Fanon - Battling for the New Man

8/9/2019 Fanon - Battling for the New Man

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ISSN: 1540-5699. Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press). All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN

ARCHITECTURE

Journalofthe SociologyofSelf-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

There is a paradox at the heart ofFanons vision of the future of newly inde-pendent societies: On the one hand, he hadamply analyzed and documented the ap-

parent psycho-pathological character ofthe colonized man (Black or Arab)born ofthe ideational and material conditions im-posed by European domination; on theother hand, he called for the emergence of anew man with a certain type of Europe asa model. How could the matrix, the nexus

of pathology built into the colonized personover the years be overcome in such a way asto lead to the invention of a new man thatwould prevent the duplication of a sick Eu-

rope in her former colonies? Did Fanon, theactivist, allow his political ideals to takeprecedence over his knowledge as a psychi-atrist? Is Fanons conception of a newman mere wishful thinking, a last warningand admonition to colonized people at atime when he knew he was about to die?

Professor Marnia Lazreg is a member the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, 2004) and former fellowof the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, the Bunting Institute (Harvard University) and the Pem-

broke Center (Brown University). She has published extensively on feminist theory, gender in the MiddleEast, cultural movements, social class, human rights, development, and colonial history. One of her arti-cles, Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria ( Feminist Studies

1988) was reprinted in several anthologies and translated into foreign languages. She is the author of TheEmergence of Classes in Algeria: A study of Colonialism and Social Change and The Eloquence of Silence: AlgerianWomen in Question. She also edited Making the Transition Work for Women in Europe and Central Asia. Heressay Consequences of Political Liberalization and Socio-Cultural Mobilization for Women in Algeria,Egypt and Jordan, is due to appear in Anne Marie Goetz, ed. Governing Women: Womens Political Effective-ness in Contexts of Democratization and Governance Reform, Routledge, Fall 2007. She has just completed a

book, Torture and Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad which will be published by Princeton Univer-sity Press in fall 2007.

Battling for the New Man

Fanon and French Counter-Revolutionaries

Marnia Lazreg

Hunter College, City University of New York

[email protected]

Abstract: This article examines Frantz Fanons conception of a new man in the context of thepsychological action campaign initiated by French military strategists during the Algerian war.Using archival research, the article draws parallels between military psychologists and Fanonssearch for a new man in a war of re-colonization for the former and decolonization for the latter.While the French military used sophisticated methods of brainwashing to bring about a newcolonial subject, Fanon relied on anti-colonial political engagement, and an ambiguous relationto a rehabilitated European thought. The paper raises questions about Fanons dismissal of thelong-term significance of brainwashing for individual agency, and the absence of an elaboratepsychiatric response to counter the military psychological action campaign.


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I would like to suggest that Fanons lastentreaty was not only the logical conclu-sion of his analysis of the role of violence/force in the process of decolonization, butalso resonates with an important part of asecret French military strategy of preciselycreating a new man in Algeria usingmethods of psychological action

. In otherwords, both Fanon and the French civil/military authorities were aiming for thesame ultimate goal, the creation of newmen albeit with different methods. Themilitary had a plan for achieving this goal.Fanon proposed a few pointers that fellshort of a program of action. More impor-tantly, although he knew of some of the

psychological action techniques used bythe military in brainwashing, he did notseem to have appreciated their long-lastingeffects on perceptions of self, or on the po-sitioning of the self in relation to the post-independence socio-political order.

In this paper I am concerned with un-derstanding the gap

between Fanonsknowledge of the psychopathology in-duced in the colonized person and his inde-terminate conception of a new man. Ialso seek to understand Fanons apparentdismissal of the effects of military methods

of psychological action, a program thatcombined propaganda, interrogation, and behavior modification. I do not wish tocounterpose the French military and Fanonas an idle yet potentially misleading aca-demic exercise. Rather, I wish to explore thesignificance of Fanons conception of anew man in the context in which it waselaborated, namely the Algerian war,which informed the bulk of Fanons workand ideas. In a way, anti-subversive war of-ficers and revolutionary psychiatrist wereengaged in a course of action that reflectedto each a reverse mirror image of the other:military men used psychology for politicalgain; the psychiatrist used politics for psy-chological gain.

