Reading in the Time of Monsters 012 - Antifascism and Criticism

Reading in the Time of Monsters

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Reading in the Time of Monsters 012 - Antifascism and Criticism

Or, Commitment and Contempt

Peter Berard

Aug 26, 2023

EDIT- I sent out a minorly glitchy version of this. But this one should be good.

On this episode, I talk about what antifascism might add to critical perspective. People commonly treat the antifascist attitude to criticism as, basically, a limiting factor, that you’re not supposed to like or enjoy works by artists you might otherwise be in the streets protesting against. Maybe I’ll get more into the specifics in a later episode, but as far as actual practicing antifascist organizers such as myself go, this is not the case. Rather, it’s the application of ideas to practice and the lessons drawn from practice to ideas. Left-leaning intellectuals ignore this at their peril, as we’ve seen in the embarassing spectacle of the hosts of Dissent’s “Know Your Enemy” podcast failing to know when a 23-year-old forum fascist, Nate Hochman, was taking them for a ride, and completely failing to own up to it when the extent of how badly they were duped was revealed after Hochman was fired from the DeSantis campaign for posting memes. The ways in which left intellectuals fail to engage with antifascism might be harmful for the left… but it’s damn sure harmful for my ability to take these people seriously. What do they care? They still get paid.

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Reading in the Time of Monsters

The old world is dying; the new one cannot be born; now is the time of monsters. What better time to read, and read seriously? Every pedant on the internet thinks they're a critic because they have cultural preferences and their various streaming and social media services encourage them to state these preferences in little boxes. But some of us think criticism is something more. We know that criticism implies a way of being- a rejection of complacence, a dedication to searching high, low, and in between for insight and perspective, a constant development of the critical toolkit. Not only does that way of being point towards a better existence, but it also makes for criticism that's more fun to read. That's the gambit of this podcast- that there's an audience for something other than same-same mediocrity and parasocial agreement-clubs.

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