Cultural Criticism of Rap

 

Rap has persevered in the decades since the decline of its predecessors, the end of what used to be called Black music, in the 1980s, in conjunction with the predominance of pop music, which had been manufactured and sanitised to maximise sales. Only once the music scene became totally dominated by music which had no relation to anything outside of its bubble do we find rappers could lay claim to authenticity. The success of so-called 'Gangsta Rap' comes down to its drawing upon a certain view of the lives led by the Black American under-class. The fact that these rappers then go on to celebrate their success in a rags-to-riches narrative meshes well with the false promise of meritocracy. We now live with the worst of both worlds, where it seems no one is pushing boundaries far enough.



Beyond Liberation.

Today we find class politics are all too readily dismissed, and suspiciously so, in the decades since the fall of Communism. Instead it was the newly emergent identity politics which took hold at the wake of socialism’s funeral. In the era of political-correctness we find class politics missing from the discussion, only for its space to be filled by identity – whether it is gender, sexuality or race – in ways which couldn’t possibly threaten the prevailing order. But this isn’t the end of the story. It was Christopher Hitchens who once remarked that “Socialism has been to its own funeral more often than Tom Sawyer.” We may find if we are so inclined, that the majority of the working-class in world terms is female. If class may be abolished through the culmination of the class struggle, then it may be possible to overcome other forms of domination.

This has been the case for a lot longer than we might like to admit. The term ‘proletariat’ is actually derived from the Latin for ‘offspring’ which refers to those who were too poor to serve the state with anything other than their wombs. It denotes to a specific swathe of the masses in the Roman Republic. Too deprived to contribute to economic life in any other way, these women produced labour power in the form of children (who would then be reared by the state as soldiers and sent into battle). What society demanded from them was not production but reproduction. The proletariat started life among those outside the labour process and not from within it. The labour these women endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders.

In the post-industrial capitalist societies we find that the service sector staffed by vast numbers of women has expanded enormously. And of course, there are those women who have made it in the financial sector – but they are not the proletarians and have little stake in a class-conscious feminism. Even when Britain was the workshop of the world the industrial working-class were outnumbered by domestic servants and agricultural labourers. The sweatshops of the developing world are packed to the brim with female workers, both young and old. And so, we find the politics of class and identity can converge on common material conditions.

The journalist Germaine Greer takes the notion of women's liberation as more than equality, as the achievement of formal equality would mean equality with unfree men and that's hardly emancipation. Liberation from constraints on divorce, abortion, jobs and income are not the end but the beginning. The case of recognising the raising of children and even housekeeping as work with a living wage is an example of what Greer is talking about. Venezuela has gone one step further this year and put aside pensions for full-time mums. This is a much more radical proposal than quotas for women in board rooms, which would just give rise to a few more Thatcheresque women in Greer’s terms. As Lindsey German has written “The talk of glass ceilings and unfairly low bonuses for women bankers misses the point about liberation, which is that it has to be for all working women and not just a tiny number of privileged women.”

Under capitalist conditions the wage a woman receives as a sex worker or indeed a performer in pornography is no different than the wage received by a waitress. Not in the narrow sense that the rate of pay is the same per hour, but rather in the sense that in each case the worker’s labour is still exchanged for a wage. The labour contributed remains disproportionate to the wage received in order to guarantee profitability. It’s about the extraction and the accumulation of profit on the backs of other people’s labour. The advocates of decriminalisation should take note that the content of the labour is not what matters in a society where free-choice and markets prevail. Indeed, in a society of free-choice sex work would be an option among many. A moralising ban on pornography and prostitution seems somewhat futile in light of this. It misses the point.

Objectification is a part of capitalist society; it is a part of the productive process, with the role of wage labour and the commodities resulting from it. Being paid for sex is no different than being paid to smile as a waitress. Wage labour is not a category with any moral precepts or implications, it is merely functional. It's not immoral as much as amoral, relativist and pragmatic. The moves by David Cameron to impose an ‘opt-in’ mechanism over the internet inflow of pornography are contrary to the thrust of a market society. It often seems as though Conservatives want to unleash all of us to the freedom to fail, at least when it comes to the economy. Yet when it comes to social questions the Right wade into our personal lives in order to reassert ‘traditional values’ over us.

The case for feminism has to be made from the ground up, the same with socialism, beginning with the conditions already prevalent in society. In this way we can see that there is a point of divergence between the feminist mission and the structure of capitalist society insofar as the objectives crash against the pillars of market ideology. This may be a terrifying prospect for middle-class liberal feminists, but it’s the way it should be. Women can't just be as free as unfree men. The attainment of civil rights and liberties is only the end of one kind of struggle, which is certainly not at odds with class society and the capitalist system. It’s the aim of human emancipation, not mere liberation under capitalism, to which this cause must be welded.

Originally written by Ellie Crowe and JT White on August 10th 2013 for Pulse.