This paper is divided into three parts:

1. The overlap and points of divergencein assessments of the nature of the col-

onized person in the writings of mili-tary strategists as well as Fanon;

2. The strategies used by the military tobring about a new man;

3. Fanons conception of the new man.

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The Algerian war was defined byFrench military strategists as a new war,

or revolutionary war requiring uncon-ventional methods with which to prosecuteit (Lazreg 2007). As such, it was deployedon two main fronts: military and psycho-logical. In fact there were two wars; onewas fought with planes, tanks, and lightmobile units, the other with psychologicalmethods of propaganda and brainwashingin which torture figured prominently. Thissecond and simultaneous war was appro-priately called guerre psychologique (SHD1957, 1959). While regular military propa-ganda targeted French conscripts whose

commitment to the war was deemed weak,psychological warfare proper, which alsoincluded special propaganda techniques, but mostly torture, targeted the Algerianpopulation only. In order to build an effec-tive program of psychological action, mili-tary strategists constructed a psychologicalprofile for use as a template by itinerantpsychological experts, many of whom wereintelligence officers.

Algerians were defined as sub-human(

sous-hommes

), primitivea concept thatwas frequently used by hard line generals

such as Massu and Salanemotional be-ings, detached from reality, fanatics, but

1 In this article, I will use my own transla-tion of the books by Franz Fanon as well as Con-stance Farringtons translation of the Wretched ofthe Earth

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valuing pride, dignity and justice. Al-though intelligent, Algerians were deemedlacking in the capacity for critical inquiry,which, allegedly, was a consequence oftheir attachment to Islam and their result-ing tendency to fanaticism (CAOM). Theroot-cause of the thirst for justice and dig-nity which the psychological action expertsnoted among the native population was notexplained, and thus the colonial system ofrule was left unexamined and untouched.For, explaining it would have meant dis-cussing the socio-economic inequities thatled to the war to begin with. By contrast,Fanons analysis of the Algerian situationnaturally focused on the colonial context

that produced aspirations for justice anddignity. Fanon had also observed that thecolonial construction of the natives charac-ter had no effect on the natives inner selfduring the process of decolonization, al-though it had been at the core of the na-tives decision to free himself of the colonialsystem: The colonized man knows allabout this [his definition as an animal], andhas a good laugh (2002:46). Some officerstoo had doubts that their construction ofthe character of the natives was accurate: Areport issued by the 31

st

Light Infantry

Group,

in the Oran (Wahran) region, notesthat The indigenous people, geneticallydistrustful, observe us, appear indifferent,and adopt a wait-and-see attitude (SHD1956:2).

An examination of the role offorce

inthe anti-colonial war reveals additionaloverlap between Fanon and the militarystrategists conceptions of the necessity ofviolence in an anti-colonial war. Fanon hadargued that colonial rule was based on vio-lence, symbolic as well as physical. The be-ing of the colonized is kneaded with raw,unmediateda rather problematic con-ceptionviolence (2002:48). Consequently,decolonization must by necessity proceedalong a violent path. In this, the colonizedperson turns the violence inflicted uponher/him against the colonist. Force meets

with force, violence itself is its own specialmedium (la mdiation royale); violenceis praxis (2002:83). Anti-subversive warstrategists had argued that the native onlyunderstood the language of force, andthus had to be dealt with only with force.Imputed force calls for more (concrete)force. Force has no other medium but itself.

Finally, Fanons choice of words in dis-cussing the transformation of the colonizedintellectual into a politically aware intellec-tual at the vanguard of the decolonizationstruggle is similar to that of the Psycholog-ical Action strategist: Both use the conceptof contact. For Fanon, contact with thepeople helps the intellectual to discover a

different reality, honesty, good faith.More importantly, contact reveals to thecolonized intellectual, the falsehood ofthe humanistic, universalizing theories thatthe colonizer furnished his mind with(2002:47-49). For military officers, makingcontact with the population was a codeword for pacifying the population afterliberating it from the FLN. Just likeFanon had outlined the risks (includingpopulism and the cult of the detail) forthe intellectual of failing to understand thepeople during contact with them, when he

is ensconced (in French, enfoui) inthem, submerged by their tide, militaryofficers on the ground too had trouble withthe notion of contact with native Algeri-ans. As officer Pouget (1981:143) put it,search for contact, contact intelligence,line of contact etc. This line of contact onthe ground, the Joint Chiefs of Staff repre-sented it on the map in a double underline:red for the enemy, blue for the friend. Where on earth is this devilish contact lo-cated, elusive like the enemy in an unnam-able war? The war was waged in andagainst the population deemed friend andenemy. More importantly, the most efficientmethod of making contact with the pop-ulation-enemy in order to turn it into apopulation-friend was torture.


