Fourier as Trickster: The Poetry of Utilitarian Truth

"The hieroglyph of truth in the animal kingdom is the giraffe. Since the characteristic of truth is to surmount error, the animal that represents it must be able to raise his head higher than all the others: this the giraffe can do, as it browses on branches 18 feet above the ground. It is, in the words of one ancient author, “a most fine animal, gentle and agreeable to the eye.” Truth is also most fine, but as it is incapable of harmonizing with our customs, its hieroglyph, the giraffe, must be incapable of helping humans in their work; thus God has reduced it to insignificance by giving it an irregular gait which shakes up and damages any burden it might be called upon to bear. As a result we prefer to leave it to inaction, just as nobody will employ a truthful man, whose character runs counter to all accepted customs and desires."

– Charles Fourier, 1808 quoted in Lars Band Larsen

Truth for Fourier is also an approximation which could only account for seven eights or eight ninths of any proposition. Thus, in his day and age, civilisation produced only between 87.5 and 88.9% misery. If you were miserable, you might blame the 11 or 12% for your conditions, but there would entail a larger degree of error with the bisection of agents from conditions or mathematizing life bearing standards, and then confusing them like a flag and its condotieri: the demographic error transposes what was only a likelihood or probability statement to a body count. With inflation and two centuries of progress, the certainty is increased by natural inflation to total-minus-one percent misery, which is a pretty sure bet, but still, any culprit delegated to represent the minority would have an equivalently probable claim to innocence.

To increase levels of certainty increases uncertainty in direct proportion. Perhaps this is why reactionary regimes end with a thousand days of terror if they do not instead choose to navigate a thousand bedrooms and deSade probabily did understand that merging bodies was no property transaction when the head is decapitated prior to the engagement, neither perverse, transgressive nor economic. Unfortunately, we are still prone to count bodies like coins in the till: the one percent are thought to cause our misery. The error persists because we've habituated to the use of a single sense organ tuned to track the smell of money. It goes clear beyond our olfactory range that the one percent of bodies are in fact the most miserable and rank offal saturating the lower atmosphere, only illustrating that the most rank can flatulate from the least particle with an orifice for exclusion.

There is another error concerning Fourier. He is, despite his insistence to the contrary, described as a philosopher of Utopia. That is absurd, and Ms. Marx and Engels may more properly fit that description. A brief glance will illustrate that Charles, like Jarry, is an absurdist and a poet. Here is the logic: If we could manage to create a phalanstery as a permanent, self-contained city with a mathematically set population (1620) settled in situ, operating on the principle of fluid movement driven by passional attraction or a cosmologic aesthetic, then you should have no problem with the idea of a tropical arctic paradise and all the oceans turned to lemonade.

But still, we are to expect at an 88% level of probability (the expectation, not the proposition) of truth value. When the phalanstery is an event, not a topical trope or stand, the city is a festival, not a habitation. It took the inhabitants of Togetherness, a Fourieran (hippy) commune near San Francisco only three years to discover that the permanent situation is impossible, and voluntarily disbanded in 1969. The cops have recently discovered this too, but it took forty five years to sink in, hence the permanent eviction of the various occupations last year instead of the old tactic of kidnapping any children issued therefrom. When the occupiers discover the potlatch as the provisional party lasting only as long as the provisions, the cops will be overwhelmed by a puff of logic which cannot be detected through the filtering effect of any gas mask, but is deadly all the same – they'll stop getting a paycheck. Before this can occur, the exchange paradigm will crumble, and rumble will be something one does (with or without switchblades, chains and crowbars) behind the back seat of a '28 ford coupe, and when the moon goes round nine times, a harmonic will emerge from the harmony of the duet with no strings attached as they've all been bitten through and through with no loss of attachment.

Marx' error was in taking Fourier too seriously (or was it the literal translation), an error in linear thinking always generating the eternal return or logical tautology. I expect there is seven eights truth value, once one dispenses with utility, in Furier's assessment that savagery, barbarism and civilisation all emerged in only three centuries after eighty thousand years of harmony, back before dialectics was invented in 492 bc, except as an absurd statistical anomoly, just like, according to Alfred Jarry any absurd truth – one's as good as another – the equivalence of all absurdities.

The Collège d'Sociologie also disbanded when fondling too much the babe of transaction in swaddling clothes none would consider pederastic as through ever-circuitous logic the cosmos remains enframed by the economy, ensuring its eternal return. To de-nominalise a share is to verbalise it, and that is a direct action (sharing) which, no matter how reciprocal it appears, is no matter to barter nor steal and then feel like shit in the morning.