BLOG OF PUBLIC SECRETS

Gadflies, Gossip and Conspiracy

 

 

On September 27, Robert T. Tally, Jr., a student of Fredric Jameson, wrote in an obituary for the famed Marxist literary critic that “Others have noted, dialectically or ironically, that this” – the fact that Jameson’s death marks the end of an epoch – “is itself a profoundly anti-Jamesonian view, for it expresses a vision in which it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Jameson.”1 It so happens that this unnamed “others” is Slavoj Žižek, who wrote in his obituary of September 24, that on the day of his death, “it was not Jameson who died; death just happened to him – it is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the death of Jameson.”2 This closing line is also used as a subtitle to Žižek article, which makes it hard to miss. I have not gone searching far and wide to discover whether others have in fact said anything similar. I doubt it. The reason is simple enough, and Tally’s greater familiarity with Jameson does not gainsay the fact that Žižek has been discussing the paradoxes of immortality in his own writings for decades. Žižek is not content to comment on Jameson’s work without reference to his own. Not only does Tally’s article not name Žižek, but he inverts the point of Žižek’s use of the Jamesonian phrase that Žižek, in fact, made famous: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” which is Žižek’ version of this aphorism. This speaks to the many differences between the two articles, with Tally iterating the Cultural Studies cliché that for Jameson there were always positive and utopian prospects within the most negative ideological elements. Perhaps one can imagine that the end of world would bring some relief to the animals of Earth. Whereas Žižek can stand beside Jameson as both a thinker and an equally avid consumer of culture, the student relies on insider referencs and sophomoric tit for tat to make his points. To put things in terms of ancient sculpture, one is the Greek original, able to stand on its own, the other is the Roman knock-off that relies on the prop of subterfuge.

Žižek’s remarks in his essay that Jameson’s work investigated conspiracy as an aspect of cognitive mapping, not as feature of everyday gossip and frivolous intrigue. This remark was raised in the prologue to Douglas Lain’s discussion with Fabio Vighi on the Sublation Media YouTube channel, along with a thumbnail that promised to say something about the “Žižek Left,” which was either not discussed or reserved for Patreon subscribers.3 The September 30 comment I left on that episode includes the following:

“There are few significant commentators on Žižek, though many commentators, and Vighi with Feldner's book, Žižek: Beyond Foucault, is highly recommended. Beyond this, it is hard to argue [as Vighi does] that capital does not need labour when today there are more workers performing labour tasks than ever before. The working class, even in the United States, is approximately 70 percent of the population. Even if it is not organized or unionized, that does not mean that it does not exist, that capitalism is not exploiting labour, or that we have moved beyond production. The fact is that workers need to be better organized and that in no way requires something like the full autonomist spectrum of exodus and emphasis on pleasure, leisure, etc, which are ideas that are not outside the development of capitalism since the nineteenth century. Lefebvre had a more practical understanding of this issue, for example. Vighi’s new versus old rhetoric is somewhat pointless since art and culture, and intellectual production, simply continue, now more than ever, without needing to be ideologized. Regarding the Deleuzian injunction to not reterritorialize labour, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said the same thing and perhaps said it in a better overall intellectual framework than Gilles Deleuze’s postmodern binaries. As for people not being their real self but becoming avatars, that virtuality is already implicit in subjectivity, and Vighi said it perfectly: the problem is going from bad to worse. For example, the rejection of autonomy by post-structuralists because it has a bourgeois legacy is typically used by these same theorists to reject Marxism along with it and lead the left down the postmodern path that has supplemented rather than challenged neoliberalism. The argument seems to be, let us not go back to the pre-postmodern left, let us remain the post-left. I am not convinced by what is ultimately the Fukuyama-vs-Derrida paradigm. Žižek and Badiou were at least a break with that and theorists like Jodi Dean have the correct orientation. Little wonder she lost her job.”

