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Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #37, Summer 1993
COLUMNS
-includes "The Old World is everywhere and rotten" by (d)anger; "We
All Live in Waco" by John Zerzan; "Domestication News" by John
Zerzan; and "Vagit-Prop" by Annie Le Brun.
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The Old World is everywhere and rotten.
Once again power has celebrated itself with another inauguration
where more of the same was divined and insured. And this time the
changing of the guard received quite an applause from many of the
prisoners themselves: a sigh of relief from those who would rather
be stabbed in the back than shot in the face. The enthralled have
shown faith in a change in the weather while the meteorologists
continued to forecast clear skies for slavery. Domination has
completed itself once more by flaunting its flexibility as a cover-
up for both its nightmarish reality and its real vulnerability. But
a prettier shade of thanatoxic society satisfies the palate only of
those who have lost their appetite for life, and while the blind
congratulate the myopic on their lack of vision, those of us who
have not forgotten the sweetness of indescribable freedoms will
continue our crazy war against death's expanding rationality. We
will follow our wakeful dreams and drink from our simplest desires.
We will create festivals in the system's cracks and celebrate
nothing but the adventure of our own lives. -
(d)anger (POB 203, Portland, OR. 97207)
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We All Live In Waco
THE QUEST FOR AUTHENTICITY AND COMMUNITY, completely denied and
rendered desperate, finds its home in Jonestown and Waco. The sense
of truly being alive and of belonging has almost nowhere to go in
the society whose two fastest growing classes are the homeless and
prisoners. Daily existence is increasingly that of despair,
depression, and derangement, punctuated by news of the latest
serial murder spree or global eco-disaster, consumed as horrible
entertainments in the emptiness.
DEBORD expressed the situation accurately: ``It should be known
that servitude henceforth truly wants to be loved for itself, and
no longer because it would bring some extrinsic advantage.
Previously, it could pass for a protection; but it no longer
protects anything.'' Even the apparatus of oppression concedes
virtually the same point: Forbes, organ of finance capital, com-
memorated its 75th anniversary with a cover-story theme of ``Why We
Feel so Bad when We Have it so Good.'' In the Psychological Society
at large, in which the only reality is the personal, its hallmark
denial and delusion are challenged, almost ironically, by the
definitely impoverished realm of the personal. More and more
clearly, the choice is between craven servitude or a qualitative
break with the entire force-field of alienation.
IN A CULT everything that an individual has is invested, the only
guarantee against the total refusal of that cult. How else, for
example, could it be endured that wives and children were offered
up to David Koresh and blind submission obtained rather than
revolt? Evidently autonomy and self-respect can be freely given
over when the world so thoroughly devalues them.
NONE OF US is immune from the horrors, commonplace and
spectacular; the immune system itself, in fact, seems to be giving
way, and this is not confined to AIDS or TB. The stress of work,
according to a March report on the UN's International Labor
Organization, is advancing to the point of a ``worldwide
epidemic.'' The overall situation is gravely worse than when
Nietzsche observed that ``most people think that nothing but this
wearying reality of ours is possible.''
CURRENT reality has become impossible and continues to lose
credibility. We must be outsiders, never represented, investing
nothing in the death march we are expected to help reproduce. The
ultimate pleasure lies in destroying that which is destroying us,
in the spirit of the Situationists, who, when asked how they were
going to destroy the dominant culture, replied, ``In two ways:
gradually at first, then suddenly.'' -John Zerzan
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Domestication News
WORTH NOTING IS A CONCISE ARTICLE IN THE March 4 issue the British
journal Nature. Almost 4,000 years of agriculture in central Mexico
yield a dramatic picture to the research efforts of archaeologists
O'Hara, Street-Perrot, and Burt. Conclusively debunked is the
notion that traditional farming methods were more benign than more
modern methods.
SEVERE soil erosion and other forms of environmental degradation
commenced, in fact, with agriculture itself. By the time of the
Spanish conquest (1521 A.D.), contrary to widespread belief,
Mesoamerica presented anything but a pristine landscape. ``Erosion
caused by the Spanish introduction of plough agriculture,'' the
authors observe from exhaustive soil samples, ``was apparently no
more severe than that associated with traditional agricultural
methods.'' As they explain later in the article, ``it is hard to
distinguish any specific impact of the introduction of plough
agriculture and draught animals by the Spanish after A.D. 1521.
THE POINT is plain: domestication is domestication, and embodies
a qualitatively negative logic for the natural world. Agriculture
per se brings a ruinous, unidirectional impact, despite the wishful
thinking of those who envision a coexistence with domestication,
consisting of benign, `green' methods that would reverse the global
destruction of the land.
THE DEVASTATION exists on a much more basic level, whose reality
must be faced. As the article concludes, ``There is a move by many
environmental agencies both in Mexico and elsewhere for a return to
traditional forms of agriculture, as they are considered to be
better for the environment. As our findings indicate that
traditional farming techniques cause significant erosion, it is
unlikely that a return to prehistoric farming methods would solve
the problem of environmental degradation.'' -John Zerzan
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Vagit-Prop
By Annie Le Brun
If any naive women still cherished illusions about the revolu-
tionary character of the neo-feminist hullabaloo of the last few
years, turning the Second Sex into televised images will have the
undeniable merit of finally disillusioning them.