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Psychological action techniques wereinitially used by the military to secure intel-ligence by making captured combatantstalk, but they soon became crucial to a planof socio-political engineering devised byGeneral Raoul Salan to create a new man.The notion of a new man in which Fanonand anti-subversive war officers shared isintriguing. It was already part of Francesintellectual and public discourse. Further-more, between the two World Wars, a Cen-ter for the Study of Social Problems had

been established under the leadership of anengineer, Jean Coutrot, who had beenstudying the impact of an accelerated paceof industrialization on Man, especiallythe working class man. Around this Societywere people with various agendas, such asAlex Carrel, a eugenicist, who wanted todevelop a program for creating biologicalelites (Clarke 2001:63-86). Although theyadopted the notion of a new man from anon-colonial milieu, the anti-subversivewar officers integrated it in a program ofpsychological action inspired by theories of

crowd behavior (as formulated by Gustavele Bon) and mass manipulation. Theyfound in the work of Sergei (Stepanovich)Chakotin (1940), a student and assistant ofthe famed physiologist, Pavlov, and formermember of the Center for the Study of So-cial problems, justifications and techniquesfor a program of behavior modification inwhich torture played a significant role.

In his book, The Rape of the Masses

, Cha-kotin revealed that political behavior, likeall other categories of human behavior, isbased on four classes of instincts or innate

reactions. Extrapolating from Pavlovs ex-periments with cats and dogs, he argued

that the instincts of struggle (or defense),nutrition, sexuality, and maternity formthe foundation of applied psychology(18-20). Accordingly, the manipulation ofthe right instincts yields the appropriate be-havior through reflex conditioning. For ex-ample, the instinct of struggle is related topassive states such as fear and depression,as well as active states, which include thesearch for power and domination, whereasthe nutrition instinct is related to materialwants and rewards (xv, 19). Chakotin be-lieved that methods used by counter-rev-olutionary fascist movements that literallyraped the masses could be adopted to bringabout behavior reflecting peace, freedom,

and equality among people (19). He re-vealed the techniques that overcome resis-tance in individuals, and produce fear andobedience through expert use of symbols,speech, sounds (including music), and pain

.For instance, resistance (also called inhibi-tion

) can be neutralized in an individual byshocking (overexciting) his nervous sys-tem and causing a deep emotion. In-duced fatigue may also render theindividual sleepy, a condition that weakenshis resistance, and makes him receptive tosuggestion as happens in hypnosis (13).

Chakotins worktaught at the CentredInstruction Pacification Contre-Gurilla

inArzew, Western Algeriainspired strate-gists to mount a physical and moral of-fensive to conquer the population (Souyris1957:102). They saw the appropriateness ofusing violent methods of psychological ac-tion, including placing recalcitrants or no-torious rebels (Souyris, 102-109) in specialmoral rehabilitation camps (

camps de dsen-doctrinement).

Chakotin sensitized psycho-logical action experts in search of the propermethods of behavior modification to the use

of combinations of sound stimulants, im-ages, as well as anticipation of pain. Further-more, modulations of pain in the torturechambers were combined with reflex condi-tioning techniques between torture sessions,calculated to induce detainees to talk.

2 This section is based on chapters 3 of myforthcoming book, Torture and Twilight of Empire:From Algiers to Baghdad

, Princeton UniversityPress.


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Salans New Men

How were these ideas put to use by theanti-subversive war generals? Salan de-vised a shock method which would leadto pacification, based on the erasure ofthe ideological hold that rebels have onthe population; the creation in the popula-tion of a new mindset favorable to ourcause; and the establishment of the right in-frastructure (SHD 1957).This was an elab-orate psychological scheme requiring theutilization ofspecial psychological methods(SHD 1957). Salan cast doubt on the pre-vailing methods of psychological actionwhich emphasized making contacts with

the population. He wished to do a cleans-ing mental operation, followed by a refur-nishing of the mind with new concepts.Echoing Pavlov and Chakotin, he stronglyfelt that pacification could not be super-imposed on a mental domain that had notbeen emptied out of its contents.

