Being Numerous Read online

  The 43 Group was an anti-fascist organization that deployed violence as its primary tactic. Its founding members had returned from the war with the presumption that their work fighting fascism had ended with Hitler’s downfall. It seemed unthinkable that the once-flourishing prewar fascist movement, led by the aristocratic, anti-Semitic politician Mosley, could be revived. What does it mean to reckon with the desire for fascism at the very moment the death spectacle of the camps could not be unseen by the world? But the ex-servicemen who founded the 43 Group returned from the war to find Mosley and his fascists regrouping, rallying and organizing in growing numbers. They speechified about the threat of an “alien menace.” Synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in East London were vandalized. “They didn’t burn enough of them in Belsen”—so went the chant during fascist mobilizations, referencing the infamous Nazi concentration camp.

  In response, the anti-fascists of the 43 Group made it their business not only to identify and surveil, but to physically confront, disrupt and shut down postwar fascist organizing in London and across Britain. “We’re not here to kill. We’re here to maim,” they would say—and indeed, they wielded knives, knuckledusters and crowbars. The group disrupted over 2,000 meetings over five active years and is widely credited for its success neutralizing postwar Britain’s fascist movement. “We defended the community by making it impossible for the fascists to terrorize us,” one member, Jules Konopinski, told the Guardian in 2009. The group’s militancy drew some contemporary censure from parts of the British Jewish establishment, but for the most part its place in history is either overlooked or lauded by historians, Holocaust memorial institutions and anti-racist groups. Famed hairdresser Vidal Sassoon was an active fighter among the group, and when he died in 2012, mainstream media obituaries described him as an “anti-fascist warrior” who was “fighting back against fascist oppression.”

  Fast-forward to January 2017, when I was publicly chastised for celebrating one artful Antifa punch delivered to Richard Spencer’s face, caught on meme-ready video. It is a classic instance of historical NIMBYism—taken up by liberals and conservatives alike—in which it is only in the past, or in other countries, that violent militancy against white supremacy constitutes legitimate resistance. This logic is premised on the belief (even the tacit one) that while dissent, militancy and violence is fine there and was fine then, our current context is not so bad. We imprison today’s protesters and canonize yesterday’s insurrectionists.

  We must undo this NIMBYism and reckon with the violence of the here and now. Even if anti-fascists couldn’t get close enough for physical confrontation on the day the neo-Nazis marched in Berlin, it was nevertheless a violent event, even before the police began assaulting seated protesters. Often, defenders of Antifa militancy call the resort to violent tactics a form of self-defense—a preemptive act to protect the community from the violence inherent to fascist organizing. When Antifa protesters aggressively shut down Milo Yiannopoulos’s talk at Berkeley, numerous participants cited the bigot’s tendency to use his platform to name and out transgender students on campus. After Charlottesville, Dr. Cornel West, who marched that day with local clergy, said of Antifa: “They saved our lives, actually. We would have been completely crushed.” Of the white supremacists, on the other hand, he remarked, “I’ve never seen that kind of hatred in my life.”

  We must delineate what we are, and are not, willing to name “violence.” I don’t believe a smashed bank window or a burning trash can on the Berkeley campus outside a Milo speech to be victims of violence or to produce victims. But that is not an absolute distinction related to animate versus inanimate objects—for a smashed mosque window or a swastika on a Jewish grave would, by my lights, produce legitimate victims of violence. The latter, but not the former, are in service of an ideology—white supremacy—in which violence inheres. There is a crucial distinction between destruction as collateral damage of a political end (say, in the goal of disrupting a neo-Nazi gathering), versus as its central tenet (genocide).

  Anti-fascist violence is thus a counterviolence, not an instigation of violence onto a terrain of preexisting peace. A situation in which fascists can gather to preach hate and chant “blood and soil”—this is a background state of violence. The problem we face, then, is not so much that of necessary violence as it is one of impossible nonviolence.

