Friday, January 29, 2010

Even Feminism Desires the Text of Power & A Few Clarifications on Key Concepts



Even feminism? Yes even feminism desires the text of power

Theory is another word for nothing left to lose. The Institute for Experimental Freedom is beyond masochistic with its bodies, murmurs and texts. We publish, print and distribute works foolishly against their future renditions. The typo or technical error pale in comparison to the shame we experience the moment our desire codified in digital mappings of vectors and typography brushes against the docile or eager appetite of whoever reads PDFs, blogs or printed zines. This shame, a sort of abjection, reverses onto us as it returns ten-fold in so many little confusions: a misinterpretation of a key term, a refusal to love our refusal to be governed by value in its textual form, an anxiety regarding one's own capacity to be acted on by the text, or feeling outside of the ironic horror we cannot help but know as a world we are attached to. Years ago, we might have simply turned deaf ears to these confusions which come in the way of half-critiques. We may have been mobilized as yet another faculty of the impoverished subversive text apparatus. We could—and have, in other incarnations—modify our words, and our practices of the text as a text of pleasure, in order to suffice as rational discourse. We could be resubjectivized by the grammar of ideology and its pathetic cry for attention; the “ideas matter” of the infant in an IWW shirt who just won't shut up about Noam Chomsky, or that of the internet forum poster who believes that he might not be such a lonely loser if everyone would just read The Coming Insurrection and talk to him about it. But, we'd prefer not to.

The Institute for Experimental Freedom practices a text of pleasure and text of power, both on paper and on the body. The CrimethInc jabs in Rolling Thunder are no misnomer. We are experimental material, and we're in it for us, our friends and the friends we have yet to meet. However, this is not to say we are not a part of a stupid milieu like everyone else, nor is it to say we are not trying to find the exit; we are, carefully.

We take the practice of thought, the practice or writing, the practice of power, the questions of “what is an artist?” “what is a writer?” “what is history?” “what are our conditions?” very seriously. And we think through a ruthless experimentation with our lives—by subjecting ourselves and our friends to high frequencies of cruelty, banality, joy, and sadness—we might stumble upon something which we would carefully put close to our hearts and share—with the milieu and with what survives it. Which is perhaps another way of saying, although ideas don't matter, the practices of a discourse require critique and provocation with which we will lovingly shock the face of any of our comrades or opponents. We have been hoping this would be reciprocated. Alas, still we sit on our knees, while our “insurrectionist” and anti-state communist peers merely stumble on their dirty-talk in front of the mirror.

Nonetheless, The Institute is a warm calculating assemblage. The comments between stories on anarchist websites which have nothing to do with it, the subtle jokes of our friends and hostiles, and the horror of our lovers' Fathers do a rudimentary violence to our corporeal topographies. From the tidy paper cuts, we excrete just a little red—enough to paint our lips or a small American flag. However, perhaps we underestimate the force of nagging slits on the skin—whether it be political or otherwise. Nothing itches more than a thousand paper cuts.

So we scratch; we'll give in a little bit. But, rest assured we have no illusions that scratching will make the itch go away. On the contrary, we're hoping to pull the wounds open just a bit more.

From these rips in our texture we'll offer these humble gifts: a series of elaborated descriptions of the terms we hold close to our hearts, which demand to be shared.


Still very much wanting the text inscribed against our unsurprisingly thick skin,

-Liam Sionnach | IEF | '10


A few clarifications on key concepts within many of the texts we publish and distribute in the way of a series of complex glosses to be irregularly posted online.

Without further adieu:



World Civil War | Gloss 1.

Civil war presupposes the modern state. In some ways, civil war can be read as both what was outside of history and then, with the development of the modern state, what became included in history. A comment like “The history of societies thus far is the history of class struggle” has a secret intelligence contained within it when we read it through our magic decoder matrix: civil war.

