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Title: The Impossible, Patience
Author: Alejandro de Acosta
Date: 2014
Language: en
Topics: art, nihilism, détournement, language, mediation, negation, anti-politics, literature, slogans, ressentiment, green nihilism, decomposition, John Cage, Little Black Cart
Source: Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/TheImpossiblePatienceCriticalEssays20072013
Notes: *The Impossible, Patience* was originally published by Little Black Cart in book form and can be found https://littleblackcart.com/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=230.

Alejandro de Acosta

The Impossible, Patience

Introduction: Proximity

The book’s form

As I wrote the essays gathered in this collection I passed from one

writing plan to another. Around seven or eight years ago, following

instructive reading of Montaigne, Hume, and Gracián, I had conceived a

plan to compose a series of essays. Each would defend an indefensible

thesis or at least inhabit a difficult, paradoxical perspective.[1] This

was partly out of sheer appreciation for the form and a consequent

desire to explore it, but also out of a need to find a way to express

what I had to say, insofar as I sometimes felt myself beyond common

sense, in a less than prescriptive voice. I was not disposed to continue

writing in the prose that composed some of my first published forays

into the topics discussed here, which are perhaps more articles or

papers than essays. It occurred to me to splice contradiction and

abstraction into the flexibility and personable tone of the essay (thus

the inclusion of Gracián—certainly not an essayist—in the above list),

adding some of the terse contrariness of the thesis. It seemed to me

this would prove healthy in two respects: it would save me from the

destiny of a certain prose, called “academic” by its detractors, and

also, perhaps, counteract what I perceived (and ever more continue to

perceive) as the linguistic rigidity around some vibrant subversive

projects and in most anti-political conversations. But as the years

after 2010 unfolded, I found myself less in the mode of composing essays

serially and largely in solitude, according to my older plan, and more

in one of dialogue with people from the North American anarchist space

or milieu[2]—responding to requests for contributions, or simply

acknowledging the appearance of interesting new persons, discussions,

readings, and events. In that way a plan for a book of essays on

previously selected topics (seduction, boredom, survival, solitude,

masks, etc.) changed into the more sequential order of the present

collection.[3]

Another way of describing the newer plan of the collection is to note

the following. Three essays placed in the middle were written in

dialogue with... what is the appropriate designation in this context?

Poets? Artists? Creators of difficult creations? In any case, writers

who belong to the history of the anarchist Idea, but are rarely

discussed in the company I have been keeping: Fénéon, Cage, Duncan.

Rather than section these three pieces off in a section on literature or

language, or, worse, publish them elsewhere, I opted to insert them into

what would have otherwise been a sequence (a syllabus?) of essays where

anti-political and nihilist themes deepened, in oblique directions, my

explication of that Idea. As I noted, the shift from serial composition

to a dialogical mode introduced into the essays a more linear,

developmental structure, as if the effects of conversation had led me to

more of an explicit parti pris. It seems important to me both to retain

something of that structure for the reader and to interrupt it.

Otherwise I run the risk of composing a book of theory about nihilist

anarchy, something no one needs. If, in the interpolated essays, the

engagement with these three figures (as well as that eternal outsider,

d.a. levy) remains in the mode of introduction and allusion, I think

it’s because I suspected and continue to suspect that many of my readers

either have no sense of them as writers or cannot connect what sense

they have to anarchist practice—least of all an anarchist practice of

reading or writing! Which is all to say that I wrote these pieces to

some extent in a teaching mode. I am glad to have touched upon each of

these writers here, if only because to name and honor them in my own way

constitutes an assertive response to a certain expectation of sloppy

writing that characterizes the anarchist space.

If there is a note of patience in these essays about matters that drive

people around me to great impatience, then I suppose that I have found

it, among other places, in the form itself. I take it that an essay is

primarily an exploration of ideas, and only secondarily an exposition.

Expectation of getting to the point is replaced by invention of a

wandering line in and as the essay. Mine are also informed by a kind of

egoism that authorizes me, in its peculiarly empty way, to make whatever

I am concerned with my own, as I impersonate the social outsider I

often, but with no real certainty, feel myself to be. So to the

paradoxical formulation of confounding theses I now add this paradox of

form, that the sociable genre of the essay can be deployed so

antagonistically at times. In saying so I am respectfully acknowledging

those that inspired me to write essays, reassuring all those who think

there is something fake at work here that they are indeed correct, and,

hopefully, amusing everyone else.

The title’s punctuation

Bill Haver used to say that to think the most important questions one

simultaneously requires a infinite patience and infinite impatience. In

the coincidence between some friends’ will to destruction and the

brevity of most attention spans I sense the infinity of impatience.

Omniprevalent rushing to action, conclusions, or whatever is next in the

feed does make one feel that patience has never been less possible. But

that is just a feeling, something like a premonition, not much more; the

present situation is full of dreadful affective indices. Here some

minimal resistance, some uncanny intuition, informs me that a strangely

infinite patience may still be coupled with our familiar infinite

impatience. And that is why the title is not Impossible Patience.

Patience is sometimes difficult, but it is hardly impossible. What is

impossible is the realization of the Idea of anarchy (which is why many

friends, unwitting Platonists, call it the Beautiful Idea). What is

impossible would be to fully assume, to truly embody, the resistant

positions (quasi-positions, really, as they are anti-political rather

than political) most often referred to in this book.

Consider them: the value of the term nihilism, to begin with, has always

been that of an insult or accusation. By the time someone calls

themselves a nihilist, there is already something of a responsive

desperation about the gesture, and not just the straightforward act of

naming implied in the common use of the phrase taking a position. Much

the same should be said for anarchist, which will be not saved from

irrelevance by retroactive conversion into a philosophy, addition of

adjectives or prefixes, or assimilation-equation to some liberal or

other radical tradition. If it is still fun (though certainly not

useful) for me to play with such terms, it is because, first, people in

the business of setting and enforcing theoretical and political agendas

for others still call their adversaries anarchists and nihilists, and

this makes me want to be such an adversary. Second, impressionable,

angry, and desperate characters continue to be courageous or foolhardy

enough to call themselves anarchists and nihilists, which makes one want

to sidle up beside them with an inscrutably patient attention to their

destructive inclinations. I share the ethics of those who feel it is

impossible to reverse an insult, of those who prefer not to hide from

what is said in it (that you are known to be an outcast), but prefer to

take it on, to become the nightmares of a nightmarish society. In my own

way, I share the ethics, and sometimes lack thereof, of those who know

it is impossible to actualize the Beautiful Idea by any instrumental

means, including instrumental destruction, and instead bear witness to

that impossibility in their dismantlings here and there.

Which is where the intuition’s mark, a comma, my comma, appears: as if

in bearing witness to impossibility we learned to stage an impatience

with impatience itself. As if to remind that this writing, because it

forms part of our punctual actions, must remain fragmented, and that

fragmentation, the emptiness that composes it, can only be read in

punctuation and spacing.[4]

Patience, then…

Proximity’s distance

Someone whose opinion I value described my approach to writing and

publication as emerging from a concern with community. I think I know

what he meant. Through these essays, there is an arc of increasing

attention and interest with regard to the people, situations, and

publications of the milieu. I have been writing with a fairly clear

sense of address. For most who care, I write from far away; but I have

been flirting with proximity, and it shows. That is what could be called

my concern for community. So I accept the evaluation of my esteemed

friend, but at the same time I must say that when I think of community

in relation to the conversations that contributed to these essays, I

mentally cross out the word. The reasons will become clear to attentive

readers along the way. For now I’ll say another word about the proximity

that brought the book to its newer plan. For me increased proximity has

made more conversations possible, but remains something other than

belonging. This passage in a life of Spinoza resonates strongly with me:

... he cannot integrate into any milieu; he is not suited to any of

them. Doubtless it is in democratic and liberal milieus that he finds

the best living conditions, or rather the best conditions for survival.

But for him these milieus only guarantee that the malicious will not be

able to poison or mutilate life, that they will not be able to separate

it from the power of thinking that goes a little beyond the ends of the

state, of a society, beyond any milieu in general. In every society,

Spinoza will show, it is a matter of obeying and of nothing else. [...]

It is certain that the philosopher finds the most favorable conditions

in the democratic state and in liberal circles. But he never confuses

his purposes with those of a state, or with the aims of a milieu, since

he solicits forces in thought that elide obedience as well as blame, and

fashions the idea of a life beyond good and evil, a rigorous

innocence... The philosopher can reside in various states, he can

frequent various milieus, but he does so in the manner of a hermit, a

shadow, a traveler or boarding house lodger...

Proximity to the milieu, in contrast to belonging, could be compared to

what has been called the Ibn ‘Arabi effect. The Ibn ‘Arabi effect has to

do with a possible feedback of the experiences of those who have

abandoned the radical milieu into that milieu. If an “anarchist” project

were constituted, not to preserve itself and thus the milieu (usually in

this order in terms of explicitly stated goals, and in reverse in terms

of actual operations), but to seek out those who have quit the milieu,

numerous salutary effects might eventually be felt: decreased influence

of “young masculinity” (team-building homosociality as the default

social bond), less disappointment and more curiosity about the stakes of

quitting, maybe even encouragement towards such abandonment as a sign of

intelligence. In both cases, in what can be learned by studying the

hermit-philosopher’s life and the (for now imagined) lessons of the Ibn

‘Arabi effect, I underline the necessary distance that coincides with

space and time to reflect. Approximation makes more conversations

possible; distance and feedback allow them to proceed past the

inevitable onset of redundancy.

But everything written here out of proximity and reflection on proximity

is shadowed by another set of more private, solitary thoughts, no less

written into the essays for being private or solitary. Such thoughts not

only are private and solitary but concern privacy and solitude as such

and are thus at odds with the politics discussed here—though not the

ethics, or, alas, the aesthetics. And insofar as I now see how much I

was concerned with such thoughts, I wonder why I signed A. de A., and

can only tell myself that it was another impersonation, one more mask.

I Have Even Met Happy Nihilists

“I Have Even Met Happy Nihilists” is the result of multiple

modifications of a review Kelly Fritsch invited me to write for the

Canadian journal Upping the Anti. An edited version of the review

appeared there in 2008. It was perhaps the first time that I wrote on

nihilism. What I read there now is an acknowledgment that politically

salvific leftist theory such as Critchley’s, even as it proclaimed an

allegiance with a certain anarchism, excluded most of what I was

beginning to find so interesting in anarchist thought and practice. I

also register a note of suspicion concerning growing attention to

anarchism in the academy. In retrospect, it seems clear that anarchism

was being invoked here, not by or for anarchists, but for a socialist or

even Leninist Left in need of correction. I am glad that in some small

way an anarchist spoke up to trouble the terms of that largely symbolic

invocation. Thinking these matters through was enough to let me know I

needed to wander off in another direction. The problem, of course, is to

figure out how to undo the common flipside of this suspicion, the

attitude of some anarchists that our “low theory” (as McKenzie Wark put

it in his study of the Situationists) is something entirely sui generis,

and so is or ought to be our only point of reference… In any case, this

review was the discovery of the anti-political, “impossible”,

perspective explored in this collection.

1. The other kind of nihilist

Simon Critchley, a professor at the New School for Social Research, has

written a brief book setting out a possible movement from ethics to

politics, from commitment to resistance. Infinitely Demanding serves as

an index of what is promising and what is a dead end in certain

philosophical approaches to Left positions and to anarchism in ethics

and politics. Rather than remaining at the level of political theory,

Critchley seeks to connect his claims with the activities of protest

movements. Here activists could find the rudiments of a common language

and some concepts for theorizing their own activity. What those who

never did, or no longer do, consider themselves activists make of it is

another matter—especially if part of their reason for doing so is

putting into question their relation to the Left. For the book is not

without the defects of much, if not most theoretical work on ethics and

politics: overly narrow theoretical and practical panoramas.

Infinitely Demanding opens by staging the problem of nihilism for ethics

and politics: all beliefs or values increasingly seem meaningless and

all actions appear equally worthless. A redefined ethics is presented as

a way to overcome nihilism, theorized as a singular kind of commitment

to a situation or cause that renovates or recreates the meaning of

action, and politics appears as the actions resulting from that

overcoming: resistance to... mostly to State power, it seems—a problem I

will return to. In sum, Critchley proposes that the problem of nihilism

is overcome, or at least more convincingly confronted, when ethics moves

from being based on a moral tradition, code, or law, to the raw

experience of ethical demand, and when politics abandons the project of

the seizure of power in favor of an endless resistance.

Critchley begins with a programmatic introduction that presents the

problem of nihilism. When he uses this term, he means it in roughly the

sense Nietzsche used it in his unpublished notebooks: the “uncanniest of

all guests,” etc. Predictably enough, then, Critchley assumes that no

one would confess to nihilism. Either one is not a nihilist, or is, but

will not confess to it. Such unconfessed nihilists are either passive

(“focused on himself and his particular pleasures and projects for

perfecting himself”[5]) or active (“various utopian, radical political,

and even terrorist groups”). While the category of passive nihilist

seems mostly to reflect a critique of unreflective individualism and

consumerism, especially of the North American variety, the second is an

unlikely hodgepodge of everything from Fourier’s phalansteries (poor

Fourier!) through Russian anarchists, Bolsheviks, Futurists, and

Situationists, all the way to various ‘70s Left

guerillas-cum-terrorists, and finally al-Qaeda, as their “quintessence.”

What they all share is “find[ing] everything meaningless, but instead of

sitting back and contemplating, [they try] to destroy this world and

bring another into being” (5). So here is the problem for Critchley:

those who should be politically active, as he considers political

action, are nihilists. For him, a way out of both of these forms of

nihilism is to turn back beyond the hollowness of meaning that seemingly

produces them, returning to the problem of motivation.