In Defence of the Welfare Queen.

As always the reactionary press are full to the brim with hateful tales about the women who "choose" to be jobless and claim the plentiful benefits offered to single-mums by squeezing out as many babies. This "lifestyle choice" is a favourite topic at The Daily Mail where the job description of a journalist amounts to sucking on the end of a sewer pipe whilst saluting the Führer. In the run-up to the General Election of 2010 the right-wing media repeatedly pinned failure on New Labour and attributed a policy of encouraging young mothers not to bother with work and to remain unmarried. It is an easy job for journalists and it pays off, there is plenty of advertising revenue for a paper which doesn't raise difficult questions about the powerful and instead takes to bashing the poor. Baiting working-people against the so-called benefits culture is easy because the unemployed are not politically active and have no one who represents their interests to defend them.

The wider insinuation is that New Labour sunk the country into debt by giving too much to people on benefits. This is a complete falsehood and it is amazing that such a lie can be pandered by the media after the financial meltdown of 2008, which caused the recession that sent tax-revenues into decline so public spending became unsustainable. As for benefits, it was New Labour that hired an investment banker called David Freud to overlook welfare benefits and pensions in 2007, with the specific aim of cutting benefits. The banker recommended that we replace all of the crumbs - housing benefit, incapacity benefit, disability allowance etc. - with a single and means-tested payment designed to 'incentivise' work. Then the Conservatives came along in 2010 to drive the plan through Parliament and slash £18 billion from benefits in the meantime. Before New Labour was given the boot David Freud also laid out plans to do away with incapacity benefit in favour of a temporary scheme which "compels" recipients into the workforce.

The underlying assumption of cutting benefits to drive single-mothers into work is that children-rearing isn't work. It's just something that women do for free, like a lot of things. The effects of driving single-mothers into the workforce in this way are quite interesting. Jobs for people who have been unemployed generally require subsidies in order to guarantee that the firms will take them on. We can see this in Britain where David Cameron has cut national insurance, which he deemed a "jobs tax", in order to create jobs for the long-term unemployed. Effectively the cut in national insurance is a subsidy to firms that take on the long-term unemployed, which has the potential to lower wages across the workforce and further undermine trade unions. So single-mothers shouldn't be raising their children and living off of "handouts" instead these women should be coerced into work so that you can be paid even less. You'll never read that in The Daily Mail, where the most basic level of moral decency is also conspicuously absent.

According to one study, which was no doubt distorted by The Daily Mail in the usual manner, the average single-mother is on around £3,546 a year in benefits. That amounts to £74,466 for 21 years, about £74 a week which is less than a day's work at minimum wage. At the same time it should be noted that it costs on average around £200,000 to raise a child to that age in this country. There is little to no mention that the amount of benefit fraud costs around £500 million to £1.5 billion a year, with estimates of over-payments ranging to around £3 billion a year. So it is clear that it will be the disabled, the mentally ill and people on very low incomes who will be hit by the benefit cuts. These aren't the "welfare queens" that the Republicans have slammed for nearly 50 years, these are the people who are set to be forced off of benefits after the Coalition has stipulated that each job centre has to sanction 3 people a week. A sanction cuts off the benefits from the recipient for a period up to 6 months.

The only permissible issue to debate is to what extent child benefit is necessary. Most recently the debate over benefits was whether it was right of David Cameron to cut child benefit for wealthier families. The presupposition that a little over £20 a week more per child is enough to raise a child remains constant, along with the suggestion that the women who have raise children on benefits are simply "whores" who have chosen to live off of your money and not go to work. Notice the other presupposition: there are jobs for women which pay enough to raise a child on. These are the laws of the commentariat in it's eager campaign to pit the working-class against itself and even at the BBC we find the question is limited to "Should we be paying people to have children?" All the while the gutter press act as if contraception and personal responsibility are the answer, in other words no benefits for anyone, no free child-care and no doubt contraceptives shouldn't be handed out for free. Notice that this level of 'personal responsibility' is only expected of the poorest of the poor.

The Ballardian State of Nature.

The Noble Savage.
 

In Ballard's High-Rise (1975) we see the professional inhabitants of a luxurious apartment building descend into mayhem and debauchery. It began with wild sectarian parties, then the swimming pools and the school were cut off from the dwellers of the lower levels. Gradually the high-rise becomes more and more cut off from the outside world. As the services of the high-rise begin to break down, a war breaks out between the middle floors and the lower floors. Barricades are put up to keep marauders at bay. Dogs are released into the air-vents and hunted down for food by the tenants. Initially the metaphorical class system of the high-rise degenerates to a stratified array of competing tribes - a war of all against all - and then further to the level of disassociated hunter-gatherers. This is reflected by bizarre rituals of sexual domination, Wilder drifts from floor to floor sleeping with numerous women along the way as Royal creates a sort of "harem" on the 40th floor. 

