Epistemology & the New Right

Gabriel von Max, “Reading Monkey,” circa 1900

5,363 words

Portuguese translation here

“If one construes a delusion as such, the will — if it wants to continue to exist — must create a new one.” — Nietzsche[1]

After perusing the two American Renaissance review essays posted to Counter-Currents on August 1, 2012, I couldn’t help feeling as I always did when I too was part of the American academy. I was struck dumb by the researchers’ inability to consider the role played by the prevailing order of knowledge in their conceptualization and implementation of research. Most people in the academy speak only of the “intellectual assumptions” of researchers, seeking to root-out the “prejudices and misconceptions” held by those involved in study that might bias their findings. However, the very essential, culture-specific understandings of the human – and what it means to be human – are never questioned, and liberal bourgeois reality (by now monolithically anti-racist, anti-white, and multicultural) adds another boulder to its fortress. Thus, the twin study had no need to critique bourgeois models of achievement; just as the altruism study understood the normalcy, legitimacy, and decency of multiculturalism.

Of course this makes perfect sense when one considers that every form of life[2] has always educated its members to embody its particular criterion of being human. It only becomes a problem when that criterion of being human creates degenerates in mind and body; or when men like us stand beyond the dominant order of knowledge, or episteme, only to be surrounded by the squalid reality it creates.

The subjects of research, especially in anthropology, my former field, are always already assumed to be bourgeois and liberal, even when they exist in one of the few spaces not-yet under the control of bourgeois liberalism, because most Americans at any intellectual level have difficulty contextualizing anything that they know. It’s not that it is just too easy to assume that female genital mutilation is abhorrent and a “problem” for all women; that people in Iran just want to be free; or that Italian fascists are parochial, homophobic, and racist; but that bourgeois American and Western cultural subjects – as human beings – live, believe, conceptualize, and therefore create the world, in the terms of a specific episteme.

For a racialist, race is everything; for a culturist, it is culture; for me, knowledge is everything – especially how it is produced and how it works to motivate behaviors.[3] What about political and economic forces? Materialism is an ideology – a framework that makes some things knowable and possible and other things unknowable and impossible. It is the same for History, biology, physics, psychology and every discipline in the academy. Each discipline and ideology operates within an episteme. Each episteme is a coherent set of values and evaluations that limit and direct the conditions of human possibility. Epistemes do so because of one basic fact about the human animal: we are a narratively driven species. We tell ourselves who, what, where, when, and how, we are. There is not a single aspect of human behavior that is not given content by a narrative. Eating, procreating, defecating, sleeping, just to name the most natural of behaviors, all make sense because of narrative. Saying so does not lessen the importance of the material aspects of being human. Instead, it points to a deeper way to understand why we do what we do.

While others like Alain de Benoist, Alexander Dugin, Pierre Krebs, Guillaume Faye, and Tomislav Sunic (not to mention Nietzsche, Evola, and Sorel) discuss liberalism and the bourgeois form of life epistemically, no one in the North American New Right has provided a framework for understanding how knowledge works and how bourgeois knowledge keeps us entangled in its web. Oddly enough this is a problem inherent in the name “new right” and its contradistinction from the “old right.” For what we point to with such a distinction is nothing less an epistemic shift, or conceptual revolution.

While some academics among us might still cling to the idea that reading the classics or our contemporaries is important just to know what they said (usually to be refuted and improved), seeing our problem epistemically – as a problem of knowledge – makes it important to read New Right thought so as to continue the task – begun by the classic and contemporary European New Right – of creating a new episteme, in short, a new ontology that creates the conceptual possibilities of our greatness. I propose that doing so will give the North American New Right a revolutionary impetus, and as such, a higher purpose than merely whitening America.

