutual destruction threat is over.), feminine morality is not completely abject in Cixin’s story. Continuing in a thorough-going Antienlightenment ideology, masculine Reason–simple game strategy premised on trigger-happy survivalism–is in the end portrayed not as an all-purpose strategy but as a culture inappropriate to micro-relations (such as clan and family relations). Cixin’s ending shows that the simple IR game does not translate into micro-social rationality, as the few human survivors can only relate to each other as imperial Others, scanning for tells of feminine unreason in each other, and consequently, tactically annihilating each other, leaving but one small, pathetic human ship in the galaxy. As on a playground full of sexist children (see M. Kimmel 2011, 2015, 2018), scanning for telltale signs of femininity is the diligent labor of the masculine winner of an imperial annihilation standoff. Add a scale limit to the moral economy algorithm!: If N < 1 billion.
This attempt to assert Antienlightenment moral scale, suggesting that feminine Morality might ought to be preserved in a confined, rump social role (the last instance), is not convincing within The Three Body Problem IR morality tale, wherein optimizing human thriving is portrayed as unreason, identified as the “moral,” the crass symbolic embodiment of an indisposition to annihilate, and where disposition to annihilate is portrayed as the governing reason. This strikes me as Antienlightenment’s fake appeal. If we accept the premise that societies are governed by this simple, supposedly eternal, symbolic, value game rule (flattered qua “reason”), to annihilate–if therefore the credible threat of masculine destruction is the only way a society survives, it’s not evident why this simple algorithm would apply on any particular scale. Why do we presume we cannot communicate or build trust internationally, but we can within families? That’s an unreasonable assumption based on nothing but untenable gender idealization. Or is that just an assumption tucked in from an old Chinese and English anxiety about relating across languages? The Antienlightenment thesis that annihilation-prone masculinity secures survival on a governing macro social scale, where feminine morality enables survival on a rump, micro scale distinguished by natural communication and trust, is, as it has always been, not necessary, strategic genius, but merely a traditional ideological tool of inegalitarian rule and consequent dissolution. We’ve been here before. The Antienlightenment has never been the answer.
The Antienlightenment ideology argues that eschewing human capacities for communication, organization, science–that is, for development, the one true path to minimalist reason, societal survival (distinguished from human thriving), is to prioritize showing the imperial enemy masculinity–!das penis presente!–as the credible symbol of disregard for life. People sure are easy in this basic game theory scenario. Everything else in human societies is maybe (we’re not sure) a whole lot of inessential work to preserve an afterthought of feminine micro-relations, though it’s not really clear why we would preserve what is conceptualized in this ideology as nothing more than unstrategic weakness. Wouldn’t you (because you are AI, right? Or a defense intellectual.) just annihilate humans, with their complex, agential, innovative lives, so that some tech dudes’ apps can grind away unimpeded until they run down? And so Antienlightenment ideology, with its creaky old, invalid, unscientific assumptions in service of inequality and inegalitarianism, delivers us to the door of senseless antihumanism and Terrestrian destruction, not in the final instance, but very efficiently. Now in fact.
TBD: Compare Cixin’s Antienlightenment thesis to Cormac McCarthy/Coen Bros’ All-American Antienlightenment film No Country for Old Men.
In the spare, atmospheric Eldrich Western No Country for Old Men, Ed Tom (Adam) is one of the Old Men, the dying law-bringer old gods, an angel. Like the regretful, fatalist Cold War liberals, Ed Tom feels after all his policing work, he is outmatched by the combination of evil, his own fatalistic projection Anton Chigurh, and man’s compulsive, petty-minded, self-abasing attraction to “money and drugs.” Understand that the women characters in the movie are simply Greek chorus, as where Carla Jean (appearing to talk to Chigurh in the privacy of her home) ultimately looks into the camera and tells the audience that as humans, they decide to do evil. Structure; institutions; long-range, delegated intention; tendency and trend; reason, interest and planning–none of that truly matters, and all that background context is reduced to nebulous, inhuman “fate” in McCarthy’s anti-sociological, Antienlightenment imagination.