The protagonists are Robert Laing, Richard Wilder and Anthony Royal, who reside in each of the three segments. Laing is recently divorced and is trained physician who teaches at a medical school, to avoid entering the field of a general practitioner and treating patients. Ironically Laing has found his first "patients" by the end of High-Rise. Wilder works in the television studies and initially tries to produce a documentary on the high-rise. He moves into the high-rise with his wife Helen and two sons, but abandons them to "climb" the building - a metaphor for the meritocrat. Royal is one of the architects of the high-rise, he resides on the 40th floor with his upper-class wife and attempts to cultivate a position of power over the whole building. In these aristocratic pursuits, the polar opposite of Wilder's "ascent", Royal builds an entourage of servants and a "harem" (including Helen Wilder) at the top of the high-rise.


At first the segmented nature of the high-rise is a metaphor for the class system, the first 10 floors are occupied by the lowest earners and represent the proletariat. The top five floors are occupied by the highest earners and most prestigious tenants, like Anthony Royal on the 40th floor, whilst floors 10 to 35 are inhabited by a kind of middle-class. Though the entire building is home to professionals, the kind of people who would be regarded as members of the bourgeoisie, who are brought down to earth as the high-rise seems to unleash primitive behaviours among the tenants. The bourgeois veneer falls away as the characters hold back less and less, from alcohol and parties to sex and violence, as if venturing into a primeval realm where one's true self might be found. Out of the main characters it is Laing who seems to find himself in the chaotic trajectory of life in the high-rise. By the time we are introduced to him, from which point the rest of the story is told in flashback, Laing is content eating dog in his apartment with Alice and Eleanor.


The most vitriolic of Ballard's detractors would claim that his characters remain two-dimensional, lack development, and Ballard's works are totally plot driven. This is ignorant of the way Ballard externalises human experience to the point that the changing setting becomes an extension of the characters. In High-Rise the building itself becomes a revealing extension to the development of characters. For instance, Richard Wilder begins on the second level and ends on the roof of the building. Wilder abandons his wife Helen and sons, locking them inside the apartment, to pursue reaching the 40th floor and a confrontation with Anthony Royal. He gradually becomes a bearded, almost naked, savage in this pursuit. The plans to make a documentary about the high-rise have faded by the novel's conclusion, the camera Wilder carried around with him to shoot the opening for the documentary is reduced to a inanimate object - the purpose of which he no longer understands. Towards the end the graffiti and vandalised walls of the high-rise are in the process of being replenished it would seem, as a new social order emerges.

A War of All against All.

This view of a war of all against all may be Hobbesian, but the wider view is a Rousseauian one. Many of the works of JG Ballard focus on the pathological aspects of Western civilisation, car crashes are eroticised and human beings adapt to life on a traffic island. The social order of a Leviathan idealised by Thomas Hobbes is not found in contemporary society. Instead social decay is  almost omnipresent and at the root of it all is the development of civilisation, specifically the striving towards a social order which would be born from the innovations of science and technology. The high-rise itself is a product of this striving, which is precisely why it is the ideal setting for the story, it is partly the force behind the destruction of the order it is striving for - namely, the primeval desires unleashed within the confines of the high-rise. The capitalist social order is the first to be dissolved in the apartment building, which in turn opens up a void where a new tribalism reigns only for this to fragment into a perpetual war between individuals.


Royal and Pangbourne, a gynaecologist, share the view that the high-rise is a liminoid experience from which a new social order may emerge. In the high-rise the average tenant has entered into a common realm with others, while the identity and status bestowed on them by society is gradually lost. Personal identities as well as relations to others are explored, challenged and decimated to give way for a new set of identities. Near the climax of High-Rise Royal no longer enjoys the life of "zoo-keeper" and identifies more and more with the scavenging gulls, earlier in the novel he even notes that his white safari jacket and greying hair is similar to the feathers of these birds. The transition from "zoo-keeper" to "non-human animal" would not necessarily be a hidden desire to be one of the herd as the gulls are free to fly away. Anthony Royal is passive whereas Richard Wilder is rebellious in his ascent of the building, whereas Robert Laing is the "moderate witness" who survives the vicissitudes which transpire as the social order crumbles.


In the end Royal is shot dead by Wilder, who is in turn killed and cannibalised by the women of the high-rise and Laing is left cooking an Alsatian for the two women barricaded in his apartment with him. After the layers of a social fabric produced by economic relations dissolve in the high-rise, as does the successive stages of tribes and hunter-gatherers, the only remaining order is patriarchal and it is next to breakdown. In killing Royal, Richard Wilder has completed his ascent and in doing so has initiated a paradigm shift so radical that the transition destroys him. The women of Royal's "harem", who are described as Wilder's new mothers, turn their carving knives on Richard Wilder as he reaches the penthouse and strips naked. The raiding parties are led by Helen Wilder, who let Robert Laing live as he appears submissive to Alice and Eleanor - a form of passivity to the new order perhaps. As Laing cooks Royal's favourite dog, a white Alsatian, for Alice and Eleanor he is at peace as he notices that the events of the building are spreading to another apartment block nearby.