The same day, Dustin Guastella published on Jacobin an article titled “The Immortal Ghost of Karl Marx.”4 Its primary purpose is to refute two essays by Joseph Heath that proclaim the end of Marxism. The article makes little mention of Jacques Derrida’s only direct engagement with the topic of communism, Specters of Marx, but instead attributes emphasis on the “spectral or supernatural” aspect of the Marxist legacy to “moderate conservatives” who fear its return.5 Liberals, for their part, and according to Guastella, think that Marxism is dead and cannot return, but must nevertheless produce accounts about why Marxism has returned. Guastella seems to agree with Chris Cutrone’s account of the Death of the Millennial Left, but without any engagement with his ideas either.6 He rejects the claim that social democrats do not need Marxism on the view that many Marxists became reformists after Marx’s death and that without Marx there would be no welfare capitalism. Marx is therefore necessary to “the great advances in social democratic reform that liberals now take for granted.” And so, what Guastella takes away from liberals like Heath, however, he also takes away from communists, whose commitment to Marxism is satirized as a “religious faith in the coming revolutionary crisis.” This of course is not Marxist in the least, but rather a mechanical application of Marxist concepts, in this instance, as a form of teleology, which is a conviction that one does not find in Marx and Engels, despite their efforts to understand the principles and laws of socio-economic development. The structure of the argument is also similar to the post-structuralist move mentioned previously, with Marx acting as a Jamesonian vanishing mediator between communists and liberals. For Guastella, Marxism retains its explanatory power but not its political import – i.e. its utopian or idealist dimension. As for Derrida, his followers are said to be unable “to explain themselves in plain language let alone anything that goes on in the real world.” To suggest that the followers of Writing and Difference should explain themselves in plain language is like demanding that a poet to write prose.7 One might not be surprised to hear this from a social democrat who has no interest in the ultimate overcoming of capitalism. These Derrideans are thriving, Guastella thinks, while vulgar Marxists (like himself?) are an endangered species. Somewhere in all this there is the conjecture that John Rawls is believed to have killed Western Marxism. And here we were, thinking it was Gabriel Rockhill who had achieved this final coup de grace. 

In the essay “Intellectuals, Not Gadflies,” Žižek refers to a long tradition of philistinism that views intellectuals as given to radical ideas to supplement their wimpy existence.8 Those Marxists who continue to defend Marx’s ideas are the worse since taken to the extreme, they could lead to communism. Because of this, G.K. Chesterton recommended that society establish a corps of philosophy police to prevent the outbreak of conspiracies among political dissidents, which could begin with something as simple as a book of poetry. The charge against Marxists is that the philosophical notion of totality has led leftists towards political totalitarianism. The philosophy police would generate chatter about people no one has even heard about, like Joseph Heath and Robert Tally, to prevent talk that could upset the foundations liberal society. Žižek proposes that the solution to the creation of such a cadre – which in other respects are those who maintain the conditions necessary for free and open dialogue – is to generate intellectual provocations that raise unpleasant questions, for example, about the condition of the working class in U.S. and abroad, without proposing concrete solutions. He gives as an example Wendy Brown’s critique of wokeism as a universal liberal rhetoric with deep attachments to the notion of truth and human rights discourse. For Brown, the cure to this is an anti-democratic, or homeopathic, process of deconstructive self-questioning that avoids the suturing of meaning and the development of a pragmatic political programme. Unlike the wokesters who have recently sought to “apply” postmodern ideas in their quixotic quests for social justice, as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay argue, theory she thinks should remain an obscure practice that renders problems visible without any further investments.9 In aesthetic terms, one should practice something like social realism but not socialist realism. The two Palestine solidarity songs created by the rapper Macklemore are examples of this kind of cathartic idealism in the service of a good cause. Since most leftists in the U.S. do not believe in an alternative to capitalism, either in the short or the long term, the spectre of Marx can indefinitely perform the task that the journalist Briahna Joy Gray would give it, which is a lever with which to move the Overton window a little further to the centre left. Political contestation is limited to a democratic form of nihilistic virtue signalling.

The Lacanian dimension of the Real that Žižek wishes to identify in Jameson, which is not a matter of historicizing the scholar, his work, or the culture that produced them, is also located in the idea of communism. This marks a distinction from those postmodern ideas like Derrida’s and Deleuze’s that distinguish between critique and involvement. This comes around to the role of an imagined big Other who would bring some coherence, or truth, to social struggles. Philosophical police would see to it that no such organ is established. Žižek here rejects the postmodern withdrawal into subjectivized aesthetics of the neoliberal new philosophers. It brings him to address the distinction between an authentic event and an inauthentic event. The October 7 attack by Hamas, one could argue, is an inauthentic event, however dreadful, and quite unlike the retribution meted out by the Israeli regime in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. This distinction between an authentic and an inauthentic event is aligned by Žižek with the distinction between Alain Badiou’s definition of an (authentic) event, and Deleuze’s definition of an (inauthentic) evental surface and process of subjective becoming.

Zionist racist supremacy and the subjugation of Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenis and Iranians is a false solution to the problems of global capitalism. Unlike the “axis of resistance,” and because they are focused on narrow self-interest, the Israeli regime does not arrive at the properly formal level of an evental rupture. This also marks the distinction between the utopian dimension that Jameson reads in literature and the hauntings of Marx that Derrida reads in contemporary European history, both of which are outside the prevailing capitalist democracy. If political liberalism represented a radical break with feudalism, the Marxist universality of the proletariat represented the same with regard to bourgeois democracy. Because the current axis of resistance that is opposed to the fascist drift of the U.S., the E.U., NATO and the autocratic West seeks the creation of a territory and the liberation of the downtrodden from the death grip of the conspiracy against it, it will without question find its true artists, intellectuals and political leaders.    

