Another horrifically poignant and accurate personal account, from a trans woman on Tumblr, of what it is like to exist in "queer feminist" spaces as someone who's femininity – and thus right to belong, and moral goodness – is constantly fragile and in question.

A painfully personal exposition of a life of gender dysphoria as a closeted trans woman, and using that position as a window into how truly, horribly and damaging the misandry of cis (and some transfem) feminists is. Not just to trans women, but also to cis men, too, but how it also forms a convenient echo chamber through thought-terminating cliches and dismissing messages based on who says them, to insulate feminists from possible criticism and the impacts of their words.

A trans women's experiences being abused at the hands of queer feminist spaces – transmisogyny, the inherent evil of callout culture and whisper networks, and so on. Just go fucking read it, it's an incredibly powerfully and poignantly written essay that, if you're on the left in the US, will probably deeply challenge your views.

The story of how Twitter cancel culture essentially killed a trans woman, convincing her that she couldn't truly be a woman, that the newfound identity she'd just been stepping into was invalid and needed to die, and that she should detransition, all because they couldn't handle a provocative title, and didn't read further than that title before banding up into a mob to punish her.

The story repeatedly goes to great lengths to try to say that it somehow wasn't cancel culture, but that's purely an exercise in doublethink. It absolutely is, it bears all the hallmarks of it:

• A preference for paranoid over reparative readings – looking for what's wrong with a work and trying to be angry at that, instead of looking at what's good about a work, possibly even what's good about it that others might appreciate even if you don't.
• Non-marginalized people trying to be social justice warriors on marginalized people's behalf without asking them, for virtue points.
• Thw dynamics of a mob, where nuance is erased and stopping the momentum is impossible.
• Paranoid assumptions about intention.
• The idea that only marginalized people can possibly write about marginalized experiences
• The idea that if someone writes about a marginalized experience differently than you would have, that means they "aren't really X."
• etc.

Some particularly egregious quotes are:

“There were several reporters that reached out to me right after the story came down. I remember having a conversation with one of them and saying, ‘Is [writing about] this really what you want to do? I’m not going to participate. I think that this is just going to make it worse,’” Clarke says. “And they ran with it. It brought in the whole cancel culture thing. Isabel needed that story down for her, not for them, and not for anybody else. But for her. And that’s why it came down. I tried to make that clear [in the editor’s note on the story’s removal]. But people still wanted that cancel narrative.”

Why did Isabel Fall need the story taken down for her own sake, hmm?

And:

"If anybody canceled Isabel Fall, it was Isabel Fall. She remains the subject of her own sentences."

Who made her "cancel herself" – check into the hospital and take down her story and ultimately kill the new version of herself she was stepping into? This is almost victim blaming to protect cancel culture.

Despite being framed as specific to the furry community – and one particular kind of social harassment – this is actually a really good general guide, if interpreted more broadly, for spotting many (although not all) kinds of social harassment that aims to take advantage of our desire to be "good," "moral," "protect people," "weed out creeps," and other such instincts. The crux of it is this:

As I mentioned previously, this “Google Doc expose” pattern has been employed in the past by actual victims desperate for their community to stop supporting their abuser.

Sometimes, when you see a Google Doc floating around accusing a furry of being abusive, that’s what you’re seeing.

Other times, you’re being handed a specially crafted piece of rhetoric that cherry-picks and lies by omission to make innocent people seem guilty of being terrible.

Here are a few things to watch out for to distinguish legitimate grievances from targeted harassment.

• Scope creep.
  • Is the doc focused on a specific, focused group of people, or does it read like a hit piece on as many popular furries as possible?
• Actions, not affiliations.
  • A legitimate call-out will focus on what harmful actions a person did, their victims’ stories, and the harms caused as a result of said actions.
  • Harassment docs focus on weak ties (“they were in the same Telegram group as ____”) or a person’s interests.
• Past remediation efforts.
  • Did the person in question immediately jump to the Google Doc outcome without trying anything else first?
• What are the incentives involved?
  • Speaking out about a horrible experience is terrifying, especially if it was perpetrated by someone with a lot of wealth or social capital in your community.
  • Conversely, trying to guilt the offending party or their audience into donating money to buy silence is simply blackmail.
• Is this part of a larger pattern?
  • Is this the only callout a person has ever made?
  • Is this the tenth callout this person has made this year?
  • What other metadata can you use to judge the validity of the information you’re presented with?

This short list of things to look out for isn’t foolproof, but it should help most people reduce their error rate for assessing a callout on social media.

A story of how purity culture took over online spaces.