Although Rousseau adhered to a conception of the state of nature which was harmonious and individualistic, High-Rise is not purely Rousseauian in themes as Ballard's vision is of a collective and not of individualism. The tenants of the high-rise began as atomised individuals and by the novel's conclusion the building is in transition. The contagious spread of the events in the high-rise to another building nearby represents the beginning of a shift to collectivism devoid of the boundaries propped up in the preceding orders. The confines of the high-rise could not constrain the events in the end. The radical shifts which systematically undermine and breakdown every paradigm to emerge in High-Rise may be driving towards a kind of "zero-point" like the state of nature. A point where divisions of class and sex have been smashed, the heights of subjective freedom, though not realised through the state as that would still require a reliance on scientific and technological innovation. The vision portrayed is anarchic, to say the least, and there are early signs of a radical feminism emerging as the "zero-point".

Rodent Populism.

 The rightly reviled ultra-nationalists of Europe, Jean-Marie Le Pen et al, are widely considered the modern proponents of fascism. This has recently manifested itself in the "exposure" of Nick Griffin to an aggressive audience and panel on Question Time. The programme may have shown Griffin up as he is, a repugnant bigot, but the political class represented on the show engaged in a display of masturbatory narcissism - forgetting about the prejudices of Parliament. Baroness Warsi conveniently forgot about the homophobic leaflets she had distributed in 2005. Let alone the way that Jack Straw fed the debate over the veil and the widespread opposition to Ghurkhas gaining British citizenship among politicians. Instead they portrayed themselves as the politically-correct, tolerant and liberal defenders of freedom and multiculturalism. We all know the horrors of fascism and the modern faces of it are no less despised.

Despite what we would like to believe about our modern politicians, it is from the political class that fascist tendencies are most likely to emerge. These tendencies will be depicted as "moderately" racist and "necessary" measures taken for national security. The Arizona immigration bill is a typical example, it came not from the American Nazi Party but it might as well have, as it stipulates that "foreign" looking individuals must carry the papers needed to prove their US citizenship. If not such individuals can face fines, arrests and even deportation. Let alone the disgraceful Berlusconian approach, which essentially encourages Italian fishermen to kill Africans trying to get to the continent by sea, and the state-sponsored torture of men picked up and accused of "terrorism" in the Middle East.

We have recently seen this theory partly confirmed as the French National Assembly has approved the banning of face-covering veils. 336 politicians voted in favour of the ban leaving only one in opposition, though the Socialist Party boycotted the vote, and the ban will go through the Senate in September. It is likely that by 2011 the veil will be banned in France and wearing it punishable by fines. The President of France, the "Rat Man" so detested by the Left, and his band of conservatives have given the bill their full support in a populist move to further perpetuate the time in power. As the spending cuts kick in, the ban will help keep the electorate on board with Sarkozy through thick-and-thin (in theory) as Muslims become a convenient scapegoat during the rough recovery.

This is a perfect instance of politicians, who are not considered extremist and are in fact liberal and politically-correct, actively cracking down on a religious minority. Out of the French Muslim population (estimated at 5 million people) around 2,000 women wear the veil. The opposition to the veil is supposedly derived from a concern for women's rights and the secular values of French society. Even though it could be argued that the bill is unconstitutional. There is no such legislation on the veils worn by nuns, but that could be because the majority of the masses are Catholic. The French government probably doesn't care about the issue, but it is bound to win over far-right votes at the next election given the delicate nature of the issue.

The logic behind the bill is to deter and prevent the subjugation of women and further integration of the Muslim community into French society. This logic is taken from liberal ideas about the equal rights and freedoms of all individuals. The penalties for wearing a veil include a fine or to be sent on a citizenship course. Notice, the assumption that if one wears a burka it is a rejection of Western culture and secular values. Paradoxically, it seems as though in a liberal society - where individuals are free to be whoever they want to be and live however they wish - the right-wing government of France expects Muslims to live according to a certain standard of "Frenchness". Naturally, not all religious groups are held to this same standard. It could be that there is a new version of the "Harm Principle" in France: you can do whatever you want so long as it is French and you do not harm others.

Unfortunately, this kind of attitude is common in European countries and we may see a similar ban in Britain. It's ironic as this ban is no better than the kind of chauvinistic legislation imposed on women in Saudi Arabia, among other places, where the veil is obligatory. Even the most simple of souls must see that it is contradictory to try and end paternalism through paternalism. Though this warped methodology is ever more common in the West. The "War on Terrorism" is a perfect instance: violence to prevent violence, terrorism to reduce the threat of terrorism. The subjugation of women in the Muslim community, or any other, cannot be resolved by further oppressing women. This should be obvious in this day and age, even to the "Rat Man" and the liberal hypocrites of Whitehall.

