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Title: Brittle Utopias
Author: Anonymous
Language: en
Topics: insurrectionist, Killing King Abacus
Source: Retrieved on March 7th, 2009 from http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/

Anonymous

Brittle Utopias

In the Istanbul of the Ottoman Empire there was a palace with seemingly

endless corridors; where those outside had little idea what happened

inside and those in one department didn’t know what happened in the

other. At least that’s how it was in the imagination of Ismail Kadare,

the Albanian novelist who wrote The Palace of Dreams. In his novel, the

protagonist is given a job as a dream reader. He is sent to a room that

he has difficulty finding, and told to read the dreams of others,

sorting them into those that are of no interest, and that need to be

investigated further: those that could be prophesies of events that will

be threatening to the state. People throughout the empire submitted

written accounts of their dreams to local offices in hope that their

dreams would be selected, sent to Istanbul, and later proven to be

prophetic. Little did they know that some dreams would be labeled as

exposing threats to the state and that this didn’t bode well for the

dreamers. Kadare knew what we also know: that dreams have the potential

to threaten the structures of power.

Without dreams, visions that reach beyond the death marches of this

society,war, industry, pollution, boredom, we cannot destroy that which

tries to doom us to a passive yet stressful ambulant numbness. I

recognize the stench of rotting flesh, but I’m not sure how to freshen

the air. But is it necessary for us to conceive of a detailed plan of

the world that we will build in the place of the putrefying corpse? Or

is it more necessary to first perform the cremation rites? It is more

important to know which path to take away from this social order than to

be certain what one will do upon arriving at the end of it.

In The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin laid out a detailed account of how,

at that time, communism could be achieved without government. He even

included statistics of production levels. These are long out dated of

course, but I don’t think that his vision was meant to be a strict model

for communism even at the time that he wrote it, for in he same text he

said: “Now all history, all the experience of the human race and all

social psychology, unite in showing that the best and fairest way is to

trust the decision to those whom it concerns most nearly. It is they

alone who can consider and allow for the hundred and one details which

must necessarily be overlooked in any merely official redistribution.”

(Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread p. 94) When we draw upon the utopian

dreams of others we must be careful not to stick to narrow minded

imitations of dreams that are born from other situations, on the other

hand dreams that come from drastically different situations at times

ignite a spark of inspiration that allows one to approach the present

situation in a dynamic way. Some dreams are supple and resonate with the

ever renewed present, others become fossilized, they are so dry and

brittle that they crack and shatter to pieces when they try to move from

the dream into reality.

Some utopias are visions of places in which humans can be truly present,

places that lack the ever proliferating forms of mediation of this

society. Others are non-places, these are dreams that are old even if

just conceived of though they don’t crack, they are too unified, too

pristine. Ethnic cleansing, Communism with a big C, the nation, pure

capitalism, these utopias can never be fully brought into practice, but

that is not the problem. The problem is that there are powerful

structures which try to bring these grand-plans into being, to the

letter and with scientific precision. I don’t want to live in a

non-place where social problems can be solved with mathematical formulae

and human beings become Xs and Ys. Social relations are unsolvable, we

can only appear to solve them by temporarily forcing them into a

relatively static position, at the cost of great human misery. Anarchy

cannot be a great leap forward. Anarchy is not a non-place where human

beings must bend to fit a mold.

Some dreams create people that are inscribed upon like a scratched

record, they go around in circles always returning to the same point.

Cracked dreams fall into the actual world in pieces, bite sized easily

digestible bits, like a situationist slogan in a computer ad. Cracked

dreams become the motor of a history that produces only novelty and

nothing new. The frustrated dreams of one generation are reflected back

at society in the slogans of the status quo of the next. These

reflections are distortions, twisted mockeries of the dreams of those

who itched to blast out of history into an utterly other utopia.

The distorted reflections of unrealized dreams inspire reaction.

Unrealized desires cause frustration; when blocked from action people

become reactive. They react to the limited choices that are relentlessly

thrust upon them, an endless string of lesser evils. We have all

experienced unrealized desires that have become resentment. Cracked

dreams are ever recycled by resentment, by their lack of realization and

our incapacity to act, by a society which limits our actions so severely

that we are often left to merely react to its repressive mechanisms.

There are those who disdain all talk of destruction, who hold that

creation is the essence of action, that destruction is the antithesis of

any accomplishment or social change. But creation and destruction are

twined processes like life and death. Modern science describes energy as

being neither created or destroyed but merely transformed.

Transformation is simultaneous creation and destruction, for one state

to be created another must be destroyed. Hindu mythology describes Shiva

as a creator and destroyer. It seems logical to me that they should

attribute both functions to one god.[1] So how is it that so many of

those who call for social change above all else shrink away from the

very idea of destruction, as if a new social reality can be created

without destroying the state-capital leviathan? It is interesting to

look at what kinds of activities many of these people hold up as being

creative deeds. There are the progressives who think that it is

important to work within the system, to vote, to be a good citizen.

These people are often very busy re-creating the present social order.

Busy work is elevated to a high deed by those who value reaction over

action. Unable to act willfully, left with Pepsi challenge like options,

one becomes frustrated but is compensated by a large quantity of

possible reactions, the busy work of writing letters to congressmen,

going to demonstrations, filing lawsuits. The frustrated desire to act

becomes answering an opinion poll on a news show. Stand up and be

counted, but what does all this counting add up to?

This mentality also surfaces among radicals. Miscellaneous forms of busy

work, attending meetings, circulating pamphlets, running the local

radical infoshop are considered necessarily superior to all forms of

sabotage because these are viewed as constructive tasks, while sabotage

is viewed as destructive. While some of what is held up as creative, the

creation of places to meet, discussions and publications and flyers that

open communication, are important parts of any social struggle, others

are but 1001 types of busywork that only serve to reproduce the present

social relations. Those that broke windows in Seattle, the ELF,

neoluddites and other saboteurs, they don’t do anything but break

things. Meanwhile back at the collective, the same person who makes such

accusations is splitting hairs to achieve a consensus decision about how

to set up a fund-raiser. A brick through the window of Niketown, a

firebomb in the GOP headquarters, these acts of destruction create more

than the brilliant cascade of glass shards or sparks, more than the joys

of redecorating that which we abhor. Behind the barricades and in the

dead of night something else is born, our own active powers burn as

brightly as Vail, when private property is no longer private nor

property we have created new relations with each other and to the spaces

that we have been locked out of for so long.

In this necrophilic society, reactive busy work bears many still births

amidst the smokestacks and concrete.

The frustrated desire for change produces the novelty of seasonal

fashions, Windows 95 98 2000, these things are qualitatively similar to

their previous versions. Windows 2000 is only quantitatively different

than previous versions. How many bytes do you have in your hard drive?

Novelty is incomparable with the renewal of life, the difference between

a mother and a daughter, a green shoot and a seed. The renewal of life

in fundamentally connected to death. This society drains a little life

from us every day in the same way that it hides death. Joyous cries on

the subway are about as rare as a dead body on the road. A friend of

mine came to visit me in China from the US, he was shocked to see all of

those little animals in cages waiting to be slaughtered. He had eaten

meat for 30 years before that without being particularly bothered by the

idea. In the richer countries, though we breathe in cancerous fumes,

death is hidden away, wiped clean. Where death is packed in Styrofoam,

one has to wonder what kind of life can be lived. Creation which doesn’t

include a little death isn’t part of life, it is instead the clonelike

reproduction of the same. The cycles of software and fashion and other

clones born from busywork escape death and were therefore never part of

life. Our struggle should be a creative destruction, not the

reproduction of living death.

We do not wish to become agents of the reproduction of the same. We

dream of other ways of relating, of a utopia that is a real living dying

rotting breathing place, a utopia of process not a brittle non-place. We

wish to blast out of this history, a history of reaction. Hindu

mythology conceives of creation and destruction as paired processes,

life coming with death. It also envisioned that this age is part of the

kali yuga, the black age, the last age, the cow is on her last leg and

when the kali yuga ends she will be legless. The cow will go splat, the

world will end. Maybe the ancient Hindu scholars saw it this way because

since creation and destruction are paired, the world is a process of

constant transformation, there can be no social order that is eternal,

it too must eventually die. Maybe then it is not the realists who see

things most clearly, since their vision is trapped in the present, but

those dreamer utopians who know that this society could not possibly be

permanent, those who are trying to kick at the cow’s last leg.

[1] I use this example to illustrate a point. I do not intend to glorify

Hinduism itself, which is force of oppression in India today; the caste

system being just the most obvious example. When I was in India I

noticed that many western travelers romanticized Hinduism without taking

even a second to look at its effects, even when they brutally stared

them in the face.