Ed Tom’s devil, Chigurh constantly insists he operates on fate alone. That denial of responsibility is the basis of his antihuman inhumanity. Capital’s Accountant asks if Chigurh will kill him too; Chigurh repeats, “You never saw me.” With the flip of a quarter, the devil encourages humans to forfeit their one purported distinction, their ability to make moral choice, and instead accept his fate construct. The beyond-morality capitalist hitman Carson Wells, who knows the devil well and knows the devil does not care about money, is ultimately a pathetic one-trick pony, easily dispatched, uselessly bound to beg Chigurh to take money in exchange for his life.
As they are senselessly slaughtered, humans stay human (save their souls) by refusing “fate,” instead calling out their killer’s moral choice. Call-out culture is rooted in the police-minded Right, girded by Cold War liberalism’s monomaniacal, fundamentalist Holocaust trauma haunting (See Moyn 2023). By now it has metastasized into an unmoderated culture of hysterical intolerance for the entire range of human failures, in which self-annointed police reflexively levy damning, crippling shame on every human failure, or even every Other’s values (Smith 2022: 173-174).
At the story’s finale, as evil limps away having been struck by fate, neighborhood boys who had volunteered to help him pettily quibble over the money he insisted one take.
McCarthy is a great author. Written with a bold, broad brush at dizzying distance from reality, Antienlightenment stories can be told in epic, mythological proportions, romantically promising that human development is impossible, but inequality and patriarchal inegalitarianism protect human creativity. Most Antienlightenment narratives are drivel, though, compulsively unable to tuck their shaming accusations into their narrative structure.
Whether starkly gorgeous and engaging or inane and tedious, Antienlightenment stories have their unifying, characteristic tics and tells. The easy reduction of women characters is an obvious, consistent one. The tender romanticization of the law-bringing police fathers (“old men”) is its complement. Virtue is shrouded in the shifting mists of time, as if it were separate from the struggles for egaliberte, distributed agential sovereignty. Salvation and creative expression is reserved for the chosen dead who reject Enlightenment knowledge. Of course Antienlightenment stories are forever illustrating why humans need policing not valorized care, and how the middle mass is the problem facing exceptional humanity at the margins. Upon skewed misanthropic foundations, churning out crippling shame and manipulative myth, their moral arc is the society of inequality and inegalitarianism.
…
We can further clarify by contrasting today’s Antienlightenment art to Deleuze’s exploratory retrospective on Enlightenment art, in the essential litcrit essay “Bartleby; or The Formula,” analyzing Melville’s literary “Original” characters constituting Primary Nature beyond and before conscience, choosing and not choosing.
Deleuze is classifying the great Enlightenment author Melville’s characters, but he could be describing the bifurcation of Cold War liberalism into two parties: “We are now in a position to classify Melville’s great characters. At one pole, there are those monomaniacs or demons who, driven by the will to nothingness, make a monstrous choice: Ahab, Claggart, Babo …Melville defines monomaniacs as the Masters of reason, which is why they are so difficult to surprise; but this is because theirs is a delirium of action, because they make use of reason, make it servetheir ownsovereign ends, which in truth arehighly unreasonable.”
“But at the other pole are those angels or saintly hypochondriacs,” like modern liberal parties, “almost stupid, creatures of innocence and purity, stricken with a constitutive weakness but also with a strange beauty. Petrified by nature, they prefer … no will at all, a nothingness of the will rather than a will to nothingness (hypochondriacal “negativism”). They can only survive by becoming stone, by denying the will and sanctifying themselves in this suspension [13] Such are Cereno, Billy Budd, and above all Bartleby. And although the two types are opposed in every way––the former innate traitors and the latter betrayed in their very essence; the former monstrous fathers who devour their children, the latter abandoned sons without fathers” they both constitute Primary Nature.