 

Notes

1. Robert T. Tally, Jr., “The Fredric Jameson I Knew,” Jacobin (September 27, 2024), https://jacobin.com/2024/09/fredric-jameson-philosophy-marxism-obituary.

2. Slavoj Žižek, “Larger Than Life,” substack (September 24, 2024), https://substack.com/@slavojzizek/p-149486644.

3. Sublation Media with Douglas Lain, “Žižek and Emergency Capitalism,” YouTube (September 27, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gjeoxV6Owg. See also Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner, Žižek: Beyond Foucault(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

4. Dustin Guastella, “The Immortal Ghost of Karl Marx,” Jacobin (September 30, 2024), https://jacobin.com/2024/09/marx-socialism-liberals-class-conflict. One of Heath’s articles was previously discussed by Vivek Chibber in Nick French, “No, Liberalism Hasn’t Buried Marxism,” Jacobin (September 14, 2024), https://jacobin.com/2024/09/liberalism-marxism-cohen-rawls-workers.

5. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The Sate of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London: Routledge, 1993).

6. Chris Cutrone, The Death of the Millennial Left: Interventions 2006-2022 (Portland: Sublation Media, 2023).

7. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967/1978).

8. Slavoj Žižek, “Intellectuals, Not Gadflies,” Critical Inquiry #34 (Winter 2008), S21.

9. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity – And Why This Harms Everybody (Durham: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020).

 

 

Global Capitalist Nostalgia for Identity

 

 

The passing of Fredric Jameson causes one to wonder who in cultural theory could possibly fill his shoes. Shoes were of course the subject of one of his most famous discussions of the difference between, on the one hand, the world that Martin Heidegger imagined Vincent Van Gogh imagined a bohemian peasant like himself inhabited and, on the other, the cultural logic of late capitalism, with its waning of affect and nostalgia for the present, which is to say, a moment of mediatized “time-space compression,” as David Harvey explained it, that does not leave the postmodern personality enough time, like the photographers Charles Marville or Eugène Atget, to register the extent to which the world around them has changed. Indeed, so much of the postmodern suggests the collapse of time and dialectics into spatialized arrangements that are the bleeding edge of capitalist transformation, as seen from the bunker buster bombs dropped on Gaza and the exploding pagers in Lebanon to the anti-immigrant media pranks of Republicans in Ohio and the use of TikTok influencers to sell hot sauce and cosmetics to teenagers.

Jameson noted the psychological and cultural impact of the breakdown of meaning in postmodern culture. He did not, as so many artists did after him, revel in postmodernism’s “resistance is futile” corporate and military-industrial sublime. This disappearance of the “house that Heidegger built” somewhere on a German hillside was not something that Jameson lamented, even as he argued that Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes – advertising analogues to Arman’s object portraits and Daniel Spoerri’s after-dinner snare sculptures – better captured the mediatized glass and mirror-covered world he lived in. No less aware of the brutality of this Ray Ban architecture than J.G. Ballard, or Joe Biden, Ballard’s creation, what made Jameson our literary critic was his sensitivity to the human condition, which implied his own sensitivity to the problems with capitalism and schizophrenia, which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari tried to playfully inhabit in an effort to escape the master code of Marxist alienation, leading the likes of Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Paul Virilio and Arthur Kroker, in valiant efforts to offer something even flatter than Édouard Manet’s Olympia, to chronicle the latest in supersonic reversals, scientific auto-colonization, engineered disappearance and excremental culture.

Very likely the biggest challenge to Jameson’s work came in the 1990s, when feminist scholars like Gillian Rose and Doreen Massey attacked the Marxist theorists of postmodernism as a boy’s club whose adherents felt threatened by postmodern decentring. This coincided with radical democratic attempts to shift the locus of anti-capitalist resistance away from the labour-capital contradiction and towards feminist and postcolonial struggles beyond the traditional left, adduced primarily to struggles over positions of power in academia. Chantal Mouffe’s call to academic agonism as a legitimate form of democratic contestation no doubt played its role in the cancel culture phenomenon that developed in the wake of Black Lives Matter and MeToo, with some attention belatedly given to the petty-bourgeois and middle-class character of this post-Marxist and now intersectional agenda.

