What was Fight Club? Theses on the value worlds of trash capitalism

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 18, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 143-170

  Henderson, George L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

Fight Club; Film; Marxism; Species being trash; Value

Indexed keywords

CAPITALISM; COMMODITY; MARXISM;

EID: 79955062137     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474010395337     Document Type: Article

References (103)

1. Fight Club, dir. David Fincher, perfs. Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter, DVD, FOX Home Entertainment, 1999. The film is based upon Chuck Palahniuk's eponymous 1996 novel. This essay follows Henry Giroux's suggestion that Fight Club be understood, first and foremost, as public pedagogy, a film whose pretense is that it has something important to say and to teach about capitalist modernity
2. H. Giroux, 'Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: "Fight Club", Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence', JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, 21(1), 2001, pp. 1-31).
3. Giroux suggests that any such object ought to be responded to. And indeed Fight Club has. The film has become a lightening rod for passionate debate since its release 10 years ago. It features prominently in the syllabuses of college and university courses, has generated an outpouring of reviews and commentaries inscholarly journals, newspapers, and online discussions. 'Fight clubs' have sprung up across the US and Europe. The 'History Channel' recently produced a series of 'Jurassic Fight Club' CGI films. On the state school fight club in Dallas, Texas,
4. Gretel C. Kovach, 'Report says principal put students in cage to fight', New York Times, 19 March 2009. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/us/20dallas.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=state%20school%20fight%20club&st=cse (accessed 26 May 2009).
5. Regarding the present paper I am grateful to Bruce Braun and Vinay Gidwani for several years of invaluable conversation about 'capital' and 'value'. I thank Stefano Bloch for his enthusiasm for 'trash', a reason to re-view Fight Club, and our many meetings conversing about the film in and around south Minneapolis. I am grateful to Jenni Kotting for preparing the Fight Club screen captures reproduced here.
6. This view has emerged in a number of scholarly works (e.g. L. M. Ta, 'Hurt So Good: Fight Club, Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism', Journal of American Culture, 29(3), 2006, pp. 265-77, prominent newspaper reviews, and is also espoused in a number of online reviews and discussions. See, for example: http://www.intervarsity.org/2100/filmreviews.php?id=2757 (accessed 6 May 2009) and http://pages.prodigy.net/zvelf/fight_club.htm (accessed 6 May 2009).
7. These websites capture some of the diversity of response to Fight Club. The former site, to its displeasure, finds an anti-capitalist message in the film, while the latter site, finding a similar message, is less disturbed by it. The author, George Wu, is worth quoting at some length: Fight Club is about two things, two different problems. The first problem is capitalism and its spawn, gross materialism. The second problem is with a potential solution to the first one - terrorism fed by male emasculation in a postmodern society. Misreadings of Fight Club emerge when critics believe the film is offering an answer. It is not. It is offering a warning.When Tyler says one has to lose everything to be free, Uhls' [the film's script writer] dialogue is emphasizing Nietzsche's belief that the awareness of nihilism had to be obtained before we could in turn establish meaningfulness. Tyler embodies Nietzsche's frequently misunderstood übermensch in his supreme amorality and in his testing of others - that which does not kill makes us stronger. But ultimately Nietzsche's philosophy was one of meaning and creation, not nihilism and destruction. Tyler's objective is to destroy everything without giving a hint as to what will replace it. What we see from Uhls and Fincher though is precisely how those who rebel from society form their own groups with their own repressive conformity. In this case, Tyler's soldiers are absurdly loyal in their stupidity. More so, three-quarters of the way through the film, Fight Club delivers an unbelievable twist. What would have been a fatal flaw in another film is a surprisingly subversive thematic challenge in this one. The twist demolishes most of what the film seemed to be striving for until then, and suddenly the viewer is open to make a choice between the problem and the solution. And this is where Fincher's tale becomes truly cautionary, not against explosions of violence stemming from male frustration, but against dismantling rampant materialism while replacing it with mass chaos. Wu is certainly right in noticing the film's subversion of its initial message, thus placing the audience in the role of 'decider'. Omar Lizardo, goes further than Wu, suggesting that Fight Club offers the beginnings of a class conscious 'counter myth' to capitalist hegemony
8. O. Lizardo, '"Fight Club", or the Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism', Journal for Cultural Research, 11(3), 2007, pp. 221-43.) The argument to be developed in the present paper will challenge the idea that Tyler was ever outside materialistic, capitalist society. Tyler instead dramatizes a sort of über-materialism.