Critchley’s uncontroversial assumption is that the social, political,

and economic circumstances that currently hold sway (at least in North

America) are demotivating. But there do exist conceptual tools to

re-motivate unconfessed nihilists, especially in recent ethical theory.

Those with a desire for justice, liberation, unbounded passion, or a

radically different life might indeed feel close to a certain nihilism

as State power continues to grow and capitalism seems ever more absolute

and unsurpassable. A differently conceived ethics, however, can give

rise to a politics of resistance that does not need or expect to seize

power or defeat capitalism—just to resist them from within. Or maybe

that just is unwarranted; it is not trivial to state, as Critchley does,

that one can be anti-capitalist and anti-State without ever hoping to

succeed. He writes: “far from failure being a reason for dejection or

disaffection, I think it should be viewed as the condition for courage

in ethical action” (55).

I agree that one need not count on success to act. (At a deeper level,

this implies the critical uncoupling of what is sayable in theory from

what seems possible in practice, thus opening the theoretical

imagination to the impossible—which is not to say, the utopian.) But

before I go on to Critchley’s treatment of ethics, I will pose two

questions. First, why are “we” (who? Critchley uses the vague “we” quite

a bit) in the business of motivating anybody? How can we know if we are

even in a position to do so? How are we so sure that “they” are not

already motivated—perhaps in ways that “we” do not recognize as

political? Especially since, according to Critchley, both kinds of

nihilism are emanations of a fundamentally religious solution to the

problem of meaninglessness? When Critchley asks his readers “how might

we fill the best with passionate intensity” (39), who exactly is he

referring to? Those among “the best” who have fallen to nihilism? The

best among the credulous rest? At the least, his background

presuppositions about relations betweendefeat capitalism—just to resist

them from within. Or maybe that just is unwarranted; it is not trivial

to state, as Critchley does, that one can be anti-capitalist and

anti-State without ever hoping to succeed. He writes: “far from failure

being a reason for dejection or disaffection, I think it should be

viewed as the condition for courage in ethical action” (55). I agree

that one need not count on success to act. (At a deeper level, this

implies the critical uncoupling of what is sayable in theory from what

seems possible in practice, thus opening the theoretical imagination to

the impossible—which is not to say, the utopian.) But before I go on to

Critchley’s treatment of ethics, I will pose two questions. First, why

are “we” (who? Critchley uses the vague “we” quite a bit) in the

business of motivating anybody? How can we know if we are even in a

position to do so? How are we so sure that “they” are not already

motivated—perhaps in ways that “we” do not recognize as political?

Especially since, according to Critchley, both kinds of nihilism are

emanations of a fundamentally religious solution to the problem of

meaninglessness? When Critchley asks his readers “how might we fill the

best with passionate intensity” (39), who exactly is he referring to?

Those among “the best” who have fallen to nihilism? The best among the

credulous rest? At the least, his background presuppositions about

relations between intellectuals and masses should be made explicit. But,

for me, the stakes are greater than that. The unstated and truly

fascinating matter is that many are motivated without an explicit

ethics. This is a key component of anarchism and seems absent from

Critchley’s theory. Second question: Is nihilism always and only a

problem? I remain unconvinced that it is, if only because I have met

even stranger creatures than the active and passive nihilists Critchley

warns us away from. About the active nihilist, Critchley writes that he

“finds everything meaningless, but instead of sitting back and

contemplating, he tries to destroy this world and bring another into

being” (5). If such a nihilist thinks this new world will be more

meaningful, he is still too credulous! There are among us passionate

people, intelligent people, people capable of acting in a political

sphere and of subtracting themselves from it as well—and they confess to

nihilism. They do not need to be motivated by anyone; and they often

consider themselves to be more sober than the rest of us.

I realize that I have ended up with something other than a critique

here. Since, as I am about to explain, Critchley’s ethics has to do with

a raw experience, I offered mine, insofar as I have met individuals who

contradict or exceed his schema: confessed nihilists, to be precise.

2. Ethics as micro-politics

However it manifests, nihilism undermines beliefs and values that have

traditionally composed morality. Critchley seeks to overcome this

undermining, provocatively suggesting: “the question of the metaphysical

ground or basis of ethical obligation should simply be disregarded …

Instead, the focus should be on the radicality of the human demand that

faces us, a demand that requires phenomenology and not metaphysics”

(55). That is, the emphasis must shift (and after nihilism it cannot but

shift) from deducing the foundation of ethics to a phenomenology of

ethical experience. What Critchley calls a “demand” is, he argues,

impervious to nihilism. It is therefore unsurprising that, although

Alain Badiou, Knud Ejler Løgstrop, and Jacques Lacan are all summoned as

interlocutors in the discussion of ethical experience and the ethical

subject, it is Emmanuel Levinas who serves as the main point of

reference. Levinas, in works such as Totality and Infinity: An Essay on

Exteriority (1961) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974),

claimed that ethics has priority over metaphysics or ontology as “first

philosophy” and that the first fact of ethics is the face of the Other.

One’s experience of the Other is irreducible and primary, preceding even

self-knowledge. One’s encounter with the Other is the beginning of

experience as such and thus makes all experience, all subjectivity, part

of ethics.

One interesting aspect of Critchley’s reading of Levinas is his claim

that the nature of ethics is the same for secularists and for theists. A

formula: “I experience a radical demand and try to shape my subjectivity

in relation to it” (55). If the problem of grounding or justifying

ethical theories is set aside in favor of a phenomenology of ethical

experience, any sort of ethical experience that brings about the radical

demand is good enough: the face of God, of my lover, of the strange

neighbor, of the hungry or tortured other. This gesture is fully in line

with Levinas’ philosophy, and I find it compelling to some extent; my

principal objection is that the categories of secularist and theist

invoked here do not exhaustively describe all possible forms of

religious and (for lack of a better word) non-religious experience.

Could it be that Levinas and Critchley are identifying some basic

structure that is, if not hard-wired into the history of “European” or

“Western” forms of subjectivation, especially insofar as they reflect

monotheisms, at least massively available to the inheritors of those

traditions? If so, what about everybody else, here and elsewhere? Do

animists or polytheists hear the demand? And what of the poor Buddhists

that, in one of his most irritating gestures, Critchley mentions only in

repeating the infamous Nietzschean quasi-metaphor that equates Buddhism

with passivity and nihilism? How, in short, do those of us who do

experience ethics as the cleavage in ourselves relate to all of those

who have no self to be cleaved—or have too many for it to matter?

Critchley does not address this question. He is rather more concerned to

discuss how this cleavage or split in the self need not amount to

endless guilt and self-torture. He does this through a discussion of

sublimation and humor that incorporates psychoanalytic concepts into his

ethics in a bid to remove them from the accusation of vestigial

religiosity often leveled at Levinas and his followers. This is all

interesting but seems rather secondary given the magnitude of the

problems he has raised (so far: nihilism and the putative universality

of ethical experience).

Now, returning to the idea that any experience of ethical demand is good

enough: is that so? Some of these faces of the Other are intimate,

others distant; some real, others imaginary. How to reconcile them all

in a single phenomenology? It is not hard to criticize Levinasian ethics

for its crypto-religious leanings: it seems the only way to get around

the imperative of the moral law was to divide the self, rending it

insofar as it was possessed by the Other. A mutually ethical relation

would then amount to mutual possession. Obviously many anarchists,

especially the egoists, would have no interest in such claims. They

might rather hazard a version of what I heard a Korean anarchist say

quite charmingly some years ago: “Some days I am ethical ... some days I

am not.” Though I do not think this means the idea of a raw experience

of ethical demand is useless, I do think it shows its purported

universality is a failure. (And this perhaps returns us to a more

modest, pre-Kantian ethics, something like the moral sentiments of Hume

or Smith, though without their claimed relation to our animal or human

nature.) In politics, the problem of nihilism is perhaps not as

immediately discernible as it is in ethics. As Critchley describes it,

one facet is strategic and has to do with identifying politically

effective actions that are in line with the ethical demands one

experiences. But prior to that is the question of motivation: Critchley

seeks to “provide an ethical orientation” that might support “a

remotivation of politics or political action” (90). For him, political

action “does not flow from the cunning of reason, some materialist or

idealist philosophy of history, or socio-economic determinism, but

rather from … a ‘metapolitical’ moment of ethical experience.” This idea

of a politics motivated by a morality without sanction is, if not

already anarchist in most senses of the word, compelling to many

anarchists.[6] For Critchley this ethical component both motivates

political action and maintains it as democratic, egalitarian, or at

least non-coercive. I would like to underline that this is a different

account of motivation than the passage from ethics to politics as

usually conceived, because the ethics at stake is situational: theorists

or philosophers can recommend actions, motivating people to act, but

ethics has no sanction.

For that reason especially, it might seem promising that Critchley

attempts to connect his argument with existing movements. “The ethical

energy for the remotivation for politics and democracy can be found in

those plural, dispersed, and situated anti-authoritarian groups that

attempt to articulate the possibility of … ‘true democracy’” (90). I

should note, however, that he does not seem to have (or at least never

refers to) any direct experience of these movements.[7] When he presents

what he calls “anarchic meta-politics” as a basis for and extension of

anarchist theory and practice, it’s safe to say that he is not

especially familiar with either. With respect to anarchism, Critchley is

a combination of a dreamer and a friendly observer. Overwhelmingly, he

seems to situate himself primarily in some sort of philosophical Left

(that is probably the book’s “we”) that needs to be steered to anarchism

while holding on to a certain young Marx. It is not surprising that

citations of authors closer to Marxism than anarchism (Ernesto Laclau,

Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Miguel

Abensour) far outnumber references to anarchist texts or movements in

Infinitely Demanding. I am not mentioning any of this to maintain some

sort of purity or specialization of anarchist thought and practice, but

rather to underline to what extent it is an imagined and imaginary

anarchism that is under discussion here, whether under that name or

something like “anarchic meta-politics” or “neo-anarchism.”

At the same time, Critchley frames his argument as explicitly

anti-Leninist (and makes, both in the introduction and the appendix

(5-6, 146), the claim that contemporary Islamic terrorism is

neo-Leninist). “Politics,” he writes, “is praxis in a situation that

articulates an interstitial distance from the state and allows for the

emergence of new political subjects who exert a universal claim” (92).

That, and emphatically not the attempted or successful seizure of state

power. But here there is an enormous problem: if politics is so defined,

what shall we call the activities of States? It makes more sense to me

to either describe both State activities and the actions of movements as

politics, or—and this is by far the more compelling, if under-explored,

option: to describe State activities and some of their contestation as

politics, and the remainder of what anarchists (and some others) do,

outside of movements, as micro- and especially anti-politics. If we

accept this second description, then the version of ethics we get is far

more fragile: it is neither universally reliable as moral law or raw

experience, nor is its motivation of a passage to politics a predictable

or desirable effect.

For his part, Critchley maintains that for the foreseeable future, the

presence of states is inevitable. What ethically motivated subjects do,

then, is confront State power, creating and acting within “interstices.”

Critchley illustrates the opening up of interstices with a strange quote

from Levinas: “Anarchy … cannot be sovereign. It can only disturb,

albeit in a radical way, the State, prompting isolated moments of

negation without any affirmation. The State, then, cannot set itself up

as a Whole” (cited in Infinitely Demanding, 122). I wonder if Critchley

has fully digested what Levinas is suggesting here concerning negation.

It also bears underlining that this is a passage, as Levinas made clear

(and as Critchley repeats) about philosophical anarchy, and therefore as

relevant to the other, confessed, nihilism I have gestured towards as

much as to any supposed anarchism or neo-anarchism. Critchley’s

interpretation of this philosophy in practical terms amounts to, first,

underlining to what extent its demand translates to a thoroughly

anti-authoritarian politics (“anarchy is the creation of interstitial

distance within the state, the continual questioning from below of any

attempt to establish order from above” (122-123)). For him, this is the

overall ethical force of anarchism. Secondly, Critchley maintains that

“the great virtue of contemporary anarchism is its spectacular,

creative, and imaginative disturbance of the state” (123). While I find

this philosophical affirmation of protest movements somewhat

interesting, I am also deeply troubled at the way it makes confrontation

with State power the defining or at least most meaningful moment of

anarchist practice. This is to miss out on countless sorts of collective

activities, sometimes called communities, not to mention more or less

secret individual pursuits. I am referring again to the micro- and

anti-political, which, though they are understandably off the radar of

an interested outsider, compose for many of us the most significant

aspect of anarchy as we are able to live it. This overemphasis on the

State is my third major problem with Infinitely Demanding.

3. Hangovers of the Left

Critchley concludes with a telling appendix entitled

“Crypto-Schmittianism—the Logic of the Political in Bush’s America.” It

offers a schematic conjunctural analysis of the U.S. state and its

politics, emphasizing, as the title suggests, the supposed influence of

the writings of the Nazi-affiliated political theorist Carl Schmitt on

the Bush administration. How did they get re-elected in 2004? “I think

part of the story is that certain people in the Bush administration have

got a clear, robust, and powerful understanding of the nature of the

political. They have read their Machiavelli, their Hobbes, their Leo

Strauss and misread their Nietzsche” (133). Meanwhile the Democrats are

“too decent, too gentlemanly or gentlewomanly. They are too nice […] It

seems to me that they don’t understand a damn thing about the political”

(143). Critchley suggests they study Carl Schmitt and Gramsci. The

argument as to the bookishness of the Bush Republicans goes so far as to

enter into a discussion of whether George W. Bush is stupid (if you

care: he isn’t (138); he seems to have read a book and is apparently

capable of presenting “theses” (141)). From there, Critchley returns to

the main argument of the book, distinguishing between three political

alternatives available in the current conjuncture. They are “military

neo-liberalism,” “neo-Leninism” (our old friends the active nihilists)

and the “neo-anarchism” he recommends.