Jameson’s effort to “dialectically” incorporate this race, gender and sexuality challenge, as noticed in his 2009 book, Valences of the Dialectic, was not unlike his sensitivity to cinema, literature or the built environment. He took it in but without conceding to dogma or empiricism, which is to say, by being attuned to its contradictions and by including psychoanalysis in his understanding of historical materialism. This effort to constantly give the dialectic a “new vocation” in the thinking of autonomous realities eschewed post-structuralism’s approach to unmediated binaries. With this, it was possible to consider how, for example, Leninism became Stalinism, or feminism became progressive neoliberalism and intersectional wokeism. It is not so much that things always go awry, or that nothing stands still, but that social change within the coordinates of capitalist totality produces problems that are dissimulated by culture and ideology. It is Marxism that allowed Jameson to resist the injunction to anti-dialectical thinking in today’s “new materialist” and “neo-positivist” academia, as with, for instance, discourse theories that ignore their own investments in power, such that, anything that might not coincide with those interests are perceived to be wrongly paranoid. One thinks of the Just Stop Oil activists who in late September 2024 souped two more of Van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers without any consideration of the public’s indifference towards this t-shirt-branded tactic. Most of Jameson’s books are exercises in method rather than concept-poor but verbiage-rich exposés of activist agonism.

As I completed my undergraduate degree in history in 1991, I became immersed in the world of contemporary art and urbanism from the perspective of the debate between Marxists and postmodernists. This debate has hardly simmered in these days when for example critical theorist Fabio Vighi suggests to podcaster Douglas Lain that we should not territorialize left politics around labour.1 The fact that it is Marx and Engels who taught us this, and not Deleuze, somehow seems lost to the requirement to make it new. Jameson recommended that we historicize instead, a strategy that seems inoperative for those who are concerned primarily with empowerment, which is a desire that is readily instrumentalized by social media. In my own little corner of this contradiction, I had this to say in one comment I posted on the Christian Parenti episode of The Chris Hedges Report, which was titled “Wokeness Kills Class Politics and Empowers Empire”:

“With wokeism in the 2000s, no one is talking about Lead Belly and the 1930s, but regardless, the uses of the word have changed over time. The left is responding to the changed uses of the word, after OWS and the rise of BLM, for example, and many in fact were not aware of this simple use until around 2022, when that became the thing to say to defend wokeism. According to Parenti's article:

‘Woke ideology has six features: 1) It is a self-consciously left oppositional politics that seeks to transform society through the moralizing micropolitics of politicized etiquette, thus a fixation on the politics of language and symbols; cultural appropriation and misnaming are cardinal sins, and centering historically oppressed groups is essential. 2) It sees the world through reductive and essentialist identity politics that fixates on the categories of race, gender, indigeneity, sexual orientation, physical disability, mental health diagnoses, immigration status, and sometimes even socioeconomic status. 3) Woke discourse is imbued with a therapeutic mentality expressed in safety-obsessed incantations about harm, trauma, healing, care, and “doing the work.” This leads to an excessive focus on subjectivity, which itself becomes an unacknowledged methodological individualism that posits personal struggles as political struggles, and vice versa. 4) Wokeness has a deeply anti-intellectual concern with moral and political hygiene that constantly draws a distinction between the politically clean and unclean, friend and enemy, good and evil; certain people, places, books, ideas, and consumer products must be avoided. 5) Woke culture is often operationalized through a horizontal, vigilante methodology that seeks to censor offending utterances and personages by means of “calling out” via public denunciation, condemnation, and harassment, and by pressure on and appeals to employers, corporations, and state agencies to silence, fire, deplatform, and otherwise punish wrongdoers. Thus the woke worldview is bound up with censorious and authoritarian “cancel culture” and the social media ecology in which that form of activism is most often enacted. 6) Most important, woke politics eclipse and displace old-fashioned universalist class politics — the struggle over who produces wealth, how, and for whom. Woke discourse will make occasional reference to class struggle and political economy. But more often, woke lefties explicitly condemn class politics as racist, sexist, or reductive.’3