9. For an appreciative note on Fincher and company's technical prowess, see Crowdus, 'Getting Exercised Over Fight Club', Cineaste, 25(4), 2000, pp. 46-8.
10. This paper is not alone in its orientation. Most prominently Henry Giroux has argued that the film's masculinist, warrior worship is an extension of capitalist ideals, especially in their neoliberal guise.
11. Giroux, 'Private', p. 1. Many other commentators have noted the irony that Fight Club's anti-bourgeois message is wrapped inside a slick Hollywood production. An astute student reviewer writes in Eyecandy, the undergraduate media studies journal at University of California, Santa Cruz, 'One of my interviewees, the man who started his own fight club, said something that effectively summed up the film inseveral ways. He said that in the film, anarchy becomes just another corporate system, that "the thing they fought was the thing they became". This is not only true of the 'Project Mayhem' terrorist group in the film but also of the film itself. While attempting to question capitalist, materialist and masculine ideologies that our society holds dear, Fight Club merely became another advocate for dominant conceptions of such ideologies'. See http://eyecandy.ucsc.edu/Volume18/archives/2001_spring/articles/noah/page1.html (accessed 6 May 2009). In the spirit of extending these sorts of analyses that would link Fight Club to capitalism, I attempt to show how the workings of the film relate to specific workings of capitalism, including the possibility that capitalism and its ideology in Fight Club are not fully enclosed systems.
12. In making this statement I do not want to imply that everything about these actions is reducible to capital. (I thank Bruce Braun for reminding me that texts are far messier than that, while still wanting to offer one particular coding.) By the same token, the work of capital (the very concept of capital) can be read as much messier, more lawless, than what is offered here, again a formulation also captured well by Braun.
13. B. Braun, 'Toward a New Earth and a New Humanity: Nature, Ontology, Politics', in Noel Castree and Derek Gregory (ed.) David Harvey: A Critical Reader (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 191-222.
14. J. Frow, 'Invidious Distinction: Waste, Difference, and Classy Stuff', in Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke (ed.) Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 25-38.
15. J. Knechtel (ed.) Trash (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007);
16. G. Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Trash (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006);
17. J. Scandura, Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008);
18. G. Lucas, 'Disposability and Dispossession in the Twentieth Century', Journal of Material Culture, 7(1), 2002, pp. 5-22;
19. N. Gregson and L. Crewe, Second Hand Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2003);
20. S. Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999). For films that explore the cultural politics of trash
21. P. Keillor, 'London' and 'Robinson in Space': Two Films by Patrick Keillor (British Film Institute DVD release, 2005);
22. A. Varda, 'The Gleaners and I' and 'The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later' (Zeitgeist Films DVD release, 2002).
23. G. Hawkins, The Ethics
24. B. Brown, 'Thing Theory', Critical Inquiry, 28(1), 2001, p. 5, emphasis in original. For an analysis of thingness comparable to Brown's
25. J. Bennett, 'The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter', Political Theory, 32(3), 2004, pp. 347-72. Bennett does not maintain, however, Brown's distinction between object and thing that I find helpful here.
26. D. Clarke, 'The Ruins of the Future: On Urban Transience and Durability', in Anne Cronin and Kevin Hetherington (ed.) Consuming the Entrepreneurial City (New York: Routlege, 2008), pp. 127-42.