Salans method was to set up an organi-zation modeled after the FLN, with a polit-ical commissar, and a commando operatingunderground. The instruments of this pac-ification program were to be the psycho-logical action officers, including Mobile

Officers that traveled to military campsthroughout the country to advise local in-telligence officers, Intelligence Officers, anda trained corps of political commissars.The latter were to be selected by Mobile Of-ficers in close cooperation with local au-thorities from the targeted military zone.They were to be skillfully kidnapped(enlevs) and trained in secret SpecialCenters SHD 1957). After completion oftheir training, the political commissarswould be discretely reintroduced intotheir douars [hamlets], protected and con-trolled with extreme care. They in turnwill secretly recruit members for the newstructure, organized in cells after the rebelmodel, and will form the kernels of future bands which we will later arm (SHD1957). They would be introduced after the

cleansing of the OPA, and the establish-ment of a new infrastructure. They would bring about the ideological conquest ofthe population before being officially incor-porated into the administration of theirzone. At this phase too, a mobile self-de-fense network would be created out of the bands that operated clandestinely. Thispacification method was perceived assolidit was based on a professional teamof psychologically reconverted nativesaswell as economical; its psychological reli-ability would help to reduce the number oftroops. It is unclear how many people werepicked up for no other reason than theywere deemed suitable for the task of being

re-educated into the new men whomcivil and military leaders often mentionedin their communications. This was a policy,initiated at the highest levels of the militaryhierarchy and carried out in secret that tar-geted unsuspecting individuals for psycho-logical engineering.

In treating some of the men who hadbeen brainwashed Fanon distinguished, asFrench intelligence officers did, betweenthe brainwashing of intellectuals and thatof common combatants. However, he feltthat intellectuals were subjected to more so-

phisticated methods than common combat-ants. Fanon was convinced that thetreatment of intellectuals, required ther-apy to rid the victims of the guilt of be-trayal, whereas he deemed the commoncombatants symptoms not serious sincetheir brainwashing was carried out prima-rily with torture (1963:285-289). He failed tosee that intellectuals, of whom he onlytreated a very small number, too couldhave been tortured prior to undergoing brainwashing. Fanon may not have beenaware of the multiple theoretical sourcesused by anti-subversive war psychologicalstrategists in devising their brainwashingprogram, nor was he aware of the full scaleof this program.


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HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNALOFTHE SOCIOLOGYOF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, V, SPECIAL DOUBLE-ISSUE, SUMMER 2007

III. FANONSCONCEPTIONOFTHENEWMANINTHE THIRD WORLD

In the last two pages and a half of theWretched of the EarthI use the French edi-tion, Les damns de la terreFanon calls onthe Third World to blaze a new path, makea fresh start, or in French faire peauneuve (literally get a new skin), to developa new way of thinking, to try and create anew man (2002: 305). To achieve this goal,Fanon suggests that the Third World mantear himself away from Europe for a num-ber of reasons.

First, Europe is now in a state of sta-sis between physical and spiritual frag-

mentation, having exhausted itself in itsnarcissism. It has little to offer the people itcolonized since it brought them destruc-tion, death, and enslavement under the banner of humanism. As he put it Letsleave this Europe that does not cease to talkabout man, but murders him whether itfinds him, at every street corner, in everypart of the world (305).

Second, Europe has lost control andcannot redress its course. It is a rudderlessship that must be abandoned.

Three, a corollary of the precedingpoint, in Europe cerebral work, (le tra-vail crbral) has become painful as it isdisconnected from, alienated from, reality.

These oft repeated reasons over lessthan three pages are meant to demonstrateto the Third World man that the object ofhis dreams is not worth it: We must leaveour dreams, we must abandon our old be-liefs [in the goodness of Europe], ourfriendships for they belong to a time whenwere not alive. It is time to wake up fromthe night in which we were plunged

(301). The awakened Third world man can-not afford to play catch up with or apeEurope. The European game is definitelyup! (302).

But is the European game really up forFanon himself? After identifying all the rea-

sons for which Europe must be abandonedand avoided, he asserts that it is true how-ever that we need a model. He asks thatthe Third World man look elsewhere for in-spiration. Yet, and after portraying Europeas hypocritical, lying, unjust, and genocidalFanon finds himself compelled to outlineher achievements: First, at home, on herturf, Europe has been successful at every-thing she endeavored to do. Second, Euro-pean thought contains answers to all theproblems encountered by humanity(303). Third, Europe would be better atleading Africa should we wish to trans-form Africa into a new Europe (303-5). Inother words, Fanon was convinced of the

universalistic and humanistic core of Euro-pean thought, but felt that it had been per-verted by European men who lacked thewill necessary to fulfill Europes humanis-tic promise and worldview. Instead, thesemen allowed European technology, thesearch for productivity and efficiency, fast-paced existence (in French, rythmes) totake precedence over total man. This ech-oes Coutrots and his associates concep-tion of French industrialization as havingstunted the growth of man, and trans-formed him into a machine of production.

Fanon conflated a political critique of Eu-ropes imperial domination with a critiqueof the impact of technologies of productionon Man, with a capital M, when in reality,as he well knew, colonized Africa, Northand Sub-Saharan, had escaped the processof industrialization that alienated Manfrom his work as mechanization in (all of)French colonial Africa was far less devel-oped than it was in Europe.