  The next obvious question pertains to targets: Where does one draw the line concerning which groups or speakers deserve anti-fascist exposure and confrontation? We might agree when it comes to openly white nationalist activists—the Richard Spencers or Nathan Damigos of the world—but what of someone like racist pseudoscientist Charles Murray, or members of the so-called “alt-lite” who purport to not be racist, but who run in the same circles? There’s no Antifa committee or council that draws rules to serve as rails about who counts as fascist enough to fight; each community that takes anti-fascist action must decide for itself on appropriate targets and tactics. This constitutes an ethical practice, not a moral code. And it’s worth noting that this is largely a hypothetical concern: it has not posed a problem that Antifa activists have gone after “regular” Trump supporters. Perhaps some college Republicans had their “Make America Great Again” hats unceremoniously knocked off at Berkeley, but they were organizing and supporting a Milo talk. And this is the Antifa point: to make consequences felt for organizing with or alongside white supremacists and hatemongers. Slippery slope arguments are distractions at a time when there are so many outright-fascist organizations at which to aim our anti-fascism.

  Fascism is not just a type of regime, nor is it an ideology for a would-be regime. As noted above, micro-fascisms permeate quotidian life, as does the perverted desire for fascism. But the practical question of where to draw the line when it comes to deploying violent counterprotest has not been answered. (We do not, for example, do the work of anti-fascisting ourselves by punching ourselves in the face daily—or at least I don’t —but then again, we are not seeking to organize with proactively fascist racists as a form of life). Borrowing from Italian novelist and critic Umberto Eco, we might want to use the term “ur-fascist” for those for whom violent intervention could be an ethical possibility.

  I can’t give you a definition of ur-fascism that accounts for every instance of something we might want to call ur-fascism in the world, any more than I can give you a definition of the term “game” that covers every instance of something we correctly call a game. This was what philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein meant by a “family resemblance concept”—there is no one essential common feature shared by all things we call “game”; rather we see “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing.” I’m not the first to apply the idea to fascism. Eco wrote in the New York Review of Books that “fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game,” noting, “Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist.” So we might name an overlapping network of similarities like populism, nationalism, racism, traditionalism and disregard for reasoned debate—any one (or more) of these could be absent, and the term “ur-fascism” would still apply.

  But I’d suggest that we can further use Wittgenstein’s family resemblance idea to talk about whether we draw the boundary on what counts as an ur-fascist. Wittgenstein talks about the problem of delineating the boundaries of a term or concept thus:

  I can give the concept “number” rigid limits … that is, use the word “number” for a rigidly limited concept, but I can also use it so that the extension of the concept is not closed by a frontier. And this is how we do use the word “game”. For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game and what no longer does? Can you give the boundary? No. You can draw one; for none has so far been drawn. (But that never troubled you before when you used the word “game”.)

  So I cannot give you the boundary of ur-fascism, or the clear path away from fas
cism; we, in practice, have to draw it as we go. Understandably, that is a more troubling conclusion than when this logic is applied to the use of the word “game.” But this is where ethics comes in: collective decision making, community inclusion, and careful but forceful deliberation about what (or who) counts as a threat when they attempt to take platforms or to organize in our midst.

  Toward anti-fascisting, even while we cannot anti-fascist be!

  2

  Ghost Stories

  If you have ghosts, you have everything

  —Roky Erickson

  C: Someone has died who is not dead

  M: And now we are friends

  —Sarah Kane, Crave (1998)

  I don’t see dead people. But a ghost has haunted the bathroom adjoined to my childhood bedroom for as long as I can remember, and it terrifies me. I don’t believe in ghosts.

  I was around seven years old when my family moved to the leafy 1930s-style detached home in London in which my parents still live. My bedroom was on the back corner of the second floor, with an en suite bathroom. It boasted a dusty pink tub and toilet, installed when avocado green was an acceptable bathroom color scheme. I don’t trace the ghost back to that era, or to any specific time. All I know is that he was there when, or as, I arrived. I have never been haunted—except metaphorically—anywhere else.