Related Links:
Sarkozy's cabinet approve ban on face veils
French Parliament approves ban on face veils
Constitutional confrontation looms over burka ban
Shopping for Burkas

The Power of Cigars.

"You want compromise? How's this? 20 years in the can. I wanted manigot, I compromised, I ate grilled cheese off the radiator instead. I wanted to fuck a woman, but I compromised, I jacked off in the tissue." - Phil Leotardo

According to Slavoj Žižek "An normal paternal authority is an ordinary man who wears phallus as an insignia, he has something which provides his symbolic authority." For Tony Soprano, the cigar is his phallus, the symbol of his paternal authority in the domestic family as well as in the hierarchical structure of the crime family. When we first meet Tony in the opening credits, he is seen driving from New York to New Jersey and lighting up an enormous cigar along the way, obviously he is not a cigar, he possesses the cigar. This means he is not what this phallic insignia represents, but he possesses this phallus because of the role he is attempting to play and the authority derived from the phallic insignia. In the Mafia mythology of crime dramas, cigars are common place, cigars are synonymous with gangsterism and symbolic of excess, power and wealth. Notably in the opening credits, he only lights up the cigar after officially entering the Garden State through the New Jersey Turnpike; indicating that his authority is in New Jersey and not New York.

In one of the most overt use of this phallic symbol in the pilot episode, Tony has an anxiety attack whilst tending to a barbecue and puffing on a large cigar his ducks fly away. At first he appears content in his role preparing meat, a role once played by his father, for his loved ones whilst his beloved ducks remain in his pool. But when the ducks fly away, he suffers the attack and the cigar drops from his mouth, he is castrated. Tony's paternal authority is dependent on the presence of the family unit, whether that be a traditional nuclear family or a criminal organisation, consisting of subordinate members. The fear and anxiety of losing his loved ones, as well as his criminal brothers, would be a castrating experience for Tony - in the sense that Tony's position at the head of the table would be rendered meaningless. Yes, his position is one of power, but he dependent on the underlings for income and this generalises to his domestic life - there he is dependent on his family for love, comfort, food and other forms of gratification.

Many characters in The Sopranos suffer from or die from cancerous tumours or legions, this could be indicative of the nature of organised crime. The fact that smoking often is the cause of cancer may imply the doomed fate of those who play "Godfather". Johnny Sack spends most of his time on camera smoking and later dies of cancer. Though Sack is never seen smoking a large cigar, just cigarettes which are smaller and slimmer. This may imply a lack of potency in Sack's character or reflects his pragmatic approach to business. Something which Tony, and other characters, lack as they use violence to achieve many different aims. Interestingly, Gary Cooper, Tony's ideal American, died of prostate cancer. This is the true price of Tony Soprano's authoritarianism. Growth for the sake of growth, is this not the ideology of the cancer cell.

In the final episodes, Phil Leotardo becomes the Boss of the Lupertazzi crime family, one of New York's legendary Five Families, Leotardo is visibly smug and finally content in a position of power. It is only in this position of authority, as the paternal figure of a large crime family, does Phil light up a cigar. Prior to achieving such status in the underworld, Phil spent 20 years incarcerated and it is constantly suggested that during his incarceration that he engaged in homosexual intercourse. In years since his release from prison, Phil was notably aggressive and arrogant in his conduct. He patronised Tony during a sit-down and actively provoked retaliation from Soprano's soldiers in the aftermath of his brother's murder. Leotardo later orchestrated the murder of Vito Spatafore, out of deep feelings of violent homophobia which most likely stem from the self-hatred derived from his own activities in prison. It appears as though Phil Leotardo suffered from a massive Napoleon complex that could even rival Tony Soprano's "mother issues" and anxiety attacks.

However, it seems that Phil Leotardo may fall into the category of ridiculously obscene paternal antagonists, like Frank Booth or Bobby Peru, that Žižek identified in several David Lynch films. Phil overcompensates for his own feelings of sexual deviancy and emasculation through "uber-macho" behaviour. Particularly, in the form of over-the-top displays of violent homophobia, obscene threatening behaviour and horrific acts of violence. It could also be that Phil Leotardo, like Frank Booth and Bobby Peru, does not just possess a phallic symbol of authority like Soprano. But that he actually is the phallus. In the words of Žižek "It's not simply that they possess phallus, that they have phallus as an insignia of their authority. In a way they immediately are phallus."

In the finale, Phil Leotardo is shot in the head and chest before being run-over by his own car, which actually squashes his skull for all to see, this is symbolic of the destruction of the phallus and the paternal authority it represented. This fitting end is similar to the one met by Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart. Peru died by falling onto his own shotgun and literally blasting his head off by accident. The bloodied stocking Bobby wore to conceal his identity, containing the remnants of Peru's head land nearby, resemble a used condom. Just like Bobby Peru and Frank Booth, Phil Leotardo was an obscene paternal presence, devoid of any anxiety, fearless in the face of the consequences of his exuberant machismo - as exemplified by his violent tendencies towards torture, mutilation, beating and rape as well as murder.