27. J. Frow, 'Invidious'.
28. M. Thompson, Rubbish Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
29. M. Thompson, Rubbish Theory, pp. 9-10.
30. Cf. A. Appadurai (ed.) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
31. See W. Straw, 'The Thingness of Things', Invisible Culture, 2, 1999, available at: http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue2/straw.htm (accessed 15 October 2009).
32. W. Straw, 'The Thingness', p. 12.
33. The argument that wasted artifacts now accumulate in greater degree than useful products is explored in Clarke, 'The Ruins'
34. Z. Bauman, Liquid Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005).
35. See also the large scale photographic works of Edward Burtynsky. His extraordinary depictions of waste heaps, mine tailings, landfills, and the like, posit these sites as at once colorful, lush, pattern-filled landscapes and politically, ecologically charged spaces.
36. J. Baichwal, dir., Manufactured Landscapes (Zeitgeist Films, DVD release, 2007).
37. G. Hawkins, The Ethics;
38. B. Allen, 'The Ethical Artifact: On Trash', in John Knechtel (ed.) Trash, pp. 196-213.
39. No investigation of this question can forget that its contemporary origins actually lie in Mary Douglas' founding text Purity and Danger. The entire text is devoted to the question of how that which is 'unclean'can be held at once to be both holy and unholy, valued and devalued.
40. M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966).
41. Exceptions would be Thompson's rubbish theory and Douglas's work on 'purity and danger', both of which have a broader cross-cultural remit that I will not take on here.
42. G. Hawkins, The Ethics
43. D. Clarke, 'The Ruins'. N.B.: I do not to deny that Hawkins's larger point is that a different relationship to trash is possible and that for her Marx posits the possibility of a too perfect and pristine relationship between human beings and objects, in which waste fails to get its due.
44. The idea that collecting, sifting through, and/or meditating upon commodity debris can be a critical practice that defetishizes the commodity is explored, for example,
45. J. Ward, '"London is all Waste": Rubbish in Patrick Keillor's Robinson Films', SubStance, 37(2), 2008, pp. 78-93,
46. T. Kendall, 'Utopia Gleaners', in John Knechtel (ed.) Trash, pp. 222-9. Walter Benjamin pioneered this form of cultural critique. See, for example,
47. W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1969).
48. I could be said, then, to be interested in an ideological reading of film, per T. Cresswell and D. Dixon, Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). That said, I don't want to suggest that films have only one, best reading. Nor that ideological texts are merely ideological. On geography and film more generally
49. D. Clarke (ed.) The Cinematic City (New York: Routledge, 1997). It should be clear my purpose is not to read Fight Club as a film scholar but to read it as a provocation for thinking through the composition of value and the various norms through which value is expressed.
50. See V. Gidwani, Capital, Interrupted (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008);
51. B. Braun, 'Toward';
52. T. Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
53. To be clear, exchange value for Marx is the establishment of equivalence among qualitatively different commodities, via the market. For him, exchange value is one of the necessary forms of value, per se, i.e., exchange value is a necessary form of expression of socially necessary labor time. Here I am seizing on a generic, material feature of the capitalist world as seen through exchange value: the necessarily ceaseless transposition of use values in time and space and the necessary capacity of use values to be transposed. Included in this necessity is their required potential to be valued as something other than what they are, including as well their potential to become unuseful.
54. In a traditional sense, then, Tyler is a producer of exchange values (commodities). But he also leaps the barrier between exchange value and use value, proposing that exchange is use value. His function would seem to be to incite the repurposing of use value and then step aside, like money 'secreted' by and always moving away from exchange
55. K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (3 vols., New York: International Publishers, 1967), Volume I
56. On 'time-space compression' see D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989).
57. In this regard, it is difficult to discount Brad Pitt's star quality, and no less the thrift-store, grunge chic his character conveys. (cf. K. B. Halnon, 'Poor Chic: The Rational Consumption of Poverty', Current Sociology, 50(4), 2002, pp. 501-16).
58. D. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1981).
59. R. Weber, 'Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment', in Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore (ed.) Spaces of Neoliberalism (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 172-93;
60. P. Knox, 'The Restless Urban Landscape: Economic and Sociocultural Change and the Transformation of Metropolitan Washington, D.C.', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81(2), 1991, pp. 181-209.
