'MASS PSYCHOLOGY' AND POPULIST REASON

In the fight against fascism one prime point that materialists tried to make was about the complicity of the masses towards Fascistic politics. From Wilhelm Reich(The Mass Psychology of Fascism), Elias Canetti ( Crowds and Power), Theodor Adorno(Culture Industry), in the Plays like "Rhinoceros' Eugene Ionesco, and the works of authors including Thomas Mann. The approach towards the inevitability of rationalism goes further back to Immanuel Kant and you can see it in the visual arts in works like Goya's 'The sleep of reason produces Monsters'. This is the approach towards all sort of populism by people like Adorno, and George Lukacs was to put it in simple terms "The History of Irrationalism is the Pre- History of Fascism". Brecht's approach was some what different, and so also Walter Benjamins, since he saw a possibility in reaching out to the masses through Mechanical Reproduction. Brecht criticized the Frankfurt school of being more interested in transporting the property of the School to the U.S than in resisting the Nazi onslaught. Marxists like Raymond Williams (Problems in Materialism and Culture) and Louis Althusser (Reading Capital) also tried to move towards a materialism totally giving up on the Young Hegelianism of early Marx.Jurgen Habermas was also standing for a rationalist scientificity which he thought that Marxism did possess. While it is obvious that most of these people were antagonistic towards Nazism,, one of the pitfalls of their approach was that to resist a flourishing mass level fascism, there was in actuality no other force than these very masses that they held in contempt.

More recent enquiries into actually trying to evolve some strategy of resistance at a popular level from the marxist (democratic) side came from Ernesto Laclau(On Populist Reason), Chanthal Mauffe et al on the Latin American side. They tried to take a different approach towards the question of Identity, though still trying to understand religions as sociological categories rather than as spiritual entities.

Post modernists like Michel Foucault , though starting off with stringent materialism(Note the famous 'Nature -Culture debate" between him and Avram Noam Chomsky). soon became aware of a problem in regarding these questions in a binary manner (Foucault was later to take sides with the Iranian Revolution). Pierre Bourdieu's sociological works in trying to examine art and literature(Distinctions: A social critique of the Judgement of Taste)  and his attempts to point out the problem of 'cultural capital' and its impact on the intellectuals(Homo- Academicus) also tried to veer away from the comfortable  intellectualism that was supplanting crucial questions of popular political engagement, Another scholar who was to point out that ' the academy was a market place of ideas was Anthony Wilden(Man and Women, War and peace) This is one thing that Brecht or Heinrich Mann and many other artists of that period tried to overcome, but was not successfull in, due to the close connections between cultural and social capital and the elite. Laclau does try in his own way to point out this question in his work, but it were in the works of Post Marxists like Foucault, Jacques Derrida(Writing and difference), Gilles Deleuze (A thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia),Jean Baudrillard, Lyotard, Edward Said and especially the thalmudic Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas that the question of the 'other' (Entre Nous) became a prime concern. The apparent failing of Marx's philosophical work, taking from Saint Simon and Hegel, the social fascisms initiated in the name of implementing a scientific dialectical materialism was more apparent by now since after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, world politics had already moved away from the already 150 years old ideological paradoxes. People like Stuart Hall, Bell hooks, Sander Gilman, Paul Gilroy, Toni Morrison and a spate of other scholars coming from minor communities or racially segregated spaces tried to evolve towards a minoritarian imaginary(Deleuze- 'Kafka : towards a minor Literature) while trying to resist the majoritarian onslaughts of racism and Capitalism. Feminists like Patricia Hill Collins,and dalit thinkers like Ambedkar, E.V.Ramaswami Naykar, Susie Tharu, Kanchah Illaiah, Gopal Guru, Jenny Rowena, M.T Ansari, J.Devika, K.K.Baburaj, K.K Kochu, A.Arun, Sunny m.Kapikkad etc., also tried to evolve more deliberative and discursive strategies to overcome the one sided onslaught of majoritarian Fascisms on the minor communities and groups.

My attempts cannot properly speaking be located fully in such a rubric since my own spiritual and mystical experiences have moved me away from the materialist framework, and have enabled me to consider the possibility of taking to the prophetic trail(Which has a rationality of its own.) and overcoming internecene conflicts through discursive and deliberative democratic strategies. Rationality is in fact not simply a denial of god but a way in which a manner of thinking attempts to gain coherence, and considering the Zero Points(Roland Barthes) or aporias (Derrida) in thought,, the finality of the rationale is always already suspect.
The argument about the non- existence of God(Atheism) is in this way different from rationalism, because it starts from an apriori argument about the non- existence of God, which could in no way be proven with any finality by taking recourse to science or rationality. Rather than conclusively arguing about the absence of God, they take this as a pregone conclusion and so does not need further deliberation. How can human mind, or science and technology come to such a conclusion on a matter in which the experiences of hundreds of generations of human beings are involved and what intellect could be considered to be superior to that of the infinite , so as to measure it? Technological or empirical examination is limited to the material world, and is incapable of providing conclusions about the spiritual. To take matter as prior to the idea , also involves other complexities- for example, 'Money" or "capital' though considered material are abstract concepts in reality, and replaces transactions in the barter system by providing an abstract value by which each thing is priced. Can we then conclude in anyway that the values attributed by money to things is in anyway objective and representational of the whole realm of the economy? Since before internet the price of the rupee was premised on gold, caan we then conclude that the value of gold will remain constant in all societies and among all peoples?. The concept of 'capital' though it did provide certain insights about the industrial economy, has not moved much further even after the setting up and dissolution of many 'socialist' economies. why is this so? why was it that socialist systems easily submitted to inegalitarian technocracies in the name of scientificity, whereas the technological and political systems gave space for some difference in democratic societies, which could help us see through the pitfalls in the totalizing strategies of modern science such as those of surveillance and control or military industrial interests, including warfare to which the citizen /subject became a mere slave or accomplice. Political reason has so far failed to consider parties or political groupings also as socially conflicting collective entities, and have failed to understand the fact that a prophet is also someone who, by the grace of god, was capable of resolving the major questions of their period(though their answers had subtle differences between them) and that religious reasoning has also to be encountered to arrive at an egalitarian present.

Benoy.P.J