“When I hear the word culture, I release the safety catch on my pistol.” This is attributed to Goebbels or Göring, usually, but is from the 1933 play Schlageter by Hanns Johst. Trust an intellectual to care about getting the citation right.
There’s a slippage between culture and intellect. Intellectuals care about culture but are more marked by a claim to cognitive proficiency. Culture, on the other hand, is many things, not all of them narrowly cognitive. Culture is a “structure of feeling,” as Raymond Williams put it.
Perhaps there’s something a bit slippery in the way intellectuals are positioned as having a cognitive function: to be beings of thought. And yet that positioning fulfils an emotional need. The need for someone to be paying attention to understanding the world.
The figure of the intellectual stands in opposition to the “man of action,” of praxis. It’s a figure that has its leftist incarnations too. There’s maybe something masculinist in this figure. The intellectual is positioned as too feminine. Soft hands, dressed for the salon or the café. The communist man of action was supposed to scorn all that. The communist woman of action: his ascetic double. For the action people, the intellectual fellow traveler was a useful tool, but not an equal.
Live as long as I have and you see all these old figures repeat, as social media avatars. We lost so many struggles. We’re on the defensive. We might not want to confront this fresh crop of fascists—if that’s what they are—in our own inherited drag. Maybe there’s other ways to draw on our own legacies.
What is fascism? A lot of things. Let’s start by saying: Fascism is violence that makes itself law. With a little more nuance: Fascism is aggression under the alibi of order that precedes and installs its own law. Fascism is sovereignty that asserts its primal desires through aggression against the other. It affirms the truth of its existence not just through its victory over its others, but through their eradication.
In worlds blown apart by extraction and exploitation, where everything is reduced to exchange value, fascism is the fantasy of an order that has been lost, to be achieved by forcibly separating, ranking, and culling all that commodification renders fungible. Fascism retrieves a form of subjective power from the universal solvent of exploitation by rendering others as even less than objects, as abject.
Fascism presents itself as a restoration of something authentic, self-same, and self-evident, as the alibi for its violence. Its fantasy is the restoration of the truth and purity of a race, a gender, a sexuality, a vigorous and clean body, uncorrupted, naked under the sun, made of nothing but the soil of the homeland. It likes to think these obsessions are healthy. It puts only clean things in its body. Allows only clean things in its mind. It has metabolic obsessions. No foreign matter may trouble its gut.
We must fight it, and we will, and not just fight it. As a communist or feminist, one can get caught up in the language of negation, defining oneself in relation to what one is against. It’s exhausting. It calls for strength, clarity, hardness. Negation creates a time of high tension, with constant calls to attention. If not in substance, then in mood, one can become too much like the fascist enemy, the mimic and double of his strategies and style. One has to take care. Fascism doesn’t always appear as the bad other. There is a microfascism that is a potential of any desire.
Sometimes we need a place and time where fascists can’t touch us. A hole in time that’s just for us. I’m going to call this other place and time “femmunism.”
I could define femmunism negatively, as other to fascism, but I want to position it a bit differently. Firstly, femmunism is that which fascism hates the most. Because, secondly, femmunism won’t come out and fight it, and in fighting it mimic its mood. Femmunism withdraws from fascism’s martial time. It is uninterested in all of fascism’s emotions: its seething grievance, coddled resentment, wounded pride, hallucinatory nostalgia, manic grandeur.
Fascists love conflict, so they need to feel they are in opposition to exist. They are the great ones held under by some filthy impostor. Unless there’s the specter of enemies everywhere, it’s hard for them to stay mad, and hard for them to stay hard. Without resistance they seize up like an overwound muscle.
Anti-fascists are the other fascists love to hate. What they hate to hate—is femmunism. They sense it everywhere. It irks them because it doesn’t face them. It withdraws. Femmunism seems to have access to some pocket where fascists can’t enter. Femmunism is cunt.
Since fascism’s project is to fuck the world, this is infuriating. Femmunism is off having a party somewhere else. Even if fascists do find their way into our little soirées, our night within the night, as soon as they show up—we’re gone again. They become the proud possessors of an empty room.