Fanon entrusts the Third world manwith the task offinding inspiration in a pu-rified Europe, a Europe cleansed of itscrimes. Of these he lists in a first place thepathological tearing apart of his [Mans]functions and the crumbling away of hisunity (1963: 315). Thus, the Third Worldman must revolutionize Europe by re-ex-ploring its prodigious theses, finding so-


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lutions to the problems that Europe couldnot tackle. This echoes some of the Frenchofficers desire to finish the revolutionstarted in Algeria and take it back to Franceand bring about a new order. For example,Captain Jean Racinet (1970:93), who paci-fied the southern town of Gryvillethought that France ought to achieve theAlgerian revolution at the home of theFLN, in its place, and against it. Wewanted the Algerian population to do itsrevolution. We made the revolution ours(89).

As I already mentioned, the hard linepacifiers had a plan for how to literallyconstruct a new man. The question is how

did Fanon think that a new man could becreated in the formerly colonized societieswhen he had amply analyzed the patho-logical psychic condition of the colonizedman? How could a new man emerge out ofthe psychic mutilation he underwent? Howcould he free Europe of its own distortionswhen he is kneaded with them, molded bythem? This is a double burden that theThird world man must shoulder: free him-self of Europe, while freeing Europe of itsanti-humanistic self.

If colonialism is a system, and Fanon

along with Sartre felt that it was, an anti-co-lonial response must also be systemic. Re-placing the system requires addressing itsmaterial, political, cultural and psychologi-cal aspects. It is not clear whether Fanonthought that this new man would emergeout of this multiple task of creating a newsystem or was he the precondition for thecreation of a new system, regardless of hissundered psyche.

Clearly, the new man can onlyemerge out of a consciousness that has beenable to demystify the colonial ideology ofobfuscation that hides before eternal es-sences. This is the consciousness of the in-tellectual who through contact with thepeople, burns all his [European] idols,namely selfishness, recriminations born outof conceit, and the infantile silliness of al-

ways wanting to have the last word(2002:49). However, the transformation thattakes place in such an intellectual is a func-tion of the degree to which he is part of acolony that has been sufficiently shakenup by a movement of national liberation.Fanon notes that where there has been noreal struggle for liberation, as was the casewith the Antilles, or Senegal, we find[among intellectuals] intact, behaviors andways of thinking picked up in the course oftheir contacts with the colonial bourgeoi-sie. In them, a vigilant sentinel [still]stands guard in defense of the Greco-Latinfortification (50, 49).In Peau Noire, MasquesBlancs (Black Skin, White Masks), Fanon had

applied the Hegelian metaphor to betterunderstand the psychopathology of theAntillean who is born Black but thinks ofhimself as White (especially vis--vis otherBlack people), uses whites as a frame ofreference, and constantly seeks recognitionfor his superiority from his fellow Anti-lleans. He remarks that having had free-dom bestowed upon them, Antilleans donot know the price of freedom. UnlikeBlack people in the United States, Fanon ar-gues, The negro is a slave who has beenpermitted to adopt the attitude of the mas-

ter (1952:198).In the same book, Fanon defines the

psychopathology of the Antillean as re-siding in the hiatus or lack of connectionbetween the family and the larger society.One is Black; the other is dominated cultur-ally and politically by White Frenchmen.Entering societys mainstream means forthe Black Antillean entering and internaliz-ing a state of anomaly. Fanon provides a beginning of a concrete program thatwould restore the Antillean to himself: Useof comic books especially designed forBlack children in order to create new, morepositive myths, songs adapted to Blackchildren, and at the extremeand onewonders why?new history books atleast until 7th grade(141). In other words,changing school curricula to re-socialize


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the Antillean child is the first therapeuticstep toward a restructuring of the self.Fanon also evokes in passing that Sartrehad thought that adoption of Marxism, pre-sumably as a method of social analysis, andthus social demystification, helped thosewho took on the colonial system.

