Mark Fisher: Exiting the Vampire Castle // Carla Bergman & Nick Montgomery - The Stifling Air of Rigid Radicalism
We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity
instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we
must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of
exclusion and excommunication. This summer, I
seriously considered withdrawing from any involvement in politics. Exhausted
through overwork, incapable of productive activity, I found myself drifting
through social networks, feeling my depression and exhaustion increasing.
‘Left-wing’ Twitter
can often be a miserable, dispiriting zone. Earlier this year, there were some
high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were
‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes
objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified
and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and
witch-hunting moralism. The reason I didn’t speak out on any of these
incidents, I’m ashamed to say, was fear. The bullies were in another part of
the playground. I didn’t want to attract their attention to me.
The open savagery of
these exchanges was accompanied by something more pervasive, and for that
reason perhaps more debilitating: an atmosphere of snarky resentment. The most
frequent object of this resentment is Owen Jones, and the attacks on Jones –
the person most responsible for raising class consciousness in the UK in the
last few years – were one of the reasons I was so dejected. If this is what
happens to a left-winger who is actually succeeding in taking the struggle to
the centre ground of British life, why would anyone want to follow him into the
mainstream? Is the only way to avoid this drip-feed of abuse to remain in a
position of impotent marginality?.. read more:
About a century ago,
the famous anarchist Emma Goldman was at a party, dancing her heart out, when a
young man took her aside. “With a grave face, as if he were about to announce
the death of a dear comrade,” the man told her that “it did not behoove an
agitator to dance.” It made the revolutionary movement look bad, he said.
Goldman was pissed, and basically told the guy to fuck off. This encounter is
thought to be the source of the now famous defense of joy and play often
attributed to Goldman: “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.” This wasn’t
just about dancing. Goldman insisted that conformity and policing persisted
within radical movements themselves, and radicals were expected to put “the
Cause” before their own desires.
A century later, while
the rules may have changed, something still circulates in many political
spaces, movements, and milieus, sapping their power from within. It is the
vigilant apprehension of errors and complicities in oneself and others; the sad
comfort of sorting unfolding events into dead categories; the pleasure of
feeling more radical than others and the fear of not being radical enough; the
anxious posturing on social media with the highs of being liked and the lows of
being ignored; the suspicion and resentment felt in the presence of something
new; the way curiosity feels naive and condescension feels right. We can sense
its emergence at certain times, when we feel the need to perform in certain
ways, hate the right things, and make the right gestures. We’ve found ourselves
on both sides of its puritanical tendencies, as the pure and the corrupt. Above
all, it is hostile to difference, curiosity, openness, and experimentation.
This phenomenon cannot
be exhaustively described, because it is always mutating and recirculating. It
cannot be reduced to certain people or behaviors. It is not that there are a
bunch of assholes out there stifling movements and imploding worlds. In fact,
this vigilant search for flawed people or behaviors—and the exposure of them
everywhere—can be part of the toxic process. No one is immune to it. It is
widely felt, but difficult to talk about, so there’s not much point in shouting
about it. It is more like a gas: continually circulating, working on us behind
our backs, and guiding us towards rigidities, closures, and hostility. The air
makes us cough certainties: Some feel provoked, and attack or shrink away;
others push cough medicine; but none of this stops the spread. For us at least,
there is no cure, no gas mask, no unitary solution.
We have come to call
this force rigid radicalism. It is both a fixed way of
being and a way of fixing. It fixes in the sense of
attempting to repair, seeing emergent movements as inherently flawed. To fix is
to see everything as broken, and treat struggles and projects as
deficient. It also fixes in the sense of making permanent, converting fluid
practices into stagnant ways of being. When rigidity takes over, creative
transformation dies out... read more:
