Being Numerous Read online

  Praise for Being Numerous

  “Natasha Lennard’s lucid writing about militant social struggles from the inside is in some sense the simplest thing: these are the contemporary forms of what people have long done against intolerable conditions and intransigent powers. And yet engagement with them is so disallowed in the present that Lennard’s fidelity to investigation and insight feels hard-won, heroic, and deeply honorable. This is committed journalism at its finest: forbidden, formidable, ferocious.” —Joshua Clover, author of Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

  “I am always thrilled to read work by Natasha Lennard. Her combination of theory and hard reporting is as rare as it is essential. Questions about liberalism and anti-fascism that dominate our political moment are tackled here with theoretical sophistication, serious reporting, and an inimitable style.” —Sarah Leonard, coeditor of The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century

  “This book is a must read for those interested in elegant and clever writing on the urgent political and social issues of our day. Natasha Lennard offers sharp perspectives on the stale and complacent polarization of left and right. And there is a power and freshness here: amidst the glimpses of the personal—while often couched in erudite philosophical discourse—she reveals herself to be a woman and thinker of substance.” —Razia Iqbal, journalist at BBC News

  “Deconstruction with a political bite, Natasha Lennard is the left’s answer to post-truth.” —Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials “Lennard’s writing puts feelings, facts and reasoning in close contact, respectfully learning from each other. As she shows so clearly, this communing of the faculties is one of the keys to an anti-fascist life.” —McKenzie Wark, author of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty First Century

  “Lennard is no mere academic cheering from the sidelines, because fascism is never academic. In her testimonies and elegant critiques, she haunts the specter of its appearance, dealing with its pernicious effects on everyday life, and asks the pertinent question: what does a non-fascist life actually look like?” —Brad Evans, author of Histories of Violence: Post-War Critical Thought

  Being Numerous

  Essays on Non-Fascist Life

  Natasha Lennard

  First published by Verso 2019

  © Natasha Lennard 2019

  This book draws on essays that have appeared in

  The Evergreen Review, Real Life, Vice, Esquire, The Nation,

  Salon, Logic, Fusion, and The New Inquiry.

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-459-2

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-462-2 (US EBK)

  ISBN-13: 9781788734615 (UK EBK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

  Printed in the UK by CPI Group

  Having only the force

  Of days

  Most simple

  Most difficult

  —George Oppen, 1968

  For my mother, Sindy, and my person, Lukas.

  Contents

  Introduction

  1.We, Anti-Fascists

  2.Ghost Stories

  3.Riots for Black Life

  4.Making Felons

  5.Still Fighting at Standing Rock

  6.Know Your Rights

  7.Love According to the State

  8.Policing Desire

  9.Looking at Corpses

  10.Being Numerous

  11.Of Suicide

  Index

  Introduction

  I was attending a memorial in late 2016. The previous night, an old friend had been thrown from a car when, swerving to avoid a deer carcass, the vehicle flipped on a Wisconsin highway. He had been en route to join the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in North Dakota.

  I met Clark in 2010, about a year after I’d moved to New York from London for graduate school. We were part of a book club called the Anti-State Communist Reading Group, or something to that dramatic effect. The friendships forged there became the foundation of an anarchist-leaning cadre, which helped fuel Occupy Wall Street with radical leftist, sometimes blustery energy. Rake-thin, beanstalk-tall, moustachioed and grinning, Clark was a mischievous and above-all generous activist. We were thick as thieves for a long time but drifted apart in the years before his death. No animosity—we chose different projects, different organizing spaces; far-left organizing in New York cleaved along ideological and personal lines. But the presence of Clark’s absence, or his absent presence, was reason enough for a splintered scene to come together again that winter night in a community bookshop in Queens.

  It was the evening of November 8th, 2016. We weren’t looking at our phones, and I didn’t see the infographic maps of the United States turning red. Donald Trump took Indiana, Kentucky, swing-state Ohio, and battleground Florida before midnight Eastern time. We drank to our friend and lit candles, oblivious.

  “We are pressed, pressed on each other, / We will be told at once / Of anything that happens.” So wrote poet George Oppen in his 1968 work Of Being Numerous, and it’s truer now, thanks to techno-capital, than when the poem was written. But that night in the little bookshop, pressing together for those few hours, we were not told at once of the results rolling in.

  I walked away from the memorial, dead phone in hand, assuming like so many bad empiricists that Hillary Clinton was well on her way to a win. I joined a group of journalist friends at the tail end of an election viewing party. They sat open-mouthed in front of red infographics.

  More lines from that same Oppen poem come to mind: “It is the air of atrocity, / An event as ordinary / As a President / A plume of smoke, visible at a distance / In which people burn.”

  Before he died, Clark wrote a political call of sorts in a scribbled note: “Live how we want to. Account for real needs and desires whilst making a million and one sacrifices. Do anything for each other … Fight so hard that we don’t feel as if we’re going to explode all the time, make that the great American pastime again.” His best friend read out those words at the memorial. An invocation toward non-fascist life, written before the shuddering fact of a President Trump.

  The following evening, people took to the streets in great numbers across the country; the New York crowd I joined was diverse and young. The chant went up, “No Trump! No KKK! No Fascist USA!” I wondered if the youngest among us, or those newest to protest, knew that this slogan was a riff on an old favorite, “No Cops! No KKK! No Fascist USA!”

  I begin here with election night not because this collection is organized around it. A number of the essays herein were first written some years before Trump’s ascendance; a number written after. It is unavoidable, though, that it haunts every piece, compiled as they are in this moment of emboldened racist fascism. But I bring up election night here—my election night, shaped as it was by a very different type of loss and haunting—to invoke the idea of accidents. In a sense, accidents are the proper subject of this book.

  I don’t mean happenstances, or missteps—too many liberal commentators frame our current political moment as a baffling mistake; history taking a wrong turn. I mean
“accident” as it was used by late theorist and urbanist Paul Virilio: the accident which is contained within, and brought into the world by, the inventions of progress—what gets hailed as progress—itself.

  “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution,” he wrote. “Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” Invent the car, invent the car crash. Invent nuclear power, invent the H-bomb. Invent networked online communications, invent totalized, mutually enforced surveillance and even new modes of election fraud. The accident is not the inevitability—the advent of the car did not, of course, determine any given car crash—but it brought to life the possibility of such things, to which we are all too often blinded by the propaganda of progress as some smooth, unidirectional passage. Accidents happen; technical progress determines what kind of accidents can exist.

  Virilio applied the concept of the “accident” to technological advancement and its logic of acceleration. But the idea is useful broadly, when looking at the operations through which society, selves and power are produced and organized. For example, if the current growth of fascism is an accident, in a sense cribbed from Virilio, it is not because it is a diversion, antithetical to liberal capitalism. The accident was baked into the context.

  What follows in this collection, written and updated over the last four years of my career as a columnist, journalist and essayist, is a series of pieces, each of which takes aim at how liberal, capitalist ideology—and its sometimes-fanatical commitment to Enlightenment promises—fails to address its own potential accidents and limitations.

  Liberal centrism is conservative. Many progressive victories claimed by its adherents were built on the back, at least in part, of decades-long radical struggles. Liberal centrists cling to a paradoxical progress of conservation; its believers seem to long for the halcyon delusions of pre–November 8th, 2016. The chants go: “America was always great” (it never was); “Not my president” (he is). The New York Times proclaims, “Truth can’t be manufactured” (it can, it is, and the Times should know); the Washington Post’s new tagline reads, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” (it dies in broad daylight, too). Unwilling to reckon with the accidents attendant on innovations they otherwise applaud, which are not mistakes, centrist ideologues fail to offer weapons, let alone a sturdy shield, against the fascism of the state, the white supremacist constellations it encourages, and the micro-fascisms that permeate daily life and habit. This book is a call for better weapons and an expansive understanding of the battlefield where oppressive systems hold territory in ever more brutal ways.

  Jean Paul Sartre described, in his 1938 novel Nausea, how “things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense.” His protagonist reflects, “You seem to start at the beginning. And in reality you have started at the end. It was there, invisible and present, it is the one which gives to words the pomp and value of a beginning.” I didn’t begin any of the following essays with the intention, or even the idea, of compiling them. That’s the nature of recounting—starting at the end, seeing patterns emerge, a thread of consistent argument and politics, in work I have written as discrete pieces over the years on themes as varied as riots, political violence, the limits of a rights discourse, ghosts (which are not metaphors), corpses, sex, suicide, the state, and the self. That they come together is a happy accident, which is no coincidence at all.

  November 2018

  Brooklyn

  1

  We, Anti-Fascists

  Between spells of January drizzle, in the midst of scattered street protests, on a particularly bad afternoon in Washington, DC, Richard Spencer got punched in the face.

  That morning, Donald Trump commenced his term as president with rageful, nationalistic oration. Nearby, police penned in and mass-arrested over 200 inauguration counter-protesters. The demonstrators, participants in an “anti-fascist, anti-capitalist bloc”—in which I had also marched—would go on to face a repressive array of bogus felony charges and potential decades in prison. By the afternoon of January 20, protests were dispersed, gloating frat boys in red “Make America Great Again” hats ambled through DC’s dreary avenues, and Donald Trump was president.

  Any silver lining that day was going to be thin. But there it was, gleaming: a sublime right hook to Richard Spencer’s face.

  I didn’t see it in person, but on a YouTube clip, which during the coming weeks would be viewed well over 3 million times.