In essence, this paper is arguing on two fronts. On the first, it is a rather simplistic explanation of how knowledge is produced and how it functions. It is a short synthesis of an academic lifetime of theory and philosophy of knowledge, power, and transvaluation. It asks us to understand the consequences of our continued use of bourgeois, liberal, and modern concepts of “being human.” On the second, it is asking us to be more like our European brethren, who successfully inherited and built upon the thought of Nietzsche, Evola, and Sorel (my Big Three – feel free to add Schmitt, Ludovici, Jünger, etc.) to fight modern and postmodern man in a war of knowledge and concepts. Why this has never happened here, until now, is made clear in Sunic’s Homo Americanus,[4] and even Werner Sombart’s Why Is There No Socialism in the United States.[5] Perhaps Americans “never had it in them” to critique bourgeois man, but I refuse to believe that our New Right wants to be “American.” Otherwise, we would just be campaigning for the Republicans and content to “get our country back.”

Before we get bogged-down discussing epistemes, lets try to understand how knowledge works.

How does knowledge work?

Knowledge is affective. It . . . produces . . . action. Plain and simple, it is the story needed to motivate a narratively driven species – such as our own – to move.

It is the force that molds our daemon into shapes and directions useful for whatever herd we live among. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, French poststructuralists that theorized the impact of capitalism and capitalist desire on the body, used a territorial model to explain how our bodily energy, puissance, or what the Greeks called daemon, is coded and disciplined to long for different forms of expression and redemption, in the form of pouvoir.[6] (It is possible to conceive expression metaphorically as form and redemption as content – but the latter is much more important and value-laden than that. It is moral in content, but more so a question of what process of accumulation is considered optimal in a form of life. It can be argued that Homeric Greek life offered heroic redemption, Medieval Christianity offered spiritual redemption, and bourgeois liberal modernity offers material redemption to those who most fully embrace its system of truths and valuations.) Anyone who has read Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality knows that he explained the function of moralistic knowledge in similar terms, but leaving aside the hypnotic postmodern language of Deleuze and Guattari.[7]

This primordial and bodily energy perhaps originally existed as a way to ensure procreation and self-preservation, what is commonly called “fight or flight.” With the development of language, however, it became bound-up with communication and the social manipulation of desire. It was, in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, deterritorialized – brought from its bodily domain of sex and violence – and reterritorialized into something useful for a more complex aggregation of people.

Although this description makes us visualize a repressive and manipulative process, in fact it is creative and gentle. Nietzsche talked about the mind’s will to order, organize, control, repress, direct, to impose limits upon, and ultimately to discipline sensory information.[8] Deleuze and Guattari subsumed this form of will within the body’s production of desire, thereby explaining that the subordination and ordering of puissance is not a cursory imposition on the ways in which we are expected to live, but the very production of reality and lived experience. From the perspective of desire, life (puissance) and the government of life (pouvoir) are one and the same. With the impossibility of the thing-in-itself in mind, pouvoir would be the only way we can consciously know desire – as a desire for. In other words, knowledge directs, organizes, and disciplines desire, and in so doing normalizes the government of life. Thus, we cannot be liberated from this process, even if liberalism would have us believe otherwise, as I will explain below.

From where does knowledge come?[9]

Knowledge comes in the form of narrative, whether popular, academic, political, artistic, or religious. For epistemologists, besides attempted models of interpersonal knowledge-implementation (for example, why capitalism is able to keep us striving after a never-ending series of “person defining” objects of consumption, to the point that we actually release endorphins when shopping and consuming), the most valuable targets of inquiry are the truth regimes that produce the most useful and important information in the episteme. Thus, in the modern bourgeois world, the sciences attract the most attention. Coming to this highly philosophical form of inquiry from Black Studies, I was always more concerned with the creation of altruism than with the creation of psychological and medical diagnoses.[10] In any case, a truth regime is the methods of producing, enforcing, and protecting truth and the epistemic bases of being human.[11] Foucault coined the phrase “truth regime” in order to make sensible his assumption that science and scientific knowledge are bound to sources of epistemic power. It is not just politics and economics that control what we know but a system that makes our beliefs true and justifies their status as knowledge. Because the vast majority of modern men are not reading Foucault but watching Fox News, they can still assume that the epistemological status of knowledge claims is independent of the operations of power. For us, however, it is imperative that we begin to think of our project as an epistemic break.

