Category: Philosophy

Cancel culture is back but, of course, it never really went away. And yet, the recent flurry of controversies surrounding a new narrative no one can get enough of — JK Rowling and the Succession of Statements — makes it feel like the debate around its existence has resurfaced in the popular media with a vengeance.

I have complicated feelings around cancel culture, personally — partly because it is often so scatterbrained in its approach, precisely because it is not the magically unified movement it is often made out to be by its opponents.

This tweet, however, broadly hits the nail on the head:

But this is not to ignore cancel culture’s more interpersonal instances of emergence, where it tends towards the encouragement of a lot of leftist infighting. I’ve spoken before about this — about how I found myself on the receiving end of an attempted cancelling in 2017, and how it really sent me west, pushing me into some dark corners of the political imaginary that I’m happy to have later crawled out of. However, I’ve also witnessed numerous other people go through the wringer of leftist paranoia in this way — a paranoia mistaken for a militant sense of justice — and many of them have unfortunately not recovered.

The issue for me is that “cancellation” is, in its everyday usage, bad praxis. It rarely looks like how it is described above. In less public instances, it often pushes those accused of a leftist infidelity further into the arms of an apparent enemy. It also seems to me like it often resembles a kind of mutually-assured mental destruction. No one who comes out of an instance of cancellation, whether sent or received, does so undamaged. So whilst holding public figures to account is important, cancelling is a terror if it is used as a blunt instrument.

This is to say that I think there is a huge difference between punching up at those who have long gotten a free pass on over-inflated platforms and those who have been on the receiving end of a paranoid “prison politics”. Those who perceived themselves as being victims of a successful or attempted cancellation nonetheless often confuse which side of the divide they are on.

This tendency is epitomised, I think, by Nina Power’s recent article on JK Rowling for the Telegraph. To talk about “a principle of charity” in this regard is laughable for multiple reasons.

Rowling is in a position where she is far too used to a rhetorical charity. It is arguably what makes people of such cultural acclaim stop thinking once they get to a certain level of success and forget that they are human and when they open their mouths what comes out can be dogshit. As such, Rowling epitomises a petite bourgeois white feminism that clings tightly onto experiences of suffering, despite the extent to which her present circumstances have changed.

Take, for example, all of the times that Rowling has spoken about her experiences of depression and anxiety, single parenthood and the struggles of getting published, or her most recent claim that she too could have been trans maybe in another life — she does sometimes publish under a male pseudonym, after all, and that’s basically the same thing. In the spirit of the principle of charity, however, it remains true that Rowling has been through some tough times — and these are experiences that shouldn’t be diminished.

Everyone is broadly in agreement about this. When the Sun opportunistically ran an interview with her ex-husband, who she left amidst accusations of domestic violence, many of those critical of her TERF tendencies were among the first to rally behind her and criticise the Sun. But that alone does not legitimate her other positions. In fact, she seems to be incapable of empathising with those who find her articles and carelessly tweeting to be as upsetting as the Sun’s article about her. Nina Power also fails to grasp the limits of her own argument in this regard.

It is clear that, in that moment, Rowling’s husband was approached through the principle of charity and given a far bigger platform to not apologise for his behaviour on than he warranted. It was also an interview displayed with more prominence than it needed. It was seen by thousands and this was damaging, not just to Rowling but also those who share in her experiences. Evidently, there are instances where a principle of charity is inappropriate.

I’ve been thinking about Nancy Hartsock’s feminist standpoint theory a lot recently, in light of this, after transcribing a Mark Fisher lecture which discusses it. The central point here is one against the moral relativism of this sort of argument, whereby everyone is entitled to their own point of view, but it is also true that some points of view are nonetheless better (and better informed) than others. Applying this to class struggle, Hartsock uses the figure of the cleaner as an analogy — specifically someone who cleans toilets for a living. This person is, as far as society is concerned, at the bottom of the social ladder. They do a job few want to do. However, in cleaning utilities they also understand better than anyone how those utilities are used. Whilst, for a bourgeois establishment, this kind of labour is increasingly abstracted — it just gets done whilst those who do it remain invisible — the person at the bottom sees all. They see the machinations of the capitalist system above them and, if encouraged to break the illusion of immediacy, can have a far better understanding of capitalism in its totality than a bourgeois class that is wrapped up in the ignorance of abstraction.