  This ghost is formless—a shadow that seems to peer back, an aspect that shifts when you look back twice, a displacer of air in the room. I’ve feared him for as long as I’ve disbelieved in his broader kind. A few months ago, I was back to London to stay in that house with my boyfriend, to whom I clung throughout the night in fear. I wasn’t afraid that the ghost might come; the ghost was already there. It’s not a heavy presence all night, but he stirs at some point or points most nights. The bathroom shifts from small and quaint to a cave of darkness visible. Closing the bathroom door doesn’t help; the concealment can evoke more dread.

  There is no prima facie contradiction in fearing something that one does not believe to exist. This experience is not even an unusual one—a fact attested to by the success of horror movies. My fear doesn’t point to a de facto belief, and the ghost who haunts my childhood bathroom does not present grounds for shifting my web of ontological commitments to include a realm of formerly embodied souls wandering among us. I’m not simply waiting for the right empirical experience to substantiate a coherent and comprehensible ghost world for me. But the least interesting thing to do with my ghost is to explain him away.

  Instead, I want to account for my ghost without reducing him to nonexistence or empirical fact. Rather than as a mere metaphor, I want to insist upon the ghost’s presence as a substantive reminder to believe and disbelieve differently—to believe and disbelieve simultaneously, with a commitment that goes beyond a jump in the night. The hows, not the whats, by which he is. I aim to explain why I can allow a certain reality of the ghost—and why I should, and you should too.

  I was petrified as a child, but only in private. Neither withdrawn nor fanciful, I was not imaginative enough to see ghosts everywhere, nor fairies anywhere. And if I was precocious enough to reject magic, I was not philosophical enough, until much later, to let it back in. But my bathroom was haunted.

  The haunting was pretty standard: I would lie like stone under my covers, hiding my feet. Trips to pee at night were mad dashes to the toilet and back, under the watch of a dark presence, with a felt immateriality no less robust than a human gaze. Yes, yes, the male gaze in my bathroom mirror. The fact that the ghost has always seemed male to me is probably not an accident, but this essay isn’t a therapy session. The ghost will never show or prove itself male or not, or gendered in any direction, because the ghost won’t prove itself at all. And the ghost hardly stands alone in the set of beings interpellated through gender. But, again, the ghost is not a metaphor.

  As children often are, I was better back then at maintaining contradictions—the reality and unreality of the ghost was no mental strain. But I contracted positivism while growing up, and I tried to explain my ghost away. When I was around eleven, a physics teacher accidentally offered some bright relief by describing the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, when a person experiences a total inability to move or speak while on the edge of waking, a state often accompanied by visual and auditory hallucinations, and the sense that a presence is physically weighing on them or the edge of the bed. Centuries of succubus and incubus demons sitting on chests, all explained as a glitch on the journey to or from REM sleep.

  A bad drug trip can be mitigated by the reminder that it’s drug-induced. Hallucinations, deciphered as mental illness, can be mitigated by the use of drugs. In both cases, what matters is an intervention that asserts that the hallucination is not real. Such reality-affirming (or-inscribing) interventions can be lifesaving. The same considerations need not apply to my ghost. While he could be explained merely as the product of sleep paralysis, the simplest explanation is not always the best. The explanation you choose for a phenomenon partly depends on your aims. Knowing about sleep paralysis didn’t stop it occurring, nor did it vanquish the ghost as an ongoing presence to this day.

  When my mother told me that she uses my bathroom and bedroom for my baby nephew when he stays over, I shuddered. My nephew’s little body, bubble bath, baby toys, and the ghost. I leave psychic room for the possibility that they might notice each other.