Interestingly, Foucault was motivated in his intellectualism by Nietzsche, and was one of the main proponents of “Nietzsche as postmodern democrat.” Nonetheless, what remains of “our Nietzsche” in Foucault is often put to stunning use. For instance, in “Truth and Power,” Foucault explains that the fundamental political problem (facing us, the New Right) is not merely to criticize what currently passes for truth, or to change people’s consciousness, but to detach “the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.”[12] In other words, we must begin the creation of a new regime of truth; and the political question becomes a question of a new narrative itself. Where Nietzsche is present, here, is in the assumption that truth is given power epistemically and that any victory for us can only be grounded in a new episteme.[13]

As we are beginning to see, knowledge works by directing our primal energies, and knowledge is produced in accord with the epistemic bases of forms of life. Knowledge is always a system that makes sense. As such, some things are knowable and others are unknowable. Once, our present condition was beyond the realm of possibility.

Things change, however. There are a small handful of scholars associated with preeminent Stanford University professor Sylvia Wynter that study the epistemic shifts that culminated with the creation of chattel slavery and the racial human. Moving from Papal usage of Aristotle to “make sense” of New World natives, to the transformation of feudalism into capitalism, they read the History of the species as a path toward universalized altruism.[14] For these scholars, modernity is a problem, but not as it is for us. Where we experience modernity as an epoch built on the domestication of European man and the destruction of his traditions and capacities for violent self-defense (among other things), they experience modernity as those who are desperate to believe in the French Revolution. In other words, they want the modern West to be more modern – more free, egalitarian, and universally fraternal. I mention this not only to highlight how it is possible to understand our situation epistemically, but to demonstrate how the truth regime of anti-racism helped their cause. For none of the academic criticism leveled at Wynter and her compatriots ever mentioned the political nature of the research or questioned the morality of promoting universal altruism as progressive. The episteme (and its various operative regimes of truth) made those concerns unknowable.

Linguist Philip Lieberman, one of Wynter’s favorite sources, sought to explain the relationship between valuation and altruism by discovering from where the two entered the human experience. His work is astonishing for two reasons: how clearly he explains the power of narrative and the relationship between altruism and morality, and for failing to contextualize his own work epistemically. Resulting from the biological development of the brain and supralaryngeal tools needed to produce human speech, he surmised that a new type of cognitive capacity evolved. This was the human ability to construct linguistically encoded behaviors such as those controlled by systems of morality and ethics.[15] “These developments enabled us to induce the modes of altruism that bond us together as groups. In consequence, . . . in place of the genetic programs that regulate the behaviors of all organic species, we developed . . . culture-specific programs by which our human behaviors – cognizing, affective, and actional – came to be . . . regulated.”[16]

This is the same conclusion reached by Nietzsche. After first exploring the link between language and consciousness, and concluding that conscious thought, that which takes the form of language, is the shallowest form of thought because it is designed only to connect one person to another, Nietzsche then seeks to understand how consciousness is connected to human social forms. “Consciousness,” he says, “belongs not to man’s existence as an individual but rather to the community and herd-aspects of his nature; it developed only in relation to its usefulness to the herd. Consequently, we may only know ourselves through what is average and knowable from the herd’s perspective. We know exactly as much as is useful to the human herd.”[17]

Lieberman continues his explication of the development of altruism to demonstrate how technology has allowed the human to burst outward from its small (pre-modern) communities to populate every continent and harness the forces of nature. We have done so, however, having surpassed the narrowness of the still operational altruistic models of previous centuries. While slavery, for example, was once a universal component of human forms of life, it is now “universally outlawed” (thanks to our ever advancing moral and ethical systems). Unfortunately, he says, race, the bane of one of its later variants – American racial slavery – is still “unconquered.”[18]