In the Wretched of the Earth , however,Fanon focuses on a mechanism other thantargeted education through which theopacity of the consciousness of self, and ofmimicry of the colonial other, is tran-scended or sublated. Violence , the physicalconfrontation with the colonist, determinesthe extent to which consciousness is de-mystified. And it is so because in the colo-

nies, unlike in the colonizing countries, therelationship between the colonizer and col-onized is raw, unscreened by dsorien-teurs or agents of the colonial system thathelp to gloss over its inequities, and makethem palatable by inducing false conscious-ness. This is evidently not accurate, butFanon may have had in mind the colonizedperson that had not been worked throughideologically by colonial schools. The colo-nized man frees himself of the indigneforced into him by the colonial psychoso-cial order, and regains his humanity. Such a

man remains unspecified in Fanons en-treaty. He could be Ali-la-Pointe, the downand out unemployed young man who re-deemed his life by embracing the Algerianrevolution, or the assimilated intellectualwho manages to wake up from his Euro-pean dreams. From Fanons perspective,Violence as praxis is self-transformative.Violence eradicates the colonial super-structure (2002:49). By erasing the super-structural encasing of the self, violencecreates a cathartic effect productive of anew inner experience of the self. It also pro-duces what Fanon called a self that is ac-tionnel, action-oriented, that exercises itsagency against the colonist. If this analysisremains at the psychic level, nationalisminevitably appears as a pathological re-sponse to a pathological situation; it stems

from a pathological condition. And themuch criticized comment made by Sartre inthe preface to The Wretched of the Earth, thatspecifically brought out the significance ofpathology in Fanons analysis was not offthe mark: Fanon, the psychiatrist, gave apsychological explanation to a politicalphenomenon.

Nevertheless, Fanon clearly describedthe structural preconditions of the emer-gence of decolonized man. These were:liberation of the national territory; an in-cessant struggle against all new forms ofcolonialism; a staunch resistance to com-placency in the higher circles [of politics](2002:223). However, Fanon also provides a

searing critique of post-colonial governinggroups, pointing out their spent national-ism, their dictatorial inclinations, their in-capacity to elaborate a minimalhumanistic catechism, their [African] rac-ism, their aloofness from the people, theirpillaging of national resources (158).Amidst the nausea, and the stench of deathand rot that he feels and describes in vividterms with words such as cadavers andsarcophagi (213, 221), Fanon evinces asort of nostalgia for Europe: The western bourgeoisie, although fundamentally rac-

ist, manages most often to mask its racism by multiplying nuances, thus allowing it-self to preserve intact its proclamation ofthe eminence of human dignity. Or, Abourgeoisie, such as developed in Europe,could, while reinforcing its own power,elaborate an ideology. This dynamic, edu-cated, secular bourgeoisie has successfullyaccumulated capital thereby giving the na-tion at least some prosperity (158,168). Bycomparison, the Third World bourgeoisie isgreedy, lacking in dynamism, lazy and mi-metic (157). One might argue that it wasonly expected that men whose psyche had been thoroughly mutilated would notevolve forms of government that wouldrevolutionize their societies. At any rate, by1961, one year before the independence ofAlgeria, Fanon is disillusioned with the


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new nations of Africa, and finds that Eu-rope had not left its colonies; it is still incontrol. Europes persistent power turnedindependence from apotheosis to curse. Infrustration, going one step further, Fanonturns his critique of the Third World into anargument for historical accountability: Eu-rope is obligated to give the Third Worldaid because the Third World literally cre-ated Europe (95,98).

In sum, the conditions under which thenew man Fanon called for did not avail.They did not exist in Martinique, they didnot exist in Sub-Saharan Africa, but gleamsof them shone in Algeria during the war. Iwill refrain from examining the contempo-

rary Algerian situation as my interest is notto prove Fanon wrong, but to explore whathe meant. How is it possible to explain thatFanon, the psychiatrist, neglected to delveinto a latent and deep-seated form of colo-nial psychopathology (qua- alienation)that would re-emerge after the colonialstruggle was over? Fanons focus was onpolitical engagement, which he endowedwith a curative capacity. The point is notthat political engagement is not necessary;it is. But it is not sufficient. In this sense, theanti-subversive war officers were daring in

their arrogance: They proposed to dealwith the pathology they had created overyears of colonial rule by the forced induc-tion into the colonized of more pathology.The brainwashed combatant was turnedinto a military auxiliary: he became the tor-turer of his former comrades in arms. A laguerre, comme la guerre! Pathology be-gets more alienating pathology, and whatFanon called the restructuring of percep-tion (2002:231) of the colonized man maynot be undone with political action alone orone supplemented by a rejuvenated cul-ture. Rather, intense and focused tech-niques that undo the alienation of thepsyche over generations would seem to bemore appropriate.

