These past few months have been full of meaning. We've endured some new horrors and banalities, and we've felt our potency multiplied across our corporeal boundaries and across the mythological territories of nation states. Still though, it's been difficult. The lovely machine we relied on for oh-so-many proclivities, has reached the limit of its potentiality and will soon be a sad material proof of human foolishness—idling in stasis, meeting our desire with indifference. Rest in peace, peti macchina di compact.
But hold back your tears, we got one those “going green” dell laptops and the game is back on.
The two of us are as pleasantly detached as we ever are and as perverse and drunk on social power as we can be, so stickyfingers the next Danger LP or bump your favorite song about ascending in ante, and get your shit ready for the our lil' syndicate to vandalize everything with meaning.
The next big fucking things
1. More expropriations from history
* which is to say stealing from radical history books and such
2. Textual Mashups & Mixtapes
* All text takes the form of mashup. We want to do to contemporary genres of text, what Spilled Milk did to DMX. These texts will likely occur in multiple series, and so far we have conceptualized the textual mashup as thematic, or as more specifically in reference to a particular question. If we are left to our own devices, one can expect the forms we choose to expose and appropriate to be the forms already so at home within the Institute, you know like theory and porn and stuff.
3. The Pleasure of The Subversive Text
* A text, clearly referencing Rolland Barthes, exploring authorship and pleasure and inquiring through method the possibility of a practice of power that goes beyond the problematic of paternalism (see: the family, patriarchy), and that puts to use the power asymmetry of authorship and readership as this possible method. This text will deal both with the questions of discursive models of sovereignty and with potentially different models of anonymity and incoherent subjectivities (props J Lo).
4. A yet un-named collection of theses on experiment and ritual that will develop the concept of Plan B more coherently. Looking at the ways practices are linked as frequencies of subversion, this text will explore a theory for a parallel and adversarial structure and the concepts of civil war, social war and insurrection, with the friendly contributions of Benjamin and Agamben' theories on violence and sovereignty.
5. A yet un-named collection of fragments regarding patriarchy, feminism and post-patriarchal practices.
6. Easily replicable commodities, T-shirt and Button Designs, to be posted at a central online location and then decentralized in production and profit.
* I have been thinking of ways to best make use of my skills and resources—particualry to communize my faculties and to encourage others to do so as well. The specific idea that the IEF and friends will be working on is a subtly (or overtly) subversive t-shirt using enormous type, and you know, hip style to share with other nodes of subversion. This would be done as a practice of the small-scale venture capitalism thing with the least amount of investment capital and the most amount of immediate even-breaks and profit. The intent here is not to encourage everyone to sell stuff, but to make small-scale capitalism the object of our surviving-bodies in a way that produces for us more quality objects and relationships with time. Which is to say, perhaps the people who would most likely download the graphics and use them to make objects to sell, want to make objects and engage creatively with symbols already; but if we were to try and constitute that desire a “pure art” outside of capitalist relations, we would at best be kidding ourselves and at worst be “working for fascism”. So putting that desire to use and communizing our faculties is one of the best options we can think of.
The obvious problem is that of branding and brand-recognition. And again, to that we simply prefer not to pretend we are outside of capitalism, and instead engage in these obvious problems with the same conflictuality of desire that we engage in when we are at work.
We want to find practices that immediately improve our conditions, that develop the survival habits of scamming, cunning and theft, that get our rents paid, and that gets the capital that can produce more potentiality—for the particular action and the continuity of a project.
7. Politics is Not a Banana | What are you doing after the orgy or insurrection or whatever?
If you don't know what PNB is have a look. Some say it was an image from the future. But we'd dare to say the future may be without images.
If you liked what you saw, then you should know the second issue of Politics is Not a Banana is an orifice and an edge that desires to be filled; that desires to scratch itself on your mildewy surfaces—won't you oblige?
About Submissions:
PNB is not a democracy. We have no illusions about the power we wield as those who pose the questions—and we love it. Nonetheless if you want to submit to the crack of our whip or you feel a charge and a potency to expose your content to us, feel free. However—as to maintain our own composure—we can make no promise that any contributions we receive will be printed, but we think it could be cool for you to show us a 'lil something, a seam, a hipbone perhaps.
We want so badly to desecrate glossy surfaces with the following forms of text that reflect our thematics of desire and power from a perspective that makes material the zone of indistinction between the vulgar and the exquisite.
1. theory
2. cultural criticism
3. pornographic text
4. high resolution photography and illustrations
5. textual mashups (think 1-3 and maybe some prose or something)
It could be cool if the second issue of Politics is Not a Banana came out sooner than later, so here's last point. There have been many emails we've simply failed to satisfy, inquiring into where and how one could grab a copy of PNB. It is our intent to produce a few more (say, totaling 500-1000 copies of full color joints) but it would be nice not to be held hostage by the past and focus our energies on what new things we make. Similarly, some have waged there shaming fingers at us for producing a piece of print that is not easily reproducible, and that objects being strange sizes and full color is more problematic than say, a copy of the previous fire to the prisons and or a crimethinc PDF. Being that as it were, for the most part the only way to get a copy of PNB #1 was, and remains, to cross paths with us, usually at a book fair or gathering of some sort. Many apologies, but we're simply not that kind of distribution. Nonetheless, it would be nice see people's comments on the questions of Black and White print VS. Color print, and if people want a second issue of PNB by the anarchist book fair in April, or would prefer more copies of PNB: the first of many issues we have to be available by that time. As many of you well know, getting copies, what with the economy and all, can be a difficult endeavor—especially when all we have to offer is skills most 20-something already practice. PS: While, we're on the topic, if anyone has access to resources that would make printing a full color journal of vulgarity armed easy and wants design work in exchange or an abstract “favor,” send an email immediately to: ief-southeast(at)riseup(dot)net
For some, we hope to cross paths in April, for others, a bit sooner.
From my cold, cold house,
-Liam Sionnach IEF, nearing the next excuses for why rent isn't on time '09