In arguing thus, Lieberman demonstrates not only that ethico-behavioral systems were narratively driven, but also that they continue to be. For nowhere in his book on the evolution of altruistic behaviors and their relationship to morality does he feel the need to quantify his own moral positions – nor his use of these positions to justify the idea that the species is progressing because of its moral-ethical aversion to slavery. Nor, obviously, does he need to explain that “racial prejudice” is abhorrent.

Indeed, language is not epiphenomenal to the social structures in which it acts, but a very part of those structures. Alexander Dugin argues that the human is not derived from any thing-in-itself but from politics. The political system, he says, “gives us our shape.”[19] This is a narratively driven process, given that “the political system has an intellectual and conceptual power . . . to shape the paradigm, integrated in society through state institutions.”[20] This paradigm, or episteme, he continues, is what “constitutes us . . . Politics grants us our political status, our name, and our anthropological structure.”[21] He concludes his epistemic demolition of the primacy of bourgeois man by explaining that the shift from the traditional to the modern state was not only marked by a transformation of political institutions but by a “transformation of man at the most fundamental level.”[22] It is upon us, he says, to similarly move beyond the operative modern (and postmodern) conception of our species. Doing so, however, cannot be achieved materially.

Fernand Hallyn agrees, proposing that “frames of signification” organize “poetically,” that is, through language and grammar, to provide, among other things, the boundaries and boundary markers between “us and them.” He terms this process the “poetics of the propter nos” – the “us” on whose behalf “we” act.[23] To the chagrin of American New Right racialists, Francis Parker Yockey understood that race is a concept that can only be understood in the context of liberalism. As Michael O’Meara explains, “The scientific concept of race arose as the self-interested view of the culture-opposing bourgeoisie, whose materialism denied the significance of spirit, soul, and heritage – dismissed not just as forms of aristocratic privilege, but as mere superstructural offshoots of an inherently ‘irrational’ world.”[24] In other words, the concept of the biologically racial human leaves us irrevocably tied to the form of life that made such a concept possible.

Pierre Krebs takes a similar approach to question of peoples and races. As a European, Krebs has a lifetime of interaction with those close-knit cultural and linguistic groups who understand themselves as a people. These peoples have now become the basis of European resistances to standardization.[25] Taking their perspective, Krebs is able to pick apart various truth regimes – History, humanity, and even race – and show how their epistemic embeddedness not only determines their creative power (think: methodology will always generate the results it is designed to produce) but also problems for those of us seeking to live in a “racial” but not multiracial or multicultural society. In the case of Europe, whiteness is a hard sell. It is too American – too caught up in the capitalist demolition of uniqueness and particularity to make much sense – too epistemically bound to America, that is.

Krebs’ critique of race stems from an epistemic approach to our problem and a fine reading of Nietzsche. Krebs is aware, as Heidegger said, that to name a thing is to call it into being.[26] If we call ourselves into being based on the epistemic truths of the world we seek to destroy, ultimately we may be less successful than we presume. For the concepts we currently use to know and create man and the world are inherently tied to the episteme we fight. In these terms, Nietzsche’s insistence that we think differently from our enemies becomes less abstract, as is Tomislav Sunic’s call for mental decolonization.[27]

With Lieberman and Wynter’s explanation of the origin and functioning of altruism above, we have a decent example of how liberal truth regimes work – and an ironic one at that, given how readily they pick and choose what to castigate in modernity. To move toward a conclusion, I want to contrast how liberalism and fascism understand knowledge. This will also make my position more clear.

How does liberalism understand knowledge to work?