Comments: 1) Left oppositional may be a misnomer if you are talking about micropolitics because many in this discourse theoretical or post-structuralist sector reject left-right-centre distinctions that are macropolitical. One can nevertheless talk about a postmodern left. One characteristic of this post-left is its focus on power-resistance, and nihilistic power politics, which have little or nothing, depending on who you’re talking about, to do with the socialist left. This postmodern left has little interest in etiquette, in fact, and more interest in so-called activism, even if that is around language and symbols, and so on, according to social justice methodologies. 2) The postmodern left is not only concerned with historically victimized groups, and you could attribute aspects of far-right culture to postmodern anti-foundationalism. For example, white supremacists who fear they are being “replaced” express their grievance as though they too are victimized groups, this being the most improbable claim in the “oppression Olympics.” There are reactionary and fascist sources – as I argue in Too Black to Fail – to postmodern thinking that the postmodern left is oblivious to. 3) In Bernie Bros Gone Woke I comment that Catherine Liu’s notion of virtue hoarders (derived in part from Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Fear of Falling) should add vice signalling because the “extreme centre” (Tariq Ali) in the petty-bourgeois PMC is concerned, by definition, with status seeking and is a “mediocratic” class (Alain Deneault) that is willing to sacrifice its own professionalism and political ideals for the sake of empowerment. The talk about trauma and care is related to developing fields of research that are compatible with the neoliberal academy. However, in practice, these people who cancel others on the basis of flimsy differences are playing a class game that often does not apply to other middle-class people in their social circles, and they themselves do not consider their own hostilities and micro-aggressions to be problematic but instead justified, much like the U.S. military. The postmodern left has difficulty being obsessed with subjectivity because in anti-humanist and anti-normativity terms it thinks itself anti-bourgeois (it isn’t, it’s petty-bourgeois), and so it rejects individuality on the basis instead of “structural” categories like gender, race and sexuality. It justifies attacking individuals on the basis of group agendas, which is why people like John McWhorter and Helen Pluckrose created advocacy groups to help support those who are being unfairly cancelled in the workplace. The personal is political line belongs to a universalist second wave feminism that does not exist in third wave feminism, which is focused on difference, not the individual. Of course, in practice, these different waves can be confused in people’s minds. Fourth wave online feminism is intersectional and focused on diversity more than difference. Pluckrose and Lindsay refer to this as “applied postmodernism,” which is by and large an oxymoron. 4) The fourth point goes too far into anthropology categories. Others compare it to religion. One could also talk about trends and cool culture that are derived from postwar counterculture and activism, not to mention anarchist trends and moralizing. It is best to keep to a historical materialist analysis of wokeism and its class dimensions. 5) What Parenti describes here is correct except for the fact that wokesters also “do the work” through tacit and underground means that are not publicly stated. The reason is that they reject notions like human rights that are based on universality and the rule of law, which they reject as a naturalization and ideologization of specific interests, usually straight, while, male, European. When everything comes down to power, “all is permitted,” in this Nietzschean-Foucauldian way of thinking. This is why the woke are more interested in culture wars than in class wars – because they are in fact not leftists, as Salvoj Žižek said to Jordan Peterson about so-called cultural Marxists. 6) This last point is entirely correct except for the fact that intersectionality theory pretends to be concerned with class in the race, class, gender, sexuality formula. There are reasons why this does not work, especially when you get into the more postmodern versions of intersectionality, relationality and decoloniality.”

None of what is said here can be derived from the usual categories associated with postmodernism, and presented for instance by Ihab Hassan and re-presented by David Harvey in his book on the condition of postmodernity as the obverse to modernism: romanticism-Symbolism / paraphysics-Dadaism, form / anti-form, closed / open, purpose / play, design / chance, hierarchy / anarchy, mastery-logos / exhaustion-silence, art object-finished work / process-performance, distance / participation, creation-totalization / deconstruction-antithesis, presence / absence, centring / dispersal, boundary / intertext, semantics / rhetoric, metaphor / metonymy, depth / surface, signified / signifier, code / idiolect, symptom / desire, cause / effect, paranoia / schizophrenia, transcendence / immanence, and so forth. That Marxism continues to be the main contender to postmodernism, which, as we were admonished, is the cultural logic of late capitalism, made Jameson one of the towering cultural critics of the second fin de siècle that this time around was dominated by the culture of the decadent petty bourgeoisie.

 

 

Notes

1. Sublation Media with Douglas Lain, “Žižek and Emergency Capitalism,” YouTube (September 27, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gjeoxV6Owg.

2. The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel, “Wokeness Kills Class Politics and Empowers Empire (w/ Christian Parenti) | The Chris Hedges Report,” YouTube (September 25, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTpeQ4V-YeY&lc=UgyvTXORFs58eYel1Gp4AaABAg.A8orBnHYwnnA9-SwSmOu2R.

3. Christian Parenti, “The Cargo Cult of Woke,” Catalyst 8:1 (Spring 2024), 117-139.

 

 

Hack Work Imposed on Bernie Bros Gone Woke

 

 

