The Noughties - A Solon's Calling.

Living in End Times.

"What would 'September 11th' have been without television?" - Jacques Derrida

In the late 1990s, people were speculating that the new millennium would herald the end of the world. Over 10 years later and Roland Emmerich has made movie with an apocalyptic vision, which might happen in 2012 apparently. We still cannot imagine the end of capitalism, so we imagine the apocalypse because that is easier to envision in this era of mass fear and cynicism. It would be too easy and cynical to simply describe this time period as a decade of shallow consumerism, horrifying atrocities, celebrity worship, impending environmental doom and avaricious excess. The Noughties were paradoxical, in that wondrous luxuries were now available at the click of a button on a keyboard. But all the while there was a sense that we are drifting obliviously into our own destruction - these are the end times. Yes, this occurred in previous decades, but in the Noughties this was taken to an extreme, pressing onwards as if there are no limits except there clearly are limits now. One question comes to mind: How long can we just keep going on like this?

As JG Ballard once wrote "The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th Century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world." It could be that the ambiguity, born of that "marriage", is present in the undercurrents of our lives today. Botox is an interesting case in reflecting the strange juxtaposition, the horror and the beauty, the nightmare and the reason. It was during World War II that fears of Germany using biological warfare drove the Americans to develop the chemical botulinum toxin, the principle ingredient of botox, as part of a germ warfare experiment. Botulinum toxin is actually one of the most lethal substances in the world, it causes the disease botulism which has a rate of almost 100% mortality. But it was later found that non-lethal amounts could be used to treat wrinkles. It wasn't until the early 21st Century that botox became accessible to those who weren't the rich or the famous. At times it seemed as though there was a desperation to push consumerism further and further, breaking down boundaries and pushing the limit. But at the same time exhaustion, at the notion of very real limitations and there banality, leading to a increasing reliance on the past.

This feeling of exhaustion, limitation and banality is explicitly present in music. As it is evident that the mainstream music industry is increasingly dependent on past genres and eras to recreate itself, leaving the listeners feeling that it has all been done before. This reliance may have been what led to an abundance of goods and services which lacked the very thing which they used consisted of. Examples: decaffeinated coffee, nicotine patches, sugar free drinks, cyber-sex, even warfare and capitalism. Nicotine patches are cigarettes without the little white sticks of death, which you light up and smoke yourself to death with. Cyber-sex is sex without the physical act of intercourse. People talk about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as if no one on our side had to die, is this not a desire for war without war? Since in war, people on both sides inevitably die. What about the "liberal communists" like Bill Gates? Those who want capitalism without the inequality, poverty and enormous suffering caused by market forces, who promote the idea that all inequality, poverty and suffering can be eliminated through capitalism with a human face. However, capitalism is not about equality it is about competition, winners and losers,  and dog-eat-dog individualism. Therefore, it could easily be claimed that the liberal communists want capitalism without the very essence of capitalism.

We've seen the politics of fear, along with the most vile forms of Orientalism, put into action following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, which has also reminded us that we're still governed by liars and criminals. The politicians of the West have found a new enemy in "Militant Islam" to replace the communists with, so they can go on increasing defence spending and invading sovereign nations. After nearly 10 years, the "War on Terrorism" has failed to capture Osama bin Laden and bring down al-Qaeda. Though, it has resulted in 80% of Iraqi oil being grabbed by energy corporations and record profits for arms manufacturers - clearly, our leaders have their priorities in order. Never mind the hundreds of thousands who have died. We have seen the Bush administration begin in controversy and end appropriately in controversy. The Bushites were one of the worst administrations in history and has been succeeded by the Obama administration - who were elected by desperation for change. Unfortunately, it appears that the Obama is no dove and that his administration, as they've locked us into a war with Pakistan, are as hawkish as their predecessors. All the while, the media acts as if there should be no casualties of war, again they want war without war.