Knowledge, like everything else in the liberal form of life, has been neutered and packaged for mass consumption. It is safe. It is horizontal. It is neutral. It has no value and is disconnected from power, let alone regimes of truth. The assumed neutrality of knowledge is apparent when parents are told “reading is essential to your child’s development.” First, development is one of the favorite concepts of the liberal psychological truth regime. It will unfailingly bring a particular type of person into existence – one whose achievements will be measured monetarily and whose happiness will be measured by a lack of aggression, violence, or overly critical thought. Second, reading is never value neutral. Each and every word that passes our eyes and ears is designed to impact the flow of desire – to get you to move, and usually to a shopping mall. Bourgeois liberalism makes us believe knowledge is neutral, and then has us killing over X-Boxes. In short, liberal knowledge has no function beyond being consumed.

Liberalism inherited what Nietzsche described as the original truth regime: the Judeo-Christian God. Truth was given a source, and one so foolproof that to question it was to burn for eternity. Modern science, with its teleological reasoning and heretic creating power, inherited God’s throne as lone source of truth. Like God, it too creates beings in its own image: psychologized pussies, genetically determined automatons, and ethnically relative but “more real than whites” darkies.

The science that gives us these truths believes without irony that its methodologies are apolitical and unrelated to the results that always miraculously demonstrate that the human is inherently bourgeois. (Oops, see how easy it is to slip? The human MUST by definition be bourgeois, for nothing can pre-exist its conceptualization.) The most obvious and egregious of scientific offenders is History. One may have noticed I never write history. Those with a sense of the “problem of History,” those perhaps only partially epistemically resigned, will say, “[h]istory is what really happened, while History is what we write about it,” but events do not make History – only Historians do; and History is about nothing but valuation.

A perfect example of how the New Right attempts to address this epistemic problem is Greg Johnson’s essay on Holocaust revisionism.[28] First, Dr. Johnson separates “history from Historiography,” a break that I see as superfluous, being prompted, as it is, by a materialist (bourgeois) conception of historical and phenomenological process. Secondly, he brilliantly points out that it is the narrative of the Holocaust that is used as a moral truncheon and not any event associated with it; thus demonstrating that the disciplinary effects of the Holocaust can be understood best as a truth regime. It makes certain things knowable and others unknowable.

Finally, because liberalism assumes that knowledge is naturally neutral and that truth is value free, it has us believe that only its enemies (like us) “manipulate” knowledge. This manipulation they call propaganda. At best, however, propaganda should merely designate knowledge, because how liberal scholars describe it is exactly how knowledge works, period. It is ironic that liberalism accused fascism of propaganda, because far from propagandizing, it merely demanded its subjects understand that knowledge manipulates and to accept the possibilities of manipulation.

How does fascism understand knowledge to work?

While Capitalism and Communism, the two dominant liberal political philosophies, assume the biological and economic bases of being human, human equality, and the primacy of the pursuit of comfort (Capitalism) or mechanical production (Communism), fascism assumes that the human is a narratively driven creature that must be inspired to sacrifice, commitment, and discipline.[29] For many, seeing Communism described as a liberal political philosophy might seem outrageous. But, when it is studied epistemically, one discovers that there is nothing in Communism that disputes the liberal economic man and his disassociation from Tradition and heroic valuation. Far from “Third Way” economic strategies, this is the crucial difference between liberalism and fascism.

Fascist knowledge is never neutral. It never produces anything accidentally. And it never comes without a price. Derrida coined the expression “logics of parergonality” to name the way in which the establishment of any system as a system suggests a beyond to it; consisting of what the system excludes either by virtue of what it cannot comprehend or of what it prohibits in order to accomplish its systematic objectives.[30] Fascist intellectuals under the tutelage of Giovanni Gentile utilized a similar conceptualization and critique of bourgeois liberal truth. Gentile, then in charge of the creation of a fascist pedagogy – and thus laying the very foundation of a fascist episteme – was concerned with what the liberal understanding of knowledge left out, and more importantly, what it produced with what it included. He determined, as had Nietzsche, that the bourgeois form of life (specifically Anglo-Saxon) was constructing the limits of human possibilities in the most mediocre, base, and vulgar terms, thus normalizing and even lionizing cowardice, greed, and indifference.[31]

