A Short Essay on Bloch's Munzer and its relation to Schmitt

Written for a German class a few years ago during my obsession with Muntzer. There is some material that is untranslated, that I can provide translations for if there is the interest.

Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein
--Rosa Luxemburg

“Our sabotage organizes the proletarian storming of heaven. And in the end that accursed heaven will no longer exist!
--Antonio Negri

     Modern sovereignty can be defined by a dialectical process of revolutionary crisis and the deflection of that crisis into colonial expansion. In this sense, the dialectical process gives capital a unique ability to productively subsume its crisis into itself. The process rebounded back on itself in the First World War. Mass death left the laboratory of the colonies and entered Europe proper. All of the techniques that defined World War I were first tested in the colonies. The explosive violence that defined that war destroyed the easy progressive teleology that even was starting to impact the workers movement. The immediate response was a series of failed uprisings that marked the first years after the war. The specific aftermath that I am interested in is the collapse of the Wilhelmite German State after World War I and the failed revolutionary insurrection afterwards.

     The impact of the war and the insurrection led to a radical philosophical shift in two significant thinkers, Ernst Bloch and Carl Schmitt. Ernst Bloch’s Jewish messianism took on an increasingly radical turn as he turned increasingly towards a radical marxist politic. At the same time, Carl Schmitt moved away from a neo-Kantian interpretation of legal theory towards a radical authoritarianism defined by decisionist, rather than a normative, definition of sovereignty. These shifts also produce the work that both figures are best known for. Although the two figures are defined by substantial political differences, their political transformations are defined by a revolutionary energy that I want to conceptualize as the ‘schwarmgeistig.’

     This concept, which I draw from Bloch’s book on Munzer, is tied to a self-destructive quality that I want to argue is immanent to the process of capital itself. It represents the self-destructive element in the structure that Marx continually pointed to. We can see this expressed best in the end of the first chapter of the manifesto which itself is a translation of these theological concerns. “Mit der Entwicklung der grossen Industrie wird also unter den Fussen der Boureoisie die Grundlage selbst hinweggezogen, worauf sie produziert und die Produckte sich aneignet. Sie produziert vor allem eignen Totengraber. Ihr Untergang und der Sieg des Proletariats sind gleich unvermeidlich.” I want to first begin by looking at what that might mean a revolutionary politic, before shifting to the way that Ernst Bloch explores the concept in Thomas Munzer als Theologe der Revolution. I will end in the ways that Carl Schmitt theories attempt to return to the policies of the Absolutist State in order to nullify this radical possibility.

     To understand this notion of the schwarmgeistig, the element of religious fanaticism, of utopian dreaming in the turmoil of revolutionary movements, I want to turn to a passage in Anson Rabinbach’s theorization of the Messianic. Rabinbach points out.

     "The apocalyptic element involves a quantum leap from present to future, from exile to freedom. This leap necessarily brings with it the completed destruction and negation of the old order. Messianism is thus bound up with both violence and catastrophe. Scholem has emphasized the importance of this aspect of the Messianic idea to underscore the contrast between “the destructive nature of the redemption on the one hand and the utopianism of the content on the other.” This tension, which the Marxian idea of “transition” only weakly captures, is the essence of the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic upheaval as the handmaiden of redemption. In history this image constantly recurs, appearing in the creation of the revolutionary calendar of 1793, in the Munster Anabaptists destroying the records of the old church, Komsomol youth disinterring the bones of the Saints in the Russian revolution, or the specter of the Maoist Red Guards demolishing the ancient art works of Confucian China—each symbolizes a total destruction of the prior age as the precondition for the full restitution of the Messianic period."

      This description brings in the two elements that I want to tie in with this concept of the schwarmgeistig, this concept is produced in the dialectical relationship between the destructive power of the apocalypse and the redemption contained in the figure of a utopian future on the other hand. The notable quality of the violence can be found in the fact that it is enacted in the open. Revolutionary transformation is supposed to occur through its very performance. It evokes the notion that, “the people are good, but the magistrate is corruptible,” which acted as a constant irritant to Carl Schmitt. At the same time, the violence can not be explained in instrumental terms. It opens up the world to a general economy of expenditure that places those in the more limited economy of instrumentality in a state of both bewilderment and horror.

