Thread by @graceelavery, Okay friends, the fash have been up all night shrieking that a [...]

Okay friends, the fash have been up all night shrieking that a Berkeley professor has been advocating book-burning, and in many cases calling for me to be fired or physically attacked. So I suppose it is worth addressing directly.

Some of the attacks took the form of disgusting and baseless insinuations from sock puppet accounts claiming to know me professionally. This is dangerous.

So first, *please* everyone take English and humanities classes at college. This whole embarrassing mess could have been avoided if people were a little more comfortable reading irony. Twitter over-rewards literalism and punishes ambiguity—but we can overcome that with education.

If you think I was sincerely encouraging people to burn books, I suggest you look around and see how many books were actually burned. Either my words weren’t taken seriously bc I was misunderstood, or they were meant not to be taken seriously. You can figure this out yourselves.

This being said, the pile-on revealed some interesting contradictions in the way that “free speech” arguments work, and a certain romanticization of the figure of the burning book, that are worth pausing with. Here my ideas derive from Stallybrass’s work on the material text.

My argument is a theoretical one: books are commodities, made of paper, ink, and glue. One cannot destroy the form of a commodity by destroying the object. Capital makes us think a commodity “contains” some essence of the labor that produced it—this it its “fetish-character.”

“Fetish-character,” not “commodity fetishism,” bc it‘s an intrinsic property of the commodity that it induces this superstition. So not something we can unthink—insofar as we recognize the world of fabricated objects at all under capital, that recognition is conditioned this way.

A couple of distinctions should be made. First, destruction of a commodity is distinct from the destruction of a fetish—or, let’s say, from something irreplaceable, something non-abstracted.

The Hirschfeld archives, burned by the Nazis, were not “books” in any sense whatsoever: they were a unique archive.

That archive comprised the stories that told the stories of the lives of trans people in Weimar German, whose political civil rights Hirschfeld had gone some way to secure. The loss of that archive is a loss to trans history and a loss to our collective knowledge of the past.

If one wants an analogue for the erasure of all knowledge about trans people the past, one could look at the prominent anti-trans activist Selina Todd’s claim that there simply were no trans people before the late twentieth century.

Or indeed the erasure of those lives indicated by the phrase “transgender craze that’s seducing our daughters,” which sounds fascist because it is.

Second, the destruction of a commodity by an individual, or even a private group, would be different to the state-sponsored destruction of that commodity. On the contrary, the burning of the official texts of the ruling class might well be considered an act of popular liberation.

Bizarrely, my tweet was indeed censored by Twitter *but only in Germany*—I will be thinking about this for a while. Germany of course carries national laws against Holocaust denial; perhaps they also have laws against promoting book burning. Interesting!

It is true that I am a professor at a public University, and therefore I speak in an attenuated sense as a representative of the State, at least as far as the first amendment goes. So I have a particular duty (which I am discharging at present) to be thoughtful in my speech.

However, the doctrine of academic freedom—that scholars should be able to think where we like, even if it pisses people off—plainly protects me here. Everyone should know the difference between academic freedom and free speech.

This is another moment where the free speech mob demonstrate their embarrassing ignorance. The former is a collective right asserted by the University as such; the latter is an abstract individual right that is /routinely compromised/ in any situation in which it is asserted.

(Additionally, therefore, one might observe that the burning of a book in one’s possession is quite clearly a political protest protected by the first amendment. I don’t care about that fact, but it should give the free speechers pause that none of them noticed it.)

Now, I’m aware that the idiots will need me to say it, so here we go: don’t burn books, kids. You don’t need to do that to survive, and it is more likely to turn people off than otherwise.

But also, let’s remember what these people have refused to get mad about: a ban on people entering the United States from so-called “Muslim countries”; concentration camps on the Mexican border; the state-sponsored massacre of Black men and women. This is what fascism looks like.

If you think “the Nazis did this” is a winner, well, the Nazis did things like those too—to people, not to books. I spend my life in books—reading them, writing them, teaching them, looking at them—and there isn’t one that is worth as much as a person.

You tell me, over and over, that state-sponsored book burnings “represent” the destruction of people. Perhaps they would—they did, for example, when the Nazis burned the Hirschfeld archives. But ppl are already being destroyed by the State, and you seem less bothered by the fact.

Indeed, the US govt is far more likely to destroy the books of a freak like me than they are going to say anything to contest Abigail Shrier’s inflammatory drivel. As the CIA burned the library and archive of Wilhelm Reich, the Marxist psychoanalyst and sex theorist, in 1956.

A word to Abigail Shrier. I do not wish to burn your book. I do not wish others to do so. I wish nothing but safety and respect to you and yours. I do wish to mock your book, which strikes me as dangerously ill-conceived, historically illiterate, and disturbingly framed.

Moreover, I note that you are at #1 in the Amazon book chart for “Transgender Studies.” As one of the editors of the only peer-reviewed journal in the field, Transgender Studies Quarterly, this alarms me. I believe you can see why it should alarm you too.

You have social and educational capital that allows you to express your ideas, and to publish them for public scrutiny. A large majority of trans people do not have access to that capital. Target does not sell ANY of the major books in trans studies (I checked yesterday).

In other words, we are once against standing outside the Hirschfeld archive: the stories of trans people are burned, excluded, not told, and not sold, while others stand by and say there were no such stories before the present “craze.”

That’s it. Let’s all try to do better. And read Joan Wallach Scott’s /Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom/.

(Oh, and both /1984/ and /Fahrenheit 451/ are both bullshit. Read more and better dystopian fiction!)

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