Without once more invoking the prefix “neo-”, I might point out that, if

we stick to the terms of this schema, there is a position missing here.

These alternatives are not really alternatives: the neoliberals and

neo-Leninists, whoever they are, will never be convinced by reading a

book like Critchley’s. The neo-anarchists might find in it a new

language for their ethico-political motivation. And those who are

inexplicably motivated, within and outside politics? They are the

incredulous: confessed nihilists.

Reading the appendix I could not help but feel that I was learning

entirely too much about Critchley’s true politics and watching him be

dragged back into the perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately

self-referential Leftism of so many Continental philosophers—or

university professors, for that matter. I was somewhat interested in the

image I got from the last chapter, a vision of an ethically inclined

phenomenologist charting out a turn to a politics of resistance that had

some chances of building a bridge with existing movements and

non-academic theorizing. It might have helped make some trouble, at

least. The appendix botched that image. I will conclude by explaining

how and why it matters.

The first aspect of the problem is Critchley’s uncritical identification

with Democrats or Left electoral parties. Critchley discusses the U.S.

Democrats and what they should do, and whether “we” should support them

(143-145). For many of us this is completely irrelevant to the theme of

the contestation or evasion of State power, and especially to what we

think of as politics and its alternatives. Second aspect: the assumption

that the appearance of recognizable philosophical signifiers in relation

to the Bush administration signals that it can be understood by study of

the texts involved. “They have read …” and so “they understand the

nature of the political.” This is preposterous. It is the

intellectualist fantasy of a professor. Supposing there is a nature of

the political, there is no golden road, no special texts that one must

read, to understand it. The third aspect of the problem is a graver

version of the second: Critchley devotes space to claiming that “Bush

thinks” as though this mattered. What all of this amounts to is the

familiar phenomenon of an intellectual who simply cannot let go of the

mirage of electoral politics and political figureheads, never realizing

to what extent being intellectually and emotionally involved in their

activities amounts to anything but resistance.

Despite two awkward references to the “Situationism of Guy Debord” (5,

135) it never seems to occur to Critchley that the Spectacle is more

than image-based propaganda. It is a social relation, or lack of

relation, really, that makes it possible to speculate, for example,

about the reading lists of cabinet members, the plans of huge and

institutionalized electoral parties, and even the intelligence or lack

thereof of figureheads as though it mattered for the politics of

resistance. All the while, engaging in such speculation, we miss the

fact that we have been duped into continuing to think of ourselves as

belonging on the same purported Left-Right continuum as huge electoral

parties, satisfied that we are farther to the Left than the Democrats.

This is, it seems to me, the limit of Critchley’s political thought. It

is friendly to what he conceives as anarchism, or at least to

anti-authoritarian protest movements; but it cannot shake its

identification with a Left that continues to define the limits of action

in terms of engagement with the State and forbids stepping beyond

them—beyond politics. Therefore the anarchism he recommends is reactive.

Yes, theoretically inclined activists might learn something about how

they are perceived and how they might explain themselves from

Critchley’s writing, but there is little here in the way of a broader

social or strategic imagination with which they might chart out future

actions. And as for the rest of us—my friends the nihilists; those of

us, too, who are something other than activists—what remains are curious

questions. How do we explain to each other what motivates us, if it is

indeed so intimate (which is not necessarily to say private, or

personal)? It’s fair to say that some of what Critchley suggests about

raw ethical experience, about an ethics without sanction, is relevant

here. Is there a way to reject the language of politics and/or activism

in favor of micropolitics or anti-politics, so far as we are capable of

defining these terms, and the activities and structures they express,

other than reactively?

Appendix: I Have Even Met Happy Nihilists, Tractatus Version

[Excerpts]

1. Someone writes a book.

1.1 Someone else publishes it.

1.2 In it you find a story of the world.

1.2.1 The story comes ever so close to describing, if not the life you

live, something like the life you suppose others live.

1.2.2 Activists, for example.

1.2.2.1 Or those who compose movements.

1.2.2.2 At least those who say they do.

1.2.2.3 And anarchists, maybe, since there is also supposed to be

something called anarchism, which is said to overlap with activism or

movements.

1.3 But the book is strange.

1.3.1 It tells a story about anarchy, gestures to it somehow, but

sideways.

1.3.2 You might wonder what that has to do with your life, your

thoughts.

[…]

6. The book is both more and less than what it seemed to be at first.

6.1 Less: the habits of writers run deep, and there is a way such habits

have of containing the new even as they strive to name it.

6.2 More: in all the flag-waving there might be an interstice.

6.3 A place and a time, however contingent, however passing, where and

when to say: here some others and I lived.

6.3.1 Because we lived, sometimes we were ethical.

6.3.2 And almost no one noticed or understood.

Its Core is the Negation

This is the first in a trilogy of essays on approaches to nihilism, the

other two being “History as Decomposition” and “Green Nihilism or Cosmic

Pessimism.” It is focused on Duane Rouselle’s After Post-Anarchism, a

book that caused me no small amount of frustration. I was pleased to

discover something in it worth sharing with many who I knew would never

make it through its pages, so I tried to write it out for them in

Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, where it was published in 2013. It

was also, then, a gift to that publication, which I recall reading with

interest around 1991-1992, and where I had published some playful essays

in more recent years. In this essay, the feeling of there being

something new to say took a hybrid form, combining a “report on

knowledge” with a personal philosophical narrative. This is also the

place to remark that, in the same vein as Duane’s book, the reading (and

re-reading) of the writings of Monsieur and Frère Dupont have been for

me, as for a few others, the source of an uncanny clarity; they receive

brief explicit mention here, but their salutary influence should be

clear.

1

I have always considered my inclination to anarchy to be irreducible to

a politics. Anarchist commitments run deeper. They are more intimate,

concerning supposedly personal or private matters; but they also

overflow the instrumental realm of getting things done. Over time, I

have shifted from thinking that anarchist commitments are more than a

politics to thinking that they are something other than a politics. I

continue to return to this latter formulation. It requires thinking

things through, not just picking a team; it is more difficult to

articulate and it is more troubling to our inherited common sense.[8] I

do not think I am alone in this. It has occurred to some of us to

register this feeling of otherness by calling our anarchist commitments

an ethics. It has also occurred to some of us to call these commitments

anti-political. I think these formulations are, for many of us,

implicitly interlinked, though hardly interchangeable. What concerns me

here in the main is the challenge of what it could mean to live out our

commitments as an ethics—though I think the relevance of this thinking

to anti-politics will be clarified as well.

I intentionally write ethics, and not morality: as I see it, ethics

concerns the flourishing of life, the refinement of desirable ways of

life, happy lives. Tiqqun put it well:

When we use the term “ethical” we’re never referring to a set of

precepts capable of formulation, of rules to observe, of codes to

establish. Coming from us, the word “ethical” designates everything

having to do with forms-of-life. ... No formal ethics is possible. There

is only the interplay of forms-of-life among themselves, and the

protocols of experimentation that guide them locally.[9]

Many of us have been able to reject morality as a form of social

control, as the stultifying pressure of the Mass on us, as imposed or

self-imposed limitation on what we do and what we are capable of doing.

Much the same could be said for any ethical universalism which, though

emphasizing ways of life and not moral codes or injunctions, tends to

homogenize ways of life in the name of a shared good; it does so by

surreptitiously presupposing that good and treating it as a natural fact

or self-evident transcultural reality. In short, it rejects transcendent

morality only to re-introduce it immanently. Our rejection of this

single Good went often enough in the direction of pluralism: the story

went that there were many Goods, many valid or desirable forms of life.

This seemed obvious enough, even intuitive, to many of us. The story

went well with anarchist principles of decentralization and voluntary

association, and resonated with many in the years when

anti-globalization rhetoric emphasized Multiculturalism as a practice of

resistance and The Local as the site of its practice. It also made

sense, or at least was useful, insofar as it was an efficient way to

communicate an anarchist perspective to non-anarchists, especially to

potential anarchists.

So here we have two different approaches to ethics. One tries to secure

access and orientation to a single flourishing form, the criterion being

that it be understandable by all: the Good unifies. The other approach

claims that there are many such forms, and this plurality itself is the

criterion: the Good distributes itself into Goods. Always suspicious of

universalizing claims, for many years I sided (more or less comfortably)

with the latter, participating in a game of adding -s to the end of

words like people, culture, gender, and so on. Though I was never too

concerned to recruit, so that the benefits of communicability were

irrelevant to me, this game nevertheless seemed linked to an affirmative

gesture, affirmative specifically of difference and plurality in the

political sphere. There was always the question of recuperation, i.e.

that governmental and other institutions so easily incorporated such

pluralism into their functioning as its liberal pole (the conservative

pole, which was always present implicitly at least, had to do with norms

of governance or rule-following generally). For example, these days

university administrations trumpet Multiculturalism louder than anyone

else, and Locally Sourced is a hot marketing term. This troubled those

of us who took this side, but we countered by emphasizing what could be

called raw plurality as opposed to the masticated, digested, and

regurgitated version we got from administrators and mouthpieces of all

sorts. Choosing pluralism, eagerly or grudgingly, we might have ended up

as uneasy relativists; or we might have been working hard to expand the

frontiers of liberalism and democracy, there where the word radical

finds its most docile partners...[10]

I have come to realize, after what I now recognize to be good deal of

confusion, if not unconscious hedging, that even as I labored on the

limits of pluralism, my thinking was incongruous with that position. My

writing and conversations repeatedly gestured in the direction of

another position, irreducible to universalism and ever more desperate

attempts at pluralism. It is a nihilism that denies the validity of the

singular Good at the heart of universalism, as well as the distinct

senses of the Good at the heart of pluralism. For nihilists, the only

ethical gesture is negative: a rejection of the claims to authority of

universalism and pluralism. For us, all such claims are empty,

groundless, ultimately meaningless. And this is what was really at stake

in distinguishing ethics and morality. My idea of a happy life is not

something I reason my way to, or choose, but rather something that

manifests senselessly... but I can use my reasoning (my judgment, even!)

to help in pushing back, reducing, destroying everything that blocks my

way of life.

This report on what must be not only my own trajectory, but also part of

the history of the last twenty-five years (more or less for some others)

is due in part to some crucial pages in Duane Rousselle’s After

Post-Anarchism that consolidated this thought of nihilism for me.

Rousselle argues that the nihilist position I have just described has

always been the ethical core of anarchism, and that we are now in a

moment where this may finally be recognized.

2

I want to respond to After Post-Anarchism because it contains that

significant provocation. Unfortunately, for most of its readers, this

book cannot but be an exotic object. To whatever degree it discusses

familiar ideas or even lived situations, it does so through arcane

routes. Yes, it is difficult reading; but it is not by engaging with

what is most difficult in it that readers will happen upon the few

remarkable insights that it contains. Rousselle’s writing is difficult

because of the density of his references and because of an unfortunate

penchant for wordiness and digression. Although I would be the last to

say that every idea articulated in theoretical or abstract terms can

also be phrased in ordinary, so-called accessible language, I suspect

that much of what I find valuable in After Post-Anarchism can indeed be

restated otherwise. I intend to do so here. As I noted, this aspect of

After Post-Anarchism struck me as an unusually clear formulation of

thoughts I had been struggling to express for years (among other places,

in the pages of this magazine). So, instead of a broader critique of

post-anarchism (which Rousselle has a knack for folding back into a plea

for its relevance) I will limit myself to some brief remarks about his

misprision of the respective roles of theory and practice.[11]

Post-anarchism receives numerous formulations in this book, but really

only two definitions. The first is simply that it is a “discursive

strategy” (31): not so much a theory as the outcome of ongoing

discussions and debates in a theoretical space where anarchism,

post-structuralism, and new social movements (as theorized by their

participants and outsiders) intersect. In this respect I could make many

objections or clarifications, but I will simply note that for such

investigations to proceed as Rousselle intends, anarchism (as “classical

anarchism,” 4 and passim) must be interpreted as “anarchist philosophy,”

sometimes “traditional anarchist philosophy” (39 and passim).[12] The

second definition, which follows from the first but is more provocative,

is that post-anarchism “is simply anarchism folded back onto itself”

(136). For Rousselle this means an anarchic questioning of the ethical

basis of anarchism, a search for the anarchy in anarchism; he later

specifies his own version of this folding in terms of the distinction

between manifest and latent contents of statements.

Here I can underline both the weakness and the promise of Rousselle’s

approach. Whatever the silliness of the term post-anarchism, I think the

second definition’s project of questioning, of folding back reflexively,

is of interest to any anarchist who does not take their position on

questions of morality and ethics (or anything else, for that matter) for

granted. When he is pursuing this sort of questioning, Rousselle is at

his strongest. When he is treating the anarchist tradition

interchangeably as a series of historical figures, events, practices,

etc. and as the discursive or conceptual framing that can be abstracted

from them (“anarchist philosophy”), he is at his weakest. He repeatedly

falls into the intellectualist trap of describing actions as the result

of pre-existing theoretical attitudes. “Can we at least provisionally

admit,” he asks rhetorically, “that anarchism is not a tradition of

canonical thinkers but one of canonical practices based on a canonical

selection of ethical premises?” (129). Freeing himself from the idea of

an anarchist movement set into motion by a bearded man’s intellect, he

remains on the side of the intellect by presupposing of a pre-existing

set of premises on which practices are “based” and from which they

derive their status as “canonical.”