  Spencer, a neo-Nazi who claims America belongs to white men, was in the middle of telling an Australian TV crew that he was not a neo-Nazi, while pointing to the white nationalist mascot, Pepe the Frog, on his lapel pin. A black-clad figure, face covered (the unofficial uniform of our march that morning) jumps into frame, deus ex machina, with a flying punch to Spencer’s left jaw. The alt-right poster boy stumbles away, and his anonymous attacker bounds out of sight.

  Within hours it was a meme, set to backing tracks from Springsteen, New Order, Beyoncé and dozens more. A thing of kinetic beauty, the punch was made for an anthem’s beat; the punch was made for sharing.

  I had thought we could all agree: a prominent neo-Nazi was punched in the face; it was a good thing.

  I had miscalculated “we.”

  In the weeks and months prior to Trump’s inauguration, an outpouring of media commentary was dedicated to determining whether the soon-to-be president was or was not a fascist, and whether we were or were not on the verge of living under a fascist regime. Characteristics like selective populism, nationalism, racism, traditionalism, the deployment of Newspeak and a disregard for reasoned debate were rightly noted as fascist tendencies, if not sufficient for some to call the Trump phenomenon a fascist one.

  These articles spoke to a genuine panic that the arc of history had been bent in the wrong direction, twisting back on itself toward early twentieth-century Europe. They were steeped in modernity’s progress myth, conveniently forgetting that fascism has, in fact, always been continuous with modernity. Whether or not the commentators concluded that Trump was an actual fascist, they all agreed that fascism was to be understood as The Worst. This glut of commentary treated fascism as something that takes shape only in the context of a historically constituted regime—the problem of fascism was real, but located only in the threat of its possible return: Will Donald Trump bring fascism to America?

  It was as if decades of theorizing fascism—as an ideology, or a tendency, a practice, something that never quite disappeared —had been erased overnight and all that mattered in the media frenzy was delineating Trump’s similarities and differences to Hitler or Mussolini.

  I didn’t consider at the time that most of the commentators weighing in on Trump’s fascism (or lack thereof) presumed their position to be anti-fascist enough. Every argument was premised on the post–World War II a priori that fascism is an evil to which we are opposed: a departure from or aberration of the sociopolitical status quo, something outside of ourselves. It’s perhaps no accident that a liberal commentariat would focus on this sort of state fascism—one that reductive histories pretend was conquered by liberal democracy, rather than crumbled in protracted war. But there’s nothing so easy, nor so empty, as opposition to a fascism that is framed as an unparalleled historical horror that could return.

  I took in good faith these professed concerns about the Trumpian specter of fascism, and I believed in turn that we would see a broad liberal-to-left acceptance of vigorous anti-fascist action. And so, I advocated, and continue to advocate, for a particular response to perceived fascism, one that has enjoyed successes throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I’m talking about the anti-fascism abbreviated as “Antifa”—a militant, no-tolerance approach to far-right, racist nationalism, the sort that, while it is not new, has become newly empowered and utterable. As such, I am talking about that messy, instable,
ever-oversimplified category: violence. Or, as I see it, counterviolence. I delighted, publicly, in Richard Spencer getting punched.

  Antifa is not a group, nor a movement, nor even an identity. To state one’s political position as anti-fascist after 1945 is close to empty and, I will argue, in a certain sense necessarily false. But as a practice taken up by the pan–far left (socialist and anarchist alike), Antifa is an illiberal intervention that in resisting fascism does not rely on the state, the justice system or any liberal institution. It finds organization online, in the streets, on campuses—wherever fascism is to be found.

  Having spent much of my writing career arguing against the old canard of violence versus nonviolence, I did not think liberal aversions to the idea of political violence would suddenly vanish. But I thought, with fear of fascism in the air and a clamor for some unified resistance, that we could at least agree that it was okay, if not good, to punch a neo-Nazi. How wrong I was.

  The gleeful social media circulation of the Spencer punch video was met with censure from the same liberal media microcosms that had spent the previous weeks nail-biting about fascism. Even the most simply Antifa act—a silencing, anti-Nazi punch—would not find broad support in the so-called resistance.

  A year into the Trump presidency, I felt like I’d fallen through the looking glass. The apparent panic about the rise of fascism had been overtaken by paranoiac fear and condemnation of the rise of anti-fascism.

  I had thought that Charlottesville would take on the valence of historic Event—the sort about which we speak of “before” and “after”; a turning point. A neo-Nazi plowed his Dodge Charger into a crowd of anti-fascist counterprotesters, killing one and injuring many. A young black man was viciously beaten by racists with metal poles in a parking lot by a police station. White supremacists marched, Klan-like, with burning torches and Nazi salutes around a Confederate statue of General Robert E. Lee while chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”—a gruesome pastiche of nineteenth-century American and twentieth-century European race hate, never vanquished but newly Trump-emboldened. The day after the rally, the president blamed “many sides.” Some days later, like a pantomime villain at another campaign-less campaign rally in Phoenix, he let out an ominous roar: “Anteefa!”