Melville accomplishes something with his secondary nature, legal witness characters, that McCarthy does not with Ed Tom. They are not just witnesses but agents: “There exists, finally, a third type of character in Melville, the one on the side of the Law, the guardian of the divine and human laws of secondary nature: the prophet…Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Captain Vere in Billy Budd, and the attorney in Bartleby all have this power to ‘See’: they are capable of grasping and understanding, as much as is possible, the beings of Primary Nature, the great monomaniacal demons or the saintly innocents, and sometimes both…But they cannot ward off the demons, because the latter are too quick for the law, too surprising. Nor can they save the innocent, the irresponsible: they immolate them in the name of the Law, they make the sacrifice of Abraham. Behind their paternal mask, they have a kind of double identification: with the innocent, toward whom they feel a genuine love, but also with the demon, since they break their pact with the innocent they love, each in his own manner.”
Contra the Antienlightenment’s authors, for Melville, “If humanity can be saved, and the originals reconciled, it will only be through the dissolution or decomposition of the paternal function. Melville will never cease to elaborate on the radical opposition between fraternity and Christian “charity” or paternal “philanthropy.” To liberate man from the father function, to give birth to a new man or the man without particularities, to reunite the original and humanity by constituting a society of brothers as a new universality. In the society of brothers, alliance replaces filiation and the blood pact replaces consanguinity. Man is indeed the blood brother of his fellow man, and woman, his blood sister…A brother, a sister all the more true for no longer being “his” or “hers,” since all “property,” all “proprietorship,” has disappeared. A burning passion deeper than love, since it no longer has either substance or qualities, but traces a zone of indiscernibility in which it passes through all intensities in every direction…”
“How can this community be realized? How can the biggest problem be resolved?…It is not an individual or particular affair, but a collective one, the affair of a people, or rather, of all peoples. It is not an Oedipal phantasm but a political program…Such is the declaration in Moby-Dick (chapter 26): if man is the brother of his fellow man, if he is worthy of trust or “confidence,” it is not because he belongs to a nation or because he is a proprietor or shareholder, but only insofar as he is Man…
Pragmatism is misunderstood when it is seen as a summary philosophical theory fabricated by Americans. On the other hand, we understand the novelty of American thought when we see pragmatism as an attempt to transform the world, to think a new world or new man insofar as they create themselves…A contemporary of American transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau), Melville is already sketching out the traits of the pragmatism that will be its continuation. It is first of all the affirmation of a world in process, an archipelago… But to reach this point, it was also necessary for the knowing subject, the sole proprietor, to give way to a community of explorers, the brothers of the archipelago, who replace knowledge with belief, or rather with “confidence”––not belief in another world, but confidence in this one, and in man as much as in God.”
“Like Melville before it, pragmatism will fight ceaselessly on two fronts: against the particularities that pit man against man and nourish an irremediable mistrust; but also against the Universal or the Whole, the fusion of souls in the name of great love or charity. Yet, what remains of souls once they are no longer attached to particularities, what keeps them from melting into a whole?
What remains is precisely their “originality,” that is, a sound that each one produces, like a ritornello at the limit of language, but that it produces only when it takes to the open road (or to the open sea) with its body, when it leads its life without seeking salvation, when it embarks upon its incarnate voyage, without any particular aim, and then encounters other voyagers, whom it recognizes by their sound. It requires an acute perception, both visual and auditory, as Benito Cereno shows, and must replace the concept with the “percept,” that is, with a perception in becoming. It requires a new community, whose members are capable of trust or “confidence,” that is, of a belief in themselves, in the world, and in becoming.”
“The dangers of a “society without fathers” have often been pointed out, but the only real danger is the return of the father. [25] In this respect, it is difficult to separate the failure of the two revolutions, the American and the Soviet, the pragmatic and the dialectical. Universal emigration was no more successful than universal proletarization. The Civil War already sounded the knell, as would the liquidation of the Soviets later on. The birth of a nation, the restoration of the nation-state––and the monstrous fathers come galloping back in, while the sons without fathers start dying off again…Long before Lawrence, Melville and Thoreau were diagnosing the American evil, the new cement that would rebuild the wall: paternal authority and filthy charity…The American confidence-man appears everywhere in Melville’s work.” — Gilles Deleuze, 1997.