One more critical remark about the weakness in this approach. Rousselle

describes post-anarchism in a third way, and this one is not so much a

definition as an illustration. He writes that post-anarchism is the “new

paradigm” (126) of anarchist thought: “The paradigm shift... that made

its way into the anarchist discourse, as ‘post-anarchism,’ allowed for

the realization and elucidation of the ethical component of traditional

anarchist philosophy” (129). He is so zealous in his promotion of this

term that several times in his book he annexes authors who explicitly

reject the term, such as Uri Gordon and Gabriel Kuhn, to the cause. This

all seems to me to be in bad taste. There is also a more profound

problem at stake: paradigm shifts do not happen because one says they

do. The declarative, performative wishes evidenced whenever Rousselle

uses the language of advancement or progress, as though what was at

stake here was a science, tell us much about his intentions, but always

fall flat in terms of convincingness. Even if there is a paradigm shift

at work in anarchist theory (or practice!), there is no reason to

consider the shift as an improvement. We are probably just catching up

to an increasingly complex, chaotic, and uncontrollable world. So I

fault him for misunderstanding what a paradigm shift is, for wildly

exaggerating the overall importance of post-anarchism, and for framing

anarchism too abstractly as an inchoate philosophy. Nevertheless,

returning to my principal reasons for writing this essay, I will now

praise Rousselle, for some of what he writes about ethics.

3

Early in After Post-Anarchism Rousselle states that, answering what he

calls “the question of place” (roughly, on what grounds do you make an

ethical claim?) there are three types of responses. There are

universalist theories, which state that “there is a shared objective

essence that grounds all normative principles irrespective of the stated

values of independently situated subjects or social groups” (41). This

would include most religiously grounded moralities, as well as appeals

to human nature. Most such theories are absolutist, but they need not

all be so; utilitarianism is an example of a “normative theory that

proposes that the correct solution is the one that provides the greatest

good to the majority of the population.” The second set of theories,

which corresponds to what I called pluralism in the opening section, is

what Rousselle refers to as ethical relativism. “Relativists believe

that social groups do indeed differ in their respective ethical value

systems and that each respective system constitutes a place of ethical

discourse”(43). That is, there are different systems (of belief,

culture, custom, etc.) that may ground morals. Again, there is an

interesting subset, a limit-case: “At the limit of relativist ethics is

the belief that the unique subject is the place from which ethical

principles are thought to arise”(43). This corresponds to most types of

individualism.

The provocation I am underlining in Rousselle’s book is that, rather

than try once more to save pluralism by pushing it farther into a

parodic relativism, he pursues what he calls ethical nihilism. His first

stab at a definition runs: “ethical nihilism is the belief that ethical

truths, if they can be said to exist at all, derive from the paradoxical

non-place within the heart of any place” (43). That is, nihilism denies

the ground, or at least the grounding or claim to grounding, in ethical

universalism and pluralism. “Nihilists seek to discredit and/or

interrupt all universalist and relativist responses to the question of

place [...] nihilists are critics of all that currently exists and they

raise this critique against all such one-sided foundations and systems”

(44–45). Obviously, this completes the triplicity with which I began

this essay.

It is from this triplicity that Rousselle develops his analysis of

ethics in relation to anarchism. Rather than argue about existing moral

codes or ethical paths, Rousselle suggests that another position has so

far remained largely undiscussed: the nihilist one that rejects the

authority or normativity of such argumentation. He states that

post-anarchists, so far, have approached “classical anarchism” as a

universalism (generally based on human nature) and sought to

redistribute its ethical impetus in the direction of relativism. What

Rousselle seeks to do, by contrast, is to make explicit the implicit

core of classical anarchism; and that core, according to him, is

ultimately nihilist. “One must therefore seek to remain consistent with

the latent force rather than the manifest structure of anarchist ethics,

for there is a negativity that is at the very core of the anarchist

tradition” (98–99). Centering his discussion on Kropotkin, Rousselle

claims that while Kropotkin’s manifest ethics was clearly universalist

(grounded on an appeal to human nature), his latent ethics was nihilist.

“If it can be demonstrated that Kropotkin’s system of ‘mutual aid’ also

called for the restriction of the free movement of the individual then

it can also be argued that his work, like much of traditional anarchist

philosophy, was always at war with itself” (146).[13] The ethical

nihilism is revealed by chipping away at the manifest content of the old

saws, serially revealing the conflicts they conceal, the latent content

that was always implied in them:

• Anarchists are against the State and Church

implies…

• Anarchists are against the structures of representation and power at

work in the State and Church

implies…

• Anarchists are against any other structures of representation and

power analogous to those at work in the State and Church

implies…

• Anarchists are against any structure of representation and power

implies…

• Anarchists are against all authority, all representation

implies…

• Anarchists are against …[14]

Now, most anarchists will drop off at some point in the chain of

implication, judging it to have gone too far past what they regard as

common sense. (Our enemies might be less inclined to think they have

gone too far.) What does this mean? Roughly speaking, that under

analysis the initial emphases on opposition to state or religious

authority give way to an unbounded hostility to all authority; that the

opposition to political representation opens onto being against all

representation; and that the critique of the unfoundedness of existing

moral codes concludes in a sense of the ungroundedness of all morality.

And they do so in two senses: historically, as the overall tendency of

anarchism has sufficient time to develop (that it will be repressed and

denied by its adherents as well as enemies is not evidence against

this); and psychologically or subjectively, since this overall tendency

is also an intimate matter in the life of individuals, part of the

unconscious of its first and present proponents (and so analogous claims

about repression by adherents and enemies most certainly apply).[15]

Rousselle suggests that, although most post-anarchists thought they were

improving upon anarchism or developing its intuitions, they were in fact

rendering it more docile, because more akin to liberal ideals; he, on

the other hand, has revealed its nihilist core, its true and original

inclination to anarchy. The problem now becomes: when anarchists disavow

this nihilist core, opting for some version of relativism (or

universalism!), how do we answer them? For the same reasons that I do

not take Kropotkin’s or Bakunin’s manifest ideas as my guides, I do not

take what analysis might reveal as their latent content as my guide. And

if I do not find this kind of argumentation compelling, why would I use

it on another? This is where Rousselle’s intellectualist assumptions

undercut the force of his claims. I do think, however, that the ethical

nihilist position is at the core of most anarchist discourse and

practice, as its latent content. That is, I think he is basically right,

not specifically about so-called classical anarchism, but, proximately

and for the most part, about anarchists. Rousselle’s psychoanalytically

inspired method of reading texts should be transformed into a rhetoric,

or rather a counter-rhetoric, that can intervene in the present more

directly. What he does with old texts, others might be able to do with

people, groups, and contemporary texts. But how and when to use this

counter-rhetoric? The least I can say is that I am not in the business

of convincing anyone about what they really think. I may well keep my

analysis to myself, or state it in resignation of being misunderstood;

or I may use it to attack. Whatever the case, the nihilist position will

be known in that it exposes the differend between itself and the others,

and between the others and themselves.

This is consistent with the basic formulation of nihilism as a negative

ethics. Actions taken in its name are always provisional: to reiterate

from Theory of Bloom, all we have and all we know is “the interplay of

forms-of-life” and “the protocols of experimentation that guide them.”

No one knows what the world would be like if it were populated with

nihilists alone! Following the previously cited sentence on the

negativity at the core of the tradition, Rousselle cites one of his

sources, the moral philosopher J.L. Mackie:

[W]hat I have called moral scepticism is a negative doctrine, not a

positive one: it says what there isn’t, not what there is. It says that

there do not exist entities or relations of a certain kind, objective

values or requirements, which many people have believed to exist. If

[this] position is to be at all plausible, [it] must give some account

of how other people have fallen into what [it] regards as an error, and

this account will have to include some positive suggestions about how

values fail to be objective, about what has been mistaken for, or has

led to false beliefs about, objective values. But this will be a

development of [the] theory, not its core: its core is the negation.

(99)

In my language, the negation corresponds to ethics as a way of life; the

account of error, to what I call a counter-rhetoric. I praise Rousselle,

then, because he contributed to a defense of what is negative in

anarchism, while also hinting at a defense of negativity as such. He

makes space for us to read passages such as the one by Mackie, above,

creatively, offering them to us as lessons—logical lessons about what

anarchy means. Its core is the negation.

4

Such logical lessons are useful, arguably necessary, if we want to

discard hope at this juncture and think with more sobriety. Most of the

thinking from this perspective remains to be done. It concerns the

conjunctions and disjunctions between several senses of nihilism. First,

there are those most familiar in the milieu as positions: nihilist

anarchy and nihilist communism. Second, there is nihilism as a

theoretical concern in other writers, from Jacobi to Baudrillard.

Lastly, there is the diagnostic sense of nihilism inherited from

Nietzsche. Articulating these with the ethical nihilism Rousselle

discovers/invents at the core of anarchism will be a complicated task,

so I will limit myself here to an enumeration of provisional

consequences stemming from what I have written so far. I offer these

consequences as a relay from After Post-Anarchism’s provocations to the

thinking that remains to be done: to make it possible, to prepare it as

best I know how. The first two consequences suggest how we might deploy

the triplicity to understand and critique contemporary anarchist

approaches. The latter two concern the broader relevance and context for

ethical nihilism, setting out from the anarchist context.

The first consequence is that it is now clear that many contemporary

anarchists confusedly combine ethical universalism with ethical

pluralism; and ethical universalism with ethical nihilism. In a society

like ours, one whose ideal is supposedly liberal democracy, we should

expect pluralist language to be the most likely one in which radicals

will offer their analysis and proposals. Community organizing,

consciousness-raising, and so on, have obvious links to liberalism and

are at best its radical forms. As a result, moralistic types — those who

publically advocate a renewal of society, an improvement of government

and management (as self-government, self-management), suggesting

pluralist approaches — are likely to refuse to discuss or make explicit

the universalist core of their thought. Others might advocate the same

practices, while privately sensing or even admitting the hollowness of

the values they defend. (One disingenuous result of these private/public

conflicts is the unrestrained impulse to act no matter what, as though

action can never be damaging or compromised, coupled with claims that it

is all an experiment, that we are learning as we go, and so on.) This

offers a new perspective on the emergence and significance of

second-wave anarchy[16] generally, including post-Left anarchy,

green/anti-civilization anarchy, and, I suppose, post-anarchism as well,

all of which might now be seen as attempts to analyze and reveal these

contradictions, to make explicit the ways in which anarchist discourse

was always at war with itself.

The second consequence complements the first: another set of anarchists

confuses ethical pluralism with ethical nihilism. Here merely stating

the ethical nihilist position coherently has effects. In this respect I

think of those who might have overcome the liberal value-set in

politics, advocating destruction of the existent, but continue to drift

back to pluralist/relativist perspectives in everyday life and

problem-solving due to a lack of imagination. This probably results from

unconsciously positing a pluralist society as what comes after a

destructive moment, while not consciously framing destructive action as

having any particular goal beyond destruction of the existent. I should

add here that it would be hasty to collapse the ethical nihilist

position into any one practice or set of practices. Destructive

practices, partial or absolute, do not follow mechanically from

negation. Destruction is not the practical application of a negative

theory. I am certainly not saying that destruction is not worthwhile as

a practice or set of practices; but I am saying that nihilists by

definition reject the overidentification of any practice with their

negation of existing moralities and normative approaches to ethics. It

is my sense that, once the nihilist position exists as something other

than a caricature, the other positions will be increasingly undermined

from within and without.

The third consequence is that ethical nihilism is more than a theory. It

is a way of living and thinking, a form-of-life in which the two are not

separate. That Rousselle discusses it only as a theory leaves it to the

rest of us to elaborate what else it is, what it looks like, as some

say, or how it is practiced. It is my sense that he was able to write

this book because of events and situations in his life, in the milieu,

in other places. So when I invoke the practical aspect of nihilism,

having already said that it cannot be reduced to any practice or set of

practices, I mean two things. First, that I mean to underline the

unusual tone of all the practices of those that accept some version of

the perspective that there is no Outside (to capitalism, civilization,

or the existent), or that are profoundly skeptical about any proposed

measures to get Outside. Second, that to speak of practices related to

ethical nihilism continues to make it seem like a theory that endorses

or suggests a course of action, while its interest is precisely that it

may not do so. Monsieur Dupont’s phrase Do Nothing is relevant here: “Do

Nothing... was and remains a provocation. [...] Do Nothing is an

immediate reflection of Do Something and its moral apparatus.”[17] From

weird practices to doing nothing: this is precisely the enigmatic space

where anti-politics converges with ethics. Yes, there is a gap, perhaps

a colossal gap, between the implosion-moment of societies like ours and

the eternal meaninglessness of value claims and moral codes.

Anti-politics might be said only to address the former, while ethical

nihilism ultimately invokes the latter. But anti-politics may also

reveal ethical nihilism; our willful action may accelerate the ex- or

implosion of the world to reveal more of the meaninglessness it has been

designed to conceal.

The fourth consequence is that nihilism is also a condition. It is not

merely those who make it their business to think and act in the world

that are living with nihilism. The force of ethical nihilism is not so

much in being a position one advocates as in its undermining of others’

claims to certainty. If we are able to do this sometimes it is because

there are many others who, in a rapidly decomposing society, more or

less consciously grasp the hollowness in every code of action. Take this

passage from Heidegger as an illustration:

The realm for the essence and event of nihilism is metaphysics itself,

always assuming that by “metaphysics” we are not thinking of a doctrine

or only of a specialized discipline of philosophy but of the fundamental

structure of beings in their entirety ... Metaphysics is the space of

history in which it becomes destiny for the supersensory world, ideas,

God, moral law, the authority of reason, progress, the happiness of the

greatest number, culture, and civilization to forfeit their constructive

power and to become void.[18]

Dare I add here that something of this condition was also gestured

toward in a few precious texts on postmodernism, texts which raised

tremendous questions about their present, and by extension ours, only to

be buried in an avalanche of increasingly unimaginative discussions, as

if to systematically shut down the possibility of such questioning?

What these four consequences add up to is perhaps something on the order

of a paradigm shift that some of us are perhaps dimly beginning to

perceive. Or perhaps it is much bigger and more terrifying than a

paradigm shift could ever be. Rousselle overestimates the importance and

centrality of post-anarchism to anarchist theory (and, needless to say,

various milieus), and his claim that his theorizing after post-anarchism

consolidates the shift from pluralist/relativist post-anarchism, with

its reformist and radical liberal tendencies, and a fully nihilist

theory expressing the latent destructive content of anarchism, is

misplaced. But increasing emphasis on nihilist ideas, and the increasing

prevalence of what could be called nihilist measures, is a condition

that involves us all to some degree. And we have tried to think it

through and respond. The call for an end to government instead of a

better, more democratic, more egalitarian form of government is ancient.

The call for the abolition of work instead of just, fair, or dignified

work is decades old, at least. How many of us no longer criticize

competition so as to contrast it with cooperation, but because the

victory it offers is laughably meaningless? How many of us have more or

less explicitly shifted from advocating a plurality of genders to

pondering the conditions for the abolition of gender as such? What to

make of the increasing opposition to programmatism[19] and demands in

moments of confrontation and occupation?

I intuit two things here: that pluralism seems to continually reveal its

relativist core more and more often, and that the revelation of the

relativist core will make it increasingly easier for the nihilist

position to be stated, with all of its disruptive effects. Conversely,

as I have suggested, merely stating the nihilist position coherently has

effects. I propose that those interested make it their business to

deploy the triplicity. To which I will immediately add: there will be

stupid and parodic versions of this moment. For some of us this moment

will be lived entirely as parody and stupidity. But there will also be,

for some, an opportunity to refine what our anarchism has always meant,

not as the direction history or society is going in, not as the truth of

a tradition, or as an ideal of any sort, but as that which breaks from

such orientations in the most absolute sense: the negating prefixes a-,

an-, anti-... anti-politics as a provisional orientation, branching out

into countless refusals.[20] Our ethics emerges and gives itself to

thought only where breaks and refusals clear a sufficient space. We know

almost nothing about such spaces, so our ethics might also be defined as

the provisional disorientation with which we approach our ways of

living, the interminable and necessary skepticism that characterizes our

thinking’s motion.

Fénéon’s Novels

“Fénéon’s Novels” was extemporaneously created at the Renewing the

Anarchist Tradition conference in 2007. I visited this gathering four or

five times over the years and made some good friends there. Among other

things, extemporaneously created here means that the excerpts from

Fénéon cited were 1) intended to familiarize listeners with material

none of them had read 2) chosen more or less at random—which random

order was preserved in the written form and informed its transformation

into the present piece. I later created this more writerly version with

helpful feedback from Joshua Beckman. It was accepted (by one editor)

and then rejected (by the rest) for a book on contemporary political

movements, which seems appropriate; it both is and is not about

contemporary political movements. It addresses some of the thinking on

language discussed more broadly in “To Acid-Words” by focusing on a

specific kind of writing that might easily be overlooked, thus staging

the question of what to do with all of the writing that we don’t want to

consider writing. Relatedly, here I say some things about ethics from a

somewhat different perspective than the preceding essays: ethics as a

way of attending. (A similar view is discussed in a piece not included

here, “Anarchist Meditations”.)

Meanwhile the newspapers took over the task of recounting the grey,

unheroic details of everyday crime and punishment.

— Foucault, Discipline and Punish

1. Tiny Novels

You are about to read five novels.

(brevity)

Yes, novels; brief novels, novels in three lines. They were published

anonymously in the form of a faits-divers column in the Parisian

newspaper Le Matin. The date was 1906. Félix Fénéon took a temporary job

working at this liberal newspaper, with a circulation around half a

million, translating wire reports and town gossip into the 1,220 novels

that have survived. Each one is a report assembled from a minimum of

information. Each is also carefully composed as a minute novel. It is as

though Fénéon interpreted the column’s title, nouvelles en trois lignes,

in both of its possible senses: “the news in three lines” and “novellas

in three lines.”

(virtuosity)

In these novels, Fénéon’s prose balances painstaking precision and dry

wit. This was also the style of his art criticism and of the pieces he

published in anarchist newspapers.[21] He was always reticent about

publication; he often signed his articles “F. F.” or with generic names

such as Hombre. Unprolific, then, given to a certain anonymity, Fénéon

was deliberate about when and where he wrote—and more importantly, how.

2. A Way of Life

Whatever he might have called himself, I find it useful to call him a

dandy. I consider dandyism to have been a lived philosophy.[22] I mean

the way of life of anyone who has developed a complete aesthetics of

existence, as one might once have developed or accepted, in the ancient

Hellenistic schools especially, an ethics of existence.

Dandyism, the modern form of Stoicism …[23]

His manner of speaking, the tone of his voice; his style of dress, the

way he did or did not appear in certain places; the way he formed or cut

off friendships, the nature of his love affairs: all of these expressed

an overall aesthetics of existence.[24] How can this be related to the

fact that, at least when he wrote the novels, Fénéon’s political

sympathies were with the anarchists? It was the familiar anarchism of

the late nineteenth century, with its pragmatically materialist view of

history, science, and progress, its visceral anti-clericalism and

anti-patriotism, and its vital infusion of egoism. This last aspect is

perhaps how the dandies were able to make common cause: an emphasis on

the individual and his or her self-presentation answered to both ethical

and aesthetic sensibilities, offering the promise of their convergence.

There are a number of figures who could be retroactively described as

having, as part of their aesthetic sensibility, radical political

sympathies.[25]

(startling)

Now, an uncertainty: Fénéon may have been the one who deposited a bomb

that detonated outside the Hôtel Foyot on April 4, 1894. Whether or not

he was responsible, this attentat belonged to the violent political

climate of that Paris: often enough, brutality against the poor resulted

in the anonymous bombing of a bourgeois restaurant or aristocratic opera

house. Fénéon may or may not have done this; he was tried for it. His

biographer, Joan Halperin, summarizes contemporary accounts of his

demeanor before the judge and prosecutor:

She excerpts from the interrogation:

Here is a first clue concerning the style of the novels. Fénéon kept his

composure, responding to the interrogation with impeccable witticisms.

His responses reveal an almost impossibly well-calculated precision and

humor. They also tell us something about F. F.’s aesthetics of

existence; they are evidence of an utter commitment. Even in a situation

where one could be sent to prison or put to death, one did not give up

on the witty repartee, on holding one’s own against a boorish

interlocutor. Our novels are also marked by such a commitment; not,

however, before the judge and prosecutor, but before the banality of

everyday life and the boredom of work.

3. Brevity and Relation

So these novels are the writings of an anarchist dandy, done in the

context of temporary work, and may be related to an aesthetic commitment

that is, tendentially, an ethico-political commitment. At the same time

they are not explicitly political texts. There are a few items

concerning actions motivated by political beliefs, but even these seem

to include ideological positions only incidentally. What is interesting

here is rather how he transformed the received genre of the

faits-divers. These items were already brief. The anonymous F. F. made

them witty. In their newly significant brevity, they communicate a

complicated and indirect pathos, unfolding a new relation to

everydayness.[26]

(urgency)

At first glance, the column seems to enumerate a banal series of banal

anecdotes. The pivotal events of these novels are almost always murders,

suicides, assaults, or transgressions of one sort or another. There are

also many accidents. Not, therefore, actions that can be interpreted in

an overt and political sense as injustices or reactions to injustices;

rather, the ordinary brutality of everyday life.

Political indices in the plot do not alter the effect:

Fénéon transformed the triviality of these anecdotes by sculpting them

into compact novels. F. F. extracted the maximum effect from the

transformation of the nouvelles as news into the nouvelle as novel. His

tiny novels deviated conspicuously from the faits-divers: after all, its

main function was filler. In the U.S. a comparable form is still used in

small-town newspapers, or as police blotters:

(banality)

The form suggests: this dull event at which you were likely not present

does not merit an article. It barely even merits your attention. Most of

us read through this information in the state William James, in his

lectures on psychology, once dubbed

drowsy assent.[27]

However, read with a bit more care, they are unexpectedly (because

accidentally) humorous. In his compressed novels F. F. took full

advantage of the marginality and triviality of the faits-divers. He was

conscious of the way in which they draw our attention in a very

different manner than an article under a big headline on page one, or

editorials signed by famous, authoritative names. They operate through

subtlety, through indirectness. Novels in three lines cannot compel our

attention; they can only seduce us into attending.

4. In the Air

In historical terms F. F.’s style was an eccentric and microscopic

fusion of two dominant literary movements in France at the time. The

first, already going out of vogue, was naturalism. Its aim was a raw

description of everyday life; a novel narrating dramatic events that one

could, indeed, imagine as the subject matter of newspaper articles. The

second movement was that of Fénéon’s friends, such as Mallarmé:

symbolism, with its way of making a cypher of every phrase. No

journalistic possibilities there, so it would seem. But these brief

tragicomedies F. F. composed are cryptograms: concrete images that

suggest an abstract idea or purified emotion without ever naming or

indicating it directly. The image, then, as the raw material; symbolic

intensity coalesces through a scrupulous prose haiku that documents it.

(reader = witness)

In his art criticism Fénéon was especially interested in

Neo-Impressionism (a term he himself coined). Here we might learn

something about what we could call his optic. Seurat and the other

pointillists studied the refraction of light. They deployed in their

painting a marvelous combination of naturalist and artificial

aesthetics. Their colored points were applied on the basis of new

scientific theories of vision, allowing a reinterpretation of the gaze’s

operation in everyday life. On the other hand, or rather, from other

angles, the same canvases could not but overemphasize the fact that

paint has been thusly deployed. Fénéon’s brief novels, similarly, are

snapshots or miniatures that show us quotidian scenes, but also show us

how they show them. In giving the faits-divers a new style, Fénéon

proved that their initial, supposed non-style indeed was one, however

poor. In this sense the news, like the novel, becomes a matter of taste

and an object of criticism. F. F.’s style, in being more artificial and

affected, was, at the same time, more natural, more exact.

5. Emergency Novels

But these micro-narratives are obviously also emergency novels. What I

have called brevity, understood as compression, communicates a certain

urgency. A clue to understanding the passage from brevity to urgency may

be discovered in an equally compressed book review. Here is F. F. on The

Brothers Karamazov:

Like the novels, this review is witty and brief, but hardly dismissive.

It is evocative, allowing one a mysterious glimpse at Dostoyevski’s

novel. This review is a second clue to understanding how brevity and wit

co-operate. If a lengthy novel can be folded into a review that

resembles a novel in three lines, could we interpret brief novels as

capable of unfolding back into the form of a lengthy narrative? Yes, but

only if they are written with the utmost care. That would be the

difference that style makes: the difference, that is, between writing

the faits-divers badly and writing them well. These anecdotes of random

and everyday brutality could be read as so many unwritten full-length

novels. They are novels with no author, or novels whose author is

humanity, Hombre. F. F. did not choose anonymity; rather, he discovered

himself at work, at Le Matin, positioned as an anonymous writer, and

affirmed that anonymity. He began to transmit unwritten full-length

novels, all the more compelling for that.[28] They are the novels of all

and none.

(pathos)

Compression that suggests urgency: this means an accelerated pace, the

sense that thoughts and actions have been condensed, and therefore the

imminence of the reverse operation—opening back up, expanding,

exploding. A sudden release, a sudden decompression in the emergency

novel. Semiotically: a bomb. Mallarmé is supposed to have sweetly said,

la vraie bombe c’est le livre.

For his part, Alfred Jarry, in the chapter dedicated to his friend

Fénéon in his Faustroll, wrote:

An entire world hangs in suspension behind each novel. How is it to be

discovered?

(seduction)

Sometimes with humor. Recall the interrogation’s parenthesis:

Many of the novels have a punchline effect. That is one of Fénéon’s

techniques: if someone has died, for example, that is the last word.

But, as Freud wrote of jokes,

… we do not in the strict sense know what we are laughing at.[29]

6. Ataraxia

Beyond urgency, brevity, its compression, suggests a kind of gaze or

glance that is simultaneously reserved and intensely attentive. It is

the signature of an aesthetic but also an ethic: a way of life. We are

already, as always, investigating the transformation of everyday life

into art. It seems that this mutation requires an attunement of

attention or perception. Each novel is not only the trace of an

evanescent event; it also bears the signature of the way Fénéon read the

wire reports he perused to compose the column. The novels, that is,

suggest a discipline of attention or observation. Let us imagine that

Fénéon trained himself in this attention and was able to make it

available in the form of novels in three lines. A perceptive reader, a

careful reader, and sometimes a lucky reader might find that, as James

put it,

the drowsy assent is gone.[30]

Simply, they are too well written to be news, immediately suggesting

nouvelles as novels. Transforming banality into an anonymous pathos that

he compressed into each line, F. F. invited or seduced another pathos, a

care in reading and interpreting.

Fénéon’s brief novels construct a different mode of relation to events.

His style mutated the usually dull style of journalistic prose (banal

report of banal event) by exaggerating its objective tone, taking it

further in the direction of impassivity. Rather than assuming a

predictable emotional response on the part of the reader, F. F. allowed

the icomprehensible pathos of the collision or mixture of bodies that is

the event to shine through. That is the pivot of Fénéon’s improvement of

the faits-divers genre: he wrote about brutal, accidental, bizarre

events in a voice at once intelligent and ataractic.

Given such events, given especially an aleatory series of accidents, we

might find ourselves trying to explain them, producing a narrative. We

call upon, depending on our proclivities, psychological or social

forces. Many of the novels, for example, concern domestic violence,

inebriated firefights, bombs or fake bombs (fake seems more common). Our

theories, those we have taken on in good or bad taste, seem to explain

or interpret these seemingly random occurrences. Indeed, Fénéon may have

been hinting: please interpret here. Yes, feel whatever you might.

However, if there is something ataractic in the novels, the opposite

intention also emerges: do not interpret; let the event’s pathos shine

through. So I say F. F.’s style is a Stoicism in short-prose, inasmuch

as he, the writer, is unmoved. In terms of humor: deadpan. And Fénéon’s

dry wit encapsulates precisely this contradiction. Of Jarry’s absurdist

way of life, Robert Shattuck writes:

Fénéon attempted to develop a coherent beauty in his own life, folding

in the familiar anarchist impulse to solidarity with others, by

inflecting it in a Stoic manner. But let us not get confused with

oblique appeals to dandyism, anarchism, and Stoicism. These are

ultimately so many vague sign-posts. I can only hope Fénéon would have

laughed at their crudity. What matters is the construction of a new

relation to these sundry accidents, these many minor events. The

suffering of another is not to be multiplied; rather, it is to be

witnessed, and perhaps responded to.

Perhaps what we need is a prose that makes us witnesses to events in

this way, without interpellating us as subjects of a pedestrian

morality, good average citizens, or consumers of the news. That is the

importance of emphasizing the pathos of the event itself, in its

ultimately indescribable absurdity or banality. F. F.’s novels do not

communicate suffering, but, paradoxically, bring pleasure.

7. Daydream of Life

Freud had already, one year before the novels, described the joke or

witticism as an event in language in search of pleasure.[31] He

underlined brevity as one of its principal mechanisms. One year after

them, in an essay on the relation between creative writing and

daydreaming, Freud proposed that it is the characteristic operation of

great stylists to bring their readers pleasure, even when their subject

matter would otherwise leave us cool or even repel us. He compared the

stylist to a child:

The child, who has been any of us, either plays alone or constructs what

Freud calls a

closed psychical system[32]

with others within which the new and more pleasing order may be

communicated. Beginning in adolescence, play turns to fantasy and

daydream, apparently incommunicable. The stylist, however, through a

combination of talent and discipline, is able to reconstruct the closed

psychical system with his or her readers. It is in this sense that I

suggest Fénéon’s style communicates his optic or gaze, his attitude,

even some trace of his way of life. So, when Freud suggests that

I am compelled to say much the same for Fénéon. It is not so much that

the style directly communicates his attitude or ethics, let alone a

command to imitate one or take the other on. It is rather a matter of

translation (from the banal to the amusing or remarkable) and seduction

(an invitation to share the gaze and the attention by making it

attractive), or of making it possible to witness the event, as an event

in nature, through the sublime artifice of a style.

8. Antislogans

It may be useful to compare novels in three lines with slogans, which,

though also quite brief, cannot be interpreted. Rather, they exist to be

repeated. Slogans usually function as passwords: someone repeats one

which you also repeat; this can make possible an identification, a sense

of belonging, whose mechanism is rarely discussed or analyzed. Sometimes

we suppose that operation amounts to understanding their meaning. It is

relatively easy to recognize the meaninglessness of slogans that we

don’t like. Example: what does

SUPPORT OUR TROOPS

mean? Out of a certain pride, perhaps, many of us have a hard time

admitting that the slogans that we like are also meaningless. Example:

what exactly does

NO GODS

NO MASTERS

mean? An even more difficult one to figure out is

THIS IS WHAT

DEMOCRACY

LOOKS LIKE

“Looks like?” What are we witnesses to? Any of these slogans, and

hundreds more like them, function by means of mediatic proliferation in

various everyday milieus. Their function is not to provide information,

much less to provoke thought. Rather, as passwords, they operate by

allowing some people into groups and excluding others, or by

broadcasting the imminent presence of a group in some public or

semi-public space. Novels in three lines, by comparison, could be

decribed precisely as antislogans. Slogans are concise, and, concisely,

say very little: just enough to determine who passes. F. F.’s

micro-novels explode back out into dramatic scenes of everyday life,

stretched out as it is between impersonal natural accidents and

impersonal (or all-too-personal!) political and social dominations.

Fénéon could not tell his readers what to think of these events. Nor

does his prose suggest any kind of moral judgment. all of that would

have been in bad taste. He rather crystallizes what in them is ethical,

existential, significance.

9. Two Short-Prose Challenges

In recent decades we have seen the rise of various print and especially

digital vehicles for radical prose. We have also, and not

coincidentally, felt growing apathy and participated in ugly scenes of

information overload. I would echo Oscar Wilde here:

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless

information.

The goal F. F. set himself at his temp job, that of secretly deploying

an effective, but above all seductive prose style, continues to be

vital. I, at least, want to be inspired and challenged, not merely

informed! Two challenges to that end follow.

A challenge for individuals

In part, my satisfaction in reading the novels in three lines emerged as

a fantasy that all of the short prose I produce at work, mostly in the

form of email, could be beautifully formed. I wanted, I realized, to

tilt the balance in favor of finely crafted, exact, biting little

telegrams and away from the faits-divers of my everydayness. But I am

convinced that it is a matter of health and good taste to inquire about

how so many of us are plugged into media machines as producers or

consumers; to inquire, that is, about the aesthetics of flows of text

and images. I do not exactly mean that writing in good taste amounts to

direct action. The effects of something so subtly written are likely to

be largely insensible. It is a far simpler subversion. Fénéon

transformed the dull production of copy into an aesthetic event,

composing a beautiful series of novels. According to an aesthetic that

he lived without compromise, he sent them out anonymously, drawing

attention neither to himself nor to the newspaper. It was more important

that the stylistic subversion pass, because this was a kind of work

refusal.

A challenge for groups

Fénéon’s style, the attitude he took on so as to transmit something

other than information through these novels, and especially the fact

that he took on that attitude by manipulating his contemporary media

channels, suggests many challenging questions about today’s

proliferating information flows. It seems ever more evident that there

is a diffuse but very powerful command directed at many of us:

STAY

INFORMED

Our social and political commitments, not to mention the apparent

necessities of work, seem to demand that we consume information, without

regard for the form it comes in. Most so-called radical channels of

information do not really modify the basic form of news and therefore do

not alter the command. We have habituated ourselves to divide content

and form, and be interested in the content, and ignore the form. Such

habits ought to be questioned on aesthetic and ethical grounds. I do,

sometimes, want to be a witness. I want to be aware of what I want to be

aware of. But I do not wish to suffer from the bad taste of it all: how

badly written it is and how insufferably communication unfolds.

Sometimes I want to be aware of the suffering of others. But I do not

wish to become miserable as a result. It is simply false that the price

for remaining receptive to novelty, nouvelles, is sadness.

When I began reading these novels and composing my thoughts on them, I

was tempted to describe the faits-divers as predecessors of RSS feeds,

scrolling headlines, or ubiquitous “comments,” and Fénéon’s style as

suggestive of a subversive use of these new headlines. In the few short

years since then, there has been a deluge of digital forms of writing

and broadcasting short-prose[33], with much attention paid to content,

and little to form or style. Some interventions must still be possible.

Some young aesthetes must be assembling apparently banal feeds that,

upon closer inspection, are so well written that they disrupt an economy

of information—just that economy that is making all too many of us

stupider every passing minute. N3L? But that is to be optimistic. The

question is, who, today, is capable of summoning anything like Fénéon’s

composure, anything like his gaze, anything like the exact attention

that he translated into prose.

Let us not bother, then, with the anxious narrative about the death of

newspapers, of print; let us not endlessly circulate the stories about

what stultifying digital worlds we are being willingly or helplessly

dragged into. Let us rather praise ingenious writing wherever and

whenever it incongruously occurs.

How Slogans End

“How Slogans End” was first published in the second issue of The Anvil

Review in 2011. It was my second contribution to The Anvil and a first

experiment in discussing language practices of the contemporary

anarchist space from the purview of a broader history of experimental

poetics, with which the newer practices were accidentally in dialogue.

It also takes up the thinking about slogans at the end of “Fénéon’s

Novels.” Parenthetically, the computer programs discussed in “How

Slogans End” are no longer available online: the AIMG has simply

disappeared, whereas MESOSTOMATIC, which I used to generate the last two

poems, has been taken down “due to complaints from arrogant academic

windbags,” as might have been expected.

Living or dead, that’s the big question.

When you get sleepy, do you go to sleep?

Or do you lie awake?

— Cage, “Composition as Process”

If among you there are those who wish to get somewhere,

let them leave at any moment.

If anybody is sleepy, let him go to sleep.

— Cage, “Lecture on Nothing”

1

There is a computer program called the Automatic Insurrectionary

Manifesto Generator. AIMG produces this sort of output:

What’s needed is not mobilization, and even far less absence, but a

putting-into-practice of inoperative crisis, a rejection in all forms of

the temporality of humanism.

This is a call to indifference, not an insistence on absence.

We must destroy all humanism—without illusions.

Confronted with those who refuse to recognize themselves in our orgies

of negation, we offer neither criticism nor dialogue but only our scorn.

A link labeled “AGAIN” is conveniently centered below the text, inviting

us to the pleasures of repetition. It reloads the page and each time

generates a three-paragraph manifesto composed of such sentences. AIMG’s

output is wholly predictable, in a ‘mad lib’ sort of way. All the titles

it produces have the same schema: “Leaving X behind: notes on Y,” where

X includes “mobilization,” “activism,” “passivity,” “fossilization,”

“humanism,” and so on; and Y includes “crisis,” “rupture,”

“insurrection,” or “zones of indistinction which need no justification,”

for example. The same goes for the rest of the manifestos. You may have

encountered its output at its home page, whose link was posted and sent

around quite a bit in 2009; or you may have been presented with its

texts in a more or less deceptive, more or less mocking way in blogs, or

in comments on Anarchist News.

A link at the bottom of the page takes us to “insurrect.rb,” the code.

Reading those 126 lines was very interesting; despite my limited

understanding of programming, the way AIMG operates was clear enough.

There is a list of definitions in which words are classed together under

headings such as “things we like,” “things we don’t like,” “things we

do,” “things we don’t do”; for the most part, then, they are groups of

presumed synonyms. (I note with interest that the longest list is

“things we don’t like”.) As I had suspected, the possible outcomes are

finite. At first, reading just the code might suggest that the problem

with the rhetoric of insurrectionary anarchism is that it is not

inventive enough. Its terms are not sufficiently varied or

differentiated and therefore they have a tendency to collapse into each

other. But is the programmer’s goal to use the code to produce a more

artful rhetoric?

On the same page as “insurrect.rb” is a “read me” file, which offers the

following explanation:

The purpose of this little program is to expose the seductions of

rhetoric, not to criticize actions taken. Despite my admiration for many

of the actions taken in the name of insurrection, I’m suspicious of how

easy it is to substitute style for substance in the communiques

describing these actions. And this is not to say that all

‘insurrectionist’ texts are meaningless […] This program is intended

only to demonstrate the pitfalls of language which sounds too good to be

meaningful.

The remarks about substituting “style for substance” and “sounding to

good to be meaningful” suggest the contrary: the “purpose” is less

rhetoric. To the degree that AIMG accomplishes this goal, it does so by

showing the limited inventiveness of what I will call I-discourse. And

it does so from a perspective that opts for an uninventive “substance”

rather than a superior “style.”

One could easily undertake a critique of the programmer’s assumptions by

asking if the lists of “things we like” or “things we don’t like” really

contain interchangeable terms. (Or, supposing that they do, how such

interchangeability comes about). But there is a more interesting issue,

a more profound limitation in the code than finite word lists. Line 75,

for example, reads

“This is a call to #{things_we_like}, not an insistence on #{things_we_dont_like}.”

In prose, this amounts to something like:

Do the good, not the bad

or:

Do what we do, don’t do what we don’t do.

These are examples of the simplest grammatical formulations of a moral

code, of a sort we discover in all sorts of discourses. Discovering such

a code puts me beyond the desire to critique (to improve by strategic

negation). The question becomes one of overcoming a morality that is so

easily codified.

The programmer, or whoever wrote the “read me” file, tells me what he

sees as the AIMG’s purpose. I am free to understand its ouput in that

manner or in a variety of others. Now, to overcome the unexamined

morality written into the code, I am concerned first of all with wit.

Supposing the output has something to do with its stated purpose, that

purpose is achieved through being witty. (Of course AIMG is not witty,

because it is not a person. But the programmer probably thought he was

being witty when he assembled it; and many people think they are witty

when they use it and propagate its output.) I take wit to be primarily

an aesthetic matter, to be judged in terms of its success. (And there

are many sorts of successes. It could be that the joke is on the

jokers.) For the overcoming I have in mind, I am also concerned with

importance, with some way of getting at the values at play in a moral or

ethical system. So let us play a logical game, cycling through

possibilities based on varying answers to two questions: Is the AIMG’s

output witty? And: does the AIMG matter?

2

Given our two questions, there are four positions:

• The AIMG’s output is witty, and it matters.

• The AIMG’s output is not witty, and it matters.

• The AIMG’s output is not witty, and it does not matter.

• The AIMG’s output is witty, and it does not matter.

Now, this logical game is just that – of course anyone may occupy one or

more of the positions successively or even simultaneously. But for the

sake of the game I summon up a lunar landscape, where four speakers

deliver their monologues.

The first two positions emphasize writing. Who has already stepped

forward to say that AIMG’s output is witty, and it matters? It is the

Author (and his audience, amused). Such is the position laid out in the

“read me” file; such is the apparent stance of many who posted the link

or examples of its output. For them, the machine works; it does what it

is pronounced to do. It reveals to us our familiarity with a certain

rhetoric. The momentary confusion that accompanies it is supposed to be

funny, and to provoke a particular insight. As Bergson so precisely

illustrated, the comic usually comes down to either a living thing that

acts mechanically or a machine that seems to be alive (See Laughter).

The AIMG is obviously a case of the second. The Author knows that, in

reading an automatically generated manifesto, I will likely, at least

initially, attribute some authorial intention, some message, to the

text. When I discover or when it is revealed to me that I have been

fooled, I may be angry, amused, confused … Aha! And ha! ultimately I

will laughingly accept the lesson of the AIMG. The AIMG’s output is not

meaningful, it is just rhetoric! The apparent fancyness of the language

is belied by the simplicity of reproducing something like it. And, for

the Author (and his audience, amused), such automatically produced

rhetoric is not what our political common sense demands. Sometimes I

want to side with the little pleasure evidenced in this position:

pleasure in a machine that works, the pleasure of repetition. AGAIN!

A second voice intervenes and says: but the AIMG’s output is not

something like I-discourse. The simplicity is in the attempt at

recreation, which therefore fails, not in I-discourse itself, which is

meaningful. This amounts to saying that AIMG’s output is not witty, and

it matters. Who has spoken? It is the Critic. This is the voice of the

audience, unamused, expressing their revolt. For them, the machine does

not work; it does not or cannot do what it is pronounced to do. It

presupposes lazy habits of reading, in which people respond badly to

jargon they do not recognize, complex ideas and theories that require

long study, etc. The Author’s common sense has spoken up and said: the

AIMG demonstrates the hollowness of I-discourse. The Critic responds:

you are the fool who does not discriminate between the meaningful

original and the meaningless bad copy! For this speaker, what the AIMG

actually reveals is a misprision of I-discourse: the output’s lack of

meaning is not an example of anything. The synonyms are not synonyms;

the terms are generally not used with sufficient precision. The Critic

engages, then, in a militant defense of a militant discourse. I am this

critic, too, sometimes: much of the time I want to side with the defense

of complex ideas, of study, even in a certain sense of the mutant speech

that is theoretical jargon, and to be suspicious of the common sense

that warns away from all that. At the same time, it is difficult to side

with a humorless Critic, and unwise to take the side of the good

original against the bad copy.

The latter two positions place emphasis on the activity of reading

rather than that of writing. The third belongs to one who, bored, says

nothing. If we poked him and demanded a response, he might sigh like a

character from Beckett: what matter where the simplicity originates? For

he who is Bored, AIMG’s output is not witty, and it does not matter. The

position of the Bored is similar to that of the Critic, but represents

its degree zero. For him the output’s lack of meaning does not reveal

anything of importance. It rather reveals the habit of reading in a

generic way. When the Bored learns that he has been fooled, all that he

takes to have been revealed is the habit as such. But this sort of

insight is available in more or less any event of reading, whether the

text in question has been written by one or more people, in part or

entirely automatically, etc. I note with interest that this could

equally well be the position of someone who uses I-discourse, or of

someone who does not. The former would be like the Critic, but

unconcerned about the way the AIMG misses the mark. The latter would not

see this as an important lesson: everyone knows that GIGO. Sometimes

this is my position – anytime, really, if I am bored.

This leaves the position of one who thinks AIMG’s output is witty, and

it does not matter. She speaks last. I call this the position of the

Curious. It is similar to the position of the Author, but is

characterized by an excess of amusement, an unruly overflow of amusement

beyond the stated lesson of the “read me.” This amusement, not grounded

in the thought of a lesson or its importance, suggests manners of

writing and reading of which the AIMG is the crudest form. So she has

little use for the AIMG according to its Author’s intention for it,

since she can’t imagine any way to use it and be witty. She who is

Curious says: doesn’t this all suggest that the truly remarkable

question here concerns the capture of a vocabulary by a

grammatical-moral code, whether or not the AIMG is a good example of it?

What does that reveal, not about I-discourse, which is a fashion of the

times, but about political rhetoric (including the minimalist rhetoric

we call “common sense”) in general? Most of the time I am interested in

unserious ways of reading. So, curious, I have seized AIMG as an

example, staging my curiosity by offering an illuminating

counter-example.

3

There are two computer programs called IC and MESOLIST. They produce

this sort of output:

[]

Using IC and MESOLIST, John Cage invented a writing machine that

produced what he called mesostic poems, a variant of the more familiar

acrostic poem. In acrostics, it is usually the first letter of each line

that, read vertically, forms a name or phrase. In mesostics, the

vertical component, or “spine,” is in the middle of each line. The

mesostics invite multiple forms of reading, not the least of which is

reading aloud, because they are themselves ways of reading and

invitations to creative re-reading. This is so inasmuch as the mesostics

are composed of either an entire given text (in Empty Words, for

example, Cage explains how he used mesostics using the spine “JAMES

JOYCE” to “read through” Finnegans Wake) or a set of quotations from

various writers. Often other strings of letters appear, such as the

names of authors and the titles of books. (One might conclude that it is

not just re-reading or “reading through,” but study that is at stake,

though this would require dramatically re-evaluating what we usually

mean by that word.) Cage composed many texts in which a love of

language, of the ideas, words, and sounds in his preferred authors

combined with his serene and studied use of random processes for

composition. Now, Cage’s music remains obscure for most. Among those I

know who are familiar with his name, it usually functions as a

historical point of reference rather than an object of appreciation (an

artwork). His writing is, I suppose, even more mysterious. But it is

also light, the lightest butterfly-writing one could ever wish to read.

It is our problem if we are the ones who expect a message from either.

Using IC and MESOLIST, Cage wrote several books of compiled and

interlinked mesostics, such as I-VI, Themes and Variations, and the one

that concerns me here, Anarchy. MESOLIST lists “all words” in the source

texts “that satisfy the mesostic rules” (I-VI, 1). IC, “a program …

simulating the coin oracle of the I Ching,” is used to decide “which

words in the lists are to be used and gives … all the central words”

(ibid. A more complete discussion of this process with respect to its

creation and use may be found in Empty Words, 133-136). In Anarchy, the

source material is thirty quotes from Kropotkin, Malatesta, Bakunin,

Tolstoy, Thoreau, Whitman, Goldman, Goodman, Buckminster Fuller, Norman

O. Brown, and Cage himself. For example: “Periods of very slow changes

are succeeded by periods of violent changes. Revolutions are as

necessary for evolution as the slow changes which prepare them and

succeed them” (Kropotkin); “The liberty of man consists solely in this:

that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as

such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any

extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual”

(Bakunin). But also: “What we finally seek to do is to create an

environment that works so well that we can run wild in it” (Norman O.

Brown); “I’m an anarchist, same as you when you’re telephoning, turning

on/off the lights, drinking water” (Cage). Or even little stories such

as this one, drawn from Hyppolite Havel’s biographical sketch of Emma

Goldman: “In San Francisco, in 1908, Emma Goldman’s lecture attracted a

soldier of the United States Army, William Buwalda. For daring to attend

an Anarchist meeting, the free Republic court-martialed Buwalda and

imprisoned him for one year. Thanks to the regenerating power of the new

philosophy, the government lost a soldier, but the cause of liberty

gained a man.”

These quotations and the twenty-five others, in which the use of

“rhetoric” as construed by the Author and the Critic is generally at a

minimum, reappear in fragmentary form according to the processes

described above. Sometimes, as in the mesostic I have already cited, the

explicitly anarchist nature of the content is evident (though not for

all that clear in the sense implied by the desire to reverse the

priorities of “style” and “substance”). Sometimes it is not so evident:

[]

Most of the mesostics invite me to active reading. How many ways can you

read this delightfully polysemic excerpt?

[]

Cage’s mesostics may be understood in the context of a long history of

writing experiments undertaken for their own sake, that is to say: for

pleasure. This field is vast, but arguably its sundry protagonists all

share in a suspicion towards, a methodical sidestepping of, the

traditional image of the artist as beautiful and creative soul who,

inspired, materializes the artwork. They all have in common a sense that

there are social, political, psychological, even metaphysical blocks to

the outflow of creativity. Arguably, from Dada to Burroughs and beyond,

many of these experiments have discovered their pleasure in some form or

another of the game called épater la bourgeoise. For Cage, by contrast,

the writing machine that makes mesostics is meant neither to shock

anyone nor to reveal a hidden truth or reality by subverting the rules

of writing. If there is a resemblance to the motivations of the authors

I am alluding to, it is in their common suspicion of the author as ego,

as consciousness. In their own way they all echo that fascinating

Nietzschean lesson, that consciousness is a second-order process, a

derivative of the interplay (“combat”) of non-conscious forces, drives,

affects, or desires. What Cage added, then, is the most innocent turn

imaginable: I would say that, rather than shocking, he only wishes to

play.

Indeed, there is no critique, implicit or explicit, in Cage’s writing

machine. What goes in is what he wishes to affirm; what comes out is in

another way also what he wishes to affirm. They are “golden passages,”

as Giambattista Vico used to say. There is no real point to this

doubling other than the pleasure it affords: there is no growth or

insight, other than one which may come as randomly as any as long as we

keep playing. “As we go along (who knows?) an idea may occur in this

talk. I have no idea whether one will or not. If one does, let it”

(“Lecture on Nothing,” 110). Cage followed Buckminster Fuller and

Marshall McLuhan in claiming that work was already obsolete. “Instead of

working, to quote McLuhan, we now brush information against information.

We are doing everything we can to make new connections” (Anarchy, vi).

Reading is then the last thing we should describe as labor: the labor of

reading, in all its seriousness, is subsumed in a game of reading. The

game is not a way to unwind from labor; but labor is a particularly

wound-up sort of move in the game. It is justifiable only as a matter of

taste.

Cage paid homage to his influences and inspirations in a schizoid way,

drawing them into, drawing them along in his mesostics. Who among us

knows how to play along with such unserious affirmations? Many of the

more or less anonymous masks that leave their comments on the mirror

pools of the Great Web know what to do with such a list of names and

such a set of quotations. They attack some names, defend others, negate,

launch petty attacks, etc. The paranoia of Critics! When we are these

sad egos we miss the pure affirmation of Cage’s writing machine. It

multiplies the originals, diffracting them not just by reinterpretation

or application of them to new conjunctures and objects; it disassembles

them down to the level of word, letter, and phoneme. This is precisely

how we could overcome the sad egos that we accidentally fall into being.

(Sadness is always an accident.) Embracing randomness, chaos, everything

in language games or discourses or speech genres that is not under our

control: it could mean liberating our language, if that does not sound

too trite. It could also mean unbounded pleasure.

4

When it occurred to me to seize upon the AIMG as an example, I supposed

I had been waiting on Cage, patiently seeking an opportunity to

re-engage with and share his mesostic experiments. Now I feel things are

the other way around, as though he had been waiting on me, offering his

smiling face as a mask. I daresay I have been used by him – in the

gentlest way imaginable. I have proposed that the mesostics in Anarchy

are the illuminating counter-example we need to question the AIMG. But I

also think I have made clear that they are not against, counter to,

anything. It is ultimately not interesting to me to occupy the position

of the Author nor that of the Critic. I find nothing objectionable in

the existence or use of AIMG. I occupy rather the readerly positions of

the Bored and the Curious. But he who is Bored has nothing to add to

this conversation (unless, interestingly, it becomes a conversation

about boredom – but I will leave that for a future essay). She who is

Curious regards AIMG as an embryo of something, as an opportunity to

read and write differently – perhaps, eventually, to speak differently

as well. A hint of this was evidenced when someone commented on

Anarchist News that some of AIMG’s output was not so bad, after all:

“yeah! a few times i found some lines that i actually dug! haha!” Let us

go farther in this absurdist, affirmative direction. It is, I think, the

mask Cage was always holding out to us. Let us treat AIMG as a partial,

unconscious, fortuitous reach in the direction of a project I would like

to fantasize about more fully: a way of rewriting and rereading

everything that we care to read. A machine to dissolve slogans.

Let me explain. I place myself between the Bored and the Curious because

I have little use for AIMG as it is offered to me by someone who says

“this program is intended only…” But neither do I want to intervene and

replace that intention with another, correct, counter-intention. Someone

wants the program only to show something about the rhetoric of

I-discourse, and perhaps more generally about rhetoric; I reply: that is

only another floating statement. It seems to me that a written statement

of intention, separate from the writing in question, should be

approached as the strangest of clues. Especially when the Author is more

or less anonymous; at least presented with a body and a face one may

hear the tone of words, study facial expressions, analyze posture and

gesture, take in the surroundings and context, and so on. This is

already the case when one is reading a poem, essay, or manifesto. It is

far more of a problem when it comes to randomly generated output. So I

have set aside the authority of the Author, and treated his claim of

intention merely as one way of reading. His is a rhetoric that aims to

dissolve itself: the rhetoric of minimal rhetoric, perhaps of zero

rhetoric. What about rhetoric as an art? It has long been agreed that

rhetoric must involve an aesthetic component, since it is first and

foremost the art of speaking to crowds, of condensing a message. The

message, unfolded, could in some cases be spelled out as a series of

reasoned arguments; enfolded, the arguments become enthymemes, generated

by the invention of the speaker. The art is in the invention, which,

classically, means the speaker’s style. Suspicion towards rhetoric is

(which is as ancient as rhetoric) is focused on the danger of a message,

surreptitiously encoded in an eloquent style, and so concealed from

reasoned criticism: an enthymeme that is lovely or effective but that

does not unfold into a reasoned argument. “Sounds good” is thus

suspiciously separated from “is meaningful” and the relation between the

two is always in question.

Here I invoke Cage’s mesostics, and generally his practice of voiding

his art of intention and ego. If there is any rhetoric in the mesostics,

it is in the input alone; the poetic form makes it impossible to deliver

a message. This strange form of communication that undoes rhetoric also

unbinds aesthetics and morality. The author of AIMG both chooses his

lists of synonyms and composes the (moral) code that arranges them; the

mesostics, though they begin with golden passages, do not allow their

author any control over their fragmentary rearrangement in the poems (as

parts or as wholes), and thus the code does not contain, explicitly or

even implicitly, a morality. There is thus no problem with rhetoric,

because it has finally been undone; but there is a curious question of

aesthetics (of pleasure) left over. “Sounds good” as well as “is

meaningful” can no more be said to coincide than to differ. The question

becomes not “does it say anything?” or “what does it say?” but “who is

reading?”

