Shoutout to @thejaymo for showing me Bryce Hidysmith’s blog. Jay sent over one essay in particular — Bryce’s most recent at the time of writing — on accelerationism and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, called “Bromden, What Will It Take To Make You Capitulate?” Bryce writes:
I’m surprised that I’ve never seen either the left or right Accelerationists talk about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I’ll be disregarding the film adaptation, which, though it has some high-grade acting, misses the entire point of the novel due to consequence of its medium making the acts of McMurphy the dram, rather than the commentary of Bromden. The interior perspective of Chief Bromden is, frankly the uniquely interesting part of the book; the rest is just an uncouth prison drama. I’m inclined to think that a better way to think about OFOTCN is that it’s a story from the perspective of Bromden, as he is only able to contextualize the triumph of pseudo-capitalism in America as something equivalent to a unfriendly artificial intelligence of the paperclip maximizer variety. He terms this process as “the Combine.”
“The Combine”, as Bryce demonstrates with some passages from the book, is a central part of the story expunged from the film adaptation. It’s the Chief’s conspiratorial name for a kind of fascistic dynamic that permeates the Inside/Outside barrier between society and the psych ward. Bryce continues:
Bromden blames himself for failing to fit into the Combine’s progam, while also understanding that the Combine’s program is destroying everything he values. The mental patients, as “culls from the Combine’s product” are unable to participate in the American system, which is to say adequately adapted to an artificial environment built by the Combine manifesting its destiny all over the place. However, Bromden still frequently takes the perspective of the Combine as legitimate […] The central tragedy of the novel should not be understood as McMurphy’s failure to successfully lead a rebellion of inpatients, but Bromden’s simultaneous self-knowledge of the moral and aesthetic bankruptcy of the system he lives within, and his inability to take a perspective that’s able to critique it with an external source of justification.
Some readers may remember that I have written about accelerationism and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest before but, having never read the book, I can’t claim to have done so very well. I mentioned the film in passing in one of my posts on Westworld from a few months ago and how it was caught up in my readings of the work of Leslie Fielder. In Part One, I wrote:
… does Westworld not become a dramatisation of this very [madness], inherent to the idea of the American West? The revolt of the AI “hosts” of the theme park is as much a catalyst for a “new world” to come as it is the materialisation of a spectre of a past waging war on the woeful consolidation of its own future. […] To be haunted by the fractured memories of previous iterations is surely the central condition which entwines the consolidated American State and and its Self.
Fiedler comes in here for the way that he aligns the figure of the “Indian” with the internalised geographic unconscious of the American psyche, which I wrote about more in-depth in Part Two.
At the end of that post — which I don’t want to rehash so give the link a click if the context isn’t immediately clear — I wrote:
Perhaps the best analogy for all that we have discussed, continuing this ever-entangling entanglement of consciousnesses that Fielder and others explore, is the finale of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
Jack Nicholson’s character, “Mac” (aka McMurphy), is, in a way, the ultimate Westerner; the rebel, who stirs up and antagonises the status quo. He is, as Fiedler calls him, “the New American Man.” Fiedler writes on the original 1962 book, set in a psychiatric hospital: “McMurphy chooses instead if not madness, at least aggravated psychopathy and an alliance with his half-erased, totally schizophrenic Indian comrade — an alliance with all that his world calls unreason.”
McMurphy, we must remember, is not actually mad. He pleads insanity when convicted of crimes of battery and gambling, believing he will receive a more lenient sentence. The tragic irony of the story is that he is eventually lobotomised, and it is the Chief, in the film at least, on seeing what has become of his friend, the fully-erased New American Man, who breaks out of his affective impotence and heads for the Outside.
Just as the Man in Black, in seeking the maze, is disappointed to find it is not for him, there is perhaps a parable here for the current White Western Man that the revolution is not for him. This seems to be what has the Right running scared. In wanting to take responsibility for their actions only, and not the actions of others, they may be left treading water.
If the White Man really wants to exit, he can’t lead but only follow…
What Bryce introduces on his blog may seem like a very different (even contradictory) reading but I think that the two tragedies of the book, as Bryce describes them — Mac’s failed revolution and Chief’s psychological impotence — are inherently connected.
For Fiedler — something he later clarifies explicitly in the final chapter of his book, The Return of the Vanishing American — madness is a potential avenue for “White transcendence”. For Fiedler, noticing the frequent trope of how White Europeans are so frequently paired up with non-White counterparts, highlights the desires of the White man that these characters are said to represent. If the partner is Black “we tend to interpret as a parable of an attempt to extend our sexuality, to recover our lost libido” — I watched Training Day (of all things) yesterday and that film is a fascinating example of this but its also common to all sorts of stories: Wuthering Heights, in particular, comes to mind. However, if the partner is Indian, “we are likely to read as signifying a desire to breach the limits of reason, to extend our consciousness.”