The truth of free-market fundamentalism has come out in the form of a financial crisis and a series of bailouts after the "liberalisation" in the financial sector. Once their policies began to fail, the Bush administration in the US and the New Labour government in the UK acted in direct contradiction to their rhetoric. In reaction to the monumental hypocrisy surrounding the financial crisis, there has been a rise in reactionary populism on both sides of the Atlantic. It's easier to scapegoat a minority and traditionally the far-Right have always benefited from economic turmoil. Though, in this case the vast majority of Europeans demonstrated maturity in not resorting to anti-Semitism - as Europeans have traditionally. The emergence of some form of racist populism seems inevitable, but at the same time it is certain not to be a return to fascism, as we have seen nationalists gain seats in the European Parliament. Instead, you should expect to see an shift towards increasingly racist immigration policies, as the environment deteriorates and people start to migrate to escape the consequences. The faces of such "moderately" racist policies are Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi, not Jean-Marie Le Pen and Nick Griffin.

The Age of Pleonexia.

"Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality." - Ayn Rand

Here are some interesting statistics about the world from the last decade. Between 1997 and 2009, in the UK, wages for low-earners increased by 45% while wages for high-earners increased by nearly 300%. Under the Bush administration, tax-cuts for the wealthy led to 1% of the American population accumulating over $1.5 trillion in less than a decade. 5% of the world's population owns nearly 90% of the world's wealth and consumes around 30% of the world's resources. $54 billion is spent on feeding every child in the world for a year, but we spend $97 billion on pornography. We literally spend more money on watching strangers have sex, than we spend on feeding the children of strangers. OPEC put $3 billion a year towards research into ways of decreasing damages on the environment every year, but we spend over $4 billion just on erectile dysfunction every year. Just compare the $1.5 trillion we in the West spend on aid, climate change, preventing deforestation, charitable givings and so on, to the $7 trillion  the state has spent on waging wars for oil and bailing out banks. There is clearly something perverse with all of this. Though, when you read of Alan Greenspan's objectivist beliefs or the fact that Peter Mandelson is a fan of Macchiavelli, it all seems to make a bit more sense.

During the financial crisis of 2008, we saw the emergence of previously invisible men who had been raking in millions as they drove the economy towards destruction. In the UK, we had Fred Goodwin who left RBS with a retirement package of £16 million. In the US, Dick Fuld ran Lehman Brothers into the dirt - to the point that it was losing $8 million a minute - and then walked away with $500 million from that year. And then there was Bernie Madoff, who soon became the favourite punch-bag of the media. Bernie Madoff, the man who illegally accumulated $65 billion. The media soon turned Bernie Madoff into the embodiment of the "irresponsibility" and insatiable greed which triggered the financial crisis. As Slavoj Žižek explained, to simply blame Madoff, and others like him for this crisis, is to ignore the fact that Madoff merely took the logic of the system to its extreme. Žižek views Madoff as the ultimate postmodern capitalist, who ruthlessly speculates up to the limit while half of your profits go to different foundations, charities etc. No different than Bill Gates, just taken to excess. But without the system, such an excess would not be possible or encouraged.

The Greeks of the ancient world had a word "pleonexia" used to describe that insatiable desire to own things which rightfully belong to others, in those times this was viewed as a sickness and even a form of enslavement. Pleonexia is similar to the Marxist concept commodity fetishism, which could be described as when people believe that a commodity has an innate value as opposed to the value subscribed to the commodity through labour. That in some way consumption of particular goods is a form of expression, that particular goods symbolise something about your identity. Thus, the obsession with the accumulation of things. If you're living to make money, you have fetishised money, and in a sense money rules you. You are not free as you are bound by that which you fetishise, whether it be money or shoes it doesn't matter. Though, this is not a new phenomenon, but once again it seems that it has definitely been taken further in the last decade. Never before has a crisis of such magnitude been caused by the spending of money which we don't even have. I am, of course, referring to credit. Not only do we want to shop till we drop, but we don't want to spend any money at that time. Shopping without shopping. It was new practices in the way of credit cards, loans, mortgages etc. which brought about this crisis.

