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Between Predicates, War: Theses on Contemporary Struggle

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kisses,

The Institute for Experimental Freedom

Between Predicates, War | New Pocket Book

“To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives”

W. Benjamin

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The Institute for Experimental Freedom is proud to announce the release of Between Predicates, War: Theses on Contemporary Struggle. Almost two years in the making, Between Predicates, War 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.

As we wrote in Politics is Not a Banana, 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 the passion, we offer this text as another chapter in this project.

Between Predicates, War: Theses on Contemporary Struggle is a pocket book, of a 100 or so pages, designed with care and finesse, available from LBC Books, or directly from the Institute.

From the Introduction

“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. Events 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 everything 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.

 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 produces 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.

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 because 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.

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.

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.

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.

…

Available for mail order at LBC Books, and at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair.

PDF for viewing here!

List of vendors and events coming soon.

Nothing is too beautiful for the unwanted children of capital,

kisses,

The Institute for Experimental Freedom | March, 2013

Oh yeah, We made a book

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?

From the introduction:

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.

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.

Following a strange popularity of the '07 printing of Politics is Not a Banana 7x7 journal, 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.

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.

Distributors and Bookstores Get in touch for wholesale prices or use the order form at the bottom of the post.

Politics is Not a Banana is currently available in the US at:

Firestorm cafe and books in Asheville, NC

Internationalist Books in Chapel Hill, NC

Blue Stockings in NYC

Book Thug Nation in Brooklyn, NY

Spoonbill and Sugartown in Brooklyn, NY

The Cream City Collective via Burntbookmobile, in Milwaukee, WI

Sporeprint Infoshop in Columbus, OH

City Light Books in San Francisco, CA

Modern Times Books in San Francisco, CA

Needles and Pens in San Francisco, CA

Bound Together Books in San Francisco, CA

Online Distributors:

Little Black Cart

Last Earth Distro

(this post will be kept up, and updated as new locations come in)

Order the damn book!!!!!1!

Politics is Not a Banana | What are you doing?...

1 x book at $7 retail + priority mail $10.95 10 x books at $5 wholesale + priority mail $53.95 25 x books at $5 wholesale + priority mail $138.95 50 x books at $5 wholesale + priority mail $276.95

Email for media mail options

Also, who likes reading books online and printing terrible bootlegs?
[aka: readable Politics is Not a Banana | What are you doing...? PDF on issuu]

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 email us if you contributed and have not received a book. We'll totally make it up to you, if you know what I mean.

Politics is Not a Banana | "What are you doing...?" & new website, coming extremely soon (let's say September)

What are you doing after the orgy or the insurrection or whatever?

Politics is Not a Banana is at the printer. After some practical gestures to expose a plane of consistency for theory and practice, a few old questions posed from a different angle, a bit too much smoking inside, and an excessive use of typography, Politics is Not a Banana: “What are you doing...” has reached its threshold. Some 168 pages of content, color covers, off-set printing and 2-color-pantone insides as a perfect bound 4.25x7in assemblage will make up the machine of PNB. Around a thousand copies will be printed for the first run. Seriously, we don't even know a thousand people, much less a thousand people who will want to read this fucking thing.

“Politics is Not a Banana: What are you doing...” is not “Politics is Not a Banana 2.” While it is certain that the Politics is Not a Banana that has been floating around since spring of '08 was the first of many issues we have, it was not “Politics is Not a Banana 1.” This project is not intended for progress or development. If by chance we get worse over time, it is because we will have given in to the seduction of becoming a better commodity or a more terrible practice of print—which are temptations that are felt at every corner. If the former is the case, it would behoove you to not merely denounce us. If the latter is the case, may god have mercy on the anarchist milieu.

“Blablabla form blablabla content”

We believe that we can get what we want. Its difficult perhaps; we have to become sensitive to each other in order to really be expositional, rather than merely performative[1]. However, with a meaningful practice of doing relationships how we want to, we may accidentally stumble upon something a bit better than just a different form of terrible. It is this logic that motivates the experiment with the commodity known as Politics is Not a Banana.

The Institute for Experimental Freedom would like to congratulate itself. We engage in projects with a certain lightness and prefer the form of the experiment, which serves to prove—to give experience—to a what we believe to be sensible. If the 7x7 issue of Politics is Not a Banana proved anything, it was that the practice of DIY print (zines) could be reappropriated. Solidarities between service workers felt as inclinations were made material, and whatever force of seduction was afforded to Politics is Not Banana translated into crews across the US figuring out their own shit and printing a few copies. The theft and use of the hookup network between various metropolitan service workers made the initial 300 copies of Politics is Not a Banana possible. The use of the information super highway and the PDF form accounts for the other immaterial conditions which gave Politics is Not a Banana its strangely vast distribution. The practice of so called DIY print is not dead, it is merely refined.

Cool.

Despite the fact that Politics is Not a Banana “What are you doing...” was professionally printed, it should not to be understood as form in favor of content. Rather, it is an elaboration of the methods employed to produce the glossy pages and the design decisions of the first issue that tormented Anarchy Magazine. Should we pay from our own pockets to produce beautiful things that will be captured as commodities? Never. Although, sometimes we do. This time, however, like the last, is a testament to what is possible through a profaned use of class antagonisms, friends, sadomasochism, a few hoops to jump through, and, of course, material solidarities. Although currently we shamefully practice doing the commodity ethically or whatever, perhaps soon we'll give the purists a real reason to hate us.