I remember the first time I dropped acid. Sydney, 1982. Big share house in Chippendale. We’re having a house party. People dancing and talking, fucking and getting fucked up. There’s an installation of a dozen telephones someone had found in a dumpster, arranged with fairy lights.
Then someone starts kicking in the front door. Fascist skinheads. They drive around the inner city in a minivan looking for us, for our parties. They’ve found us. Most of us are too out of it to respond quickly. Except for John, a rather large man, who leaps up and runs to the door.
Failing to push it shut, John blocks the doorway and takes a rain of blows, until a small pack of us gather our wits, come together, and push the door closed. The departing fascists yell at us for being faggots and dykes, commies and whatnot, most of it true, then drive off.
John has a nasty cut to the head, is barely conscious. Rather than wait for an ambulance, several of our party bundle him into a car and speed off to emergency. The rest of us fall about in stunned silence. Someone changes the music. Someone gathers us on the living-room floor, in a circle. We hold hands. We hold each other. We cry, faces smeared with tears and eyeliner. Those of us on acid in the middle, being held all around.
The phone rings. Probably news about John. I pick up the phone at my feet. But it keeps ringing. On a practical level this is confusing and on a metaphysical one seems resonant and weird. The working phone had been incorporated into the phone sculpture, and I’d picked up one of the nonworking ones. Everyone on the floor scrambles to pick up a handset to answer the call. My girlfriend finally picks up the right receiver and the ringing stops. “Hello?” she says, in a small voice. The rest of us collapse in hysterical laughter.
“Shoosh!” she says, so she can hear. John has concussion, requires stitches to the head, an X-ray for a possible fractured arm. Will be held overnight. Somebody finds a pen and writes the key points down on someone’s arm. My girlfriend puts the phone down. And we cry. We all cry. And hold each other.
Some go off to John’s bedside. Most of us stay on the floor. I wake hours later to the smell of eggs cooking. I take a piss, find a rubbish bag, collect empties. We chip in money to get flowers.
It wasn’t the first time, or the last, that fascists would find us. But usually, they didn’t. We had a little world they didn’t know about—that nobody they knew knew about. It was the last house party at that house for a while. But there were plenty of others, elsewhere.
John recovered from his injuries and became a local hero. They were a few pathetic Sydney fascists, but it took courage and quick action to hold them off. The kind John had, that I simply don’t possess. Good qualities, perhaps, depending on how they’re used. But not for me. What others did that night pointed me towards something else. When we gathered each other, held each other, laughed in the midst of absurd calamity.
Some comrades who were at that party had another share household, a short walk away. Our household was artsy, theirs more political. One day, we get a call from over there. Everyone had been away for the weekend on political business. Someone must have been watching. When the household returned, they found the house completely trashed. Probably by fascists.
We go over to help out. Everyone in a low mood. All the art that had been on the walls destroyed. Books strewn about, stained with piss. Everything smashed. We pick up trash bags and begin to haul out the debris. Every now and then there’s anguish as the ruins of some keepsake surface. I cut my finger trying to pick broken glass out of a photo frame. It looks like the end of the world.
Then I hear sounds of joy from another room. I drop my trash bag to join the others. In the general desolation, one of our party found a single thing intact—a single champagne glass. Not knowing whether to laugh or cry, we do both. Someone ducks out to the bottle-o and returns with champagne. We take turns drinking from that single glass.
Our courage had left us that morning. But then, this moment of joy. This moment when we could gather and share our pain, make this one pretty coupe glass take the weight of feeling off us in an impromptu ritual. They think they can take everything from us, but they’ll never know what they can’t have, what they can’t feel.
And so my dears—I raise the signs of femmunism: the sickle of care, of mutual aid, of food and drink and a nice hot cup of tea. The magic wand of pleasure, of joy, of the party that knows how to party.
And so, my dears, I ask you: Please raise a glass, real or imagined, for this toast. We will fight the fascists. Like we did for George Floyd. We will fight, but we’ll also live, and love, together. To femmunism!
