The phrase ‘really existing’ in my title is intended to echo the common prefix to Soviet state and other socialisms thought to have at various times operated as the dominant economic mode in a given country. That such a phrase exists is indicative of the fact that there has been a strategic need, on the Left, to distinguish between effective (in the sense of ‘having effects’) socialism and the strains of latent or regressive socialism which exist to greater or lesser degrees in non-socialist countries. In this paper I will argue that an aspiration towards an ontology analogous to that represented by the ‘really existing’ prefix is what Tyler Durden and the members of the titular organisation in David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club embody and negotiate. This aspiration is both gendered and revolutionary, that is, an attempt is made to solidify a particular ontological status in the spheres of both identity and politics. Durden is the strategy Edward Norton’s narrator (whom I will refer to as ‘X’) unconsciously employs to effect an alteration in the postmodern order. I will argue that the ‘problem’ of Fight Club is that X (and therefore Durden) are products of that very self-contradictory postmodern moment, and that their revolutionary efforts are thus problematised from the outset. The narrative progressively explores two strategies for change: a) a reversal of the postmodern destabilisation of gender and, when an ineffective identity politics becomes an exercise in simulacra, b) revolution proper. Whether the latter of these strategies has been effective is left ambiguous by the end of the film, but what emerges is a compelling picture of the historical limbo of postmodernity, a moment antagonistic to both past and future.
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Foto: Sylvia John