61. J. R. Short, 'Yuppies, Yuffies and the New Urban Order', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 14, 1989, pp. 173-88.
62. This point is superbly made for lower Manhattan in C. Mele, Selling the Lower East Side (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
63. N. Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routlege, 1996).
64. On overdetermination see L. Althusser, 'The Object of Capital', in Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 73-198. On the idea that the 'last instance' of theeconomic never arrives,
65. see L. Althusser, 'Contradiction and Overdetermination', in Louis Althusser, For Marx (New York: Verso, 2005), p. 113.
66. H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge, MA, Blackwell, 1991);
67. H. Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (New York: New Press, 2005).
68. More properly, this reading of the film has to be produced; I do not want to imply that it is already there. In what follows, therefore, I approach images of trash, refuse, and surplus in Fight Club as betokening a sort of problematic, an unspoken 'region' of value through which systematically to explore the film's politics. On the idea of the problematic,
69. L. Althusser, 'The Object'.
70. Marla's association with the economy of 'used goods' is further established in later dialogue with Jack: MARLA: I got this dress at a thrift store for one dollar. JACK: Worth every penny. MARLA: It's a bridesmaid's dress. Someone loved it intensely for one day, then tossed it. Like a Christmas tree - so special, then, bam - it's abandoned on the side of the road, tinsel still clinging to it.
71. K. Martin and E. Kazyak, 'Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children's G-Rated Films', Gender and Society, 23(3), 2009, pp. 315-36.
72. For an astute analysis of how Fight Club at once represents a 'crisis of masculinity' and reinscribes masculine order, see J. Craine and S. Aitken, 'Street Fighting: Placing the Crisis of Masculinity in David Fincher's Fight Club', GeoJournal, 59, 2004, pp. 289-96. My take on capitalist workings in the film is quite different from Craine and Aitken's, however. Whereas these authors view Project Mayhem as dedicated to the 'disposal of capital' (p. 294), I will argue Project Mayhem is a manifestation of the way capital periodically disposes itself.
73. Fight Club's imaginary of political economy as absorptive of commodity after-life and of after-life as immanent within commodities, in this sense complements Spivak's notes on value. Spivak emphasizes the domination (disavowed by economic theory) that must be performed on human and non-human natures before they enter the universe of capital.
74. G. Spivak, 'Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value', Diacritics, 15(4), 1985, pp. 73-93.
75. C. E. Hoffecker, Corporate Capital: Wilmington In The Twentieth century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).
76. A. Stoekl, Bataille's Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 32-59. The classic socio-spatial work on the constitutive relations of 'in place' and 'out of place' is
77. T. Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
78. K. Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin, 1973), p. 361.
79. K. Marx, Capital, p. 35.
80. On the unfortunately named 'structural' causation, unfortunately named because it is not structural in the usual reductive sense
81. L. Althusser, 'The Object'.
82. B. Anderson and J. Wylie, 'On Geography and Materiality', Environment and Planning A, 41, 2009, pp. 318-35.
83. K. Marx, 'Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844' in R. Tucker (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1975, 2nd Edition), pp. 66-125, especially the subsection 'Critique of Hegel's philosophy in general'.
84. M. May, 'Spinoza and Class Struggle', Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 6(2), 2009, pp. 204-8, for a concise conceptualization of the dispersed composition and agency of the laboring body and labor power.
85. Readers can consult Jane Bennett for a cogent overview of diverse materialisms, of which 'body materialism' is just one. The distinction she draws amongst 'body materialism', 'historical materialism', and 'thing-power materialism' is a useful heuristic but it is possible to go too far with it and miss some of the complexity of each of these materialist traditions. For example, without meaning to whitewash Marx's anthropocentrism I would call attention to a certain 'thing-power' that lurks within and troubles Marx's oeuvre. One would not discern that disturbance from Bennett's reading of 'historical materialism'.