In the world of twenty-first century gender politics, we are discovering new depths to this upturned pyramid of privilege. There is certainly, in some corners, a race to the bottom, but people’s analyses of the world around them more often than not speak for themselves. However, it goes without saying that trans people have always been on a lower rung of the ladder than cis men and women. This is most apparent when we consider the arguments that trans people are suddenly everywhere. They’re not suddenly everywhere but rather are no longer so socially invisible. They have also been afforded greater freedoms by social progress and now their perspectives on the illusions of gender (given in immediacy) are being heard. It is also clear to many that women like JK Rowling, no matter how contrary this may seem to their personal experiences, have been listened to at the expense of other demographics long enough. Their struggles are real, but their perspectives are nowhere near as omniscient as they like to insist. When push comes to shove, this becomes very much apparent. (See: “Central Park Karen”.)

Of course, no one likes to have their worldview challenged in this way. No one likes to hear the suggestion that their view of reality, no matter how “rational” in the parochial context of their own experiences, is off the mark. This often isn’t the start of some dialectical process, however. The likes of JK Rowling — Alan Sugar is also one of the first to come to mind — more often than not retain a firm grip on their time lower down the social hierarchy in order to further abstract their own success as the expense of others. What they end up expressing, as a result, is a kind of cognitive dissonance, whereby their understanding of oppression is acutely blinkered because it is solely defined by their own experiences. It is clear, in this sense, that social mobility does not provide better informed perspectives. The world you left behind is lost in the haze of abstraction.

The irony of Nina Power’s article on all of this is that she has fallen into this very trap, although her mobility has been more horizontal than vertical. Much of her most recent work bemuses many people but I think it makes perfect sense in the context of her combined experiences of state persecution and leftist persecution. The combination of the two blurs the boundaries rather than providing a better view of the whole. It is sad, more than anything. What is dangerous about this, however, is how her own reasoning is draped in the pretensions of a flawed philosophy. This is not simply a case of one person slipping from left to right. For a philosopher of her standing, it is far more embarrassing than that. After all, surely there is no fate more shameful for a Badiou scholar than to end up defending moral relativism in the Telegraph.

I am all for the principle of charity and the left could certainly do with internalising one, but it requires a version of this principle that is far more robust than Nina Power’s. After all, sometimes charity is little more than an attempt to launder an ethics, and obscure the extent to which, as Badiou might put it, we have betrayed a truth.

Update: There was considerable fallout from this post. You can read about that here.

Black Lives Matter sends identity politics into a feeding frenzy but it only ends up chomping on itself. The argument here from Matthew Goodwin is simple: a collective sense of self is detrimental to an individual sense of self.

But that’s precisely the argument being Black Lives Matter, isn’t it? Capitalism’s tyranny of the individual has, for too long, ruled over the subjugated collective.

This is only problematic if you think individual subjectivity has supremacy over group consciousness, and that is already the default position of society at large. Strangely, Goodwin is exactly right about idpol — and this is why Black Lives Matter belongs distinctly to something other. It is the “White Lives Matter” crowd who drag it down into the muck of identity politics (read: “individual identity politics”). Because of this, Goodwin betrays a lack of critical reflection regarding this core aspect of the meaning of Black Lives Matter — the correct response to which is an ejection of capitalism’s constant stoking of competition.

Black Lives Matter is distinctly non-competitive. It demands an answer to a simple question: “Don’t we matter?” The collective nature of the retort is hard-baked into their standpoint due to the oppression faced. Individuals murdered at the hands of the police are not murdered for their individuality but because they are seen as “Black people”, i.e. a member of an ethnic group. Part of the oppression of Black lives is that this collective perspective is enforced — the foundation for any instance of profiling. The raising of Black group consciousness is, then, wholly necessary if Black lives are to combat the extent to which society declares “you are the bad ones.”

The irony of “White Lives Matter” is that this statement, in turn, responds defiantly to the implicit message of Black Lives Matter, betraying their blinkered perspective through such a hopelessly myopic misunderstanding of the stakes involved.