In Tyler we Trust. In Fight Club we Bleed.

"I wanted to destroy something beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom. Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground." - The Narrator

It could be said, Fight Club is the story of a man depressed by the banal materialism of his life and his meaningless job, who descends into insomnia and eventually madness. He engages in civil disobedience against consumer culture, and ultimately commits an act of terrorism. This is the shallowest interpretation, that the story is simply about a man and his arc is guided by his dissociative identity disorder, which is true to an extent and should not be overlooked, but there is so much more to Fight Club than merely mental illness. In fact, if you accept such a view you are underestimating the film, as much as I did when I first held the DVD and read it's title. Though, when you really think about it, it is difficult to sum up what Fight Club actually is about, without negating some viewpoint or interpretation, since Fight Club is wonderfully polysemic. This is true of the film, but even more true of the novel. Therefore, this article is not about pin-pointing all of the themes and possible interpretations of Fight Club.

The novel Fight Club was written in 1996 by Chuck Palahniuk, the first of many wonderfully transgressive and satirical novels in his career. Palahniuk is best known for his unique style, darkly comic subject matter and somewhat "cultish" fan base. His most well known books are Fight Club and Choke. Palahniuk was heavily influenced by minimalists such as Tom Spanbauer and Amy Hempel, as well as postmodernists like Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis. His writing has also been influenced by Continental philosophy, specifically existentialism and post-structuralism. As a writer, Chuck specialises in transgressive fiction, satire and horror. There seems to be nothing that is out of bounds for Palahniuk. In the past his writing has featured fist-fighting, terrorism, pornography, plastic surgery, death cults, nihilism and masturbation-gone-wrong. The characters of his books, tend to be philosophical and misanthropic to some extent, usually present alternative views and theories about life. So far, two of his books have been made into films, Fight Club in 1999 and Choke in 2008, and it looks likely that some of his other novels may be adapted for film one day.

The time of which the book and film were made are of significance as the 1990s were a strange time in America and the world in a way. The Cold War had just ended, leaving the US without an enemy that would provide sufficient justification for their bloated defence budget. The limbo between the age of the "Red Terror" and the "War on Terror". Francis Fukuyama declared it the "end of history" and that capitalism, in the liberal democratic variant, had triumphed. As theoconservatives became increasingly prominent in the GOP and began campaigning against abortion, the 12 years of Republican rule came to an end in 1993 with the rise of Bill Clinton and the 'New Democrats'. The US seemed to be under threat more so from domestic terrorists in the form of white angry men living in the woods. The year before Fight Club was published, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombed the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, damaging or destroying over 300 buildings, killing 168 people and injuring 680. Until 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing was the most horrific terrorist attack committed in the US. The attack was a reaction against the Waco Siege and the Ruby Ridge incident of the early 90s. The prospect of domestic terrorism in the US became more plausible after Oklahoma.

"You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger." - Marla Singer

Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, has been referred to as the "torchbearer for the nihilistic generation" and he continues to be associated with nihilism today. Yet he insists he is a romantic and it could be said that this romanticism bleeds into his work. "My novels are all romantic comedies, but they're just romantic comedies that are done with very dysfunctional, dark characters." At the core of most of Palahniuk's work, there is a romantic element, which often goes unnoticed by his readers, overshadowed by his unique blend of dark satire and transgressive minimalism. "Actually, my characters are still playing in a very classic sort of boy-gets-girl scenario, or girl-gets-boy scenario." In Fight Club, the love story is obviously centred around the narrator, also known as Jack, and Marla Singer. It could be said, he has reconstructed the genre of romantic comedy in his work, it is a combination of romance with dark humour that go so well together.

The relationship between Marla and Jack, and by extension Tyler Durden, has a Freudian quality, in the novel it is even described as a love triangle. The Oedipal overtones are even more overt in the novel, in which the narrator often compares Marla and Tyler to his parents. The narrator's father set up a new family every 6 years, Tyler described this as "setting up franchises", the way in which Durden later set up cells of Project Mayhem across America almost imitates this attitude. Jack's father embodies consumer culture and Tyler is the subversion of that embodiment. In "killing" Tyler, his father, his model of God, Jack rids himself of the qualities in him which reflect those individuals. It is these qualities that stand in the way of him and Marla. Palahniuk once pointed out that traditional literature is anti-passivity and anti-rebellion, but advocates a sort of moderation of passivity and rebellion in individuals. Traditionally, the passive character destroy themselves, the rebel is destroyed by society, but the moderate character survives and lives on as the witness. In Fight Club, Palahniuk collapsed these character archetypes into the narrator. Jack is initially the passive character that kills himself and Tyler is the rebel crushed by society. Subsequently, Jack emerges as the third character archetype, the moderate witness which walks off into mist.