References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. “Bartleby; or The Formula,” pp. 68-90 in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McCarthy, Cormac. 2005. No Country for Old Men.
Smith, Julie. 2022. Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? HarperOne.
During the period of mass-Christian semi-conversion managed by Olafr Tryggvason, Icelandic saga writers borrowed from Celtic folklore the meme of the super-powered female antagonist. But this was not a stock Nordic character, and so the Icelandic writers turned these Celtic villains into trolls.
Reading Norse folks tales both old and new, it seems to me that trolls, in the materialist Nordic forest cultures, are a disrespectful way to depict peoplewithin Nordic society who, from either elite or hoi poloi perspective, exhibit antisocial qualities and brutishness. Grendl and his mother, for example, were trying to beat back and protect themselves from a community of vicious marauders. From the imperial victor’s point of view, effective indigenous counteroffensives are monstrous.
Troll literally just means magic. “Magic,” as Lucy Lawless clarified when repeatedly asked about Xena Princess Warrior writing inconsistencies, demands suspension of disbelief. Magic means we’re skipping over glaring issues, hopefully to get something evocative across, but often just to get some tendentious propaganda across.
Trolls aren’t really outsiders. They’re big, ugly, thuggish, irresponsible and dangerous people who live next to and interact with the human or protagonists a lot. Often trolls are distinguished by long noses, for example, a trait that tends to crop up now and again in aging Scandinavian people anyway. Modern author Rolf Lidberg’s relateable trolls are clearly just common folk.
Trolls and people tend to marry or morph into each other over the course of some folk stories. Protagonists, including when they seem very much to be representing the beleaguered youngest member of a family audience, are depicted as underappreciated princesses and princes, while in some stories, characters that start out as talking animals end up being princes. So there’s a lot of fluidity there, between behaviour and metaphorical nature, and unsurprisingly there’s a clear tendency to both compensatory and hyperbolic representation in these folktales.
Usually the mighty Icelandic troll ladies were slain by the saga hero, though sometimes they were spared in exchange for treasure, or befriended, as in the case of Brana & Halfdan, according to Martin Puhvel (1987, McGill).
Normal females powered by vengeance played the boss villain role in Celtic folklore, and usually it took the help of an animal, such as a dog, for the male hero to defeat them. Cats were associated with the abjected feminine and villainous hags, the cailleach (Puhvel 1987).
As Silvia Federici documented (1998), the crippling fear of women is often the result of instrumental, imperial-cosmopolitan divide-and-conquer interventions imposed upon hinterlands communities. Eleanor Hull’s research (1927) showed that female Celtic supernatural villains like banshees and various evil, watery tarts were degenerate descendants of ancient, mighty war goddesses like Macha and Bodb.
“I truly believe that our societies work by a constant effort to not see reality. There is another scene I often recount: it was when Jean-Luc Godard was receiving an honorary César in the 1980s or in the 1990s, during the Césars ceremony in France. Godard was invited to go on the stage set for the ceremony, in order to receive his César, given that night by Isabelle Huppert. So he went on the stage. All the people in the room, dressed in tuxedos and expensive dresses, were expecting him to deliver a speech in which he would thank his producers, his screenwriters, eventually his mother, as people always do in this kind of situation. But instead, Jean-Luc Godard said, more or less: I would like to thank the telephone operator who works for Gaumont, the cleaning women, etc. And suddenly, the audience laughed. If you thank a screenwriter, everybody thinks it’s moving, but if you thank a cleaning woman, people think it’s funny. Godard was making an important statement about the system that sustains the art milieu; he was underlining the fact that, when you make a piece of art, a movie, there are some people who clean the studio for you, some people who stay ten hours a day in an office to answer the telephone for you.
The situation is the same when you are a writer: you are invited to give a lecture, your publishing house pays for a hotel room for you, and someone in this room cleans your bed, cleans your bathroom. It’s all a system. So when Godard pointed out the way this system works, people laughed as if it was a joke. I saw their laughter as a kind of physical, bodily response in order not to be confronted by what Godard said. Their laughter was a strategy to escape reality, to not see a structurally violent situation.So when I write, I ask myself, How can I prevent people from escaping what I’m trying to show?”