The woke left fears the individualist/egoist post-left, because it offers something so much stonger, more vital, more free, than it ever could. This is a takedown of many of the ways in which it tries to smear egoists to protect its precious "correct" church of anarchism or leftism.

Stirner is often accused of being somehow antithetical in principles, values, and tendencies to anarchism. This is bullshit. This will show you why.

This essay has aged poorly in one, narrow sense — in that the particular figure Fisher chose to defend, Russell Brand, has shown himself to be an asshole in a multilayered, ongoing way since the time of writing. But Fisher was not Brand, and for every person like Brand whom the left accurately identifies as a problem, there are an equal number whom they slander for no reason; and that isn't even what's important about this essay. Many of the core ideas behind this essay are evergreen, and truer now than when it was written.

Insights:

1. "The petit bourgeoisie which dominates the academy and the culture industry has all kinds of subtle deflections and pre-emptions which prevent [class] even coming up, and then, if it does come up, they make one think it is a terrible impertinence…"
2. "[T]he features of the discourses and the desires which have led us to this grim and demoralising pass, where class has disappeared, but moralism is everywhere, where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent" are "we have allowed bourgeois modes of subjectivity to contaminate our movement". Namely:
   1. The Vampire Castle:
      1. "The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd."
      2. "The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements"
      3. "rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group."
      4. "I’ve noticed a fascinating magical inversion projection-disavowal mechanism whereby the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender. In fact, the exact opposite is the case, as the Vampires’ Castle uses an ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class. […] it [is] noticeable that the discussion of class privilege [is] entirely absent."
      5. "The problem that the Vampires’ Castle was set up to solve is this: how do you hold immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional? The solution was already there – in the Christian Church. So the VC has recourse to all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented, and which Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals. This priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt-mongers, is exactly what Nietzsche predicted when he said that something worse than Christianity was already on the way. Now, here it is …"
      6. "The Vampires’ Castle feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups – the more ‘marginal’ the better – into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampires’ Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering […]"
      7. "The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour."
      8. "Because they are petit-bourgeois to the core, the members of the Vampires’ Castle are intensely competitive, but this is repressed in the passive aggressive manner typical of the bourgeoisie. What holds them together is not solidarity, but mutual fear – the fear that they will be the next one to be outed, exposed, condemned."
      9. "The third law of the Vampires’ Castle is: propagate as much guilt as you can. The more guilt the better. People must feel bad: it is a sign that they understand the gravity of things. It’s OK to be class-privileged if you feel guilty about privilege and make others in a subordinate class position to you feel guilty too. You do some good works for the poor, too, right?"
      10. "The fourth law of the Vampires’ Castle is: essentialize. While fluidity of identity, pluraity and multiplicity are always claimed on behalf of the VC members […] the enemy is always to be essentialized. Since the desires animating the VC are in large part priests’ desires to excommunicate and condemn, there has to be a strong distinction between Good and Evil, with the latter essentialized. Notice the tactics. X has made a remark/ has behaved in a particular way – these remarks/ this behaviour might be construed as transphobic/ sexist etc. So far, OK. But it’s the next move which is the kicker. X then becomes defined as a transphobe/ sexist etc. Their whole identity becomes defined by one ill-judged remark or behavioural slip."
      11. "The fifth law of the Vampires’ Castle: think like a liberal (because you are one). The VC’s work of constantly stoking up reactive outrage consists of endlessly pointing out the screamingly obvious: capital behaves like capital (it’s not very nice!), repressive state apparatuses are repressive. We must protest!"
   2. Neo-Anarachism (this is the one I most fall afoul of, although I'm neither bourgoise nor educated technically, that is the culture I was raised in/am closest to; and although I think I have good reasons for my lack of action — namely, being very disabled — that doesn't change the effects): "By neo-anarchists I definitely do not mean anarchists or syndicalists involved in actual workplace organisation, such as the Solidarity Federation. I mean, rather, those who identify as anarchists but whose involvement in politics extends little beyond student protests and occupations, and commenting on Twitter. Like the denizens of the Vampires’ Castle, neo-anarchists usually come from a petit-bourgeois background, if not from somewhere even more class-privileged […] They are also overwhelmingly young: in their twenties or at most their early thirties, and what informs the neo-anarchist position is a narrow historical horizon."
      1. "Neo-anarchists have experienced nothing but capitalist realism. […] But the problem with neo-anarchism is that it unthinkingly reflects this historical moment rather than offering any escape from it. It forgets, or perhaps is genuinely unaware of, the Labour Party’s role in nationalising major industries and utilities or founding the National Health Service. Neo-anarchists will assert that ‘parliamentary politics never changed anything’, or the ‘Labour Party was always useless’ while attending protests about the NHS, or retweeting complaints about the dismantling of what remains of the welfare state. media to attempt to engineer change from there. […] Purism shades into fatalism; better not to be in any way tainted by the corruption of the mainstream, better to uselessly ‘resist’ than to risk getting your hands dirty."
      2. "It’s not surprising, then, that so many neo-anarchists come across as depressed. This depression is no doubt reinforced by the anxieties of postgraduate life, since, like the Vampires’ Castle, neo-anarchism has its natural home in universities, and is usually propagated by those studying for postgraduate qualifications, or those who have recently graduated from such study."
   3. "Why have these two configurations come to the fore?"
      1. "they have been allowed to prosper by capital because they serve its interests. […] why would capital be concerned about a ‘left’ that replaces class politics with a moralising individualism, and that, far from building solidarity, spreads fear and insecurity?"
      2. "It might have been possible to ignore the Vampires’ Castle and the neo-anarchists if it weren’t for capitalist cyberspace. The VC’s pious moralising has been a feature of a certain ‘left’ for many years – but, if one wasn’t a member of this particular church, its sermons could be avoided. Social media means that this is no longer the case, and there is little protection from the psychic pathologies propagated by these discourses."
   4. "The bourgeois-identitarian left knows how to propagate guilt and conduct a witch hunt, but it doesn’t know how to make converts. But that, after all, is not the point. The aim is not to popularise a leftist position, or to win people over to it, but to remain in a position of elite superiority, but now with class superiority redoubled by moral superiority too. ‘How dare you talk – it’s we who speak for those who suffer!’"
3. "What is to be done?"
   1. "So what can we do now? First of all, it is imperative to reject identitarianism, and to recognise that there are no identities, only desires, interests and identifications. […] Sadly, the right act on this insight more effectively than the left does."
   2. "But the rejection of identitarianism can only be achieved by the re-assertion of class. A left that does not have class at its core can only be a liberal pressure group. Class consciousness is always double: it involves a simultaneous knowledge of the way in which class frames and shapes all experience, and a knowledge of the particular position that we occupy in the class structure."
   3. "It must be remembered that the aim of our struggle is not recognition by the bourgeoisie, nor even the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. It is the class structure – a structure that wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it – that must be destroyed."
   4. "The interests of the working class are the interests of all; the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, which are the interests of no-one. Our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital."