This is to say that “Black Lives Matter” declares we are not the bad ones. Proponents of “White Lives Matter”, who betray their racism by demonstrating they can only think in dualisms, are implicitly declaring: well, neither are we! And whitey doth protest too much, methinks, because this response does not emerge defiantly from an oppressed consciousness; it emerges from a consciousness not used to thinking of itself any differently.

Insert Mitchell and Webb meme:

Rather than skulls on hats, the attacks on our nations’ statues illustrate another part of the problem of capitalism. We may not march forth under an explicit banner of death but we do march uncritically under the tyranny of the individual — and many of these individuals have committed crimes against humanity; against the human collective.

All lives don’t matter if Black lives don’t matter — this is the message of BLM rendered most succinctly. But, beyond this, it is also true that all lives don’t matter so long as we retain our flawed devotion to individuals. This is the hypocrisy of London’s Parliament Square. There is an implicit sense that the statue of Winston Churchill, architect of the Bengal famine, is offset by his stone neighbour: Mahatma Ghandi. But in both instances, the championing of the individual covers over the facts: that Churchill killed millions whilst Ghandi fought for millions. But in each instance the deeper point is missed. We champion leaders, not lives, and this is implicitly a capitalist perspective. We champion business leaders, not workers. We declare that, on the few occasions when workers rise through the ranks to be leaders, this is evidence that we care about the mass. But we don’t. We care about individuals.

This is why names like George Floyd float to the top. But Floyd has not been championed because he is exceptional but because he represents a statistic. In fact, it is as an individual that he is denounced. He wasn’t a leader in his community. He wasn’t a figure to rally behind. So why should we rally behind him? But the denouncing of Floyd’s individual character only further highlights the extent to which they miss the point. George Floyd, in the moment of his death, was not George Floyd, he was a Black man. And it is Black lives that matter.

Dominic Raab came under fire today for saying he doesn’t understand the gesture of “taking the knee” as a form of protest, saying it is “a symbol of subjugation and subordination” from Game of Thrones and, other than when he proposed to his wife, he’ll only be caught doing it before the queen.

The fury at Raab supposedly comes from his complete misunderstanding of the act’s context — its origin in Colin Kapernick’s bizarrely controversial habit of kneeling during the US national anthem before football games. For a government official to not possess what is general knowledge for anyone who has watched these protests unfold over the last few years is quite shocking. If anyone should be paying attention to the growing protest movements in other countries, surely it is the UK’s foreign secretary?

But is Raab wrong beyond that?

After all, “taking the knee” is a sign of subjugation, in much the same way “hands up, don’t shoot” is — it is a symbolic relinquishing of personal sovereignty; a gesture to remind cops of their power and responsibility, and a plea that they don’t abuse it. This is surely the same symbolic meaning behind kneeling before a monarch? When the queen lowers that sword onto your shoulders to knight you, it is as much a sign of mutual trust as it is of deference. In our present moment, however, it is a gesture that only serves to highlight how little mutual trust there is.

Neomi Bennett’s case, also in the news today, demonstrates precisely why this kind of protest is necessary. A widely respected nurse, who had even been honoured by the queen for her services to nursing, she was arrested for obstruction because she didn’t trust the police officers who had pulled her over; police officers who were as bemused by her fear as she was of their lack of probable cause. Why does her lack of trust in police give them reason to arrest her, whilst their lack of trust in a black woman sat in her car is no grounds for disciplinary action? Who is supposed to be serving who here?

This is precisely why the sight of Keir Starmer or the police taking the knee alongside protesters often looks hollow. These government officials and police use it as a vague reminder to protesting citizens that police officers and politicians, in their turn, are citizens too. But this is little more than an illusion, made possible by the thin veil of what constitutes parliamentary democracy in the twenty-first century. Because they still hold the sword. A police officer should only take the knee after resigning. Until then, it makes as much sense as kneeling before the queen so that she can kneel back. Taking the knee is an all too temporary gesture if, when you stand up again, you’re still wielding the sword of the state.