Going back to the perverse factoid, that we spend around $44 billion more on pornography than on feeding impoverished children in far away lands, there is something more at work here. First of all, pornography is actually a deeply conservative genre, it is not as some may think a symptom of the permissiveness of our times. The fundamental prohibition, as Žižek points out, that as we cross one threshold - accessing close-ups of penetration, full frontal nudity etc. - but the price is the narrative, which acts as a justification for sexual activity, cannot be taken seriously. The screenwriters are not so stupid that they believe that such vulgar fairytales, misogynistic and even racist stereotypes can be taken as seriously as films or even TV dramas. This is because they not intended to be realistic, emotionally engaging or believable - this is the price of the "filth" on offer. Whereas, in emotionally engaging dramas, which screenwriters have clearly laboured over, always skip over the sexual act. What is most significant of all this, is the almost all pervasive influence of conservatism, as an ideology, parading as the product of permissive liberalism. Another example of this would be "Gangsta Rap" which could be seen as promoting the Hobbesian view of human nature, laissez-faire capitalism, as well as misogyny and racial stereotypes.

Spectators of Life.

"Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." - Guy Debord 

The Situationist, Guy Debord once said "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles." Debord, and those of the Situationist International, thought that the capitalist structures, of the late 20th Century, would be based upon images and spectacles, as opposed to the production of goods. In the consumer society, experiences themselves would be commodified and we would be encouraged more so to express ourselves through what we consume. Reducing individuals to mere consumers, fragmenting society along the way, and leading us into passive consumption. We become spectators to life. In the case of pornography, reality television shows, cookery programmes and soap operas this is literally true. This seems almost exactly true of a certain advent of the early 21st Century, think of social networking sites like Facebook and how they could function to replace social interactions. Social gatherings without social gatherings. Friendship without friendship, almost. This is an explicit development in late capitalism, which the Situationists detected in the late 1950s and continued to rail against until the early 70s.

If the Noughties is the preface to the trajectory the 21st Century will take, what is the significance of the worship of celebrities? The attention the media gave to the speeches at the G20 protests, they were mentioned in passing, wasn't anything near the kind of coverage seen at the funerals of Jade Goody and Stephen Gately. The media were sure to give the public access to speeches by mourning relatives. Of course, the magnitude of celebrities in our world is demonstrated best by Michael Jackson, the man who's fame drove many of his loyal fans into denial of his descent into drug addiction and the evidence of his sexual depravity. If their denial, and the failures of justice, is not evidence enough of our celebrity obsession one can find plenty of examples. Just like social networking, the obsession with celebrities is really a fixation over spectacles. Though, celebrities only affect our identities in terms of the opinions we have of them. The obsession with celebrities does not even appear to be an obsession with fame or the reason these people are famous. It is an obsession with the flaws and dysfunctional lives which make celebrities human to us. Deaths and births, marriages and break-ups etc. are all ordinary occurances of life today. To some, such things are represented more in the lives of the famous than in their own.

Take X-Factor, the reality tv-show which simultaneously feigns elements of grass-roots democracy whilst it churns out celebrities for us, as a target market, to fetishise and fixate over. The depth of this fascination the public has developed is evident in the fact that more people voted for Joe McElderry in X-Factor 2009 than they did in 2005 for Tony Blair. Though, at least Rage against the Machine beat McElderry to Christmas Number 1. Then again, either way Sony won. Even the increasingly shallow and cynical nature of democracy is being extended to reality tv-shows, the best we can hope for is the lesser of two evils - e.g. RATM over McElderry and Simon Cowell. The most disturbing thing about reality-tv is that it is almost the modern version of going down to the mental asylum to mock the mentally ill, as many did for entertainment in previous centuries. It should be noted that in the television industry many shows are referred to as "filling", whereas adverts are referred to as "content". It seems quite likely that the one-hit wonder machine that is X-Factor, is merely a bone thrown to the rabble to ensure they'll keep on consuming. After all that was said and done in the decade, it seems that we desperately need radical change to resolve many of the problems that now plague our civilisation. Before we drift off of the edge.

Where were you?
Goodbye Noughties - Freedom Press
Decade of Death (for journalists) - CNN
Decade of Debt - CBC
An interview with Slavoj Žižek - The Culture Show
The Situationist International

On Orientalism - Edward Said

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