Fascism understood that the “Italian people” needed to be created, but only in very certain terms. In order to do so, they set about controlling and directing the truth regimes of the nation. Just as the bourgeois liberal system of truth production insures that we value materialism and comfort above all else, the fascist government sought to limit available knowledge to that which inspires people to pride, responsibility, concentrated identity, and narrowly defined altruism.[32] Through Romanità, the cult of Roman greatness, the fascists literally attempted to implement Nietzsche’s beautiful formulation of History: “History must speak only of the great and unique, of the model to be emulated.”[33] This was no vulgar propaganda or brainwashing, but instead a more noble and heroic use of knowledge.

Recently a Counter-Currents reader admonished me for subjecting my son to a similar restriction and direction of knowledge and desire. His or her assumption, I presume, was that “one cannot think for their children and must set them free to become who they might.” A more bourgeois understanding of knowledge I can hardly imagine. I had to assume as I stared in wonder at the Counter-Currents site that this person believed that handing my son over to liberalism and allowing him – the STANDARD BEARER OF OUR SPECIES, the FUTURE of my family’s name – to drift aimlessly from one multicultural, cowardice-inspiring, strip-mall parking lot to another is somehow more noble, more valuable to our species, than teaching him about Greece, Rome, HIS Gods, and the thousands upon thousands of examples of bravery, honor, decency, brilliance, mastery, and brotherhood harbored by his and our people. No, you are right dear reader, Sesame Street and its multicultural morality serves us much better. But I digress.

“What an extraordinary lack of books exuding heroic force in our time,” mused Nietzsche, as he pondered the “struggle of knowledge against knowledge.”[34] It is this struggle in which we must be engaged – not necessarily the struggle to ethnically cleanse liberal America. Greg Johnson once said “In a White Nationalist society we will still be arguing about drug legalization, gay rights, environmentalism, abortion, etc..”[35] And he is right, unless we epistemically unpack the bourgeois conception of the human that makes the modern nation-state possible. Remember, the truths, the concepts given highest authority in the liberal form of life, are not only designed to maintain that form of life but to create a certain type of human. If we create an all-white liberal state, we will have done nothing to arrest the decline of our species. However, if we can reconceptualize our war in Nietzsche’s terms, with a deep understanding of our true enemy, we will instead create a fatherland where a rights-based man at war with the natural world and his own instincts will be unthinkable and unknowable.

Fascism was founded upon the heroic, aristocratically radical, thought of the Counter-Enlightenment (a debatable but sympathetic term for the threads of European thought that opposed the various moves toward standardization and degradation culminating in 19^th Century modernity)[36] and sought to resacralize life through myths, legends, and narratives of greatness, strength, and honor. It created a politics to reestablish hierarchy, the will, and a more natural estimation of the human – all with a will to creating a new man. In other words, it was breaking with the liberal episteme, not in order to liberate a marketplace, but instead to create a more noble, heroic, and virile man. Fascism understood that all knowledge is designed to manipulate understanding and behavior. No knowledge is value neutral.

Some famous Christian said, “the truth will set you free.” We know, however, that it will only set you free to be manipulated by another truth. It is past the time for us to “imagine the unimaginable,”[37] to transvaluate liberal values,[38] and to fully embrace the Counter-Enlightenment – the only epistemic enemy that liberalism has ever known – and the revolutionary power of the New Right. As Evola explains, until a choice and commitment of that magnitude is made, we may be utility to “the democratic, bourgeois, [and] humanistic” episteme that corresponds “with the advent of an inferior human type,” but never to one in which man is natural, hierarchical, or dutiful to the harshness and exactitude in which greatness thrives.[39]

Notes

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 201.