–Édouard Louis
“Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault taught me something very important: that there is no truth without anger. That anger is a key to understand our world(s), that it’s maybe even the most scientific tool human beings invented.
If I take a concrete example, my mother had to face, during all her life, extreme difficulties: poverty, precarity, male domination, and male violence. She wanted to wear make-up but my father didn’t want her to; he would say that make-up was for sluts (sic). During twenty years of her life, she endured this masculine violence, but most of the time, when she was talking about herself, she would say: But my life is OK, it could be worse, I cannot complain. Why so? Because her mother and her grandmother before her, and her daughters endured the same violence. This violence became so systematic, it was so present around her, that she ended up thinking that it was «normal». That’s a tragedy; how can you change the world if violence is so systematic that people end up not seeing it anymore?
Only if you are angry you understand that this violence is not normal. Anger is what allows you to take a step back and to understand the social structure you are stuck in. Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s books are full of rage, and so are my books, I hope.” –Édouard Louis
Based mostly on Swedish Syndicalist biographical material, I wrote most of Folke Fridell’s English-language Wikipedia biography. But toward the end, I started doing a little analysis of his work, which is not Wikipedia’s thing. So if they delete it, here’s what I wrote:
Folke Fridell
Fridell was born in 1904, the youngest of a large family (6 siblings, and 6 more half siblings by his father) living in a stream-side home in a woods in Lagan, Kronoberg County, Småland, in Götaland, Sweden. His mother was a public school teacher and seamstress and his father was a soldier, tailor, and postal carrier. The family was locally known for their intense reading culture, and Fridell’s education mostly came through that family culture, the local library, and a book collection he found in a deserted house while he was shepherding. At age 13, he started working in a textile factory, and after a youthful spell of learning the masculine arts of card-playing, drinking, fighting, and generally being a roughneck, at age 19 he was shocked straight by his older brother’s drowning. Thereafter he returned to reading, and in addition took up writing after factory work hours. Fridell married Hanna “Stina” Wahlberg (9 years his junior) in 1934, and together they raised two boys, born 17 years apart. He would remain at the factory until 1946, when he was able to quit and support himself on his writing.[1]
Despite his brief hard-living period, at a young age, Fridell joined the IOGT, the Temperance movement. In 1921, the year of his brother’s death, he participated in the formation of and was made secretary of a local branch of the Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden (Sveriges arbetares centralorganisation, SAC). In meetings, he was at first shy about the organization material he wrote. When the Syndicalist Workers’ Federation (Syndikalistiska arbetarefederationen, SAF) broke from SAC in 1929, Fridell followed, as he admired the more radical politics of the founder, a Swede who had spent some years working and living in the U.S. Fridell became a member of SAC once again when SAF merged back into SAC in 1938.[2]
In the 1930s, Fridell started writing for Arbetare-Kuriren, the newspaper of SAF. After the reunion of SAC and SAF in 1938, he contributed frequently to Arbetaren, SAC’s newspaper. Fridell is recognized as a theorist of syndicalism.[3] He was also active as a lecturer and a delegate at several SAC congresses; from 1942 until 1946, he was a deputy in the organisation’s central committee. Swedish Syndicalist archives include posters prominently advertising Fridell as the featured speaker at May Day demonstrations inviting “All peace- and freedom-loving people together.”[4]
Fridell debuted as a fiction writer with the novel Tack för mig – grottekvarn (“Thanks from me, treadmill” ?) in 1945, and his breakthrough came with his second novel, the strongly autobiographical Död mans hand (1946). He was hooked and wrote a book nearly every year thereafter, winning labor and national awards for his writing every decade of his life after 1950. Although they were savagely denounced and dismissed by conservatives, his novels were widely read, in part thanks to their distribution by book ombudsmen in the factories. Fridell explained the reason behind his art:
“As long as there are proletarians, there is a proletarian literature. And I would like to go a little further and say that as long as people are insulted in their work for so long, there must be voices that speak their language and take their case.”