History and society were only really unified with the development of the modern state. The modern state in Hegel became the subject of history for his philosophy. Marx, among other Young Hegelians made this their object of critique. However, lurking bellow the surface of such idealism in Hegel was Hobbes and the concept of sovereignty. The state of nature in Hobbes was a sort of permanent potential of war of all against all. Law, enforced by the state, would create a clear divide between what was inside the law and what was outside of it; generating “civil society” (or “the civil state) on the inside, and civil war on the outside. This meant that living beings would only be included in human society (and thus, history) once they became subject to the rule of law; all manner of imperial practices come with ease. However, even in Hobbes's hypothesis, there remained a permanent problem. Law, which gives human society its so-called order, can only be enforced through means which appear indistinguishable from civil war. What Marx discreetly references is not that class struggle is the history of living beings on the planet, but that class struggle is civil war inside the gates; and is the general conditions of capitalism.

The concept of a “world” may be important in some of the ways “world civil war” is used. “The evident is not merely a matter of logic or reasoning. It attaches itself to the sensible, to worlds” (p4, Call). A world is a zone of meaning, sense—“before time, absolutely, there is sense.”(Ok, War it is Tiqqun 1) History is the reification of time as Man's time, and perhaps even the concealment of civil war. It locates a living being as subject to the sensuous praxis of generating and reproducing human society. Civil war is the free play of bios, of forms of life; life which acts in a world. “Civil,” because worlds are not limited by the boundaries or laws of nation-states and because conflict can take place in myriad of spheres, with a multiplying array of techniques. “War,” because the potential for doing violence to the most just must not be discounted, ever. On a terrain with a multiplicity of worlds, only forms of life who feel their power can act decisively.

Even in Hobbes, if there were not civil war, there would be no need for Leviathan. Leviathan wasn't a god on earth, as much as the political equivalent of someone who's afraid of the dark. The modern state therefor had as its object the warding off of an ever present civil war. It coded civil war as “evil”, and put religious apparatuses to work. We could say the modern state's practices of government had the character of a war against civil war. The development of techniques of governing which corresponded (liberalism) excluded and disciplined dangerous elements. At certain times these elements were juridically coded as “the hostis” (hostile, unknown, outside), and came in the way of invading parties, but also in the way of crime, and later, sickness.

What we call “world civil war” develops out of the modern state's failure, and each and every elaboration of civil war. Reading its history religiously, we learn that good does not triumph over evil; moreover we learn that coding the state as the hand of god reaches a threshold because its teqinches of power continuously collapse into the terrain of evil. Law cannot be enforced without the possibility of doing violence to the most just. Civil war is then the omnipresent aporia of the modern state. It cannot prevent transgression and revolt and yet it is logically demanded to develop itself to do just that.

On the other hand, we can read “world” synonymously with “global.” World civil war develops as the excess of liberal techniques of power. Capitalism generates a fracture in the being of Man's time, elaborating the fracture caused by the state. Two representations develop. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie, who managed, tuned, and attempted to master capital, and on the other hand, the proletariat, who produced all value and whose subjugated existence pulls the two into an intense conflict. Because war between nation states is governed by international law, a war between non-state actors forces both parties to develop techniques of war which are out-side the law. From the moment the first partisan disrupted the separation between solider and civilian, the development of an exceptional and irregular technique of war was set into motion. Whereas capitalism created the conditions where the state was no longer the authorizer of the political, and in fact becomes another technology for the bourgeoisie to deploy in order to neutralize intense political relationships, class struggle within capitalism returns the question of the political to forefront and cuts across national boundaries by deploying the figure of an irregular fighter in the image of the proletariat across the earth. Class struggle was the prior most intense configuration of civil war, because of its international dimensions, its ethical character which transforms any conflict into absolute enmity, and because of the proletariat's capacity to hold the threat of a self-negation: The proletariat is the class which abolish class society through its own self-abolition. However, if the proletariat who came in the way of the working class general strike, and later the diffuse irrationality of autonomous armed joy were defeated—as it was—then what would survive this condition was the representation of the bourgeoisie (at a planetary level) with a new paradigm of war without the limits of national boundaries and international law; who stood on a new terrain without a stable enemy but rather a globe of hostilities which could be intensified, if need be.

With the development of a War on Terror and permanent counter-insurgency, world civil war now returns to its initial terrifying presence. Capital, liberated from the tyranny and stupidity of bourgeois management acts as its own sovereign force and subsumes all hostile forms of life: The phase of real subsumption. The state as an appendage of capital is deployed to give meaning to the world of images by imposing the category of enemy on any one of its own excessive consequences. The ontological character of this gesture is completed once the enemy has been reintegrated into the symbolic-order, either through rehabilitation (democratization) or exclusion (a fair amount of killing).

However, perhaps the proletariat has not been defeated. Perhaps the proletariat is still the class, or vocation, which abolishes class society—and elaborates civil war. In the conditions of civil war against the bourgeoisie with the development of industrialism, the proletariat's force of negation was contingent on a strategically positioned portion of workers: the industrial working class. However with the dissolution of the both the factory and its inhabitants, and with the integration of subculture and all manner of past “revolutionary subjectivities” into the rationality of commodity production; perhaps there are different conditions and different contingencies from which a more terrible proletariat is awaiting to be revealed. In these different conditions, civil war is elaborated by an equally diffuse, almost imperceptible irregular fighter. The pure negative potential of a planetary multi-cultural petite bourgeoisie. An impure hostis humani generis. An army of sleeper cells with allegiance to no identity; with no more statist fascinations or illusions of a just society; and with no use in the economy of superfluous labor, already begins to advance civil war to its logical and redemptive conclusion: the dissolution of society, social war.


16 comments:

  1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/29/man-infuriated-by-overdra_n_442334.html

    rev satisfaction

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  2. i wonder what the portability/translation of a category instantiated by the productive capacities of capital (proles) into a thoroughly bio-political age?

    the hegelian insistence that the class-in-itself must first transform into a class-for-itself would seems like a dead end under real subsumption. if the "social" actually de-socialized the subjectivities necessary for production - or in the hardt sense, the production of subjectivities fragmented transcendence and implanted the process immanent to itself and is therefore a perpetual motion machine - would make appeals to proles at best an "x without x" eg "identity without identity" or "proles not proletarianized" but more dangerously dependent on their trace foundation in their master-slave production by the state-form of primitive accumulation or the result of exploitative immiseration under capital.

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  3. Dear Anonymous,

    What are you concealing?
    Let us respond.

    We were and still are born as surplus-value, shifts in metropolitan and biopolitical control regardless.

    Real subsumption -or real domination, or the integrated spectacle, or the postmodernization of capital (take your pick of theorist and trajectory)- still does not displace the immanent neccesity of sabotage and riots (the old mole as ontology, as a fundamental truth)or of the programme of withdrawal (to withdraw and rendur null the capital/labor dialectic).

    What "appeal to proles"? ('class struggle' as understood as global civil war, or social war?). Frankly, my proletarian body (the class-in-itself: my shitty job on monday; or, the class-for-itself: my comrades and mine intent to auto-reduce two cases of beer tonight) and my petit bourgeoisie body (writing this very text, preparing for some rather dull cuddling and sexual performativity in a few hours) inhabit shared worlds, not always contingent, and not always integrated.

    Regardless, the "appeal" you invoke is centered on different kinds of suspect language games: speaking amongst the 'intellectuals' to no longer invoke the "proles" (just as bad as the reciprocal opposite: telling others to not act like petit-bourgeois intellectuals); or, making an "appeal" or invocation of the proletariat is simply old fashioned (which may be rather close to your 'logic', seeing as how you periodize with repugnant cliches - "age").

    I love the master-slave dialectic, it is how I target my doo-doo.

    (We can talk of subjectivity and capital-restructuration later).

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  4. "In March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns," things we don't know that we know - which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the "knowledge which doesn't know itself," as Lacan used to say, the core of which is fantasy. If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq are the "unknown unknowns," the threats from Saddam about which we do not even suspect what they may be, what we should reply is that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the "unknown knowns," the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves, but which nonetheless determine our acts and feelings."
    (Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan)

    THE UNKNOWN KNOWNS
    An "almost imperceptible irregular fighter", the subliminal city of subconscious saboteurs, an army of sleeper cells in a collective id (but "the function of the dream is to prolong sleep"), and Francis Coleman, now charged with making "terroristic threats" for threatening to rob a bank in revenge for overdraft fees.

    "God, he's never hurt everybody," said his mother, sobbing. "He's a good person. He's not even a violent person...I think he just flipped. He's gonna pay a terrible price for this."

    "It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it," says Baudrillard. "Terrorists know that in their symbolic strategy they can count on this unavowable complicity."

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  5. the best part:
    "Tomorrow I'm gonna get my satisfaction. I'm gonna rob the place," Coleman said, according to WFMZ producer Dan Rinkus. "Satisfaction is going to be had, one way or another."

    good old sensuous desire as a motivator.

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  6. god that was really long and boring and not very clarifying about much of anything. but since i bothered to read it, i'll respond:
    1) you claim the state created the "civil state" (also referred to in the article as "human society" somehow...), but isn't this also the case within ANY human society? the members of one group treat each other with certain rules, customs, and civility, and treat members outside the group as fair game in the war of all against all? how is the state doing that any different than a tribe doing that?

    2) you seem to be claiming that capitalism commandeered the state as a mere "appendage" for it's own ends at some point after it's creation. this is just not true. the state arose and spread *specifically* as a system of social governance that worked well at protecting capitalism (i.e.- world systems theory / Immanuel Wallerstein...). your underlying premise is screwy.

    plus as far as defining "global civil war" goes, this was pretty fucking convoluted....

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  7. re: anonymous
    #2) i have no idea how that could be empirically true. the state definitely pre-dates capitalism by thousands of years. many people put it at around the neolithic revolution. capitalism started in its infant form in what, the 15c?

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  8. where'd you get that? the state is relatively recent as a widespread phenomenon. i am talking about the west here, maybe china had a state back in the day....
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_systems_theory

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  9. even with wallerstein's extremely limiting typology, states pre-exist capitalism.

    from that wikipedia article you cited: "Modern society, called the "modern world-system" is of the latter type, but unique in being the first and only fully capitalist world-economy to have emerged, around 1450 - 1550 and to have geographically expanded across the entire planet, by about 1900."

    what do you think pre-dates 1550?

    a more traditional marxist account would argue that there were many "modes of production" before the capitalist one (which comes into it's own in britain around the end of the 15C, as described in Capital volume 1 chp 26+). for instance, fuedalism is a pre-capitalist mode of production.

    the misunderstanding might partially be one of the analytic category 'capitalism'. marxist (though not wallerstein) usually focus on the forces of production, and the existence of exploitation of the working class at the hands of the bourgeoisie, which is unique to 15C+ Britain and the corresponding spread. this is not to say that economic oppression did not exist in previous modes of production, but they were of a different type. so, while there are revisionist accounts that try to place china in previous centuries as a proto-capitalism mode of production it is not widely accepted by marxists because such an analysis usually leaves out the relations of production.

    though it may prove ultimately unsatisfying for answering all of your questions, michael perelman's 'the invention of capitalism' may help clear up some of these discrepancies.

    "the state", not necessarily the Modern state but state nonetheless, is found in many human societies. if you would like to go to the historical or anthropological evidence, there's plenty out there. i would suggest looking first to studies on the neolithic revolution and going through either antiquity or more general anthropological accounts.

    you may be referring to "nation-states" which emerged as the result of the treaty of westphalia in 1648. those did emerge within the context of early european colonialism and the nascent stages of capitalism. but to reduce states to the disciplinary arm of capital is not only short-sighted but doesn't share much sympathy except in the most orthodox marxist circles.

    i am familiar with sovereignty and the sovereign power exercised through the state in greek and roman though. think "city-states" etc etc. (i'm sure it exists in non-european contexts as well, though i'm much less familiar with that literature.)

    many of the sources liam is drawing on find the traces of greek or roman sovereignty as they intersect with the global logic of biopolitical production. even a cursory read of agamben would familiarize you with the extent to which the argument is about aspects of roman customary law that find their footing within the management of the current world order.

    /////
    this is not to say that there are plenty of bones to pick with the formulations of the state or sovereignty presented above. rather, it's a friendly comment that your understanding of states seems quite off.

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  10. idk if marx really would have said there were 'many modes of production'; i'm rather fond of eric wolf's account where he collapses marx's 'feudal' and 'asiatic' modes into the tributary mode; what preceded that was the 'kin-ordered mode' ('primitive'/tribal societies). obviously capitalism emerged out of the feudal variant of the tributary mode. so that's basically 3.

    can anyone think of any more?

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  11. Lemme try an work some secret magic decoder matrix action:

    ---------------------------------
    History and society were only really unified with the development of the modern state. The modern state in Hegel became the subject of history for his philosophy.
    ...
    Civil war is then the omnipresent aporia of the modern state. It cannot prevent transgression and revolt and yet it is logically demanded to develop itself to do just that.
    ---------------------------------------

    So it's almost like liberal capitalism promises peace and freedom, but hasta use war and confinement and bad shit to make sure its that way! is likea paradox... omg!

    is all coming together... I totally heard that *we* trained the taliban, and osama and bush are bff.

    ---------------------------------------
    However, perhaps the proletariat has not been defeated. Perhaps the proletariat is still the class, or vocation, which abolishes class society—and elaborates civil war. In the conditions of civil war against the bourgeoisie with the development of industrialism, the proletariat's force of negation was contingent on a strategically positioned portion of workers: the industrial working class. However with the dissolution of the both the factory and its inhabitants, and with the integration of subculture and all manner of past “revolutionary subjectivities” into the rationality of commodity production; perhaps there are different conditions and different contingencies from which a more terrible proletariat is awaiting to be revealed. In these different conditions, civil war is elaborated by an equally diffuse, almost imperceptible irregular fighter. The pure negative potential of a planetary multi-cultural petite bourgeoisie. An impure hostis humani generis. An army of sleeper cells with allegiance to no identity; with no more statist fascinations or illusions of a just society; and with no use in the economy of superfluous labor, already begins to advance civil war to its logical and redemptive conclusion: the dissolution of society, social war.
    ---------------------------------------

    so the proletariat has to fix it but wtf!?!?!?! there's no proletariat left but maybe its like really the proletariat inside _all_ of us yknow? gonna go and try to negate myself anybody got any tips PM me!!!

    seriously there's like a parlor comedy in here somewhere with the flabbergasted insurrectionist running around awarding revolutionary subjectivity to teapots and houseplants...

    revolution through thick and fin de siecle

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  12. You all are the most linguistically interesting writers I've read in the days that are today. What a rich word you spin..

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  13. motherfuckers: speak so people can understand you.

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  14. This is an academic argument on the internet. As such it's purpose is not to be understood. It's purpose is to make the participants feel smarter (or in this case harder or more nihilistic or more revolutionary) than each other.

    The argument is (or seems to be) about whether we should call ourselves "proletariats" and then revolt, or if we should call ourselves something else, and then revolt. This will remain unresolved and the revolt will never happen. It's really too bad too, cuz it seems like (for at least some of the participants) "revolt" means "self-negation" and oh boy, wouldn't it be nice if these guys would get on with that?

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  15. Less Carl, more Karl.

    "if the proletariat who came in the way of the working class general strike, and later the diffuse irrationality of autonomous armed joy were defeated"

    The proletariat was created by defeat of peasants at the hands of the state, acting in service of the interests of the then-dominant class. This led to the conditions of ascendancy of the capitalist class and the forcing of the proletariat into the form of working class. This is all in Marx's Capital.

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