Nietzsche sees anarchism as poisoned at the root by the pestiferous weed of ressentiment — the spiteful politics of the weak and pitiful, the morality of the slave. Is Nietzsche here merely venting his conservative wrath against radical politics, or is he diagnosing a real sickness that has infected our radical political imaginary? Despite the Nietzsche’s obvious prejudice towards radical politics, this paper will take seriously his charge against anarchism…

[…]

For Nietzsche, the way we interpret and impose values on the world has a history — its origins are often brutal and far removed from the values they produce. The value of ‘good’, for instance, was invented by the noble and high-placed to apply to themselves, in contrast to common, low-placed and plebeian.[3] It was the value of the master — ‘good’ — as opposed to that of the slave — ‘bad’. Thus, according to Nietzsche, it was in this pathos of distance, between the high-born and the low-born, this absolute sense of superiority, that values were created.

However, this equation of good and aristocratic began to be undermined by a slave revolt in values. […] the slave revolt in morality inverted the noble system of values and began to equate good with the lowly, the powerless — the slave. This inversion introduced the pernicious spirit of revenge and hatred into the creation of values. Therefore morality, as we understand it, had its roots in this vengeful will to power of the powerless over the powerful — the revolt of the slave against the master. It was from this imperceptible, subterranean hatred that grew the values subsequently associated with the good — pity, altruism, meekness, etc.

Political values also grew from this poisonous root. For Nietzsche, values of equality and democracy, which form the cornerstone of radical political theory, arose out of the slave revolt in morality. They are generated by the same spirit of revenge and hatred of the powerful. […] Anarchism is for Nietzsche the most extreme heir to democratic values […] It seeks to level the differences between individuals, to abolish class distinctions, to raze hierarchies to the ground, and to equalize the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor, the master and the slave. To Nietzsche this is bringing everything down to level of the lowest common denominator — to erase the pathos of distance between the master and slave, the sense of difference and superiority through which great values are created…