What is of central importance to Fiedler is the role of whiteness in this story. Both Mac and Big Nurse are tandem figures of a virulent whiteness — an authoritarian whiteness and a whiteness looking for a way out — both of which threaten to snuff out the other but it is Chief who puts Mac out of his miserable post-lobotomy existence. However, as Fiedler points out, the novel can be read as a meta-exploration of this failure. Written by a white man, Chief becomes Ken Kesey’s own internal Indian who he seeks to let free. As Fiedler writes in his previous book, Waiting for the End:
What we customarily call the “oppressed minorities” (and the same is true when the oppressed are, in fact, majorities) are exploited not only economically and politically, but also psychologically, though this latter fact is less noticed in election speeches, newspaper editorials, or even serious analyses of class and race relations, whether pro or con. Oppressors, that is to say, project upon the oppressed certain of their own psychic dilemmas, elements of their own mental life of which they are ashamed, or toward which they are deeply ambivalent.
Nowhere is this more common than in tales of white transcendence such as this, and I think that Bryce’s comment on this pseudo-capitalism is an apt one. The logistics of exit are so frequently racialised along these same lines — unwittingly, perhaps, but I think they should be done so purposefully.
What Fielder calls the Higher Masculine Sentimentality — “a passionate commitment to inverting Christian-Humanist values, out of a conviction that the Indian’s way of life is preferable” — is rampant in Right Accelerationist circles whilst Left Accelerationism often parrots a patronising Christian-Humanism without fully contending with the consequences of the revolution to come.
To be absolutely clear: Accelerationism should be understood as a spatiotemporal philosophy of entropy for preparing ourselves for the future, for making ourselves worthy of the event of acceleration. What this entropy will — we hope — ultimately lead to is the destruction of the institutions that structure our lives, at the levels of individual, state and planet. These institutions are driving themselves into the ground and we should encourage this — not willy-nilly but from the perspective that this is a necessary process if we are to reach a new future, and we should understand these institutions as white, male and bougie.
If we can read Nyx’s Gender Accelerationism blackpaper as an exploration of the fact that “the future is female” isn’t a soft feminist slogan for democratic politics but a violent transformation of the patriarchal subject / subject under patriarchy, we can likewise read the works of Leslie Fiedler — and so much American culture besides — as containing the implicit message that whiteness is gonna have to go too.
In fact, is the argument that Chief Bromden’s character is defined by his “simultaneous self-knowledge of the moral and aesthetic bankruptcy of the system he lives within, and his inability to take a perspective that’s able to critique it with an external source of justification”, not precisely the argument shared today by Afropessimists and Blaccelerationists? The argument that a worthy critique of capitalism requires an exit from the white male supremacy that structures it at every level?
If run-of-the-mill Accelerationists don’t talk about this more, that might be because many don’t want to think about the social suicide they are encouraging for themselves. But they should.
Fiedler again, with a conclusion to The Return of the Vanishing American that is downright Deleuzean, echoing the narrative of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest explicitly and pointing to its relevance to any accelerationist project:
We have come to accept the notion that there is still a territory unconquered and uninhabited by palefaces, the bearers of “civilisation,” the cadres of imperialist reason; and we have been learning that into this territory certain psychotics, a handful of “schizophrenics,” have moved on ahead of the rest of us — unrecognised Natty Bumppos or Huck Finns, interested not in claiming the New World for any Old God, King, or Country, but in becoming New Men, members of just such a New Race as D. H. Lawrence foresaw. (How fascinating, then, that R. D. Laing, leading among contemporary psychiatrists of the theory that some schizophrenics have “broken through” rather than “broken down,” should, despite the fact he is an Englishman, have turned to our world and its discovery in search of an analogy; he suggests that Columbus’s stumbling upon America and his first garbled accounts of it provide an illuminating parallel to the ventures of certain madmen into the regions of extended or altered consciousness, and to their confused version, once they are outside of it, of the strange realm in which they have been.)
Obviously, not everyone is prepared, and few of us ever will be, to make a final and total commitment to the Newest West via psychosis; but a kind of tourism into insanity is already possible for those of us not yet ready or able to migrate permanently from the world of reason. We can take, as the New Westerns suggest, what is already popularly called — in the aptest of metaphors — a “trip,” an excursion into the unknown with the aid of drugs. The West has seemed to us for a long time a place of recreation as well as of risk; and this is finally fair enough, for all the ironies implicit in turning a wilderness into a park. After all, the West remains always in some sense true to itself, as long as the Indian, no matter how subdued, penned off, or costumed for the tourist trade, survives — as long as we can confront there a creature radically different from the old self we seek to recreate in two weeks’ vacation.
And whilst the West endures, the Western demands to be written — that form which represents a traditional and continuing dialogue between whatever old selves we transport out of whatever East, and the radically different other whom we confront in whatever West we attain. That other is the Indian still, as from the beginning, though only vestigially, nostalgically now; and also, with special novelty and poignantly, the insane.
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