Natasha Lennard elevates oppositional movements & attacks the conditions for contemporary fascism

Natasha Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept. She has also written for The Nation, The Guardian, Bookforum and the New York Times, among other venues. She currently teaches critical journalism at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her books include Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life (https://www.versobooks.com/books/2949-being-numerous), and a co-written anthology of interviews on the question of violence entitled Violence: Humans in Dark Times (http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100350210). In our interview she addresses how she views the role of journalism and critical writing, stressing that communication is “necessary but deeply insufficient” as a means of creating radical structural change. I appreciate the ways that she interrogates the seductive concept of a “marketplace of ideas” and the seemingly unassailable notion of “Free Speech.” Instead, she’s invested in ideas of accountability and a public sphere in which we are forced to reckon with how speech acts can “call into being” fascist realities. Rather than calling it “censorship,” Lennard sees a culture of accountability as a matter of intervening to insist on “less oppressive spaces” and emphasizes that a just world would “pivot the center” (in Patricia Hill Collins’ words) so that those who are directly affected by hateful material could lead the project of deplatforming fascism. While she acknowledges that Twitter taking away the means of creating what she calls “fascistic lifeworlds” is a progressive step, she also makes it clear that we should not be required to wait for “Silicon Valley Leviathans” to regulate hate, to slowly cave to leftist organizing and resistance. Being Numerous argues for the power of using the term “fascism” to name the authoritarian desires that drive white supremacy; suggesting that it’s useful as a means of capturing the violent nature of the forces we oppose, and for calling into being an anti-fascist response. In general, her work is clear about the tensions between materialist politics and social constructivism, drawing from Donna Haraway’s notion that the world is made, but not made up. She argues that the struggle of our times is to figure out how to create opposition both “all at once” and slowly and reflectively, as challenging as that inherently is. Rather than offering a simplistically hopeful framing, Lennard asks us to actually engage with the impressively fast rebuilding of a robust left-wing politics after decades of “ideological decimation.”