Slave morality is characterized by the attitude of ressentiment — the resentment and hatred of the powerless for the powerful. Nietzsche sees ressentiment as an entirely negative sentiment — the attitude of denying what is life-affirming, saying ‘no’ to what is different, what is ‘outside’ or ‘other’. Ressentiment is characterized by an orientation to the outside, rather than the focus of noble morality, which is on the self.[7] While the master says ‘I am good’ and adds as an afterthought, ‘therefore he is bad’; the slave says the opposite — ‘He (the master) is bad, therefore I am good’. […] Nietzsche says: “… in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, psychologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act all, — its action is basically a reaction.”[8] This reactive stance, this inability to define anything except in opposition to something else, is the attitude of ressentiment. It is the reactive stance of the weak who define themselves in opposition to the strong. The weak need the existence of this external enemy to identify themselves as ‘good’. […] The man of ressentiment hates the noble with an intense spite, a deep-seated, seething hatred and jealousy…

Is anarchism a political expression of ressentiment? Is it poisoned by a deep hatred of the powerful? […]

Anarchism as a revolutionary political philosophy has many different voices, origins and interpretations. […] These are united, however, by a fundamental rejection and critique of political authority in all its forms. The critique of political authority — the conviction that power is oppressive, exploitative and dehumanizing — may be said to be the crucial politico-ethical standpoint of anarchism. […] The State is the main target of the anarchist critique of authority. It is for anarchists the fundamental oppression in society…

[T]he State, for anarchists, is a priori oppression, no matter what form it takes. […] The State has its own impersonal logic, its own momentum, its own priorities […] As an abstract machine of domination, the State haunts different class actualizations — not just the bourgeoisie State, but the worker’s State too. […] This conception of the State ironically strikes a familiar note with Nietzsche.

Anarchism is based on an essentially optimistic conception of human nature: if individuals have a natural tendency to get on well together then there is no need for the existence of a State to arbitrate between them. […] Anarchism may be understood as a struggle between natural authority and artificial authority. Anarchists do not reject all forms of authority, as the old cliché would have it. On the contrary, they declare their absolute obedience to the authority embodied in what Bakunin calls ‘natural laws’. Natural laws are essential to Man’s existence according to Bakunin — they surround us, shape us and determine the physical world in which we live.[24] However this is not a form of slavery because these laws are not external to man… They are, on the contrary, what constitute man — they are his essence. […] Anarchism, then, is based on a specific notion of human essence. Morality has its basis in human nature, not in any external source.

Natural authority is implacably opposed to “artificial authority.” By artificial authority Bakunin means power […] This power is external to human nature and an imposition upon it. It stultifies the development of humanity’s innate moral characteristics and intellectual capacities.

In this critique of political authority, power (artificial authority) is external to the human subject. The human subject is oppressed by this power, but remains uncontaminated by it because human subjectivity is a creation of a natural, as opposed to a political, system. Thus anarchism is based on a clear, Manichean division between artificial and natural authority, between power and subjectivity, between State and society. Furthermore political authority is fundamentally repressive and destructive of man’s potential. Human society, argue the anarchists, cannot develop until the institutions and laws which keep it in ignorance and servitude, until the fetters which bind it, are thrown off.

[…]

Anarchism operates within a Manichean political logic: it creates an essential, moral opposition between society and the State, between humanity and power. […] This logic […] is the central feature of Manichean thought.

[…]

Opposing living sociability to the State, in the same way that Marxism opposed the proletariat to capitalism, suggests that anarchism was unable to transcend the traditional political categories which bound Marxism. […] Manicheism […] is the undercurrent that runs through [all these theories] and circumscribes them. […] as long as there is an enemy to destroy and a subject who will destroy it; as long as there is the promise of the final battle and final victory. […] This is the binary, dialectical logic that pervades anarchism: the place of power — the State — must be overthrown by the essential human subject, the pure subject of resistance. Anarchism ‘essentializes’ the very power it opposes.

Manichean logic thus involves a reverse mirroring operation: the place of resistance is a reflection, in reverse, of the place of power. In the case of anarchism, human subjectivity is essentially moral and rational while the State is essentially immoral and irrational.[38] The State is essential to the existence of revolutionary subject, just as the revolutionary subject is essential to the existence of the State. One defines itself in opposition to the other. The purity of revolutionary identity is only defined in contrast to the impurity of political power. […]

[…] although there are differences, the Manichean relationship of opposition between the human subject and political power that is found in anarchism obeys the general logic of ressentiment described above. This is for two reasons.

