REPLY TO ART MONTHLY

Only a fool discusses an ongoing legal case. But it is possible to discuss the case of Art Monthly, which this month maintained their post-LD50 alignment with the most vicious position in contemporary culture with a brief item which casually and potentially actionably lies about my friend Nina Power (who has never “admitted complicity” in any invented campaign) and affects to take seriously a number of deranged claims about me.

The item represents the third casual smear job the magazine has published about me since 2017, after five years in which I regularly contributed texts to their pages. They know that I’m Jewish, that I previously lived for two years in Israel and worked in Ramallah, and also why I defend freedom of expression in art, since in 2014 I articulated my case in their paper. They also know that in 2017 activists for the Antifa movement, which they are proud to support, threatened to “cut out my tongue” for agreeing to speak about Julius Evola’s ideas about magic at an Israeli bookshop in Berlin, and also to come to the bookshop and attack my colleagues with dogs. (The bookshop was driven out of business. Art Monthly endorses this behavior towards bookshops.) And the magazine are also aware of the incredible record of unhinged accusations and violent attacks enacted in recent years under the sign of Antifascism, including, in my own case the complete fabrication of a totally abhorrent essay whose absence of any reality lucidly testifies to what is really involved here. If I claimed Art Monthly editor Bickers had pseudonymously authored an article calling for the State-mandated murder of Jewish people, would she have cause to complain?

Art Monthly refuse to report these points because they interfere with the narrative they are intent on reiterating. To understand why, it is necessary to understand the structural role of the magazine as a subsidized organ of the British managerial state, and the psychological condition this position implies. Art Monthly is not fundamentally committed to art or ideas. It exists to disseminate pro-Regime ideological lines and supply ersatz credentials for conformist curators and artists. What matters to it is not art, but control over art, in the same way that Foucault observed that “bourgeoisie doesn't give a damn about the mad, but it is interested in power over the mad… the procedures used to exclude the mad produced or generated a political profit, or even a certain economic utility."

For many years the magazine was able to perform this task inoffensively, if never inspirationally. It was simply banal, as opposed to repulsive. But this is regrettably no longer the case. In line with the broader deterioration of Western political culture over the last several years, and the increasingly desperate edge of the cartel which controls it, it is no longer sufficient for apparatchiks to merely be boring. Like their political allies in the corporate media, intelligence agencies, and political parties what now is demanded is systematic dishonesty and active aggression to eliminate anyone demonstrating real integrity, and repress growing awareness of the corruption of the system they serve. 

The political strictures of this decaying reality drastically limits intellectual room for maneuver. No longer able to recognize consistent logical and ethical arguments, since to do so would implicate their own operations, the regime is forced to rely on a brittle pose of authority, and a demonized enemy to deflect attention away from its growing moral abasement. The extent to which Art Monthly and equivalent outlets are now forced to rely upon writers who are clearly unequipped intellectually to write about art both reflects and entrenches the deepening crisis, as with the degrading reserves of ability compelled by an increasingly hollow editorial posture, the possibility of grasping and therefore correcting real problems drifts ever further away.

Instead of facing real issues, and recognizing their own imbrication in an increasingly ugly and exploitative system, they flee into a flattering dreamworld in which they are fighting the Nazis. More than the slant of their particular symbols, which are basically meaningless except as crude propaganda, their erratic and dogmatic approach defines a political class that can no longer persuade and now simply defames and intimidates.

Like every form of fantasy, ideology is a screen designed to shield an individual from confronting the untenable psychological reality of their position in order to maintain the status and the privileges it gives them. It is not a coincidence that all of the artists and writers who have been cancelled or marginalized in the last several years, from Agamben to Nina Power herself, have been cancelled precisely for acting as artists and writers should act. Nothing is more dangerous to individuals claiming the title of artists and thinkers without any evident merits than integrity, courage, and intellectual and moral consistency. These people expose through their resolve the emptiness of accredited managerial claims to authority and the truth of their compromise with repressive and exploitative interests.

More than the figure of the Left, which is now a lingering alibi emptied of substantial content, it is self-delusion and the absence of conscience which defines the essence of the official position. Finally they believe in nothing except retaining the privileges of their current situation. Their increasingly cynical attitude extends psychologically from their capitulation to power, and their function in obscuring that power. It is important to maintain an illusion of independence; to present what in truth is an opportunist embrace of degraded incentive structures as if it represented the work of moral and intellectual choices, and to pretend the pseudo-debate and false oppositions taking place to the side of the salient issues as meaningful.

The general term corresponding to this general dynamic is criticality: an inversion or simulacrum of critique, or a pseudo-critique, geared to maintaining the monopoly of critique which social and political power supplies as a concession, and which represents an ideological product designed to make sure that power itself is not touched. Today, this conception is supplemented with support for repression and marginalization, aimed at preventing those who have placed themselves outside this cursed circle from pursuing vectors of real critique or independent creativity. 

Plainly the ideological term has degenerated into a polemical slogan; but it is true that this logic corresponds to historical fascisms of both Left and the Right. Notwithstanding his regrettable subsequent political record, Julius Evola was among those who experienced this when, in 1930 squadristi shuttered his publication La Torre following his declaration that “we are neither fascists nor antifascists” but committed instead to defending super-ideological principles, against the Regime as need be. For this, he was branded an antifascist, in a context in which this term corresponded to the term fascist today, and compelled to use bodyguards to move around Rome.

The fact that we are now again seeing the materialization of recognizably fascist politics, with rule by decree, repression of independent intellectuals and artists, normalization of racism (under the Orwellian label ‘antiracism’), synthesis of corporate and state power, perpetual war, politicization of religion, politicization of family life, de facto regime militias and criminalization of the opposition, and even National Socialist politics, with what opportunist apologist Bratton calls the epidemiological model of society, with the stigmatization of enemies as biopolitical hazards (“I feel I am like Robert Koch in politics,” declared Hitler in 1941) lends our present situation its peculiar irony, in which fascists attacks anti-fascists as fascists from Melbourne to London. Art Monthly, of course, have nothing to say about this, and will remain reliable shuttles of power no matter how gruesome things get.

Camus once remarked that a writer has two duties: to liberty and truth. These are not
moral luxuries possible only in comfortable moments, but the bedrock conditions of ethical political action. It is only on the basis of liberty and the commitment to truth that free societies safeguard their intellectual and moral coherence, and these principles must be defended everywhere, at all times, and any cost. Until the current regime is restored to its reason, it will only become progressively more insane and destructive. There is no natural limit to how repressive and violent the regime can become except the limit inherent in the power of evil itself. Beyond any question of political identification it is this moral line which represents the real line of division today. And this line runs through the heart of every human being,