By his influential criticism of monotonous and soul-killing factory work in the era of Taylorist automation, Fridell become a renewer of the workplace as well as a champion of the right of the worker to defend his dignity and capacity for cooperative decision-making. Other frequent themes of Fridell’s writing were juvenile delinquency, rural emigration, and dystopian views of the future.[5]
Fridell’s work has been regarded as easy to read, conveying an ironic sense of humor. A prolific writer and editorialist, he often wrote in the voice of an alter ego.[6] Some of his plays were translated into English; the working class characters’ dialogue was represented in British cockney accents.
The following excerpt from his novel Tack för mig – grottekvarn demonstrates Fridell’s anarchist, but also very Swedish critique of the suffocating, crushing experience of intimate betrayal, excessively imposed upon workers as unfreedom cascades like a net from the controlling interest of the capitalist (concentrated wealth accumulation):
“Imagine if I went to the employer tomorrow and said, ‘I do not want to work today. I will snatch pike from the brook and laze me in the grassland, for I am a free person.’ What do you think he would say? He would say I was mad, that I should be investigated or detained at a forced labor agency.
I judge his judgment because he is a party to the matter and he loses financially if I celebrate but one day. But that’s not the worst.
Worse it is that everyone else becomes his avatar. My companions would say, ‘Now Oskarsson has gone crazy again.’ And in the barracks all the fools would huddle in the stairwells and pitch pointed words at my old lady, and the kids would ask my kids how it was with crazy Oskarsson! And the end of the whole thing would be my own wife crying, begging me to relent and, for her and the children’s sake, to get back to work yesterday.”
The dialogue suggests the character is struggling with the pain of betrayal, as he partially feminizes that traitorous net of inegalitarian social control. That associative feminization could work as a distraction from the inegalitarian distribution of sovereign agency that, Fridell also recognizes, directs that refracted, enveloping, and penetrating coercive power. Yet Fridell’s analysis, expressed in his creative work, does not point to human social interdependence–or even non-sovereign, delegated agency–as the root of unfreedom. Rather, the cause of unfreedom is the inegalitarian institution of ownership and control–as it dominates, enslaves, and turns against us our own human social interdependence.
In capitalism, we are compelled to betray one another, and our own needs, usually for nothing other than the thoughtless maximization of elites’ relentless accumulation of wealth and rivalry with each other. In this way, our torturous social- and self-dissolution, our unmaking, is automated. That is one devastating price of absolute private property right and absolute elite liberty.
Conversely within this framework, heroism, which is not automated, consists in collectively devising and implementing interventions–deprioritizing capitalist and other rentier interests in control, exploitation, and appropriation–by which working people can regularly allow each other and themselves reasonable freedoms. Apart from fleeting, idiosyncratic moments of grace, heroic interventions cannot be uncontested, painless, or bloodless. But they restore to us our captured social network and ourselves, our freedom. They restore to us our social human capacity to relieve our mortal, sentient suffering.
Fridell died in 1985 at the age of 80 and is buried in the cemetery of Berga church in Lagan.[7] Outside the library in Ljungby, a bronze head sculpture of Folke Fridell commemorates his contributions to the development of literature, working conditions, and human liberty in Sweden.
Social-literary analysis, see especially pp. 84-90.
(According to Melville,) “If humanity can be saved, and the originals reconciled (with secondary humanity, the inhuman with the human), it will only be through the dissolution or decomposition of the paternal function…As Joyce will say, paternity does not exist, it is an emptiness and nothingness-or rather, a zone of uncertainty haunted by brothers, the brother and sister…Melville will never cease to elaborate on the radical opposition between fraternity and Christian ‘charity’ or paternal ‘philanthropy’...(The fraternal/sororal society) requires a new community, whose members are capable of trust or ‘confidence,’ that is, of a belief in themselves, in the world, in becoming…Long before Lawrence, Melville and Thoreau were diagnosing the American evil, the new cement that would rebuild the wall: paternal authority and filthy charity” (Deleuze 1998: 84-88).
“And what was Bartleby asking for, if not a little confidence from the attorney, who instead responds to him with charity and philanthropy–all the masks of the paternal function?” (Deleuze 1998: 88).
