The ‘Black Nazi’s’ prophecy. Who would Norman Mailer be talking about now?

“We will probably never be able to gauge the extent of the psychological devastation that the concentration camps and the atomic bomb have wrought on the collective subconscious of humanity. For the first time in human history, perhaps for the first time ever, we are forced to live with the repressed awareness that even the most imperceptible nuances of our personality and the most insignificant reflection of our ideas – or indeed the absence of ideas and personality – could nonetheless determine our fatal demise, like numbers within some gigantic statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted and our hair collected, whilst our death would remain unknown, neither honoured nor noticed. Not a dignified death, the consequence of serious and deliberate actions, but a death caused by an unidentified deus ex machina’.

It could have been written the day before yesterday by any apocalyptic intellectual or politician, or even Pope Leo, concerned about the fate of ‘magnificent humanity’. After all, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned a few days ago, issuing a dire warning: ‘AI could kill us all within a decade’. The theme is clear: ‘In the midst of civilisation – that civilisation based on the Faustian impulse to dominate nature through the control of time and the cause-and-effect relationships that determine social relations – in the midst of an economic civilisation based on the presumption that time might truly be subjugated to our will, our psyche would itself be subjugated by the intolerable anguish that, since death is meaningless, life too would be random, and time, deprived of cause and effect, would eventually come to a standstill”. Pope Leo would not say this, nor would any prudent, ‘well-adjusted’ individual who is less pessimistic about the coming apocalypse. But it might well have been said by some proponent of post-liberalism or a prophet of the ‘dark Enlightenment’, one element of which is accelerationism: the technological leap that will either bring about the future or the collapse of the whole of humanity.

This sentence, too, seems as if it were written today: “A stench of fear has seeped from every pore of American life, and we are suffering from a collective nervous breakdown. The only courage, with rare exceptions, that we have witnessed has been the isolated courage of isolated individuals.” Yet these are prophecies from many decades ago, concerning a new protagonist: “It was against this bleak backdrop that a phenomenon emerged; the American existentialist – the hipster, who realises that our collective condition is to live under the threat of instant death from atomic war, of relatively swift death at the hands of the State conceived as the ‘univers concentrationnaire’, or of a slow death by conformism, with every instinct for rebellion and revolt stifled”. This was not written by Peter Thiel, a proponent of the theory that democracy is no longer conducive to freedom, yet he could well have written it. Above all, this passage: “To live with death as an immediate danger, to detach oneself from society, to exist without roots, to venture along unexplored paths within the rebellious imperatives of one’s own being… the vital energy with which one must be in tune if one does not wish to risk losing one’s rhythm.”

These are not the words of today’s doomsayers or conformists, grappling with AI or climate change amidst the West’s myriad existential crises. Rather, they capture the essence of the hipster according to Norman Mailer. Let’s take a step back to 1957. The famous article on the “loneliness of the hipster”, The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster, exploded like a landmine in the underground scene of Greenwich Village’s alcohol-fuelled, acid-fuelled nights. The essay portrayed the hipster as the sole form of solitary, autistic, self-destructive yet simultaneously creative rebellion against Eisenhower’s America—our Western world. It caused a scandal and sparked debate, as, for a long time, did everything Norman Mailer wrote. Forty books and two Pulitzers; one of the most celebrated writers of his time, starting with the enormous success of The Naked and the Dead in 1948; founder of the Village Voice. Powerful, excessive, contradictory (“I’d like to see what he writes when he’s sober,” quipped one of his editors, who ended up being sacked).

Perhaps now that the famous acronym, AOC, has declared the era of ‘woke’ nominalist political correctness to be over, that title – and that word ‘Negro’ which recurs relentlessly throughout the text – may be reprinted. In 2023, however – the centenary of his birth – Random House’s refusal to republish it caused a stir, due to the prudishness surrounding the name. Elsewhere, things are no better. In Italian, there is only one edition—a 2015 publication by Castelvecchi—which is virtually impossible to find. Meanwhile, Nave di Teseo, which has embarked on a commendable ‘Norman Mailer Project’, has not ruled out publishing it. But that’s further down the line, not straight away.