1. Firstly, as we have seen, ressentiment is based on the moral prejudice of the powerless against the powerful — the revolt of the ‘slave’ against the ‘master’. We can see this moral opposition to power clearly in anarchist discourse […]
2. Secondly, ressentiment is characterized by the fundamental need to identify oneself by looking outwards and in opposition towards an external enemy. […] Anarchism subscribes to a dialectical logic, according to which the human species emerges from an ‘animal-like’ state, and begins to develop innate moral and rational faculties in a natural system.[40] However […] the subject cannot achieve his full human identity as long as he remains oppressed by the State. […] The realization of the subject is always stultified, deferred, put off, by the State. This dialectic of Man and State suggests that the identity of the subject is characterized as essentially ‘rational’ and ‘moral’ only in so far as the unfolding of these innate faculties and qualities is prevented by the State. Paradoxically the State, which is seen by anarchists as an obstacle to the full identity of man, is, at the same time, essential to the formation of this incomplete identity. Without this stultifying oppression, the anarchist subject would be unable to see itself as ‘moral’ and ‘rational’. His identity is thus complete in its incompleteness.

So the Manicheism that inhabits anarchist discourse is a logic of ressentiment that for Nietzsche is a distinctly unhealthy outlook, emanating from a position of weakness and sickness. Revolutionary identity in anarchist philosophy is constituted through its essential opposition to power. […] But is it?

Bakunin himself throws some doubts on this when he talks about the power principle. This is the natural lust for power which Bakunin believes is innate in every individual […] The power principle [is /why/] man cannot be trusted with power […] he has perhaps unconsciously exposed the hidden contradiction that lies at the heart of anarchist discourse: namely that, while anarchism bases itself upon a notion of an essential human subjectivity uncontaminated by power, this subjectivity is ultimately impossible. Pure revolutionary identity is torn apart, subverted by a ‘natural’ desire for power, the lack at the heart of every individual. […] Kropotkin, too, talks about the desire for power and authority. […] If this is the case, can human essence still be seen as unpolluted by power? While anarchism’s notion of subjectivity is not entirely undermined by this contradiction, it is nevertheless destabilized by it: it is made ambiguous and incomplete. It forces one to question anarchism’s notion of a revolution of humanity against power: if humans have an essential desire for power, then how can one be sure that a revolution aimed at destroying power will not turn into a revolution aimed at capturing power?

Has anarchism as a political and social theory of revolution been invalidated because of the contradictions in its conception of human subjectivity? […] I would argue that anarchism, if it can free itself from these essentialist and Manichean categories, can overcome the ressentiment that poisons and limits it. Classical anarchism is a politics of ressentiment because it seeks to overcome power. It sees power as evil, destructive, something that stultifies the full realization of the individual. […] However I have shown that this separation between the individual and power is itself unstable and threatened by a ‘natural’ desire for power — the power principle. Nietzsche would argue that this desire for power — will to power — is indeed ‘natural’, and it is the suppression of this desire that has had such a debilitating effect on man, turning him against himself and producing an attitude of ressentiment.

However perhaps one could argue that this desire for power in man is produced precisely through attempts to deny or extinguish relations of power in the ‘natural order’. Perhaps power may be seen in terms of the Lacanian Real — as that irrepressible lack that cannot be symbolized, and which always returns to haunt the symbolic order, disrupting any attempt by the subject to form a complete identity. […] Anarchism attempts to complete the identity of the subject by separating him, in an absolute Manichean sense, from the world of power. […] However, as we have seen, this world free of power is jeopardized by the desire for power latent in every individual. The more anarchism tries to free society from relations of power, the more it remains paradoxically caught up in power. Power here has returned as the real that haunts all attempts to free the world of power. […] the attempts to deny power, through essentialist concepts of ‘natural’ laws and ‘natural’ morality, themselves constitute power, or at least are conditioned by relations of power. These essentialist identities and categories cannot be imposed without the radical exclusion of other identities. This exclusion is an act of power. If one attempts to radically exclude power, as the anarchists did, power ‘returns’ precisely in the structures of exclusion themselves.

[…] So how does anarchism overcome this ressentiment that has shown to be so self destructive and life-denying? By positively affirming power, rather than denying it — to ‘say yes’ to power, as Nietzsche would put it. It is only by affirming power, by acknowledging that we come from the same world as power, not from a ‘natural’ world removed from it, and that we can never be entirely free from relations of power, that one can engage in politically-relevant strategies of resistance against power. This does not mean, of course, that anarchism should lay down its arms and embrace the State and political authority. On the contrary, anarchism can more effectively counter political domination by engaging with, rather than denying, power.

To use Michel Foucault’s definition, power is a “mode of action upon the action of others.”[46] Power is merely the effect of one’s actions upon the actions of another. Power […] is merely a relationship of forces, forces that flow between different actors and throughout our everyday actions. […] For instance, rational and moral discourses, which anarchists saw as innocent of power and as weapons in the struggle against power, are themselves constituted by power relations […] Power in this sense is productive rather than repressive. It is therefore senseless and indeed impossible to try to construct, as anarchists do, a world outside power.

