[Andrew Szilvasy]

Quincy,

I enjoyed the article. Thanks for sharing.

[Mark McDonnell]

Yes, thanks for that Quincy. Great article. I recognised the name and realised it's the Mark Fisher who wrote about music so well, specifically the retro weirdness of the 'hauntology' genre which briefly obsessed me a few years back. What a tragedy he died so young. He articulates much that I've tried, possibly clumsily, to express here about aspects of identity politics that I find troubling: the humourless moralising; the lack of room for irony, or playfulness or nuance in art; the ascribing of the worst possible motive or scenario to any language use or opinion seen as 'problematic'; the Kafkaesque way that any criticism of its orthodoxies, even those from an obviously left or liberal perspective, is positioned as tainted by suspicion of a conservative agenda; the way, in fact, its most sustained attacks are usually on liberals (so much easier to elicit the required grovelling apology and promises to 'do better'); the fetishisation of identity categories; and particularly the bizarre, almost embarrassed, erasure of class from the wokeness project. All this and the painful, spirit-deadening language it employs. This is spot on.

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. 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. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.

The privilege I certainly enjoy as a white male consists in part in my not being aware of my ethnicity and my gender, and it is a sobering and revelatory experience to occasionally be made aware of these blind-spots. But, 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.

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. In all of the absurd and traumatic twitterstorms about privilege earlier this year it was noticeable that the discussion of class privilege was entirely absent. The task, as ever, remains the articulation of class, gender and race – but the founding move of the Vampires’ Castle is the dis-articulation of class from other categories.

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.

I've no doubt that the sillier excesses of identitarian liberal-woke politics, and particularly the increasing wholesale embrace of it by the mainstream media, have had some effect in alienating the working class and turning them away from actual, progressive left-wing politics of the sort that would benefit everyone, irrespective of colour, sexuality etc. These are people who are not, on the whole, racists, transphobes and homophobes, and nor are they stupid. But they may not be immersed in the relevant Twitter threads or have been through the higher education systems, from which identity politics derives its ideas and language. Therefore they (rightly, I think) see many aspects of the current 'woke' landscape as off-putting, maddening and absurd. And I've no doubt that many working class POC, gay and trans people are fairly sick of this stuff too. Progressive politics needs all these people on its side and unless the left is willing to distance itself from, and stand up to, this “priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt-mongers” it will lose them. If it continues to allow the right to have the monopoly on criticism of this stuff then that's where the working class may continue to drift. Which is why I like this article, which is unambiguous in its criticisms but clearly and unarguably from a left wing, class-conscious perspective.

I was also struck by this from Fisher's article:

Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism. The reason I didn’t speak out on any of these incidents, I’m ashamed to say, was fear. The bullies were in another part of the playground. I didn’t want to attract their attention to me.

This isn't healthy. And it's sobering that this article is seven years old and things seem to have only got worse on the identitarian left. (And it goes without saying that things have got worse on the identitarian right). I hope Fisher's final paragraph can still prove true.

We [by which I assume Fisher means anyone on the left, indeed anyone interested in the project of human dignity and equality for all individuals] need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication.