tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14038931837547552062024-03-13T06:09:46.939-07:00the institute for experimental freedomThe theoretical grounding and aesthetic desire of the next autonomous social forcethe Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-27341226977119215462013-03-22T13:28:00.000-07:002013-03-22T13:28:20.368-07:00Between Predicates, War | EPub Optimized for Smart Phone Reading <h2>
<span style="font-size: large;">Between Predicates, War: Theses on Contemporary Struggle </span></h2>
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<div style="text-align: right;">
kisses,</div>
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The Institute for Experimental Freedom</div>
the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com63tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-82127080344412629742013-03-05T09:58:00.000-08:002013-04-21T15:27:20.900-07:00Between Predicates, War | New Pocket Book <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">“To great writers, finished works
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lives”</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">W. Benjamin</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Institute for
Experimental Freedom is proud to announce the release of <i>Between
Predicates, War: Theses on Contemporary Struggle</i>.
Almost two years in the making, <i>Between Predicates, War</i> is a fragmented collection of theses on our tumultuous
situation. From Egypt to the US, Greece to the UK, contemporary
struggle announces a revolt against government. These theses draw a
line connecting the forces at play, examine their parodic language,
affective practices and radically self-annihilating tactics. At the
threshold of our epoch and at our phase of self-governance, the
events unfolding rub up against the meaning of autonomy, and in doing
so ask the question, “What does it mean to live a life?” This
uneasy question—and this decade of experiments aimed at answering
it—anticipate the formation of a real force. What grew
rhizomatically—in subterranean practices of sharing—between
anti-globalization and radical environmentalism, between riots
against the democratic police and irruptions of occupied spaces,
burst through into the open and unpredictable air of the now. At our
particular moment there is a chance that—from ancient Athenian
democracy to our refined economy of subjectivation techniques—the
paradigm of government may come to close.
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<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0.06in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">As we wrote
in <a href="http://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/136406/politics-is-not-a-banana-number-one" target="_blank"><i>Politics is Not a Banana</i></a><span style="font-style: normal;"></span>,
we have no illusions of leading a charge—and furthermore, that's
the wrong way to think about the situation. We simply want to
understand our conditions, and act accordingly. With humility, a
healthy sense of the humors, and <i>the passion</i>, we
offer this text as another chapter in this project.
</span></div>
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</span>
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</span>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0.06in;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Between
Predicates, War: Theses on Contemporary Struggle</i> is
a pocket book, of a 100 or so pages, designed with care and finesse,
available from <a href="http://littleblackcart.com/">LBC <span style="font-size: large;">B</span>ooks</a>,
or directly from the Institute.
</span></div>
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<br />
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<h4 style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0.06in;">
From the
Introduction</h4>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="background: transparent;">“Contemporary
struggle” is our way to conceptualize what links the events of our
epoch—events that cannot be defined as social movements or
categorized within leftist conceptions of reform and revolution. </span></span><span style="color: black;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">Events</span></i></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="background: transparent;">
are the common form that struggles take after the collapse of the
historical subject and the zone of the social. We define contemporary
struggle as a vast set of heterogeneous practices of revolt that
appear to have </span></span><span style="color: black;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">everything</span></i></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="background: transparent;">
as their object; that is to say, events whose antagonisms are not
directed against the state or capitalism per se but against
techniques of government, against the productive power of government.
Perhaps we will be reproached for reducing the specificity of all the
movements of the past decade. However, the velocity with which
struggles since the Greek uprising of ’08 have moved from
intelligible anger over a collectively perceived injustice to
celebratory or revolutionary situations, reveals that they are
irreducibly revolts against the paradigm of government. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0.06in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background: transparent;"> Government
no longer sits in a closed chamber of educated men; it acts through
each of us and through every apparatus that orients us and amplifies
our senses in a particular direction. Government doesn't just
repress, it </span></span><span style="color: black;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">produces</span></i></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="background: transparent;">
a distributed multiplication of governable subjectivities.
Contemporary struggle resists, flees, and attacks being produced as a
subject, appearing in the space between one coherent subjectivity and
another.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0.06in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background: transparent;">Because
it appears in the space between subjectivities, contemporary
struggle—consciously or not—contests the meaning of autonomy.
Capitalism has done away with the social as a foundation to human
life, leaving the individual as self-entrepreneur to develop
solutions to the crises of baseless existence. If social media
appears on the theater of culture and politics this is </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;">because</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="background: transparent;">
economic life demands that individuals collaborate on
problem-solving. In order to develop itself in harmony with the
economy, the individual is allocated the self, as the vehicle and
instrument of freedom. It is given the space to think freely, go
against the rules, and open doors of creativity—if only to
eliminate flaws in the flows of the economy. Government needs
subjects to self-govern because principles no longer reign with any
authority; the economy needs subjects to self-manage because
technology and ecology present fatal limits to its rhythm of
expansion. However, when struggles originate in an open field devoid
of authoritative principles, the desired affects of self-management
sometimes fail to materialize, and in turn the space between
coherency, contingency, and predicates can appear more hospitable
than the generalized hostilities of economic life. Contemporary
struggle locates the space of autonomy as a potential for a different
way of living, and holds on for as long as it can.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0.06in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background: transparent;">Contemporary
struggle reveals the limits of language. The grammar of justice,
democracy, and equality could limit past movements because these
terms were situated in a meaningful discourse—that of the enemy.
Today, these words and their institutions are empty. What is
perceived as logical inconsistency by political pundits is precisely
the plane of consistency where a new language is being constructed.
The parodic, ironic, and absurd character of today’s movements'
discursive promiscuity, irrational application of language, and use
of memes reveal a new language coming into being. </span></span>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="background: transparent;">Contemporary
struggle loves/hates technology. It’s no surprise that the same
mobile apparatuses we are required to buy to integrate our lives into
the flows of the economy—smart phones, laptops, and tablets—are
the media protagonists of the turbulent present.. However, the use of
technology by today’s uprisings is no mere affirmation, even in the
“Free Information” movement. From hacking to instagram flashmobs,
from social networking an occupation to manipulating attention spans,
contemporary struggle renders technological apparatuses inoperative
in their proper form. </span></span>
</div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="background: transparent;">Contemporary
struggle will produce the basis for either generalized
ungovernability or a more horrific form of government. Social
movements from the '60s to the late '90s created the conditions for
general self-management; the most radical horizon they could perceive
was a world democratically administrated and without work as
production. The social movements anticipated the distribution of
racial, gender, and sexual subjectivities, freedom as choice, and
cybernetics. Today their demands reflect back at us in so many
commodities, so many techniques of government, so many empty
environments affectively managed by food and retail attendants.
Today’s revolt could give way to our dreams or our nightmares. </span></span>
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…</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0.06in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Available for mail order at <a href="http://lbcbooks.com/">LBC <span style="font-size: large;">B</span>ooks</a>, and at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair.</span>
</div>
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</span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><a href="http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2013/04/21/between_predicates__war-web_print.pdf"><span style="color: #660000;">PDF for <span style="font-size: large;">viewi<span style="font-size: large;">ng here!</span></span></span></a> </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">L</span>ist of vendors and events coming soon</i>.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Nothing is too beautiful for the unwanted children of capital, </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0.06in; text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: small;">kisses,</span></div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0.06in; text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>The Institute for
Experimental Freedom</i><span style="font-size: small;"> |</span> March, 20<span style="font-size: small;">13</span></span>
</div>
the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-35113221058050325052012-08-11T13:13:00.001-07:002012-08-11T13:13:42.403-07:00Murdered By This World<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5cZyxOEPOkk/UCa7wOM4iTI/AAAAAAAAAHU/MTL1OYm8eEg/s1600/delete_me.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5cZyxOEPOkk/UCa7wOM4iTI/AAAAAAAAAHU/MTL1OYm8eEg/s400/delete_me.png" width="257" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<i>For T and everyone murdered by this shit world.</i><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>7.19.12</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Soft Sadness a shadow</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
beckoning me to come towards</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
a wandering star</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
so I can turn to dust</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
and scatter silently over</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
the earth</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
into the sun</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
and down through the</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
depths of nothing.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;">
<i>-CM</i> </div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<a href="http://zinelibrary.info/3-posters-delete-me-ief" target="_blank">3 posters</a><br />
<br />
<br />the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-91245765288404119542012-04-09T15:04:00.002-07:002012-04-09T15:54:59.111-07:00General Strike With Chaos<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Hbuhj_o1u3Q/T4NnB47IevI/AAAAAAAAAHM/LwHHRDgoHk0/s1600/may1-web.png"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 279px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Hbuhj_o1u3Q/T4NnB47IevI/AAAAAAAAAHM/LwHHRDgoHk0/s400/may1-web.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5729536433103338226" border="0" /></a><br /> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Our contribution to the ongoing organizing for the May Day General Strike</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><a href="http://www.zinelibrary.info/files/may1.pdf">11x17- Print ready PDF</a><br /></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">And while we're at it... Remember what happened two years ago, before there was a popular movement of occupations, there were short bursts of experimentation and heartbreak (<i>that's not all that was broken</i>). In one such event, an occupied parking garage party “turned violent.” Or rather, an avenue of lost memories, cobbled together with the toil of those who were before us, was enchanted by a terrible spirit. That thin veneer that separates proletarians from every potency of life was violated. Property: shops, art, cars. 1886, that bloody mess, haunted the evening, recalling what was lost: that is to say conjuring a long narrative of the sickening loss of life to value. Those arrested, guilty or not, still await trial, traumatized by the police and this justice of Law. This May Day, may the comrades of the Asheville 11 be in our hearts, and may a terrible spirit enchant this world. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Spring 2012: repair what is irreparable.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: bold;">How to use this poster:</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: italic;">The poster has been designed for easy black and white xerox printing, and viewing.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">In the space marked “Local Meeting Point,” one can add their own information using a marker, or for the tech and design savvy, Open in Adobe Illustrator, check options for outlined text, unless you have Haas Grotesk (Helvetica, with original metal kerning-spaces). The type should be sized from-13-21 and if you don't have Hass Grotesk, probably no one will notice if you use Helvetica.In Adobe Acrobat, Tools, Typewriter. Again choose Hass Grotesk or Helvetica with a bold weight (I'd suggest <i>75bold</i>). Left Justify to the “L” in “Local” or all the way to Left, at the beginning of the doted line. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">And ain't no one gonna get their feelings hurt if you decide a more coherent poster serves you local needs better, but if you do put up some posters we're always happy see some flicks.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: right;">General Strike Harder</p><div style="text-align: right;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: right;">Kisses,</p><div style="text-align: right;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: right;">-IEF Spring, Nearing the End of the World</p>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-63310362952055623102012-02-20T09:58:00.000-08:002012-02-20T18:00:24.813-08:00God Only Knows What Devils We Are<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D6TM3MwCjuE/T0KMyotFl_I/AAAAAAAAAHA/w5nMCYwuo5o/s1600/MiguelPolicia3.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 254px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D6TM3MwCjuE/T0KMyotFl_I/AAAAAAAAAHA/w5nMCYwuo5o/s400/MiguelPolicia3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5711282079007086578" border="0" /></a><br />And, as it were, Mr. Chris Hedges<br /><br /><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/god%20only%20knows-imposed.pdf">8.5x11 Imposed Pamphlet PDF</a><br /><br /><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/god%20only%20knows.pdf">Readable PDF</a><br /><br /><br />Introduction courtesy of <a href="http://www.crimethinc.com/">Crimethinc</a><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The past few months have seen a backlash led by professional journalists against <a href="http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/zakkflash02152012/%E2%80%9D"> diversity of tactics</a> in the Occupy movement. <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/14-8%E2%80%9D">Rebecca Solnit</a> represented our <a href="http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2011/10/07/dear-occupiers-a-letter-from-anarchists/">Dear Occupiers</a> pamphlet as “a screed in justification of violence” simply because it endorsed diversity of tactics. Chris Hedges followed up by calling “black bloc anarchists”—an invented category—<a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cancer_of_occupy_20120206/%E2%80%9D">“The Cancer in Occupy.”</a> Both allege that a violent fringe is undermining the movement and must be excluded from it.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">What is taking place here is a kind of <em>silencing.</em> Defining people as “violent” is fundamentally a way to delegitimize them; Solnit and Hedges feel entitled to spread falsehoods about their political adversaries because their goal is to shut them out of the discussion entirely. That’s why Hedges acknowledges he <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/interview-chris-hedges-about-black-bloc/1328799148%E2%80%9D">never spoke to anyone involved in a black bloc</a> in the course of composing his diatribe. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect better from journalists with their own wikipedia pages and glamor shots, who have much to lose should popular movements cease to be managed from the top down.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">To counteract this silencing, we sought out our comrades from the heart of the <a href="http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/pastfeatures/blocs.php%E2%80%9D">black bloc</a> and asked them to tell their side of the story: where they come from, why they participate, how they see the world. We do not accept the terms set by the mudslingers: our intent is not to compete for ideological legitimacy on a battlefield of abstractions, but to foster mutual understanding grounded in personal experience.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: right;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: right;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: right;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Have you ever worn the mask one-two one-two, </span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />(M) to the (A) to the (S) to the (K)<br /></span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Put the mask upon the face just to make the next day,<br /></span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Feds be hawkin me<br /></span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Jokers be stalking me,<br /></span> <span style="font-style: italic;">I walk the streets and camouflage my identity,<br /></span> <span style="font-style: italic;">My posse in the Brooklyn wear the mask.<br /></span> <span style="font-style: italic;">My crew in the Jersey wear the mask.<br /></span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Stick up kids doing boogie woogie wear the mask.<br /></span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah everybody wear da mask<br />but how long will it last</span>. </p><div style="text-align: right;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: right;">-The Fugees</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: right;"><span style="font-style: italic;">That’s why I live illegal</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">All my life I live illegal<br /></span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Don’t give a fuck bout the law<br /></span> <span style="font-style: italic;">When my pockets reaching zero<br /></span> <span style="font-style: italic;">I’m fresh out the ghost town<br />similar to your town</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I’m probably where it goes down<br /></span> <span style="font-style: italic;">He pretends he tolls down</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: right;">-Ski Beatz & Freddie Gibbs</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">For thirteen years, for over a decade, I have donned the black mask. “<a href="http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2006/11/30/seattle-seven-years-later/%E2%80%9D">Seattle</a>”—that word still means “the days the world stood still” to me. “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27th_G8_summit%E2%80%9D">Genoa</a>” still holds more terror and perversity than the North American September 11. In experiencing anonymous collective force, I have gained far more than a diversity of tactics in my tool box. The black bloc is not merely a tactic, as so many anarchist apologists claim; it’s more of an aesthetic development in the art of street confrontation. The black bloc is a methodology of struggle; it goes beyond a single color, and its intelligence reaches beyond the terrain of protests. The black bloc is irreducibly contemporary because only in its opacity can a ray of light from the heavens finally reach us. Allow me to explain.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><b><strong>I.</strong></b></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">It’s the summer of 2000. Many of us have given up on both Democrats and Republicans. The sense is that “anti-globalization” poses the only alternative to advanced capitalism. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Democratic_National_Convention_protest_activity#Rage_Against_the_Machine_concert%E2%80%9D">Democratic National Convention</a>: I am marching, drenched in sweat, through the catacombs that hosted the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots%E2%80%9D">Rodney King riots</a>.<span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"> </span>Sadly, the only remnant of those fateful days is a militarized police force that anticipates our every move. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">We walk into an enormous play pen—the “free speech zone”—surrounded on all sides by a sea of navy blue wielding pepper balls and batons. Amid the most dreadful speeches and rebellious rock music, we find each other: the stupid, isolated, alienated, and utterly lost children of capital, just beginning our downward spiral—just beginning a precarious life, without promise and without hope.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">We organize ourselves at the center and proceed to the margin, where things are unpredictable. Someone climbs the tall fence, reaching the limit of free speech; and then another, and another. A black flag is unfurled, and a figure waves it with pride, claiming this as a site of freedom with that stupid gesture. The pepper balls crash against your skin; they collide against your frail bones, exploding on impact and releasing a furious burning that traps itself in your oily clothes and sweat. The crowd collectively gains intelligence and transforms the signs bearing socialist slogans into shields for cover. We brace each other and press the signs against the fence. Shot with pepper balls, a figure falls from the apex of the fence; arms and femur bones snap against the concrete.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">That putrid smell, the eyes glossed over in tears, the stomach churns and nausea overwhelms you. Vinegar-soaked rags help to soak up the poisonous clouds, but you can hear screaming everywhere as the blue tide comes rushing in, and your nerves twist and vibrate as the CS gas and police mutate into a single hostile terrain.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Suddenly, I am with six or ten people. I don't know who. We've found a large road sign and we're lifting it slowly. Plastic bottles soar impotently overhead. A small rock or two hits an officer. We press with what was once our labor power, straining to hurl the worthless product of our grandparents’ toil back at our overseers. The object tilts over the fence and falls to other side: <em>clong.</em> We cheer and revel in our functionless gesture. “Fuck the police” resounds throughout the night, however foolishly. A few bank windows collapse in glittery confetti. Spray paint decorates a wall. We journey to the end of the night; at its perimeter, we share drinks and laughs over our absurd gestures. Finally, back at the union hall, we crash in our sleeping bags, exhausted and dehydrated, to dream of the abolition of capitalism.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">I am irreparably transformed. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><b><strong>II.</strong></b></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Lets rewind. Sixteen years ago, I am an adolescent teenager. I have entered Alcoholics Anonymous—somewhat earlier than most of my family. There, I witness one friend’s overdose, another friend’s relapse and subsequent incarceration for manslaughter, and the spread of methamphetamines throughout my neighborhood. I watch <em><i>Requiem for a Dream</i></em> some years later, horrified by the cinematic juxtposition of “normal” and “marginal” addiction—it feels so familiar.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">I am watching 20/20, an episode exposing Nike sweatshops. Through some extended leaps of logic, I recognize a link between those exploited by sweatshops and my own condition. With this heightened sensitivity, I conclude that</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">1) addiction has an economic function</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-left: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">2) the economy includes industries that tend to harm people—through exploitation, alienation, and immiseration, the reproduction of addiction being a subset of the last of these</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 0.49in; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">3) the economy tends to hurt people generally.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">My initial moral indignation passes; my sensitivity shifts from a moral compass faulting individuals for their choices to something more like class consciousness. The broke-ass cars in the yard appear starker. The drive-by shootings in our neighborhood gain a new meaning. The empty refrigerators' sad grumble reverberating in our empty stomachs, my many stepbrothers’ sweet mullet haircuts—these bring me a certain revelation: I am white trash.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Seattle: the anti-globalization summits and corresponding riots. The beautiful rhythm: work, misery, chaos. They kill <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Carlo_Giuliani%E2%80%9D">Carlo</a> and we meet at the intersection of Colfax and Broadway to block traffic, frantically trying to show our tears and rage. The war. My sister is deployed to Iraq. We wear helmets and anachronistically chant “Bring the war home!” We spray slogans and burn effigies. We block the flows of the metropolis. As if to baptize our newfound agency, we are showered in pepper spray. Tear gas spreads across entire continents. We go from basement hardcore shows to warehouse parties. Our friends learn to DJ. Cocaine comes back into style and claims two victims; heroin gets a few more. The boredom and stupidity is suffocating. We attempt to wrest the noose from our necks. Democracy sweeps Bush back into office. We're <a href="http://crimethinc.com/texts/rollingthunder/demonstrating.php%E2%80%9D">trashing a gentrified district of Adams Morgan</a>. My friend records an MP3 of her heartbeat, shouts and heavy breathing accentuated by shattering glass and anxiety.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">In the US, we hit a lull. Everywhere else the world burns.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">As we get older, we find new ways to survive. A small meeting of coworkers transforms into <a href="http://phillyimc.org/en/team-real%E2%80%9D">an ambitious conspiracy</a>. Without making any demands of the boss, we increase our pay and our quality of life. We eat well, we can afford cigarettes, we travel where we want to: <a href="http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/actions/2005/g8/%E2%80%9D">Scotland</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_civil_unrest_in_France%E2%80%9D">France</a>, <a href="http://italycalling.wordpress.com/2011/07/03/civil-war-in-valsusa-repression-against-no-tav-movement/%E2%80%9D">Italy</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB97Kbw7eWY%E2%80%9D">Germany</a>. Can't stop the chaos. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">In Europe, the black bloc means “no media!” I watch a snitch in a tie go down among the kicks and punches of the hooded ones. A car burns. As the police battle two thousand rock throwers, a couple hundred advance through the marketplace, smashing everything. “Tremble Bourgeoisie!” is scrawled across a temp agency service. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Back home, our own temporary involvement in the economy—our precarious life—is reflected in the windows of the temp agency, the retail shop, and the café. The image of our desire is captured in the commodities to which we have no access. Our needs are displayed in advertisements that sell us happiness and grocery store aisles that mutate our tastes and relations to other living beings. Smashing, burning, and looting make sense to us in this context like nothing else could.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><b><strong>III.</strong></b></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">What <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cancer_of_occupy_20120206/%E2%80%9D">Chris Hedges</a> fails to understand about black bloc activity is that it arises from a real <em><i>need</i>.</em> The “cancer” that Chris finds so disturbing—the contagion of an anonymous collective force—is precisely why and how it continues to outlive every social movement from which it emerges. These generations—we who fantasized about Columbine and now only know metal detectors at school; we who expected September 11 and now only know the politics of terror; we who grew up as the world crumbled all around us and now only know the desert—we <em><i>need</i></em><i> </i>to fight, and not just in the ways our rulers deem justified and legitimate.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"> </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">As workers, we’re excluded from unions, from collective arrangements of any kind. When we manage to find employment at all, it is meaningless labor that corresponds to our own superfluousness in the economy. We were raised by a generation so thoroughly defeated that it feared to pass on its history. We are the inheritors of every unpaid bill, of every failed struggle, the products of the insanely selfish individualism of advanced capitalism in North America.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Our entire environment feels hostile. Hence our hostility.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Chris Hedges cannot understand this because he misses the real historical conflict expressed in contemporary struggles. As <a href="http://nplusonemag.com/concerning-the-violent-peace-police%E2%80%9D">David Graeber</a> points out, his exhumation of the decrepit journal <em><i>Green Anarchy</i></em> shows how out of touch he is. The black bloc spreads because of a real need to take back <em>force,</em> which has been monopolized by the police. The black bloc spreads because it is a living practice of collective intelligence, redistribution of wealth, and improvisation; it spreads because it interrupts the ways we are confined in our identities as <em>subjects</em> within capitalism. The black bloc is tuned to the uneasy pulse of our time.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">A paradigm of life is coming to an end. The black bloc is irrevocably contemporary because our age of unrest is reflected in this gesture. Populations everywhere are becoming ungovernable and doing so by casting off the fundamental assumptions of government, the techniques of policing, and laws of the economy. The paradigm of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereignty%E2%80%9D">sovereignty</a> is collapsing. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">To see what is changing, we have to understand the nature of sovereignty. The modern state is founded upon an anthropological fiction of human nature and the <i><em>surgical extraction</em></i> of violence from living beings. Thomas Hobbes argued that the establishment of the civil state conveyed the human being from the state of nature—a war of each against all—to the loving arms of the sovereign, rendering him a citizen-subject on the condition that he leave “nature” at the door. But this discourse separates each being from collectivity: the subject of sovereignty is always already an isolated individual. And the arrangement keeps war at the center of the state, as the sole dominion of the sovereign. Ironically, what the subject lays down in return for security—the capacity to use force—is precisely what the sovereign must wield in order to ensure it: and this is wielded above all <i><em>against subjects.</em></i></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">The form of sovereign power shifted as democratic governments replaced autocracies, but the content of state sovereignty remains. The modern state has shifted from techniques governing territory to <a href="http://roundtable.kein.org/files/roundtable/Foucault_Soc_Defended.pdf%E2%80%9D">techniques governing populations</a>.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">It is increasingly difficult to distinguish between totalitarian and democratic governments, as <em>policing</em> is identical under both. The police have the power to let live or take life—<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopower%E2%80%9D"><em>biopower</em></a>—and the distinction between democratic and totalitarian becomes even more muddled as management and medicine also gain this power, determining who can access fundamental human needs. The mediation of capital creates a hellish environment in which practically everyone is integrated into a single hostile terrain, subject to its violence and its <em>justice.</em> If the <em><i>cause du jour</i></em>is enunciated as “fuck the police,” this is because the police are the living embodiment of Hobbe's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_%28book%29%E2%80%9D"><em><i>Leviathan</i></em></a>, the state that keeps us at arm’s length from our own potential.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"> </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">“The police” includes all who police; <em>policing</em> is an array of techniques, not all of which demand uniforms. Hedges’ cancer metaphor exposes his penchant for order, translating it explicitly into the language of biopower. Remember how Oakland's Mayor, Jean Quan, and other authority figures used the discourse of health and risk to justify the repression of occupations around the US? Hedges continues this work of <em>policing</em> with his metaphor of an unhealthy social body in need of <em><i>surgery.</i></em><i></i> Whenever the basic assumptions of sovereignty and capitalism are called into question by those who defy state violence and the sanctity of property, the police are mobilized to discipline them. This <em>disciplining</em> is carried out by both the armed wing and the necktied wing of the police. It’s not a coincidence that Hedges invokes biopolitical language just as a portion of the population is beginning to discover the power of their bodies.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Less than seven years ago, in New Orleans an entire population was forced into a concentration camp by militarized police forces acting on a juridical state of emergency. The ones who did not obey this order could be gratuitously shot down. The justification given during Katrina was the health and well-being of the population. One can't help but notice this same paradigm at work, albeit with less racialized brutality, in the violent evictions of the occupations. Safety, Health, Security: <em><i>Necessity knows no law.</i></em><i></i> These police actions only deviate slightly from the norm in terms of intensity, frequency, and grammar of “protection.” The deaths of Oscar Grant and Sean Bell attest to the murderous day-to-day operations of the police. The other casualties, the forgotten, continue to haunt every city block, where the police function to eliminate useless surplus—either out of economic utility or biopolitical necessity. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism, as Walter Benjamin spells out in <em><i>Theses on the Philosophy of History</i></em>. It is terrifying to face the wreckage of history that constitutes the present. One loses count of the tragedies. Despair, recoded as “happiness,” runs through every aspect of social life, increasingly reflected by Hollywood and ironic television sitcoms as if to anesthetize us.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">The arguments for orderly, passive demonstrations by Hedges and other liberal pundits miss all this. <em><i>One doesn't sweep the floor in a house falling off a cliff.</i></em><i></i> In a world that feels absolutely hostile and alien, every element of social life acquires a sinister glow. In this light, the black bloc appears as a ray of optimism because it creates an opening that leads through to the other side of despair. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">The new struggles increasingly take place outside of legitimate and traditional venues. When the factory was the contested site, the workers’ movement was the most vibrant and decisive space of contestation. During the shift from a factory-centered economy to an economy integrating social life, we saw the emergence of social movements contesting social spaces. Now that social life has been fully subsumed within capitalism, the mutant offspring of the proletariat and the counterculture is appearing outside the legitimate parameters of the old movements. This explains the spread of anti-social violence, anomic play, self-destructive revolt, <em><i>irony.</i></em> Chris Hedges may wish to turn away his gaze, but society is imploding.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">We accept our conditions and get organized accordingly. Compared to the <em><i>fatal</i></em><i></i> and fatalistic strategy employed by school shooters, terrorists, and isolated individuals marked as insane, the black bloc, rioting, and flashmobs are collective and <em><i>vital</i></em> forms of struggle. The Left is obsolete—rightfully so, as it still clings to this collapsing society at war with its population. Society is decomposing and nothing will or should bring back the the good ol' days—the days of slavery, hyper-exploitation of women, apartheid, homophobic violence, Jim Crow. We wager that organizing our antagonisms collectively and attacking this society where we are positioned, without anything mediating our force, is our best chance for a life worth living.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Remarking on how the black bloc assaults the sanctity of property, Chris says “there's a word for that: <i>criminal.</i>” Even here he is behind the times. Once, it seemed that crime designated specific transgressions of the law, such as breaking a window. Today, this fiction is evaporating as crime is openly integrated into the economy. The black market, the gray market, the war on drugs, the war on terror. Branding criminal is not simply a maneuver in a public relations war—though it is that too; <i><em>crime is the excess of law.</em></i> Security cameras and Loss Prevention are not there to <em><i>stop</i></em><i> </i>shoplifting and workplace theft any more than borders exist to stop illegal immigration. The designation of criminal is simply one more tool for managing populations, another line along which to divide and exploit.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">The cynicism of the justice system is surpassed only by capitalism itself. There’s not enough money circulating any more for us to be fully integrated, so entire economies of ultra-flexible, superfluous, and precarious work have arisen. We don't do anything that appears to matter, but somehow we have to do it <em><i>all the time</i>.</em> Just to count as <em><i>people,</i></em> we have to gain all sorts of stupid commodities—a cellphone, a laptop, a specific knowledge of culture. Because our wages are so low and we work so much, our only options are illicit. Petty drug dealing, sex work, and pirating movies and music have become at once a normal practice for us and a constant opportunity for the police to rein us into the justice industry. The black bloc makes sense to us because it offers an intelligent way to do <em><i>what we always have to be doing</i></em><i></i> without getting caught.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">If Chris Hedges is really concerned about crime, perhaps he shouldn’t praise <em><i>anything</i></em><i></i> in the movement of occupations. What attracts us to the black bloc is exactly what draws us to the occupation of a public square: all the different people with different experiences coming together to steal back the time stolen from us by work and the spaces stolen from us by ownership and policing, the<i> <em>collective crime of revolt</em></i><em>.</em> Hum the national anthem all you want and sing “dissent is patriotic” to the media, but the reality is that anything that breaks with the way things are is categorized in the same sphere of crime as “violence” and treated accordingly. So why not <em><i>do it together</i></em><i> </i>and<i> <em>with intelligence?</em></i><em></em></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><b><strong>IV.</strong></b></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Above all, the black bloc is contemporary because it is a site of self-transformation. Even the abused corpse of Gandhi is in accord: if we want to change the world we must change ourselves. To take this further, we might say we have to <a href="http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2011/12/17/self-destruction/%E2%80%9D"><em><i>abolish ourselves</i></em><i></i></a><i></i>.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Capitalism has only managed to stave off revolution by constantly reordering and diffusing social antagonism. At the center of the economy, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between citizens and police, yet at the same time they appear to be at war with each other. At the margins, everything that once made antagonistic groups into “revolutionary subjects” is extracted—think of the fate of the Black Panthers—and the remaining husk works to gain entrance to the center or manage the disorder of the margins. Only an immediate break with the process by which we become subjects can open a window of potential. This self-transformative gesture is where tactics and ethics meet. If liberal commentators can't handle the implications of this, this just shows the widening abyss between those who would defend citizenship and those who refuse to be governed.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Allow me to elaborate from our side of the barricades.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">The black bloc is an anonymous way of being together. Anonymity allows me to shed the mask I have to wear at school, at work, in your parents’ house, in casual conversations at the bar. The black bloc enables us to interrupt the processes that make us into subjects according to race, gender, mental health, physiological health. Here, we can cease worrying about how power will extract the truth from us, and we can reveal truth to each other.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">The black bloc assumes an intense ethics of care. Hedges alleges that it is “hypermasculine.” Not everyone who dons the black mask reads feminist and queer theory—Bell Hooks, Judith Butler, Selma James, Silvia Federici, Guy Hocquenghem—but these are extremely influential on our discourse. Had Hedges taken the time to research his subject, he would have found multiple <a href="http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2009091215370632%E2%80%9D">discussions</a> about the gender of anonymity.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><a name="_GoBack"></a>Via the black bloc, we open the space to play with power. We radically reverse its operations on our bodies. Casting off the assumption that our bodies need to be protected, that we should give them over to the care of the state, we collectively re-inscribe them as as source of power. We also reverse the notion that freedom ends at the boundaries of individuals. <em><i>I want you to put me at risk:</i></em> in this axiom, we find the basis of love, friendship, and death, the three irreducible risks of life. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">The black bloc is the site for a new <em><i>sentimental education</i></em>: a political reordering of our sentiments. We learn new sensations of love, friendship, and death through the matrix of collective confrontation. In the obscurity of the black mask, I am most <em><i>present</i></em><i></i> in the world. This unfamiliar way of being compels me to focus and intensify my senses, to be radically present in my body and my environment.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">In the black bloc, I have to reconceptualize geographies. The event of the riot gives us a new mobility and space, a laboratory in which to experiment with public space and the relations of property and commodities. Moving through a one-way street backwards, I note how a slight displacement causes the flows of capital to malfunction. The metropolitan environment ceases to appear as a neutral terrain: suddenly I can identify all the ways it functions to channel all activity into a very narrow range of possibilities.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Drifting thus through urban centers, I become attuned to all the apparatuses at work and to how they can be caused to break down. Newspaper boxes and dumpsters can be moved into the street, blocking police from entering the space we are creating. Cars—the individualizing apparatus <em><i>par excellence</i></em><i>—</i>can be put to collective use. All the pretty commodities in the window, usually the breadth of an entire social class away from me, are now a mere hammer’s distance from my proletarian hands. I can move through these spaces in which I am not authorized to be, transforming them. I can dance with mannequins or use them to smash out the windows of a storefront. I can trade the insanity of everyday misery for a collective madness that devastates the avenues of wealth. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">For those of us who were excluded from the community of good workers, there is the black bloc. Like the myth of the historical proletarian community, it has no single organization, no membership, no written constitution. Through the black bloc, we find collective power, a sense of camaraderie, a historical tradition of living and fighting. It offers the possibility of immediately changing our conditions and immediately changing ourselves. Those who say it doesn't act in the workplace misunderstand the forms work takes today and where it takes place. The black bloc has been instrumental in the recent port blockades on the West Coast and in the occupations of universities through Europe, the UK, the US, and Chile; the method is constantly being appropriated and adapted. When coworkers outsmart the cameras to take money from the register to share—when the hungry pocket goodies from an expensive health food store—when <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28group%29%E2%80%9D">Anonymous</a> strikes the credit card companies—wherever we use anonymity offensively, there is <em><i>black bloc.</i></em></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">As I write this, Greece burns yet again, and more of the flexible, unemployed, and immigrant populations appropriate the tactics of the hooded ones—<em><i>and vice versa.</i></em> The black bloc can't be cut out of the movement of occupations: there is no surgery that can extract the need for redemption from history, and there is no method better tuned to that task than this <em><i>vital opacity.</i></em> On the contrary, the so-called cancer will grow, spread, and mutate—and the movement of occupations, like other movements, will increasingly be indistinguishable from the black bloc. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-18422651313253187882011-10-07T12:08:00.001-07:002012-05-17T17:36:30.208-07:00Oh yeah, we made a snapback hat<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JWcONmGsL-Q/To9QwhgvGdI/AAAAAAAAAGg/230sYCrSxdc/s1600/Hood-hat-close.jpg"><br /></a><br />
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hnKMB-EU52M/To9QiYHJNjI/AAAAAAAAAGY/9fd6TGdptzs/s1600/20110930151733.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5660831808146191922" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hnKMB-EU52M/To9QiYHJNjI/AAAAAAAAAGY/9fd6TGdptzs/s400/20110930151733.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 326px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
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The Institute for Experimental Freedom is proud to announce the release of the dumbest commodity we've made as of yet. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Coast to Coast Hoodlums</span> (very) limited edition snapback comes as an ode to all y'all who can't stop gettin ignorant. Even though some dummies are talking their stupid mouths, the rest of y'all are holding it down, wil'n out, and keeping your mouths shut. So ya know, if you wanna buy a black hat with a red bill and trim or something, we got you.<br />
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Specs:<br />
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$ 23.00 USD plus shipping<br />
Check out the sweet close up image with bad photoshop shadowing below.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">SOLD OUT :(</span></span></div>
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<br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JWcONmGsL-Q/To9QwhgvGdI/AAAAAAAAAGg/230sYCrSxdc/s1600/Hood-hat-close.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5660832051187620306" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JWcONmGsL-Q/To9QwhgvGdI/AAAAAAAAAGg/230sYCrSxdc/s400/Hood-hat-close.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 292px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><strike>If you reeeeeealy want us to make more of these let us know </strike><br />
Thanks for the kind comments!<strike> </strike><br />
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So a bunch of people have said they'd like us to make more. We'll <a href="http://bit.ly/KxfwgV" target="_blank">PNDR</a>--who we are apparently advertising just by mentioning (and we understand how ridiculous that is, but hey its 2012)--is having some design contest, and we're trying to avoid having to pay to make more of these, so I guess if you're on that you should go to <span class="shortLink"><a href="http://bit.ly/KxfwgV">http://bit.ly/KxfwgV</a> and vote for this hat, and then we'll get some cash and there will be more sweet hats in the world</span>. And don't worry, we won't tell anyone about your streetwear habits. <br />
Also, let it be known, while we are actually attempting to sell out this particular commodity, we don't endorse paying for things. So if you buy a hat from us, or if we win, from them, make sure to make up for it...<br />
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kisses,<br />
-IEF - 17 May 2012<br />the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-9608024638950764972011-09-11T15:33:00.000-07:002011-10-01T09:08:37.904-07:00These colors still don't know how to run correctly<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://harobedretsiger.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/9-11-eagle.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 448px; height: 440px;" src="http://harobedretsiger.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/9-11-eagle.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://operatorchan.org/g/src/g40990_crying%20eagle%209-11.jpg"><br /></a><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">Ten Years Later</span><a href="mailto:ericvondoemming@yahoo.de" target="_blank"></a><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />IEF | <span style="font-style: italic;">On a Day of Remembrance for Fallen Heros</span><br /></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">9/11, ten years later. Ten years of terror and counterterror—ten years of innocent blood—and the nightmare finally appears to be over. Osama is dead, the war is won[1], and most importantly, a new wave of resistance is sweeping the globe, a resistance that has nothing in common with the terrorists or their enemies. If the most nightmarish aspect of the last decade was its unreality—a dream-world corpse-machine—today's struggles are striking because they are </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>real</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. This is the moment we have waited for: a moment without distractions, a moment ripe for revolution. And yet, perhaps there is a lesson still to be learned before we close the chapter.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">At one level, at least, the terrorists did win. Nobody today thinks of exporting democracy. Not only democracy, but the whole idea of a smooth space of cultural exchange has been thrown into confusion. Without this idea, which was always utopian, it is difficult to believe in the neutrality of the market; at an intuitive level, the "economy" loses its self-evidence. Not that this implies any sort of anticapitalist groundswell. It simply generalizes the knowledge that capitalism is sustained only by continual war. One must be willing to die for the economy. And if not, one must find something else worth dying for. There are a thousand mechanisms for suppressing this knowledge—the attempted reconstruction of the soldier as a computational nexus, the surgical precision with which Osama was eliminated—but they cannot erase it. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>We saw it on TV</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The dirty wars of the eighties, like the terrorist attacks of the same era, were maintained at a subliminal level, as </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>real events</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> that could be represented or misrepresented, discussed or brushed under the rug by politicians and commentators. One saw the smiling face of Arafat or the Gipper, but not their hands. In our era—which revolves around 9/11 but began some years before—the opposite has been true. The events are their own representation. This was as true for the Seattle black bloc as it was for the embedded journalists in Afghanistan. The magic of 9/11, the sorcery that gave a symbolic act material consequences, was that it took this truth to its conclusions. By becoming a perfect image, it broke the stream of images, and thus broke the stream of events—of nonevents—as no mere event could do. The reluctant nihilist's apology for Al Qaeda, "At least they did something," reveals an unconscious understanding of this fact.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">If propaganda is a visible lie pointing towards an invisible truth (if only the truth of consolidated power), pornography is a visible truth pointing towards nothing. The great propaganda event of our century was not propaganda at all. It was a pornographic nightmare that swallowed the world.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Towards the end of the decade, we active nihilists began to catch on. Against a depleted anarchism preaching "back to the community, back to the real," we radicalized the most unreal aspects of the summit protest. It began as secession from activism: do not seek affinity on the basis of political abstractions and their associated imperatives, but on the basis of shared conditions and the desires that inhabit them. Plan B was above all an organizational proposal, a proposal to establish affinity through the immediate gesture of attack. 100-200 = 1000. The exact texture and meaning of the gesture was ambiguous at first; eventually, through experimentation, it revealed itself as the pornographic. Invisibility did not mean merely evading detection, refusing communication; it meant a communication of meaninglessness. Although we did not find strangers spontaneously joining us in the street, we observed a certain resonance among worlds that seemed to make us stronger. This was the second secession: the social terrain of insurrectionary generalization became the image-world, in which spatial and temporal fragmentation mean nothing. "Shared conditions" ceased to mean physical or even social proximity; it meant the universal emptiness that our gesture revealed as act.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The difference between the terroristic strategy and our own had less to do with our squeamishness than with our rejection of professionalization. A central criterion for action: is it reproducible, does it promote or inhibit spontaneous antagonism? We articulated this tactical distinction as a matter of strategic principle, a gulf between ourselves and the theocrats. In retrospect, this was an exaggeration.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">September 11 was a Hollywood production, with an executive producer and a massive corporate staff; with the advent of YouTube, Hollywood is passé. Ours is the age of participatory spectacle. Therefore, the tactical departure (or resuscitation) that we attempted was, rather than an internal development of the anarchist milieu, a selective reactivation of possibilities in adaptation to the times. A new iteration of capitalist sociability made a certain theoretical hypothesis realistic, and so we took the torch held out to us. Held out to us by terrorism. We were not the only vector of this historical transmission, but we were one of them. The result, which we witness in London as much as Athens, is a </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>diffuse pornographic intelligence</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">: Osama Spontex.[2]</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Our own experiments eventually ran aground on the difficulties of sustaining a project that expresses itself only as emptiness. The secret thread of revolutionary commitment running from event to event did not matter at the level of our social reproduction or our material support base, for the simple reason that it was secret. We dispersed in various directions. Some formed communes, some got serious about Marx, some returned to building the anarchist movement. In every case, we took a step back from the extreme hypothesis. Without abandoning the insurrectionary strategy of rupture, we reinscribed rupture within a logic of continuity.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">One might read this experience as a transitional phase in a continuing revolutionary progression. A nihilist moment was needed to clear out the vestiges of liberal, pacifist, and socialist compromise, so that a fighting movement could be reborn, a movement ready for the coming struggles. From a tactical perspective, the militant potential of the antiglobalization movement needed to be isolated and developed so that it could enter into new configurations: anti-austerity and anti-police struggles as the two fronts of tomorrow's class war. Maybe.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">On the other hand, this return to bread and butter seems to resonate with a broader trend: the pacification of the image-world. When Greece burned in 2008, it was the European media, not the rioters, who talked of the "700 euro generation." The Greeks called themselves an image, an image from the future—and the generalization and success of the revolt (among Greek cities and towns, and also globally), was achieved at the level of images. In this respect, the more recent Egyptian insurrection was conservative, not only for its rapid recuperation by democratic demands and regime change, but also for its representation as secret, subliminal: everyone knows that what mattered is what happened in the street, away from the cameras; everyone knows about the media blackouts, the inaccessibility of truth. This gives credibility to an equally subliminal strategy for revolution, which limits attack to the real, to the explicable, to the truth suppressed by lies, to the antipornographic—a strategy that meshes seamlessly with the endgame of the counterterrorist decade. Namely, the return to normalcy of a system that digests and commodifies even the abnormal.[3]</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The terrorisms will continue, with or without us, ever more diffuse. Certainly, the strategy of subliminal struggle will bear fruit, as surely as the activist strategies of the past. It will find its limit, though, in constructing a social body that can only normalize or exclude the spontaneous nihilism of our time. We do not want to repeat the spinelessness of our earlier excursion, nor do we want to democratize terrorism. But we are not content with this limit.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:85%;">1 The continuing hostilities in Afghanistan have become yet another multilateral police action, more like Belgrade than Fallujah.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:85%;">2 Mao Spontex denotes the attempt in post-68 France to elaborate the theory of revolutionary guerrilla warfare without reference to a centralized party-apparatus. Its intellectual expression is exemplified by writers like Deleuze, Foucault, and Guattari. Practically, it is supposed to have influenced (and learned from) the Italian Autonomia. The ideas seem to have affinity with the Invisible Committee's idea of the Party, which (incidentally) also references anomic violence in the terrorist manner.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:85%;">3 "We didn't do it for the lulz." Anti-austerity is a political abstraction inviting a new activist imperative. It differs from the old anarchist abstraction only in presenting itself as concrete, economic, specific to the times. Anti-austerity action without an anti-austerity ideology might be another matter. Whether or not that's a good idea is another question.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-58564853956543589632011-05-30T20:42:00.000-07:002011-05-30T20:54:14.363-07:00New Pamphlet about the Struggle in Wisconsin | Early Spring for the Badger<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" style="font-family: georgia;" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FFa_C6XvPjk/TeRlUB1oYpI/AAAAAAAAAGE/mCIdnYQ4Ne0/s1600/Wisconsin-badger.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FFa_C6XvPjk/TeRlUB1oYpI/AAAAAAAAAGE/mCIdnYQ4Ne0/s400/Wisconsin-badger.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5612722430375649938" border="0" /></a><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Early Spring for the Badger is a collection of anonymously written notes on the Wisconsin February – March 2011 Struggle against Austerity Measures. Contained is a collection of communiques and actions, reflections on the struggle, critique concerning the themes of democracy, race, policing, madness, and violence, and propositions for a revolutionary strategy within the global anti-austerity struggle. </span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The first 100 print-run of Early Spring for the Badger was distributed at the Look to Wisconsin Conference in Milwaukee May 20.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The demonstrations against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was only the first spectacle of what will become the US struggle against Austerity, and the consequences of global economic turmoil. This pamphlet hopes to sharpen the anarchist and communist critique and point towards a trajectory from which a meaningful counter attack can be realized.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <small><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://libcom.org/files/WI-pamphlet-read.pdf">Read Online PDF</a><br /><a href="http://libcom.org/files/WI-pamphlet.pdf"><br />8.5x11 Imposed for Print PDF </a></span><br /></span><br /><br /></small>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-76286068061276156362011-03-17T14:45:00.000-07:002011-03-17T15:06:23.792-07:00Delete Me, I'm so Ugly | New text on Madness & Despair<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-I667yE42J8o/TYKFQqzPpCI/AAAAAAAAAF8/xRUIqsDTSAA/s1600/delete-cover.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 257px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-I667yE42J8o/TYKFQqzPpCI/AAAAAAAAAF8/xRUIqsDTSAA/s400/delete-cover.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5585173009306461218" border="0" /></a><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><blockquote style="font-family: georgia;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Forty years ago, the Socialist Patients Collective, embarked on a project to <span style="font-style: italic;">turn illness into a weapon.</span> To hold on to the fear and paranoia that dresses our despair in its most vibrant colors; to claim that experience as valid, and as the very condition on which modern capitalism reduces sense, claim bodies as its subjects, and functions to generalize alienation. The gun followed shortly.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Three stories separated by almost a century links the terror of woman. In Daldry's <i>The Hours</i>, Mrs. Dalloway lives and continues to reveal the tragedy of our world. There is nothing comforting that calls on the bodies marked dysfunctional to restrict their desire toward death. The body wants to fall, to submerge, to cough, to inhale the dark liquid and dissolve. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The house wife goes on strike, alone, acting as does the marginal factory or service worker. Stealing no longer keeps despair at bay; cheating can't bring back the years of doomed performances ahead. The future is always bleak. Addiction, a slow death. She drowns her children, she murders herself. She interrupts, in the most grotesque and elementary form, <i>reproduction</i>, and she assaults the meaning of this world. Minus one.</p></blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia;"></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia; text-align: justify;">Madness, addiction, dysfunctional positionalities. I am terrified by the pen mark of the doctor, and of the indifference afforded to me by the consciously depressed. I want to make sense of it, but I can't. My texts, my speech, constantly acquiesce to the demand for rational discourse, molds into another author-function—disciplining her, and making room for me, and repeating the operation that gives encouragement to others who want to play with power. My experience drifting through twelve step programs will always remind me of a sense that there are those who want to hurt us, and then repair us. Who want to manage our despair, and reproduce the addicted-rock-bottom-body, the broken-mad-body, as a petri dish on which to make a different functional subject. While it's important not to equate madness with addiction, the scandal of these dysfunctional subjects is nevertheless similar. The sadness provoked by the realization that these experiences find analogous homes in what could be called an emotional commons requires unblinking eyes, and, in the days we can get out of bed, collective self-organization of care. Should it surprise anyone that this “care” has come and will come again in the form of “force?” We chose to publish <i>Delete Me, I'm so Ugly</i> in order to contribute to a reading of our times through the lens of despair, to hone in on the intelligence of madness, and to continue to ask “Of what does our congregation consist?”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/Delete.pdf">Readable PDF</a><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/Delete-imposed.pdf">Imposed for Print PDF </a><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-82099917180513959272011-02-27T09:54:00.000-08:002011-02-27T10:54:21.766-08:00Poster & Comments on Wisconsin Anti-Austerity StruggleOkay, We're weirded out as much as the next hater that Madison law-enforcement have joined the very nice occupation of WI capitol building, bringing their riot gear. If we wanted to be vulgar, we could say, well, so far the struggle's character is arguably captured in the image of what critical race theorists would say is "whiteness." However, it would clearly be a bit dishonest to say that's whole story. Nonetheless, the struggle, like <a href="http://libcom.org/library/the-anti-cpe-struggle-report-theorie-communiste">other anti-austerity struggles</a> stakes its claim on an image of past illusions restored: that of a working democracy, with liberal subjects contesting their value in the economy. Civil discourse in the labor of producing a "social" that is no longer tenable, and that defines the borders of inclusion in "civil society," which no longer can have borders. In content and in form, it has so far taken measures to extract and make invisible the naughty elements.<br /><br />On the other hand, diffuse sick outs and doctors notes and international solidarity are a fascinating development. The fact that some have said "get a little bloody," might be part of the union bosses in the US falling into the same powerlessness as the CGT. Whereas it might be a threat of violence that no body who wants society to keep functioning actually wants to come to fruition, it might also reveal how this shit is so bad that the unions need to talk a big game. Eitherway, a funny thing happens when authoritative voices say it's okay to get wild and those who listen start to define their own parameters of force. All that being said, policing is a function that anyone who serves the concept of The People, and anyone who protects the flows of capital can perform. Cops, snitches, para-military, bosses, managers, citizen-arresters, military, fascists, blablabla. Optimism: What else could it mean when the uniformed subjects of this refuse their role? We can only hope those who will be at the decisive fault line understand <a href="http://burntbookmobile.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/a-message-to-wisconsins-insatiable-workers-and-students/">their historical task.</a><br /><br />So, General Strike eh? <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Sorel">Sorel?</a> <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/12200144/Benjamin-Walter-Critique-of-Violence">Divine violence</a> anybody?<br /><br /><a href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v292/yellob/generalstrike.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 517px; height: 799px;" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v292/yellob/generalstrike.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.mediafire.com/file/7j8f3ciyz3n4pc7/strike-sab.pdf">11x17 Poster</a>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-57124274693502087672011-02-05T13:39:00.000-08:002011-02-05T14:02:37.539-08:00Enemies We Know Poster Series<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/TU3GwQft5dI/AAAAAAAAAF0/49nyESNduVg/s1600/enemies-intro.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 260px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/TU3GwQft5dI/AAAAAAAAAF0/49nyESNduVg/s400/enemies-intro.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5570326846491190738" border="0" /></a><br /><p><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;">As proof that we are not merely the purveyor of false promises we submit to you, finally, the Enemies we know poster series. Sorry about the wait, but you did savor the anticipation, no?</span><br /><br /></p> <p style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;">Design</span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;">Each lovely piece of rhetoric is to be printed black and white on 11x17. We have taken care to adhere to <a href="http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/12695#comment-127749">certain design criticism</a>, and believe we have achieved a quality result. The headings and drop caps are set in Pixture, a pixelated typeface referencing the centuries old <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur_%28script%29">Fraktur.</a> We did this to make reference to the technological and cybernetic content of the posters—all this talk of “apparatuses.” The body text is set in Plexes Pro. We might live to regret this decision, but we think the humanistic warmness of Plexes doesn't subordinate its speaking power. Type decisions by our contemporaries attempt desperately to achieve a kind tone in order to make the short-attention span of a likely user forget she is looking at a piece of propaganda. We, on the other hand, will use the deceptive “I” statements to achieve a more subtle result. Plexes is undeniably “user-friendly,” but remains a disruptive internety text in it's strange “k.” Hopefully, our design decisions effect the results we'd like. If not, at least some citizen will be a little less cheerful when they experience the poster as if they were texting, “I've painted a world at peace that can only be described as <i>war.</i>”</span></p> <p><br /></p> <p style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;">Identity</span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;">As we mentioned before, to cancel out, or add your own brand: Adobe Acrobat, Tools, Advanced Editing, Touch Up Object Tool/ Touch Up Text. Or whiteout or whatever.<br /></span></p> <p><br /></p> <p style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;">Use</span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;">Walls, windows, your room, police cars, etc. </span> </p> <p><br /></p> <p style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;">Oh yeah</span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;">If you see any of these shits posted around, and find yourself armed with camera, why not catch a couple flicks and send them our way.</span></p> <p> </p> <span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />Enemies We Know poster series</span><br /><br /><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/enemies-intro.pdf">Intro (i.e RIP Democracy LOL)</a><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;"><a><br /></a></span></span> <p><span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/enemies-police-v2.pdf"><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;">Police </span></a></span></p><p><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/enemies-bosses.pdf">Bosses</a></p><p><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/enemies-rapists.pdf">Rapists</a><br /></p> <p><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;"></span></span></p><p><br /></p> <p style="font-style: italic; text-align: right;"><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-style: italic; text-align: right;"><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;">Mad love for the Asheville May Day Defendants, and the Egyptian proletarians </span> </p><div style="text-align: right;"> </div><p style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif;">IEF | Cold-ass South | Winter '11</span></p>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-74930969373646122772011-01-28T09:02:00.000-08:002011-01-28T09:08:56.245-08:00Belated Letters to Insurgents and Good Tidings | part 2<p style="margin-left: 1.54in; margin-right: 1.54in; text-indent: -1.54in; font-family: georgia;">L. Desormais,</p> <p style="font-style: normal; text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">My never ending apologies for truant letters. The metropolitan trenches have this way of deepening my lack of faculties—making what words should come with ease into an endeavor all its own. Our congregation is so very far from the lovely scent of open conflicts. Still heeding the watchwords and making sense of the inspiring images and messages from distant lands, we lack the immediacy of speech. All of this makes communication remain a potentiality to be realized, rather than the result of the dispositions we take on during conflict. There is still a road ahead of us.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="font-style: normal; text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">It's not difficult to understand or conceptualize a strategy of general withdrawal from production. What is bothersome remains the technical operations that follow this strategy, and the confusion surrounding the question “Of what does our congregation consist?” The answer to one informs the other. Understanding the makeup of our collectivities would give us insight in to both the questions of “What material resources, languages, and terrain do we already possess?” and “What role do we play in modern society?” What means we employ in order to withdraw from this role would be informed by the former question of what we already have at our disposal. I'm sure you can empathize—it's hard to know whether or not a collective should put its efforts into cheerleading the various protagonists that emerge in struggles that are geo-socially foreign—through means of revolutionary solidarity, public discussions, and general propaganda. Or if a collective owes it to the struggles taking place to seek out, make links and, with a careful hand, tie together the threads of a coherent active minority position that can itself contribute in its own unique way to the emergency situations when they come. One does not exclude the other—and it's best to simply wager and go for it—but I think a collective still must suss it out collectively in order to make the best wager. </span> </p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="font-style: normal; text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">You'll notice I don't mention the syndicalist, or big organization method. And though I'm sure you're familiar with critiques of unions, the left, etc, I want to put this argument to rest. Allow me to test my logic. It's not that I don't have a small yearning for the proletarian programs of the past, but as it stands no mass organization can resist the seduction of producing subjects, and no economic hypothesis can fathom a life without “the rule” and “value” as its basis. There can be no free labor when any attempt to free ourselves is limited by the process that created labor as such. Not to be such an art-douche, but forms do not exist in a vacuum. If all social forms are dominated (subsumed) by capital, no social form can be expected to generate a world free from capital. Furthermore, if we are in a period of capitalist valorization dominated by the process of producing capitalist content, then the fight is not happening primarily at the level of classical politics. Although we can see different social movements influence the policies of politicians and capitalists through legal and illegal means, we always see, in the same operations performed by these social movements, the realization of fully functioning capitalist democracies. This is why the fight is called “biopolitical,” because the war in progress takes place as conflicts over what lives are licit and illicit. This makes fomenting any real oppositional force a challenge because to be included or excluded is still to be perceived and incorporated. Would we prefer to be marked for death or for market research? We see the “protester” or “activist” take its rightful place among the loyal opposition, and we see the unions make abundantly clear just exactly what “the worker” identity has won us. We can't trust anything to wither away, but I don't think that means that we are irredeemably destined to experiment with failing forms. I think in the US in particular, because of how advanced the process of social dissolution and alienation, we are best suited to experiment with content—with what undocile means of living we find to arm us for withdraw from production. And this will always find itself antagonistic to mass organizations. If there is a <i>dictatorship of the proletariat</i>, or a strike as delimited as is capitalism, it will be anonymous and terrible.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Okay. As you can imagine, Obamafication in the US has not abolished the dark ages, and the citizens of this society keep hoping against hope for change. Curious, today the global north might be split on its feelings about the free flows of information. Wikileaks, rather than tuition costs—rather than meaningless labor and an equally meaningless “social life”—cause pause for alarm in this country. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that the autonomous elements of the information super highway are the state's only composite hostis, but I think the intelligence of these events shouldn't escape our gaze. The Obama campaign relied heavily on the free flow of information, incorporating the partisans of Web 2.0 into its troops. Today Obama's administration considers using military force against one of the recognized instruments of cyber political crime. One can imagine that those who hacked and attacked Visa and Mastercard as retribution for the arrest of Julian Assange and Brad Manning were also those who voted for </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>hope and change</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">. Someone asked if terrorism was the new paradigm of warfare, forgetting for a moment, that partisan forms have always also contained terror as their content. Today we're forced to consider what is the meaning of purely immaterial combat with material consequences? This is where I am not as well read in Baudrillard as I probably ought be.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="font-style: normal; text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">After the spring, US anarchists felt their “we are winning” myth drift away. And with the loss of that myth, they also lost touch with the constellation of areas of revolt—the places, bodies, thoughts, and practices that generated a collective sense, or meaning. But once again we are reminded of how both the “we are winning,” and the “we have lost” myths are gaseous, and quickly dissolve without leaving any substance. Greek anarchists do what only the Greek anarchist can do. The French strikes reveal how the French areas of revolt are linked in a tactical feedback loop to Greece, to the US, to Iran, etc. England and the whole Green Isle flare up and remind us that history has not overlooked even the most panoptic societies. In Italy, the author-function literally becomes a shield to hide behind. I'm not interested in simply demanding that we keep finding inspiration in these events. To wave a flag and give backrubs when they are needed does not make a revolutionary force. Being faithful to history requires us to examine these events with suspicion and precision. What will it mean to communicate “we hear the call” each time civil war escapes its sovereign capture? To elaborate the piercing sound of revolt, and make it audible across the borders of identity and nation states. To not fall victim to the feeling that time is running out for us, but hold still the truth that even as we are repressed, it is a sign that time is running out for <i>them</i>. </span> </p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">In November, the FBI sent out a document regarding the domestic threat of “anarchist extremism.” Years before, </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>they</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> decided that ecological and animal liberation extremists were their public enemy. The image of detentions, deportations, and raids quickly arises. We've all felt the looming sense that Auschwitz never ended, and we've been reminded time and time again that this facility easily becomes a prison, this stadium easily transforms into a concentration camp. Katrina, New Orleans must not be forgotten, nor should September Eleven, Chile. Today, the deaths of eight squatters in New Orleans reminds us that Katrina was linked to the murder of the Lower East Side. Bordiga said that disasters were unplanned massacres in Capitalism—unplanned expenditure, where surplus labor was recycled. But fascism is not merely an extreme excess, it is an originary potency of sovereign power. The same operation that produces justice produces mass graves. How do we draw on this history? How does the image of starving ancestors give us strength when the enemy—who will accost even the dead—has never ceased to be victorious? I wonder if one of the defining operations of an insurrectional process in the US would be a constellation of actions that makes these historical tragedies immediately referenceable and contemporary. A friend said sometime in '07 that </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>we want to give rise to that old class hatred</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">, to make the rich, the police and the politicians tremble—to sleep uneasily with the full knowledge that something terrible awaits them—sooner or later. And in '10, the English civil war resurfaces with a resounding “Off with their heads!” Despite Charles and Camillas pouting, we live past the time when kings die. Sovereign power has a lot more to do with the whole of police operations than it does with elected representatives. But in the US we are outmoded and outmaneuvered. We expect to be arrested and imprisoned. We countdown, joking about the End of the world, but realistically anticipating our own political mortality. We have approximately five minutes before the police show up, and if we are not ready to fight them, we must be equipped to withdraw. The whole of what we are fighting for actually depends on this.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Across Europe since I've begun to write this, </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>the Informals</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> return. Their demand, like that of Greek Uprising, is simply a call to participate, but unlike the fierce demand of '08 to join the history taking place, the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, and the Informal Anarchist Federation's (FAInformal) demand reanimates the partisan, a hero of honor and glory. </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Take a position in the new urban guerrilla war. </i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">We are reminded of the years of lead, but not so much of the Commune. Comrades in France were initially charged with being a part of such a conspiracy, but even what they were alleged was a different tone of sabotage. But what is it about the spectacle of terror that is so salient with our contemporary conditions?</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-inline-policy: continuous;"> As I said in the beginning of this letter, we in the US don't live in the conditions where an armed group is even a hypothesis—even if violence is present everywhere</span></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">. But the parcel bombs mirror in a small way the armed madness of the isolated Individuals taking their sad acts of revenge in the US. The last two years speak volumes to the terror of everyday life. More students turn their sights on their classmates and teachers. A man, after years of deliberation, crashes his plane into an IRS building as an expression of his desperation and desire for a classless society. A Dean is stabbed and the Governor of MO, who was the main target of the anarchist, escapes his blade. A man takes aim at a Parent Teacher Association. The Discovery Channel is taken hostage and demanded to learn the </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>language older than words</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> at gun point. The media prattle squabbles over the political identity of the AZ shooter. So many disturbed individuals frighten our public consciousness. There is literally nothing that links these strange acts besides their disturbed reality. Would any of this make more sense with a more coherent political pole of violence? I'm not sure. In Europe, a world that hasn't lost its taste for collective approaches to life, the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire and the FAInformal create a spectacle of anarchist terror. Is this armed joy or simply the same desperation and suicidal gesture as its US counterpart? It is difficult to say. I think its important to really think about these events. Many of the criticisms leveled at the Cells of Fire and FAIinformal rely on an ethical detachment from life-harming violence. Other critiques rely specifically on the results of their actions—were they effective? Effective at what? I don't think even the Cells of Fire or FAInformal think their actions cause significant economic damage or create enough of a threat to influence politics. They do openly make the argument that their actions are intended to frighten judges, bosses, politicians, and police. The partisan dignity of the armed group does have its allure, but I don't know if its enough, or if the military logic necessarily subjugates the intelligence of other strategies. From our position, an action's effectiveness should be measured in its ability to spread undocile practices. The spreading of different techniques of resisting authority and domination necessarily includes violence, but it also includes techniques of anonymity, fraud, laziness, co-operations and collective strategic thought. And so, if a thousand hands reach out and pick up the gun, and anonymous attacks proliferate and deepen, perhaps the Cells of Fire and FAInformal are correct. However, I'm not sure where these hands will come from when most people are too frightened, alienated, and disconnected to fight for even the most basic social change. I fear the Cells of Fire and the FAInformal more than likely produce themselves as specialists in a war that most people cannot even perceive. However, it must also be said that they are comrades and deserve critical solidarity. The best way for US anarchists to provide this for them will be in sowing the threads that give those isolated individuals who would sacrifice themselves against the terror of everyday life, a different option for how to fight. To make the war more perceptible, and to critically act in solidarity. </span></span> </p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This year will be eventful—we can count on that. US anarchists will not be frightened from their task. However, to you and yours, I think it's important to stress that what you </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>don't</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> see on the news will be more important than what you do see. Many comrades are facing higher charges and more calculated repression. It's important to remember that techniques of repression are not deployed in order to annihilate an enemy, they are deployed in order to attenuate and make us manageable—to discipline and domesticate us. The way we resist this is by finding ways to not be harmed, or destabilized by their threats. In many ways this is why camaraderie and a sense of collective meaning is so important. Because when they begin to perceive us as a conspiracy, we have to know that the worlds we are attached to are caring, powerful, and will keep fighting no matter what happens to us. Through the process of living through this repression, the material solidarities that keep us holding on will be strengthened. We will establish certain bonds of trust and solidarity that come from sharing the intensities of war, from knowing the stakes. The actions that make reference to our comrades who are under attack let us all know we are not alone, and that we won't be neutralized. </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-inline-policy: continuous;">This is good</span></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">, but we need to make sure that when the cases are all over the intensities—of our care and our force—are not subjugated by a desire for our collective rest. We need to take the time and consideration to generate our spaces as fighting-territories that welcome home our released comrades, and remind them that we refused to be terrorized while the state attempted to make an example of them. This is all part of the process of resisting repression. </span></span> </p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="font-style: normal; text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">We are now dealing with an advanced environment of repression—a more intelligent apparatus of “conspiracy” production. In these conditions, what constitutes a conspiracy in the eyes of the Law will be increasingly murky. It will be difficult to count on sympathetic jurors because there will be no social movement of which they share sympathies; the means to struggle have already been cut from the legal sphere and have already been judged as “conspiracy.” It comes as no surprise that in terms of public consciousness “conspiracy” rhymes with “terrorism.” However, this does not mean that we should shy away from such conversations that take our objectives and the stakes of struggle seriously. On the contrary, we must be prepared to elaborate this logic and share it. In many ways, this means those of us who have learned the taste for strategic thought must find new ways to share that practice. </span> </p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="font-style: normal; text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">More than likely, the events that make up the face of US anarchist practice will only be slightly altered. Some wild demonstrations, bookfairs, night-time attacks and gatherings will continue relatively unscathed by the counter-insurgency operations to come. However, there will be new places that take their position in global civil war. There will be disillusioned students from the East and West Coasts who join up and use their practical education from the occupations to begin a new conflict. Anarchists who learned so much about themselves and what they are capable of during the Oscar Grant riots, will share and apply their lessons during other emergency situations. Those who have dug-in may venture elsewhere, and those who have landed may take over uninhabited spaces, and make them livable. Perhaps research and reconnaissance will give rise to new maps and intelligence of different territories of conflict that we have not yet encountered. Twenty Ten, we experienced some growing pains, but I think we are on our way to finding those truths of which we will not let go. And from these, new worlds will be constructed, and populated. We are collectively learning how to speak and how to breathe together. A disintegrated US will take its part in a global cartography of areas in revolt. Ten thousand Spanish Civil Wars.<br /></span></p><p style="font-style: normal;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I should hope to find my body in the care of your loving arms soon enough,</span></p><p style="font-style: normal;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">kisses,</span></p><p style="font-style: normal;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">your devoted comrade,</span></p><span style="font-size:100%;">Liam</span>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-78274060346900973432011-01-27T13:56:00.000-08:002011-01-28T09:08:14.218-08:00Belated Letters to Insurgents and Good Tidings | part 1After Infinite Strike was posted some time ago, I received a letter from a beloved comrade translator. Like everything else, my reply suffered from sloth and soon transformed into a text better meant for others; something of a welcome to 2011, and so on. Our correspondence follows.<br /><br />kisses,<br />Liam<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/TUHzjV-ytVI/AAAAAAAAAFg/cQMut5RST4c/s1600/ebe%2B961.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/TUHzjV-ytVI/AAAAAAAAAFg/cQMut5RST4c/s400/ebe%2B961.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5566998402928129362" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><i></i></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><i></i></span><blockquote style="font-family: georgia;"><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><i>Liam,</i></span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Ô! 'Tis exceedingly well set. Very good, very strong.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />The numerals and the latin redound to your own better instincts,</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />to say nothing of your incorporation of the french in the larger fonts.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Brilliant. Gentle. People will complain & they will be mistaken.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><i><br /><br />Foreign Words</i>. Splendid. Splendid!</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />And now, how not to let up?...</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />The weather in B______ is dead dreary, empty streets, an armistice holiday.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Another fortnight of that, even less as I'm writing, and we'll be rejoined warmly</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />among the cozy little side street of my burg of predilection toward the south,</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />where we'll make winter and springtime and who knows? Lots of new friends,</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />gaming, suppers, heels dug in conspiring. After the final 'strophe in _______ you</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />ought come pay a visit.</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br /><br />We'd be delighted of course,</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />More soon from one who is happy to be,</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Your devoted appendage,</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />And what is more,</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Your admiring well-wisher,</span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />L. Desormais</span></blockquote><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:georgia;"></span></span><blockquote></blockquote><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:georgia;"></span><br /><br /></span> <p style="margin-left: 1.54in; margin-right: 1.54in;"> </p><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ></span><blockquote><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" >"Bless us!—what noble work we should make!—how should I tickle it off!—and what spirits should I find myself in,</span> <span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />to be writing away for such readers!—and you—just heaven!—with what raptures would you sit and read—but oh!</span> <span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />—</span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" >'tis too much—I am sick—I faint away deliciously at the thoughts of it—'tis more than nature can bear!—lay hold</span> <span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />of me—I am giddy—I am stone blind—I'm dying—I am gone.—Help! Help! Help!—But hold—I grow something</span> <span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />better again, for I am beginning to foresee, when this is over, that as we shall all of us continue to be great wits—we</span> <span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />should never agree amongst ourselves, one day to an end:—there would be so much satire and sarcasm—scoffing and</span> <span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />flouting, with raillying and reparteeing of it—thrusting and parrying in one corner or another—there would be nothing</span> <span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />but mischief among us—Chaste stars! what biting and scratching, and what a racket and a clatter we should make,</span> <span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />what with breaking of heads, rapping of knuckles, and hitting of sore places—there would be no such thing as living for us.</span> <span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br /><br />But then again, as we should all of us be men of great judgment, we should make up matters as fast as ever they went wrong;</span> <span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />and though we should abominate each other ten times worse than so many devils or devilesses, we should nevertheless,</span> <span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />my dear creatures, be all courtesy and kindness, milk and honey—'twould be a second land of promise—a paradise upon earth,</span> <span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />if there was such a thing to be had..."</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /></span></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><i>The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman</i>. Book III, ch. XX.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:Times;"><span style="font-size:100%;"></span></span><blockquote><p style="margin-left: 1.54in; margin-right: 1.54in;"> </p><p style="margin-left: 1.54in; margin-right: 1.54in; text-indent: -1.54in;"><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 1.54in; margin-right: 1.54in; text-indent: -1.54in;"><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 1.54in; margin-right: 1.54in; text-indent: -1.54in;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/TUHzuYYYNuI/AAAAAAAAAFo/uFy_KPCZxyQ/s1600/smashedAA.jpg"><br /></a></p><p style="margin-left: 1.54in; margin-right: 1.54in; text-indent: -1.54in;"><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 1.54in; margin-right: 1.54in; text-indent: -1.54in;"><br /></p><br /><p style="font-style: normal;"><br /></p> </blockquote><p style="margin-left: 1.54in; margin-right: 1.54in;"><span style="font-family:Times;"><span style="font-size:100%;"></span></span></p> <p style="margin-left: 1.54in; margin-right: 1.54in;"><br /><br /></p>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-27240086020768750932011-01-19T09:51:00.000-08:002011-01-19T10:07:11.271-08:00Oh yeah, that review of Introduction to Civil War for Theory & Event<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/images/products/books/9781584350866-f30.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 305px; height: 475px;" src="http://mitpress.mit.edu/images/products/books/9781584350866-f30.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">So, we didn't do our research. It turns out Theory & Event is one of those online academic journals that you have to have a password to read, and after some coaxing by our friends, we decided to post this on the blog. Enjoy.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">ps: If you do have a password read T&E issue <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae.13.4.html">here</a>. And if you want to share your password, so we can read other cool articles online, email us.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:130%;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:130%;"><b>Civil War: The Continuation of Communism by Other Means</b></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Introduction to Civil War</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is an alternative origin myth. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Introduction to Civil War</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is the vademecum when you show up to fight club, or any strange twelve-stepesque community of friends. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Introduction to Civil War</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is the book to keep out of the hands of children who are ready to subtract themselves and all of their classmates and teachers from production. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Introduction to Civil War</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is a molecule of a war machine.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">The text</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i> </i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">was originally published in </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Tiqqun 2</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, a short-lived French journal of radical thought. Emerging out of the fervent struggles of the European anti-capitalist movement, Tiqqun located itself within a nexus of radical feminist thought, Foucault's studies on biopolitics, Italian </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Autonomia</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, situationist-inspired theory, and Benjaminian approaches to history. The editors intentionally practiced a desubectivizing operation of anonymity, and the texts themselves, a feminist/Deleuzian operation of multiplicity. Where there are many links between the journal's thought and the editors’ participation in the struggles of the late '90s and early '00s, it would be difficult to claim Tiqqun as specifically “anarcho-autonomous,” “ultra-left,” or whatever else Sarkozy and Glenn Beck claim to be the ideological bogeyman behind the French editors, who are now being accused of this or that terrorist enterprise (see: Nov. 9 ‘09 Tarnac Arrests). Tiqqun was a journal that examined the exceptional situation of everyday concentration camps, and theorized from that point, highly influenced by Giorgio Agamben. Today, Tiqqun's contributions are becoming available to English speaking worlds, and their final concept “civil war” emerges as visible and viable. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">Civil war: the continuation of communism by other means. History will decide whether or not civil war replaces Foucault's concept of contesting the meaning of </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>the social</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (social war), but one thing is clear from Tiqqun’s contributions: if the social has dissolved, and governance is now only techniques of managing its collapse, then civil war becomes the necessary condition of this existence. And if this is the case, then the last bit of poetry found at the end of Introduction to Civil War, “How is it to be Done?,” may be accurate in exclaiming the only way for us, within this condition of global civil war, to touch on our humanity again will be in a collective negation, namely, an unlimited </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>human strike.</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">Civil war presupposes the state. Even by advocates of the state's own admission, the state serves as a preventative measure. Tiqqun locates the elementary human unity not in the body, which quickly becomes subject, but in form-of-life (16). Since all thought is strategic (20) they begin here because the state is the consequence of a certain metaphysics that governs each form-of-life at play in the self—an attenuation of difference through subjectivity. Tiqqun proposes that another metaphysics, a negative one, can be made present, within which forms-of-life might be left to play. This free play of forms-of-life, this “principle of their coexistence” (32), is nothing other than the condition of civil war that the modern state was developed in order to suppress. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">This logic reveals a hidden fact regarding the formation of the modern state. If forms-of-life take place through bodies, animating bodies with taste and inclinations to lose themselves and to pass into another's spheres, then the development of the state, the borders and executions it visited upon worlds, were also visited upon selves. When the state is the suppression of the self, </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>civil war </i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">is not only inevitable but already omnipresent. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">From the absolutist state to the welfare state to the liberal state, the state serves as merely a parenthesis in civil war, first as an attempt to exclude bare life from a territory, then from a population, then from the singular body. From classical politics to biopolitics, the state sets out on a steady course of encountering its own impossibility. This steady course is civil war.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">With and against Marx’s dictum that the history of human societies is a history of </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>class struggle</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">; Tiqqun reads the history of forms-of-life as the history of civil war. The story of the state, namely “status,” is the story of an attempt made to freeze this free play of forms-of-life. Again and again, it fails, and out of each successive failure develops a new form of governance and new techniques to suppress civil war. The present conditions of “Empire” are nothing more than an outgrowth of these failures. The modern state is nothing more than a complex set of governing and neutralizing apparatuses that continue the </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>political </i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">suppression of civil war by other Clausewitzian means. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">But what does sovereign power do that classical politics doesn't? Drawing on Hobbes and Schmitt, Tiqqun argues that the modern state is a theater of operations in which the intensity of ethical difference is neutralized and every </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>image</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of difference is pulled to the center for a endless photo-op. Classical politics, through a holistic and despotic state, arranged an order of moral codes via absolute force in order to come to some higher meaning. Classical politics put religion and the sphere of ethics into the theater of the political by including kings as the living heirs to God and individuals as the loyal disciples of God's moral order. In contrast to the rituals of redemption offered through the bloody play of forces contesting territory under the reign of classical politics, sovereign power can point its population to nothing. The modern state is quite literally the management of life, devoid of transcendental authority. The modern state governs, but learns not to govern too much. Moreover, the modern state applies the classical maxim </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>cuius regio, eius religio,</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and contends and defeats all opposing religions in order to continue as the hand of god on an earth </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>without God.</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">The paradox of law, which is the founding thesis of the norm, is as follows: law is in force only in its imposition; law appears only in the act of law. If law is fungible or malleable, this is because it has no justification other than its logic. “It is my pleasure” says the modern sovereign. The norm develops from this essential lacuna of law, but things are as they are not simply because they are, but because of material practices, because of </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>how</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> they are. Norm as </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>nomos</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> emerges from specific means deployed through apparatuses of control.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">Enter the reign of the economy. There could never be an economic subject without a political subject. Tiqqun reads Foucault's study of biopolitics not as a story of power outmaneuvered by the deployment counter-subjectivities, but instead as processes of subjectivization by a vast number of apparatuses</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>.</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Such massive, overdetermined subjectivization mitigates vital and substantive opposition. Capitalism could not have spread across the globe without first the physical neutralization of hostile populations and practices—which is to say, the condition of war had to be neutralized, in order for “peace” to become the normal condition. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">Through Tiqqun's matrix of civil war, we learn that the development of capitalism, primitive accumulation, and war are not mere periods of tragedy that human society had to endure as the necessary, teleological process of the modern state. Instead, they are the originary operations, the operations that are repeated in order to maintain the </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>status</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of the so-called peace of citizen-subjects. The Hobbesian operation of exclusion/inclusion is looped on an endless repeat. With the advancements of liberal techniques of government, the operations no longer take the form of a visible exposition of disciplinary force aimed at beating a </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>hostis</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> out of a population, (</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>viz</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">., an external military affair). Rather, these neutralizing operations take form in self-managed policing (</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>viz</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">., an internal police). Foucault explains the process of how the “delinquent” was made into an enemy of society; Tiqqun clarifies that the criminal practices had to be excluded and named “anti-social” in order for there to ever be a formal workers’ movement that could be associated with a public social (albeit, illegal) justice. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Introduction to Civil War</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> exposes the modern uneasiness with “violence.” Violence must be excluded not because it threatens to turn the earth into a pit of corpses (capital has no qualms with such a process), but because it threatens to break the imaginary boundaries of subjects, and release forms-of-life to their free play. Hobbes remains the originary political theorist, in that we can already see the beginnings of self-managed subjects through the threat of exclusion. What must be excluded from a living being in order to include it in the caring arms of the state (and thus give it political-subjectivity) is precisely what attaches it to worlds and what gives it the capacity to encounter others. The exclusion of bare life produces docile bodies. The forced retreat into the self typifying the modern subject must be understood not merely as the process which the western individual was founded, but specifically as the process that generated economic “man” whose stupid (literally: stupefied) concept of freedom ends where all else begins. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">Thus, what Tiqqun calls “the black magic of the economy” is deployed at all levels to integrate all human life into “society” first as living beings (</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>zoe</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">) then to continue functioning as legal subjects (</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>bios</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">). But this process can never generate today’s citizen-subject as a perfect artifice of legal behavior. On the contrary, by forcing the political-economy, the process makes society—the massive circulation of legal practices of freedom—indistinguishable from the state. Through the proliferation of the police, the dark memory of the state's violent origin exposes each terrified citizen to the paradox of its existence. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">The liberal state and the welfare state, or liberal democratic and social democratic institutions, are not distinct modes of government but rather two poles of the modern state. Tiqqun argues that the management of a certain social definition of happiness was all it took for the liberal state to control its population (118). With police and with publicity, the liberal state could cynically keep order, but the police and publicity developed in a way that served and exceeded the institution of the nation-state. With the collapse of liberal and social hypothesis, the police and publicity were able to shed their institutional justification and become exposed as mere apparatuses of sovereign power. Through this collapse, this folding up of the liberal state, police and publicity gain a new important role; they are exalted as the super-institutional poles of Empire. Techniques of policing transform into Biopower and techniques of publicity transform into Spectacle. The state itself does not disappear just yet, but it is demoted, and Spectacle and Biopower begin the reign of Empire (118). </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">It is in the planned-environment of Empire that Tiqqun calls on us to take a partisan position: to intensify the play of forms-of-life beyond their attenuation; to loosen the nooses of subjectivity that Empire places around our necks (176). Civil war is where forms-of-life can freely play. An armed joy of bank expropriations, strikes, bombings, occupations, pirate radio stations, riots, and experimental forms-of-life (such as those in 1977 Italy) rises to a new metaphysical plane in the history of the citizen-subject. Civil war can never be routed. Each hyphen between a citizen-subject contains an intense flow of inclinations. What Tiqqun makes abundantly clear is that these intense inclinations are themselves the many protagonists of history. Civil war, not the state; the form-of-life not the subject, takes us, gives us meaning, and exposes us to a new plane of experience. The Imaginary Party—Tiqqun says “we,” (174)—can be understood as the party </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>for</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> civil war. It is a fragmented plane of consistency where each practice that prefers not to conjure away forms-of-life calls home. Unlike other discourses that rely on a single revolutionary-subjectivity, Tiqqun's Imaginary Party is nothing but a multiplicity, but unlike Negriist dreams of global civil society, the Imaginary Party does not shy away from the global civil war. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">Tiqqun's concept of communism by other means performs of a particularly interesting operation from this point. Moving beyond the false consciousness of the Left, Tiqqun concludes “There is no visible outside anymore […] Madness, crime or the hungry proletariat no longer inhabit a defined or recognized space, they no longer form a world unto themselves, their own ghetto with or without walls” (131). If there is no longer any pure outside but rather exteriority present at every inch of the biopolitical tissue, then the Imaginary Party is not a political party that contends for power, nor a class that wishes to overthrow another class, nor a multitude that sees its desire reflected back at it through its representations of power. The Imaginary Party is the party of the political only insofar that through its presence it exposes each citizen-subject to the intensity of what it means to act politically.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">Despite Tiqqun's insistence on the need to reclaim violence (34), we learn this need is not in order to simply pose a greater technology of violence against their state's violence, but rather for each body to become at home with its capacity for force. So-called “terrorism” today exposes citizens of Empire to the conditions they have placed on forms-of-life. What Tiqqun advances in terms of civil war, is in actuality a perverse war-machine. The Imaginary Party is full of precisely the content you might </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>imagine</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. In a queer gesture, Tiqqun explains that “Empire is not the enemy with which we have to contend, and other tendencies within the Imaginary Party are not, for us, so many hostis to be eliminated, the opposite is, in fact, the case” (182). This means that the capacity for force, that inaugurates an element of the Imaginary Party, is specifically a force directed </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>inward.</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Through the release of forms-of-life to their free play, Empire's meaninglessness and its lack of substance are totally revealed. The warlike penchants of forms-of-life form a war-machine only insofar that these penchants conjugate “friends” and “enemies” whose ethical distinctions are far more intense then any banal promise of security that Empire can articulate.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Introduction to Civil War</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> ends exactly where you might expect: at the question of “how?” Like Debord's </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Society of the Spectacle</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Introduction to Civil War,</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is not (despite the Library of Congress) an essay of critical theory, but rather a text at home with Clausewitz and Blanqui. Although their insistence on Heidegger's “the they” and all this Schmittian talk of “friends and enemies” situates Tiqqun in a framework of armed struggle, the anonymous editors break free in their concluding piece. What Tiqqun theorizes and what Tiqqun strategizes operations within are two different disciplines. Perhaps this is one of the most difficult positions for Tiqqun to articulate: What it might mean to live communism, and what it might mean to spread anarchy? History (or perhaps the messiah if we go by Benjamin), will have the final say, but what is irreducible in </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Introduction to Civil War</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is the feeling of meaninglessness that is the alibi of daily reproduction and the fact that whatever new struggles are emerging do not fit into the normative nor formal leftist conception of revolution or revolutionary subjectivity. Perhaps forms-of-life will animate bodies and advance what the religious wars in Europe only dreamed of. Perhaps </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>everything</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> will be in common, especially our fragile bodies. Or perhaps Tiqqun has misread something of our times and the coming community will have no allegiance to flesh and sinew, nor even thought. Either way, whether it is through the phantom of terror itself gaining substance (Baudrillard) or the inauguration and multiplication of collectivities whose ethical tissue is robust and whose thought is strategic, Tiqqun concludes that </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>the time of the now</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is decisive. Empire or civil war? </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Liam Sionnach is a terrible “art” project gone awry. It was based in a misreading of Foucault, Deleuze, and Agamben, and in the miserable conditions of the US Service Industry. It attempted to reveal the vacancy of the author-function, but conceded to feminist critiques of anonymity. Ultimately Liam Sionnach misunderstood the meaning of “what matters who's speaking, someone said.” Although </i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The Institute for Experimental Freedom's</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i> Liam Sionnach project has been around since '05, it has been most successful at interrupting the intellectual development of contemporary US anarchist theory from '07 to the present. Liam Sionnach has written a few pamphlets, lectured at some Universities, and contributed to journals of contemporary radical theory. Currently, Liam is pushing toward the threshold between this form of life and another, and mourning the truancy of communism. </i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: normal;">www.politicsisnotabanana.com</span></span></p>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-84347757873391301442010-11-10T12:05:00.000-08:002010-11-10T15:17:35.901-08:00Infinite Strike | La Grève Infinie<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/TNr8paOycCI/AAAAAAAAAFM/Kz1GBx-cEXs/s1600/greve0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 310px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/TNr8paOycCI/AAAAAAAAAFM/Kz1GBx-cEXs/s400/greve0.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5538016480151629858" border="0" /></a><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The Institute for Experimental Freedom's European appendages and friends are proud to release an English translation of “La Gr<span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;">è</span>ve Infinie” (Infinite Strike). This text was written on Oct 27th 2010 from within the events transpiring throughout the French strikes and blockades. It has appeared throughout France, and is available in at <a href="http://www.nantes.indymedia.org/"><cite>nantes.indymedia.org/article/22087</cite> </a> and <i><a href="http://juralibertaire.over-blog.com/article-la-greve-infinie-59845046.html">http://juralibertaire.over-blog.com/article-la-greve-infinie-59845046.html</a>. </i> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Although the US is not France, we can't help but find a certain resonance with the strike, with the determinacy of struggle. We welcome the return of<i> causseur</i>, of the vandal, of course! We delight in the fine fractures that link our deep sense of despair with the its negation—the secret solidarity between our weakness our others strength. And so, as a means of reverberating the call, the IEF offers this text to those of us who are everywhere homeless, and everywhere foreign. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Within the text—which is just overheard within the event—we see a clear proposition. The elementary strategy of “shutting it all down.” Blockade the oil refineries, extend all self-reductions beyond ourselves, block the ports, defeat the police, shut down the nuclear reactors. Realize all strikes as a position. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;">Practice makes perfect.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/TNr8zECtKFI/AAAAAAAAAFU/jFGzMn79774/s1600/infinite_strike-cover.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 256px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/TNr8zECtKFI/AAAAAAAAAFU/jFGzMn79774/s400/infinite_strike-cover.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5538016645994063954" border="0" /></a></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/infinite_strike_spread.pdf">Infinite Strike | Readable</a></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/infinite_strike_paphlet.pdf">Infinite Strike | Imposed for Print</a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; text-align: right;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; text-align: right;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; text-align: right;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: right;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; text-align: right;">With love and in struggle,</p><div style="text-align: right;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; text-align: right;">The Institute for Experimental Freedom | Nov 2010</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; text-align: right;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:180%;">INFINITE STRIKE</span><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; text-align: right;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in; text-align: left;"> </p><p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;">It's clear. The Party of Order seeks, with all the forces at its disposal, to have us return home. On this point, at least, the unions and the government are of one accord. Doubtlessly banking upon our most miserable inclinations, our insidious predilection for the emptiness and absences in which we have so perfectly forgotten how to live and struggle. Here they are mistaken. We will not go home; we who are everywhere homeless. For if there exists a single place that we might deem inhabitable, it's within this </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>event</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, in the intensities taking shape therein, thanks to which we are living. In accordance, above all, with the means we will be able to provide ourselves.</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">It's clear. An insurrectional process gathers strength to the extent that the givens that make up its particular understanding of reality become, imperceptibly, blaring truisms. Being given that Capitalism is a universal lie, the form of its negation, inversely, will be that of a plurality of worlds combined jointly by the </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>truths</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> that hold them together.</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">The words by which a situation becomes comprehensible to itself directly determine both its forms and its spirit. The forced objectifications will manage, at best, to trace vague contours around a muchness. The diversity of analysis, be they those of the sociologists or those of the radical activist, put about the self-same concert of confusion: broken-winded apology or interested pessimism. In either case one is struck by the want of so much as a glimmer of the </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>tactical sense</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> by which a voice finds its real comprehensibility, a veritable Common which could liberate the possibilities opened-up by the situation, and through which one could rid oneself, like a nightmare upon waking, of our programed despondency. The trenchancy of this voice resides as much in its choice of words as in the positivity of its orientation. </span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">An opening gesture proves necessary to set out the strategic intelligibility of the events in progress. That of situating oneself, of orienting oneself. To speak from somewhere, not simply from behind one or another point of view, but from the position of a </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>party</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">.</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">1</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">This movement, to name but one of its virtues, has, from the very outset, approached matters from the root. Generalized economic blockades, deliberate organization of a total paralysis, refusal to compromise or negotiate. Direct, crude language. From there it has simply given material form to the slogans habitually condemned to languish as expectations or simulacra. The strike has materialized itself in so many bodies, in so many determinations. And it's for this reason that it appears as something truly menacing. So it is, from the perspective of practices set in place, that the movement situates itself beyond a simple social movement, that it participates </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>already</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> along the lines of an insurrectional process. This is our point of departure.</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">2</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">Let us set down a fact: there no longer exists, at the present, anything of the old revolutionary movement. And as those who'd taken over the watch plunge ever deeper into the morass of self-satisfied civicism, we can feel out, from time to time, the sensation of an emptiness. It's precisely this emptiness that we will need to inhabit, to transform into an opportunity.</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">3</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">In France a singular superstition afflicts a great majority of bodies who otherwise pride themselves on being so rigidly </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>secular</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">: the belief, a reedy thing, though apparently unshakable, in the reality of the "social movement". The misfortune of this acceptance resides in the following: it's a belief which no longer credits the least amount of </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>faith</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> among its adherents. From "victories" to "defeats", from sporadic mobilization to conclusive demobilization, it's a belief ever more clapped out and threadbare. Never mind that the object of this belief is itself the heir of a historical catastrophe, that of the classical workers' movement. The latter, as underlined by Mario Tronti, was not defeated by Capital, but rather by Democracy. Not by some external victory on the part of the former, but by as a result of the </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>internalization</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of the latter. To the extent that this pack of illusions goes unrecognized, the burden placed upon those who struggle is that much greater.</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">4</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">A movement defines itself negatively in accordance with its limits. Its field of action is nevertheless circumscribed by that beyond which it dares not venture. This predefined scope assures that the movement remains nothing but the hysterical conjuration of a predictable end. The very life of a movement is directed under the sign of this headlong rushing ahead, this frenzied effort to forestall the end for which it had been set going in the first place. Its end is frightening in that it means nothing less than its death. A temporality separated from the course of History. No enduring project or vocation. The movement is to be forever started over again, laboriously, from the beginning, out of the same nothingness. From such a beginning we can only ever start over, without learning, since there's nothing to learn, ad infinitum. Close the parenthesis. </span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">5</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">But the horizons of true historical action hang not upon this sad canvas, there isn't any "return to normalcy." What there is, on the other hand, is the persistence of a revolutionary project, with its subterranean accelerations and decelerations. With respect to such a process there exists but one time. A time in which nothing left undone is forgotten. What there is are two camps: on one side there are those who seek to carry out a total strike, an irreversible blockade of the circulation of flows, and, on the other side, the scabs and the cops. The entirety of the social landscape is subject to this cruel partition. </span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">6</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">To the extent that a strike recognizes itself as forming part of this process it remains one of the rare sites in which a transmission of experience persists. The strike doesn't set out to commemorate past struggles, but rather to recall them: which is to say, </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>to restore them to memory</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. This is done not only for the sake of the strike itself, but for the carelessness of a world occupied with the organization of forgetting.</span></p> <blockquote style="border: medium none ; margin: 0.06in 0in 0in; padding: 0in; line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></blockquote> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">7</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">One must always take care to see that the terrain upon which a situation is articulated isn't chop full of mines. Such is our case. First step: abandon the neatly demarcated terrain upon which a thing, an event, is understood </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>in the form of a thing</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. A thing never exists for-itself, for nothing exists outside of the intelligence beholding it. It is possible that by dint of usage the term "social movement" no longer serves to designates anything but a particular form of powerlessness, the semantic operation of a certain sociology, which, from the moment it finds acceptance, paralyzes any and all strategic elaboration as much as any form of collective intelligence. This stems from the fact that sociology has itself been completely </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>socialized</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. It invests every discourse with the same obsession for statistical calculation, allowing only for a laborious objectification of reality via a handful of depressing categories. That which shapes and gives form to our worlds remains firmly beyond its grasp. For them, our friendships represent no more than a handful of aberrant variables. The </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>unknown</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of their equations. The infinity of a strike.</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">8</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">Saint-Nazaire. The demonstrations called for by the unions lead systematically to confrontations lasting several hours. Heroic displays of rock-throwing and hastily set-up barricades. "Sarkozy, you're fucked", intoned by the thousand. A courthouse jointly stoned by diverse groups of rioters. A friend said, "how beautiful to see a city rise up against its police."</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;"><i>9</i></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">The true orientation of the struggle is not to be found between opposing classes, Capital versus Labor, but rather a partisan opposition between those who make a pathological cult of work and those for whom it inspires a simple disgust. From here on out there are those who still want to work and those who would prefer not to. </span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">10</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">A disquieting </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>omerta</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> reigns within the interior of the movement. It consists in the denial of what the events themselves ceaselessly demonstrate, namely, a pained rejection of work. Not merely a local protest against a quantitative extension of the latter, but a total indictment of the manner in which work is everywhere experienced. Which is to say, as a disaster. The rejection is unequivocal. Work. The looming shadow of death. The "theft of human energies", mesmerizing its victims. We are witnessing the agony of the classical world of Work, and with it the disappearance of the figure of the Worker. The ruination of the cozy intimacy that the latter had achieved with his hardship. Even though work has always been experienced as a prolonged torture, one still finds "mind over matter" specialists who attempt to determine the threshold beyond which work becomes intolerable.</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">11</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">Traditional politics is founded upon a few axioms, invariably presented as unsurpassable a priori. The principle of "governmentality"; the organization of a social need in virtue of which "things must be governed", failing which they would invariably fall into chaos. "Work" is likewise postulated, like a blackmail, affirming nothing but the obligation to "make a living", under any circumstances and however possible. Thus a narrow solidarity unites the apparent diversity of political conceptions and their attendant neurosis, all deriving, in the final analysis, from the same feeble anthropology. On the one hand, the cybernetic </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>project</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of generalized governance, on the other, the anarchist </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>ideal</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of a heavenly autonomous governance. The </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>myth</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of full-employment directed toward sustainable development and the self-managed </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>fable</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of voluntary work, lotted out along egalitarian lines. In either case we see the same managerial apparatus applied to life and living, the same ferocious will to suppress our better instincts. The same </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>objective</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of desperate regulation. Mobilization and Total Appropriation constitute at once the ethico-practical ideal of the most inveterate activism and the very power which it pretends to combat. </span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">12</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">Return of the paradox: the contestation of a reform remains the prerogative of the most advanced reformists. Calculating the future to the point of abandoning any present, any form of presence. The exemplary schizophrenia of the anarcho-syndicalist, codifying, from the present on, the posterity of the revolution, legislating the "after". But to legislate the </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>after</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> is to have already forgotten the now, to have let slip away the absolute necessity of a present which escapes us and </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>for which</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> we are on strike. The density of a time that couldn't be reduced to the platitude of a bare chronology. A foreseeable future will always be at war with the invisible destination of the present. A programed thereafter will never rhyme with the here and now. Freeing up a bit of "leisure" in the interest of an improved management of labour-time harks back to the most suspect utopias. One cannot qualitatively improve work by a quantitative reduction of its duration. There is no </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>duration</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of labor for the very reason that labor </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>is</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> duration, a time one endures.</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">13</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">The current media discourse contrives to stage the climate of the strike as though it were a question of some recently discovered branch of meteorology. One frets over a fuel shortage as if it were an imminent heat-wave; one casts the riots of the high-schoolers after the fashion of an unexpected snow-fall; one prattles on about the strike just as one might ruminate over a capricious storm front. Thus each in his manner would have it in for the weather, groaning over their provisions. "May the blockers by struck down by the wrath of the people!" But it doesn't hold. Inserted among the endless ream of news updates, the nightly display of so many "malcontents", of "we're-being-held-hostage"s and "frustrated-at-the-pumps", presented in the manner of tourists stranded by a flood in India or Chilean miners trapped in the bottom of a hole, shows itself to be a decidedly precarious strategy on the part of those in power. </span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">14</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">In a world where the circulation of flows extends upon a global scale, the party of the blockade, of the insurrection, cannot logically prevail without having forged, globally in its turn, the solidarities necessary to endure. The field of action proper to the latter, like the breadth and reach of its ambitions, knows no limit. </span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">15</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">Barcelona, September 29, 2010. Day of the general strike. One day against ten years of murmuring silence. What had seemed so securely locked-up in the ghetto of the "anti-system" milieu sparks up, catches fire again, and catches fire at last. Ten years of socialist democracy will not have been equal to forty years of fascism. The order put to heel that day looked every bit the frightened Falangist. Everyone was back on the street, across loose stones and broken glass, the laughter and the cheers going up, as if to give chase to the hasty exit of the police. </span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">16</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">Once again, the appearance of the "</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>vandal</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">". Nevertheless, no one is really taken-in any longer by this </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>stylistic</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>figure</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. The dramatic </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>mise en scene</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> of the latter is played to little effect. Perhaps only the innocents at the student union, or the members of the veterans' society remain capable of being thus stirred. But what's going on today? One could speak of a certain return, our return: a return to working-class violence, a return to youth violence in the streets, a return to the violence of the "old" who pass stones to the "young" in homage to that which they'd never ceased wanting. The words of an old man in Lyon to a young rioter, "we give you the stones we can no longer throw." What had been so perfectly unlearned and forgotten reappears today with all the violence of a thing repressed. The </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>magic</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> linked to the figure of the "</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>vandal</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">" seems to have lost its efficacy to the precise extent that the suburban delinquent, the foreigner, the anarchist, in sum </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>the outsider</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, no longer serve to delimit anything. How can one seriously speak about exteriority, about marginality, in a world bereft of any outside? The question of violence is no longer posed, but everywhere imposed.</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <blockquote style="border: medium none ; margin: 0.06in 0in 0in; padding: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></blockquote> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">17</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">By the same token, the practices of rioting that so regularly punctuate the movement deserve to be recognized as another, mores specific, more surprising form of the blockade. The uncontrollable recurrence of looting and confrontations spanning several days that leave the city centers in total paralysis. The GIPN (the french domestic counter-terrorism unit) in arms, facing down the unarmed crowds. A lesson is to be drawn: the strategy of an economic blockade can never be disassociated from the imperious necessity of annihilating and/or routing the totality of police forces. </span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p face="times new roman" style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">18</span></p> <p face="times new roman" style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">One never locates oneself simply within a movement, but always in relation to it, facing it, perhaps even in opposition to it. Opposing all of that which is incoherent or flimsy, the reflux of despair, where it flows back into emptiness. It's a question of attacking the material and affective conditions that bind us to this world. The return to normality must be rendered not only impossible, but undesirable. To establish a cartography of everything which holds us: flows, forces, affective states, logistics, and supplies. To acquire, across the conspiring weave of our friendships, the insurrectional know-how to rout this world. We've learned the opening letters of the alphabet of sedition: blockading the refineries, the oil depots, the ports. Allowing the streets to fill with garbage and transforming the latter into barricades. Smashing the shop-windows that reflect our absence. The question put to us might just as easily be: how to shut off, definitively, the nuclear reactors? How to turn the strike into desertion? How to care for, nourish, and love one another without leaving this world in peace?</span></p> <p face="times new roman" style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p face="times new roman" style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%; font-family: times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="RIGHT"> <span style="font-size:100%;">"</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Una salus victis nullam separe salutem</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">."</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="RIGHT"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;" align="RIGHT"> <span style="font-size:100%;">"</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>The sole salvation of the vanquished</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Is to await no salvation</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">."</span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%; font-family: times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%; font-family: times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p> <p style="border: medium none ; padding: 0in; margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%; font-family: times new roman;" align="JUSTIFY"> <span style="font-size:100%;">France, October 27th, 2010.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-81663421306377282092010-10-26T13:14:00.000-07:002010-10-26T16:05:17.557-07:00Enemies We Know<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/TMc4e9j778I/AAAAAAAAAFE/kmdkCHjJtps/s1600/enemies-cover.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 258px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/TMc4e9j778I/AAAAAAAAAFE/kmdkCHjJtps/s400/enemies-cover.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532452771820466114" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The Institute for Experimental Freedom is proud to announce the release of “Enemies We Know.” This project was originally intended to be a 4-part poster series, and will be released in this medium as well. However, after careful consideration and reflection, these short texts are currently being released as an easily reproducible pamphlet—designed with high contrast black and whites, easy readability, and succinct critical messaging. This pamphlet serves the purpose of an “instead of an introduction,” and because it is not designed to spread ideology, it focuses on clarifying who and what are our enemies, rather than what is our program. The three known enemies that are the subjects of this pamphlet are “Police,” “Bosses,” and “Rapists.” Each is examined from their functional role within the environment they serve and exposed as an amorphous set of practices rather than a substance. Our intention is not to merely name the enemy—who doesn't know know the name of that occupying force in blue? Rather, our intention is to elaborate an analysis of what function each realizes, and how they can be disarmed, undermined and neutralized. In a world of such confusion, it's nice to know certain truths.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Identity:</span><br />If you don't like the “IEF” brand and contact on the back or you wish to add your own, use Adobe Acrobat or another PDF editing program to digitally edit it (for Acrobat: tools, advanced editing, touch up object tool), or simply white it out during production. Even though, it would be more satisfying to leave anonymous letters to potential comrades, we concluded its more beneficial at this time—a time without clear escape routes—to direct a reader toward some signal that they are not alone.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Use:</span><br />After considering the social and political environment you occupy, leave this pamphlet anonymously at potential points of encounter (the cliché and historical points: cafés, bookshops, colleges, record stores, and bars).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Enemies We Know<br /><br /></span><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/enemies.pdf">Read</a><br /><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/enemies-print.pdf">Print</a><br /><br /><div style="text-align: right; font-style: italic;">With love; in struggle,<br />The Institute for Experimental Freedom<br /></div>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-77015579906292762082010-06-04T01:38:00.000-07:002010-06-04T02:15:08.104-07:00Got 55,000 Problems but a "Local Project" ain't OneTo whom it may concern,<br /><br />Revolution is not a risk management endeavor. It is, in many ways, a slight alteration of everything that gives life meaning, the fear of the fragility of our bodies included. Insurrection is not a game—even if it uses game-theory. Insurrection—not a military campaign, not a movement for democracy—is the contemporary method for revolution because it combats the productive process of the pacified citizen-subject. It makes everyone and everything into a device of revolt. Insurrection returns risk to eros, and meaning to love.<br /><br />Whereas its good to learn from experience, we learn nothing when fear of experience is paralyzing. Now is not the time to lose courage, nor is it the time to grind our teeth against walls. It's been said by <span style="font-style: italic;">one </span>that we ought think of revolution as the development of small businesses. You invest this here, you get this benefit there. If the<span style="font-style: italic;"> I</span> had $55,000, the<span style="font-style: italic;"> I</span> would invest it in more security and comfort for its existing franchises and political allies. Don't be fooled by the investment-anarchists, there is no project or other group that should be prioritized that requires our hasty deployment of resources. We do not have a collective pool of money that can be deployed at any time; only at the right time. On the other hand, wouldn't it be cool if we did? The only project that should be prioritized is the refinement of the practices and material solidarities that constitute a partisan warmachine of insurrection. Without access to the networks of legal aid and deception that are abundant within the false mobilization of activism, a partisan warmachine can quickly expend its resources.<br /><br />Money is not a substitute for emotional support, but paying the rent of your comrade who has been traumatized by the police, in order to have more time to collectively strategize reveals a material solidarity that links friends and comrades into a singular event. It has been said that insurrection requires that its proponents accept a criminal nature of their existence. To really become present to this existence, we will need far more than the Four Star Anarchist Organization's imaginary $55,000, and as has been proven, sometimes in the art of war having a few good contacts is better than having many bad <span style="font-style: italic;">ones.</span><br /><br />We mean it: Now is not the time to lose courage. Now is not the time to fear experimentation. Solidarity means—does anything not mean attack?<br /><br />With insurrectionary love,<br />Liam Sionnach<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-size:130%;">For our beloved friends</span><br /><br />War<br />as a form of life<br />is messy.<br />Count up<br />the <span style="font-style: italic;">habeas corpus,</span><br />walk softly<br />on shards of glass.<br /><br />Honest, fearless,<br />communication<br />an assault on meaning<br />in the utopia of meaninglessness—<br />is punishable by<br />a different frequency of<br />social death.<br /><br />The polite police officer says<br />“I understand your frustrations<br />and we can talk about it now if you'd like to,<br />but your father...<br />when we gets home...<br />I just don't know.”<br /><br />We're sitting<br />legs crossed<br />clutching cigarettes<br />holding back tears—holding it together<br />sipping thick black coffee<br />hoping to traumatize<br />our strange fragile bodies—<br />to override their emotive functions.<br /><br />Soft rain, sharp plateaus of wind<br />enter through the little holes<br />in our ears<br />interrupting the lack of speech.<br />Words drop from our lips,<br />nothing is conveyed.<br /><br />If the phone rings<br />we won't be any safer<br />but if the phone rings<br />we'll be able to<br />not-sleep calmly.<br /><br />We know the script<br />the most savory excess is revealed.<br />The violence of the process<br />through which subjects are made<br />is exposed.<br />Through the deployment<br />of authoritative voices,<br />the rhythm of this violence<br />extracts this or that practice,<br />excluding <span style="font-style: italic;">history</span> from<br />the workday, leisure, holiday<br />and restores a false unity<br />of vacant time<br />with infinite little atoms bouncing<br />off police batons. <br /><br />If the phone rings<br />the script is confirmed<br />but we'll be able to<br />not-sleep more calmly.<br />An annotation<br />a note<br />in the negative space<br />oscillates the thought<br />that takes us<br />from the script<br />to a new meaning.<br /><br />Take a perverse pleasure<br />in the torment<br />let tears harden<br />into diamonds<br />and coal<br /><br />The violence of<br />discipline<br />marks our fungible<br />tissue<br />traces new scars.<br />Without innocence,<br />sensuous debt,<br />history.<br /><br />Let the blood<br />roll down<br />into the crevices<br />at our hips and<br />in between our fingers,<br />feel it dry<br />and crack<br />dark red.<br /><br />Share its accursed<br />taste<br />with those we<br />keep loving.<br /><br />Touch the crevices<br />and veins<br />and take pleasure,<br />take time<br />to let those we<br />keep loving<br />spit<br />dark red<br />tar<br />against the open lips<br />of Grampa<br />on life support.</blockquote>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-1020782171294655282010-03-30T14:12:00.000-07:002010-03-30T15:14:40.853-07:00The Dictatorship of Postfeminist Imagination<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/S7JrhfVC8NI/AAAAAAAAAE0/-O9jwiPbDok/s1600/dpi-cover_Page_01.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/S7JrhfVC8NI/AAAAAAAAAE0/-O9jwiPbDok/s400/dpi-cover_Page_01.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5454540321788719314" border="0" /></a>After a few dozen email conversations, grammatical and content edits by our beloved friends, and the addition of critical annotations, the IEF is proud to announce the release of The Dictatorship of Postfeminist Imagination.<br /><style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> </style> <p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia;">from the preface:<br /></p><p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia;"></p><blockquote><p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia; text-align: left;">This text is a sort of meta-critique of anarchist practices of feminism. It was provoked from this editor, generally, because of a certain absence of critical feminist theory within a milieu which adopts the assumptions and imperatives of identity politics. It was provoked specifically, because of the intelligence which the text <a href="http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/10569">“Is the Anarchist Man our Comrade?”</a> and <a href="http://zinelibrary.info/why-she-doesnt-give-fuck-about-your-insurrection">“Why She Doesn't Give a Fuck About Your Insurrection?”</a> honed in on—of which many of us already know: the affects produced by our practices of consent, accountability, community and identity are weak. Moreover, because the forms, which mimic legal practices, that are taken up to combat internal gendered and sexualized oppression are empty of a consciousness of their historical development. Although this text is responding to particular texts and particular utterances which followed, as a sort of ethical practice, this text refuses the limitation of the milieu that speaks to itself in a particular jargon. By revealing the discourse that is taking place and staking a claim in it, this text intends to overflow its sad boundaries. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia; text-align: left;">The text has multiple voices, contradictions; seams which exist as a threshold between this idea and the next. It always does. It is assembled merely as a temporary space which these bodies who are attached to worlds and their meanings communicate. Although it comes from an editing process which seeks to weave an amalgamation of intelligences and sensibilities into—at the very least—the raw intellectual materials to reveal a political position, this text is also only one such rudimentary position in a long history of <a href="http://petroleusepress.tumblr.com">feminist theoretical development.</a> And although the voices which are put to use by this assemblage may very well scoff at certain feminist writers, it would be foolish not to examine this history. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia; text-align: left;">The writers, or worlds, which inhabit this text are both infantile and full of a decade of scars. We've been experimenting with our lives, our bodes, spaces, and temporalities, and we've met similar and unique pitfalls. The theory we write is an extension of the theory we inhabit. We start from the horror that we are all potential perpetrators, because we are not sure we have developed the spoken language, or gestural vocabulary to articulate our experiences, and because we can't count past one in four—or was it one in ten? We love power, we even sometimes love to authorize, but we're terrified by the means which we must encounter our power. Because we know it's often at the expense of others.</p> <p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia; text-align: right;">Hating the irreversible time of daily miseries<br />and their repetition,</p><div style="text-align: right;"> </div><p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia; text-align: right;">-Liam Sionnach | IEF | 2010</p><p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia; text-align: right;"><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/dpi-read.pdf"><br /></a></p><p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia; text-align: left;"><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/dpi-read.pdf">online reading</a><br /><a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/dpi-print.pdf">8.5x11 imposed for print PDF</a><br /></p></blockquote><p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in; font-family: georgia;"></p>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-41320493443067214452010-01-29T01:43:00.000-08:002010-01-29T09:57:16.871-08:00Even Feminism Desires the Text of Power & A Few Clarifications on Key Concepts<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/S2KypvhsEWI/AAAAAAAAAEk/DXpxEvfhl4o/s1600-h/woundman_johannes_wechtlin_fieldbook_of_wound_surgery_1517.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 260px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/S2KypvhsEWI/AAAAAAAAAEk/DXpxEvfhl4o/s400/woundman_johannes_wechtlin_fieldbook_of_wound_surgery_1517.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432100530764386658" border="0" /></a><br /><style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> </style> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:180%;">Even feminism? Yes even feminism desires the text of power</span> </span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">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 <i>value</i> 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 <i>know</i> 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. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">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. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">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.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">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. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">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.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">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. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Still very much wanting the text inscribed against our unsurprisingly thick skin,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">-Liam Sionnach | IEF | '10<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Without further adieu:</p><br /><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></p><blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/S2K2IxdJlNI/AAAAAAAAAEs/6Y_8DKtSHrM/s1600-h/legs_bright.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 279px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/S2K2IxdJlNI/AAAAAAAAAEs/6Y_8DKtSHrM/s400/legs_bright.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432104362393048274" border="0" /></a></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:130%;">World Civil War | Gloss 1.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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 <i>all against all.</i> 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. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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.”(<i>Ok, War it is</i> 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 <i>bios</i>, 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. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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). </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">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 <i>hostis humani generis</i>. 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.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/S2K2IxdJlNI/AAAAAAAAAEs/6Y_8DKtSHrM/s1600-h/legs_bright.jpg"><br /></a></p></blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-50150374990133798932010-01-21T23:32:00.000-08:002010-01-22T11:07:25.452-08:00Family and Historical Materialism 2010 has this way of making me oh-so proletarian<span style="font-size:180%;"><br />Another Cold Year for the <i>War</i>mth</span><style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --</style><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman,serif;font-size:180%;" ><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Death and Redemption<br /></span></span><p style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/S1lZ2aU5yaI/AAAAAAAAAEU/CtLDuts2xzs/s1600-h/ages-woman-death.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 266px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/S1lZ2aU5yaI/AAAAAAAAAEU/CtLDuts2xzs/s400/ages-woman-death.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5429469617086646690" border="0" /></a> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.04in; text-align: right; font-family: georgia;">“<i>Theres a man goin' round taking names and he decides who to free and who to blame. Everybody won't be treated all the same.”</i></p> <p face="georgia" style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in; text-align: justify;">The fold of our history is either death or redemption. The history of the vanquished and the history of preemptive alienating and policing apparatuses yearn to conclude. We all have a door and a rotting carpet; a family and a dynasty of fuck ups; advanced social dissolution from worlds and senses to answer for. They say <i>men make history, but not in conditions of their choosing.</i> If it is our sensuous activity within a world, a praxis, which generates a world, then by what means do we confront the millions of potentialities which are taken from history? Those souls who are irrevocably lost, or worse yet, rendered bare life through processes of subjectivation, are prepared to be judged, not by history, but by the police. Each death is a tragedy because in “each” there is a shame of separation. The private life only becomes public in death. But this public death is itself a technique of exposure, which links the family and society to the church, to the school, to the prison. The tragedy which the living are constantly exposed to is not merely their own telos but capitalism's continuous merciless holiday. In this society, no one dies. Everyone is murdered. </p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p face="georgia" style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in; text-align: justify;">What is pathetic in death is not the loss of a container of memories and affects or the fleeting away of another productive member of the family, of society, but the loss of the capacity to speak. Death acts like a nightmare on the living. Conjuring images of “once upon a time,” the living attempt to answer for the horror of a brisk wind which extinguishes light in one subtle swoop. But the sad conclusive cough of a body judged guilty of living in capitalism is repeated and shared. Each voice is rendered mute. Each potentiality perfectly aware of what strangles it daily. The tears of the living for the dead, while representing a real sadness, never conjoin to form the flood which will redeem the past. Instead, the mouth opens, limbs shake with anxiety; our small, light-colored hairs stand up searching for a warmth which is not in this world. And in the end, what could be communicated—the single gesture of communicability itself—is once again lost, irretrievable, amidst blinking lights and the flow of commodities which live so much longer than any of us.</p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p face="georgia" style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in; text-align: justify;">What is redemption in such circumstances? Is it <i>forgiving our trespasses, and forgiving those who trespass against us?</i> By what means do we admit a presence which annuls memories, scars, blood?</p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in; text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;">My family is connected through Facebook. The eulogy for my grandmother stumbled on her truth. She took on a predictable position of women married to husbands in the twentieth century. She mothered many children and formed the foundation to a family whose care was held by a second-generation Italian <i>pater.</i> She, and all the other shes of the family, suffered only the absence of en-courage-ment. It is not surprising: they all left. My grandmother quietly lived <i>as if</i> she had been redeemed, doing the books to my grandfathers photography business, never once elaborating her own passions for paint on canvas. The eulogy concluded, as my grandmother often would, that if anyone felt despondent, the eulogist would happily go shopping with them. The analogy to government orders following the events of September eleventh to go shopping is not lost on me. There were some really good sales at Macy's</p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in; text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;">On the other side of the family, between drinks, and with far too many teenage mothers, I learned cousin Ian had been sentenced in 'Oh-four. My absence from Facebook excluded me from hearing this bullshit earlier. <i>Was it three-strikes you're out? Did he have guns too? How long is a life-sentence? </i>The silence of social death touches even the Midwestern Irish working class. My other cousin, who used hockey like how the black body uses football or basketball, or how southern whites use the military, received a terrible back injury and was sentenced to a fancy new oxycodone addiction. Again, if only I had Facebook... One of my sisters still clings to the myth that we're different because we didn't grow up in these fucked up conditions, but she conveniently forgot about all the suicides and boredom; the drive-by's and the addictions, even the empty refrigerators, which painfully illustrate our miserable upbringing. We all ran too, and we ran for a reason.</p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in; text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> The fold of this history is uncertain. On the one hand, everything about today, and even yesterday, just points toward the production of death. Enduring high school, when anarchy was merely a secret which Propagandhi attempted to whisper to me through power chords; or when <i>struggle</i> was just some band that that dude from the Locust was in, Columbine seemed perfectly reasonable. We sketched pictures of it all the time. We searched our history books, attempting to discover any time when the underdog wreaked its vengeance. We had no voice then, no words to call our own, and no world which affected us. We had only the conditions of all of that dissolving. In that time, many of us were quite literally unwanted children; and judging by the fields we set on fire, the plots to blow up schools, the churches we vandalized, and unfortunately, the animals which we tortured, we were capable of some fucked up shit. The youth of today are even worse.</p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in; text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;">On the other hand, maybe we can once more be affected by “Death to death!” Which is not to say, “peace.” But more specifically, our time, capitalist time, is a time of living-dead. Techniques of government expose life's limits to itself and generate bare life. No one knows sovereignty better than the life which is judged not worth living by the police or the life which is let to live by its manager. And because of Biopower and the Spectacle, it's increasingly difficult to separate any of these figures. Redemption in this world is not repaying a debt, atoning for guilt which we owe society. Capitalism is guilt. We owe them nothing. Redemption is giving them just that.</p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in; text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;">Walter Benjamin writes: “For we have been expected upon this earth. For it has been given us to know, just like every generation before us, a <em>weak </em>messianic power, on which the past has a claim. This claim is not to be settled lightly.” The day after my grandmother died, I set off for New York to do a panel about the messianic analogy within the proletariat. The day before my grandmother's funeral, I spoke of becoming sensitive to the imperceptible civil war which has taken place as class struggle and now takes place as social war. In the conditions of social war, this civil war can be felt as a war between normality and its cracks. The proletariat within this civil war is a force who is contingent on history but whose possibility lies outside of it. The proletariat cancels and fulfills history through its own self-negation. At one time, in the conditions of industrialization, classical politics, and a strategically positioned portion of the oppressed, the proletariat took form in the messianic-gesture, what Benjamin called the “divine violence” of the general strike. The proletariat, who was contingent on “a class of civil society but not of civil society,” was expressed as the industrial working class using their own labor-power—what produced value—to negate value and class society itself: redemption.</p><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in; text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;">Benjamin continues, “<span style="font-size:100%;">nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. Only a redeemed humankind receives the fullness of its past. Which is to say, only for a redeemed humankind has its past become citable in all moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>a l’ordre du jour </i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">[order of the day]—and that day is Judgement Day.”</span></p> <p style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in; text-align: right;font-family:georgia;">“<span style="font-size:100%;"><i>The hairs on your arm will stand up. At the terror in each sip and in each sup. For you partake of that last offered cup, Or disappear into the potter's ground. When the man comes around.</i></span></p><div style="text-align: right; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in; text-align: right;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers. One hundred million angels singin'. Multitudes are marching to the big kettle drum. Voices callin', voices cryin'. Some are born an' some are dyin'. It's Alpha's and Omega's Kingdom come...</i></span></p><div style="text-align: right; font-family: georgia;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in; text-align: right;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still. Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still. Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still.”</i></span></p> <p face="georgia" style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/S1lZ_kH_36I/AAAAAAAAAEc/pMYr-HkWw_8/s1600-h/brueghel_triumph-of-death2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 287px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/S1lZ_kH_36I/AAAAAAAAAEc/pMYr-HkWw_8/s400/brueghel_triumph-of-death2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5429469774335696802" border="0" /></a></p><div style="text-align: justify; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br />The horror of death in capitalism must be met with a greater horror. Hollywood produced this a representation of this horror some forty-two years ago. How appropriate that in a world, where all death is murder and all life is bare life, the dead would come to life to feed on the living. The death which the proletariat brings with it is the reversal of the operation which lets bare life live or die. The violence of redemption fulfills all past antagonisms. Its operation returns everything to use, especially our fragile bodes, especially the rot of the world. The proletariat—who perhaps takes us, affects bare life—strikes against being human when human progress is analogous to capitalist development. It turns all things which have been given value above life to toys to be ruined. It makes common everything, and like the Spanish militias who danced with the corpses of nuns, it brings our dead grandmothers to share in the collective arson of beauty salons.<br /><br />The insurrection which comes is not generated from the desire for a better world: there is none. It is not even the accomplishment of democracy. It is the nightmare of the past holding the future hostage, and publicly killing and feasting on it on youtube, over and over again. In our conditions, that of an absolute social war, insurrection and its total extension is the rhythm we must collectively write and impose on capitalist society. Through these experiments and repeated gestures we develop a new sentimental intelligence and different sensuous praxis which no longer accepts our shameful conditions. We impose different collectivities beyond family, nation, and society exactly at the point of their negation. We find we are not alone, exactly at the point we lose our selves. We share exactly at the point when we begin to seize. When each funeral loses what was attempting to kept it a private affair—when newspapers are terrified to write a single obituary because the will of the dead keeps leaving ruin in its wake—then we will begin to know what redemption entails. </span></div><p face="georgia" style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in;"> </p> <p face="georgia" style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in;"> </p> <p style="text-indent: 0.1in; margin-bottom: 0.04in; font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">-Liam Sionnach | IEF | Jan '10</span></p> <style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --></style>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-49870373930917220892009-12-08T10:50:00.000-08:002009-12-13T19:43:46.847-08:00Oh yeah, We made a book<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/Sx6vKKu0FkI/AAAAAAAAADg/3tPRipdUlIE/s1600-h/IMG_9983.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/Sx6vKKu0FkI/AAAAAAAAADg/3tPRipdUlIE/s400/IMG_9983.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5412956391360173634" border="0" /></a><br /><style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --></style>The Institute for Experimental Freedom (IEF) is proud to release the little book: Politics is not a Banana: The Journal of Vulgar Discourse, What are you Doing After the Orgy or Insurrection or Whatever?<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">From the introduction:</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-size:130%;">The insurrection has not transformed our rotting teeth into pure indestructible diamond grills. The orgy only spreads our combined STDs, unless we cover our filthy used bodies in saran wrap—which is pretty cool. Whatever; we made more than $6.50 plus tips but then blew it all on wine, cigarettes, rope, and ceiling hooks. The insurrection gives us this opportunity though, to forget, to practice, and even to run up on some doctor and force his medicalizing ass to nurse our irrevocable rot; to re-imagine our relationships with our stupid dying bodies. It makes us become attentive to the force of our little deaths and the inexhaustible desire we can embody.</span></blockquote><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/Sx6v57KUv7I/AAAAAAAAADo/CIPA_9TgZsM/s1600-h/IMG_9988.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/Sx6v57KUv7I/AAAAAAAAADo/CIPA_9TgZsM/s320/IMG_9988.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5412957211814313906" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/Sx6wInBfDWI/AAAAAAAAADw/7UDyA6j3OZ0/s1600-h/IMG_9989.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/Sx6wInBfDWI/AAAAAAAAADw/7UDyA6j3OZ0/s320/IMG_9989.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5412957464106569058" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/Sx6wfw2GubI/AAAAAAAAAD4/1SIwHMveU7k/s1600-h/IMG_9991.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/Sx6wfw2GubI/AAAAAAAAAD4/1SIwHMveU7k/s320/IMG_9991.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5412957861880183218" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><p></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">The book is a collection of texts, images, and design sensibilities which combine insurrectional theory, critical theory, and post-structuralist inquiries about power and subjectivization with experimental fiction, flarf poetry, Brechtian pornography, and Swiss-influenced post-ironic typographic design.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Following a strange popularity of the <a href="http://issuu.com/the.institute/docs/banana_pages?mode=embed&documentId=080628041740-f1a6cee693e14b15aa6cc3f4b28c92cc&layout=grey">'07 printing of Politics is Not a Banana 7x7 journal,</a> the IEF put out a call for submissions for another issue. Contributions were overwhelming, and resulted in our decision to print this beautiful magenta 4.25x6 book/textual war-machine.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Contributions range from the IEF's own Liam Sionnach and Maxamillion Stihl, to new English translations from the collectively written French journal Tiqqun, to a lesser known French group “The Enlightened Avant-Garde” (aka The Movement for the Apocalypse of Montpelier) to Parser's Magazine's Robert Farr flarf poetry to Wax Poetic's own Idris Intifada. </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Distributors and Bookstores <a href="mailto:ief-southeast@riseup.net">Get in touch</a> for wholesale prices or use the order form at the bottom of the post.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/Sx6w6poJlxI/AAAAAAAAAEA/hCcwiOi8ftQ/s1600-h/IMG_9977.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/Sx6w6poJlxI/AAAAAAAAAEA/hCcwiOi8ftQ/s400/IMG_9977.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5412958323799070482" border="0" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Politics is Not a Banana is currently available in the US at:</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.firestormcafe.com/">Firestorm cafe and books in Asheville, NC</a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://internationalistbooks.org/">Internationalist Books in Chapel Hill, NC</a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://bluestockings.com/">Blue Stockings in NYC</a></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://bookthugnation.com/">Book Thug Nation in Brooklyn, NY</a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.spoonbillbooks.com/">Spoonbill and Sugartown in Brooklyn, NY </a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://creamcitycollectives.wordpress.com/">The Cream City Collective</a> via <a href="http://www.blogger.com/burntbookmobile.wordpress.com/">Burntbookmobile,</a> in Milwaukee, WI</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/www.sporeprint.info/">Sporeprint Infoshop in Columbus, OH</a><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.citylights.com/">City Light Books in San Francisco, CA</a></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.mtbs.com/">Modern Times Books in San Francisco, CA </a><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.needles-pens.com/">Needles and Pens in San Francisco, CA</a></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.boundtogetherbooks.com/">Bound Together Books in San Francisco, CA</a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Online Distributors:</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.littleblackcart.com/">Little Black Cart </a> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.lastearthdistro.net/">Last Earth Distro </a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:78%;">(this post will be kept up, and updated as new locations come in)</span></p><br /><form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post"><br /><input name="hosted_button_id" value="10403001" type="hidden">Order the damn book!!!!!1!<br /><table><br /><tbody><tr><td><input name="on0" value="Politics is Not a Banana | What are you doing?..." type="hidden">Politics is Not a Banana | What are you doing?...</td></tr><tr><td><select name="os0"> <option value="1 x book at $7 retail + priority mail">1 x book at $7 retail + priority mail $10.95</option> <option value="10 x books at $5 wholesale + priority mail">10 x books at $5 wholesale + priority mail $53.95</option> <option value="25 x books at $5 wholesale + priority mail">25 x books at $5 wholesale + priority mail $138.95</option> <option value="50 x books at $5 wholesale + priority mail">50 x books at $5 wholesale + priority mail $276.95</option></select> </td></tr><br /><tr><td><input name="on1" value="Email for media mail options" type="hidden">Email for media mail options</td></tr><tr><td><input name="os1" maxlength="60" type="text"></td></tr><br /></tbody></table><br /><input name="currency_code" value="USD" type="hidden"><br /><input src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_buynowCC_LG.gif" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!" border="0" type="image"><br /><img alt="" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" border="0" height="1" /><br /></form><br /><a href="http://issuu.com/the.institute/docs/politics_is_not_a_banana_what/1?viewMode=magazine">Also, who likes reading books online and printing terrible bootlegs?<br />[aka: readable Politics is Not a Banana | What are you doing...? PDF on issuu]</a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:78%;">Oh and by the way, in part because our absurd negligence, and in part because of riseup.net's low file space, some contributors may not have received a copy of PNB in mail, please <a href="mailto:%20ief-southeast@riseup.net">email us</a> if you contributed and have not received a book. We'll totally make it up to you, <span style="font-style: italic;">if you know what I mean.</span></span>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-29352450257225910142009-12-06T10:10:00.000-08:002009-12-09T10:16:58.493-08:00Get Paid | Wil' Out | Push the University to Crisis<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/Sxv45kQqDPI/AAAAAAAAADQ/GCZ_pUszw3Q/s1600-h/IMG_9995.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/Sxv45kQqDPI/AAAAAAAAADQ/GCZ_pUszw3Q/s320/IMG_9995.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5412193045085555954" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />Here's a recent post on infoshop which touched us in the most charming lumpen-bourgeoisie ways. Although ruining the University financially through a sort of self-abolition of the student is quite a good start, we'd like to point out there are other <a href="http://www.osa.nyu.edu/starting_new_club.html">means</a> with which to elaborate this practice, and other ways which a university is occupied.