On September 3 I had the pleasure to discuss American politics and my book Bernie Bros Gone Woke with Kiko on his YouTube channel Kiko’s Freethinker’s Forum.1 In order to prepare this discussion I re-read my book for the first time since publication. On two occasions I have discussed with Kiko some of the issues that were addressed in my Blog of Public Secrets post “Dark Academia, CRAPHEAD and Khoury Review.”2 That blog post was the first time I made a written public statement concerning the public secret that I have been confronted with since 1998, which began with a situation involving audio surveillance in my home and that snowballed into a widespread phenomenon that turned my life into an illicit Reality TV-type show that to this day goes unacknowledged. This situation has been exploited to various ends, some of them involving efforts to regime-change my lifestyle and sexual preferences. I have never considered this to be the original or only reason for the bullying, which I understand primarily through a class perspective, but it is one that has been used to justify and perpetuate these circumstances. Under conditions of surveillance, capture and feedback, I am moralized by people I do not know, anywhere at all, for whatever it is that day or that week that does or does not satisfy this anonymous mass. A public secret is an abusive structure that has been exploited in my case to include: surveillance, social blackmail and ostracism, public humiliations in classrooms, at work and in public places, abuse of privacy and habeas corpus rights, theft of personal possessions and money, credit card theft, harassment by neighbours, sleep deprivation by neighbours, home windows smashed by neighbours, sexual harassment in more than one workplace and in public places, sodomy rape, electric shocks, pushed off sidewalks, following, harassment and threats of violence in places of medical and dental care, poisoning by a local pharmacy, poisoning assault and attempted date rape, dizziness and concussion symptoms for over six years, threats by trucks on highways, stalking and assault, repeated “whack-in-the-face” micro-aggressions by thousands of people in public, cultural and academic settings, since 2008 inability to maintain paid employment, conditions of imposed poverty, difficulty maintaining social and family relations in this context.

This incomplete list includes hacking of my published work, which coincides with efforts by some publishers to discourage me from publishing at all, and that includes: waiting up to 12 and 18 months to have a valid proposal rejected, fraudulent peer reviews and peer reviews that seem to have been written by the individual who poisoned and assaulted me. The latter could have been written by someone who is imitating the style of that person, which is a phenomenon that I refer to as the CRAPHEAD collective phantom. For example, the review of my book Vanguardia that was published on the Marx & Philosophy Review of Books has many of the telltale characteristics of this individual, which I described in my last posting on this issue. This includes inanities, disingenuousness, and using points that I raise in my own work as arguments against me, as if I am not aware of what is being offered as a correction. Re-reading the entirety of Bernie Bros Gone Woke, I am now aware of at least 27 mistakes. The publisher Brill has a fairly strict process for getting a book from manuscript to design and print. After reviewing the manuscript, the series editor oversees one copy edit of the book, which is then sent to the designer, in this case the company Newgen that is based in India. Newgen produces a design proof and allows the author one set of corrections. I negotiated with them three proofs, working the number of mistakes down from 41 in the first proof to 1 in the third proof and zero in the fourth and final print proof. I am exacting when it comes to typos and do not like to see mistakes in print. The fact that there are only a few typos in my book Too Black to Fail is an indication of that fact. When I post something on this blog, for example, I now return to it a day or more later because there are now mistakes hacked into these postings every time.

Looking back, I started finding suspicious mistakes in my work when I was writing the Adrian Piper chapter of my PhD thesis. I would vouch for most of this thesis as my own but there are phrases in that chapter that I would, after the fact, have difficulty thinking are mine. When I edited the two volumes of Bruce Barber’s essays and interviews in Performance, [Performance] and Performers (2008), I was very annoyed to find that design proofs were being sent to me that had typos that were not in the previous proofs. I was also annoyed that a few consequential words in an essay I had written for Barber’s 2007 Artspace/Te Tuhi catalogue had been altered without consultation. A next instance is my book The Neoliberal Undead (2013), with the publisher mistakenly printing the before last version of the design proof, which contained more than a dozen mistakes. Although a correct version was later printed, I was promised that the misprints would be pulped. Over the years I have found that misprints remain for sale. In the case of the cover for Zapantera Negra (2017), I had insisted that the publisher remove the leaf pattern that was going into the anus of the Black Panther character. The publisher agreed to the change but then the Table of Contents was removed from the print version of the first edition of the book. Since that time, I have been obliged to be insistent with publishers who either feign or do not know that my work is being used to propagandize my own victimization. This was the case with my two Routledge publications, which had errors finessed by staff or hackers onto the back covers. One of these has been adjusted. When it comes to typos in the book text, some typos are telltale hacker signatures. Certain words are often tampered with, and, around the period 2014 to 2020, the spelling of people’s names was constantly altered. For a while, Jewish names were being misspelled and then later the names of right-wingers were misspelled. Unlike some people I know, I have never found it clever to misspell the names of people I disagree with or for any other reason.                   