However, just because one can never be free from power does not mean that one can never be free from domination. […] For Foucault, relations of power become relations of domination when the free and unstable flow of power relations becomes blocked and congealed — when it […] no longer allows reciprocal relationships. […] The State, according to Foucault, is merely an assemblage of different power relations that have become congealed in this way. […] While anarchists see power as emanating from the State, Foucault sees the State as emanating from power. The State, in other words, is merely an effect of power relations that have crystallized into relations of domination.

[…] [T]he point of this distinction is to show that this essential separation is now impossible. Domination — oppressive political institutions like the State — now comes from the same world as power. In other words it disrupts the strict Manichean separation of society and power. Anarchism and indeed radical politics generally, cannot remain in this comfortable illusion that we as political subjects, are somehow not complicit in the very regime that oppresses us. […] As political subjects we can never relax and hide behind essentialist identities and Manichean structures […] Rather we must be constantly on our guard against the possibility of domination.

[…] One can, as I have argued, never hope to overcome power completely — because every overcoming is itself the imposition of another regime of power. The best that can be hoped for is a reorganization of power relations — through struggle and resistance — in ways that are less oppressive and dominating. Domination can therefore be minimized by acknowledging our inevitable involvement with power, not by attempting to place ourselves impossibly outside the world of power.

This definition of power that I have constructed — as an unstable and free-flowing relation dispersed throughout the social network — may be seen as a non-ressentiment notion of power. […] To overcome ressentiment we must, in other words, will power. We must affirm a will to power — in the form of creative, life-affirming values, according to Nietzsche.[56] This is to accept the notion of self-overcoming’.[57] To ‘overcome’ oneself in this sense, would mean an overcoming of the essentialist identities and categories that limit us.

[…]

I would argue that anarchism would be greatly enhanced as a political and ethical philosophy if it eschewed essentialist categories, leaving itself open to different and contingent identities — a post-anarchism. To affirm difference and contingency would be to become a philosophy of the strong, rather than the weak. Nietzsche exhorts us to ‘live dangerously’, to do away with certainties, to break with essences and structures, and to embrace uncertainty. “Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into unchartered seas!” he says.[60] The politics of resistance against domination must take place in a world without guarantees. To remain open to difference and contingency, to affirm the eternal return of power, would be to become what Nietzsche calls the superman or Overman.

[…]

Perhaps anarchism could become a new ‘heroic’ philosophy, which is no longer reactive but, rather, creates values.

[…]

Furthermore, perhaps one could envisage a form of political community or collective identity that did not restrict difference. The question of community is central to radical politics, including anarchism. One cannot talk about collective action without at least posing the question of community. For Nietzsche, most modern radical aspirations towards community were a manifestation of the ‘herd’ mentality. However it may be possible to construct a ressentiment-free notion of community from Nietzsche’s own concept of power. For Nietzsche, active power is the individual’s instinctive discharge of his forces and capacities which produces in him an enhanced sensation of power, while reactive power, as we have seen, needs an external object to act on and define itself in opposition to.[66] Perhaps one could imagine a form of community based on active power. For Nietzsche this enhanced feeling of power may be derived from assistance and benevolence towards others, from enhancing the feeling of power of others.[67] Like the ethics of mutual aid, a community based on will to power may be composed of a series of inter-subjective relations that involve helping and caring for people without dominating them and denying difference.

Does philosophical critique often feel destructive, and cynically unbeatable? Do you feel unease seeing the same kinds of tactics that we often see critical philosophers use levelled against such things as vaccines, 9/11, trans healthcare, and climate change — talking about the uncertainty and socially constructed, institutional, incentive, ideologically-driven nature of science, or the profit motives and material incentives on the part of doctors and the pharmacutical industry that might construct something like the belief that transitioning medically should be a common treatment for trans people — that we feel aren't meant to be analyzed that way? This essay gets at the heart of this problem, and suggests a way forward, without falling into reactionary anti-criticism.

What has become of critique, I wonder, when an editorial in the New York Times contains the following quote?

"Most scientists believe that [global] warming is caused largely by man-made pollutants that require strict regulation. Mr. Luntz [a Republican strategist] seems to acknowledge as much when he says that “the scientific debate is closing against us.” His advice, however, is to emphasize that the evidence is not complete.

“Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled,” he writes, “their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.”"

…

Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show “the lack of scientific certainty” inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a “primary issue.” But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument—or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. … Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast?

In which case the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact—as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past—but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! … And yet entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. … Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for good?

… what does it mean when this lack of sure ground is taken away from us by the worst possible fellows as an argument against the things we cherish?