In this sense, the reference to Game of Thrones is oddly fitting. When characters talk about taking the knee to show deference to their rulers, it is a sign of necessary surrender. But there is a palpable difference in the show between taking the knee for an unofficial leader, who vows to fight for the subjugated, and taking the knee before a tyrant. (The cognitive dissonance of police officers comes from their mistaken belief that they are the former when their behaviour points more towards the latter.)

Surely this is why Kapernick combines his kneeling with a fist raised aloft, as a sign of unity and solidarity, much like Tommie Smith and John Carlos before him. There’s an almost Nietzschean-Bataillean foundation to this gesture, as a seemingly paradoxical gesture of subjugated power. In this sense, the power of the movement rests of its foundation in profound loss, in loss of life, and the power of taking the knee comes from doing so before police who are a probable threat to your life. Beyond its present usage, Kapernick taking the knee placed an inconvenient truth centre-stage within American life — whilst they sing about the land of the free, he represents the home of the brave, daring to remind the world that, in America, black lives are subjugated lives.

But this very suspension of being had given rise to a movement more sovereign than any that has come before it.

The hordes descending on UK cities to defend statues over the weekend have been laughable, even if their actions are telling.

As tweeted earlier, the argument that the Right have been peddling — that our nation’s old statues, installed by past generations, depicting slavers and the like, should stay up despite the current climate because they educate people — has been spectacularly undermined, as the statues’ defenders turn out to be the stupidest people around.

This all happened mere hours after Boris Johnson himself regurgitated the educational argument in an official statement.

He was immediately made to look like an idiot, as the All Lives Matter counter-protesters went on to attack police and damage property with far more wanton abandon than any of those people Johnson was denouncing.

Who are the “mindless thugs”, really? Those seeking to illuminate the more maligned periods of our history through focused civil action? Or a throng of galaxy-brained counter-protesters who have wrought more violence on the police than those actually campaigning for their abolition?

For all the calls to execute that kid who climbed the cenotaph last week, here we’ve got footage of someone pissing against a memorial to PC Keith Palmer.

Meanwhile, up the road, counter-protesters greet that same cenotaph with Nazi salutes — a cenotaph that had previously been “defaced” by little more than the presence of Black bodies in its vicinity.

Saturday was a fascist’s wet dream, as they got off on punching police and collectively pissing in the doorway of a branch of Boots.

It’s hard to make sense of such abject idiocy, but all we see here is the brainrot that occurs when you’re overcome by ideology. Of course the heinous crime of attacking statues — which are representative of ideology in the most implicit and pernicious fashion — has to be combated with a vibrant demonstration of the strength of ideological capture.

It makes no sense whatsoever from any viewpoint outside of this capture, but I hope it only helps to embolden those who’ve already been protesting these past few weeks, in affirming their distance from that strange mental enclosure.

The somnambulist action of these idiots reminded of this extended passage from Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology, in which he digs below this sort of mindlessness, that hides its lack of logic under a thin veil of inconsistent principles (please excuse Žižek’s usual edgelording):

…for Lacan, the only point at which we approach this hard kernel of the Real is indeed the dream. When we awaken into reality after a dream, we usually say to ourselves ‘it was just a dream’, thereby blinding ourselves to the fact that in our everyday, wakening reality we are nothing but a consciousness of this dream. It was only in the dream that we approached the fantasy framework which determines our activity, our mode of acting in reality itself.

It is the same with the ideological dream, with the determination of ideology as a dreamlike construction hindering us from seeing the real state of things, reality as such. In vain do we try to break out of the ideological dream by ‘opening our eyes and trying to see reality as it is’, by throwing away the ideological spectacles: as the subjects of such a post-ideological, objective, sober look, free of so-called ideological prejudices, as the subjects of a look which views the facts as they are, we remain throughout ‘the consciousness of our ideological dream’. The only way to break the power of our ideological dream is to confront the Real of our desire which announces itself in this dream.

Let us examine anti-Semitism. It is not enough to say that we must liberate ourselves from so-called ‘anti-Semitic prejudices’ and learn to see Jews as they really are — in this way we will certainly remain victims of these so-called prejudices. We must confront ourselves with how the ideological figure of the ‘Jew’ is invested with our unconscious desire, with how we have constructed this figure to escape a certain deadlock of our desire.