  Although I’m the only one who has experienced my bathroom ghost, he is not a private mental object. (I don’t believe in private mental objects.) I talk about the ghost now, joke about him. I’m telling you about my ghost because I don’t really know how to tell about him. I point to him here, because I can’t but I do. If he (or anything) were just a subjective phenomenological experience, we wouldn’t be able to discuss it. Sure, you can’t feel what it feels like to be haunted by my ghost, but you also can’t feel what it is like to be me in general. That’s not unique to haunting, and it is not a good enough reason to dismiss the ghost as just an invention of my imagination. Equally, if the ghost were simply there—like standard-issue worldly stuff—there’d be no grounds for comment, no reason to reach out and share him with you. It’s his ambiguity that makes him worth mention.

  Intimacy lives in those places we don’t reduce to the wholly explicable, even though we could.

  Contemporary science allows for the reality of my ghost only insofar as he is the content of a real hallucination or psychological process, steeped in my projections. And I can’t disagree with that conclusion, aside from the fact that it’s not much fun. My disagreement begins with the assertion that hallucination or imagination are the only possible terrains of reality for my ghost.

  The new atheists, such as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, or social critics Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris—the worst of all ghostbusters—demand the universe, however physically massive, be as small and legible as possible. They would do well to consult some better empiricists. Willard Van Orman Quine, a twentieth-century American logician and philosopher, had little time for ghosts, but even less time for the sort of bad thinking that organizes the world into stable, immovable categories that could never allow for ghosts. Quine thought our theories of the world should be considered webs of belief, with centers and peripheries. At the center of the web are propositions we might call analytically true, or a priori—for instance, 2 + 2 = 4; or all bachelors are unmarried. On the periphery are beliefs that can be changed based on some recalcitrant experiences; for example, if one believes there are no red-haired French people, but then meets a few red-haired French people, the original belief is easily revised. Quine rejected that these are actually two different types of truth, epistemologically (i.e., really). Given the right, albeit dramatic, alterations to a belief web, 2 + 2 = 4 could be false, and not just by swapping around the meaning of words.

  Right now, as I sit here soberly typing, if I see a pink elephant dance into the room, my web of belief is such that I assume I am hallucinating, not that
pink elephants dance into rooms. It would take a decent dose of recalcitrant evidence for me to choose the latter explanation. Given that we develop these holistic systems in societal, not isolated, contexts, it would likely take a critical mass of people experiencing the pink elephant to conclude that the pink-elephant hypothesis is a better story of reality than the hallucination hypothesis. But Quine’s point is that this is possible.

  Webs of belief are holistic systems, and they can shift to include new, even radical propositions, so long as the entire web shifts accordingly. The webs of belief aren’t intersubjective attempts to map out a real world—that is, a map that gets closer and closer to truth with better and better science. Rather, they delineate reality at a given time, and every proposition contained in such a web is (in theory) revisable. They could shift to include the existence of ghosts, or just one bathroom ghost. We can imagine a world in which we had enough shared experiences to include bathroom ghosts as verifiable objects in our web of belief. More crucially, Quine’s approach entails not only that we could “add” ghosts to the set of existing things, but also that we can maintain webs of belief in which things do and don’t exist at the same time.

  A given web of belief is better, by Quine’s empiricist lights, if it better predicts future phenomena based on experience. But, using the example of Homer’s gods, he noted that the affective reality of something doesn’t depend on its materiality: “In point of epistemological footing,” Quine wrote, “the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.”

  This points to the larger stakes of Quinean holism, which relate to my ghost’s mode of existence. When Quine talked about conceptual schemes for future prediction, he failed to talk about desire, about ethics. In affirming my ghost, I’m asking that we not be boring assholes about what gets to exist, and how. The ghost invites an ethical consideration, not just an ontological one: he is indicative of inexplicable possibilities, which get ruled out as empirically impossible. We act better, I believe, when we don’t work to fold every unusual phenomenon into a preexisting dogma. It’s a political imperative to believe (impossibly) that another world is possible, while necessarily being unable to explain that world from the confines of this one. The “inexpressible contained—inexpressibly! —in the expressed,” as literary scholar and author Maggie Nelson summed up Wittgenstein’s central concern in her 2015 book The Argonauts.