…

What has critique become when a French general, no, a marshal of critique, namely, Jean Baudrillard, claims in a published book that the Twin Towers destroyed themselves under their own weight, so to speak, undermined by the utter nihilism inherent in capitalism itself—as if the terrorist planes were pulled to suicide by the powerful attraction of this black hole of nothingness?

What has become of critique when my neighbor in the little Bourbonnais village where I live looks down on me as someone hopelessly naïve because I believe that the United States had been attacked by terrorists? … I am now the one who naïvely believes in some facts because I am educated …

What has become of critique when someone as eminent as Stanley Fish … believes he defends science studies, my field, by comparing the laws of physics to the rules of baseball?7

What has become of critique when there is a whole industry denying that the Apollo program landed on the moon?

What has become of critique when DARPA uses for its Total Information Awareness project the Baconian slogan Scientia est potentia? Didn’t I read that somewhere in Michel Foucault? Has knowledge-slash-power been co-opted of late by the National Security Agency? Has Discipline and Punish become the bedtime reading of Mr. Ridge (fig. 1)?

Let me be mean for a second. What’s the real difference between conspiracists and a popularized, that is a teachable version of social critique inspired by a too quick reading …? In both cases, you have to learn to become suspicious of everything people say because of course we all know that they live in the thralls of a complete illusion of their real motives. Then, after disbelief has struck and an explanation is requested for what is really going on, in both cases again it is the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the dark acting always consistently, continuously, relentlessly. Of course, we in the academy like to use more elevated causes—society, discourse, knowledge-slash power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism—while conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intents, but I find something troublingly similar … it worries me to detect, in those mad mixtures of knee-jerk disbelief, punctilious demands for proofs, and free use of powerful explanation from the social neverland many of the weapons of social critique. Of course conspiracy theories are an absurd deformation of our own arguments, but, like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party, these are our weapons nonetheless.

… have we behaved like mad scientists who have let the virus of critique out of the confines of their laboratories and cannot do anything now to limit its deleterious effects: it mutates now, gnawing everything up, even the vessels in which it is contained? …

If the dense and moralist cigar-smoking reactionary bourgeois can transform him-or herself into a freefloating agnostic bohemian, moving opinions, capital, and networks from one end of the planet to the other without attachment, why would he or she not be able to absorb the most sophisticated tools of deconstruction, social construction, discourse analysis, postmodernism, postology?

We can summarize, I estimate, 90 percent of the contemporary critical scene by the following series of diagrams that fixate the object at only two positions, what I have called the fact position and the fairy position—fact and fairy are etymologically related but I won’t develop this point here. The fairy position is very well known and is used over and over again by many social scientists who associate criticism with antifetishism. The role of the critic is then to show that what the naïve believers are doing with objects is simply a projection of their wishes onto a material entity that does nothing at all by itself. Here they have diverted to their petty use the prophetic fulmination against idols “they have mouths and speak not, they have ears and hear not,” but they use this prophecy to decry the very objects of belief—gods, fashion, poetry, sport, desire, you name it—to which naïve believers cling with so much intensity.22 And then the courageous critic, who alone remains aware and attentive, who never sleeps, turns those false objects into fetishes that are supposed to be nothing but mere empty white screens on which is projected the power of society, domination, whatever. The naïve believer has received a first salvo (fig. 2).

But, wait, a second salvo is in the offing, and this time it comes from the fact pole. This time it is the poor bloke, again taken aback, whose behavior is now “explained” by the powerful effects of indisputable matters of fact: “You, ordinary fetishists, believe you are free but, in reality, you are acted on by forces you are not conscious of. Look at them, look, you blind idiot” (and here you insert whichever pet facts the social scientists fancy to work with, taking them from economic infrastructure, fields of discourse, social domination, race, class, and gender, maybe throwing in some neurobiology, evolutionary psychology, whatever, provided they act as indisputable facts whose origin, fabrication, mode of development are left unexamined) (fig. 3).

Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? Why critique, this most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are always right! When naive believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naive believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don’t see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. Isn’t this fabulous? Isn’t it really worth going to graduate school to study critique? “Enter here, you poor folks. After arduous years of reading turgid prose, you will be always right, you will never be taken in any more; no one, no matter how powerful, will be able to accuse you of naivete, that supreme sin, any longer? Better equipped than Zeus himself you rule alone, striking from above with the salvo of antifetishism in one hand and the solid causality of objectivity in the other.” The only loser is the naive believer, the great unwashed, always caught off balance (fig. 4).