86. J. Bennett, 'The Force of Things'. 46 On the uncanny as grounded in the relationship between the 'homely' (heimlich) and 'unhomely' (unheimlich),
87. S. Freud, 'The "Uncanny"' 1919, pp. 368-407.
88. K. Marx, Capital, p. 87, fn.1, in which he rejects various socialist and utopian experimenters that attempt progressive uses of the money and commodity forms. Also see in the same volume his critique of struggles over wages.
89. Lizardo, '"Fight Club"'.
90. I thank Harlan Morehouse for prompting this observation.
91. I am alluding here to Marx's notion of content versus form, in which social content refers to social relations and social form refers to the various bearers of those relations, such as commodity, money, state, religion, etc.
92. Marx's notion of species being is complex, but we can nonetheless delimit certain precepts. Most important is that workers are simultaneously species beings. But what is the species being idea? First, there is no human being in general and certainly no original, natural form of human being to look back to that can serve as model. Human beings have always been in a state of becoming, including within capitalist modes of production; have always existed within historically and geographical specific complexes of material entities. Second, human beings necessarily come into being through ceaseless interaction with their material surroundings, from which they are and are not distinguishable. That is, they make and are made by those surroundings. Third, human beings are not reducible to the material surroundings with which they interact, nor are these surroundings reducible to human beings. There is no essence behind interaction; interaction is all. Fourth, the human body is not a unified whole but is sensate in different ways: the eye apprehends the world differently than the ear, the ear differently than the mouth, the mouth differently than the hand, the hand differently than the foot, and so on. Fifth, for Marx, human imaginaries distinguish human species beings from other kinds of beings. For the human species being the world does not come ready made: it must be altered to a suitable form (use value). This places a premium on human imagination. Marx writes, 'What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality'. Among other things, this means that the mind is not an effect of the material world it encounters. And taken with the point four, body and mind, contrary to many readings of Marx, do not necessarily form an identity. They are separated by an indeterminacy. Finally, as with the mode of production, there is no species being in general. There are only specific forms of human species being. It is this that much of the rest of the paper aims to trace.
93. K. Marx, 'Economic and Philosophical' and Capital. Direct quote is from Capital, p. 178. Cf. Althusser, 'The Object of Capital'.
94. A. Carlano and B. Sumberg, Sleeping around: the Bed from Antiquity to Now (New York: Oxford, 2006).
95. Physically man lives solely from. products of nature, whether they appear as food, eating, clothing, habitation, etc. Nature is the inorganic body of a man, that is, in so far as it is not a human body. That man lives from nature means that nature is his body with which he must maintain a constant interchange so as not to die. That man's physical and intellectual life depends on nature merely means that nature depends on itself, for man is a part of nature'.
96. Karl Marx, 'Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844', in David McLellan (ed.) Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 81.
97. This point is much indebted to V. Gidwani's highly instructive Capital, Interrupted.
98. K. Marx, Capital, pp. 486-88, especially.
99. L. Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', in L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), pp. 121-76.
100. K. Marx, 'Speech at the Anniversary of the People's Paper' [1856], in Marx/Engels Selected Works, vol. 1, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), p. 500. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1856/04/14.htm (accessed 24 January 2010).
101. We should, I think, see Marla as a participant in the same struggle that preoccupies Jack, notably the struggle of use value to come to presence through exchange value. Moreover, her non-relationship with Jack (they have a mutual disregard even as they clearly yearn for each other) indexes very well how use values in capitalism relate to each other. Use values, Marx notes, do not 'communicate' with each otherdirectly, only indirectly through exchange. Fittingly, Marla can have no direct, positive relationship with Jack, only indirectly through Tyler. (Through to near the end of the film, Marla only recognizes Jack as Tyler Durden.) Only as the credits roll do Jack and Marla confront each other directly, i.e., mutually trusting, and in Tyler's absence.
102. Compare this absence to the striking ending (i.e., the intimations of mass strike) of James McTeigue's filmic version of V for Vendetta (2006).
103. From the last conversation that Tyler and Jack have: