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Title: Feral Revolution
Author: Feral Faun
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ, critique, green, identity, insurrectionist, psychological, technology, academy, activism, AJODA
Source: Texts taken from http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/][www.insurgentdesire.org.uk]] and [[http://www.anti-politics.net/distro/download/feral-revolution.pdf. The first part, “Feral Revolution”, is the US version (enlarged) of Feral Revolution, published by Elephant Editions. Other essays are added by The Anarchist Library project as “Appendix”, in no particular order. Introduction by A.Bonanno from http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/feral-revolution.html , Elephant Editions of book.

Feral Faun

Feral Revolution

Introduction by Alfredo M. Bonanno

This book has a lot to say, far more than it might seem at first sight.

But it requires a particular disposition on the part of the reader, a

disposition to understand rather than to simply inform oneself.

In fact, there is not merely ‘information’ here, there are ‘ideas’,

something that rarely happens in American (even ‘radical’) culture, and

this is somewhat disturbing. How many of us are prepared to consider

ideas? I don’t know. Those who do not want to question their certainties

will find confirmation of their beliefs in this book in another guise,

ruining the author’s solicitations to look at reality differently.

Anyone can spend years ‘in the wilderness’, Feral maintains, referring

to the possibility of entering the reality of which the ‘wilderness’

marks the extreme limit. It is the moment of truth when we discover

whether we are really capable of breaking our bonds with society, the

umbilical cord that protects and domesticates us. That is why this book

is revolutionary: because it does not interpret reality but tries to

take us into reality just as the author himself has ventured, although

for no measurable length of time.

It is not a question of clinging tightly to the vine that Feral has

thrown down to us from his tree and diving into the fray. It is not a

question of a wild attitude or something ‘sayable’ that can be set out

in a formula, but of a totally different idea of reality. Tourists who

travel around the world to ‘wildly inaccessible’ places merely take time

off from their lives of accumulative delirium and let themselves go wild

within certain well-defined limits. They are always well equipped, take

a guide along with them, etc. In the face of this obscene spectacle it

might seem that all one has to do to avoid ‘doing the tourist’ is to

omit the safety measures and guide and leave one’s baggage at home.

Feral, I think, is saying that this is pointless because there is no

sense in going to wild places if one carries on seeing them in the way

we have been conditioned to. Nature itself can even contribute to

domesticating us: ‘Nature’ domesticates—Feral writes—because it

transforms wildness into a monolithic entity, a huge realm separate from

civilisation. The same goes for any ‘militant’ ecologist conception we

might decide to choose. Ecologists—even ‘radical’ ones—play right into

this. Rather than go wild and destroy civilisation with the energy of

their unchained desires, they try to ‘save the wilderness’. This sheds a

ray of light on some of the inconclusive debates that have been going on

in our papers (and also those of power) for a long time now.

Of course, the first (not very shrewd) impression we might have on

reading this book might be that we are face to face with a

‘primitivist’. And many have had that impression when reading those of

Feral’s articles that we have published in our papers and reviews here

in Italy. I wonder whether Feral himself with his passion for ‘wildlife’

(in the first place, man) is sure whether or not he is a ‘primitivist’.

Something of the sort certainly strikes you when he throws you that

vine. The evil wilderness reveals its true essence to him and him alone:

‘from my own experiences wandering in these places’, making all the

panoply of survival equipment unnecessary. It is as though someone,

having had a different kind of experience, forgets that this originates

within a specific logical itinerary, simply saying that for him things

were different. This is not criticism, simply to show that at times

authors seem to obstruct our understanding of their ideas. Deliberately?

I don’t know. This idea of the world as an absolute, whole entity is

something we are reasonably well equipped to grasp on this side of the

ocean. It comes as a shock to see it reach us from an American

experience, not least from walks among the millenary redwoods. Indeed,

one of the significant points of this book is that it has dug into the

myth of wild American nature.

Now we are beginning to see that the vine that we caught hold of at the

beginning of this introductory adventure does not belong to the

specifically ‘natural’ world of exotic adventure that constantly summons

us in our dreams, telling us to abandon the trials and tribulations of

daily life. Feral’s vine is a rediscovery of the significance of

humanity as a whole.

This allows us to see the man-nature relationship differently. There can

be no doubt that, in the beginning, nature was considered to be a living

being, alive and separate from that weak, naked being, man. But it is

not considered hostile until history begins to unfold alongside human

beings’ separation from nature as a result of technological conquest,

aided by religion. The ancient Greek concepts physis and logos appear at

the same time, marking this separation. They denote the transition from

the old idea of mother nature to that of nature as something to be

possessed and dominated. Man subsequently studied, catalogued, dissected

and categorised this nature so as (in all appearances) to make it his

kingdom to dominate and exploit.

The ideas expressed in this book all convey a ‘vital energy’ that has

been numbed, often killed, by the domestication of civilisation. The

real wild, not the caricature circulated by travel agencies in

illustrated brochures, cannot be tolerated by civilised society. The

latter must eliminate it in order to guarantee its own survival and

preserve order. As Feral writes, ‘Civilisation will not tolerate what is

wild in its midst. But I never forgot the intensity that life could be.

I never forgot the vital energy that had surged through me. My existence

since I first began to notice that this vitality was being drained away

has been a war between the needs of civilised survival and the need to

break loose and experience the full intensity of life unbound’.

But what is this ‘vital energy’? Feral does not tell us exactly,

although evidence of it is to be found in many parts of this book. Like

all leading concepts, it appears indirectly in considerations that would

be meaningless without its logical premise. The violent response to the

aggression and control constantly exercised by power is an attempt to

free ourselves from the domesticating conditioning that civilisation has

brought to every moment of our lives, and cannot simply be seen in terms

of defence. That would be a losing battle. You might as well just accept

the structures of power and find a niche to survive in. This

rebellion—contrary to that of the pacifists who maintain that

nonviolence is the best form of defence (not realising that the latter

is simply the other side of the same coin as violence)—is an

‘aggressive, dangerous, playful attack by free-spirited individuals

against society’. What characterises the attack is its insurrectional

nature. In the thesis developed here it is not a question of something

that is clearly visible and transformed into codified behaviour with

projects and programmes. It is more a question of the ‘vital energy’

mentioned above. I don’t know if Feral realises how radical the

consequences of these ideas are. In the first place, how fruitful they

will be to the readers who have the courage to penetrate his theses

completely and not be influenced by first impressions of ‘primitivism’.

But if this path—or perhaps Heidegger’s idea of a clearing in the woods

would be more exact here—is to be travelled, there must be no doubt

about the fact that the world is constantly making distinctions between

what is transformable and what is produced by the logic of power. If

this unity of the world where nature is not distinct from humanity, or

the wilderness from the Japanese city with its advanced urban

technology, has any significance at all, it is in this ‘going beyond’.

That is to say it is to be found at the very moment in which one’s own

personal tension and wild vital energy comes alive and sets to

transforming the conditions of domestication. If we were to imagine this

going beyond as one single, circumscribed event to take us to a

condition forever free from domestication—as was the case with the

Marxist thesis—the point of arrival would be no more than a higher level

of domestication, one where we would not even be aware of being

domesticated.

But let us not lose sight of our argument. Adventure, in order to be

such, is always adventure in act. If it were simply adventure tout court

it would end up being institutionalised and the wild, vital instinct

would become limitless and with no measure of contrast, so we would be

unable to dream or attack. When Feral says: ‘All social relationships

have their basis in the incompleteness produced by the repression of our

passions and desires. Their basis is our need for each other, not our

desire for each other,’ that certainly doesn’t mean to say that the

objective is the abolition of society and the creation of a new human

condition to take the place of the incompleteness that comes from the

repression of our passions and desires today. The elimination of this

repression is a process, a going beyond, it is not something one simply

finds around the corner, the opposite of domestication. Even if things

were to go according to Stirner’s idea of the ‘use of the other’ rather

than the ‘need for the other’, that could never become something finite.

Anything I know to be finite is to be found in the graveyard, and even

there more surprises than the wildest revolutionary fantasy might

imagine possibly await us.

I quite agree that ‘social roles are ways in which individuals are

defined by the whole system of relationships that is society in order to

reproduce the latter’, and so ‘society is thus the domestication of

human beings—the transformation of potentially creative, playful, wild

beings—who can relate freely in terms of their desires, into deformed

beings using each other to try to meet desperate needs, but succeeding

only at reproducing the need and the system of relationships based on

it’. But, due to the principle of the man-nature unity that sees

separation as something that is useful only to power, I believe that the

elimination of this condition could never be completed once and for all.

This is an essential point as far as I can see. If we were to imagine a

condition where the explosion of vital (wildly insurrectional) energy

had become something permanent, that is to say, become a fait accompli,

we would be doing no more than finishing off the job of domestication.

In other words, we would simply have become more sophisticated

domesticators. This is what happened to the Marxist ideas that appeared

in the wake of Hegel’s theses: the proletariat were to bring about their

own extinction and be victors in their struggle against the bourgeoisie.

This would mark the end of class society and philosophy, i.e., of the

ideas that had reflected this contradictory movement throughout the

various phases of its historical development. Stirner was also a

prisoner of this schema when he founded the union of egoists as the free

condition of the future. This was to be realised from the (vital?)

energy activated by one’s own personal insurrection, but again was to be

realised once and for all. We can no longer have any faith in models

that predict a clear future, not even one that would give space to the

‘fullness of the passions’.

But perhaps I am exaggerating here. Perhaps Feral has nothing complete

and finite in mind, and there are points in his book that seem to

indicate this. When he writes, ‘The playful violence of insurgence has

no room for regret. Regret weakens the force of blows and makes us

cautious and timid’, he is talking of finishing with the past. In the

joyous rebel violence of insurrection and individual liberation we

cannot take a retrospective look at the already done: having no regrets

cannot mean anything else. But anyone who has no regrets has no history

either. History is a retrospective look at what one has done as opposed

to what one might have done, and the difference is always a sorry list

of mistakes to be avoided in future.

So, anyone who, rather than dedicate themselves to this necrophilic

pastime prefers to cultivate their own life of destructive passion in

the eternal present of revolt against everything that is aimed at

regulating their life, can have no future either. The culture that

suffocates us sees this lack of future as something negative, proposing

a perspective in the logic of ‘a little at a time’ in its place, the

method suggested by Popper in the scientific field. The present world is

entirely based on such theories of accommodation. The fire only reaches

a few who, like Feral, are burning their fingers to support the thesis

of the oneness of the world and the fact that it is quite inseparable.

That might make us wince, but it is the way things are and corresponds

to our original thesis. If we eliminate all regulating ballast we have

no reserves to put in the place of what we destroy. Otherwise it is not

really a question of destruction. When Durruti said in the early months

of the Spanish revolution that the workers could destroy everything

because, having built it all once they could do so again, he was

referring to a situation that has now disappeared for ever. The same

problem arises concerning certain passages in ‘The Cops in Our Heads’.

Here Feral points out: ‘The attempt to make a moral principle of anarchy

distorts its real significance. Anarchy describes a particular type of

situation, one in which either authority does not exist or its power to

control is denied. Such a situation guarantees nothing—not even the

continued existence of that situation, but it does open up the

possibility for each of us to start creating our lives for ourselves in

terms of our own desires and passions rather than in terms of social

roles and the demands of social order. Anarchy is not the goal of

revolution; it is the situation that makes the only type of revolution

that interests me possible—an uprising of individuals to create their

lives for themselves and destroy what stands in their way. It is a

situation free of any moral implications, presenting each of us with the

amoral challenge to live our lives without constraints. Since the

anarchic situation is amoral, the idea of an anarchist morality is

highly suspect. Morality is a system of principles defining what

constitutes right and wrong behaviour.’— Here I get clear confirmation

of what I am trying to say, yet, at the same time I perceive a

contradiction. Perhaps I am splitting hairs, but the question seems to

me to be of no little significance. The confirmation is all in the

movement that guarantees nothing, even in a situation based on the

refusal of authority. But a situation enclosed in the refusal of

authority would be contradictory. In fact, Feral sees the problem and

says that anarchy is not and never could be the aim of the revolution,

but is the situation (I would say the personal situation) that makes the

revolution possible. And I agree, but this can only define itself as

‘amoral’ if it continues in the perspective of ‘going beyond’, never

becoming something established. Otherwise this final ‘whole’ condition

would require moral rules in order to organise itself and persist in

time.

The cops in our heads, along with the domestication they reflect,

represent the opposite pole to the concept of ‘wild nature’. It is this

separation from nature that makes civilisation possible, producing the

techniques that change the latter into something artificial and

enjoyable in small doses, when kept at a safe distance. Everything

becomes clear in this framework and Feral dwells upon it in detail,

excitingly at times.

Thus he writes, ‘There can be no program or organisation for feral

revolution, because wildness cannot spring from a program or

organisation. Wildness springs from the freeing of our instincts and

desires, from the spontaneous expression of our passions. Each of us has

experienced the process of domestication, and this experience can give

us the knowledge we need in order to undermine civilization and

transform our lives’. And we cannot deny this. But only on condition

that everything continues in the never-ending process of going beyond,

in the movement of freedom that does not see what is freed as something

other than oneself and one’s desire to unleash this ‘vital energy’ that

continues to flow from an inexhaustible source. Feral’s acrobatic

juxtaposition of ideas culminates in this endless transition, the

tension that never solidifies, the barricades that never cease fighting,

the violence that never quells. Well, as a soliloquy, it’s not bad. It

fascinates and redeems us from our daily chores. The individual rising

up with the torch of freedom in one hand and hatchet in the other, as

one unforgettable comrade once said, is the classic image of anarchist

iconography. And many anarchists still dream of reaching this condition

of privilege. Not the privilege of the elite, for goodness sake, but of

someone who has held the truth in his hands and with superhuman strength

is extirpating the world at its roots. And the others? Feral has not

read Stirner so superficially as not see that the next step must be that

of reaching others, a community of individual insurgents, a totality of

individuals each developing his or her own personal insurrection. But

this condition cannot be reached through one specific experience.

Nothing in the world of domestication can force us to decide in favour

of this condition of privilege, this ‘going beyond’ in act.

Let me explain. If we decide to do something, this something must

already be within our reach in some way. It is there in front of us,

visible and comprehensible, even if it concerns the strangest and most

remote utopian fantasy. If I decide to break the chains of

domestication, I can only do so because I feel the chains and suffer the

effects of domestication on my own skin. This historicist interpretation

of revolt differs little from the innatist one that assigns the

possibility of rebelling to one’s own character, maintaining that some

individuals are born with genes of rebellion whereas others are more

acquiescent and accept the rules of civilisation. Basically,

this—questionable if you like—genetic element does also exist within the

individual. It is the element we are talking about, the one called upon

to unleash rebellion.

Let us continue. No matter how we look at it, we see that the individual

must act, i.e. become conscious that this something, whatever it is, is

to be found in front of or within them, and admit that the two

hypotheses (the historicist and the innatist) interrelate. The born

rebel puts up with less than those who are not in conflict with

domestication and chains. So we come back to the wholeness of man,

within which distinctions do operate, but only up to a point. We deduce

from this that individual insurrection is only possible when the two

elements exist, meet and interact. And I think that Feral takes this for

granted. But this cannot be compared to anything else. There are no

rules to support this condition other than those that might come from

further domestication following the breaking of the chains. In this case

the rebel would have ended up conforming to the reality of his dreams,

now solidified into something permanent.

If we exclude this hypothesis, as Feral does, all that remains is the

reappearance of the enemy, recognising it and being moved to

insurrection, to infinity. With all my admiration for what Feral says,

it seems to me that this situation threatens to become a stalemate. By

remaining on the barricades one risks losing sight of what one is

actually doing. It is not true that freedom cannot be imagined, or that

all one can think about freedom is incomplete, for example ‘liberties’,

the definition of one’s own limits and those of others. I know that all

that is not true. I know that the fool is he who finds the grain of corn

in a world where most people are pecking around blindly in the logic of

power which has been embellished with a few adjustments. When his heart

floods with hatred for the owners of the chains and the logic of

domestication, this being who wants to rebel against all rules—because

freedom is above all the absence of rules—has one aim and one alone. And

the latter is not utility or domestication but to make the world of

suffering caused by the chains and the stupidity that results from

domestication disappear forever.

This aim, as clear as day, is the one about which nothing better can be

thought, so includes all strategies and any logic of adjustment,

including the single clash and partial conquests of freedom. And there

can be no doubt that this reality, of which nothing better can be

thought, can be thought, even if it is not physically tangible. It is

not simply a question of the chains disappearing or the links of

domestication being broken. It is something else, something that gets

greater and more marvellous and cannot be obfuscated by the specificity

of going beyond. It involves more (or should do), a continual going

beyond that never stops, seeing the chains and domestication in their

most intimate significance, not simply as the means to a better life as

those in power would have it.

If freedom were just a dream, lack of future would be no more than a

great black hole and everything would be reduced to either putting up

with the chains and domestication as far as possible or to living one’s

own personal insurrection. Seen in these terms, and given that the

capacity to choose between better and worse is determined by laws that

are part of one’s domestication, there would be no criteria for choice.

One would go forward blindly, guided by the genetic lumen, not knowing

whether to accept or rebel.

If we choose rebellion we do so because something exists in the future,

not just in our genetic and historical past. And this something is not

merely part of our intelligence, simply a thought. If that were so the

other thought, the logic of acceptance and domestication, would be

equally valid. In the best hypothesis in that case I would die of both

hunger and thirst just like Buridan’s ass, prostrated before the choice

of a bucket of hay and a bucket of water.

But things are not like that. I choose because I consider both the

breaking of the chains and the elimination of domestication to be acts

that thrust me towards a different perspective, throwing me into the

process of going beyond a condition that I loathe and which offends my

good taste. If I define myself wild and a lover of the real wilderness

(not that of the tourists), allowing a certain ‘primitivism’ to be

understood between the lines without ever actually admitting it, that is

nothing but a set of choices. Only those who have taste can choose. And

taste, love and desire are expressions of that genetic-historical

combination that continues to be what we are and impels us to go

forward. When I think of freedom, unspecified freedom which has nothing

better beyond it, it is my whole self that I put into this thought. I am

not a dreamer talking about his visions, but an experimenter who goes

into his visions and is prepared to risk his life for them.

Admission to such a condition of freedom cannot be gained through normal

procedures of reason. It cannot be deduced from what we know through our

daily experience (chains and domestication) but is born elsewhere in the

genetic-historical interrelation that produces our most radical

impulses, our wildest desires and dreams of eternal love that nothing

can ever dim, and the taste for wild adventure. In a word, everything

that Feral talks about and much more besides. If I were to limit myself

to thinking about this coldly I would never be able to convince myself

that it existed or that it was something worth involving myself in and

risking the tranquillity of the chains which the culture of

domestication renders more or less bearable. If I go beyond this level,

(and how many millions of people never do!) it is because at some point

I become unreasonable, throw all care to the winds, and act. But in

practice it is impossible to put all one’s projects, taste, desire and

love aside. In fact, in throwing down his vine, this wild man who lives

in a tree and wanders free among the American redwoods is throwing me an

object of love. He is linking me to him with love in the hope of taking

me with him to that tree of freedom, another wild man like himself.

Because life in freedom would be a poor thing indeed if it were simply a

territory of complete desolation with no relationships, therefore

relations. Like everything that passes between human beings, the latter

depend on taste, desire, love, pleasure, but also hatred, fear, anxiety,

and much more besides.

I do not think that this vine would ever be capable of consolidating

itself once and for all. I do not think that one can interpret the wild

condition as merely ‘vital energy’ in act from Feral’s writing. His

freedom is what one cannot have anything better than. It is the totality

of freedom, the completely free condition, without limits, impediments

or order, not even of a moral or aesthetic character. Once taken into

consideration, this totality can only be conceived as complete if one

sees it as something in movement. Freedom is growth to infinity,

otherwise I would have to admit that I, free at last, would end up dazed

in a complete stupor: absolute freedom would become the absolute

cancellation of man. Totality is therefore always in the course of

development. It is in act, yet always totally present at the moment I

think it. That is the totality I have in mind when I think of absolute

freedom, which destroys limits and domestication. If I were to see it as

something circumscribed I would be thinking of God, merely putting one

word in place of another. And this absolute totality would upturn itself

and become the concept of absolute tyranny, throwing me out of my

involvement, obliging me to adore it as something other than myself. So,

if we agree with the idea of freedom as something both infinite and in

act there is no reason why we cannot acknowledge different processes of

approach within this totality and actively go beyond the conditions of

submission dictated by chains and domestication. Is there anything

contradictory in that? I don’t think so.

Basically, this concern can be summed up in the decision to develop a

project. So the question is: can the totality of my wild rebellion and

freedom, precisely as Feral intends, be linked to a project? Or should

the latter be considered something that needs to be destroyed along with

the other creations of power because it belongs to the world of limits

and rules? In other words, can a project be realised within the context

of the wild insurrection that Feral is talking about? Or does this by

its very nature refuse such a thing because it is a residue of

domestication?

Allow me to develop these questions as I believe them to be of

considerable importance. If I negate the past, and this procures me the

means for attack by essentialising my destructive strength; if I negate

history—as we have said—I can have no future either. In itself this can

only upset palates that have been ruined by Macdonald’s hamburgers. But

this absence of future is not simply a great black hole. It is an

absence that I avert as a presence. Although a lack of something, it is

not ‘absurd’. That is to say, it is not something that I cannot

understand, otherwise it would be a mystical kind of faith which might

even have subversive connotations at times, but could never accept

practical destruction.

So this void contains a great many things, and the more I go ahead in my

rebellion the more freedom takes form and talks to me. It tells me of

the dream of my life, because that is what is at stake here, not just

one of the many games that I can play during my life. In severing all

links with the past and rebelling against domestication, I am presenting

myself bare to the future. This new bareness is all that I have and is

also the whole of freedom, without any hidden parts or reserves. I feel

freedom flare up in my veins, even for an instant in that room full of

books under the severe expression of a revolutionary of times gone by.

It is not a place fixed in time that I can retire to every now again in

my mind. It is my whole self, my totality, always. It is my love that

cannot be dissected, a little here, a little there. It stays whole,

always, a totality that continues to grow. We can only experience

infinity if we erase from our minds the idea of something static such as

the whole of everything that exists. And this totality would be sterile

were we not able to stretch out a hand and widen its range at any

moment. I, adventurer of the incredible, am capable of extending to

infinity in the same way that I can live freedom and not allow myself to

be guaranteed by it.

It is within this absolute tension that I place my project, not in vain

distinctions that assign degrees or procedural levels to doing. I sketch

out a path in the absolute, howl and jump for joy, and only here do I

allude to this tiny portion of reality: a smile, a handshake, a walk

among the fireflies in the evening shadows. And there is nothing I can

do about it if someone points to the moon but only sees their finger,

the stages in the journey. These levels, the specific occasions, are all

illusory. They dress up an idea that lives elsewhere. They are analyses,

even subtle ones, of something that, seen in its individual parts, is

nothing more than brute reality. The vital lymph of all that is

elsewhere in the illusion that supports it. Reason can only weaken it,

scientific seriousness only mask it. It is the light of freedom in its

‘wild’ totality that illuminates the project and makes it perfectly

useless to this world. How many see the project in quantitative terms

and ask themselves what the point of it all is. But why make such an

effort only to stop half way? Their intuition tells them to gaze at

their finger, the moon is too far away and too difficult to comprehend.

But tell me, in all sincerity, is that a good enough reason not to have

a project?

I have many in my heart, and I cannot turn them into talking ghosts to

make them become objects of fascination for others except by dressing

them up in cast-off clothing: analyses, considerations of events,

organisational conditions. These are at the root of the vigorous

certainties of the world of the domesticated, but can also be

interpreted differently by those who rebel. I do not think such efforts

are an obstacle to rebellion. I do think they need to be seen for what

they are: mere reflexes of totality which can only be expressed in the

modest language of progressive experience.

And now I ask one last question: can the totality we carry in our

hearts, the wild experience that Feral talks about, be said in any way

other than by having recourse to language, which is always locked within

progressive experience? After all, the pieces of writing we are

presenting here are merely words. We need to encounter what these words

betray rather than illuminate, elsewhere, in our hearts, at the cost of

our lives. Otherwise they will lose their meaning and return to the

circumscribed, miserable activity of talking for the sake of it. The

same goes for the project: words, mere words, that it is up to us to

read in another way.

- Alfredo M. Bonanno Catania, April 18, 1999

“Feral Revolution”

When I was a very young child, my life was filled with intense pleasure

and a vital energy that caused me to feel what I experienced to the

full. I was the center of this marvelous, playful existence and felt no

need to rely on anything but my own living experience to fulfill me.

I felt intensely, I experienced intensely, my life was a festival of

passion and pleasure. My disappointments and sorrows were also intense.

I was born a free, wild being in the midst of a society based upon

domestication. There was no way that I could escape being domesticated

myself. Civilization will not tolerate what is wild in its midst. But I

never forgot the intensity that life could be. I never forgot the vital

energy that had surged through me. My existence since I first began to

notice that this vitality was being drained away has been a warfare

between the needs of civilized survival and the need to break loose and

experience the full intensity of life unbound.

I want to experience this vital energy again. I want to know the

free-spirited wildness of my unrepressed desires realizing themselves in

festive play. I want to smash down every wall that stands between me and

the intense, passionate life of untamed freedom that I want. The sum of

these walls is everything we call civilization, everything that comes

between us and the direct, participatory experience of the wild world.

Around us has grown a web of domination, a web of mediation that limits

our experience, defining the boundaries of acceptable production and

consumption.

Domesticating authority takes many forms, some of which are difficult to

recognize. Government, capital and religion are some of the more obvious

faces of authority. But technology, work, language with its conceptual

limits, the ingrained habits of etiquette and propriety — these too are

domesticating authorities which transform us from wild, playful, unruly

animals into tamed, bored, unhappy producers and consumers. These things

work in us insidiously, limiting our imaginations, usurping our desires,

suppressing our lived experience. And it is the world created by these

authorities, the civilized world, in which we live. If my dream of a

life filled with intense pleasure and wild adventure is to be realized,

the world must be radically transformed, civilization must fall before

expanding wilderness, authority must fall before the energy of our wild

freedom. There must be — for want of a better word — a revolution.

But a revolution that can break down civilization and restore the vital

energy of untamed desire cannot be like any revolution of the past. All

revolutions to date have centered around power, its use and

redistribution. They have not sought to eradicate the social

institutions that domesticate; at best they have only sought to

eradicate the power relationships within those institutions. So

revolutionaries of the past have aimed their attacks at the centers of

power seeking to overthrow it. Focused on power, they were blind to the

insidious forces of domination that encompass our daily existence and

so, when successful at overthrowing the powers that be, they ended up

re-creating them. To avoid this, we need to focus not on power, but on

our desire to go wild, to experience life to the full, to know intense

pleasure and wild adventure. As we attempt to realize this desire, we

confront the real forces of domination, the forces that we face every

moment of every day. These forces have no single center that can be

overthrown. They are a web that binds us. So rather than trying to

overthrow the powers that be, we want to undermine domination as we

confront it every day, helping the already collapsing civilization to

break down more quickly and as it falls, the centers of power will fall

with it. Previous revolutionaries have only explored the well-mapped

territories of power. I want to explore and adventure in the unmapped,

and unmappable, territories of wild freedom. The revolution that can

create the world I want has to be a feral revolution.

There can be no programs or organizations for feral revolution, because

wildness cannot spring from a program or organization. Wildness springs

from the freeing of our instincts and desires, from the spontaneous

expression of our passions. Each of us has experienced the processes of

domestication, and this experience can give us the knowledge we need to

undermine civilization and transform our lives. Our distrust of our own

experience is probably what keeps us from rebelling as freely and

actively as we’d like. We’re afraid of fucking up, we’re afraid of our

own ignorance. But this distrust and fear have been instilled in us by

authority. It keeps us from really growing and learning. It makes us

easy targets for any authority that is ready to fill us. To set up

“revolutionary” programs is to play on this fear and distrust, to

reinforce the need to be told what to do. No attempt to go feral can be

successful when based on such programs. We need to learn to trust and

act upon our own feelings and experiences, if we are ever to be free.

So I offer no programs. What I will share is some thoughts on ways to

explore. Since we all have been domesticated, part of the revolutionary

process is a process of personal transformation. We have been

conditioned not to trust ourselves, not to feel completely, not to

experience life intensely. We have been conditioned to accept the

humiliation of work and pay as inescapable, to relate to things as

resources to be used, to feel the need to prove ourselves by producing.

We have been conditioned to expect disappointment, to see it as normal,

not to question it. We have been conditioned to accept the tedium of

civilized survival rather than breaking free and really living. We need

to explore ways of breaking down this conditioning, of getting as free

of our domestication as we can now. Let’s try to get so free of this

conditioning that it ceases to control us and becomes nothing more than

a role we use when necessary for survival in the midst of civilization

as we strive to undermine it.

In a very general way, we know what we want. We want to live as wild,

free beings in a world of wild, free beings. The humiliation of having

to follow rules, of having to sell our lives away to buy survival, of

seeing our usurped desires transformed into abstractions and images in

order to sell us commodities fills us with rage. How long will we put up

with this misery? We want to make this world into a place where our

desires can be immediately realized, not just sporadically, but

normally. We want to re-eroticize our lives. We want to live not in a

dead world of resources, but in a living world of free wild lovers. We

need to start exploring the extent to which we are capable of living

these dreams in the present without isolating ourselves. This will give

us a clearer understanding of the domination of civilization over our

lives, an understanding which will allow us to fight domestication more

intensely and so expand the extent to which we can live wildly.

Attempting to live as wildly as possible now will also help break down

our social conditioning. This will spark a wild prankishness in us which

will take aim at all that would tame it, undermining civilization and

creating new ways of living and sharing with each other. These

explorations will expose the limits of civilization’s domination and

will show its inherent opposition to freedom. We will discover

possibilities we have never before imagined... vast expanses of wild

freedom. Projects, ranging from sabotage and pranks that expose or

undermine the dominant society, to the expansion of wilderness, to

festivals and orgies and general free sharing, can point to amazing

possibilities.

Feral revolution is an adventure. It is the daring exploration of going

wild. It takes us into unknown territories for which no maps exist. We

can only come to know these territories if we dare to explore them

actively. We must dare to destroy whatever destroys our wildness and to

act on our instincts and desires. We must dare to trust in ourselves,

our experiences and our passions. Then we will not let ourselves be

chained or penned in. We will not allow ourselves to be tamed. Our feral

energy will rip civilization to shreds and create a life of wild freedom

and intense pleasure.

First published in Demolition Derby #1, 1988, Montréal, Québec-Canada

also printed in “Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed” Issue #19 May-July

1989

and Feral: A Journal Towards Wildness #1 Spring 1999

republished by Elephant Editions (London) 2000/2001 in the collection

“Feral Revolution”

Nature as spectacle. The image of wilderness vs. wildness

(Author’s note: The frequent use of quotation marks in this essay is to

reinforce the idea that nature and wilderness are concepts, not actual

beings.)

Nature has not always existed. It is not found in the depths of the

forest, in the heart of the cougar or in the songs of the pygmies; it is

found in the philosophies and image constructions of civilized human

beings. Seemingly contradictory strands are woven together creating

nature as an ideological construct that serves to domesticate us, to

suppress and channel our expressions of wildness.

Civilization is monolithic and the civilized way of conceiving

everything that is observed is also monolithic. When confronted with the

myriad of beings all around, the civilized mind needs to categorize in

order to feel that it is understanding (though, in fact, all it is

understanding is how to make things useful to civilization). Nature is

one of the most essential of civilized categories, one of the most

useful in containing the wildness of human individuals and enforcing

their self-identification as civilized, social beings.

Probably the earliest conception of nature was something similar to that

found in the old testament of the Bible: the evil wilderness, a place of

desolation inhabited by ferocious and poisonous beasts, malicious demons

and the mad. This conception served a purpose especially important to

early civilizations. It induced fear of what was wild, keeping most

people in the city walls and giving those who did go out to explore a

defensive posture, an attitude that they were in enemy territory. This

concept, in this way, helped create the dichotomy between “human” and

“nature” that keeps individuals from living wildly, that is, in terms of

their desires.

But a totally negative conception of nature was bound to reach its

limits of usefulness since it made civilization into an enclosed and

besieged fortress, and to survive civilization has to expand, to be able

to exploit more and more. “Nature” became a basket of resources for

civilization, a “mother” to nurture “humanity” and its civilization. It

was beautiful, worthy of worship, contemplation, study...and

exploitation. It was not evil...but it was chaotic, capricious and

unreliable. Fortunately for civilization, “human nature” had evolved,

rational and needing to order things, to bring them under control. Wild

places were necessary so that people could study and contemplate

“nature” in its untouched state, but precisely so that civilized human

beings could come to understand and control “natural” processes in order

to use them to expand civilization. So the “evil wilderness” is

overshadowed by a “nature” or “wilderness” that has positive value for

civilization.

The concept of nature creates systems of social value and morality.

Because of the apparently contradictory strands that have gone into the

development of “nature,” these systems also may appear contradictory;

but they all achieve the same end: our domestication. Those who tell us

to “act civilized” and those who tell us to “act natural” are really

telling us the same thing: “Live in accordance with external values, not

in accordance with your desires.” The morality of naturalness has been

no less vicious than any other morality. People have been imprisoned,

tortured and even killed for committing “unnatural acts” — and still

are. “Nature,” too, is an ugly and demanding god.

From its beginnings, nature has been an image created by authority to

reinforce its power. It is no surprise that in modern society, where

image dominates reality and often seems to create it, “nature” comes

into its own as a means of keeping us domesticated. “Nature” shows on

TV, Sierra Club calendars, “wilderness” outfitters, “natural” foods and

fibers, the “environmental” president and “radical” ecology all conspire

to create “nature” and, our “proper” relationship to it. The image

evoked retains aspects of the “evil wilderness” of early civilization in

a subliminal form. “Nature” shows always include scenes of predation and

the directors of these shows have been said to use electric prods in

attempts to goad animals into fights. The warnings given to would-be

“wilderness” explorers about dangerous animals and plants and the amount

of products created by “wilderness” outfitters for dealing with these

things is quite excessive from my own experiences wandering in wild

places. We are given the image of life outside of civilization as a

struggle for survival.

But the society of the spectacle needs the “evil wilderness” to be

subliminal in order to use it efficiently. The dominant image of

“nature” is that it is a resource and a thing of beauty to be

contemplated and studied. “Wilderness” is a place to which we can

retreat for a short time, if properly outfitted, to escape from the

humdrum of daily life, to relax and meditate or to find excitement and

adventure. And, of course, “nature” remains the “mother” who supplies

our needs, the resource from which civilization creates itself.

In commodity culture, “nature” recuperates the desire for wild

adventure, for life free from domestication, by selling us its image.

The subliminal concept of the “evil wilderness” gives venturing into the

woods a tang of risk that appeals to the adventurous and rebellious. It

also reinforces the idea that we don’t really belong there, thus selling

us the numerous products deemed necessary for incursions into wild

places. The positive concept of nature makes us feel that we must

experience wild places (not realizing that the concepts we’ve had fed

into us will create what we experience at least as much as our actual

surroundings). In this way, civilization successfully recuperates even

those areas it seems not to touch directly, transforming them into

“nature,” into “wilderness,” into aspects of the spectacle which keep us

domesticated.

“Nature” domesticates because it transforms wildness into a monolithic

entity, a huge realm separate from civilization. Expressions of wildness

in the midst of civilization are labeled as immaturity, madness,

delinquency, crime or immorality, allowing them to be dismissed, locked

away, censured or punished while still maintaining that what is

“natural” is good. When “wildness” becomes a realm outside of us rather

than an expression of our own individual free-spiritedness, then there

can be experts in “wildness” who will teach us the “correct” ways of

“connecting” with it. On the west coast, there are all sorts of

spiritual teachers making a mint selling a “wildness” to yuppies which

in no way threatens their corporate dreams, their Porsches or their

condos. “Wilderness” is a very profitable industry these days.

Ecologists — even “radical” ecologists — play right into this. Rather

than trying to go wild and destroy civilization with the energy of their

unchained desires, they try to “save wilderness.” In practice, this

means begging or trying to manipulate the authorities into stopping the

more harmful activities of certain industries and turning pockets of

relatively undamaged woods, deserts and mountains into protected

“Wilderness Areas.” This only reinforces the concept of wildness as a

monolithic entity, “wilderness” or “nature,” and the commodification

inherent in this concept. The very basis of the concept of a “Wilderness

Area” is the separation of “wildness” and “humanity.” So it is no

surprise that one of the brands of “radical” ecological ideology has

created the conflict between “biocentrism” and “anthropocentrism�� — as

though we should be anything other than egocentric.

Even those “radical ecologists” who claim to want to reintegrate people

into “nature” are fooling themselves. Their vision of (as one of them

put it) a “wild, symbiotic whole” is just the monolithic concept created

by civilization worded in a quasi-mystical way. “Wildness” continues to

be a monolithic entity for these ecological mystics, a being greater

than us, a god to whom we must submit. But submission is domestication.

Submission is what keeps civilization going. The name of the ideology

which enforces submission matters little — let it be “nature,” let it be

the “wild, symbiotic whole.” The result will still be the continuation

of domestication.

When wilderness is seen as having nothing to do with any monolithic

concept, including “nature” or “wilderness,” when it is seen as the

potential free spiritedness in individuals that could manifest at any

moment, only then does it become a threat to civilization. Any of us

could spend years in “the wilderness,” but if we continued to see what

surrounded us through the lens of civilization, if we continued to see

the myriads of beings monolithically as “nature,” as “wilderness,” as

the “wild, symbiotic whole,” we’d still be civilized; we would not be

wild. But if, in the midst of the city, we at any moment actively refuse

our domestication, refuse to be dominated by the social roles that are

forced upon us and instead live in terms of our passions, desires and

whims, if we become the unique and unpredictable beings that lie hidden

beneath the roles, we are, for that moment, wild. Playing fiercely among

the ruins of a decaying civilization (but don’t be fooled, even in decay

it is a dangerous enemy and capable of staggering on for a long time),

we can do our damnedest to bring it tumbling down. And free-spirited

rebels will reject the survivalism of ecology as just another attempt by

civilization to suppress free life, and will strive to live the chaotic,

ever-changing dance of freely relating, unique individuals in opposition

both to civilization and to civilization’s attempt to contain wild,

free-spirited living: “Nature.”

From “Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed” Issue #29 Summer 1991.

Republished by Elephant Editions (London) 2000/2001 in the collection

“Feral Revolution”

Radical Theory: A Wrecking Ball for Ivory Towers

It seems to have become a given among many anti-authoritarians that

radical theory is an academic pursuit. On the one hand, there are the

ideological activists who accuse anyone who attempts to critically

analyze society or their own activities in a way that goes beyond the

latest hip anarchist sloganeering of being armchair intellectuals or

academics. On the other hand, there are those who supplement the income

of their academic/intellectual professions by writing tracts criticizing

society, the left or even their own professions, but in such abstract

and insubstantial terms as to be meaningless in relation to their lives.

These intellectuals “radicals” and anti-intellectual activists remain

equally enslaved to society’s discourse. Radical theory is elsewhere.

Radical theory springs from the energy of insurgent desire first as a

basic recognition that the social context in which we find ourselves

impoverishes our lives. Because we have been educated not to think, but

rather to have thoughts, it is very easy to fall from this basic

recognition into accepting one or another “radical” ideology, mouthing

the appropriate slogans and participating in mindless activism (better

called reactivism) which jumps and dances for every cause and issue, but

never attacks society at it’s root. I’ve heard “class war” anarchists

(many of them from upper middle class backgrounds) justify such

stupidity by declaring any attempts at more precise and critical

thinking to be an expression of classist privilege — even when those

making the attempts are high school dropout lumpen. But there is nothing

radical about stupidity or “thinking” in slogans even when they’re

anarchist slogans.

Radical theory is the attempt to understand the complex system of

relationships which is society, how it reproduces itself and the

individual as a part of itself, and how one can begin to undermine its

control and take back one’s life in order to become a self-creative

individual. It has no place in either the ivory tower of the academy or

that of the mindless ideological (re)activism. It is rather an integral

part of an active insurgence against society.

Having recognized that society impoverishes our lives, it is a very

small step to realize that the simplistic sloganeering that is

frequently passed off as radical thought is part of this impoverishment.

It belittles us as individuals by substituting itself for thinking and

imagination. “Smash authority” is a wonderful sentiment, but that’s all

it is. It tells us nothing about the nature of authority, our

relationship to it, its trajectories and tendencies or how we can go

about destroying it. This is why those for whom this slogan is an

adequate analysis of authority continues to repeat the same futile and

insipid actions over and over again as signs of their resistance to

authority, actions which have long since proven only to reinforce

authority by creating easily confined rituals of pseudo-opposition which

keep rebellion domesticated.

The small step which opens the possibility of thinking beyond slogans is

an about-face, a reversal of perspective. If society impoverishes our

lives, if it offers nothing worth having, then there is no reason for

any of us to let this absurd system of relationships into which we have

been integrated continue to determine how we view the world either by

acceptance of its perspective or by reaction to it. Instead our attempts

to create our lives as fully and intensely as possible, which will bring

us into conflict with society, can be the basis for an ongoing analysis

of society and our relationship to it that challenges and enhances our

thinking and imaginations and stimulates an active insurgence against

authority as it exists in the interactions that create our daily lives.

This analysis can not be a static set of ideas and principles, because

it is an integral part of a dialectic of thinking and living as an

insurgent, self-creating individual. As such, it is an integral part of

action, not a separate specialization. Written expressions of this

analysis (which should not be mistaken for the analysis itself) require

the development of a language that is very precise and very fluid, very

pointed and very playful. I am very far from attaining this, but am

trying to develop it. The language of the situationists (particularly

Debord and Vaneigem in his SI days) was aiming for this. But those who

prefer slogans to intensive analysis frequently accuse those attempting

to develop such language of “intellectualism,” yet only by developing

such a language can the expression of theory be wrested from

intellectual specialists and made into an integral part of an active

insurgence.

Radical theory is an aspect of a way of living which smashes all ivory

towers. It exposes the theories that spill from the academic ivory

towers as lifeless shams. It exposes the actions of the ideologues of

activism as mindless reaction. To put it another way, theorists who

aren’t living insurgent life say nothing that’s worth saying, and

activists who refuse to think critically do nothing worth doing. Radical

theory is thinking becoming sensually integrated into an insurgent life

and learning, however slowly, to express itself with precision and

fluidity. When developed it cuts like a well-honed knife.

From Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #38 Fall 1993

republished by Elephant Editions (London) 2000/2001 in the collection

“Feral Revolution”

reprinted in the pamphlet “The Iconoclast’s Hammer” by Venomous

Butterfly Publications.

Insurgent Ferocity: The Playful Violence of Rebellion

“We don’t just talk about violence; it is our element, our everyday

fate...the conditions we are forced to live in...”

Os Cangacieros

Social control is impossible without violence. Society produces systems

of rationaized violence to socialize individuals — to make them into

useful resources for society, while some of these systems, such as the

military, the plolice and the penal system can still be viewed

separately due to the blatant harshness of their violence, for the most

part these systems have become so interconnected and so pervasive that

they act as a single totality — the totality which is the society in

which we live.

This systemic violence exists mostly as a constant underlying threat — a

subtle, even boring, everyday terrorism which incuces a fear of stepping

out of line. The signs and orders from “superiors” which threaten us

with punishment or poverty, the armed, uniformed thugs who are there to

“protect and serve” (huh!?!), the barrage of headlines about wars,

torture, serial killers and streeet gangs, all immerse us in an

atmosphere of subtle, underlying, rationalized social violence which

causes us to fear and repress our own violent passions.

In light of the systematic social violence that surrounds us, it’s no

surprise that people are fooled into viewing all violence as a single,

monolithic entity rather than as specific acts or ways of relating. The

system of violence produced by society does become a monolith which acts

to perpetuate itself.

In reaction to this monolithic system of violence, the “pathology of

pacifism” develops. Unable to see beyond social catagories, the pacifist

creates a false dichotomy, limiting the question of violence to the

ethical/intellectual choice between as acceptance of violence as a

monolithic system or the total rejection of violence. But this choice

exists only in the realm of worthless abstactions, because in the world

in which we actually live, pacifism and systematic violence depend upon

each other. Pacifism is an ideaology which demands total social peace as

its ultimate goal. But total social peace would require the complete

suppression of the individual passions that create individual incidences

of violence — and that would require total social control. Total social

control is only possible through the use of the constant threat of the

police, prison, therapy, social censure, scarcity or war. So the

pacifist ideal requires a monolithic system of violence and reflects the

social contradiction inherent in the necessity that authority strive to

maintain peace in order to maintain a smoothly running social system,

but can only do so by maintaining a rationalized system of violence.

The rational system of violence not only perpetuates itself, but also

evokes responses, often in the form of blind lashings out by enraged

individuals, which the system then manipulates into justifications for

its own continual existence, and occasionally in the form of consciously

rebellious violence. The passionate violence that is suppressed turns in

on the one feeling it, becoming the the slow-killing, underlying

violence of stress and anxiety. It is evident in the millions of little

pinpricks of humiliation that pass between people on the streets and in

the public places of every city — looks of disgust and hostility between

strangers, and the verbal battle of wits exchanging guilt and blame

between supposed friends. This is the subtlest and most total form of

rationalised violence; everyone conforms out of fear of each others’

disgust. This is the subtle form of violence practiced by pacifists.

“I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence

of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing.” —Raoul

Vaneigem

Those of us who are fighting for the freedom to create our lives for

ourselves need to reject both sides of the choice society offers between

pacifism and systematic violence, because this choice is an attempt to

socialize our rebellion. Instead we can create our own options,

developing a playful and passionate chaos of action and relating which

may express itself at times with intense and ferocious violence, at

times with the gentlest tenderness, or whatever way our passions and

whims move us in the particular moment. Both the rejection of violence

and the systemization of violence are an attack on our passions and

uniqueness.

Violence is an aspect of animal interaction and observation of violence

among animals belies several generalizations. Violence among animals

does not fit into the formula of social darwinism; there is no perpetual

war of all against all. Rather at specific moments under particular

circumstances, individual acts of violence flare up and then fade when

the moments pass. There is no systematic violence in the wild, but,

instead, momentary expressions of specific passions. This exposes one of

the major fallacies of pacifist ideology. Violence, in itself, does not

perpetuate violence. The social system of rationalized violence, of

which pacifism is an integral part, perpetuates itself as a system.

Against the system of violence, a non-systematized, passionate, playful

violence is the appropriate response. Violent play is very common among

animals and children. Chasing, wrestling and pouncing upon a playmate,

breaking, smashing and tearing apart things are all aspects of play that

is free of rules. The conscious insurgent plays this way as well, but

with real targets and with the intention of causing real damage. The

targets of this ferocious play in the present society would mainly be

institutions, commodities, social roles and cultural icons, but the

human representatives of these institutions can also be targets —

especially where they present an immediate threat to anyone’s freedom to

create their life as they desire.

Rebellion has never been merely a matter of self-defense. In itself,

self-defense is probably best achieved by accepting the status quo of

its reform. Rebellion is the aggressive, dangerous, playful attack by

free-spirited individuals against society. Refusing a system of

violence, refusing an organized, militarized form of armed struggle,

allows the violence of insurgents to retain a high level of

invisibility. It cannot be readily understood by the authorities and

brought under their control. Its insurgent nature may even go undetected

by the authorities as it eats away at the foundations of social control.

From the rationalized perspective of authority, this playful violence

will often appear utterly random, but actually is in harmony with the

desires of the insurgent. This playful violence of rebellion kills

“inadvertently as (one) strides out happily without looking back.”

The playful violence of insurgence has no room for regret. Regret

weakens the force of blows and makes us cautious and timid. But regret

only comes in when violence is dealt with as a moral question, and for

insurgents who are fighting for the freedom to live their desires;

morality is just another form of social control. Wherever rebel violence

has manifested playfully, regret seems absurd. In riots (other than

police riots) and spontaneous uprisings — as well as in small-scale

vandalism — a festive attitude seems to be evident. There is an intense

joy, even euphoria, in the release of violent passions that have been

pent up for so long. Bashing in the skull of society as we experience it

on a daily basis is an intense pleasure, and one to be savored, not

repudiated in shame, guilt or regret. Some may object that such an

attitude could cause our violence to get out of hand, but an excess of

insurgent violence is not something that we need to fear. As we break

down our repression and begin to free our passions, certainly our

gestures, our actions and our entire way of being are bound to become

increasingly expansive and all we do we will seem to do to excess. our

generosity will seem excessive and our violence will seem excessive.

Unrepressed, expansive individuals squander in all things. Riots and

insurrections have failed to get beyond temporary release, not because

of excess, but because people hold themselves back. People have not

trusted their passions. They have feared the expansiveness, the

squandering excess of their own dreams and desires. So they have given

up or turned their fight over to new authorities, new systemizers of

violence. But how can insurgent violence ever be truly excessive when

there is no institution of social control, no aspect of authority, no

icon of culture that should not be smashed to powder — and that

geefully?

If what we want is a world in which each of us can create our own lives

free of constraints, relating with each other as we desire rather than

in accordance with socially defined roles, we have to recognize that, at

times, violence will flare and that there is nothing wrong with that.

Fullness of the passions includes full and expansive expressions of

hatred and rage — and these are violent emotions. Though this violence

can be used tactically it will not be systematic. Though it can be

intelligent, it will not be rationalized. And under no circumstances is

it self-perpetuating, because it is individual and temporary, spending

itself fully in its free, passionate expression. Neither moralistic

non-violence nor the systematic violence of military struggle can break

down authority since both require some form of authority. Only the

expansive and passionate violence of insurgent individuals playing alone

or with each other has any chance of destroying this society...

from “Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed” Issue #33 Summer 1992

republished by Elephant Editions (London) 2000/2001 in the collection

“Feral Revolution”

reprinted in the pamphlet “The Iconoclast’s Hammer” by Venomous

Butterfly Publications.

Social Transformation — or the abolition of society

“Society...1. a group of persons who have the same customs, beliefs,

etc. or live under a common government and who are thought of as forming

a single community... 3. all people, when thought of as forming a

community in which each person is partly dependent on all the rest”

Webster’s New World Dictionary

Nothing we “know” can be assumed to be true — none of our conceptions of

the world are sacred and we would do well to question them all. Many

anarchists talk about creating a “new” or “free” society. But few

question the idea of society itself. The conception of society is

amorphous — and so more difficult to deal with than particular aspects

of it like government, religion, capitalism or technology. It is so

ingrained in us that questioning it feels like questioning our very

nature — which makes it all the more necessary to question it. Freeing

ourselves from the character armor that represses our desires and

passions may very well demand, not merely the transformation of society,

but its abolition. The dictionary definitions above show society to be a

single entity made up of individuals who are in a condition of (at least

potential) dependency upon each other — which is to say, who are not

complete in themselves. I see society as a system of relationships

between beings who are acting (or being treated) as social roles in

order to reproduce the system and themselves as social individuals.

The dependency of social individuals is not the same as the biological

dependency of infants. Biological dependency ends once the child

achieves adequate mobility and hand-and-eye coordination (in about five

years). But in those five years, the social relationships of the family

repress children’s desires, instill fear of the world into them and so

submerge the potential for full, free, creative individuality beneath

the layers of armoring which are the social individual, beneath the

psychic dependency which makes us cling desperately to each other while

we despise each other. All social relationships have their basis in the

incompleteness produced by the repression of our passions and desires.

Their basis is our need for each other, not our desire for each other.

We are using each other. So every social relationship is an

employer/employee relationship, which is why they seem always, to one

extent or another, to become adversarial — whether through joking

put-downs, bickering or full-fledged fighting. How can we help but

despise those we use and hate those who use us?

Society cannot exist apart from social roles — this is why the family

and education in some form are essential parts of society. The social

individual doesn’t play only one social role — but melds together many

roles which create the character armor which is mistaken for

“individuality.”

Social roles are ways in which individuals are defined by the whole

system of relationships that is society in order to reproduce society.

They make individuals useful to society by making them predictable, by

defining their activities in terms of the needs of society. Social roles

are work — in the broad sense of activity that reproduces the

production/consumption cycle. Society is thus the domestication of human

beings — the transformation of potentially creative, playful, wild

beings who can relate freely in terms of their desires into deformed

beings using each other to try to meet desperate needs, but succeeding

only at reproducing the need and the system of relationships based on

it.

“A pox on all captivity, even should it be in the interest of the

universal good, even in Montezuma’s garden of precious stones.” Andre

Breton

Free-spirited individuals have no interest in seriously relating as

social roles. Predictable, predetermined relationships bore us and we

have no desire to continue to reproduce them. It is true that they offer

some security, stability and (luke-)warmth...but at such expense!

Rather, we want freedom to relate in terms of our unrepressed desires,

the opening of all possibilities, the raging fire of our passions

unbound. And such a life lies outside any system of predictable,

predetermined relationships.

Society offers safety, but it does so by eradicating the risk that is

essential to free play and adventure. It offers us survival — in

exchange for our lives. For the survival it offers us is survival as

social individuals — as beings who are composites of social roles,

alienated from their passions and desires — involved in social

relationships to which we are addicted, but which never satisfy.

A world of free relating among unrepressed individuals would be a world

free of society. All interactions would be determined immediately. All

by the individuals involved, in terms of their desires — not by the

necessities of a social system. We would tend to amaze, delight, enrage

each other, to evoke real passion rather than mere boredom, complacency,

disgust, or security. Every encounter would have a potential for

marvelous adventure which cannot fully exist where most relating is in

the form of social relationships. So rather than remain captive in this

“garden of precious stones” called society, I choose to struggle to

abolish society — and that has several implications as to how I

understand “revolution” (for want of a better term).

The struggle to transform society is always a struggle for power,

because its goal is to gain control over the system of relationships

that is society (a goal which I see as unrealistic since this system is

now mostly beyond anyone’s control). As such, it cannot be an individual

struggle. It requires mass or class activity. Individuals have to define

themselves as social beings in this struggle, suppressing any individual

desires which do not fit in to the. “greater” goal of social

transformation.

The struggle to abolish society is a struggle to abolish power. It is

essentially the struggle of individuals to live free of social roles and

rules, to live out their desires passionately, to live out all the most

marvelous things they can imagine. Group projects and struggles are part

of this, but they grow from the ways in which the desires of the

individuals can enhance each other, and will dissolve when they begin to

stifle the individuals. The path of this struggle cannot be mapped out

because its basis is the confrontation between the desires of the

free-spirited individual and the demands of society. But analyses of the

ways in which society molds us and of the failures and successes of past

rebellions are possible.

The tactics used against society are as many as the individuals

involved, but all share the aim of undermining social control and

conditioning, and freeing the individual’s desires and passions. The

unpredictability of humor and playfulness are essential, evoking a

Dionysian chaos. Playing with social roles in ways that undermine their

usefulness to society, that turn them on their head, making toys of them

is a worthy practice. But most importantly, let us confront society with

ourselves, with our unique desires and passions, with the attitude that

we are not going to give in to it, or center our activities around it,

but are going to live on our own terms.

Society is not a neutral force. Social relationships only exist by the

suppression of the real desires and passions of individuals, by the

repression of all that makes free relating possible. Society is

domestication, the transformation of individuals into use value and of

free play into work. Free relating among individuals who refuse and

resist their domestication undermines all society, and opens all

possibilities. And to those who feel that they can achieve freedom

through a merely social revolution, lend with these words of Renzo

Navatore:

“You are waiting for the revolution? Let it be! My own began a long time

ago! When you will be ready...I won’t mind going along with you for a

while. But when you’ll stop, I shall continue on my insane and

triumphant way toward the great and sublime conquest of the nothing!”

From “Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed” Issue #25 Summer 1990,

Republished by Elephant Editions (London) 2000/2001 in the collection

“Feral Revolution”. Reprinted in the pamphlet “The Iconoclast’s Hammer”

by Venomous Butterfly Publications.

The Cops In Our Heads: Some thoughts on anarchy and morality

In my travels over the past several months, I have talked with many

anarchists who conceive of anarchy as a moral principle. Some go so far

as to speak of anarchy as though it were a deity to whom they had given

themselves—reinforcing my feeling that those who really want to

experience anarchy may need to divorce themselves from anarchism.

The most frequent of the moral conceptions of anarchy I heard defined

anarchy as a principled refusal to use force to impose one’s will on

others. This conception has implications which I cannot accept. It

implies that domination is mainly a matter of personal moral decisions

rather than of social roles and relationships, that all of us are

equally in a position to exercise domination and that we need to

exercise self-discipline to prevent ourselves from doing so. If

domination is a matter of social roles and social relationships, this

moral principle is utterly absurd, being nothing more than a way of

separating the politically correct (the elect) from the politically

incorrect (the damned). This definition of anarchy places anarchic

rebels in a position of even greater weakness in an already lopsided

struggle against authority. All forms of violence against people or

property, general strikes, theft and even such tame activities as civil

disobedience constitute a use of force to impose one’s will. To refuse

to use force to impose one’s will is to become totally passive—to become

a slave. This conception of anarchy makes it a rule to control our

lives, and that is an oxymoron.

The attempt to make a moral principle of anarchy distorts its real

significance. Anarchy describes a particular type of situation, one in

which either authority does not exist or its power to control is

negated. Such a situation guarantees nothing—not even the continued

existence of that situation, but it does open up the possibility for

each of us to start creating our lives for ourselves in terms of our own

desires and passions rather than in terms of social roles and the

demands of social order. Anarchy is not the goal of revolution; it is

the situation which makes the only type of revolution that interests me

possible —an uprising of individuals to create their lives for

themselves and destroy what stands in their way. It is a situation free

of any moral implications, presenting to each of us the amoral challenge

to live our lives without constraints.

Since the anarchic situation is amoral, the idea of an anarchist

morality is highly suspect. Morality is a system of principles defining

what constitutes right and wrong behavior. It implies some absolute

outside of individuals by which they are to define themselves, a

commonality of all people that makes certain principles applicable to

everyone.

I don’t wish to deal with the concept of the “commonality of all people”

in this article: My present point is that whatever morality is based

upon, it always stands outside of and above the living individual.

Whether the basis or morality is god, patriotism, common humanity,

production needs, natural law, “the Earth,” anarchy, or even “the

individual” as a principle, it is always an abstract ideal that rules

over US. Morality is a form of authority and will be undermined by an

anarchic situation as much as any other authority if that situation is

to last.

Morality and judgment go hand in hand. Criticism—even harsh, cruel

criticism—is essential to honing our rebellious analysis and practice,

but judgment needs to be utterly eradicated. Judgment categorizes people

as guilty or not guilty—and guilt is one of the most powerful weapons of

repression. When we judge and condemn ourselves or anyone else, we are

suppressing rebellion—that is the purpose of guilt. (This does not mean

that we “shouldn’t” hate, or wish to kill anyone—it would be absurd to

create an “amoral” morality, but our hatred needs to be recognized as a

personal passion and not defined in moral terms.) Radical critique grows

from the real experiences, activities, passions and desires of

individuals and aims at liberating rebelliousness. Judgment springs from

principles and ideals that stand above us; it aims at enslaving us to

those ideals. Where anarchic situations have arisen, judgment has often

temporarily disappeared, freeing people of guilt— as in certain riots

where people of all sorts looted together in a spirit of joy in spite of

having been taught all of their lives to respect property. Morality

requires guilt; freedom requires the elimination of guilt.

A dadaist once said, “Being governed by morals... has made it impossible

for us to be anything other than passive toward the policeman; this is

the source of our slavery.” Certainly, morality is a source of

passivity. I have heard of several situations in which fairly

large-scale anarchic situations started to develop and have experienced

minor ones, but in each of these situations, the energy dissipated and

most participants returned to the non-lives they’d lived before the

uprisings. These events show that, in spite of the extent to which

social control permeates all of our waking (and much of our sleeping)

lives, we can break out. But the cops in our heads—the morality, guilt

and fear—have to be dealt with. Every moral system, no matter what

claims it makes to the contrary, places limits on the possibilities

available to us, constraints upon our desires; and these limits are not

based on our actual capabilities, but on abstract ideas that keep us

from exploring the full extent of our capabilities. When anarchic

situations have arisen in the past, the cops in peoples’ heads—the

ingrained fear, morality and guilt—have frightened people, keeping them

tame enough to retreat back into the safety of their cages, and the

anarchic situation disappeared.

This is significant because anarchic situations don’t just pop out of

nowhere—they spring from the activities of people frustrated with their

lives. It is possible for each of us at any moment to create such a

situation. Often this would be tactically foolish, but the possibility

is there. Yet we all seem to wait patiently for anarchic situations to

drop from the sky— and when they do explode forth, we can’t keep them

going. Even those of us who have consciously rejected morality find

ourselves hesitating, stopping to examine each action, fearing the cops

even when there are no external cops around. Morality, guilt and fear of

condemnation act as cops in our heads, destroying our spontaneity, our

wildness, our ability to live our lives to the full.

The cops in our heads will continue to suppress our rebelliousness until

we learn to take risks. I don’t mean that we have to be stupid—jail is

not an anarchic or liberatory situation, but without risk, there is no

adventure, no life. Self-motivated activity—activity that springs from

our passions and desires, not from attempts to conform to certain

principles and ideals or to blend in to any group (including

“anarchists”)—is what can create a situation of anarchy, what can open

up a world of possibilities limited only by our capabilities. To learn

to freely express our passions—a skill earned only by doing it—is

essential. When we feel disgust, anger, joy, desire, sadness, love,

hatred, we need to express them. It isn’t easy. More often than not, I

find myself falling into the appropriate social role in situations where

I want to express something different. I’ll go into a store feeling

disgust for the whole process of economic relationships, and yet

politely thank the clerk for putting me through just that process. Were

I doing this consciously, as a cover for shoplifting; it would be fun,

using my wits to get what I want; but it is an ingrained social

response—a cop in my head. I am improving; but I have a hell of a long

way to go. Increasingly, I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges

without caring about what others think of me. This is a self-motivated

activity—the activity that springs from our passions and desires, from

our suppressed imaginations, our unique creativity. Sure, following our

subjectivity this way, living our lives for ourselves, can lead us to

make mistakes, but never mistakes comparable to the mistake of accepting

the zombie existence that obedience to authority, morality, rules or

higher powers creates. Life without risks, without the possibility of

mistakes, is no life at all. Only by taking the risk of defying all

authority and living for ourselves will we ever live life to the full.

I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all

possibilities so that I can create my life for myself—at every moment.

This means breaking down all social roles and destroying all morality.

When an anarchist or any other radical starts preaching their moral

principles at me—whether non-coercion, deep ecology, communism,

militantism or even ideologically-required “pleasure”—I hear a cop or a

priest, and I have no desire to deal with people as cops or priests,

except to defy them. I am struggling to create a situation in which I

can live freely, being all that I desire to be, in a world of free

individuals with whom I can relate in terms of our desires without

constraints. I have enough cops in my head—as well as those out on the

streets—to deal with without having to deal with the cops of “anarchist”

or radical morality as well. Anarchy and morality are opposed to each

other, and any effective opposition to authority will need to oppose

morality and eradicate the cops in our heads.

From Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed #24, March-April 1990.

Republished by Elephant Editions (London) 2000/2001 in the collection

“Feral Revolution”.

Reprinted in the pamphlet “The Quest for the Spiritual” by Venomous

Butterfly Publications.

The Quest for the Spiritual: A Basis for a Radical Analysis of

Religion

This civilized, technological, commodity culture in which we live is a

wasteland. For most people, most of the time, life is dull and empty,

lacking vibrancy, adventure, passion and ecstasy. It’s no surprise that

many people search beyond the realm of their normal daily existence for

something more. It is in this light that we need to understand the quest

for the spiritual.

Of course, many, if not most, religious people are not really questing

for anything. Religion provides them with dogmas, easy answers which

allow them to stop thinking, feeling or acting for themselves. I feel

nothing but disgust for their mindless, dogmatic spirituality and will

deal no further with it. It is rather with sincere spiritual questing

that I wish to deal.

I was raised a fundamentalist Christian, so I have first-hand experience

of one of the most repressive forms of religion. A few—though very

few—fundamentalists are truly questing for something more. I was one of

these. I questioned, I probed, I sought for the intense depth of passion

that this religion promised but that its practitioners rarely

manifested. I decided to study for the ministry, not because I wanted to

be a minister, but because I hoped to gain a greater understanding of

the spiritual. During my studies, I left my fundamentalism behind,

embracing a Christian mysticism which combined aspects of

pentecostalism, Tolstoyan anarcho-pacifism and non-violent millenarian

revolutionism.

In order to better live this “radical Christianity,” I dropped out of

college and wandered around the country visiting “radical Christian”

communes. I finally settled in a commune in Washington, D.C., because

they really seemed to be doing something. Within a few months, my

attempts to live my faith came to a head. I was putting all my strength

and energy into actively expressing the “radical” self-sacrifice that I

believed would transform the world into the kingdom of god. Twelve hours

a day, I worked on a project designed to help poor ghetto-dwellers

create a housing cooperative in which they would collectively own and

control their housing. My energy gave out. When I called on god to help

me, he wasn’t there to answer. When I was most dedicated to him, the god

I had trusted all my life failed me. As a result, I had a nervous

breakdown and went through several months of severe depression. What

finally brought me out of it was recognizing that there was no god,

there was no reason to expend myself in absurd self-sacrifice and my

energy would be best used in creating my own life.

My rejection of Christianity and god first took the form of a crass

mechanistic materialism, but someone who had so passionately pursued the

spiritual could never be satisfied with a dead mechanistic view of

reality. So I dissected Christianity—my two and a half years of

theological studies was useful in this—and compared and contrasted other

religions. I already knew that Christianity was dualistic, dividing

reality into spirit and matter. I discovered that this dualism was

common to all religions with the possible exceptions of some forms of

Taoism and Buddhism. I also discovered something quite insidious about

the flesh/spirit dichotomy. Religion proclaims the realm of spirit to be

the realm of freedom, of creativity, of beauty, of ecstasy, of joy, of

wonder, of life itself. In contrast, the realm of matter is the realm of

dead mechanical activity, of grossness, of work, of slavery, of

suffering, of sorrow. The earth, the creatures on it, even our own

bodies were impediments to our spiritual growth, or at best, tools to be

exploited. What a perfect ideological justification for the exploitative

activities of civilization.

But I don’t believe religion necessarily developed purely as a way of

justifying exploitation. Much more likely is that as exploitation

immiserated the lives of people, the ecstatic joy of wild existence and

of the flesh unrepressed became fainter and fainter memories until at

last they seemed to be not of this world at all. This world was the

world of travail (from the Latin root word which gives all the Romance

languages their word for work) and sorrow. Joy and ecstasy had to be of

another realm—the realm of spirit. Early religion is wildly orgiastic,

clearly reflecting the lost way of life for which people longed. But by

separating this wild abandon into the realm of spirit, which is in

reality just a realm of abstract ideas with no concrete existence,

religion made itself the handmaiden of civilized, domesticated culture.

So it is no surprise that in time shamans evolved into priests who were

functionaries of the state.

Religion—which started as an attempt, clearly flawed, to regain the

ecstasy of unconstrained pleasure—as the hand- maiden of authority had

to take a different stance toward pleasure. For the most part, religion

has declared pleasure to be gross, evil, or a distraction from “higher”

spiritual pursuits. Present pleasure was to be repressed for a future

paradise. A few schools of religious thought took a different tactic.

Since pleasure could so clearly induce ecstasy, these schools said that

it was fine to practice these activities as long as it was done in the

right way, at the right time, for purely spiritual purposes. The

spontaneous, playful expressions of pleasure were strongly discouraged

as they distracted from the spiritual expressions of these practices.

The puritanism and productivist orientation to pleasure in some tantric

and sexmagickal texts is astounding. In these spiritual practices,

pleasure is subverted from its natural course in which it would create a

world of free play and is transformed into spiritual work.

The rejection of religion in recent centuries has mainly taken the form

of crass, mechanistic materialism. But this is not truly a rejection of

religion. This form of materialism still accepts the matter/spirit

dichotomy—but then proclaims that spirit does not exist. Thus, freedom,

creativity, beauty, ecstasy, life as something more than mere mechanical

existence are utterly eradicated from the world. Mechanistic materialism

is the ideology of religion updated to fit the needs of industrial

capitalism. For industrial capitalism requires not only a deadened,

dispirited earth, but deadened, dispirited human beings who can be made

into cogs in a vast machine.

But there have been other rebellions against religious ideology. I am

most familiar with those that arose in Christian Europe. In their most

radical expressions, the Free Spirits, the Adamites and the Ranters

utterly rejected the flesh/spirit dichotomy, claimed paradise for the

earth in the present, claimed divinity for themselves as physical beings

and rejected the concept of sin and absolute morality. At their best,

they were radically anti-religious. They used religious language in a

way that turned religion on its head and undermined its basis. It seems

that these anti-religious radicals weren’t aware of the full

implications of what they were doing, and because of that their

rebellion was recuperated where it wasn’t simply wiped out.

Industrial capitalism and its attendant ideology, mechanistic

materialism, have drained the life and beauty from our experience of the

world. We have been taught to distrust our own experience and to accept

as “knowledge” the word of authority as found in textbooks, heard in

lectures or poured into us by television or other media. And the picture

of reality we are spoonfed is so joyless, so lacking in passion, that if

there is any feeling left in us, we must have something more. Because

religion has usurped the passion from the world, its language is often

quite passionate, ecstatic, even erotic. It certainly sounds like the

place to look for the depth of feeling and wild creativity for which we

long. In my own explorations, I experimented with mystical practices and

magical ritual. And both within the context of these experiments and

outside of that context in wilderness areas, I have had experiences

which don’t fit into the framework of a mechanistic materialist

worldview. Certainly, religion could provide a framework for those

experiences.

But, ultimately, religion fails to meet “spiritual” needs. It fails

because it declares those needs to be spiritual—of a nonworldly

realm—and so cannot deal with their roots. For it is civilization with

its need to exploit the earth, and most especially industrial

civilization for which even humans must become mere cogs in a huge

machine, that drains our lives of beauty, of creativity, of passion, of

ecstasy. William Blake said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed,

everything would appear as it is: infinite.” And I know our senses can

be doors to vast worlds of wonder. I have experienced as much. But our

senses have been bound to the needs of production and consumption, and

so made incapable of experiencing the vibrant life that is the physical

world on a moment-to-moment basis.

Religion claims to give us back the freedom, the creativity, the

passionate fullness of life that was stolen from us, but, in fact, is

part of the conspiracy to keep this fullness from us. In relegating

creativity, passion, freedom and ecstasy to the realm of the spiritual,

religion safely takes them out of the realm of daily life and puts them

in their “proper” place where they cannot become a threat to

civilization—the realm of ritual and ceremony. My own experiments with

magic and mystical practice taught me something interesting. When I

looked back on my experiences without putting them in any sort of

ideological context—and without religious metaphors to obscure what was

really going on, I realized that everyone of these experiences was a

physical, bodily, sensual experience, not an experience in some sort of

“spiritual” realm. But it was an experience of the senses free of their

ideological, civilized chains. I was momentarily experiencing the world

as a wild being, without mediation. It’s interesting to note that the

metaphor that I have found most useful in describing these experiences

is the lycanthropic metaphor—I felt that I had turned into some

non-human creature. Civilization has become so much a part of our

definition of the human, that our minds seem to view experiences of

uncivilized sensuality as experiences of inhuman sensuality. When

religion defines these experiences, it destroys their sensuality and

wildness, denies their bodily nature, and so civilizes them. Eventually,

they fade. Religion ceases to be orgiastic and turns dogmatic—and to

those with any perception it becomes clear that religion is incapable of

fulfilling its promise.

The revolutionary project must certainly include the end of religion—but

not in the form of a simplistic acceptance of mechanistic materialism.

Rather, we must seek to awaken our senses to the fullness of life that

is the material world. We must oppose both religion and mechanistic

materialism with a vibrant, passionate, living materialism. We must

storm the citadel of religion and reclaim the freedom, the creativity,

the passion and the wonder that religion has stolen from our earth and

our lives. In order to do this we will have to understand what needs and

desires religion speaks to and how it fails to fulfill them. I have

attempted to express some of my own explorations so that we can carry on

the project of creating ourselves as free, wild beings. The project of

transforming the world into a realm of sensual joy and pleasure by

destroying the civilization that has stolen the fullness of life from

us.

From Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed #17, Fall/Winter 1988.

Republished by Elephant Editions (London) 2000/2001 in the collection

“Feral Revolution”

Reprinted in the pamphlet “The Quest for the Spiritual” by Venomous

Butterfly Publications.

Drifting away from the sacred: Thoughts inspired by reading Peter

Lamborn Wilson’s The Sacred Drift

My feelings when I read Peter Lamborn Wilson is that he wishes to live

very much as I do, yet he looks to the realm of spirituality as a means

to achieve this. To me, it is evident that this is another false path to

autonomous self-creation—precisely because it is a path...and one that

has been tried so often its failure should be self-evident.

The surrealists called for divergence from all known paths, yet their

project proved to be absurd because they sought the marvelous in a

passive way outside of any “spiritual” context. Nineteenth century

materialism made the mistake of killing god without reclaiming what god

had stolen from human beings and from the world. This left a wasteland.

The surrealist attempt to use a kind of materialistic mysticism to

reclaim this was bound to fail, in part because of its passivity and in

part because of its reliance on the Freudian “unconscious” as the realm

from which the marvelous would spring.

The “unconscious” realm, like the “spiritual” realm, is a social

creation which relegates aspects of our lives which would best be left

open and accessible to a “hidden”, “other” realm.... But Freud never

even considered claiming what had been relegated to the “spiritual” for

the “unconscious.” When Jung did so, he did it merely by equating the

“spiritual” with his highly questionable construct, the “collective

unconscious”—thus, reclaiming nothing.

The surrealists had no use for Jung’s extension of religion’s existence.

But they also never recognized the banality of the Freudian

unconscious—the marvelous is not there except on rare occasions by

accident. The marvelous will only become an everyday reality when we

reclaim for our everyday lives that aspect of living that has been

relegated to nonquotidian realms.... This reclamation involves the

active creation of marvelous, passionate intensities—not mere passive

waiting.

It is the individual’s capability for active, conscious, impassioned

creation which was usurped to create the realm of the “spiritual” and

was, thus, relegated to virtual non-existence. With the creation of gods

all creative power was taken from the individual and invested in these

invented beings—and their earthly representations. The marvelous was

turned into a gift from elsewhere.

The development of god coincides with the development of social control.

God is, in fact, very much like society: neither one exists in

itself—god exists only in the belief of the religious, and society

exists only in the activities of social individuals. Yet god and society

enforce the activities which continue their reproduction. The difference

is that god exists only in the realm of belief—or ideas—whereas society

exists in the realm of material interactions and so creates

relationships which coerce even those who oppose social control into

reproducing social control.

Capitalism has exposed the material basis of social interactions at the

same time as it has created material social mechanisms to motivate

people to continue social reproduction. In other words, god and the

spiritual are no longer necessary mystifications to enforce social

reproduction. But the social mechanisms created by capitalism do not and

cannot transform individuals into the conscious, autonomous creators of

their own lives and interactions. Rather individuals are transformed

into cogs in the mechanisms. God and spirituality remain as a solace

(Marx’s “opiate”), an escape and a facet of one’s social identity (i.e.,

an ideological commodity). Stealing back the creative energy from the

“spiritual realm” now is equivalent to taking back the power to

consciously create one’s life and interactions from society. But it is

essential that we not forget that this war against society includes an

attack upon the citadel of spirituality.

Recent revivals of mysticism, paganism and shamanism among certain

radicals may be misguided attempts at reclaiming their lives, but they

appear to me to be a retreat in to a fantasy realm in the face of

seemingly overwhelming social forces. These revivals indicate the

continued lack of confidence of those involved in their ability to

create their own lives, their own monuments, their own interactions. It

may also indicate a fear of the unknown—a preference for models, for

paths, for systems of guidance—because in a world of autonomous

creators, or unique free individuals, there are no guarantees; nothing

is certain; all of the maps, definitions and paradigms disintegrate...

Such a world is a world of terror and of wonder. For the courageous,

mostly the latter.

From Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed #40, Spring-Summer 1994.

Republished by Elephant Editions (London) 2000/2001 in the collection

Feral Revolution, reprinted in the pamphlet The Quest for the Spiritual

by Venomous Butterfly Publications.

The Ideology of Victimization

In New Orleans, just outside the French Quarter, there’s a bit of

stenciled graffiti on a fence that reads: “Men Rape.” I used to pass by

this nearly every day. The first time I saw this, it pissed me off

because I knew the graffitist would define me as a ‘man’ and I have

never desired to rape anyone. Nor have any of my bepenised friends. But,

as I encounter this spray-painted dogma every day, the reasons for my

anger changed. I recognized this dogma as a litany for the feminist

version of the ideology of victimization — an ideology which promotes

fear, individual weakness (and subsequently dependence on ideologically

based support groups and paternalistic protection from the authorities)

and a blindness to all realities and interpretations of experience that

do not conform to one’s view of oneself as a victim.

I don’t deny that there is some reality behind the ideology of

victimization. No ideology could work if it had no basis whatsoever in

reality. As Bob Black has said, “We are all adult children of parents.”

We have all spent our entire lives in a society which is based on the

repression and exploitation of our desires, our passions, and our

individuality, but it is surely absurd to embrace defeat by defining

ourselves in terms of our victimization.

As a means of social control, social institutions reinforce the feeling

of victimization in each of us while focusing these feelings in

directions that reinforce dependence on social institutions. The media

bombards us with tales of crime, political and corporate corruption,

racial and gender strife, scarcity and war. While these tales often have

a basis in reality, they are presented quite clearly to reinforce fear.

But many of us doubt the media, and so are served up a whole slew of

‘radical’ ideologies—all containing a grain of real perception, but all

blind to whatever does not fit into their ideological structure. Each

one of these ideologies reinforces the ideology of victimization and

focuses the energy of individuals away from an examination of society in

its totality and of their role in reproducing it. Both the media and all

versions of ideological radicalism reinforce the idea that we are

victimized by that which is ‘outside’, by the Other, and that social

structures—the family, the cops, the law, therapy and support groups,

education, ‘radical’ organizations or anything else that can reinforce a

sense of dependence—are there to protect us. If society did not produce

these mechanisms — including the structures of false, ideological,

partial opposition — to protect itself, we might just examine society in

its totality and come to recognize its dependence upon our activity to

reproduce it. Then, every chance we get, we might refuse our roles as

dependent/victim of society. But the emotions, attitudes, and modes of

thought evoked by the ideology of victimization make such a reversal of

perspective very difficult.

In accepting the ideology of victimization in any form, we choose to

live in fear. The person who painted the “Men Rape” graffiti was most

likely a feminist, a woman who saw her act as a radical defiance of

patriarchal oppression. But such proclamations, in fact, merely add to a

climate of fear that already exists. Instead of giving women, as

individuals a feeling of strength, it reinforces the idea that women are

essentially victims, and women who read this graffiti, even if they

consciously reject the dogma behind it, probably walk the streets more

fearfully. The ideology of victimization that permeates so much feminist

discourse can also be found in some form in gay liberation,

racial/national liberation, class war and damn near every other

‘radical’ ideology. Fear of an actual, immediate, readily identified

threat to an individual can motivate intelligent action to eradicate the

threat, but the fear created by the ideology of victimization is a fear

of forces both too large and too abstract for the individual to deal

with. It ends up becoming a climate of fear, suspicion and paranoia

which makes the mediations which are the network of social control seem

necessary and even good.

It is this seemingly overwhelming climate of fear that creates the sense

of weakness, the sense of essential victimhood, in individuals. While it

is true that various ideological “liberationists” often bluster with

militant rage, it rarely gets beyond to that point of really threatening

anything. Instead, they ‘demand’ (read “militantly beg”) that those they

define as their oppressors grant them their ‘liberation’. An example of

this occurred at the 1989 “Without Borders” anarchist gathering in San

Francisco. There is no question that at most workshops I went to, men

tended to talk more than women. But no one was stopping women from

speaking, and I didn’t notice any lack of respect being show for women

who did speak. Yet, at the public microphone in the courtyard of the

building where the gathering was held, a speech was made in which it

proclaimed that ‘men’ were dominating the discussions and keeping

‘women’ from speaking. The orator ‘demanded’ (again, read “militantly

begged”) that men make sure that they gave women space to speak. In

other words, to grant the ‘rights’ of the oppressed—an attitude which,

by implication, accepts the role of man as oppressor and woman as

victim. There were workshops where certain individuals did dominate the

discussions, but a person who is acting from the strength of their

individuality will deal with such a situation by immediately confronting

it as it occurs and will deal with the people involved as individuals.

The need to put such situations into an ideological context and to rent

the individuals involved as social roles, turning the real, immediate

experience into abstract categories is a sign that one has chosen to be

weak, to be a victim. And embracing weakness puts one in the absurd

position of having to beg one’s oppressor to grant one’s

liberation—guaranteeing that one will never be free to be anything but a

victim.

Like all ideologies, the varieties of the ideology of victimization are

forms of fake consciousness. Accepting the social role of victim—in

whatever one of its many forms—is choosing to not even create one’s life

for oneself or to explore one’s real relationships to the social

structures. All of the partial liberation movements—feminism, gay

liberation, racial liberation, workers movements and so on—define

individuals in terms of their social roles. Because of this, these

movements not only do not include a reversal of perspectives which

breaks down social roles and allows individuals to create a praxis built

on their own passions and desires; they actually work against such a

reversal of perspective. The ‘liberation’ of a social role to which the

individual remains subject. But the essence of these social roles within

the framework of these ‘liberation’ ideologies is victimhood. So the

litanies of wrongs suffered must be sung over and over to guarantee the

‘victims’ never forget that is what they are. These ‘radical’ liberation

movements help to guarantee that the climate of fear never disappears,

and that individuals continue to see themselves weak and to see their

strength as lying in the social roles which are, in fact, the source of

their victimization. In this way, these movements and ideologies act to

prevent the possibility of a potent revolt against all authority and all

social roles.

True revolt is never safe. Those who choose to define themselves in

terms of their role as a victim do not dare to try total revolt, because

it would threaten the safety of their roles. But, as Nietzsche said:

“The secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of

existence is to live dangerously!” Only a conscious rejection of the

ideology of victimization, a refusal to live in fear and weakness, and

an acceptance of the strength of our own passions and desires, of

ourselves as individuals who are greater than, and so capable of living

beyond, all social roles, can provide a basis for total rebellion

against society. Such a rebellion is certainly fueled, in part, by rage,

but not the strident, resentful, frustrated rage of the victim which

motivates feminists, racial liberationists, gay liberationists and the

like to ‘demand’ their ‘rights’ from the authorities. Rather it is the

rage of our desires unchained, the return of the repressed in full force

and undisguised. But more essentially, total revolt is fueled by a

spirit of free play and of joy in adventure—by a desire to explore every

possibility for intense life which society tries to deny us. For all of

us who want to live fully and without constraint, the time is past when

we can tolerate living like shy mice inside the walls. Every form of the

ideology of victimization moves us to live as shy mice. Instead, let’s

be crazed & laughing monsters, joyfully tearing down the walls of

society and creating lives of wonder and amazement for ourselves.

First appeared in “Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed” issue #32, Spring

1992, and again in “Anarchy” issue #55 Spring/Summer 2003. Republished

by Elephant Editions (London) 2000/2001 in the collection “Feral

Revolution”. Reprinted in the pamphlet “The Iconoclast’s Hammer” by

Venomous Butterfly Publications.

To Have Done With the Economy Of Love

“Love of all things is integral beauty; it has no hate or

possessiveness.... So accept love wherever you may find it: It is

difficult to recognize because it never asks.” —Austin Osman Spare

Sexual love, erotic pleasure, is the source of boundless ecstasy, the

expression of the infinite divinity of our bodies. It is the very

creative energy of the cosmos. When this energy flows through us

unchecked, we come to be in love, to desire to share erotic pleasure

with the entire cosmos. But only rarely do we experience this boundless

energy. Within the bounds of commodity culture, love too is a commodity.

An economy of love has developed, and that economy destroys the free

flow of pleasure.

The economy of love can only exist because love has been made a

scarcity. As infants, we are wild, divine lovers in love with ourselves

and with all other beings. But parents steal this from us. They deny the

sexual nature of their love for the child and sell expressions of love

in exchange for acceptable behavior. They punish or reprimand us for

blatantly sexual behavior, calling it bad. They judge us and so teach us

to judge ourselves. Instead of loving ourselves, we feel obliged to

prove ourselves—and fail often enough to never feel sure of ourselves.

Love ceases to be a free gift to the cosmos and becomes a very scarce,

high-priced commodity for which we must compete.

The competition for economized love changes us. We lose our spontaneity,

our free and playful self-expression. It doesn’t do to act as we truly

feel. We must make ourselves desirable. If we are good-looking by

cultural standards, we have a big advantage, for appearance is a major

part of what makes a desirable sexual commodity. But there are other

useful traits—strength, sexual prowess, “good taste,” intelligence,

sparkling wit. And, of course, knowledge of how to play the

social-sexual games. The better actor wins at these games. Knowing how

to put across the right image, knowing just what role to play in what

situation—this will buy you economized love. But at the expense of

losing yourself.

Few people have both physical attractiveness and adeptness at playing

the social-sexual games. So we are left without love except on very rare

occasions. It is no surprise that when these occasions arise we do not

let them flow naturally, but seek to hold on to them, to extend them.

When love is economized, it no longer lends itself to free relating,

because the flowing away of a particular lover has come to mean the end

of love itself. Instead of relating freely, we seek to build

relationships — making relating permanent, hardening it into a system of

exchange in which lovers continue to sell love to each other until, at

some point, one of them feels cheated or finds an economic relationship

because of the fear of losing love — and having to go through the whole

process of earning love all over again.

And relationships—being an expression of economized love—are usually

supposed to be monogamous. We do not want to lose our lover to another.

If we do not agree to only sell our love to each other, might not our

lover find a better product, a lover they prefer to us, and leave us?

And so the fears induced by the scarcity of love help to create

institutions that reinforce that scarcity.

Some people don’t choose the way of relationships. They want to prove

themselves to be truly desirable commodities. So they become sexual

conquistadors. They want to rack up a high score in the arena of sexual

conquest. They don’t care about sharing pleasure. They just want to

create an image. And those who fuck them do it for the status as well.

For these people, the ecstasy of total sharing has been lost completely

to the economy of love. It is the score and only the score that counts.

In order to make the commodities more valuable, the economy of love has

created sexual specialization. Of course, the cultural emphasis on

masculinity or femininity over our natural androgyny is the foremost

aspect of this. But the labels of sexual preference, when made permanent

self-definitions, are also a part of this. By defining ourselves as gay

or straight or bisexual, as child lover or fetishist or any other

limited form, rather than letting our desires flow freely, we are making

a specialized product of ourselves and so reinforcing the scarcity of

love.

When love becomes a commodity it ceases to be real love, for Eros cannot

be chained. Love must flow freely and easily without price and without

expectations. When love is economized, it ceases to exist, because the

lovers cease to exist. Since we must become desirable products, we

repress our real selves in order to take on the roles which our culture

teaches us will make us desirable. So it is mask kissing mask, image

caressing image—but no real lovers to be found anywhere.

If we are to experience the infinite energy of sexual love, the wild

divinity of our bodies in ecstasy, then we must free ourselves of the

economy of love. We have to throw off every aspect of this lifeless

shell that our culture passes off as love. For nowhere in its realms can

the wild joys of boundless pleasure be experienced.

But to break free of the economy of love, love must cease to be a

scarcity for us. While the wild cosmos abounds with lovers, commodity

culture has stolen this from us. So we are left with one way to free

ourselves of love’s scarcity. We need to learn to love ourselves, to

find ourselves such a source of pleasure that we fall in love with

ourselves. After all, is not my body the source of the pleasure I feel

in love? Are not my flesh, my nerves, my tingling skin the vast galaxies

in which this boundless energy flows? When we learn to be in love with

ourselves, to find ourselves a source of endless erotic pleasure, love

can never be scarce for us, for we will always have ourselves as a

lover.

And when we love ourselves, the boundless joy of Eros will flow through

us spilling freely forth. We will not grasp for love because of need,

but we will freely share our vast erotic energy with every being who

opens to it. Our lovers will be men and women, children, trees and

flowers, non-human animals, mountains, rivers, oceans, stars and

galaxies. Our lovers will be everywhere, for we ourselves are love.

As mighty gods of love, we then can roam the earth as outlaw heroes, for

having escaped the economy of love, we have the strength to oppose all

economy. And we will not tolerate this culture where our lovers are

abused, enslaved and threatened, murdered and imprisoned. With all the

mighty energy of love, we will break every chain and storm the walls

until they fall and every one we love is free. And so will end the long,

nightmarish rule of economy, the death-dance of civilization.

From “Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed” Double Issue #20/21

August-October 1989

Paneroticism: The Dance of Life

Chaos is a dance, a flowing dance of life, and this dance is erotic.

Civilization hates chaos and, therefore, also hates Eros. Even in

supposedly sexually free times, civilization represses the erotic. It

teaches that orgasms are events that happen only in a few small parts of

our bodies and only through the correct manipulation of those parts. It

squeezes Eros into the armor of Mars, making sex into a competitive,

achievement-centered job rather than joyful, innocent play.

Yet even in the midst of such repression, Eros refuses to accept this

mold. His joyful, dancing form breaks through Mars’ armor here and

there. As blinded as we are by our civilized existence, the dance of

life keeps seeping into our awareness in little ways. We look at a

sunset, stand in the midst of the forest, climb on a mountain, hear a

bird song, walk barefoot on a beach, and we start to feel a certain

elation, a sense of awe and joy. It is the beginning of an orgasm of the

entire body, one not limited to civilization’s so-called “erogenous

zones”, but civilization never lets the feeling fulfill itself.

Otherwise, we’d realize that everything that is not a product of

civilization is alive and joyfully erotic.

But a few of us are slowly awakening from the anesthesia of

civilization. We are becoming aware that every stone, every tree, every

river, every animal, every being in the universe is not only just as

alive, but at present is more alive than we who are civilized beings.

This awareness is not just intellectual. It can’t be or civilization

will just turn into another academic theory. We are feeling it. We have

heard the love-songs of rivers and mountains and have seen the dances of

trees. We no longer want to use them as dead things, since they are very

much alive. We want to be their lovers, to join in their beautiful,

erotic dance. It scares us. The death-dance of civilization freezes

every cell, every muscle within us. We know we will be clumsy dancers

and clumsy lovers. We will be fools. But our freedom lies in our

foolishness. If we can be fools, we have begun to break civilizations

chains, we have begun to lose our need to achieve. With no need to

achieve, we have time to learn the dance of life; we have time to become

lovers of trees and rocks and rivers. Or, more accurately, time cease to

exist for us; the dance becomes our lives as we learn to love all that

lives. And unless we learn to dance the dance of life, all our

resistance to civilization will be useless. Since it will still govern

within us, we will just re-create it.

So let’s dance the dance of life. Let’s dance clumsily without shame,

for which of us civilized people isn’t clumsy? Let’s make love to

rivers, to trees, to mountains with our eyes, our toes, our hands, our

ears. Let every part of our bodies awaken to the erotic ecstasy of

life’s dance. We’ll fly. We’ll dance. We’ll heal. We’ll find that our

imaginations are strong, that they are part of the erotic dance that can

create the world we desire.

From the pamphlet, “Rants, Essays and Polemics of Feral Faun” (Chaotic

Endeavors, 1987) reprinted in Green Anarchy #10 (Fall 2002)

The Liberation of Motion Through Space

Time is a system of measurement, which is to say, a ruler, and

authority. There is a reason why, during many insurrections, clocks have

been smashed and calendars burned. There was a semi-conscious

recognition on the part of the insurgents that these devices represented

the authority against which they rebelled as much as did the kings or

presidents, the cops or soldiers. But it never took long for new clocks

and calendars to be created, because inside the heads of the insurgents

the concept of time still ruled.

Time is a social construction which is used to measure motion through

space in order to control it and bind it to a social context. Whether it

be the motions of the sun, moon, stars and planets across the skies, the

motions of individuals over the terrains they wander, or the motions of

events across the artifices know as days, weeks, months and years, time

is the means by which these motions are bound to social utility. The

destruction of time is essential to the liberation of individuals from

the social context, to the liberation of individuals as conscious,

autonomous creators of their own lives.

The revolt against time is nothing if it is not a revolt against the

domination of time in one’s daily life. It calls for a transformation of

the ways in which one moves through the spaces one encounters. Time

dominates our motion through space by means of “necessary” destinations,

schedules and appointments. As long as the social context which produced

time as a means of social control continues to exist, it is doubtful

that any of us will be able to completely eradicate destinations,

schedules or appointments from our lives. But on examination of how

these modes of interaction affect the ways one moves through space could

help one create a more conscious motion. The most notable effect of

having to get somewhere (destination), especially when one has to be

there by a certain time (schedule/appointment), is a lack of awareness

of the terrain over which one is moving. Such motion tends to be a sort

of sleep-walking from which the individual creates nothing, since the

destination and the schedule pre-exist the journey and define it. One is

only conscious of her surroundings and how they are affecting her to the

minimal extent necessary to get where she is going. I don’t deny that

many of the environments through which one may move, especially in an

urban setting, can be disturbingly ugly, making such unconsciousness

aesthetically appealing, but this lack of consciousness causes one to

miss many chances for subversion and play that might otherwise be

created.

Subverting one’s motion through space, making it one’s own, freed from

the bondage to time, is a matter of creating this motion as nomadic

motion rather than self-transportation. Nomadic motion makes a playful

(though often serious) exploration of the terrain over which one is

passing the essential aspect of the journey. The wanderer interacts with

the places through which she passes, consciously changing and being

changed by them. Destination, even when it exists, is of little

importance, since it too will be a place though which one passes. As

this form of motion through space becomes one’s usual way, it may

enhance one’s wits, allowing one to become less and less dependent upon

destinations, appointments, schedules and the other fetters that enforce

the rule of time over our motions. Part of this enhancement of the

nomad’s wits within the present time dominated context is learning to

create ways to play around time, subverting it and using it against

itself to enhance one’s free wandering.

A radically different way of experiencing living occurs when we are

consciously creating time for ourselves. Due to the limits of a language

developed within this time-dominated social context, this way of

experiencing life is often spoken of in temporal terms as well, but as a

subjective “time”, as in: “The time when I was climbing Mount Hood...”

But I’d rather not refer to this as subjective “time” since it has no

shared purpose with social time. I prefer to call it “nomadic

experience”. Within nomadic experience, the peaks, the valleys and the

plateaus are not created in steady, measurable cycles. They are

passionate interactions of the sort which may make one moment an

eternity and the next several weeks a mere eye-blink. On this passionate

journey, the sun still rises and sets, the moon still waxes and wanes,

plants still flower and bear fruit and wither, but not as measurable

cycles. Instead, one experiences these events in terms of one’s

passionate and creative interactions with them. Without any destination

to define one’s motion through space, linear time becomes meaningless as

well. Nomadic experience is outside of time, not in a mystical sense,

but in the recognition that time is the mystification of motion through

space and, like all mystifications, usurps our ability to create

ourselves.

A conscious, playful, exploratory creation of our own motions through

space, of our own interactions with the places we pass through, is the

necessary practice of the revolt against time — nothing less than

creating events and their language. Until we begin to transform

ourselves into nomadic creators of this sort in the way we live our

lives, every smashed clock and every burned calendar will simply be

replaced, because time will continue to dominate the way we live.

On Madness and Anarchy

I am sure there are those who would label me mad for some of the desires

I express. Fine, I gladly embrace such madness. When rational order has

proven its absurdity, those who would be free must express themselves in

terms of madness. A festival, a whirlwind, the screaming elation of

dionysian rites are true revolution. Artaud and Julian Beck have both

tried this, but in the theater. And theater is bullshit! It’ s time to

take this madness out of the theaters and to start living it. We are

wild beings trapped in the cages of civilization. Rage, grief, joy,

ecstasy, hysteria, all of our animal passions need release, public

release, now! But how? How do we avoid incarceration? How can we be

freely mad? How can we turn it from mere individual idiosyncrasy to

anarchic revolution? I don’t know. All I know is that a mad cruelty must

be aimed at civilization while erotic ecstasy is aimed at friends. We

need to learn to scream, cry, laugh, howl, growl, roar, jump, roll,

dance, caress, kiss, hug, fuck, somersault, sing, feast. We need to be

bodies, to be animals, freely without restraint. This will be the

greatest cruelty to civilization, for such action mocks it mercilessly.

To those who love to be ordered, it will appear to be the greatest

madness. But to our friends, whether human, plant, rock, river, or any

wild being, it will be the gentlest love. For this madness is Eros

unbound.

From the pamphlet, “Rants, Essays and Polemics of Feral Faun” (Chaotic

Endeavors, 1987)

Chaos Is Beautiful

Chaos has been much maligned and slandered. Even most anarchists refuse

to associate themselves with chaos. It has been equated with murder and

mayhem. Yet it should be obvious that this is the lying propaganda of

the forces of order. For the history fo the imposition of order is the

history of increasing warfare, murder, rape, mayhem and oppression.

Order, not chaos, destroys wantonly for it cares only to impose its form

on all beings. Only those who dare to be avatars of chaos can stand

against the murderous rule of order.

But if chaos is not murder and mayhem as we have been told, then just

what is it? Is it disorder? No, for disorder requires order and chaos is

beyond all order. Disorder is order fucking up. The universe is

naturally chaotic. When someone tries to impose order on some small part

of it, the order will inevitably come into conflict with the chaotic

universe and will start to break down. It is this breaking down of

imposed order that is disorder.

Undisturbed by order, chaos creates balance. It is not the artificial

balance of scales and weights, but the lively, ever-changing balance of

a wild and beautiful dance. It is wonderful; it is magickal. It is

beyond any definition, and every attempt to describe it can only be a

metaphor that never comes near to its true beauty or erotic energy.

Our freedom depends on learning to be part of chaos’ erotic dance. To do

this, we need to get in touch with our animal instincts, our deepest

desires. We need to reject every form of authority, external and

internal, for all repress our instincts. We must not seek to be masters

of our lives, but rather to truly LIVE, to end every separation within

ourselves so that we ARE our lives.

By taking freedom and pleasure for ourselves now, we become part of the

beautiful dance of chaos. We become involved in the magickal adventure

of creating paradise on earth now. The bloody history of order ceases to

be the only reality we know and the beauty of chaos begins to show

through. For chaos is beautiful, the ecstasy of androgynous Eros shining

throughout the universe.

From the pamphlet, “Rants, Essays and Polemics of Feral Faun” (Chaotic

Endeavors, 1987)

The anarchist subculture: a critique

“...the absence of imagination needs models; it swears by them and lives

only through them.”

It is easy to claim that there is no anarchist movement in North

America.

This claim frees one from having to examine the nature of that movement

and what one’s role is in it. But a network of publications, bookstores,

anarchist households, squats and correspondence connecting those with

anti-statist perspectives most certainly does exist. It has crystallized

into a subculture with its mores, rituals and symbols of “rebellion”.

But can a subculture create free individuals capable of making the lives

they desire? The anarchist subculture certainly hasn’t. I hope to

explore why in this article.

The Anarchist subculture certainly does encompass apparently rebellious

activity, historical exploration, social analysis (theory), creative

play and explorations into self-liberation. But these do not exist as an

integrated praxis aimed at understanding society and opening

possibilities for us to create our lives for ourselves, but rather as

social roles, occasionally overlapping, but mostly separate which

function mainly to maintain themselves and the subculture which creates

them and which they, in turn create.

Political correct militants dominate radical action in this subculture.

They deny the need for social analysis. After all, the issues have

already been laid out by left liberals — feminism, gay lib, anti-racism,

animal lib, ecology, socialism, opposition to war — add a dash of

anti-statism and, by god, it’s anarchism! Well, ain’t it? To guarantee

that no one can doubt their anarchist credentials, anarchist militants

will be sure to shout the loudest at demonstrations, burn a few flags

and be prepared to battle cops, fascists and RCPers wherever possible.

What they won’t do is analyze their activities or their role as

militants to see if they are really in any way undermining society or if

they are merely playing its loyal opposition, reinforcing it by

reinforcing role within their role within its spectacle. Their refusal

of analysis has allowed many of them to delude themselves into believing

that they are part of a mass movement of rebellion which must be

converted to anarchism. But no such mass movement exists on this

continent, and the activities of the militants are mainly a letting off

of steam in rituals of opposition that only reinforce their place in the

anarchist subculture.

Anarchist historians are mostly professors, publishers and bookstore

operators, interested in keeping information about anarchist history

available. Most of these people are well-meaning, but they fail to apply

critical analysis to their histories. The vast majority of anarchist

historical material seems to serve a myth-making purpose, creating

heroes, martyrs and models to imitate. But all of these models have

failed in creating more than temporary anarchic situations. This should,

at the very least, lead to a questioning of how and why they failed that

goes beyond the simplistic claim that they were crushed by the

authorities. The lack of such analysis has rendered anarchist history

largely useless to present struggles against authority, turning it

instead into the same thing for the anarchist subculture that mainstream

history is for society at large, a myth that upholds the present order

of things.

Certain anti-authoritarians theorists have intellectually attacked the

most basic underpinnings of society in ways that reveal their role in

our domestication. The theorists’ examination of these things has even

led some of them to drop the label “anarchist,” though their rejection

of authority and connection to the subculture through their writings and

their friendships continue their role within it. And for all the depth

of their intellectual exploration, a certain level of work refusal,

shoplifting and minor vandalism seems to be the sum of their practice.

Because they do not explore practical ways of expressing rebellion

against the totality of domination revealed by their critiques, these

critiques lose their edge as radical theory and seem more like

philosophy. No longer being a tool of active rebellion, their thought

instead becomes a means of defining the intellectual edge of anarchic

thought, a means by which to determine whether an idea is radical

enough. In this way, the role of the intellectual is perpetuated in the

anarchist subculture.

Creative play has also been specialized within the subculture.

Forgetting the critique which calls for the supersession of art through

spontaneous, creative, free play by everyone, mail artists, performance

artists and “anti-artists” claim this category as their own, destroying

spontaneity and freedom, and valorizing the activity as art. Many of the

activities of these people — festivals, wild poetry readings,

improvisational noise jam sessions and interactive theater — can be a

lot of fun and are worth participating in on that level, but, placed

within the framework as art, their subversive bite is dulled. In

valorizing creativity, these artists have made it more important to “be

creative” than to have fun, and have reduced their critique to the level

of whether something can be utilized in creating art. The creative

process is recuperated into a form of productive labor making works of

art. Play is transformed into performance. Acts of detournement become

spectacles in mail-art shows. Subversion is recuperated by society as

art. Ignoring the fact that art is a social and cultural category,

anarchic artists claim that art opposes culture, but their activities

create for them the role of cultural workers within the anarchist

subculture. When the situationists said that revolutionary praxis needed

to become therapeutic, they had no idea that certain North American

anarchists would find ways to wed this and a few other half-digested

situationist ideas to new age psychotherapies — but, gee, those Yanks

(and Canadians) sure are inventive, ain’t they? New age therapies came

into the anarchist subculture largely through feminist, gay lib and

related movements. The reason given for practicing these therapies is

self-discovery and self-liberation. But all psychotherapies — including

those of humanist and “third force” psychologists — were developed to

integrate people into society. When feminists, gay liberationists and

similar groups began using therapeutic techniques, it helped integrate

individuals into a common framework from which they would view the world

and act on it. Anarcho-therapists have adapted such practices as

meditation, play therapy, support and separate spaces. Meditation is

really just a form of escape, without the physical damage of drinking or

drugs. It eases the stresses of daily life, keeping them from being too

much to bear.

It can, thus, be useful, but is not self-liberating. Play as therapy,

like play as art, loses its subversive edge. Its parameters defined, it

becomes a safe release, a letting off of steam, rather than a true

breaking out with all the risks that involves. It does not present a

challenge to authority or the work ethic, because it is play safely

ensconced in the framework of productive usefulness and brings out the

chaotic energy that could otherwise challenge authority within a safely

ordered framework.

Support group therapy is a particularly insidious form of

self-deception. A group of people get together to talk about a common

problem, burden or oppression they supposedly share. This practice

immediately removes the problem from the realm of daily life, of

individual relationships and particular circumstances, into the realm of

“our common oppression” where it can be fit into an ideological

framework. Support groups are formed with a particular purpose

(otherwise, why form them?) which will shape the workings of the group,

bias the conclusions drawn and mold the participants into the framework

of the group ideology. The creation of separate spaces (women’s only,

gay only, etc.) reinforces the worst tendencies of support group

therapy, by guaranteeing that no outside element can penetrate.

Anarchists blithely ignore the authoritarian and propertarian

implications of this practice and its inherent bigotry, excusing them

because it is the practice of an oppressed group. All of these

therapeutic forms separate people from their daily life experience and

place them in a separate “therapeutic” realm where they can be readily

integrated into a particular social and ideological framework. In the

case of anarcho-therapists, it is the framework of the anarchist

subculture and the role they play in it.

Most of the people I’ve met in the anarchist subculture are sincere

people. They truly want to rebel against authority and destroy it. But

they are products of society, trained to distrust themselves and their

desires and to fear the unknown. Finding a subculture in place with

roles to which they can adapt themselves, it is much easier to fall into

the role or roles with which they feel most comfortable, secure in the

knowledge that they are part of the rebel milieu, than to truly take the

leap in the dark of living for themselves against society. And these

“anarchist” roles plug into a social structure and a way of relating to

the world at large that are equally essential to the anarchist

subculture and which also need to be examined.

“Would it not be an anachronism to cultivate the taste for harbors,

certitudes, systems?”

The structure of the anarchist subculture is largely centered around

publishing projects, bookstores, collective living situations and

radical activism. These projects and the methods of running them that

reproduce the subculture create the methods of anarchist “outreach”.

What they create in many ways resembles an evangelical religious sect.

Most of the projects that make up the structure of the anarchist

subculture are run collectively using a process of consensus decision

making. A few are the projects of single individuals occasionally helped

out by friends. (On the fringe of the subculture are numerous flyer

projects almost all of which are individual projects.) I am putting off

a thorough critique of consensus for a later article. For now, let it

suffice to point out that the process of consensus does require the

subjugation of the individual will to the will of the group as a whole

and the subjugation of the immediate to the mediation of meetings and

decision-making processes. It has an inherently conservative bent,

because it creates policies that can only be changed if everyone agrees

to it. It is an invisible authority to which individuals are subject,

which limits the extent to which they question the project in which they

are involved or the anarchist subculture.

A large number of anarchists live on their own or with lovers. But many

see a collective living arrangement as better, sometimes for as simple a

reason as easing everyone’s financial burdens (the reason which involves

the fewest illusions), but more often to create a living support group

situation, to participate more easily in a common project or to “put

theory into practice”. Having already dealt with support groups, I will

only add that living together in a support group will tend to exaggerate

all of the insulatory and idealogical aspects of support group therapy.

A collective living situation can certainly ease some of the aspects of

sharing a common project, from the financial to the trick of getting

people together to discuss the project. It can also increase the chances

of the project becoming insulatory, feeding on itself, losing necessary

critical input.

But it is those who claim to be “putting theory into practice” in these

living situations who are practicing the highest level of

self-deception.

Group living situations could possibly be a basis for exploring new ways

of relating, but the semi-permanence of such situations tends toward the

creation of social roles and structures, and new explorations are not

what the households I know of are pursuing. The separation between

theory and practice implied by the phrase “putting theory into practice”

is evident in the relative sameness of these living situations. Most

anarchists believe that there are certain principles that should govern

the way people inter-relate. In their living collectives, land trusts

and squats, they attempt to live by their principles. Their living

situations are not theoretico-practical explorations, but rather, the

submission of individuals to a pre-conceived social structure. These

principles are not put to the test in these situations, because the

anarchist household is an insulatory situation, a kind of alternative

reality in the midst of the world. With the exception of anarchist

squats — which do, at least, present a challenge to the authority of

landlords and property — these households relate to the world of

external authorities in the same way everyone else does: paying their

rent (or property tax) and bills, and working or collecting welfare.

These households do little, if anything, toward undermining society, but

they offer a structure for people to live in that maintains their

feeling of rebelliousness and the subculture gives them a safe place to

express this feeling.

The various publishing projects (including periodicals) and bookstores

are the main sources of history, theory and information for the

anarchist subculture. To some extent, these projects have to plug into

the capitalist system and so rarely pretend to be inherently

revolutionary. When they are group projects, they are usually run by

consensus on the absurd assumption that there is something anarchistic

about having to sit through long, boring meetings to work out the

details of running a small business or producing a magazine or book. But

the aspect of these projects that really bothers me is that they tend to

become means of defining the framework of thought in the anarchist

subculture rather than a provocation to discuss and explore the nature

of alienation and domination and how to go about destroying them. To a

large extent this lack of provocation is inherent in what is published.

Most anarchist publications, whether books or periodicals, are

uncritical reprints of old anarchist writings, uncritical histories,

rehashing of leftist opinions with a bit of anti-statism thrown in or

uncritical modernizations of out-dated anarchist ideas. Such writings

reinforce certain standards and models of what it means to be an

anarchist without questioning those models. Even those writings which do

present a challenge rarely seem to evoke the sort of intelligent,

critical discussion that could be part of a stimulating radical praxis.

Rather, they are also often taken as a source of standards, models, ways

of defining the parameters of revolt. This stems, in part, from the

nature of the printed word, which seems to have a permanence that is not

compatible with the fluid, living nature of thought or discussion. Most

readers have trouble seeing through the printed word to the fluidity of

thought behind it. So they react as though dealing with something sacred

— either worshipping it or desecrating it. Neither reaction pleases me,

because both signify that the ideas have become reified, have become

commodities in the marketplace of ideas — an image reinforced by the

fact that these ideas are mostly found for sale in bookstores. Another

aspect of anarchist publication is propaganda. This is the advertising

side of anarchism — the proof that it is largely just a commodity in the

marketplace of ideas. Most anarchist propaganda is an attempt to create

an image of anarchism that is attractive to whomever the propaganda is

aimed at. Thus, much of this literature seems to be aimed at easing

people’s minds, at proving that anarchy isn’t so extreme, that it

doesn’t challenge people; it reassures them, showing them that they can

continue to have secure, structured lives even after the anarchist

revolution. Since most anarchist literature, including this sort, is

bought or stolen by anarchists, I wonder if it isn’t really an attempt

at self-reassurrance, and reinforcement of the defining models of the

subculture. The structures which make anti-authoritarian literature

available could provide a network for challenging discussion aimed at

creating and maintaining a truly rebellious praxis, but instead it

creates a framework of models and structures for people to follow the

“anarchist principles” to which so many blindly cling, which reinforce

the anarchist subculture.

Radical activism is another aspect of the public image of the anarchist

subculture, particularly the militant wing. It largely involves

participation in leftist demonstration, though occasionally anarchists

will organize their own demonstration on a particular issue. One motive

behind much of this activism is to win people over to anarchism. To

accomplish this, anarchists must separate themselves as a definable

entity and make themselves attractive to those they are trying to

convert. At present, most activism seems to be trying to attract youth

and, particularly, punk youth.

So anarchists tend to be particularly loud and rowdy at demonstrations,

portraying an image of defiance and showing that anarchists mean

“serious business.” Since other groups, like the R.C.P., also get rowdy

and defiant, anarchist militants have to make the distinction clear by

loudly denouncing these groups and even getting into fights with them —

ya kinda have to wonder about these anarchist militants, if their

actions are so similar to Maoist hacks that they have to consciously put

out an effort to distinguish themselves. But evangelicalism isn’t the

only reason anarchists participate in these rituals of opposition. Many

participate because it is the appropriate anarchist thing to do. In

their minds, “anarchist” is a role that involves a specific social

activity. It is a subspecies of leftist that is rowdier and a bit more

violent than most. This allows them to separate anarchy and rebellion

from their daily lives. Questions like, “Does this activity help destroy

domination, undermine the spectacle and create free life?” are

irrelevant since anarchism is defined by participation in militant

activities, not by rebellion against everything that stands in the way

of our freedom to create for ourselves the lives we desire. As long as

one is active in demonstrations in the right way, one is an anarchist,

upholding the image and maintaining the anarchist subculture.

Though some of these structures — especially those dealing with

publication — have potential for being part of a truly anarchic

challenge to society, the anarchist subculture diverts their energy to

maintain and reproduce itself. The subculture offers us “harbors,

certitudes, systems,” tending to make us cautious, leading us to embrace

the known rather than face the challenge of the unknown. So anarchists

and anti-authoritarians, thinking themselves rebels, are in fact the

ones who define the limits of revolt and so recuperate it. The anarchist

subculture has undermined anarchy, turned it into another commodity on

the ideological marketplace and so made it into another category of

society.

“The point is precisely to step aside, to diverge, absolutely, from the

rule; to leap from the arena with hysterical verve; to elude forever the

traps set along the way...Long live the Impossible!”

To leave a critique of the anarchist subculture at examination of some

of its more important roles and structures is to miss its most important

fault — that it is a subculture. Subcultures constitute a particular

sort of social phenomenon with particular traits. If those traits were

conductive to rebellion, if they moved people to act for themselves,

then it might be possible to reform the anarchist subculture, but those

traits in fact tend in the opposite direction. There have been so many

rebel subcultures, so many bohemias, all of them recuperated. This

clearly indicates that there is something inherent in subcultures that

keeps them from presenting a real challenge to the society of which they

are a part. Let me try to examine why.

In order for a subculture to exist, its parameters must be defined in a

way that distinguishes it from other groups in society. Because a

subculture is not an official or legal entity, these parameters need not

be in any official or readily definable form. Most often, they are

underlying, inherent in the nature of the subculture, consisting of

shared values, shared ideals, shared customs and shared systems of

relating. This means that participation in a subculture requires a

certain level of conformity.

This does not rule out disagreements about the interpretation of those

parameters — such disagreements can be very intense, since those

involved will see themselves as upholders of the real values of the

group. But the real threat to any subculture is any individual who

refuses parameters.

Such a one is dangerous, amoral, a threat to all. What the parameters of

a subculture really amount to is its system of morality. It provides a

way to see itself as superior to society in general. It thus creates a

method for relating to others through guilt and self-righteousness, two

of authority’s favorite weapons. The existence and maintenance of a

subculture thus requires an internalized authority to maintain itself.

The creation of parameters will lead to an intolerance towards those

perceived as irretrievably outside the parameters — especially if they

are competitors on some level (e.g., the RCP, SWP and the like, to

anarchists), but it also leads towards a toleration of everyone

perceived as part of one’s subculture. Due to the different

interpretations of the parameters of the subculture, arguments and

fights, sometimes even vicious ones, are possible, but there is still a

certain unity that is recognized and tends to keep disagreements within

a certain framework. Such tolerance is necessary to maintain the

subculture. It also has the effect of reducing everything to a level of

mundane mediocrity. Extremes are permitted only to the extent that they

can be kept from presenting any real challenge to the subculture. Tact,

caution and politeness are the order of the day in order to maintain the

“unity within diversity” of the subculture. Conflicts tend to be

ritualized and predictable. In the anarchist subculture in particular,

there are rarely any face-to-face, honest and passionate conflicts.

Instead, face-to-face interactions are of the politeness and subcultural

ritual, of tolerance, and so are, as often as not, boring. Learning to

relate through ritual, through tact, through social masks, has left us

ignorant of how to relate freely. But within these rituals of toleration

a subculture cannot maintain itself, because like society at large, a

subculture requires conformity, social harmony and the suppression of

individual passions for its continued existence.

In relating to people outside, subcultures tend to opt for either a sort

of separatism — minimalizing contact with the outside world — or

evangelism — seeking to win people over to the perspective of the

subculture. Since the anarchist subculture is decidely evangelistic, it

is this that I will deal with. All evangelistic groups, from the

Baptists to the R.C.P., from the Moonies to the anarchist subculture,

are so because they are convinced that they have the answers to the

essential problems of the world.

Convincing others of this becomes a major motive behind the actions of

those within such subcultures. They act and speak so as to present an

image of self-assurance as well as a kind of solidarity with those whom

they wish to win over. Individuals within such subcultures do not live

for themselves but for the ideal, the answer that they are so certain

will cure all. They live, or try to live, up to a certain image, and so

are conformists.

Because of the nature of subcultures, the anarchist subculture can only

exist by removing anarchy and rebellion from the terrain of our present

day lives and turning them into ideals with corresponding social roles.

It will praise “spontaneity” while defining its content and, thereby,

suppressing it. Free expression of passion and desires are not

encouraged, in fact, quite often the opposite. Within its own framework,

the anarchist subculture is quite conservative, its own maintenance

being its top priority. Every new exploration and experimentation is a

threat to its existence and must be quickly defined, limited and

recuperated by it. This explains both the absurd, defensive reactions of

certain anarchists to more daring theoretical explorations, as well as

the tendency for these explorations to remain in a realm of separated

theory without practice. A subculture is a place of security, for

safety, for finding social roles and systems of relationships by which

one can define one’s self, not a place for free explorations and

encountering the unknown.

The anarchist subculture, then, cannot be an expression of lived anarchy

and rebellion, but can only be society’s way of defining, limiting and

recuperating them. As children of society, we are all well-versed in

distrusting ourselves, in fearing the unknown, in preferring security to

freedom. It is no surprise that we so easily fall into activities that

create and maintain a subculture. But its long past time that we admit

that this is just our way of fitting in to the society we claim to hate,

of creating a niche for ourselves in its structure. For this subculture

is not a real challenge to society; it is merely a loyal opposition

whose rules — like all rules — are just a subset of the rules of

society.

So the time has come to throw caution to the wind, to diverge

absolutely, as the surrealists say, from all rules, to leap from the

arena of the anarchist subculture — or to tear the arena down. Always

there will be those demanding to know what we’ll put in its place, but

the point is precisely to put nothing in its place. The problem, the

weakness of those of us who’ve claimed to oppose authority, has been our

need to have an authority inside our heads, an answer, a way to keep

ourselves in line. We have not trusted ourselves, and so at those

moments when anarchy has actually broken forth, when authority has

temporarily broken down opening all possibilities, we have not dared to

explore the unknown, to live our desires and passions. Instead we have

channelled our rebellion into the mere image of rebellion, but which

keep us safe from ever having to confront our real passions and desires.

The refusal of authority, the refusal of all constraints, must include

the refusal of the anarchist subculture, for it is a form of authority.

With this support gone, we are left with nothing — but ourselves. As

transient, ever-changing, passionate individuals, we each become the

only basis for creating our lives and opposing society as it strives to

force our lives into its mold. Rebellion ceases to be a role and instead

becomes our moment-by-moment refusal to let our lives be stolen from us.

Anarchy ceases to be an ideal and becomes the havoc we wreck on

authority, which undermines it and opens possibilities, new realms of

exploration for us. To realize this, we have to cease to think as

victims and begin to think as creators. The negative paranoia that

permeates the way we relate to the world needs to be rejected so that we

can accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of society as we

confront it in our daily lives and can intelligently undermine it. A

positive paranoia — a recognition that society and the hell it puts us

through are aberrations and that the world is full of wonder and beauty,

that within it all of our deepest desires and more can be easily

realized — needs to be cultivated. Then we will dare to face the

unknown, to relate to each other freely and passionately, avoiding mere

toleration and accepting honest conflict. We will dare to oppose society

from the strength of our own desires, dreams and lust for life. We’ll

refuse easy answers, systems and security for the prisons they are,

preferring the freedom found in ecstatically exploring the unknown, the

adventure of discovering the world of wonder that authority tries to

deny us. What has been denied us, we must take, and we must take it not

by conforming to a subculture, but by plunging head first into the

unknown, by taking the risk of leaving behind all that has suppressed us

no matter how comfortable and rebelling totally against society.

“Everything is always and automatically to be risked absolutely. One

knows, at least, that the thread one finds in the labyrinth must lead

elsewhere.”

From a three-part series published in “Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire

Armed” - [issues #26-Autumn 1990, #27-Winter’90-’91, and #28-Spring

1991]

republished by Elephant Editions (London) 2000/2001 in the collection

“Feral Revolution”

reprinted in the pamphlet “The Anarchist Subculture” by Venomous

Butterfly Publications.

The Last Word

“When you launch information you become information yourself.”

—Adilkno

Yes, it is possible to be possessed...not by demons, spirits, or other

alleged supernatural entities. No, what possesses us, undermining any

attempt at autonomous self-creation, is identity. This thing with no

life of its own rides us to our deaths as though we were underfed,

abused horses in the clutches of some hobgoblin.

In the game of insurgence—a lived guerilla war game—it is strategically

necessary to use identities and roles. Unfortunately, the context of

social relationships gives these roles and identities the power to

define the individual who attempts to use them. So I, Feral Faun,

became...an anarchist...a writer...a Stirner-influenced,

post-situationist, anti-civilization theorist...if not in my own eyes,

at least in the eyes of most people who’ve read my writings.

I took on these identities only semi-consciously, with little awareness

of the pitfalls I would encounter. They did not become tools I could use

to create interactions with others which integrated practice, analysis,

and passion into a game of conscious insurgence and lay aside when they

ceased to be useful. Rather, these identities became armors glued onto

me which prevented the possibility of real interactions...replacing them

with the absurd relationships of the identified in which individuals do

not revel in each other’s uniqueness, but rather find comfort in some

shallow image of similarity. In such relationships, passion, intensity,

love, amazement, cruelty, and real critical interaction have no place.

The game of conscious insurgence gets replaced by a game of simulated

rage and ritualized protest over all the appropriate issues—that is, the

game of anarchist activism.

Well, I’m tired...tired of being ridden by the hobgoblin of identity,

tired of half-assed interactions where no one really teaches anyone,

tired of the simulated rage and ritualized reactivism which tries to

pass itself off as insurgence, tired of social contexts which are always

boxes which isolate me by naming me, tired of being information to

people rather than flesh and blood and desire and passion and intensity.

By the time you read this, Feral Faun will no longer be...this is the

last word.

From “Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed” #42, Fall 1995

Appendix: other articles and essays

Steal back your life

Economy — the domination of survival over life — is essential for the

maintenance of all other forms of domination. Without the threat of

scarcity, it would be difficult to coerce people into obedience to the

daily routine of work and pay. We were born into an economized world.

The social institution of property has made scarcity a daily threat.

Property, whether private or communal, separates the individual from the

world, creating a situation in which, rather than simply taking what one

wants or needs, one is supposed to ask permission, a permission

generally only granted in the form of economic exchange. In this way,

different levels of poverty are guaranteed to everyone, even the rich,

because under the rule of social property what one is not permitted to

have far exceeds what one is permitted to have. The domination of

survival over life is maintained.

Those of us who desire to create our lives as our own recognize that

this domination, so essential to the maintainence of society, is an

enemy we must attack and destroy. With this understanding, theft and

squatting can take on significance as part of an insurgent life project.

Welfare scamming, eating at charity feeds, dumpster diving and begging

may allow one to survive without a regular job, but they do not in any

way attack the economy; they are within the economy. Theft and squatting

are also often merely survival tactics. Squatters who demand the “right

to a home” or try to legalize their squats, thieves who work their

“jobs” like any other worker, only in order to accumulate more worthless

commodities — these people have no interest in destroying the

economy...they merely want a fair share of its goods. But those who

squat and steal as part of an insurgent life, do so in defiance of the

logic of economic property. Refusing to accept the scarcity imposed by

this logic or to bow to the demands of a world they did not create, such

insurgents take what they desire without asking anyone’s permission

whenever the possibility arises. In this defiance of society’s economic

rule, one takes back the abundance of the world as one’s own — and this

is an act of insurrection. In order to maintain social control, the

lives of individuals have to be stolen away. In their place, we received

economic survival, the tedious existence of work and pay. We cannot buy

our lives back, nor can we beg them back. Our lives will only be our own

when we steal them back — and that means taking what we want without

asking permission.

From Willfull Disobedience #2

Against Charity

In many cities in the United States, anarchists have organized “Food Not

Bombs” feeds. The organizers of these projects will explain that food

should be free, that no one should ever have to go hungry. Certainly a

fine sentiment...and one to which the anarchists respond in much the

same way as christians, hippies or left liberals — by starting a

charity.

We will be told, however, that “Food Not Bombs” is different. The

decision-making process used by the organizers is nonheirarchical. They

recieve no government or corporate grants. In many cities, they serve

their meals as an act of civil disobedience, risking arrest. Obviously,

“Food Not Bombs” is not a large-scale charitable bureaucracy; in fact,

it is often a very slip-shod effort...but it is a charity — and that is

never questioned by its anarchist organizers.

Charities are a necessary part of any economic social system. The

scarcity imposed by the economy creates a situation in which some people

are unable to meet their most basic needs through the normal channels.

Even in nations with highly developed social welfare programs, there are

those who fall through the cracks in the system. Charities take up the

slack where the state’s welfare programs can’t or won’t help. Groups

like “Food Not Bombs” are, thus a voluntary workforce helping to

preserve the social order by reinforcing the dependence of the poor upon

programs not of their own creation.

No matter how non-heirarchal the decision-making process used by the

relationship is always authoritarian. The beneficiaries of a charity are

at the mercy of the organizers of the program and so are not free to act

on their own terms in this relationship. This can be seen in the

humiliating way in which one must recieve charity. Charity feeds like

“Food Not Bombs” require the beneficiaries to arrive at a time not of

their choosing in order to stand in line to recieve food not of their

choosing (and usually poorly made) in quantities doled out by some

volunteer who wants to make sure that everyone gets a fair share. Of

course, it’s better than going hungry, but the humiliaton is at least as

great as that of waiting in line at the grocery store to pay for food

one actually wants and can eat when one wants it. The numbness we

develop to such humiliation — the numbness which is made evident by the

case with which certain anarchists will opt to eat at charity feeds

every day in order to avoid paying for food, as though there were no

other options — shows the extent to which our society is permeated with

such humiliating interactions. Still, one would think that anarchists

would refuse such interactions as far as it lies within their power to

do so and would seek to create interactions of a different sort in order

to destroy the humiliation imposed by society. Instead, many create

programs that reinforce this humiliation.

But what of the empathy one may feel for another who is suffering from a

poverty one knows all too well; what of the desire to share food with

others? Programs like “Food Not Bombs” do not express empathy, they

express pity. Doling out food is not sharing; it is an impersonal,

hierarchical relationship between social role “donor” and social role

“beneficiary”. Lack of imagination has led anarchists to deal with the

question of hunger (which is an abstract question for most of them) in

much the same way as christians and liberals, creating institutions

which parallel those which already exist. As is to be expected when

anarchists attempt to do an inherently authoritarian task, they do a

piss-poor job...Why not leave charity work to those who have no

illusions about it? Anarchists would do better to find ways of sharing

individually if they are so moved, ways which encourage

self-determination rather than dependence and affinity rather than pity.

There is nothing anarchist about “Food Not Bombs”. Even the name is a

demand being made to the authorities. This is why its organizers so

frequently use civil disobedience — it is an attempt to appeal to the

consciences of those in power, to get them to feed and house the poor.

There is nothing in this program that encourages self-determination.

There is nothing that would encourage the beneficiaries to refuse that

role and begin to take what they want and need without following the

rules. “Food Not Bombs”, like every other charity, encourages its

beneficiaries to remain passive recipients rather than becoming active

creators of their own lives. Charity must be recognized for what it is:

another aspect of the institutionalized humiliation inherent in our

economized existence which must be destroyed so we can fully live.

The Bourgeois Roots of Anarcho Syndicalism

We favor the development of a worker’s movement based on direct

democracy, not just because it will be more effective in the present day

fight against the employing class, but also because it foreshadows — and

lays the basis for — a society of freedom and equality, without

authoritarianism or exploitation.

From a flyer put out by the Workers Solidarity Alliance, an

anarcho-syndicalist organization.

In the fourteenth or fifteenth century a social transformation began to

take place which reached its dramatic peak in the American War of

Independence and the French Revolution. This period was the uprising of

the bourgeoisie against the feudal system and the power of the Catholic

Church. In place of feudalism, the economic system of capitalism and the

political system of political democracy arose. Rather than allow a

non-elected aristocracy or a king to rule, liberal democracy demands

that “the people” rule through their representatives or their vote. Like

the anarcho-syndicalists quoted above, the bourgeoisie wanted a “society

of freedom and equality, without authoritarianism or exploitation.”

Leave out the parts about “workers” and “the employing class” and Thomas

Paine might have written the quote.

Of course, the anarcho-syndicalists will tell us that they aren’t using

the words in the way the bourgeois revolutionaries did. I’d take them at

their word if it weren’t for the fact that anarcho-syndicalism reflects

bourgeois ideology in much more significant ways than merely borrowing

its terminology. The values upheld by anarcho-syndicalists do not

significantly differ from those of the more radical of the bourgeois

liberal theorists, and their project, upon examination, proves to be

merely the extension of the liberal project.

As I’ve already said, the economic system that came to power with the

bourgeoisie is capitalism. I won’t go into a lengthy description of

capitalism — suffice it to say that the defining quality of capitalism,

as compared with other economic systems, is not the existence of

capitalists but the production of excess capital allowing for continued

economic expansion. Capitalism is a highly moral system — that is to say

it requires values which take priority over individual needs, desires or

greed in order to expand smoothly. These values which are essential to

capitalist expansion are production and progress. Every technological

advance is, thus, to be embraced unless it can be shown to be a threat

to further expansion of capital. Essential to production and progress is

work and so the bourgeois highly value work — and, contrary to the image

painted by “radical” labour propagandists, it is not uncommon for

capitalists to work many more hours than industrial workers, but it’s

organizational rather than productive work. Those who manage to avoid

work are the moral scum of capitalist society — parasites off the

working people.

Anarcho-syndicalists embrace every one of these capitalist values. Their

goal is “the real human mastery of production.” In spite of the high

level of anthropological evidence to the contrary, they assume that

primal people spent most of their time just striving to survive and that

it is only thanks to the production of technology and its progress that

we can live the wonderful lives we all do now, and enjoy all the lovely

commodities — oops! Sorry, I’m waxing sarcastic! The syndicalists

recognize a few specific technologies as threats to survival but see

technology in general and progress in general as positive things. In

light of this, it is no surprise that they rhapsodize over work, because

without work there would be no production or progress. Like the

bourgeoisie, they see those who avoid work as “parasites.” (See Chaze

Bufe’s Listen Anarchist!) The only real problem they have with the

capitalist system is who’s in charge — they’d prefer the One Big

Capitalist, the international union of working people, rather than

various individuals, corporations and states to be in charge. But the

basic structure would be the same. Like the bourgeoisie — and maybe even

more than the bourgeoisie — the anarcho-syndicalists embrace the values

essential to capitalism.

If production and progress are positive values, making work essential,

then social conformity is equally essential. I’ve already said that work

avoidance is seen as parasitism. Any pleasure that cannot be commodified

and so brought under the control of production is unethical. The

vagabond, the tramp, the gypsy, the outlaw, any individual who makes no

positive contribution to society is condemned as a failure or a

criminal. Even the bohemian — the non-conforming artist, musician or

poet — is suspect in bourgeois eyes — at least until a way is found to

recuperate their renegade creative urges.

This same attitude towards those who don’t fit into society is held by

anarcho syndicalists. Chaz Bufe’s castigation of “marginals” in Listen

Anarchist! makes this quite clear. The way the CNT constantly put down

the anarchist outlaw Sabate (while continuing to take and use the money

he gave them from his robberies) is truly disgusting. Throughout its

history, anarcho-syndicalism has tried to quench the fire of unruly

rebels, sometimes through persuasion and sometime through insult, to

move anarchic rebels to conform and to accept society. Wherever anarchic

rebellion went beyond the reforms the anarcho-syndicalist were calling,

these supposed non-believers in law would be the first to cry,

“Criminal! Terrorists!” Like the bourgeoisie, they want production to

progress smoothly, and that requires social conformity.

Hand in hand with social conformity goes a love for social peace. It is

true that the bourgeoisie has exploited wars between nations to expand

capital, but this is always precarious since any violence can upset the

smooth running of capitalism. Only violence instituted by the proper

authorities with a rational and ethical basis has any place in bourgeois

society. Personal conflicts are not only not to include physical

violence but should be polite, dealt with through rational discussion,

negotiation or due process. Certainly passions should not flare. The

social peace is to be broken only under the most extreme of

circumstances.

Anarcho-syndicalists also value social peace. From Luigi Fabbri’s

Bourgeois Influences in Anarchism to Bufe’s Listen Anarchist!, they try

to warn anarchists away from violent verbal expression — ironically,

trying to claim that this springs not from false conceptions of

anarchism created by the bourgeois press — why they think people with

courage and intelligence to rebel against authority would accept the

word of the bourgeois press, I don’t know. Like the bourgeoisie, the

anarcho-syndicalists call on us to express our disagreements rationally,

free of passion, in a peaceable way. Any active, violent expression of

individual rebellion is considered irresponsible, counter-revolutionary

and unethical by the anarcho syndicalists. The perpetrators are labeled,

at best, as dupes and more often as common criminals and terrorists. In

fact, outside of a “revolutionary situation,” anarcho-syndicalists

reject most form of illegal activity as counter-productive (but is that

necessarily bad?). Only the uprising of the working class (the “proper

authority” in anarcho-syndicalist theory) can justify violence — and

that violence must be rational and ethical so as to keep the instruments

of production intact and make as smooth of a transition as possible to

anarcho-syndicalist production.

Anarcho-syndicalists also wish to create a rational, ethical society.

They call on us to “attack irrationality...wherever and whenever it

arises.” The problem they see with the present society is that it is not

rational or ethical enough. Since reason is the source of ethical

behavior (in their view), it must prevail in all areas of life. Not our

passions or desires, but our “rational self-interest” should be our

guide, say the syndicalists, echoing the utilitarians. It is both more

rational and more ethical if the producer controls the means of

production, they proclaim, blithely ignoring the question of whether it

is possible for anyone to control the means of production in industrial

society.

Both bourgeois liberal theorists and anarcho-syndicalists want a

rational, ethical society based on freedom, equality and justice,

guaranteeing human rights. Both want a smoothly running economy with

high levels of production guaranteeing scientific and technological

progress. Both require social peace and conformity to realize their

projects. It is difficult not to think that their projects are the same.

I see only two significant differences. The bourgeoisie sees the economy

as an apolitical force that can progress efficiently and ethically in

the form of private enterprise. The anarcho-syndicalists recognize the

economy as a political force which must, therefor, be run

democratically. The bourgeois liberals believe that representational

democracy can create their ideal. Anarcho-syndicalists believe that

democracy must be direct — though they never seem to ask us if we want

to spend time directly voting on every social issue that comes up. The

project of the anarcho-syndicalists is really just an extension of the

project of the project of bourgeois liberalism — an attempt to push that

project toward its logical conclusion.

This brings me to the final parallel between bourgeois liberalism and

anarcho syndicalism, a parallel not of ideas, but of ignorance. Neither

seems capable of recognizing the realities of the social system we live

under. “The every day activity of slaves reproduces slavery” (Fredy

Perlman). While talking about freedom and democracy, the bourgeois

liberal and the anarcho-syndicalist both only see the human authorities

that control them; they are blind to the social activities in which they

participate which are the real source of their slavery. Thus, the

bourgeois liberal is content to get rid of priests and kings, and the

anarcho-syndicalist throws in presidents and bosses. But the factories

remain intact, the stores remain intact (though the syndicalists may

call them distribution centers), the family remains intact — the entire

social system remains intact. If our daily activity has not

significantly changed — and the anarcho-syndicalists give no indication

of wanting to change it beyond adding the burden of managing the

factories to that of working in them — then what difference does it make

if there are no bosses? — We’re still slaves! The “name-change does not

exorcise the beast.” But there is a reason why the bourgeois liberal nor

the anarcho-syndicalist can see the slavery inherent in the social

system. They do not see freedom as the ability of the unique individual

to create her/his life as s/he chooses. They see it as the ability of

the individual to become a fully and actively integrated part of a

progressive, rational society. “Slavery is freedom” is not an aberration

of Stalinist of fascist thinking; it is inherent in all perspectives

which ascribe freedom to society rather than to the individual. The only

way to guarantee the “freedom” of such societies is to suppress

non-conformity and rebellion wherever they arise. The

anarcho-syndicalists may talk of abolishing the state, but they will

have to reproduce every one of its functions to guarantee the smooth

running of their society. Anarcho-syndicalism does not make a radical

break with the present society. It merely seeks to extend this society’s

values so they dominate us more fully in our daily lives. All true

rebels, the renegades, outlaws and wild free spirits could no more

accept an anarcho-syndicalist society than the present one. We would

have to continue raising hell, creating a radical break with society,

because we don’t want more control over our slavery — and that’s all the

anarcho-syndicalists offer us — we want to throw off the chains and live

our lives to the full.

Fear of Conflict

“Truly it is not a failing in you that you stiffen yourself against me

and assert your distinctness or peculiarity: you need not give way or

renounce yourself” — Max Stirner

Whenever more than a few anarchists get together, there are arguments.

This is no surprise, since the word “anarchist” is used to describe a

broad range of often contradictory ideas and practices. The only common

denominator is the desire to be rid of authority, and anarchists do not

even agree on what authority is, let alone the question of what methods

are appropriate for eliminating it. These questions raise many others,

and so arguments are inevitable.

The arguments do not bother me. What bothers me is the focus on trying

to come to an agreement. It is assumed that “because we are all

anarchists”, we must all really want the same thing; our apparent

conflicts must merely be misunderstandings which we can talk out,

finding a common ground. When someone refuses to talk things out and

insists on maintaining their distinctness, they are considered dogmatic.

This insistence on finding a common ground may be one of the most

significant sources of the endless dialogue that so frequently takes

place of acting to create our lives on our own terms. This attempt to

find a common ground involves a denial very real conflicts.

One strategy frequently used to deny conflict is to claim that an

argument is merely a disagreeement over words and their meanings. As if

the words one uses and how one chooses to use them have no connection to

one’s ideas, dreams and desires. I am convinced that there are very few

arguments that are merely about words and their meanings. These few

could be easily resolved if the individuals involved would clearly and

precisely explain what they mean. When individuals cannot even come to

an agreement about what words to use and how to use them, it indicates

that their dreams, desires and ways of thinking are so far apart that

even within a single language, they cannot find a common tongue. The

attempt to reduce such an immense chasm to mere semantics is an attempt

to deny a very real conflict and the singularity of the individuals

involved.

The denial of conflict and of the singularity of individuals may reflect

a fetish for unity that stems from residual leftism or collectivism.

Unity has always been highly valued by the left. Since most anarchists,

despite their attempts to separate themselves from the left, are merely

anti-state leftists, they are convinced that only a united front can

destroy this society which perpetually forces us into unities not of our

choosing, and that we must, therefore, overcome our differences and join

together to support the “common cause”. But when we give ourselves to

the “common cause”, we are forced to accept the lowest common

denominator of understanding and struggle. The unities that are created

in this way are false unities which thrive only by suppressing the

unique desires and passions of the individuals involved, tranforming

them into a mass. Such unities are no different from the forming of

labor that keeps a factory functioning or the unity of social consensus

which keeps the authorities in power and people in line. Mass unity,

because it is based on the reduction of the individual to a unit in a

generality, can never be a basis for the destruction of authority, only

for its support in one form or another. Since we want to destroy

authority, we must start from a different basis.

For me, that basis is myself — my life with all of its passions and

dreams, its desires, projects and encounters. From this basis, I make

“common cause” with no one, but may frequently encounter individuals

with whom I have an affinity. It may well be that your desires and

passions, your dreams and projects coincide with mine. Accompanied by an

insistence upon realizing these in opposition to every form of

authority, such affinity is a basis for a genuine unity between

singular, insurgent individuals which lasts only as long as these

individuals desire. Certainly, the desire for the destruction of

authority and society can move us to strive for an insurrectional unity

that becomes large-scale, but never as a mass movement; instead it would

need to be a coinciding of affinities between individuals who insist on

making their lives their own. This sort of insurrection cannot come

about through a reduction of our ideas to a lowest common denominator

with which everyone can agree, but only through the recognition of the

singularity of each individual, a recognition which embraces the actual

conflicts that exist between individuals, regardless of how ferocious

they may be, as part of the amazing wealth of interactions that the

world has to offer us once we rid ourselves of the social system which

has stolen our lives and our interactions from us.

From Willfull Disobedience #2

Beyond Earth First! Toward a feral revolution of desire

Last year, Fifth Estate published a critique of Deep Ecology which

included criticisms of certain people who use the slogan “Earth First!”.

This has led to a fairly intense dialogue. As I have read this dialogue

it has become clear to me that most people—including those who call

themselves EF!ers-aren’t really sure what EF! is.

A number of letters and one article (“‘Live Wild or Die’—The Other Earth

First!,” Fifth Estate, Vol.23, #3) attempted to show that EF! was not

monolithic, that it was a movement rather than an organization. Yet the

writers of these pieces spoke of “what EF! actually does” and, in the

article, of EF!’s “split personality”—as though EF! were indeed a single

entity, a monolithic organization. To clear this up, it is necessary to

figure out just what EF! is.

There is an EF! that is an organization. This is what Mikal called the

“centralized personality” of Earth First! in his FE article. This EF!

consists of the editorial staff of the national paper and the “stars” of

EF! They create a major portion of the public image of what EF! is all

about. And their recent right-wing Malthusian ravings have not helped

that image one bit.

There is another Earth First!—however that EF! is not a movement. The

real movement is an anti-authoritarian, anti-industrial-civilization,

pro-wilderness movement, and people of Fifth Estate are as much a part

of that movement as anyone else who chooses to use the slogan “Earth

First!” To claim that a slogan creates a separate movement with an

inside and an outside defined by the use of the slogan is a

mystification. As Mikal said in his article, the defining quality of a

movement is that it moves. Everyone who is active in any way in opposing

civilization and striving to expand wildness is participating in that

movement and needs to criticize any part of that movement that is

stifling the liberation of wildness.

So what do I think Earth First! is? It is a slogan around which some

people rally. Just what this slogan means and why people need it as a

rallying point needs to be examined.

“Earth First!,” the slogan is a simple, two word proclamation of

biocentrism. Biocentrism is an ideology, an attempt to claim that we can

act from a basis other than our own needs, desires and experiences. We

cannot put earth first. When we claim to do so, we are only putting our

concept of the earth first. Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary have

both claimed to have connected with the consciousness of the universe

and have used this claim to justify their vision of paradise as a

horrendous, sterile techno-topia, saying that is the “natural course of

evolution.” I share a vision similar to many EF!ers, but their claim to

know the earth’s will is false consciousness, ideology, and all ideology

is a threat to wildness.

Why do people so distrust their own instincts and desires that they have

to create false consciousness to justify themselves? Why do they need to

claim that they are doing what they are doing because they put “Earth

First!”? Civilization, with its need to suppress whatever is wild, has

taught us to distrust our instincts and desires. It needs to do this in

order to channel our wild energies into the domesticated activities of

work and commodity consumption— the activities that are destroying

wildness everywhere. So the best thing we can do for wilderness is to

let our own wildness break free by trusting and acting on our own

instincts and desires. To be trapped in the ideology of a slogan is to

chain our radical consciousness and to stifle our movement.

By equating the slogan with a movement, speaking of the movement as a

monolithic being that acts on its own, defining participation in the

movement in terms of use of the slogan rather than people’s activities,

the image of EF! as an organization is created whether such an

organization actually exists or not. The Tucson crew reinforces this

image by creating a visible bureaucracy, but even without them — the

image would exist because EF! is spoken of in organizational terms even

by those who claim it is not one. So an image has been created which the

media can use to create a good guy / bad guy scenario. And thanks to

Foreman, Abbey and other EF! stars, the image of a monolithic

organization of crackpot, racist eco-terrorists is becoming dominant.

Give the press a name and claim that it represents a single movement and

they will see an organization there. And when even those who claim that

Earth First! is not a monolithic organization speak of it in monolithic,

organizational terms, can anything else be expected?

To summarize my thoughts:

The slogan, “Earth First!” needs to be left behind because it reflects

false consciousness. We always act from our own needs, desires and

experiences. When we recognize that in terms of our radical activity, we

free that activity from any ideological constraints.

The slogan needs to be left behind because it has created an image

that allows the media to manipulate the public’s conception of those who

act in the slogan’s name.

The slogan needs to be left behind because it is associated with the

redneck, macho, racist posturings of Abbey, Foreman and others.

The slogan needs to be left behind because it creates the image of a

movement whose only basis is the use of that slogan, creating an

insider/outsider dichotomy that allows “insiders” to write off the

criticisms of “outsiders” without giving them much thought.

It needs to be recognized that the actual movement, of which those who

use the slogan, “EF!” are part, is a movement to save what is wild from

civilization. Many of us who have criticized the ideology that has been

associated with EF! are active participants in that movement, so our

criticisms are not those of outsiders.

It needs to be recognized that “Earth First!” is merely a slogan, a

rallying cry. It does nothing concrete. Individual people, acting

separately or together, are the ones doing things of actual

significance. In order to avoid the image of being a monolithic

organization, we have to be careful to make this clear.

We need to go beyond the false consciousness of the idea, Earth First!

and recognize that only by setting our own wild instincts and desires

free can wilderness be saved. Ours is a revolution of desire, a feral

revolution. We do not do it for anything supposedly greater than

ourselves; we do it for ourselves. So, come on, anarchic adventurers,

let’s go wild!

First published in Live Wild or Die #1 February 1988, reprinted in

Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed #19, May-July 1989.

Some Not Completely Aimless Meanderings

from “The Iconoclast’s Hammer“column in Anarchy Magazine

It’s time to think about writing another column. There are a lot of

topics worth examining—topics to which I have given a lot of thought and

which are fundamental to understanding and opposing authority. But I

have no desire to put energy into examining these topics right now.

There are times when I know exactly why I’m writing. I get a real

pleasure out of making my explorations coherent enough to express them

to others. I look forward to the possibility of stimulating and

challenging discourse...But at the moment, this isn’t the case. Not I

don’t want to express myself coherently or be involved in challenging

discourse. But, at the moment, I’m not convinced that my recent writings

are doing that for me.

Recently, I was at an anarchist gathering in Long Beach, California.

There was much that could be criticized about the gathering, but I got

involved in several intelligent, humorous and challenging

discussions-even in the context of workshops! Due to a lack of p.c. and

process fetishists, it seemed much easier to get to the heart of what

was being discussed, and most people did not take offense at passionate

expressions of differences. But, around this same time, I learned that

articles I had written were being thoroughly misunderstood. I came

across responses to my pieces which described my writings as ‘Marxist’,

‘economistic’ or ‘moralistic’. This reminded me of the time when a

reviewer described two pamphlets I’d written as attempts to “create a

new religion” when I was trying to reclaim for myself what religion

usurps and places in the realm of the ‘spiritual’. Although much of this

misinterpretation of my writings can be attributed to projections of

some people’s ideological blind-spots, it is still frustrating to see my

attempts to express an explicitly amoral, anti-economistic critique

being interpreted as the opposite.

Language often frustrates me. Every language that exists in the

civilized world developed within the context of authoritarian

relationships. Those of us who wish to challenge such relationships and

express the possibility of free relating outside the context of

authority can’t help but twist, contort and play with the language we

use. In a sense, we create a new language, a language which we hope

expresses the possibilities the old language tends to suppress. This is

bound to lead to some misunderstandings. I know that most of the readers

of my writings are either anarchists or anarchist sympathizers. I also

know, from extensive interaction with anarchists, that most anarchists

‘think’ and talk in the terms of discourse created by society, by the

system of relationships and roles that is authority. They are anarchists

because they hate the government, the state, all bosses and hierarchy,

but they haven’t conceived of the possibility that authority may run

much deeper than this—that it may be the entire system of relationships

and values that is society as we know it, a system into which we were

all integrated to one extent or another...and that it may be the very

language which we’ve been taught to use to speak...about everything. So

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that my attempts to twist this language

against itself, into a language that can express rebellion and the

possibility of real life, a language that is my own, should be

misinterpreted. It’s probably far more surprising that anyone else ever

understands what I write, even partially. But I’ll try to clarify things

a bit more by reiterating things I’ve said a million times as plainly as

possible, which is to say, now I’m really gonna rant....

There are people who are anarchists in the sense of being believers in

anarchism. Their anarchism consists of a moral and/or social system

which they wish to create and expand into a worldwide system of

relationships. This ideal forces them to morally oppose those aspects of

this society which are in contradiction to their values. I am not an

anarchist in this sense and have not been since 1981. But we’ve all

heard of pianists, cellists and guitarists — so why not be an anarchist

in this sense, one who plays anarchy? Let me explain. The simplest

definition of anarchy is “no authority.” Where there is no authority, a

myriad of possibilities that cannot exist under authority suddenly open

up. If authority is the entire system of relationships that produces,

reproduces and is society, then to “play anarchy” is to create

situations in which this system breaks down and to extend such

situations as far as circumstances allow so that possibilities outside

of structures of authority can be discovered and played with. I want to

do this for no other reason than that it gives great pleasure and

expands my life.

Several years ago, a friend of mine, who was not well-read in radical

theory, but who knew she was fed up with the rules and moralities

anarchists tended to make for themselves, said to me: “I’m not an

anarchist! I’m a me-ist!” Kind of sad that, even among those who claim

to oppose authority, it seems necessary to make an ‘ism’ out of living,

doing and rebelling for oneself. But with all the moralistic drivel that

passes itself off as anarchism, it is necessary to keep on harping on

the fact that for me this ain’t a question of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘right’

and ‘wrong’, ‘justice’ and ‘injustice’ — though I may chose to play with

some of these concepts if it pleases me; it’s a matter of how I want to

live.... Even freedom is of value to me only because the fewer

restrictions there are on me as I pursue the possibilities I want to

pursue, the fuller and more wonderful my life can be. If my egoism is

expansive, it is because your pleasure gives me pleasure — not because

I’m an altruist.

But what about greed, selfishness and wealth? One of the most banal

falsifications of moral anarchists is their attempt to explain the

economic realities of capital in terms of individual “moral failings.”

The only problem with greed as it exists in this society is that it

isn’t greedy enough! The capitalist, the corporate executive and the

power monger merely take a huge chunk of the impoverished reality

offered by society, and mete out smaller portions of the same to

everyone else. In the process, they lose themselves by becoming nothing

more than their roles and destroy the wealth they could enjoy by making

it into resources and capital. Their ‘greed’ is much more the desperate

addictive need of those who know they have become nothing — the need to

make everything into nothing. I am pissed off at them, not because they

are greedy, but because the limited and impoverished nature of their

greed is destroying the world of real wealth for which I am greedy. You

see, I want the universe to be mine. I want to encompass everything,

every passion, every desire, every being into myself — I have a

boundless greed! But no economy can make this possible. In economic

systems, things can only be owned as property. Property means limited

ownership of limited things. What is one’s property is always far less

than what is not one’s property, so property always means poverty.

Wealth can only exist where there is no property and where no economic

relationships exist — where I can make everything my own and you can

make everything your own — and included in what I make my own is your

pleasure in making everything your own. In economic systems, greed is

small, petty and contractive and generosity appears to be altruistic.

But beyond economic relationships, greed is expansive and wants to have

and enjoy the other’s enjoyment, and generosity is the greatest form of

selfishness as your pleasure becomes my pleasure.

So my writing, like everything I do, is an attempt to express an

expansive selfishness — to get something I want I haven’t the least

interest in winning people over to the cause of anarchy, nor of winning

other anarchists over to my opinions. What I’m interested in is

participating in a challenging discourse that can be part of a radical

practice that challenges society in its totality by creating an

expansive, anti-economic selfishness. I am arrogant enough to say that

such a discourse requires a certain minimal understanding to be truly

challenging and that I’m not the least bit interested in wasting time

arguing with those without that understanding. These meanderings touch

on some of these matters. I’ll be using this column to expand on this in

the future.

From “Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed” #36, Spring 1993

Whither now? Some thoughts on creating anarchy

“Any society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits

of any society the unruly and heroic tramps will wander with their wild

and virgin thoughts...planning ever new and dreadful outbursts of

rebellion.” —Renzo Novatore

I feel that there is no possible society in which I would fit, that

whatever society was like, I would be a rebel. At times, this fills me

with the joy of the “unruly and heroic tramps” of whom Renzo Navatore

speaks, but often it leaves me feeling quite lonely and isolated.

I live in a “society” now—in a situation in which social roles are used

to reproduce social relationships. Would the way that we relate when we

are free of character armor and social roles still be social

relationships? I envision a world in which we can live our lives fully,

as unique, wild beings, moving freely into and out of relations with

each other as our desires motivate us, never creating the sorts of

complex structures of formalized relationships that I understand as

“society.” It is only in such a world that I can imagine feeling at

home. But I really don’t know how to go about creating this world.

Many of my friends wouldn’t agree with my perspective on society, but we

all agree that we want to create ways of relating that are radically

different from what the present authoritarian, capitalist society

offers. We all seem to be uncertain about how we can destroy this

society and learn to relate freely. Clearly, we need to examine what we

consider our radical practice.

I have written articles and flyers. I have no illusions about the

radical nature of these projects. They perpetuate certain types of

alienated social relationships, and I am fully aware of this: But I

write in hopes of inspiring something beyond the writing. I hope that

what is unique in what I write will touch another unique individual,

allowing us to break down the wall of written words and maybe meet and

create projects together. This hasn’t happened often though—usually, the

social relationship of the printed word remains intact.

In the present situation, scamming and theft are ways of survival which

are somewhat radical. They can involve an element of play and adventure

lacking in regular jobs, but they are still basically ways of

reproducing ourselves in this society and so are, in a sense, work.

Still in a small way, theft helps to undermine the commodity, because

you are taking something without paying for it. But the necessity for

secrecy limits this element of radical critique. What is most radical

about scamming and theft—as well as squatting, dumpster diving and

gleaning—is that they drastically reduce our need to work and free our

time for more worthwhile pursuits. But in themselves they are basically

just survival tactics.

Vandalism and sabotage are attacks on property and, thus, on society.

But, as most people use them now, they are limited attacks. They are

largely just reactions to specific, particularly offensive acts of

authority. The extent of the critique can be easily muted by its

attachment to a particular issue—recuperating it for society. Still

vandalism and sabotage are an active attack on society which may

sometimes effectively fuck up some of the projects of Capital. But at

their best they express only the destructive side of anarchic rebellion.

All of these activities are worthwhile as part of our rebellion against

this society, but all are limited. None of them take us beyond the

context of this society. Every one of these activities is, at least

partially, created by society as a reaction against it. They don’t free

us from society or enhance what is unique to us. They only place us on

the edge of society (which is certainly the most free and enjoyable

place to be in society), and that is not good enough for those of us who

want to live out our lives to the limits.

Since we want to create new ways of relating, ways which grow out of our

unique individuality, not social roles, we can’t merely react to

society—making it the center of our activity and ourselves merely its

margins. Each of us needs to make what is unique to us—our own desires,

passions, relations, and experiences—the center of our activity. This

implies a radically different conception of revolution than that of the

various communists and orthodox anarchists who center on “the masses.”

Neither working class, nor common human activity can create the

revolution I’m talking about. The rebellion of the individual against

the constraints of society—against the processes of domestication—is the

basis from which the revolutionary project has to grow. When the acts of

rebellion of a number of individuals coincide and can embrace each

other, those individuals can consciously act together and in this are

the seeds of a revolution that can free each of us as unique, wild,

free-spirited individuals. But what does this mean on a practical level.

Making ourselves the center of our activity means relating to society

and relating to each other in new ways. When we begin to live in terms

of our own desires and experiences, our own passions and relations, we

find ourselves perpetually—if often subliminally—in conflict with

society. Since society depends upon structure and order, and what is

unique to us is chaotic and unpredictable, we have a useful advantage in

this struggle. We can study society, learn something about how it

functions and how it protects itself; but no amount of psychological

study can give the force of order knowledge of our unique individuality.

As long as we act from our own uniqueness with our knowledge of

society—avoiding falling into social roles and predictable patterns—our

actions will seem to come from nowhere, yet will wreak havoc on our

enemy. Refusing to play social roles in the expected way, refusing to

pretend that we accept having to pay for things or work for survival,

refusing to follow rules of etiquette and protocol—this is a beginning.

Spontaneous (or seemingly spontaneous) pranks and guerrilla

theater—which cannot be attributed to clowns, theater troupes or other

social entities—may expose the nature of an aspect of society and even

create a situation in which the choice between free life and the mere

existence offered by society can no longer be hidden. Acts of theft,

vandalism and sabotage, springing from our desires rather than being

merely a reaction to a particular social atrocity, will be more random

and more frequent. Our violence against society will strike like

lightning, unpredictably and with the intensity of our desire to live

our lives to the full.

But to be able to fight intelligently for ourselves against society

requires knowledge and skills. Society, by placing us into social roles,

limits our knowledge and skills, so we need to share this information.

Books and articles can help us to do this, but are open to public

scrutiny—including that of the authorities. That makes our activity more

predictable and us more vulnerable. So ways of sharing knowledge that

grow from our actual relations as unique individuals need to be created.

This need to share skills coincides with our desire to live life fully,

to be able to freely relate and to enjoy each other as unique, wild

beings, making the exploration of new ways of relating to each other an

immediate necessity—not something to be put off until “after the

revolution.” Each of us is unique and so unpredictable. Having been

taught all of our lives to relate as social roles rather than as the

unique beings that we are, we have to rely on our imaginations to create

new ways of relating, not on any already-tried pattern—and could it be

any other way when we don’t want to create new social roles? So the

ideas I am sharing are tentative, calling for explorations into unknown

realms, inviting us to adventures that are to be entered only to the

extent that they fulfill our desires and enhance us as unique

individuals. There is nothing inherently revolutionary about these

explorations. They become revolutionary only in conjunction with a

conscious and active resistance to society—a conscious recognition that

our uniqueness and freedom as individuals is in conflict with society

and that we must destroy it to fully free ourselves.

I’ve thought a lot about how to explore new ways of relating over the

past several years. These explorations would need to be based on the

unique desires of each of the individuals involved and on their mutual

trust for each other. At first my thoughts centered mainly on some sort

of settled rural/wilderness living situation involving non-economized

relating, projects of wilderness expansion and resistance to and

sabotage of domestication and authority. The more I thought about this,

the more it seemed that such a project would involve a compromise of my

own real desires—and would most likely recreate society on a smaller

scale with individuals playing social roles rather than relating on the

basis of what they uniquely are.

When people come together on the basis of each of their unique desires

and their trust for each other, their union is, by its nature, very

transitory. Individuals will come and go as they please and participate

in the way they please. This makes a settled living situation, at best,

very temporary. Recently, I have been wandering. I would enjoy sharing

this life with friends and lovers who wish to wander as well. We would

be a wandering festival of rebellion and wonder. I say a festival, and

not a tribe or a band, because the only constant would be the commitment

of each individual involved to live their life to the full and fight

against whatever prevents this, the individuals themselves constantly

coming and going as they desire. Survival activities could include wild

harvesting, theft, scams, sharing gifts with friends and accepting gifts

from people who appreciate any street performance—public expressions of

our creative playfulness—we do. We can share skills and knowledge with

friends we visit, creating an informal network for spreading knowledge

and skills among those we trust. Acts of vandalism and sabotage and

other attacks against society will be easier since we will not be

staying around—providing an added aspect of invisibility. In these

wanderings, I would expect to spend a lot of time in wild places. I

would want to explore these places and come to know them well. These

wild places would be good locations to destroy this society. These

gatherings would provide another means of sharing knowledge and skills

as well as being a hell of a lot of fun.

As I said above, in and of themselves, these are not revolutionary

ideas. Hobos, freaks, rainbow people and others have often been

wanderers, but with no awareness of the war of society against the

free-spirited individual. We are at war, but we aren’t fighting for

power. We don’t need to build armies to overthrow the powers that be; we

need to become wild, free-spirited, unique individuals whose violence

springs from our desire to live life to the limits, and so can undermine

power itself. Wandering festivals of free-spirited individuals can

incorporate this destructive activity—very possibly much more easily

than more organized and readily defined groups.

I’ve already said that these are tentative suggestions, ideas to be

tried and tested. I’m tired of feeling isolated because I refuse to

sacrifice myself to social roles. I want to explore new ways of

relating. I’d love to hear other people’s ideas for exploring ways of

relating that get beyond social roles and enhance what is unique in each

of us. But more than that, I want to actively explore these ideas in

practice and share these explorations with friends and lovers. Then we

can cease to be merely on the margins of society and will each, as

unique wild beings, become the center of an insurrectionary project that

may destroy civilization and create a world in which we freely live,

relate and create as our unique desires move us. We will become—to quote

Renzo Novatore again— “a shadow eclipsing any form of society which can

exist under the sun.”

From “Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed” Issue #22 Nov.-Dec. 1989

The Cybernet of Domination

(Author’s note: This article is more speculative than I ideally would

have liked, because it is attempting to trace the tendencies inherent in

one aspect of modern society, tendencies which, of course, are in

relationship to other aspects of this society. This should not be read

as prediction, but as an attempt to show why cybernetics is not even

potentially liberating and will ultimately be opposed by insurgent free

spirits.)

“The dictatorship of the instrument is the worst kind of dictatorship.”

—Alfredo M. Bonanno

There is a revolution going on. By this I do not mean an insurrection,

an uprising of individuals against authority (though this revolution has

managed to recuperate some anti-authoritarian tendencies towards its

ends). I mean a substantial, qualitative change in the modes of social

reproduction. The domination of industrial capital over these processes

is being replaced by the domination of cybernetic capital. As with all

such revolutions, this will not be a smooth, easy, peaceful transition.

The old ruling order and the new ruling order are in conflict. The

strength of reactionary elements in American politics over the past

several years shows the tenacity with which the old order is trying to

maintain its dominance. But increasingly that dominance is purely

political, and the cybernetic new order dominates the economy. Some of

my technophilic anarchist friends have told me that I “need to face up

to the realities of the cybernetic age.” To me, this means examining the

nature of domination in the cybernetic age and relentlessly attacking.

All that I’ve observed indicates that cybernetic science and technology

are essential aspects of this domination.

Cybernetics innovators tend to be young (as compared to most of the

political leaders of the “old order”) and consider themselves rebels of

sorts, at the cutting edge. The anarcho-technophiles I have met are

quite sincerely rebellious and consider themselves to be opposing all

authority. But most of the cybernetic rebellion — including a fair

amount of the ‘anarchist’ cybernetic rebellion — seems like a rebellion

of entrepreneurs, a rebellion to liberate a mode of

production/reproduction not to liberate individuals. Since these

cybernetic innovators are the human agents of a qualitative change in

the nature of capitalism, it is no surprise that they choose to play a

role similar to that of earlier capitalist revolutionaries. Most of the

cybernetics freaks I know are too poor and too sincerely anarchic to

ever become part of a new ruling class. But cybernetic innovators with

money are creating just such a ruling class — though, as I will attempt

to show below, this ‘class’ might more accurately be perceived as a

system of relationships in which the technology itself rules and the

human “ruling class” of cybertechnicians and scientists only serves the

instrument, the machine. The rebellion of the cybernetic innovators is,

from its birth, purely a coup d’etat. There is nothing truly liberating

about it.

As banal as it is, it seems to need constant repeating: we live in a

society in which the image dominates reality, in which most people see

the image as reality. This makes it very easy for the cybernetic order

to recuperate rebellion, because this new order not only has a far

better grasp of image-making technologies than does the old order;

increasingly, it is becoming those technologies. A comparison of the old

order — which still is the main source of domination in most of our

lives — and the new order — which is perfecting the tools of domination,

but at the expense of the old order — would be worthwhile here.

The old order is that of industrial/financial capital. But it is more

than this — it is also the order of the nation-state and of real

political power. Authority is blatantly centralized and openly

hierarchical — no one else can pretend they are not being ruled. This is

blatant because essential power in this order actually resides in human

beings in their roles as part of the social structure. The political

mode of this order is representational democracy or one of its variants,

such as fascism, socialist dictatorship and other forms of dictatorship.

The domination of civilization over all non-human-made existence is

openly accepted as a positive and necessary thing. Commands and voting

on a choice between various commands are the methods for getting things

done. Punishment is the way of dealing with aberrations from the social

norms (though even the old order frequently uses the language of therapy

to describe its punishments). In other words, the old order is quite

open about its authoritarian nature.

At present, in much of the world (quite noticeably in the U.S.), the

technology of the new order is still mostly controlled by the old order,

which is incapable of using it efficiently, because it can’t be

understood in the old order’s terms. The social potential of cybernetics

is, thus, best discovered by reading and listening to the

cyber-mavericks. If their visions were pure sci-fi fantasies, I’d ignore

them, but the socio-political structures to fit their visions are being

actively promoted and created by various quasi-libertarian ‘radical’

groups and individuals (e.g. the Greens, libertarian municipalists,

social ecologists, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary...).

In the new order, the dominant form of capital is

cybernetic/informational capital. This does not mean the end of

industrial, financial and mercantile capitalism, but rather their

subjection to the cybernetic mode of social reproduction. This new mode

allows for some changes in social structures that, on the surface,

appear almost anarchic — changes such as those promoted by Murray

Bookchin, the Greens, RA. Wilson and other libertarians of the left and

right. These changes are not only possible, but are probably necessary

to some extent for the efficient reproduction of cybernetic society.

Decentralization is a major rallying cry of many cybernetic radicals.

This apparently anarchic goal is, in fact, not the least bit

anti-authoritarian in the context of cybernetic capitalism. Cybernetic

technology not only allows, but promotes, a decentralization of

authority. Industrial capitalism began the process by which authority

would come to exist increasingly in the very physical machinery which

reproduces society. Cybernetic technology is perfecting this process to

the extent of even bringing technologies of social control into the

realms of leisure — the home computer, video games and the like. All of

these apparently individual bits of cybertech-which have permeated

workplaces, schools, game arcades and, at least in the U.S., homes of

nearly anyone who’s not too poor to get a personal computer — are part

of a potentially unified, global network. This network is becoming the

center of authority and power. It includes both the material technology

of cybernetic machines and the social technology of cybernetic systemic

structures. Those who are too poor to buy the material machinery are

encompassed in the network by its making them dependent on social

programs that are part of the network — this dependence stemming from a

lack of access they have to knowledge which would allow them to create

their lives for themselves. The decentralization offered by cybernetics

can even extend to industry, fitting in well with the visions of certain

techno-anarchists. Some corporations are already experimenting with

having some of their production done in the form of cottage industry.

What can’t be done this way could probably be so automated that only a

few technicians would be needed in a factory as trouble-shooters. (I’ve

seen a huge factory which seemed to have only four workers.) So

cybernetics allows for the apparent decentralization of production. But,

of course, production itself remains unquestioned. This is because

cybernetic ‘decentralization’ is not the least bit anti-authoritarian;

it merely centers authority in a socio-technological network that has no

spatial or material center, because the network is itself the center and

it is (almost) everywhere. And it can easily intrude into all of our

lives.

Along with apparent decentralization, cybernetic technology offers the

possibility of apparent ‘direct’ democracy. This is what seems to

attract those anarchists and libertarian leftists who drool over this

technology. Everyone who ‘owns’ a computer is, at least politically,

connected to everyone else who ‘owns’ a computer. It would be no

surprise if some form of personal computer becomes available to even the

poorer people in the more advanced areas of capitalist domination since

this would more fully integrate them into the cybernet. If everyone in a

particular nation had a computer, they could be easily convinced that

they could make the real decisions that affect their lives — that they

could vote ‘directly’ through their computers on all significant issues.

That this constitutes as complete a separation between decision and

action as may be possible is conveniently forgotten, as is the fact that

the cybernetic system itself cannot be questioned significantly in this

way since this system itself controls what can and cannot be questioned

by the very nature of its technology. Cybernetic language is a high-tech

newspeak. The ‘direct’ democracy it offers is only that which can

reproduce cybernetic society. It does not eliminate representation; it

can merely center it in technology rather than in elected human beings.

But like all representations, this technology will act as a ruler.

The ideology behind cybernetic technology is systems analysis. Systems

analysis seeks to understand all interactions in terms of systems or

networks of relationships in which each thing affects all other things.

It attempts to scientifically (i.e. mathematically) understand these

systems of relationships in order to better control them. Thus, the

concept of ‘process’, as opposed to chains of command, becomes

increasingly important in cybernetic society. ‘Process’ — a radical

buzzword for “politically correct” ways of communicating and relating —

fits in very well with systems analysis because it is an attempt to

formalize decision making relationships without making anyone involved

feel that they are being coerced. ‘Correct’ process is potentially, the

way for the cybernet to integrate everyone as completely as possible

into itself. Process militates against non-participation, tending to

make non-participation appear as victimization rather than as a freely

made choice. The ideology behind ‘correct’ process assumes that the

individual is merely a part of the process of the system of

relationships that is the group (on the micro-level) or. society (on the

macro-level). Process is systems analysis applied to group and social

projects. It is the domination of the ideology of the cybernet in our

interactions. Process is used regularly mostly in radical, ecological,

feminist and similar groups. But many corporations are integrating

process — consensus, facilitation and the like — with old order chains

of command in experiments designed to make employees feel that they are

more truly part of the corporation. Ultimately, the ‘process’ created by

predominantly middle class ‘radical’ groups provides a system for

controlling rebellious tendencies which fits perfectly into the

framework of cybernetic control.

If a part of the cybernetic process is not functioning correctly, you

don’t punish it; you try to fix it. In the context of cybernetic

society, punishment of criminals and deviants comes to appear

increasingly inhuman and absurd. Efficient social control requires

everyone to be as fully integrated into the social system as possible,

and punishment does nothing to integrate the punished — more often than

not it does the opposite. So the most ‘progressive’ elements in society

create therapeutic approaches for dealing with social deviance. At

present, criminals are still mostly punished though the language of

therapy is used even in this context. Non-criminal deviance (e.g.

‘excessive’ alcohol use, ‘inappropriate’ sexual behavior, acting up in

school, ‘madness’) tends to be labeled a disease and ‘treated’. The

proliferation of 12-step groups and new-age therapies is just a part of

this phenomenon. Many of these groups very blatantly teach that you

cannot do anything about your alleged problems by yourself; you have to

become part of an interdependent group of fellow victims, helping each

other to recover — forever and ever and ever — and become productive

members of society. Occasionally, even criminals — particularly people

convicted of DUI or minor drug offenses — are given a choice between

punishment or forced therapy. A therapeutic approach to social deviance

appears very humane — enough so that many anarchists have integrated

aspects of therapeutic ideology into their perspectives-but this is

deceptive. The purpose of thcrapy is to reintegrate social deviants into

the social machine as well-oiled cogs. It defines technology or the

conception of the wilds as integrated systems to be used in an

integrated manner by society. Even “deep ecologists” only reject the

integration of civilized social systems and wild ‘eco-systems’, because

they feel that civilized social systems have strayed too far from the

‘natural’ systems to be capable of integrating (making some sort of

social apocalypse inevitable), not because they reject the idea that

undomesticated relating and interaction can be systematized. While most

corporations continue on apace destroying the environment, it is quite

hip now to talk ecology, and the most progressive corporations even try

to act ecologically. After all, it is to their ultimate benefit. How can

you possibly expand capital if you destroy the resources necessary for

such expansion? So cybernetic capitalism tends toward an ecological

practice as a means of domesticating the wilds without destroying them,

of integrating them into the social system of the cybernet.

Of course, these are all just tendencies which the development and

increasing power of cybernetic capital seem to be pushing towards. The

old order of industrial capital is still quite strong, dominating in the

political arena, and so still quite significant as a mode of social

domination. But an intelligent insurgency needs to understand domination

in its totality, needs to be able to recognize its new faces, so that

insurgents aren’t duped into embracing a new form of domination as

liberation. Most of the individuals I know who have embraced some

version of ecotopian, cybernetic, green anarchism seem to be quite

sincere in their desire to live free of all constraints. But they seem

to ignore some very basic aspects of cybernetics. As science,

cybernetics is the study of systems of control. Practically, it is the

production of such systems, technologically and socially — the

production of integrated systems of social control. Some of the most

common words of cybernetic language make this obvious. ‘Data’ comes from

a Greek word which means ‘That which is given” — that is an axiom, that

which you are told, without proof, and are simply not to question.

Information originally meant, literally “in formation” in Latin. The

cybernet offers no liberation whatsoever, merely the illusion of

liberation to keep rebels “in formation.” It undermines individual

experience and the trust of individuals in their own experience by

creating realms of pseudo-experience, that is, of “the given,” of

information which has no connection to anything outside the cybernet.

Individuals, increasingly, rely only on what they are told by the

cybernet, and so become dependent upon cybernetic society. In this way,

the cybernet becomes the most truly totalitarian system yet — precisely

by ‘decentralizing’ and using the integrative methods of process and

therapy which make individuals the agents of their own domestication in

a situation in which no one trusts themselves, but all are dependent on

the cybernet.

There is one flaw in this system. It disenfranchises those who do not

want or cannot afford to have cybernetic technology in their home. Even

when home computers do become available to the very poor, many may have

no interest in even learning how to use them. It is further quite

doubtful that the fully enfranchised — the technicians and scientists

who know how to produce and fully use these technologies — will be

interested in bringing everyone up to their level of knowledge about the

cybernet. So, the disenfranchised — especially the voluntarily

disenfranchised — will tend to become increasingly more so, until they

are nearly completely outside the cybernet. While inside the cybernet

the tendency is toward total control, — outside the cybernet the

tendency would be toward the total breakdown of social control.

Ultimately, in such a situation; insurgent rebellion would only be

possible outside the net.

At present, this situation is being forestalled as the new cybernetic

order and the old order have an uneasy truce. The old order needs the

informational technologies which create and are created by the new

order. And the new order is not yet powerful enough to dispense with

some of the harsher means of social control produced by the old order.

The new order has also found ways of integrating some of the more

progressive elements of the old order, such as multinational

organizations, into itself. It is also quite possible that the cybernet

will find continued uses for cops, prisons and the like within its

systemic network of social control. Or the uneasy truce may go on,

indefinitely. Since the real relations between people do not, in fact,

fit the formulas of the cybernet and its systems analysts, there is no

way of predicting what might happen. My own desire is for an

insurrection that will blow all systems of social control to bits.

But cybernetic technology is becoming the dominant mode of

post-industrial capital. It is a mode in which capital, technology,

authority and society become so totally integrated that they are truly

one. Rebellion, in this context, means rebellion against the cybernet

and rebellion against society in its totality or it means nothing. This

is what it means for the insurgent to face up to the reality of

cybernetic technology. The insurgent individual can no longer do

anything less than rebel against the totality of society — including all

of those ‘radical’ perspectives which are nothing more than the cutting

edge of the real “new world order.”

From “Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed” Issue #35 Winter 1993