<br /><br /><a href="http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20091206003234202">From infoshop news</a><br /><blockquote><span style="font-weight: bold;">Bankrupt the System, Exploit The University</span><br /><br />The recent student struggles in California to transform their universities have been inspiring examples of what people can do when they come together, and begin to collectively believe in the future rather than fearing the threats issued in the present. Social wars need money, as Alfredo Bonanno (a 74-year old anarchist recently arrested in Greece for bank robbery) can attest to, and the university has put the gun in your hands. All you need to do is pull the trigger. Max out your credit cards, max out your student loans. Bankrupt the system that is bankrupting us!<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />All my life, I've been washing dishes, delivering pizza, bagging groceries, and hustling to make enough to pay rent. I've always been a working class, Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher kinda guy. You betcha!<br /><br />In the past, I've dumpster dived, telling myself it was because I wanted to. But really, I would've preferred to eat the fresh food in the store. I did it because I didn't want to waste away my entire life in that hot, wet, greasy dishwashing room. I did it to be able to save up money so I could quit my job and travel before I became a shriveled up old prune with arthritis, whose only way to see the world was using an RV, something that I would probably never be able to afford.<br /><br />Anyway, I got into some shit with the law, you know the deal. The cops love to make their quotas. It was military, prison, or college and some time on probation for me. I applied to college solely to save my own ass, not for some stupid degree that I can present to a potential boss for the "opportunity" to spend the next decade kissing his ass.<br /><br />College is a social structure full of the privileges the state gives to the middle class. No one ever explained this dope ass scam to me before! My parents didn't go to college, they didn't know what the deal was. No wonder you middle class students are so content, I'd think to myself. No wonder you didn't want a revolution.<br /><br />Well, now that some of you do, or at least you know there needs to be some serious changes because the system is breaking down, it's up to you to pull those triggers.<br /><br />This is a call for all students to take full advantage of the benefits the middle class is offered through the university. To bet on the future and not on the present: to take out as much money in student loans and credit cards as you can, with no intention to pay it back.<br /></blockquote><br /><a href="http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20091206003234202">read more...</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/Sxv5CWuGcCI/AAAAAAAAADY/fZ7jzIYgPUw/s1600-h/IMG_9996.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/Sxv5CWuGcCI/AAAAAAAAADY/fZ7jzIYgPUw/s320/IMG_9996.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5412193196069777442" border="0" /></a></span>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-69943326504885219212009-12-02T09:40:00.000-08:002009-12-09T10:20:08.831-08:00We're only partially responsible for the Apocaplyse<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/12/02/apocalypse_read.pdf_600_.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 454px; height: 599px;" src="http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/12/02/apocalypse_read.pdf_600_.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">New text Regarding Social War and Climate Change: Introduction to The Apocalypse</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The Institute for Experimental Freedom's European appendages and friends are pleased to announce the completed layout for a new text in preparation for the Cop15 summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Introduction to The Apocalypse gives a concise and critical analysis of the current ecological catastrophe, the climate change movement and its limitations, and the real existing potential for an immediate reversal of <span style="font-style: italic;">the future.</span> Copy and distribute freely.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/12/02/apocalypse_letter.pdf">(8.5x11) Letter imposed for print PDF</a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/12/02/apocalypse_a4.pdf">(A4) Imposed for print PDF</a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/12/02/apocalypse_read.pdf">(A4) Readable PDF</a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span class="fullpost"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">From the introduction:</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">“<span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;">All of us secretly desire for this world to end. The future lasts forever. Or at least, it used to. The grand illusion of Western civilisation has always been the myth of progress, namely that the flow of history would beneficently extend into an infinite future. To our parents, civilisation offered houses in the suburbs, computers, and automobiles. And civilisation delivered. To the children of these workers, civilisation offered life on the moon, artificial intelligence, endless peace. All of which have failed to emerge. While our parents cling to the belief that someday the mortgage will be repaid and they can retire in happiness, their lost children know this is a lie. This world offers nothing to us: no meaningful work, no rest, no future – only fear. Over and over again, we find ourselves conditioned like rats by the images of not just our own death, but of total destruction. From the collapse of the World Trade Centre to the alien invasion, from the spectre of nuclear war to the hole in the ozone layer – and now the melting glaciers – these images ingrain themselves in our very being. These images are nothing more than modern projections of the deep-set fantasy of all religions: the apocalypse.</span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;">Today, catastrophic climate change is the image of the apocalypse. Nothing has escaped the touch of humanity, from the deepest oceans to the atmosphere itself. There is little doubt that carbon emissions caused by human activity may bring about the end of the world as we know it. It’s just a matter of listening to the ticking of the doomsday clock as it counts down to a climactic apocalypse. Never before in recorded history has the question of the earth’s survival been so starkly posed, and never before has such news been greeted with such indifference.</span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;">What is to be done in the face of a crisis so large it dwarfs the imagination? We are left with nothing but a sense of impending doom, a strange depression that keeps us oscillating between hysterical hedonism and sad loneliness, and in the end both responses are merely the two faces of the </span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%; -moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-inline-policy: continuous;">selfsame</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"> despair. Those self-appointed to “save” us from this crisis – the governments, scientists, activists –seem incapable of anything but sloganeering: clean development, carbon markets, sustainable development, climate justice, ecological reparations, green capitalism. We know in our heart of hearts that these fantasies give any sensible person as much cold comfort as a stiff drink. Confronted with the real possibility of the apocalypse, the world becomes inverted: to continue as if everything </span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><i>is normal</i></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"> in the present moment is the most refined act of nihilism.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;">This generalised delirium, formerly confined to only a handful of activists, has spread over the last few years to the population at large, and even the state seems a sincere believer in catastrophic climate change. Observe the reaction of the nation-states who, while in endless summits to “solve” the climate crisis, such as the COP15, continue to build airport after airport, highway after highway, giving industries the remit to emit ever-more carbon. The nation-states continue to act </span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><i>as if everything is normal, </i></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">while</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"> at the same time lying through their gritted teeth that “we are solving the climate crisis.” No-one today, even the children, believe them. Their summits and pledges are mere fiddling while Rome burns. The absurd plots hatched by scientists to avert this coming apocalypse, from putting mirrors into space to pumping water from the bottom of the ocean, have only the virtue of being at least mildly entertaining. There is a distinct air of madness about our rulers, a madness that reminds us only too much of the monarchs of the </span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><i>ancien regime </i></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;">shortly before their beheading. Yet, what can a single person do? The despair felt when confronted by the reality of climate change is an honest appraisal of a disaster where there is no easy escape. Let us hold this despair close, let it nurture us. Honesty is always the best policy for survival.”</span></p></blockquote></div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"></span></p></span>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-51385940181919061212009-10-15T10:55:00.000-07:002009-10-15T11:29:12.898-07:00Two New Speaking Dates & Thoughts on Intellectual Production<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/StdnUQEPQ6I/AAAAAAAAADI/W3_tfrZ-_XU/s1600-h/michel-foucault.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 271px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/StdnUQEPQ6I/AAAAAAAAADI/W3_tfrZ-_XU/s320/michel-foucault.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5392892676407247778" border="0" /></a><style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> </style> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; color: rgb(204, 0, 0); font-weight: bold;"></p><blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; color: rgb(204, 0, 0); font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Social Justice or Social War?*</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Other means of War in the Time of Depoliticized Life</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"><span>Monday,</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> October 19,</span> 8PM at New York University, New York, NY</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Kimmel Center Room 912 (<a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=60+Washington+Square+South,+ny,+ny&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=32.527387,79.013672&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=60+Washington+Square+S,+New+York,+10012&ll=40.731308,-73.997855&spn=0.007593,0.01929&z=16">60 Washington Square South</a>) </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"><span>Monday,</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> November 2,</span> 7:30PM at Ohio State University, Columbus, OH</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a name="adr"></a>Hagerty Hall room 180 (<a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=1775+College+Rd,+columbus,+OH&sll=40.731308,-73.997855&sspn=0.007593,0.01929&g=60+Washington+Square+South,+ny,+ny&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=1775+College+Rd+S,+Columbus,+Franklin,+Ohio+43210&ll=39.999244,-83.010065&spn=0.030706,0.077162&z=14">1775 College Rd</a>)</p></blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-size:100%;" >*</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">“Social Justice or Social War?”</span> defines a rudimentary theory of social war. It posits civil war as an underlining condition to life and the modern state as a development intended to police and conceal this. In the time where all states have lost their imaginary force of attraction, we propose that social justice is an auxiliary mechanism to “defend society.” Social war, on the other hand, is opposed to social justice as a different discourse of revolutionary change—<a href="http://marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm">one which has a different concept of history. </a></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Although the talk will contribute to a refining of these terms and their deployment, it will ultimately lack a specific conclusive direction. It will hastily engage with far too many concepts but has been said to be “surprisingly coherent.” Its surprising coherence is more than likely the result of the length of the talk and/or the performativity, which was inseparable from the talk given at the University of Wisconsin on September 11. Rather, “Social Justice or Social War?” will engage with concepts, figures, historical events as devices which we will put to use to compose atonal rhythms. These rhythms, when examined, will help us collectively write a strategy. Everything before this is conjecture—of which the IEF willfully contributes.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">A few more notes regarding the IEF's intellectual exercises in impotence</span> </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"> </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">The gesture of the lecture cannot be separated from the discourse it happens within. Whereas the IEF has located this gesture's site of taking-place in the university, it must be noted that many of us who are taken by the IEF and by the practices of insurrection are not the loyal subjects of academia. Our less than scholarly practices follow suit. On the other hand, the gesture of the lecture, because it is the taking-place of a discourse, reveals a world within which partisans take the practice of thought and its exposition seriously (even if that means we take being irresponsible incredibly seriously). Which means: performativity can communicate <span style="font-style: normal;">thus as</span><i> thus</i>, not just thus as <i>that</i>. We're like, being the <i>communism/violence</i> we want to see in the world, or whatever.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">What is concealed by the gesture of the lecture? Because it happens within multiple discourses, the grammar of critical theory may conceal the fact of civil war. Someone in Wisconsin asked, “How, after we have sort of exploded, do we not return to normal? I mean, after the chairs which caught flight have landed; and after this room, which has been torn apart, is no longer becoming torn apart; and our bodies are not encountering each others with a joyful violence. We seem to return to performing our normal roles: You as the speaker, and I among my peers as the listener? How can we stretch it out?” Can the lecture ever be profaned in such a way that is no longer recognizable as such? The lecture, the study group, the journal of strategy always <i>also</i> occupy a position in the economic production of intellect. Willfully practicing stupidity, and attempting to wash our hands clean of this, will not contest that position. Likewise, occupying that position—even the wrong-ass way—may do little to contest it. Like other positions one can have within capitalism, intellectual production is work. The lecture, through the framework of the speaker/listeners, conceals the way in which voyeurs are engaged in this collective process of intellectual production. However, only a practice which leaves none of these roles intact could collectively generate intellect without value. Which is to say, only once thought's potentiality for a consistency of practices is revealed (not necessarily, “realized”) can intellectual value be attacked at the point of production.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">In the past, marxists had posed the process of “socialization” as a way making labor a social entity. Such a process occurs in conjunction with a progressive concept of history where the proletariat becoming a dictatorship of its class makes private entities social. The anti-globalization movement's avant-garde sought to achieve such a process within the intellectual and artistic spheres of the economy through its emphasis on reclaiming social space. At its more honest moments it would speak of “autonomy,” but there is no autonomy within global capitalism, as the self-managed factories of Argentina demonstrate. If such spheres of the economy are going to be profaned, they must become unrecognizable and be redeemed of <i>re-semblance</i>. <a href="http://summercamp2009.endnotes.org.uk/node/32">Communization in this regard immediately imposes a destruction of the faculties to generate value.</a> It is no coincidence that the university, a factory of intellectual production, refers to its material spaces and its authoritative positions as “faculties.” </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">Aggressive survival practices cannot be discounted. Whereas our backsides are caressed firmly by the specters of the past generating an urgent need for negation of the present, the IEF in its erotic practices and its practices of war understands the virtues of privation. We are delighted by all the headlines which make the bourgeoisie tremble and all the events where shit goes to pieces. However, we also understand the need to extend our practices by holding positions which translate into being able to share material solidarities. If any of the colleges we speak at do not immediately become occupied in that New School sort of way, no matter. We're also occupying them in another sort of way.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We'll see you on the many roads of <i>impotenza.</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br /></i> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="RIGHT"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMuBCWsq6jQ">The IEF does not fight<span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">*</span>, nor do we argue, we simply hit that person with a bottle </a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);" align="RIGHT"><span style="font-size:85%;">*Well, actually...</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="RIGHT"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="RIGHT">-Liam Sionnach | IEF | Oct. 09 | The Dirty</p>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1403893183754755206.post-71738751595096334672009-09-16T13:50:00.000-07:002009-09-19T23:07:28.763-07:00DOOM$DAY WAR MACHINEZ | a Quip from a lil' Wildness in the Midwest<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/SrFPr6vAukI/AAAAAAAAACc/45l6eH2Q6S0/s1600-h/ief-mke.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 318px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_U0HZ3ygvLBw/SrFPr6vAukI/AAAAAAAAACc/45l6eH2Q6S0/s320/ief-mke.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382170645603859010" border="0" /></a><style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> </style> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Thanks to MKE comrades for this charming report back</i></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><blockquote>On September 11th 2009, a slew of miscreants from all corners of the insurrectional constellation descended on the University of Milwaukee campus for a lovely evening with the IEF's own Liam Sionnach. While being fed grapes and smoking indoors (naughty, naughty) The Institute got differently-abled on profanation, the end of time and the human strikes of our disease ridden bodies. The room may have gotten wrecked a bit, chairs may have gained flight, everyone may have shared a lick, and a speaker may have been pied. It is all a blur by this point. What is certain: some folks in Milwaukee definitely got a stern-talking-to by their landlords, we practiced a trans-geographic sharing of complicities and bodily fluids, offered the gift of enmity (served cold in bottles) to some frat boys, and of course articulated our favorite gesture; sadomasochism. Oh, and we're also probably never allowed back at a certain luxury hotel in downtown Milwaukee. </blockquote></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;">THE INSTITUTE FOR EXPERIMENTAL FREEDOM 2009 TOUR:<br />come for the commodities, stay for the strip-searches.<br /></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify; font-family: georgia;"><style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> </style> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /></span></p><style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> </style> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; color: rgb(102, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman,serif;font-size:100%;" >1. How does it feel to be <i>never alone, every-so-often?</i></span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;font-family:georgia;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman,serif;font-size:100%;" >Last week in the Midwest we continued a process which can only be called “beginning again”. Either because we occupy the position of being an active minority of proletarianized life, or a profoundly bored minority of proletarianized life. We are captivated with finding, and sharing each other. Perhaps a certain textual promiscuity, and a certain seductive distance brings us together. Perhaps an invisible voice acted on us collectively, and perhaps we simply like the similar clothes, music, and inside jokes. Either way, let's not reduce what could grow and become stronger by claiming to be the insurrectional queer, power-hungry, bro'd out, mean bitchez, that we <i>also</i> are. But let's hold on—without forgetting where the boundaries of exclusion are, which we are setting out—and keep losing ourselves in the thresholds. </span> </p><p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p face="georgia" style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"> </p><p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p face="georgia" style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; color: rgb(102, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman,serif;font-size:100%;" >2. The Other Means of War</span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p face="georgia" style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman,serif;font-size:100%;" >What would it mean to engage in methods of conflict and even combat which reveal <i>how it is done</i>? And yet, how could this be invisible? These are some of the challenges which face the contemporary insurrectional project. The intimate event appropriates us—makes us the technologies of whatever force it may wield. How an event is populated and practiced gives it its form. If the content of insurrectional events is defined only by the intimacy between a small group, then it is far more likely that the specialized division of labor relation which alienates us daily will be replicated. On the other hand, if we engage in an open discourse of conflict, a certain potency which is located in becoming sensitized to each other's shared desire can be lost.</span> </p><p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p face="georgia" style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman,serif;font-size:100%;" >Of course there is a tension between experiencing hostility (unknown, outside) with new people and place, and experiencing friendships. We are not trying to become secure, or reject the <i>hostis—</i>which is the foundation of all relations. However, the construction of a partisan war-machine of insurrection requires that we face, and practically answer these questions. How is the rhythm of our shared-time—the history of social war—felt beyond the confines of what happens <i>between</i> our bodies (communication), how is is felt as what affects us—what we are taken by? How is this achieved without a protest-media strategy? Are there voyeurs within the immediate vicinity of a given gesture of insurrection who will be seduced by our gifts? If the answer is “no,” then we must either face the fact of singularities, which happen as mere representations with affective faculties (the one-off event which sucks everything into its vortex) , and/or seek out, occupy and if we have the capacity impose new topographies which we are better suited to populate with affects (the consistency of ungovernable terrains—occupied workplaces, schools, and social spaces which generate material solidarity and portals into our worlds).</span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p face="georgia" style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; color: rgb(102, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman,serif;font-size:100%;" >3. Dispossessed are Turning to Communism/Violence</span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p face="georgia" style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman,serif;font-size:100%;" >If we are turning to communism in a world without it, it means we are immediately getting organized, collectively to improve our conditions. It means we will, one way or the other, find ourselves in combat. A crass provocation: get money and power by all means. Some still want to continue their projects which help others. Cool. Others want to be able to live and fight. Both need money, and positions which we will defend.</span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p face="georgia" style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Times New Roman,serif;font-size:100%;" >On the other hand, how is violence shared? How are the spaces which we inhabit combustible? This week proved two weaknesses: 1.) We are not currently positioned to attack those whose bodies have been structured as military-machines. 2.) We are still afraid to start shit (perhaps, reasonably). Quite literally, the man with dog tags is better at <i>manning-up</i> than we who perform tough. Perhaps reclaiming force will have to take place a different level. Other material forces who perform being tough and mean are better situated to start shit and bully. Perhaps if we are going to locate a biopolitical sadism, it must happen along side a biopolitical masochism. But who wants to get hit first? Or rather, how will <i>we</i> hit first?</span></p> <p></p><p face="georgia" style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><i>For those of you coming to get B-A-N-A-N-A-S in PGH, we'll see you in the <a href="http://musicremedy.com/p/plies/videos/thug-section-24241.html">Thug Section.</a> Others, perhaps we'll continue to find out if we've reached our expiration date in the Spring.</i></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><i><br /></i></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><i>Whats another word for "The partisan War Machine of insurrection</i></span><span style="font-size:100%;">?"<br /></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:100%;">“</span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-style: normal;">Doom$Day” </span><i>—or was it “Doomsgay?”</i></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size:100%;">My neck, my back, my hipbones, and my crack, still ache so much, but at least I still have my shoes. How's your ass doing?<br />-Liam Sionnach | IEF | '09<br /><br />ps: </span><span style="font-size:100%;">If anyone was there and would really like a copy of the text, feel free to beg ief-southeast(at)riseup(dot)net.</span></div>the Institute for Experimental Freedomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04205527558614933279noreply@blogger.com6