Foucault’s Force Ghost
Y’all know this by now: and you especially know it if you’ve been watching Andor (RIP Nemik). The major enemy, in that galaxy and ours, is not the Sith, or the Ssi-ruuk, or even the Empire. It’s fascism.
And, in that galaxy and ours, even the folks who claim to be most opposed to fascism still cling to the behaviors that make “big F” fascism possible.
That’s because you don’t need an Emperor or a Vader or a Hitler or a Mussolini or a Trump to have fascism. Fascism exists in each and every one of us that lives in a system dominated by order and law and limits and capitalism and modes of production that we don’t control.
If Michel Foucault had a Force ghost, he would remind us that fascism exists in our heads and our habits—it’s the tiny voice inside us that makes us love power and even makes us desire the very things that dominate and exploit us. These are micro-fascisms: and they’re so small but so integral that we don’t notice them, even while we have a strong tendency toward them.
I’m talking about something as simple as calling the cops on loud neighbors or seeing a man’s name on a job application and thinking he’s naturally ‘qualified’ or even simply - and ironically - the desire to have trains run on time.
In the preface to one of the hardest philosophy books to read ever, Foucault said: “It’s too easy to be antifascist on the [the big] level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective” (Foucault, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, Preface).
And so what does that mean? It means that fascism is a developed tendency, over time, in lots of small/individual/personal ways. Because of how we live, when we live, we can’t just “decide” to not be fascist. Anti-fascism doesn’t mean having a debate with a Nazi—that’s still meeting them in the sphere of what’s known, acceptable, and legal. If you don’t want to play their game at all, you can’t play by any of their rules. You really don’t have a choice but to punch them right in the face.
According to Natasha Lennard: “Liberal appeals to Truth will not break through to a fascist epistemology of power and domination.” This is a really big problem for the New Republic after they blow up the second Death Star, as they start to really chip away at the Empire and create something ‘new’. And we’re going to see that play out in So. Many. Books. Especially in arcs that contain Leia and Mon Mothma, maybe unsurprisingly. There’s this tension between constantly fighting huge, macro-fascisms while trying to build a new system that will bind the galaxy to a set of pretty rigid, hierarchical, authoritarian rules. Instead of the Emperor as the figurehead that keeps order through fear—the New Republic relies on everyone’s internal fascist to keep order in a way that seems…perfectly natural.
But the way of the New Republic is still authoritarian and ultranationalistic—it’s just that the nation is expanded to a galaxy. And the nation is still anthropocentric. It’s not a new conflict for the rebels and all their factions. Or even for the ‘everyday’ people. You can see this play out on Bakura: there’s constant revolt; the people want order; they turn to the Empire. They get an aristocracy/oligarchy. That doesn’t dissolve at the end of the novel, with the New Republic sweeping in—and that was Leia/Mon Mothma’s plan all along, to get the Bakurans on their side by promising to run the trains (read: repulsor chairs) on time.
Don’t mind me, I’m just going to condemn my daughter to a traumatic cycle of cultural oppression because—even though I don’t like it—I can’t imagine doing otherwise. See y’all on Yavin IV.
Being anti-fascist means practicing different ways of living. Those ways will probably make us uncomfortable since the tiny fascists inside us have guided us all for so long. They’re also not ways of living that we can prescribe as rules-to-follow. Maybe we can come up with some guidelines, but the underlying point is that anti-fascist ways of living require imagination. More imagination than the Empire or the New Republic would ever allow.