Could Fanon have developed a pro-gram of re-conditioning of the people to

counter that of the French psychological ac-tion? I cannot answer this question at thistime.*3 However, judging by the descrip-tion he gave of the French military tech-niques of brainwashing, he was not awareof their multiple sources. Nor did he seri-ously gauge the long term effects of brain-washing. There is a sense in which Fanoncould not have developed such a program.As a militant, busily engaged in politicalanti-colonial action on the side of the FLN,he had little time to devote to it. However,he alone among the FLN circles had thepsychiatric training necessary to under-stand the significance of the methods used by the anti-subversive war military psy-

chologists, and provide a response to them,or at the very least consider them in his con-ception of the new man. Fanons failure todo so and the resulting floating indetermi-nacy that mars his conception of the newman may be partially attributed to method-ological difficulties stemming from the ten-sion that existed in him between theprofessional scientist and the political ac-tivist. Fanon had trouble (as many of us so-ciologists have) with relating theindividual and social levels of analysis, andteasing out the specific from the generic.

The fact that he was a psychiatrist compli-cated matters for him as he had to showspecificitypathological specificity induced by a warped socio-political milieuwhileindicating that it was part of identifiablegeneral patterns that cut across various co-lonial situations.

Fanons analysis of the socially in-duced psychological problems experienced by the individual is accurate. It is so be-cause he understood the nature of colonialrule from within. However, where colonialrule is varied, its variations impact the indi-vidual psyche differently. Algerians had adifferent relation to the French than the An-tilleans did. The colonial divide was not be-

3 I am doing research on this issue to bepublished as a book.


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22 MARNIA LAZREG


tween Black and White, but betweenChristian-French vs. Muslim-Algerian,which concealed from the victims, militantsand activists among them, the raw facts ofrace, if not color. This did not mean thatrace did not play a role in the dynamics ofthe war. It did, but it was experienced dif-ferently at the individual as well as the col-lective levels. The Algerian war helpedFanon to shift emphasis from color as themedium and hotbed of alienation as he didin Black Skin, White Masks, to political dom-ination.

On the one hand, in discussing the Al-gerian war, Fanon de-emphasized the so-cial-psychological pathology he had

observed in the Blida-Joinville psychiatrichospital among the clinically mentally ill aswell as the sane; on the other hand, some-what leery of conventional psychoanalysis,he emphasized action, as a more effectivetherapy for politically induced individualproblems. Aware of the complexity of colo-nial experiences, Fanon had alreadystressed the need to account for context. Hehad noted the differences in attitudes to-wards blackness between Black Antilleansand their American counterparts pointingout that negritude thus found its first lim-

itation in phenomena that account for thehistoricity of men (emphasis added). Andhe had concluded that culture, which hehad described as the second medium (afterliberation of the national territory) throughwhich decolonization is effectuated, is firstand foremost national, therefore situa-tional. Consequently, the problems encoun-tered by various Black leaders living indifferent countries are necessarily different(2002:206). By implication, there cannot bea modal new man in the Third world, noris there one single path that leads to thisnew man.

In passing, I would like to observe thatall along his discussion of the new man,Fanon retains a medical language: The im-agery he uses when discussing the need toevolve a new man is strikingly medical.

The word brain or cerebral is used fivetimes in a little over two pages. For exam-ple, he asks that we gear up our musclesand our brains in a new direction; hespeaks of cerebral work, cerebral real-ity, cerebral mass of humanity,rhythms imposed on the brain. In French,the alliteration effect is more striking as theword for brain, cerveau, derived fromthe same Latin root as cerebral, helps torepeat the sound s. This resonates withwhat was being done at the time to the brains of Algerian combatants in GeneralSalans secret incubators of new men.

The issue at stake for Fanon, as formany of us, was and still is consciousness.

How can it be changed, how can it be trans-formed? Does confronting a system ofdomination necessarily mean a displace-ment of the oppressor as an object of desirefor the colonized? Or, does it mean a rejec-tion of his political and economic rule with-out a necessary questioning of the desirefor him, for what he represents that is envi-able, or not easily obtainable? Does thequestion why arent you like me, whyarent you me?a transposition of theLacanian metaphor of the thief who says:your money or your lifecontinue to

plague the colonized after money and lifehave been had? In raising this question I amnot agreeing with the post-colonial literaryartists (Parry 1981), but merely identifyingan area of inquiry that needs to be ad-dressed. In other words, is the colonial situ-ation, a total situationtotal in thesociological sense given the expression by both Goffman (1962) and Mauss (1967)amenable to transcendence once the colo-nizer is physically removed without a vast,systemic and systematic program of action,not only political but also psychological?Was the Algerian experience of a fierce anti-colonial struggle generalizable, and if sowhy did Fanon fail to tackle a psychologi-cal, counter-counter-subversive war? Whydid Fanon believe that political conscious-ness-raising (as well as some education)


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would undo what he had called a traumain Black Skin, White Masks? By comparison,the anti-subversive officers felt that theycould shock the psyche of the colonizedinto embracing and defending the colonialsystem against their own best interests.They did so systematically, doggedly, andwith some success even though they lostthe war. But what does it mean to lose awar, if some of the principles for which theanti-subversive officer fought continue tobe defended by their victims of yesteryear?