It has been said often that Tyler Durden is the contemporary version of Nietzsche's Ubermensch. But after looking at the way in which Chuck Palahniuk collapsed the three character archetypes into one protagonist, one could conclude that by the film's climax, and the book's conclusion, that Jack is closer to the Ubermensch than Tyler. This theory, reduces the importance of Durden to a mere liminal being in the transition taking place in the life of Jack. Interestingly, the narrator only kills Tyler after the scene in which Durden deliberately crashes a car and has to drag Jack out of the wreckage, which is aesthetically very similar to a birth of a child. If we view the scene as one of rebirth, the narrator has been in a dormant, perhaps foetal, state up to now and has been brought into the world by accident. Only after leaving behind his dormant past can Jack replace Tyler as Marla's lover. It is fitting that Tyler, the subversion of father and God, is the one to drag Jack out of the wrecked car and into the world. The narrator began as the passive foetus and had to be "reborn" with the help of Tyler Durden. But ultimately Jack had to destroy Tyler in order to overcome the rebellious tendencies which had usurped his formerly passive nature.


Where does Marla fit into all of this, is she just a play-thing for Jack? There is an interesting theory going around on the web, that Marla Singer is just like Tyler - an extension of Jack's subconscious. After the shocking revelation that Tyler and Jack are the same person, it is easy to view the entire story sceptically. From such a point-of-view, it could be that the entire project is all in Jack's head. However, in Palahniuk's fiction there is a consistent pattern of strong female characters, in many ways stronger than the males. Marla shares some of Jack's characteristics, she attends group therapy and is somewhat nihilistic, but unlike him she does not have the need for a person to improve herself. To say that woman does not exist, is the lowest male mythology. This originates in the Adam and Eve story, in which woman is essentially man's desire realised. As pointed out in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, a radical anti-feminist might even go further to say that woman is man's guilt realised. If man "cleanses" his desire, ridding himself of fantasies, woman ceases to exist. But it is Tyler who is the fantasy which the narrator "rids" himself of. Woman exists regardless of man's desire, as emphasised in Marla's refusal to leave the groups and forcing Jack to compromise.

"He was born in a mental institution and he sleeps only one hour a night. He's a great man. Have you heard about Tyler Durden?" - Robert "Bob" Paulson

Jack our anti-hero, the unlikeliest of proletariat revolutionaries, is the consummate member of Generation X. Cynical and nihilistic, lost to passive consumption. He's a white male, between the ages of 24 and 49, he should be at the tip of the American patriarchy. But he's not and he's very angry about it. An anger reminiscent of the common rage of white working-class Americans in the mid 1990s. In his early 30s, Jack is one of many children, all related to each other by one father, in his family that have been largely raised by women and neglected by their mutual father. He made yearly phone calls to his father asking advice about life, his father advised him to go to college after he's finished high school, once Jack finished college his father advised him to get a job. As a man, born in the late 1960s, old enough by the 1980s to receive a high school and college education, he was old enough to suffer through Reaganomics and the massive wage cuts they resulted in by the late 1980s (the second biggest cut in "labour costs" in the world, second only to those made by Margaret Thatcher).

In other words, Jack was old enough to endure the emasculating and humiliating chore of work in the service sector, without having enjoyed the glory of big muscles and a sense of community derived from unions that his working class forefathers took pride in. The workforce the narrator had to join in the early 90s had been virtually castrated by Reagan for the benefit of big business. He works as a recall coordinator for a major automobile company, the company is responsible for producing defective vehicles to cut costs, his job is to limit liability for this negligence and bad publicity. He only initiates a recall, if the cost is less than that of an out-of-court settlement, which the company is more than able to make. The words "How does he sleep at night?" come to mind. Jack is ultimately a tool for cost cutting, he is a service to the bourgeoisie, with "no special purpose or place". He is guilty, in his complicity with corporate criminals, of all the elites are guilty of. But he is still oppressed in his role as recall coordinator.

The narrator literally has no rightful place amongst the elites or the oppressed masses, he is one of "God's middle children" as Tyler once said. Many Americans consider themselves middle-class, and the middle-class is frequently referred to in US politics for this reason. In the novel the phrase is applied much more widely and accurately, because the first club formed by Durden consist mostly of middle-class Americans. This phrase seems to refer to the recurrent themes of fatherhood and consumerism, and the way in which the narrator equates them with each other. It is clear from other phrases like "If you could be God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?" that Jack feels his role in the world as one of many middle children is one of insignificance. To the characters, consumer capitalism is almost God-like, the main difference being that capitalism can be escaped. Bu for Jack and the Space Monkeys there is only one way out, through violence.