      This motif is a reoccurring one, but the moment that both Bloch and Schmitt focus on is the explosive conflicts of the wars of religion. This places the notion of the “schwarmgeistig” within the conflict that led to the creation of the secular. I want to understand it as a border concept, one that is defined by a whole series of translations that occur in that period. In this, I take seriously the statement made by Carl Schmitt, when he states, “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development… but also because of their systemic structure.” Schmitt is recognizing that the concepts of god that defined this period were always also concepts of society at large. In this sense, the notion of the ‘schwarmgeistig’ could be translated into a secular term such as the militant, but this translation misses out on the radicality of such a figure. At the same time, one cannot collapse it entirely into the transcendental concept of messianism, both because of its tendency to mystify the discussion, and because not all the figures in this category embrace that transcendental notion.

     This concept can neither be tied to the Enlightenment, nor can it be described as a sort of archaic holdover from an earlier time. Instead, it charts another genealogy of modernity, one that is defined by defeat, and allows for the more limited transformation that occurred in the Enlightenment. Paolo Virno perhaps captures this best when he refers to Spinoza’s multitude as a sort of archive of civil liberties. The moment of the wars of religion becomes significant because it both represents the most open expression of this tradition, and points to a contingent element in the creation of Enlightenment rationality. For the most part, this trajectory remains either hidden or disguised in translated forms. Bloch codes this deformity under the term “slave talk,” which he links both to readings of the Bible and to certain literary traditions. In his book, Atheism in Christianity, Ernst Bloch points to this tradition.

     The fact remains, however, and nothing can detract from it, that thinking men, as such, were refusing to be priest-ridden any more. Long before simple, devout feelings had grown rusty, long before the real Enlightenment, pamphlets against the clergy and their lies were going the rounds among the peasants, complaining about the miserable swindling and deception of the poor. The real complaint was about the way the Scriptures were twisted to serve the exploiters and drudge-merchants, but these pamphlets also show the common man’s will to speak for himself: he has finished with being struck across the mouth. The peasants, however, were defeated, and their place was taken by the rationalistic bourgeoisie: in their Enlightenment the will to come of age became an all-consuming

     Bloch is making an argument for the existence of another critical network of knowledge, one that created the logic for a form of counter-governance in a negative form. It placed the structures of legitimization into question, while positing the possibility of a different structure of society. One can turn to a comment made by Foucault in a talk on critique to get the full meaning of this. “Not wanting to be governed was a certain way of refusing challenging, limiting (say it as you like) ecclesiastical rule. It meant returning to the Scriptures, seeking out what was authentic in them, what was really written in them, what was really written in the scriptures. It mean questioning what sort of truth the Scriptures told, gaining access to this truth of the scriptures in the Scriptures and maybe in spite of what was written, to the point of finally raising the very simple question: were the Scriptures true?” Foucault is reading this in the tradition of the Enlightenment, while Bloch is arguing that it can already be found in a crude form in this peasant circulation.

     Bloch’s reading of Thomas Munzer in his book Thomas Munzer als Theologe der Revolution charts how this alternative network found its way into the daylight, if briefly, with the coming of the reformation and the printing press. The book acted as a sort of companion piece to his more famous text, Geist der Utopie, and Bloch always saw them as companion pieces. Geist der Utopie was Bloch’s critique of a trajectory of Enlightenment thought including music and the German philosophical tradition defined by Kant and Hegel. Although still concerned with the utopian impulse, Bloch made a significant shift in the archive he examined, moving from the dominant thought of the Enlightenment to the legacy of a defeated radical tradition in the Reformation. He looked at both how Munzer was produced in this tradition and at the way that the image of Munzer traveled

     Bloch links Munzer to this specific history in his description of Munzer’s influences, both its tradition of conspiracy and its tradition of oppression. It links his thought not so much to Luther’s reformation, but to a tradition of mystical thought and conspiracy. For example, we find this description early in the book,

     “Die garende Zeit zog an, jung fur sich, boll ungekannter Dinge, das Land lag wach, ruhelos, wie voraufgeschickt, wanterten Boten, Kundschafter, Prediger umher. In den Waldtalern des Harz waren ohnedies geisslierishe Lehre, Erinnerung an die Feme noch lebendig.” Munzer, a product of the poor and outcast, was also intimately aware of its networks of knowledge, of its secret histories and of the attempts to repress it. This plays an important double feature for the production of the movement that Bloch describes. It both allowed for Munzer’s critical reading of the scriptures in order to challenge the ruling authorities both religious and secular, and for him to have the critical mass support in order to do so.

     However, it would be incorrect to define Bloch’s understanding of Munzer as merely being defined by his production in a certain environment. It is also related to a concept of inwardness that Bloch links to the Utopian in his previous book. “In the end, however, after this internal vertical inner movement: may a new expanse appear, the world of the soul, the external, cosmic function of utopia, maintained against misery, death, the husk realm of the mere physical nature.” The ‘authentic’ knowledge of the self allows for the question of the ‘We’ to be answered according to Bloch. Bloch reads this inwardness in Munzer, an inwardness that stands on the borderline between the mystical and the autistic. Bloch points to this in the words of Munzer himself. Munzer states, “Was Bibel, Bubel, Babel, man muss auf ein Winkel kriechen und mit Gott Reden” Munzer’s mysticism goes beyond the critical reading practices of Luther towards a reading of one’s interiority, an interiority that he felt had a privileged position in understanding the truth of what preceded him, the essence of several generations of mysticism. The inwardness contained in this statement holds both of the notions of besessen together, possession and madness

     Like Bloch, I take the singularity of Munzer seriously, and I take the singularity of the community that Munzer operates in seriously, doing so produces the preconditions for the concept that I want to develop. But the relevance that Munzer has for the concept of the ‘schwarmgeistig’ that I want to develop lay less in those singularities than in the way that history has been taken up, both by revolutionaries and by counter revolutionaries. Bloch points the way to this in his chapter, “Munzer als Gestalt und Gegenwart.” The chapter opens by discussing the difficulty of getting at the essence of the significant individual. He links it to a similar blindness that Nietzsche sees, “Unerkennbar liegen wir uns selbst noch im blinden Flick.” He eventually argues that the ability to put together an honest answer to this involves a serious transformation. We can see this in the following passage.

     “Andereseits freilich tont der bedeutende Mensch, aus der Erscheinung zurucktretend, zugleich als Mundstuck, Antenne, Mandatar: und so dunkel er wird, so ist doch Bessenheit darin. Auch Munzer ist besessen, und nicht das Charakterologische also, sondern das Nachwirkende, Allbetreffende, zur Legende Taugliche, der Schein uber seinem Haupt schiesst an Munzer, dem Mandatar, zum halbwegs moglichen Bild zusammen.

     A reasonable picture of Munzer’s importance can only be created by stripping away his individuality, and looking at him as a representative figure. This accomplishes two significant goals. First, it strips away the ability to individualize, and therefore pathologize Munzer. Bloch argues that Munzer’s “ist besessen, und nicht das Charakterologische.” If there is a madness involved, it is both collective and political. At the same time, it points to the quality that Munzer takes on as a “Gestalt.” We can link this up to the notion of the ideal type that Weber develops, but that is too secular a concept for this phenomenon. The Gestalt is theorized as a light over his head that flashes up periodically. This light can either be read in terms of an aura or a halo, but either way it keeps us out of the disenchanted world that Weber inhabits.

     This figure flashes up in the revolutionary movements of 1848, returning as the figure of primitive revenge and redistribution to the poor. It taken up major political thinkers including Engels, Seidemann, Kautsky, etc. Munzer becomes the figure of ‘schwarmgeistig’ par excellence not because of an individual uniqueness, a uniqueness that has eroded over time. All of the physical features that are typically used to describe the man can be questioned. But instead he becomes a significant figure because he is repeatedly re-imagined. This re-imagination returns repeatedly to the fact that the current organization of the world only exists because of the active destruction of its alternatives. It points to a continual lack of completion of this project, a horizon, which may not lead to its inevitable end, but does point to the fact that it is not itself inevitable.
We can track the phenomenon negatively as well through the attempts to neutralize it. I propose that we make that effort through the figure of Carl Schmitt. Translator George Schwab attempts to pay tribute to Schmitt by linking him to the figure of Thomas Hobbes, referring to him as the Thomas Hobbes of the 20th century. Although I am not nearly as generous a reader of Schmitt as Schwab, I think that we should take him seriously. Just as Hobbes theorized the absolutist Leviathan state in order to suppress the radical forces that exploded out of the wars of religion, Schmitt tried to return to this stronger decisionist notion of the sovereign in order to suppress the revolutionary upheaval that defined the end of the First World War. The state of exception became the protection of a homogeneity that is much more contingent due to this upheaval. He also attempted to do this on practical grounds in his interpretation of article 48 in the Weimar Constitution, the emergency clause.

     The opening statement of Political Theology is perhaps the most defining one. Schmitt states, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” This statement defines the figure of the sovereign by two capabilities, both what constitutes the exception to the order of things, and when to suspend the rules in order to preserve them. This state of exception is precisely the opposite of “anarchy and chaos” because “order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not of the ordinary kind.” The law is defined by this constant need to neutralize various crises that put it in jeopardy. In this sense, Schmitt returns to the absolutist concept that Hobbes conceptualizes, a state that mirrors the sovereign god, and a state that attempts to neutralize an essentially evil man.

     Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of Article 48 became the most practical way that he attempted to preserve this order. Schmitt’s interpretation depended on a reading of the article that most legal scholars could except. He repeatedly tried to expand the powers of both the presidency and the points at which the president could claim a state of exception. Schmitt attempted to use this as a basis of closing off the electoral system to those who wanted to destroy that system. This led to his support of both the creation of a state of exception by President Hindenburg and later by the NSDAP.

     In this sense, perhaps we can conceptualize the ‘schwarmgeistig’ against what Schmitt is describing as the task of the sovereign. Just as the sovereign is defined by decision rather than as the sole legitimate source of violence, the schwarmgeistig can be defined by the ability to escape this decision rather than as the figure that contests the monopolization of violence, although the question of violence is implicit in both formulations. Schmitt tracks this as it shifts from the realm of the theological, to the realm of the political, to the realm of the economic. Each act of neutralization creates another space of the political decision and contestation. For Schmitt, this acts as a sort of horizon, the creation of an exteriority that makes “all law” into “situational law.” But from the other side, it points to the contingency of the current order of things, one that can be changed.
It is in this terrain of contingency that I want to end this essay. In his last writings, Louis Althusser attempts to conceptualize a new type of materialist philosophy, one that he calls “the materialism of the encounter.” Within it, he makes an attempt to rethink the dual concepts of contingency and necessity. “It is only after the world is constituted that the realm of reason, of necessity, and of sense is established…. Rather than thinking of contingency as a modality of necessity or as an exception to necessity, one ought to think of necessity as the becoming-necessary of the encounter of contingencies.” To invoke this notion of contingency is to embrace a continual potentiality that exists within the seemingly uniform space of necessity. The schwarmgeistig points back to the contingency and potentiality by its continual return.

Contributing to the chorus on Elizabeth Moon and WisCon, plus a few thoughts on the concept of the "safe space"

         I'm not sure to the extent that my audience is aware of the conflicts that occur within fandom, but a recent blog posting by science fiction author Elizabeth Moon, dealing with Muslims, citizenship, and the Islamic community center has created such a conflict.  There has been some thoughts on the topic from a number of sources, most notably a set of very good posts by K. Tempest Bradford, but it made me think of a few things that fall outside of those posts.

       The basic situation is pretty easy to explain.  Moon posted a long, rambling post that took on the controversy surrounding the proposed Islamic community center in New York. In her response to that controversy, she reproduced a problematic set of assumptions about Muslims, the religious tenets of Islam, and the history of immigration in this country.  Through those faulty assumptions, Moon goes on to make a set of claims about why the community center in New York should not be built.  These blog postings became a significant controversy within the fan subculture of science fiction because of Moon's status as an author, but probably more significantly, because she is going to be a guest of honor at the largest feminist science fiction convention, WisCon.  I'm not going to directly link to her blog post, but I'll give you a sense of the rhetoric through two of the paragraphs in her missive.  

Moon states,

"When an Islamic group decided to build a memorial center at/near the site of the 9/11 attack, they should have been able to predict that this would upset a lot of people.  Not only were the attackers Islamic--and not only did the Islamic world in general show indecent glee about the attack, but this was only the last of many attacks on citizens and installations of this country which Islamic groups proudly claimed credit for.  That some Muslims died in the attacks is immaterial--does not wipe out the long, long chain of Islamic hostility.   It would have been one thing to have the Muslim victims' names placed with the others, and identified there as Muslims--but to use that site to proselytize for the religion that lies behind so many attacks on the innocent (I cannot forget the Jewish man in a wheelchair pushed over the side of the ship to drown, or Maj. Nadal's attack on soldiers at Fort Hood) was bound to raise a stink.   It is hard to believe that those making the application did not know that--did not anticipate it--and were not, in a way, probing to see if they could start a controversy.  If they did not know, then they did not know enough about the culture into which they had moved.  Though I am not angry about it, and have not spoken out in opposition, I do think it was a rude and tactless thing to propose (and, if carried out, to do.)