Don't mistake cohesion and rhythm for a coherent political program. Although some readers will applaud a more easy to follow amalgamation of texts, Politics is Not a Banana “What are you doing...” is not the result of ideological unity between contributors. After carefully reading the proofs, the editors of Politics is Not a Banana turned to each other and shared the tiniest single tear for the undoubtedly stupid readings of our so-called work of art. Yes, we could have more effectively splayed aphorisms and nonsensical maxims across the page; we could have interrupted the reader with more confusing pornography, with more experimental fictions, but then again we, so charitably, decided to cut a lot of our own writing. Perhaps we can all learn a valuable lesson: there is more to the practice of radical discourse than propaganda and discipline. Make no mistake, we could give a fuck, and we certainly do give fucks, but our perversity cannot be contained in any one literary singularity. We take whatever seriously.

So how will we distribute this? How will we share our shame and power? How will we write our ignoble desire on new generations?

We have no illusions about the class composition of our friends and comrades—we work stupid jobs and survive on coffee and theft, but we're pretty good at it. Likewise, we have no fucking idea what to do with a thousand copies of anything. When anarchists give us their newspaper advertisements for this or that protest, we are usually able to get rid of like twenty and then the rest usually sit around. Sometimes print is lucky enough to be used for kindling. Most times, it's near a toilet. “Politics is Not a Banana: What are you doing...” is useless as toilet paper. It is best as a sexual technology or fashion accessory.

It is from this knowledge that we pose the question to our comrades, to our vile territories of revolt-in-practice. We will be selling Politics is Not a Banana at a retail price (around $10-12) and a wholesale price (around $5-6). We ask that comrades buy fifty or so at wholesale and then sell it to make a reasonable amount of profit to benefit their projects; we ask that distributors get in touch too, but we're not super worried if Glenn Beck doesn't cry about us on Fox news. We ask also that comrades in university and comrades who work with social spaces would be so kind to get in touch with us, to prepare this year's IEF tour (SRSLY IEF T0URz 0MG!!!!1).

Nothing is too beautiful for the unwanted children of capital,

-IEF friends

from the dirty, and across the puddle '09

[1.] the poke at performance here is not meant as a denouncement of all things performative—in the world of lies, it is useless to tell the truth—rather it is meant to critique a vulgar logic of advertising that is applied in many contemporary radical projects. We want to become sensitive to each other in order to lie together.

PS: Our sincerest apologies to those who did not make the cut—you gotta want it more. To those who sent us an email saying, “Do with this what you want.” we must reply: this is neither submission nor cruelty, it is merely feigning indifference. Perhaps the shame you feel should motivate you to redeem yourself one way or the other?

PPS: www.politicsisnotabanana.com

Some gems from inside the typographic war-machine:

Public Sex and Social War

An examination of the orgy and public sex as a biopolitical strike aimed at dissolving the categories of “public” and “sex.”

I am a Bulging Tangle I am a Stringy Mass

A pornographic critique and analysis of anarchists election year strategy using Baudrillard and Antonio Negri (Oh, my!), featuring an Inhuman violation of Barack Obama.

O.K.

An IEF Favorite. Two communiques from the Enlightened Avant-Guard regarding the “so-called anti-CPE struggle,” featuring their “politically coherent propositions” (PCP).

Taking Communion at The End of History

An elaboration of the theories of rupture, divine violence, and insurrection and a critique of the dual power revolutionary strategy using Agamben, Tiqqun, Miranda July, Walter Benjamin, and Pasolinis' Salo 120 days of Sodom.

The Revelation of St Narcissus, with annotations by an Yadira Lopez, and a tangled mess of IEF critiques.

A critique of the anarchist identity using a framework of the Situationist Internationale's critique of the image.

Biófilo Panclasta: Lover of Life, Destroyer of Everything

The first English language biography of the Colombian anarchist Biófilo and his misadventures, poorly translated.

Horrible Sound Objects

A critique of the music form and elaboration of Takeshi Kosugi's gesture, alongside some provocative images of pandas doing naughty things.

The Heart of War

An elaboration of the theory of social war and a tactical contribution to the theory of Human Strike using Clausewitz and everyone's favorite utopian fascist, Carl Schmitt.

Oh Good, The War!

An English translation of the 1999 Tiqqun piece which examines the concepts of war, spectacle, and a redemptive concept of revolutionary time.

We're back on our grizzly

As you may have noticed by the frequent posts on this blog, The Institute for Experimental Freedom is beginning to take ourselves a bit too seriously again. After an extended summer excursion, a long hiatus for some and a drawn out moment of offensive for others, we're back on our grizzly.

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

Reprint | Society of The Spectacle | Impressive use of Akzidenz Grotesk

Study groups rejoice!

The Institute is making available a reprint of Society of The Spectacle (1994 Zone books translation by the naughty purged situationist, Donald Nicholson-Smithin) in PDF form so we no longer have to lie about having read it. Enjoy, and feel free to share your thoughts on the design and layout.

Preparing my self to stop the oh-so-hurtful lie.
From a flat part of the South,

Liam Sionnach 09