Let us suppose, for example, that an objective look would confirm — why not? — that Jews really do financially exploit the rest of the population, that they do sometimes seduce our young daughters, that some of them do not wash regularly. Is it not clear that this has nothing to do with the real roots of our anti-Semitism? Here, we have only to remember the Lacanian proposition concerning the pathologically jealous husband: even if all the facts he quotes in support of his jealousy are true, even if his wife really is sleeping around with other men, this does not change one bit the fact that his jealousy is a pathological, paranoid construction.

Let us ask ourselves a simple question: in the Germany of the late 1930s, what would be the result of such a non-ideological, objective approach? Probably something like: ‘The Nazis are condemning the Jews too hastily, without proper argument, so let us take a cool, sober look and see if they are really guilty or not; let us see if there is some truth in the accusations against them.’ Is it really necessary to add that such an approach would merely confirm our so-called ‘unconscious prejudices’ with additional rationalizations? The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not ‘Jews are really not like that’ but ‘the anti-Semitic idea ofJew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system.’

Does this not capture almost every media talking point from the last two weeks?

These thugs are tearing down these statues too hastily, casting judgement upon them too readily; we must debate and take a sober look at the pictorial legacy of the slave trade in our society.

In response, the Major of London’s office erects hoardings around the cenotaph and Winston Churchill. To protect them? Or to make them disappear, once again, in plain sight?

This is something that Mark Fisher used to say a lot, particularly within the context of capitalist realism. The first move of any hegemonic ideology is to deny its own existence. It is when ideology becomes indistinguishable from reality that ideology has won. How telling that, once the ideological statues of our city centres lose their cloak of invisibility, they must be covered up with actual cloaks. The result? An intensification of ideological demonstrations to counter the removal of ideology from plain sight — but the demonstrators as a mindless as the stone from which the statues are made.

That’s not just an insult aimed at their lack of intelligence. It encapsulates the very calcifying process of ideology. As Lukács argues in History & Class Consciousness: ideology — and, indeed, history itself, as the backbone of ideology — reifies and turns to stone the subjects most firmly in its grasp:

History is no longer an enigmatic flux to which men and things are subjected. It is no longer a thing to be explained by the intervention of transcendental powers or made meaningful by reference to transcendental values. History is, on the one hand, the product (albeit the unconscious one) of man’s own activity, on the other hand it is the succession of those processes in which the forms taken by this activity and the relations of man to himself (to nature, to other men) are overthrown. So that if … the categories describing the structure of a social system are not immediately historical, i.e. if the empirical succession of historical events does not suffice to explain the origins of a particular form of thought or existence, then it can be said that despite this, or better, because of it, any such conceptual system will describe in its totality a definite stage in the society as a whole.

“History” itself — the illusion of history — is precisely the dream from which these ahistorical thugs cannot wake.

[T]he nature of history is precisely that every definition degenerates into an illusion: history is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man. It is therefore not possible to reach an understanding of particular forms by studying their successive appearances in an empirical and historical manner. This is not because they transcend history, though this is and must be the bourgeois view with its addiction to thinking about isolated ‘facts’ in isolated mental categories. The truth is rather that these particular forms are not immediately connected with each other either by their simultaneity or by their consecutiveness. What connects them is their place and function in the totality and by rejecting the idea of a ‘purely historical’ explanation the notion of history as a universal discipline is brought nearer.

The far-right understanding of history is a bourgeois fairy tale — it tells them of nothing more than their own success. (This is most tragic for a newly maligned stereotype of the white working class man, who identifies more with his oppressor: a gaslit subject whose Stockholm Syndrome has been goaded for years by the far-right populists of recent years.) After all, ask yourself: Why do so many politicians end up writing their own history books? (Lest we forget that Boris Johnson wrote his own biography of Churchill.) Lukács has the answers.

This is why the distinction between the tearing down of statues as history becoming itself and history being destroyed are important. History is only fixed if we are fixed. We become reified as our histories are reified. For Lukács:

Reification is, then, the necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society. It can be overcome only by constant and constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of existence by concretely relating to the concretely manifested contradictions of the total development, by becoming conscious of the immanent meanings of these contradictions for the total development.

