The Black Cat in the Dark Room

Learning to See in the Dark

In a now famous article published in the American Historical Review in 1979, the historian Gilbert Allardyce believed he was delivering the final death blow to the category of fascism and its utility in historical and social science scholarship. Allardyce appealed to the metaphor of a black cat in a dark room to convey the proper description of fascism's actual insubstantiality and invisibility as a reliable historical category, openly declaring the certain conviction that there was nothing to it at all, nothing to find in the dark, empty room. But Allardyce may have stumbled (in the dark) over the cat in question, without actually knowing there was one there. He may have quite inadvertently bumped up against fascism in the dark void and tripped over its role in historical analysis had he not been so prepossessed with cursing the dark rather than feeling his way around. He may have found the importance of fascism as a historical category without quite knowing that his confident denunciation was actually introducing a way to identify what he had announced barely existed.

It will be my principal purpose to try to show the importance of learning to see in the dark, which means seeing fascism precisely where its silhouette is indistinguishable from the surrounding shadows. By this I mean seeing the object less as a manifestation of an explicitly defined arrangement of institutions and social movements filled with marching Blackshirts or Brownshirts than as a form itself, behaving very much like the value form produced by a society structured by the commodity fetish. While I will return to this question in the latter part of this paper, I want first to consider some of the scenarios that might help explain why fascism has been so roundly dismissed and discounted, why it has been banished to darkness and has provoked even leftist historians like Perry Anderson to advise against any effort to "conjure up renewed dangers of a fascism, a lazy exercise of right and left alike today."¹ Although Anderson wrote these lines some years before the current crisis, he might now want to revise his judgment as somewhat premature. The reason we need to learn how to see in the dark is because since 9/11, the question of fascist politics has surfaced once more and pushed its way to the front of our contemporary intellectual agenda. What consumer of daily events today, even as those events are mediated by newspapers and television sympathetically reporting only what they receive from the state, would not be able to see in them signs of how everyday life is becoming progressively fascistic? Specifically, I am referring to the appearance of a new initiative to promote an American imperium (resembling a similar impulse during the Cold War), which not even the most determined nominalist can deny without looking foolish. We must, at the same time, recognize in this initiative the active role of the state, with its mobilization for total war in the wake of 9/11, in preparing the population for the prospect of an infinite war against terrorism. Readers of Japan's modern history will recognize the locus classicus of the familiar concept of total war, but many may not know that when philosophers of the Kyoto School in 1942 turned to recharging the concept with meaning—they then called it a philosophy of total war—they saw in it the promise of not merely the mobilization of society for war but the template for society's complete reorganization as Japan's answer to the country's modernizing historical experience, which was based on slavish imitation of Euro-America. As Kosaka Masaaki put it: "In reality, it is the problem of contemporary total war to surpass previous ideas of war.... Total war is at that place where modernity has reached a complete impasse; in a word, total war is the overcoming...