Fanons thought was innovative andinsightful, but it was also conventional inso far as it partook in a number of acceptedverities of the time. One of these is the uni-

versalizing notion (albeit based on the Eu-ropean experience) that the historical agentof development is the bourgeoisie, andwhere this class cannot fulfill that role itwill have to be replaced with the peasantry.Yet, the peasantryoften identified withthe people or with the massesis alsoportrayed by Fanon as needing to be brought up to adulthood by men orga-nized into a democratically structuredparty endowed with an ideology (of libera-tion). Political action through the partywould invent souls, the souls of the peo-

ple. Ironically, Fanons thought convergeshere with that of Foucault who argued thatmodern techniques of discipline aim to ed-ucate the soul (1995:29). Thus, Fanon didnot shy away from a patronizing recom-mendation that the peasantry be disci-plined while at the same time hailing it asthe crucible of revolutionary action.

It is important to realize that Fanon, asSartre understood, was writing for a spe-cific audience: Those of us who experi-enced (or continue to experience) colonialdomination and are fully aware of it, aswell as those of us who have yet to becomeconscious of its implications for who andwhat they are. In the end, at the end of hislife, Fanon wished to remind us that thereare multiple ways in which colonial cul-tural and political hegemony establishes it-

self in the hearts and minds of generationsof colonized and ex-colonized peoples.He wished to warn us and to admonish usto strive to reconstitute ourselves as newmen and women with the fragments of ouralienated or dispersed selves, to be wholeagain, free, sound in mind, independent atlast, full agents of our own actions. He didnot provide a program for the emergence ofsuch a man/woman. Perhaps Fanon wasthe very model for the new man he calledfor, he who, in Blida, put the specializedknowledge of psychiatry to work for thepeople it was turned against, who cured hisAntillean self by joining in with colonizedAlgerians to fight a common oppressive

power. And as he put it: On the battlefield,bounded by scores of Black men hung bytheir testicles at all four corners, a monu-ment is erected that promises to be grand.And at the top of this monument I alreadymake out a White man and a Black manholding hands (1952:200).

REFERENCES

Chakotin, Serge. 1940. The Rape of the Masses.

London: George Routledge and Sons.Centre des Archives dOutre-Mer (CAOM).

SAS/doc/5. Mmento de lofficierdaction psychologique en Alg-rie,Annex III.

Clarke, Jackie. 2001. Engineering a New Orderin the 1930s: The Case of Jean Coutrot,French Historical Studies 24, no.1:63-86.

Fanon, Frantz. 2002. Les damns de la terre.Paris: La Dcouverte.

Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth.Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre.Translated byConstance Farrington. New York: GrovePress.

Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau Noire, Masques Blancs.

Paris: Editions du Seuil.Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish:

The Birth of the Prison. New York: VintageBooks.

Goffman, Irving. 1962. Asylums. Essays on theSocial Insitution of Mental Patients andOther Inmates. Chicago: Aldine publish-ers.


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Lazreg, Marnia. Forthcoming. 2007. Torture andthe Twilight of Empire: From Algiers toBaghdad. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.

Mauss, Marcel. 1967. The Gift. Forms and Func-tions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. NewYork: W.W. Norton.

Parry, Benita. Problems incurrent Theories ofColonial Discourse, Oxford LiteraryReview 9, 1-2(1987), 27-58.

Pouget, Jean. 1981. Bataillon R.A.S. Algrie(Paris: Presses de la Cit).

Racinet, Jean-Claude. 1970. Les capitaines dAvril. Paris: Editions France-Empire.

Service Historique de la Dfense (SHD).1H3196/1. November 1956. No. 1265/31/S. Rapport sur la Campagne dAlg-rie, 4_me Division dInfanterie Motor-ise, 31o Groupe de Chasseurs Pied.

Service Historique de la Dfense (SHD).1H1261/4, March 7, 1957. DirectiveGnrale No. 6, au sujet de lactivit dumaintien de lordre en Algrie.

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Souyris, Captain A. 1957. Les conditions de laparade et de la riposte la guerre rvolu-tionnaire, Revue Militaire dInformation281:102.

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