In the case of Bernie Bros Gone Woke, 26 of the 27 mistakes I found are in the first half of the book. This clearly indicates that whoever did this has an agenda. The epigraph to the introduction of the book has a quotation from the French revolutionary Saint-Just that states: “Those who make revolution halfway dig their own graves.” A grave of course can be interpreted as hipster talk that implies an anus. The black screen of the lower half of the back cover happens to transect Sanders’ anus. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Regardless, I now must do anywhere from two to ten times more work than I should have to if I want to prevent my published work from carrying this kind of subversion that is at cross-purposes to my ideas, sensibility, well-being and intellectual contribution. I had nothing to do with the design of the back cover of Bernie Bros Gone Woke, but I did design the repeated front cover image of Sanders at the Biden inauguration. Either someone at the publisher introduced these 27 or more typos into the final print copy or someone’s computer was hacked along the way. As for my own computer, I am more than aware that files have been retroactively altered, which makes it impossible for me to verify whether I made the mistakes. If I make printouts, there is no guarantee that these sheets of paper will not be altered while I am away from my apartment.

Between 1998 and 2003, when it became clear to me that I could not rely on anyone to do anything about what was happening, including leftists, I decided that I would not become obsessed with counter-surveillance, which is a fool’s errand unless one is as skilled in such matters as Edward Snowden – and he now lives in Russia. I decided I would allow the public to solve a matter that was out of my control, that is, without absenting myself from the process. This situation was then weaponized against me to make it seem as though I should be doing something that I was not doing, such as prostituting myself, which merely serves to justify an ongoing persecution. This public secret has been abusive from the start, causing me severe anxiety from the period 1999-2001, but I adapted to it over time. It became violent in 2016, a year in which I began to experience a more dangerous form of criminal harassment. After I moved to Montreal in 2006, the use cell phones played its part in “flash mobs” targeted against me. I was stopped by police several times on account of these flash mobs that cause me to behave strangely, sometimes crossing the street at random times or using an umbrella to symbolically fend off micro-aggressions, etc. It is easier for authorities to police one person than thousands and very likely, when they do so, that satisfies the anonymous mob for a while until the next round of provocations.

Of the 27 mistakes in the book, only 4 directly damage my work. On page 8, it states that 57 percent of Trump voters in 2020 were people of colour. This number is around 13 percent. I have discussed this mistake in my rejoinder to Elias Khoury, who pointed it out in an otherwise very misleading and banal book review that was published in the International Journal of Žižek Studies.3 This review does not address any of the intellectual frameworks or research findings of the book. While this issue of the journal has been posted online, the PDF for my response article has not, as of September 7, yet been posted. I also contacted Slavoj Žižek about this, who has no say on the contents of the journal. Bernie Bros Gone Woke mentions the statement made by Sanders that he is not the kind of politician who will send you a card on your birthday. As it happens, I was planning my gift to my sister for her 57th birthday at the time that I was editing this book. There is more to that story and why a hacker might refer to this but that is irrelevant to my arguments in this book for the simple reason that a book cannot be about everything all the time. The function of the hack is to create anxiety in the author about how their personal life could be said to inform their work or their politics. This is perhaps also a critique of Sanders, but this critique can be made by the hacker in their own work, in their own time, and people can decide for themselves who they agree with. When the Clinton DNC emails were hacked, these were relevant to revealing the illegal actions of a public official and her campaign team at the highest level of government decision-making, not the lowest level of personal life. To put it in the words of Antonio Gramsci:

“Descriptive, definitional philosophy may be a dogmatic abstraction, just as grammar and mathematics are, but it is an educational and didactic necessity. ‘One equals one’ is an abstraction, but it leads nobody to think that one fly equals one elephant.”

The problem with nihilists in our postmodern societies is that they no longer know how to think. Because they cannot think logically, they relativize everything as a zero-sum and mechanistic power game, conceived very often along lines that they could not openly defend were they pressed to do so. Ignoring notions of IQ, you could say that these people are programmatically and morally stupid, and of course even stupidity has its advocates in postmodern academia, along with shit, fascism and whatever else is marginalized in any random binary opposition. The game of topsy turvy is fine for things of no consequence, indulged in the art world for instance, but it wears thin for serious subjects, lest one confuse reason with matter, politics with people, etc.

The next mistake that changes the meaning of my writing is found on page 39. The sentence reads: “With social activism defined in non-class terms, class consciousness was substituted for moral conscience and Oprah-style ‘awareness.’” This is an inversion of what I am saying. The words “substituted for” could be changed to “replaced with” so that the meaning is accurate. As it happens, there were 5 inversions of meaning in my two contributions to Identity Trumps Socialism (2023) that use the word substitute. I noticed 4 out of 5 of these during the editing process but one of these I missed, or was hacked in retroactively, inverting the meaning and placing the emphasis on identity rather than class. This is acknowledged in the introduction to my follow-up monograph, Class Struggle and Identity Politics: A Guide (2024). Thirdly, on page 66 of Bernie Bros Gone Woke, the number for the combined U.S. student debt was at that time $1.3 billion rather than $1.3 million. And lastly, on page 237, the only mistake I found that is not in the first half of the book, the health data of the 76,000 Chinese people with flu-like illnesses that the World Health Organization wanted to research was for cases recorded prior to December 2019 and not 2021. This section of the book refutes the lab leak hypothesis that was spun by the U.S. government into a conspiracy.