This is partly why this moment is so interesting and, indeed, why the Black Lives Matter protests are the closest we have come to any truly accelerationist action in decades.

We have seen the ideology of capitalist realism wane among the (broadly) working classes — that is, among those who work — but, since capitalists make all the decisions, little change has come about. This is the crisis of the negative, and it is a crisis felt most impotently by whites — they lack the “standpoint” (as Lukács would call it) of the truly oppressed. This is why change is occurring only following an attack on the statues that represent a truth still too hideous for an ideological hegemony to compute — that we built this nation on the backs of slaves.

“Nothing has ever denied of its contradictions” is a line uttered many times around this blog, and it is most often used to denounce a far-right accelerationism that thinks chaos alone can change the world. But we might look upon that statement a little more closely. Why is that the case, at least in their case? Because ideological systems of oppression generally tend to hide their contradictions. Far-right accelerationists thinking that, by committing acts of terror, they can help trigger a race war and set the contradictions lose demonstrates an ignorance as to their position in the social hierarchy.

For example, “Tfw no gf” is not a standpoint. The fury of incels and anons doesn’t hold much water because, in the grand scheme of things, no one is surprised when a white man mass-murderers a load of minorities. We’ve been watching that occur for centuries. That is the tactic that secured the system in which we live.

Because they fail to see this, they fail to see the system in its totality and so have no chance of changing it; they only see the superficial “immediacy” of their situation — with “immediacy” being Lukács’ term for that which is mistakenly and superficially given a privileged position within our self-consciousness because it is “given” to us most immediately in experience. (“Tfw no gf” becomes the perfect encapsulation of such a false standpoint since it precisely skewers that which the disenfranchised subject is immediately lacking: a girlfriend becomes the all-or-nothing focus over any more nuanced analysis of what Žižek called their “deadlock of desire”; you don’t hate your lack of a girlfriend, you hate your lack of a life under capitalism.)

Lukács, in his more explicit Hegelian-Marxism, makes a point in orbit of this that is useful for us if we hope to separate more clearly the contagious consciousness-raising of the Black Lives Matter movement from the contagious mindlessness of ideological thuggery. He writes that

the growing class consciousness that has been brought into being through the awareness of a common situation and common interests is by no means confined to the working class. The unique element in its situation is that its surpassing of immediacy represents an aspiration towards society in its totality regardless of whether this aspiration remains conscious or whether it remains unconscious for the moment. This is the reason why its logic does not permit it to remain stationary at a relatively higher stage of immediacy but forces it to persevere in an uninterrupted movement towards this totality, i.e. to persist in the dialectical process by which immediacies are constantly annulled and transcended. Marx recognised this aspect of proletarian class consciousness very early on. In his comments on the revolt of the Silesian weavers he lays emphasis on its “conscious and theoretical character.” He sees in the ‘Song of the Weavers’ a “bold battle cry which does not even mention the hearth, factory or district but in which the proletariat immediately proclaims its opposition to private property in a forceful, sharp, ruthless and violent manner.” Their action revealed their “superior nature” for “whereas every other movement turned initially only against the industrialist, the visible enemy, this one attacked also the hidden enemy, namely the banker.”

The Black Lives Matter movement, rising up (quite literally) from beneath the boot of white supremacist, capitalist and state oppression, sees the system for what it is in its totality. It attacks the statues in our streets because they are the unseen enemies of history’s persistent becoming. It, too, has a theoretical nature and a consciousness that, we hope, will persist. It punctures the crisis of the negative in this way, making for a moment of revolution that, whether explicitly or not, seems acutely Marxist in its nature.

The far-right, of course, attack whatever is in front of them — even if that’s the police that they are, supposedly, out in numbers to support. They are mired in immediacy and, in the process, they only illuminate the impotence of the very state they are attacking. They are the ying to Boris Johnson’s yang. BLM, on the other hand, is one step outside the circle and it is looking in, choosing targets wisely. That is how you accelerate a process — and that process is history.