“They understand how to pose subtle and sophisticated questions, but they swamp the sewers of their questions with the tidal sludge of their answers – that unfiltered wealth which is beneficial for a few and detrimental to almost everyone.” – Walter Benjamin
On Saturday night I founds myself at a little dance night in an ex-squat in a quiet corner of Amsterdam. A first year PhD student who had been at the seminar I had attended during the day was there too. His studies were apparently critical in nature, but it was difficult to tell. At the beginning of the night he pulled a few pick-up artist moves on the female friend of a friend who was there with us, before insisting on sitting at the bar and engaging a couple of us in conversation. The discussion didn’t go very far, but centred on his claim that the Netherlands was not a racist country, while quietly justifying elements of its racist culture from Zwarte Piet to the near election of Geert Wilders. Yet perhaps most significant was his repeated insistance that his position was “more nuanced” than ours. Eventually, frustrated and annoyed at his ignorance and intransigence, we left.
Such a claim, of subtlety, sophistication, and nuance seems common these days. Over the last weeks such a position has been put prominently by a number of people who have defended racist events in the art world and the academy such as the LD50 gallery, DC Miller’s talk on Evola in a Neukölln bookshop, or Nick Land’s lecture course at the New Centre in New York. “Look,” they scream on their facebook profiles, “we really are on the side of Enlightenment, of anti-racism, but we just have to let these racists speak in order to show the left where it is going wrong. The anti-fascists who have tried to close down these projects are crude in their actions while we are sophisticated theoreticians.”
There are of course some problems with Antifa, which everyone knows: traditionally it has been a mode of organising that goes after fascists who already recognise themselves to be fascists. Little effort is put into attacking cultures of fascism that are less self-conscious, or into the transformation of latent fascism as an element of the dominant culture. Often too there can be hints of an unwelcome righteousness gained only from the fact that the enemies are fascists, a confidence that one is in the right from the fact that ones opposition are most definitely in the wrong. But these issues are well known, not least by those involved in anti-fascist activism. Amongst those involved in practical anti-fascist politics these issues are routinely discussed – not least because those involved are often, albeit quietly, talented theorists too. Amongst those involved in the protests over the last weeks are extraordinarily acute and thoughtful theorists of racism, of the history of fascism and of resistance movements, of questions of theory and practice, of fascist aesthetics, and of many elements of contemporary culture. If the critics of Antifa spent more time listening to them instead of promoting racists they might have noticed this. Indeed they might have noticed that these recent actions really mark a change in anti-fascist work with an increased focus on fascist cultures and the tendency of certain markets and demographics to produce them.
What is striking though, from the position of the self-aggrandizingly “nuanced” critics, is the lack of nuance in their arguments. These arguments tend to run as follows: 1) All attacks from the left against racists are moralist in tone and juridical in character. That is to say, they take the form of the sort of lawmaking with which modern states control the public sphere. The left, in attempting to refuse racists a voice are taking part in the same sort of action as a supposedly liberal government that curbs the free speech of the press or the revolutionary or the heretic. 2) Racists and fascists are most effectively combatted in debate and discussion. Where this is refused they are likely to be pushed underground and remain unchallenged, meanwhile without engaging racists in discussion the left will fail to understand what it is facing. 3) Where action against racists leads the way before a theoretical understanding of them, it is always premature, always instrumental, always involves some unaccounted for and unreflected upon barbarism. It is better that we complete our understanding and then we will know what to do.
Indeed these arguments are nothing but pieces of caricature: The political world, despite being obviously full of oppression, is transformed into a blank cartography in which everyone is able to speak equally loudly and easily without fear (although especially those willing to pay 400 bucks for an online course); the activist left are mass-produced figurines in the model of Joseph Stalin; racism, especially when enounced by someone with a high enough profile, needs to be listened to, considered and understood before it can be criticised. The fact that these arguments and inferences are so preposterously stupid, so idiotic in fact that those who make them must notice too, suggests that the protestations of nuance and sophistication must be playing some other role.
It is in these self-assurances of nuance that these critics express their sickness, which Walter Benjamin once described as “left-wing melancholia.” Alongside the conviction that they are the most nuanced participants in these disputes is the confidence that they too are the most radical: that their opponents must be liberals, reformists, or plain barbarians. Yet this supposed radicalism remains wholly in the mind. In truth their claims of nuance are the only political moments in their thought, and their politics amounts to quietism. They are not thinkers of the not-yet-actualised but rather of the never-quite-ready. Indeed the twin convictions of nuance and radicalism, which remain at the level of speculation, are great barriers to action and to politics proper. Locked in the cage of the mind these critics never have to negotiate the diremptions of thought and action. They are beautiful souls whose hovering above the world today takes on the form of a drone. As Benjamin wrote of their historic counterparts, a left-wing literary intelligentsia of 1931 who were nourished by poems and paintings describing just how terrible the world was:
This left-wing radicalism is precisely the attitude to which there is no longer, in general, any corresponding political action. It is not to the left of this or that tendency, but simply to the left of what is in general possible. For from the beginning all it has in mind is to enjoy itself in a negativistic quiet. The metamorphosis of political struggle from a compulsory decision into an object of pleasure, from a means of production into an article of consumption – that is this literature’s latest hit.
Those of us who are involved in anti-fascist activism tend not to be so righteous. Reality for us is in the fracture and non-identity of our thinking and action. Politics and learning comes most often in the failure of either or both, although at times we might have small victories. Yet for our critics, the conviction that they will one day be sure of what is right has hardened itself into a sureness. These critics with all their “sophistication” are involved in an infinite regress that freezes them out of politics proper: for them there is never a moment of decision which hasn’t already been made or which won’t have already been made too early when it finally happens, never a moment of failure, never an experience of non-identity. These apparent experts in irony haven’t noticed that while criticising those who plead for a bit of safety, it is they who have already occupied all of the safest positions, free from any need to make decision, unable to enter into a moment of danger.
But then none of this is much of a surprise. Most of them are the ever-more wealthy purveyors of middle-class lifestylism, whether it be in galleries or bookshops or (pseudo-)universities. It makes sense for them to see their apparently critical role as ultimately resting on the intellectual identity and autonomy of the individual who speaks and speaks and speaks but does nothing. They provide for him. Our crude thinking and action against fascists may well get in the way of that. But they can’t see why we would get involved, because in their position of security they fail to notice how threatened, how oppressed, how damaged we are already. They wrongly assume that our thinking is just like theirs but worse, another left-lifestylism that attempts to form self-identical subjects ready for action, but which got off the bus on the way to absolute consciousness a few stops too early. Perhaps then we should accept their terms of sophistication because our own learning in action has taught us what they mean. Perhaps we should accept that we can at times be crude, but at least we are not politically silent or worse.
Crude thoughts have a special place in dialectical thinking because their sole function is to direct theory toward practice. They are directives toward practice, not for it; action can, of course, be as subtle as thought. But a thought must be crude to find its way into action.