I know--I do not dispute--that many Muslims had nothing to do with the attacks, did not approve of them, would have stopped them if they could.  I do not dispute that there are moderate, even liberal, Muslims, that many Muslims have all the virtues of civilized persons and are admirable in all those ways.  I am totally, 100%, appalled at those who want to burn the Koran (which, by the way, I have read in English translation, with the same attention I've given to other holy books) or throw paint on mosques or beat up Muslims.  But Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they've had.  Schools in my area held consciousness-raising sessions for kids about not teasing children in Muslim-defined clothing...but not about not teasing Jewish children or racial minorities.  More law enforcement was dedicated to protecting mosques than synagogues--and synagogues are still targeted for vandalism.  What I heard, in my area, after 9/11, was not condemnation by local mosques of the attack--but an immediate cry for protection even before anything happened.   Our church, and many others (not, obviously all) already had in place a "peace and reconciliation" program that urged us to understand, forgive, pray for, not just innocent Muslims but the attackers themselves.   It sponsored a talk by a Muslim from a local mosque--but the talk was all about how wonderful Islam was--totally ignoring the historical roots of Islamic violence." (Moon)

       The problems with this statement should be fairly obvious, but I'll take some time to work through those issues.  The first and most obvious problem is that despite Moon's insistence that she isn't doing this, she takes the behavior of a few Muslims and allows them to stand in for a complex religious belief system of two billion people, a belief system that far from unified, is defined by debates, factions, and radically different approaches to textual exegesis.  The reduction of a group of people to a small, static group of features is, as critical theorist Stuart Hall notes, at the very heart of stereotyping, the logic of racism and empire.  Any attempt to define Islam as a form of unified other, is, at its heart, bigoted.  The violent actions that lead to her fantasy of a 'long chain' of an essentialized  Islam need to be understood within the complex history of the region, a history of European domination and colonialism.  None of this excuses any particular action, but it demands that any act of judgment focus on particular conflicts, political formations, etc.  Islam, as such, does not exist.  It is as multiple as liberalism, marxism, or Christianity.   (Another point that should be made is that Moon also is taking up a common trope of Islamophobes, that is 'racialization', collapsing the figure of the Muslim and the Arab together to further the project of demonization.)

      The particular narrative that Moon is offering has a long history, one that has legitimated systemic racialized domination of large sections of the world.  It operates not only by the logic of stereotyping discussed above, but it's system of classification operates through a logic of the absence of coevalence.  Anthropologist Johannes Fabian noted that the discipline of anthropology operated through a logic of positing a temporal difference between the anthropologist and the 'primitive' subjects that he studies.  That subject is not formed within the social relations of the modern world.  He is not modern.  He operates within a different time than our own, the past, which is primitive and less formed than us.  He instead can only be understood as a operating within a logic of our past.  Moon takes up this logic when she implicitly argues that acts of violence can be discussed outside the context of the global political forces that shape those actions.  She, in effect, argues that the Muslim can only be understood within her or his 'primitive' and 'violent' roots, rather than as modern subjects shaped through the very modern forms of violence and domination that exist today.  Her particular attempt to deflect this criticism by posing the good moderate or liberal Muslim against the bad fundamentalist has its own colonialist legacy, operating neatly besides the binary of the good and bad colonial subject, defined by a set of narratives of assimilation.   If you are looking for more material, I would recommend both Edward Said's Covering Islam, and his more academically oriented, Orientalism.  Although both are over ten years old, they are still the strongest analysis on the topic.

        There is another, more subtle thread of resentment that runs through her narrative as well, though.  Moon seems to feel that Muslims have been coddled by liberal society, that they have been allowed to hold onto a set of particularities that the 'rest of us' have had to abandon.  Rather than recognizing the extraordinary measures of certain institutions as a necessary response to often violent forms of racism, Moon sees these as a form of 'forebearance' of peculiarity that other immigrant groups have not received.  It is narrative of immigration that ignores the long history of foreign language papers in the country, of separate cultural institutions, etc.  Unfortunately, this is an all too common fantasy of the immigration process.  The narrative of assimilation that she takes up throughout the piece has two basic problems.  The first is simple.  The narrative of assimilation is false.  The ostensibly voluntary immigration patterns of any particular group (this is a set of claims that doesn't work very well when thinking about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, although as James Baldwin points out, most immigration into the United States is not as voluntary as it has been represented) has never been defined by simple assimilation.  Instead, we can invariably see a dialectical interaction, in which the synthesis is something quite different than what came before.  (I can say more about this if you want.)