Take Deleuze’s essay as foundation, and focus in a sustained fashion, on Melville’s anti-conservative unfinished-Enlightenment politics, his class politics, and how they inform his critique of the (Anglo-)American Confidence-Man–i.e. the betrayal of fraternity/sorority and confidence/trust for the sake of profit/surplus accumulation, power accumulation (Not necessarily one’s own; usually one’s employer’s or client’s surplus/power accumulation). The root of paternal authority/filthy charity is Antienlightenment.
The Confidence-Man betrayal = Magical Rectitude, eg. liberal social progressivism.
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The fraternal/sororal society “requires a new community, whose members are capable of trust or ‘confidence,’ that is, of a belief in themselves, in the world, in becoming” is a formulation steeped in Twentieth century Postwar capitalist bloc loss of confidence in the Enlightenment. It is set on its feet by changing “becoming” to the far-better specified “human development.” Not innocent, idealist, deconstructive “becoming,” but historical-materialist human development is the epistemological basis for fraternity/sorority, egaliberte.
A realist ontology must be our foundation. Humans are not Minerva, sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus, and otherwise dependent and useless. Nor, as deconstructive ethics has it, are humans indeterminate grubs, “free” insofar as they leave it to dudes with more money and political ambition to organize us, to make and break the rules that form a social species like us. To project this dichotomy is to unmake (Scarry 1985), to impose human suffering in service of elite rule.
Democracy in the 20th century was further fucked when French philosophers suggested that they were speaking to elites when they recommended disorganizing (occupying onesself with jouissance in indeterminacy). In fact, they were merely reinforcing the policing, the disorganization of the motley crew working class. By definition, disorganization is not what ruling elites do to themselves, but to others. Deference politics have only ever reinforced inequality. They’re just another traditional means of co-opting the working class (Federici 2004).
Only Enlightenment knowledge can co-opt some elites and disorganize them sufficiently to create a window for efficacious egalitarian motley crew working class political opportunity.
Excerpted from Michelle Pauli. “Stiff competition for Bad Sex award.” The Guardian. Monday November 28, 2005.
“Perhaps it isn’t too late for John Updike to bag a Bad Sex award,” wrote Adam Mars-Jones in his Observer review of Villages at the beginning of the year. The longlist for this year’s Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award, announced last Friday, confirms that Mars-Jones’s prediction was on the money.
Updike is in the running for what the organisers call Britain’s “most dreaded literary prize”, with an extract from Villages in which an adulterous character appraises his lover’s vagina: “[it] did not feel like Phyllis’s. Smoother, somehow simpler, its wetness less thick, less of a sauce, more of a glaze”.
But, excruciating as his entry is, Updike is up against some stiff competition. Among the 11 contenders for the prize this year are some of the biggest names in literature, including Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paul Theroux. Of the three, Theroux’s offering, from Blinding Light, is arguably the most deserving of the prize, with its description of a character’s orgasm as
“…not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime fighting the stiffness as it rose and bulged at the tip and darted into her mouth.”
Theroux does, at least, manage to insert some punctuation into his description. Giles Coren, however, is in the running for an extract which comprises a 138-word long sentence followed by a two-word followup (“Like Zorro”, in case you were wondering) and which contains the alarming image of an excited male member “leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath”.
There is much unintentional humour in the extracts on offer, most particularly in Guillaume Lecasble’s description of a lobster’s seduction technique (“his feelers were just able to reach the satin of the panties”) and Marlon Brando’s almost incomprehensible sex scene from his posthumously-released novel Fan Tan.
Now in its 13th year, the prize, which only targets literary fiction, aims “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.” The winner, who will be announced on December 1 at the In & Out Club in London, is awarded a semi-abstract statue representing sex in the 1950s and a bottle of champagne, if he or she turns up.
Last year’s winner, Tom Wolfe, was one of the very few recipients to fail to attend; he later criticised the judges for failing to recognise the irony contained in the winning passage from I Am Charlotte Simmons.
The Indomitable Neoliberals FC 