A warning for the faint-hearted who require a trigger warning: the word ‘negro’ was, at that time, perfectly integrated into Anglo-American usage and accepted as respectful. This is a far cry from the ‘N-word’, which, incidentally, is rife in American literature. After all, Norman Mailer’s reputation had already begun to tarnish during his lifetime; he was described as ‘a sort of prodigiously failed literary genius’. And he remains an eccentric, contradictory figure, due to his extreme, radical views. In recent years, however, the main criticisms have focused not so much on the content—certainly abrasive, but often original and disruptive—as on the anecdotes and cultural quirks typical of American academia: accusations of misogyny (six wives, nine children), racism and, of course, ‘cultural appropriation’, having sought to mould his hipster as a ‘White Negro’. Mailer is a white man who analyses Black hip culture and argues that, in order to transgress, white people must copy (appropriate?) African-American subculture. As the American critic Andrew Urie wrote in an interesting essay on The White Negro: “It is my belief that the term ‘cultural appropriation’ is nowadays, more often than not, adopted by servile and hypocritical academics, PhD students and cultural critics.” Despite the controversy and conflicting interpretations, unearthing an old edition of The White Negro – The Loneliness of the Hipster published by a libertarian Italian publisher is a highly topical exercise. Starting with the dichotomy that Mailer draws with a stroke of his pen between the conscious rebel and the conformist: “An individual is either hip or square (the choice that every new generation entering American life is beginning to perceive); they are either a rebel or a conformist, a pioneer in the Wild West of American nightlife or a trapped, square soul”. It could very well be a description of our contemporaries projected into a solipsistic dimension, driven by the desire to dominate nature and the psyche. But it could also be a parodic description of the majority of humanity today, resigned to a journey ‘without a present or a future’. If there is one book that, read through today’s lens, reveals surprising paradoxes, it is this one about the ‘white nigger’, the hipster who was (supposed to have) blown the old world to smithereens – the world of the ‘squares’, the normies. And here we go again: an acceleration capable of sweeping everything away.

A brief lexical disclaimer. In Mailer’s era, between the 1940s and 1950s, the term ‘hipster’ referred to a cynical, nocturnal figure detached from society – an urban bohemian. It is a neologism coined in the 1940s to describe enthusiasts of bebop jazz: young, white, middle-class people who idolised and imitated the lifestyle of black jazz musicians. ‘Hip’ is the opposite of ‘square’ (conformist); in African-American slang, it means ‘savvy’ or ‘in the know’. It shares the same root as ‘hippie’ – the term by which, years later, the perplexed middle classes of San Francisco would describe those ‘in step with the times’ who really knew their stuff. Obviously, it’s a case of day and night: the night of the hipsters who lose themselves in promiscuity whilst listening to bebop; and, in contrast, the sunny, flower-power hippies who wanted to change the world (‘Think about how close we came’, Neil Young).

So this has nothing to do with the recent vintage trend – neatly groomed, pacified within a form of consumerism that is nonetheless conscious – of the hipsters of the past decade. A movement that is more parodic than regenerative, lacking any trace of the creative violence of which Mailer’s voluminous writing dreams: ‘It is therefore no coincidence that the origin of “hip” lies with the Black man, who has lived for two centuries on the borderline between totalitarianism and democracy. The presence of ‘hip’ as an active philosophy in the underbelly of American life is probably due to jazz”, to its influence on that “post-war avant-garde generation which had assimilated the lessons of disillusionment and disgust from the 1920s, the Depression and the war”. A generation that shared “a collective distrust of the words of men who had too much money and controlled too many things (an idea that is incredibly relevant today, ed.), they harboured an almost equally deep distrust of the monolithic social ideals of lifelong marriage, family stability and respectable romantic life”. Who was Norman Mailer talking about, and who would he be talking about now? "Every black person who wants to live must live in danger from the very start… they cannot have the security enjoyed by the white masses." Black people do not have "the reassuring figure of a mother, the certainty of having a home, a job, a family". It is from this ‘primitive’, savage state – where violence is the sole code of survival – that the utopia of Mailer’s hipsters takes its cue. Imitating the language of jazz, ‘because jazz is orgasm’. But we shall leave music aside: suffice it to say that when the blues and jazz merged with rock ’n’ roll, a new counterculture exploded: this time, a white, hippie one.

Mailer’s mythologised image of the ‘Negro’, on the other hand, deserves a summary. An awareness of past and present abuses suffered; violence as the sole psychological response. This is what fascinates a generation of white people: ‘It is no wonder that in certain American cities – New York, of course, San Francisco and Los Angeles – or in cities as “American” as Paris or Mexico City, this particular section of that generation was drawn to what the Negro had to offer’. The allure of a different, destructive and self-destructive anthropology, whose power to disrupt and create a new world Mailer predicted – with an imaginative effort that, when re-examined today, seems far too excessive. And so it was that “in places like Greenwich Village, a ménage à trois took shape – the bohemian and the young delinquent came into contact with the Black man, and the hipster effectively found his place in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child born of this union was the ‘hip’ language… And in this marriage of white and Black, the cultural dowry was brought by the Black man”. In that marriage – whether dreamt of or actually taken place – Mahler believed ‘a new breed of adventurers was born: urban adventurers who would drift out at night in search of action’. ‘The hipster had assimilated the Black person’s mindset, and for all practical purposes could be considered a white Black person’. The transgressive myth of the Village was born.