… The whole rather poor trick that allows critique to go on, although we would never confine our own valuables to their sordid pawnshop, is that there is never any crossover between the two lists of objects in the fact position and the fairy position. …

… What social scientists do to our favorite objects is so horrific that certainly we don’t want them to come any nearer. …

I am not trying to reverse course, to become reactionary, to regret what I have done, to swear that I will never be a constructivist any more. I simply want to … retest the linkages between the new threats [we have] to face and the equipment and training [we] have in order to meet them-and, if necessary, to revise from scratch the whole paraphernalia.

… the critical mind, if it is to renew itself and be relevant again, is to be found in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude—to speak like William James—but a realism dealing with what I will call matters of concern, not matters of fact. The mistake we made, the mistake I made, was to believe that there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except by moving away from them and directing one’s attention toward the conditions that made them possible. … This was remaining too faithful to the unfortunate solution inherited from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Critique has not been critical enough in spite of all its sore-scratching. Reality is not defined by matters of fact. Matters of fact are not all that is given in experience. Matters of fact are only very partial and … very political renderings of matters of concern and only a subset of what could also be called states of affairs. It is this second empiricism, this return to the realist attitude, that I’d like to offer as the next task for the critically minded.

To indicate the direction of the argument, I want to show that while the Enlightenment profited largely from the disposition of a very powerful descriptive tool, that of matters of fact, which were excellent for debunking quite a lot of beliefs, powers, and illusions, it found itself totally disarmed once matters of fact, in turn, were eaten up by the same debunking impetus. After that, the lights of the Enlightenment were slowly turned off, and some sort of darkness appears to have fallen on campuses. My question is thus: Can we devise another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care, as Donna Haraway would put it?

To retrieve a realist attitude, it is not enough to dismantle critical weapons so uncritically built up by our predecessors as we would obsolete but still dangerous atomic silos. … What set Whitehead completely apart and straight on our path is that he considered matters of fact to be a very poor rendering of what is given in experience and something that muddles entirely the question, What is there? with the question, How do we know it? Those who now mock his philosophy don’t understand that they have resigned themselves to what he called the “bifurcation of nature. They have entirely forgotten what it would require if we were to take this incredible sentence seriously: “*For natural philosophy everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick up and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon*” (CN, pp. 28- 29).

It is not the case that there would exist solid matters of fact and that the next step would be for us to decide whether they will be used to explain something. It is not the case either that the other solution is to attack, criticize, expose, historicize those matters of fact, to show that they are made up, interpreted, flexible.

The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution. … Critical theory died away long ago; can we become critical again, in the sense here offered by Turing? That is, generating more ideas than we have received, inheriting from a prestigious critical tradition but not letting it die away, or “dropping into quiescence” like a piano no longer struck?

Whereas the other article I mirrored here focuses more on the author, this article is a much better meta-level critique of the sociopsychological dynamics at play in what happened, from an almost post-left anti-moralist perspective:

The violent and oftentimes ironically ignorant backlash against Fall’s story sheds light on a troublingly regressive, entitled, and puritanical trend in the relationship between artists and their audiences […] Readers appear to feel a need to cast their objections to fiction in moral terms, positioning themselves as protectors of the downtrodden. […] in such a way of thinking, art is not a sensual or aesthetic experience but a strictly moral one, its every instance either fundamentally good or evil. […]

That someone reacts with hurt to art doesn’t make that art dangerous, and claiming that all art that’s capable of causing pain is inherently toxic is a solipsistic nightmare in which a reader’s personal experience becomes an act of violence committed against them by an author whom they likely do not know. It’s a reflexive model of critique, a rejection of evaluating art on its own merits. In a way it takes the place of criticism entirely, ignoring aesthetic concerns in favor of moral ones. Perhaps in that emotional reaction is some trace of readers reliving their own trauma and […] reimagining it as a scenario in which they can stop that violation from happening. […] [this] locks us in memories of our own pain and reduces art to something strictly individual, cutting away its ability to let us experience the lives and dreams of people we’ll never know.

Stories like “Attack Helicopter” are vital to unpacking the webs of intersecting forces which make up every human consciousness. They constitute an outlet for the suffering of marginalized artists raised in bigoted, imperialist cultures, a way to process the poison we’re spoon-fed from birth into something that awakens and lays bare. Calls for the destruction or censorship of such stories constitute a rejection of life’s intrinsic complexity, a retreat into the black and white moral absolutism of adolescence, or theocracy. These rigid moral strictures strip marginalized communities of their full humanity and of their history as makers of painful, difficult art stemming from their experiences as outsiders. They rob audiences of the space and tools necessary to engage art thoughtfully and in good faith. They make our world a poorer, harsher place, clannish and merciless, and smother beauty in its cradle.