Batman and Anarchism

I know what your thinking... that Batman is not only the Original Gangsta, the Man with the Milkshake, and the Jefe Maximo, but also the Libertarian Socialist we all know him to be.

First let me go out on a limb and lay out my assumptions that readers may takeforgranted/nevercaredabout:

1-Batman is not Bruce Wayne, Batman is Batman. From Grant Morrison's abstract novel Arkham Asylum: a Serious House on Serious Earth, Batman's psychoanalysis rap sheet reads as follows, "Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot. I must be a creature. I must be a creature of the night. Mommy's Dead. Daddy's Dead. Brucie's Dead. I shall become a bat." This reads as Kafka's Metamorphosis - with radical implications. Here batman attempts to escape a class critique, he has a base in the elite but it is not Bruce Wayne's economic wealth that has defined him, it is his personal loss created by economic disparity of which he himself has no hand in other than being born to it. Granted Batman's "First Night Out" depicted by Frank Miller and Mazzuchelli implies that he works from the base of inexhaustible wealth to build from.

2-If Batman is not Bruce Wayne, Bruce Wayne aspires to be Batman. Batman is a symbol beyond a man, a socially defined representation of what (wo)man could become if unrestricted by defined normatives, i.e. law, the state, economic restriction. As Lewis Call depicts in his work Postmodern Anarchism, the Nietzschean Ubermench is intended to 'kill your inner fascist.' The Ubermench, mis-appropriated most famously by a fascist - Adolf Hitler, "the overman or over (wo)man is she who no longer needs the State, or any other institution for that matter. She is her own creator of values and as such the first true an(archist)." The immediate question to this lies in the miseducation of the term anarchist - what of the black-hole of structureless living? Call states that fascism is the converse of anarchism, an ideology that operates at a cellular level rather than the individual level "the horror of fascism grows not out of the fact that it can seize power at the macropolitical level; any state can do that. Particularly horrific is the way it penetrates - rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school and office." It attempts to co-opt the indivual's personal becoming of self-governance. Batman is the Ubermench.

3- As can be extracted from any individualist story, the sole-character is the modern incarnation of Jesus and Mohammad, Buddha and Xenu. For me, Batman is neither. The individualism of Anarchism is about finding god in man. It is not about looking to Batman as the god of men, nor looking to a god generally or specifically. Batman is in a constant state of self-loathing for psychotraumatic reasons, but what he is confident of is his ability of becoming. No question, different writers depict Batman in different ways, from the fascist vigilante who turns the desperate over to the baton of the state (police), to the overly human sleuth who is shot and killed. But the possibilities of what Batman is, are particularly knowable through an anarchist reading.

Finally, this interpretation of a Batman that is above the law in the way described in point #2 is about becoming. Rather than the individual above social law who corrupts their agency by seeking self-promotion at the expense of society, Batman exists in a structured world that he seeks to subvert. Much like the notions of subverting normative behaviour as purported by Foucault, the overly normative pretend actions of elite Bruce Wayne fit perfectly for the true-self of Batman, a persona that is more aligned to subverting the system.

That's Right, you heard me.