"The liberator who destroys my property, is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free." - Tyler Durden

When we first meet him, the narrator is trapped by his desires for perfection through the consumption of goods, his "Ikea nesting instinct", and the earning of money is required to temporarily satisfy such desires. Of course, a permanent end to the desires which hold him hostage, thus his nihilism, is unattainable to achieve and he is trapped in a vicious circle, constantly seeking temporary release and constantly striving. The Ancient Greeks had a word for this, pleonexia, and Karl Marx had another term for it, commodity fetishism. If you live merely to pursue the accumulation of wealth, you are not free, you become a slave to that wealth. In the words of Tyler Durden "The things you own end up owning you." The self-harm and consensual violence is a way for him, and the Space Monkeys, to beat these fetishistic tendencies into submission. It is the severely indoctrinated qualities which become the object of horrific violence.

Breaking free of indoctrination hurts and letting go of commodities hurts, the revolution is a process of pain. Just as Fanon thought, the violence of the revolution is a liberation of individuals from the dominant deology, inducing pleonexia. Fight Club captures this notion in the violence that serves as escapism from the mind-numbing ennui of what commonly passes for life. Fanon felt this justified violence and even acts of terrorism. In the words of Tyler Durden: "I'm breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions, because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit." Though, the narrator is not a proletarian striving towards revolution, if anything he is the embodiment of the Western petty bourgeoisie or as Tyler labels them "[the] slaves with white collars." The point of the self-inflicted violence is that it cleanses the individual of indoctrinated qualities, that seem inescapable, in order to let go of the goods/services that possess you and to truly pursue a liberating revolution. Such qualities, Jack recognises in himself through Tyler, are the source of the narrator's self-hatred and self-destruction.

Violence is not just a tool to achieve political and ideological goals, for Fanon, it is cathartic and awaken the people, from the insidious hegemony of ideology, transforming them into "new men". This is particularly significant, as masculinity is another theme in Fight Club. The indoctrinated qualities, Jack and the Space Monkeys are desperately attempting to "punch out" with the guidance of Tyler Durden, are often emphasised as feminine or emasculate. The blond character, which the narrator notes as pretty and girlish looking, is the unfortunate subject of a particularly brutal beating from Jack. The fact that effeminate aspects of society are despised and treated with violence could be interpreted as misogynistic. However, it could also be said that the characters believe they are trapped in a similar situation, as women were prior to the Feminist Movement, that they are trapped and forced into subserviency. The subservient role the Space Monkeys have been forced into, is that of a wage slave, whereas the submissive role women were trapped in is that of the housewife.

Worker bees can leave
Even drones can fly away

The queen is their slave.

This is the only Haiku poem, from the others in the book, to also feature in the film. Notice that it highlights the roles of "worker bees" and "drones" as freer than the "queen bee". One could theorise that this poem, is an expression by the character's urge to turn the tables on the capitalist structures they so despise, reducing such structures to a subservient role. But due to the fact that the feeling of castration, seems to be a result of engaging with capitalism on such a devoted level, which may in fact be the reason that the individuals could grow to hate the femininity they associate with consumer culture, after it reduced them to "queens". One could say that the Space Monkeys and the Feminists both despise the subservient roles people are forced into, against their will and provided with no way out. Thus, Bob's "bitch tits" are not just literally the result of his role in society - promoting a chest-expansion program - but the result of the system which drove him to use steroids to such excessive lengths.

Some liberal film critics accused Fight Club of promoting nihilism and fascism. This is unsurprising in a way, Fight Club was released to a post-Columbine American audience, if the film had been released to a post-9/11 audience it would've probably been banned because of it's apocalyptic finale. Though, there are definitely aspects of nihilism and quasi-fascism in the film it is not a promotion of those "values", this is definitely a reactionary misinterpretation. The aspects of nihilism in Fight Club are a satirical reflection of the "anti-values" espoused by the American consumer democracy "You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die." The narrator is referring to the truth of wage slavery and the role the public plays in elections, we're just here to rent ourselves out and to push a button every 4 or 5 years that allows the bourgeoisie to justify their status as our rulers.

The narrator's arc tunnels backwards through late capitalism and liberal democracy, showing us all the ugliness and brutality of "consumer democracy" along the way. He transgresses from what should be blissful passive consumption to the nihilistic nature of wage slavery and after that where else is there to head, except fascism? The quasi-fascist values present in Project Mayhem and it's progenitor, dictatorial rule and violent repression of all opposition, are the creation of Tyler Durden, who replaced the free market as the signifier for Americans who have become "Space Monkeys"; like Hitler becoming the signifier for Germans who became National Socialists. The fascism and nihilism of Fight Club is an exaggeration, that mocks the strange way in which capitalism and democracy stand together today.

Articles on Fight Club:
Masculine Identity in the Service Class: An Analysis of Fight Club

Fight Club: A Ritual Cure For the Spiritual Ailment Of American Masculinity

Fight Club: The Return of Hobbes
Interview with Chuck Palahniuk by Playboy
Interview with Chuck Palahniuk and a clip show
The Unexpected Romantic