This book is the first book I published after Vanguardia. I had had difficulty publishing Too Black to Fail before this, with the manuscript for that book having been turned down by 29 presses, a few of them on the same day, and then, after an interval, a few more on another day, which indicates a coordination of rejection letters. I also had some 24 endorsement requests turned down. I consider this title to be one of my best books to date, with a relatively groundbreaking approach for contemporary Marxist art theory after the postmodern 1990s. I have no doubt that rejections of the book were not only in defence of postmodern approaches to identity politics, which is a reason given to me by insiders for the 18-month delay by Rowman & Littlefield, but also part of the sadistic carrot and stick logic I have referred to above in relation to efforts to control the minutest aspects of my existence. Bernie Bros Gone Woke, which was written after the Obama book but published before the latter, was turned down by 39 potential publishers and 18 potential endorsement writers. Although I do not believe it for one minute, I have been told on many occasions that persecuting me is beneficial to a community of people who do not share my sexual preferences and lifestyle, that I should sacrifice myself for this cause, and failing to do so, that I am a greedy, rich, selfish, etc., all of this along the lines of INCEL logic and a reversal of gay conversion therapy in the name of fighting heterosexuality that is in such a case confused and conflated with patriarchy, as though a George W. Bush style War on Vanilla, but acceptable to the postmodern pseudo-, non- and anti-left that thinks of everything in terms of tribalism, power relations and intersectional blackmail. I reject it wholeheartedly. When your so-called “sexual politics” amount to nothing more than nihilistic cruelty, you have forfeited your right to speak as a leftist.

My last word on these typos is that the remaining innocuous mistakes were on pages that had other words and ideas that allude to people and issues that I have adequately discussed elsewhere but that the hacker(s) of this book want to highlight to undermine my voice as the author of the text and to mislead readers regarding my actual views. This includes mistakes on pages that have words and phrases that could be thought of as clues: transgender (8), Serbia (33), feminist radicals (37), on the face of it, and, conspiracy theory (54), breach of sovereignty, and, WikiLeaks hacks (61), a future to believe in (63), annu-ally [word split] (63), Nina (71), Nina, and, emasculating (79), single error to cast doubt on the rest (88), if you can’t win based on your ideas, then get out of politics (89), she-cession, and, she-covery (109), Ocasio-Cortex (113), people assaulted, and, soap opera, and, One Life to Live (114).

That many of my colleagues and comrades have gone along with the gangsterization of my life in the name of “changing the world” is desperate and debauched. The proof to that effect is that although I have mentioned some of what has been happening to me over the years to people, the complete silence and lack of follow-up with even one question or one word of understanding says to me that they already know about it. I have seen and heard more than plenty to confirm this. I am still amazed that so many people go to so much trouble to carry on with this carnival of cruelty. The blame for some 26 years of persecution and torture by an anonymous mass public, some more aggressive than others, is imposed on me. To add insult to injury, and in addition to daily disclosures of my online activities by random people on the street, as well as random acts of micro-aggression by people with a chip on their shoulders who are emboldened by a mass pile-on, incidents, gestures and words that can be associated with past hostilities are accumulated and repeated. If the best and the brightest in academia and at large are not only indifferent but complicit, because this medieval witch hunt somehow benefits “children”, as I am often told, then something is indeed rotten in the state of the Denmark – or in this case the Netherlands.

 

Notes

1. Kiko’s Freethinker’s Forum, “Bernie Sanders, Neoliberalism, Class Struggle and Marxism w/Dr. Marc James Léger (KFF132),” YouTube (September 6, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlI9Un3mXKM. See also Kiko’s Freethinker’s Forum, “Too Black to Fail, The Obama Portraits, Identity Politics and Class Politics w/Marc James Léger (KFF118),” YouTube (April 23, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBgyFmV37vE, and Marc James Léger, Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (Leiden: Brill, 2021/Chicago: Haymarket, 2022).

2. Marc James Léger, “Dark Academia, CRAPHEAD and Khoury Review,” Blog of Public Secrets (June 24, 2023), https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2023/06/dark-academia-craphead-and-khoury-review.html.

3. Marc James Léger, “Dark Academia: A Reply to Elias Khoury,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 18:1 (2024), http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/IJZS/article/view/1249.

 

 

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