Mailer describes all this as ‘hipster psychopathy’. To summarise with Andrew Urie: ‘Although Mailer’s insights are often expressed in a crude manner, what matters are the aspects of a transgressive fascination, capable of resisting or bringing down the “square” world. Sexual promiscuity, homosexuality and bisexuality that disrupt the social order’. And above all, racial mixing – the true ‘acceleration’: ‘When it arrives, racial mixing will be a terror, perhaps comparable to the delirium of American communists when the icons of Stalin came crashing down’. Then, of course, violence – one of the points that caused the greatest consternation: the nihilistic tolerance of murder, understood as a ‘form of courage’. Essentially, a ‘hip’ and rather unphilosophical version of supermanism. “With the possible emergence of the Black man, ‘hip’ could erupt like an armed rebellion of the psyche, whose sexual impetus would clash with the anti-sexual foundations of organised power in America.” We might pause here in this digression, where Mailer says that “the twentieth century, whatever its horrors, is an extremely exciting century because it tends to reduce all of life to its extreme alternatives”. And the twenty-first, we might add, is certainly living up to that.

What has happened? Which parts of the prophecy in "The White Negro" have come true, and which have not? Some, or indeed many, have – from the conception of sexuality as unlimited gratification, through to social fragmentation, to the violent imposition of the self, which has once again been accepted.

But what was supposed to be a progressive revolution (for better or worse, Mailer is on the left; he writes for the New Left Review, and this book is published by Dissent magazine, even though he described himself as a left-wing conservative) did not come to pass. Nor did it materialise in the form of a ‘Negro consensus’ – after all, the Black person’s emergence from their subordinate status does not occur through violence, but through a slow normalisation: from jazz to cinema to politics – nor did the revolution materialise in the cultural opposite of the hipster: the hippie. Both dreamed of expanding the scope of individual freedoms to bring about a freer society. Not everything went according to plan.

Who would Norman Mailer be writing about today? If we listen to the masters of AI (whether feigning fear or genuinely afraid of themselves) – and worse still, if we listen to the institutional or predatory ‘Lords of War’ – we know they are ready to turn the established world upside down. Except that he wrote this back in 1957. But in the hallucinatory dream of "The White Negro", the marriage between a black rebel and a white hipster was supposed to set everything alight. The awareness of life or death as the horizon. The endeavour failed, or succeeded only in a self-destructive vortex. Some of those goals have been realised, but turned on their head. Sexual polyphony is no longer transgressive in the slightest; rather, it has been turned on its head into reproductive scientism. The true white hipsters – superhumanists and solipsists – are figures such as Elon Musk, who programme their children like algorithms, aiming for a genetic triumph that will, conversely, produce a new class of slaves: no longer Black people, but those who lack access to reproductive technology. The genetically modified generation is being created via computers to which only the upper classes of humanity will have access.

The destructive hipster is the new individualist who recognises neither boundaries nor constitutions. Other themes have been turned on their head. From the deadly drugs of the clubs to mind-enhancing psychotropic substances. From consciousness clouded by jazz-fuelled haze to art created by AI. The mastery of time will be managed by machines, as will immortality – from Thiel to all the others, is it any wonder that this is the new myth? Overcoming the death imposed by the Bomb or by someone pulling the strings was Mailer’s starting point: but it will be only for a few. It will be for some of the new ‘Negro Whites’. The new anthropological divide will no longer be between sexually frenzied, anti-social black slaves and defeated ‘squares’, but between those excluded from the new civilisation of machines and the new esotericism. We’re always talking about Musk, but isn’t it significant that the leader of the AfD is a woman – white (Aryan?) – who lives abroad, with a partner and children she has had with her?

Everything the hipster wanted from his marriage to the Negro comes to pass, but in reverse. Some prefer to dismiss the disconcerting evidence as a new psychopathology. As in an intriguing book, "Psychopathologies of the Far Right". Trump, Milei and the Madness in Power by the Argentine psychoanalyst Yago Franco, now published by DeriveApprodi. The radical right are ‘mad’, yet they are the fulfilment of hipster madness. Norman Mailer writes at one point: ‘It is possible, given that hipsters live with their hatred, that many of them might constitute the raw material for a storm-trooper elite ready to follow the first charismatic leader whose conception of mass extermination is expressed in language capable of stirring their emotional fervour… the hipster is equally a candidate for the most reactionary as well as the most radical of movements’. Would Mailer be a progressive or a reactionary today?