        The second problem is the more serious one.  The narrative that Moon is drawing on, a narrative that is both false and extraordinarily powerful, is precisely the narrative of the assimilation to whiteness.  The demand of assimilation has always been defined by a legal definition of citizenship that operated through the logic of whiteness as property (See Cheryl L. Harris)  In addition the work of David Roediger and James Baldwin through their work have shown the linkage between the acceptance of European immigrants as white and the acceptance of those very immigrants as citizens, a process that operates through their acceptance of the exclusionary logic of that racialization.  (In effect, it is a process that simultaneously shifts and reinforces whiteness, while reinforcing the exclusion of the racialized other, the alien.)  In effect, Moon's criticism can only be understood within this racial economy.  Her anger that the Muslim population (once again, ignoring that Muslims in the United States are not simply Middle Eastern immigrants) have not assimilated is built upon an unconscious expectation that those populations embrace these forms of white citizenship.  Although she would not recognize it, she is angry because the immigrant populations cannot or refuse to conform to a set of expectations of citizenship based on whiteness.

      Within this context, it is very difficult not to be disappointed in the decision of WisCon's organizing committee not to revoke Moon's invitation.  Certainly, the committee has acknowledged that Moon's word were offensive (Here is their response.) But, it's also a very unsatisfying response, primarily through its recourse to the language of 'difficult conversation.'  I think that posing the need for dialogue with positions such as the one that Moon has expressed is disagreeable at best.  WisCon was organized for explicitly political purposes, to create a feminist space for fandom.  I believe that expressing the kind of bigotry contained in Moon's piece excludes her from that conversation, in the same way that most feminists have recognized that the sorts of transphobia expressed by Janice Raymond should exclude them from that space as well.  This refusal is at the heart of any genuine intersectional analysis.  I support difficult conversations, but a commitment to some meaningful form of anti-racism needs to be an expectation of that conversation.

         This brings me to my final section.  I suspect that much of what I have already said is a tad academic for a lot of folks who are (potentially) reading this.  But, I think that this section may be a little less obvious.  If you take a look at Tempest's posts, the primary subject that is being worked through is the question of 'safe spaces.'  Tempest is troubled by who such spaces are for, what kinds of comfort are relevant, which forms are not relevant.  Her posts pose the question of why it is important to create a 'safe space' for some people, while its equally important to challenge other forms of 'safety.'  Without criticizing Tempest (who's position, I suspect, is close to mine) the larger conversation around the concept seems to have mystified this very concept.  'Safe Space' seems to have moved from a set of tactics (speech and behavioral regulations) that are designed to shift who has access to a particular community or are designed to allow for previously excluded forms of conversation into an end itself.  It has moved from a mode of re-imagining the political to a neutralization of the political, per se.

       The problem is that the form of neutralization imagined by Tempest's opponents (within this logic, Tempest is simply a representative of a set of networks of anti-racist fandom, a problematic form of representation, but not really mine) is itself a form of political inclusion and exclusion in and of itself.  It re-formats a set of techniques designed to fight exclusion (racial, gender, class, etc.) as techniques to reinforce a particular mode of exclusion, whiteness.  Her opponents do not want to face the discomfort of having this challenged.  This is why its really important to recognize that the creation of a space space is always a technique directed towards another end.  It can be used to create powerful feminist and anti-racist spaces, but we should recognize that misogynists and racists use these very techniques to create the opposite.  It's use is always simultaneously an act of inclusion and exclusion, that is, a consciously political act.  

     The question then becomes what kind of political community will those actions produce, who will be excluded? who will be included?  Every community consciously and unconsciously makes these decisions.  From Schmitt's perspective, this is a very mild form of separation, after it's a separation of groups of people from tasty treats, gin and tonics, and conversations about C.J. Cherryh, not life or death.  Our use of this technique should always have that political dimension in mind.  Every formation of community at this point is constituted through modes of inclusion and exclusion, and one has the choice of reaffirming a community built on whiteness or patriarchy or attempting to disperse that community for another community formation.  The purpose of the action is to combat bigotry, to produce experiments directed towards imagining a futurity without such forms of oppression.  

Update: The invitation has been rescinded, and Moon has accepted this decision.  There has been a bit of backlash directed towards the board and SF3.  You might want to go over to their sites and express your support.  I'm glad that this decision was made and thank the folks who made for taking this important decision.