After repeated interventions by the French Ministry of Culture and
the Ministry for Women's Rights, here we have the monument to State
Feminism which the worst enemies of women never dared to dream of.
Here we have none but right-thinking and upstart ladies - women
cabinet members, cabinet members' wives, authoresses and all sorts
of officials - who set out under the watchful eye of the Great
Mamamouchi de Beauvoir to draw us an unsparing picture of the
feminine condition.
For her gaze must appear to disclose to us irrefutable facts with
a dreadful objectivity. For example, incest with little girls is
practiced ``very often with the approval of the mother, because she
prefers that sperm and money not be spent outside the family; so
she encourages it.'' Also, most men prefer to cohabit with women in
couples for the sole reason that it's cheaper than going to a
brothel: ``There are some such ulterior motives...which are more or
less in the heads of many men.''
I will not compile a list of revelations of this ilk; it would be
too long. But it is still interesting to note how such basic truths
are inserted amidst the evocation of real aspects of feminine
misery: clitoridectomy, rape, polygamy, incest..., in order to ba-
nalize the real dramas of the lives of many women and to dramatize
the banality of the feminine condition in general.
Because it is not so much a matter of working to reduce the misery
of many women as it is to exploit it as an irresistible
justification for the exercise of a power with is now no longer
merely ideological. There is nothing new in this. It is, of course,
according to the same casuistry that the various Marxist-Leninist
bureaucracies founded their power. Otherwise why lay the blame on
men rather than on the Catholic religion with its untenable
position on contraception, whose dogmas doctors still put forward
in refusing to practice IVG or perform abortions? Otherwise why lay
the blame on men rather than on religion for the enslavement of
women in the Muslim world, in Africa, in Pakistan, in India? And,
on this subject, one could wish that the Indian, African and North
American women who gave assistance to the mini-series had been a
bit more careful about the role allotted to them and had been aware
of this constant recourse to the atrocities from elsewhere in order
to legitimate speeches and maneuvers here. This is a detestable
manifestation of an all-purpose Third Worldism which justifies
everything and which will surely not have been one of the glories
of the left of these last twenty years.
But it all hangs together very well when the moralism which
animates these latest philanthropic ladies finds its favorite land
in Maoist China with its undeniable successes (we're still waiting
to hear what they are) in ``revalorizing the image of the woman.''
How happy one is to hear this from the mouth of a sort of female
screw or matron, an official in charge of education in this
dreamland. That the rights of woman are magnified in a country
where the most elementary rights of man are constantly and
systematically flouted does not seem to bother our champions of
feminine liberty.
Let's note that, after having been on the wrong track regarding
the freedom of women in the Soviet Union for the last 35 years,
Simone de Beauvoir does not hesitate for a moment to relapse with
China. Even if, here and there, she thought it was well to point
out feebly that today she has doubts about the existence of a
Socialist State, and that ``women must take matters into their own
hands.'' This does not prevent the Stalinist press (L'Humanit=82,
L'Humanit=82-Demanche and even R=82volution) waxing the most enthu-
siastic about these TV shows which inaugurate, in the history of
ideological propaganda, what will have to be called `Vagit-Prop'.
You cannot retrieve your losses. These programs may someday
provide the most complete example of a Feminist Realism which, in
its exaltation of miserablism, its Jesuitic argumentation and its
conventionalism, has little to envy in the worst Socialist Realist
productions. And this in two stages (the first the clearing of
womankind up to absolute purity), then three movements: (1) the
intensive accumulation of the most horrible examples of female dis-
tress; (2) their systematic generalization, atrocity-mongering,
till it is quite natural to conclude by ``believing that Indian
women's vocation is to be burnt,'' and (3) to indulge in the ste-
reotyped ridicule of women degraded by beauty treatment: ornaments,
despairingly alienated by masculine concupiscence.
And this is the case insofar as, for men, ``buttocks and breasts
remain privileged objects...It is because they are useless, that
there is no project which animates them,'' and that ``this is what
man looks for in a woman, it is passivity, it is immanence, it is
the non-object, it is contingency, the naked presence, the fact of
being there without anything else.'' One would at least like to see
those concerned with stating their opinions. They might have a
different point of view than this Areopagus of State cub scout-
mistresses. Maybe they would even risk speaking of love, which has
been simply passed over in silence, no doubt as a category deemed
existentially useless.
So it seems to me that, 35 years after this founding event of neo-
feminism, women have in this ideological offering nothing to be
very proud of. It is nothing but theoretical fake stuff, sewn with
threads soaked in blood, which power would like to force them to
accept.
But where can you be Th=82roigne de M=82ricourt, Louise Michel,
Virginia Woolf?
This review of The Second Sex television series presented in
France in 1986 has been revised and abridged. It will appear in
similar form in the enlarged Rants anthology currently in the
works, edited by Adam Parfrey and Bob Black.