Releasing writing from intention and thus from morality, voiding

intention and thus the ego in writing, is the barely explored challenge

that AIMG gestures towards. And it is Cage’s mesostics, or something

like them, that allow us to flesh out the fantastic reach of such a

gesture. It is the greater randomness of Cage’s process that allows us

to both diagnose the secret alliance between the ego and morality (we

could call it conscience) in political rhetoric and to discover the ego

in its very emergence. I mean that, in the terms I have been employing,

the ego emerges in reading, not in writing. Ego is not there in the

composition of a text or code, but seems to have been there after the

fact; this semblance, this mask, depends on ignoring or minimizing the

importance of our practices of reading. I am not suggesting that the ego

should always be voided (as though that was up to us!), but that it is

productive and endlessly fascinating to create writing machines that

allow us to discover it. If we do this gracefully, we will guiltlessly

summon up pleasure. We might eventually get better at observing how our

egos, our masks, congeal in more or less rigid acts of reading. Boredom

is one path; curiosity is another. The Author and the Critic cling too

rigidly in their roles to the importance of their activities to allow,

as the Bored and the Curious do, their masks to dissolve or shatter in

excessive laughter. Nonserious reading: ludic, festive, voluptuous.

It could begin by inventing and using writing machines that consume and

transform every dull index that crosses our paths: I mean all those

unexamined words that make up our slogans, that pepper our statements of

intent, mission and vision, our little manifestos. I also mean those

mana-words that theoreticians enjoy moving around their chessboards. We

can do it if we can learn to inject the impersonal and random into our

writing, and eventually our speech. I dream of a way to complicate the

desire to say, speak, or mark, to send a message or command, in its

badly omened collusion with repetition. Ah, the dull indices! Who is not

tired of Freedom, Democracy, Sustainability, Consent … even of Attack

and Destroy? Clearly AIMG does not go far enough. We need a superior

machine, a crueler code.

Reading through AIMG, one last program, MESOSTOMATIC:

[]

Reading through “How Slogans End,” too:

[]

AGAIN!

To Acid-Words

Parts of “To Acid-Words” were first presented at a meeting of the

Berkeley Anarchist Study Group in November, 2011. The rest of it was

meditated on (and off) for the following two years, with a last burst of

effort in early 2014. This is to say that it has layers, strata. It is

an attempt to address the tremendous anxiety anarchists seem to have

about language, and each of its sub-sections responds analytically to

various attitudes towards language in the milieu. I think of it as a

necessarily incomplete piece, in that it addresses a relation the

anarchist milieu constantly denies in seeking out a better language

(instrumental, operational), a pre-language, or a non-language. This

relation is, of course, its relation to what it knows as Society. But

the relations to language in the milieu, and our collective anxiety

towards it, can never be entirely considered apart from more or less

discernible social attitudes. Ultimately, although there is nothing to

be said in general about language from an anarchist perspective, it is

sometimes worthwhile to trace the lineaments of some particular

anarchist attitudes to language, as I have done here. Two caveats:

first, this piece is written from a monolingual point of view, as it

addresses a largely monolingual milieu. A vastly different approach to

these questions could have begun from multilingualism and translation.

Second caveat: what is said here about poesy and poetry is delicately

presented in a sideways pedagogy, introducing an idea or three to

unfortunate readers who have little experience of these. (That, for

example, the term I’ve used for a certain idea of language, Language, is

also commonly used for a loose school of poets and writers whose works

have contributed to inspiring precisely the approach I’ve taken here, is

only one of the minor ironies of this essay.)

le militant n’entend pas, ne voit pas le langage et c’est à ce prix

qu’il peut militer

[the militant does not hear, does not see language, and this is the

price he pays for his militancy]

— Roland Barthes

What I add to these lines—what I place between them—is a kind of

enumeration, argumentation through serial juxtaposition: anecdotes and

examples, a series of scenes I have been witness to; analysis, thinking

through what I heard and saw; references, the things people said, or

wrote, and also a way of looking back at what they did not say, or

write. And asides for what remained to be noted. I place it all between

d.a. levy’s positive but dangerous “awareness / of the environment / &

its words” and Barthes’ two negatives, his thought of a militancy that

depends on a denial of language, to show something of the gray space

some of us inhabit.

So this is not exactly about anarchists. Nor is it about the society

they want to transform, dismantle or destroy. It is about how the

society anarchists want to transform, dismantle or destroy transforms,

dismantles, or destroys them in the moment of saying what there is to

do, of writing what they want or think. And about some ways to resist.

Part 1: Moral

I’m quite serious about the need to resist the tyranny of elemental

words... They’re words that brook no argument, that are intended to be

outside of syntax and thus outside of history. I try to resist this when

I write.

— Bob Perelman

How Activists Talk

As I have experienced it, the anarchist milieu (our gray space) is not

exclusively or even principally made up of activists. But in the

sub-cultural spaces, the social overlaps, and the political neighborhood

of the anarchist milieu there is activism, and so there most certainly

are activists. It’s important to be careful here, because among some

anarchists activist, like liberal, is an epithet. The activists I am

talking about are both those picked out and ridiculed with such

epithets, and, often enough, some less obvious characters. We will only

understand activists (and their talk) if we make them strange again,

because sometimes they are our friends. They are also us on some days or

in the past; they are us though we are in denial about it. Some

anarchists are activists and say so; others are activists in denial.

Someone said: “activists without the word.” Others again aren’t

activists but bear in their speech and action the inertia of activist

approaches and tactics, an entire way of life that shapes what it is to

be of the Left in North America and probably elsewhere.

Whoever they are, activists talk at meetings. Of course activists also

talk in other situations, but it seems to me that to be an activist is

tendentially to reform any situation into a meeting. For example, there

are people who only socialize by bringing elements of the meeting into

the social situation, at the limit by turning social situations into

meetings wholesale. There are rallies and protests and so on, but these

have much in common with meetings; one sometimes gets the feeling that

everything would be over if the people or institution being protested or

rallied against would agree to a meeting. Consequently, the activist

utopia is a society assembled out of meeting-atoms, a federation of

meetings.

The way activists talk at their meetings is primarily in

margarine-words. These may be slogans, phrases whose function is to

circulate, not to mean; or they may be certain oily words that slip from

mouth to ear, person to machine, situation to scene. One way to

recognize margarine-words is repetition: they are used a lot,

functioning as code words or passwords, their appropriateness assumed,

never shown. Ultimately, this is because their circulation is also the

usually unquestioned circulation of moral beliefs; but in any given

iteration, the repetition may be well-nigh meaningless, just a little

index, gentle reminder of the shared morals rather than harsh

mnemotechnic. It is never really clear which is primary, which gives

form to which: the morality at work, or the compulsion to repeat in its

collusion with the most gregarious drives. In any case, the meeting (or

the rally, etc.) is the pedagogical site where these morals are usually

circulated and sometimes, memorably, inculcated. Another way to

recognize margarine-words is that, as repeatable units, they can be

coded negatively as well as positively, so that avoiding them or using

them only as terms of derision becomes as important as using the ones

that are to be circulated, owned, and appreciated. That is how we get,

for example, “activists without the word,” and moralistic immoralists.

To take this analysis one step further and understand what activism

really is, we would have to deepen the discussion of the relation

between morality and technology, the primitive technics of repetition

and circulation, their ever-larger and more sophisticated technological

networks, their absorption of ancient codes and modern laws, and so on;

that is, discuss politics. It is difficult to explain how these two

co-operate, because sometimes morality is just that, moral principles

and deliberation and tradition and so on; and sometimes I write morality

and realize I am talking more about a certain undeliberated

obsessiveness, a sort of neurosis of doing the good that neurotically

redefines the good as its own neurotic world-view... how all of these

levels of neurosis compose modern political subjects is a question to be

set aside for now.

Instead, let’s leave matters in the realm of family resemblances and

generalize for the productive fun of it about how activists use their

margarine-words. Afterwards, we will have to thank the activists for

making this all so clear, because they are clearly not the only ones who

speak in margarine-words. Margarine-words are all of ours when we aren’t

paying attention; activists are just those who step forward most

flagrantly to show us how we all repeat.

ASIDE 1

Many of the rhetorical effects I designate here as margarine-words are

more matters of speech than writing; thus here I concentrate on how some

talk. The mana-words I turn to further on are best understood as

inventions in writing, though they do have a strange orality in mutant

speech. It turns out that it’s when margarine-words are written down

that they are most egregious (though careful listening will find them

out); and that mana-words sound strangest when spoken as mutant speech.

That said, in this essay I will refer to speech and writing more or less

interchangeably, as they occur to me.

Activists use margarine-words primarily in two ways. One is the talk of

the bureaucrat, the functionary. Sometimes the speaker is not so good at

it, so you have to listen a bit more closely to hear the

proto-bureaucrat, the proto-functionary learning her role. Even when it

is sophisticated, her talk, which on the face of it is common-sensical

and even rational, tends in the long run to the obtuse. She can’t make

eye contact for looking, or pretending to look, at all the details.

These are the people said to “fetishize process”—but this is usually

because what they want can’t be said or done in the language of process.

To speak in this way is one way to attempt, with varying degrees of

success, to instrumentalize language. In part this means to understand

and govern the selective circulation of margarine-words. That’s the

rationality of it, achieved once a critical mass of margarine-words has

been circulated, usually re-circulated if those present at the meeting

are familiar with or help out in the task. But because it seeks to

master people through margarine-words, and not the margarine-words

themselves (mastered, they might cease to circulate, or be erased, as

one with good taste stops using certain phrases, develops a studied

silence with respect to the parlance they wish to abandon), this speech

is a calculated violence done to language, ignoring aesthetic

considerations as well as ethical ones (supposing every morality is the

harsh reduction of what was or could have been an ethics). Stories told

with margarine-words are moral stories; the moral is what you have to

do, or not.

The other way of speaking is more mysterious. At first, it just seems to

be the talk of the leader, or would-be leader, his exhortations, but in

its sinews it is a kind of hysterical discourse, which perhaps has its

origin in the loss of control over the first (bureaucratic) one as

margarine-words begin to circulate beyond anyone’s control. The speaker

realizes at some level, not necessarily conscious, that an ersatz

accumulation of margarine-words is powerful, draws attention, generates

or at least concentrates energy, so he goes for it, he overdoes it, he

says whatever comes to mind as long as it accelerates the recirculation

of margarine-words. It is a way of speaking that to an attentive

listener (by definition someone not implicated in the activist project

at hand) seems so wrong that it is right. Instrumentally right. Here the

instrumentalization of language, which always eventually fails, tips

over into something much less rational. The leader, like the bureaucrat,

manages desire as best he can, but his management also depends on the

ability to unleash what is less than rational in speech. This may be

done cynically, with an eye to benefit from the ensuing confusion, or in

wide-eyed hopefulness, confidence that desire is desire for the good, is

itself good. In either case the details get lost, the

instrumentalization gets scrambled, gets noisy. He can’t make eye

contact for looking, or pretending to look, at the horizon.

ASIDE 2

Do activists listen? Not as activists. But they do hear—they hear the

exhortations, calls to action.

• * *

I wrote that the details get lost. Suppose, for example, that someone

you knew had at some point read a well-known poem, and thought he had

found in some of its well-known lines a grand illustration of his

sentiments. Suppose that the proof offered was a kind of translation of

those lines into margarine-words. Suppose, moreover, that when he

explained this to you, it became clear that he had so profoundly misread

the lines that, beyond all ordinary questions of interpretation, he

could only have arrived at his self-affirming interpretation by

unconsciously inverting the traditional and accepted understanding of

the lines. It is a kind of wrong that is so patently wrong that it could

not subsist without a lengthy justification of reading against the

grain, or an absurdist will to reverse all conventional readings. But go

on supposing, and suppose that your acquaintance was in no way capable

of such experimental reversals. Suppose rather that it were obvious that

he thought himself to be in line with the traditional and accepted

reading of the lines. How to understand this? He is on one hand so wrong

that his illustration by means of the lines simply becomes incoherent.

In another, stranger sense, this reading that is so plainly a

non-reading shows a peculiar will to instrumentalize the artwork, to

seize upon its cultural cachet. Supposing all this, you could have been

witness to the ever repeated birth of propaganda. Incidentally, then, a

new definition of propaganda: violent translation of poetry into

margarine-words.

• * *

If we could accede to an impossible situation wherein the instrumental

use of language, the circulation of margarine-words, could be paused

long enough to examine how morality is at work in it, we would find a

collusion in it of moral stories and stories about language itself. As

though margarine-words can only circulate on the condition of pushing

away any other possibility for speech. Often enough an activist will say

something that sounds like

what you say is theoretical, abstract. I am without theory; I only speak

concretely.

The proof of this concreteness is orientation to action. Listen, it is

the leader, showing the usefulness of his words. Attend to variants of

this story long enough and you will eventually discern the moral, which

is simple enough. It seems to be:

You are bad, you use language to refer to itself; therefore I am good; I

use language purposefully, in mind of action.

At the meeting, an activist is speaking, saying something, but you can’t

talk about how it is said. What is to be attended to is some content (a

plan of action) that is presumably shared. The accusation of abstraction

leveled at users of mutant speech flows from this situation, since

mana-words tend to bear the traces of their invention or borrowing more

noticeably than the margarine-words preferred by activists.

Margarine-words are always ingratiating, seeking to slip by unnoticed.

At the meeting sometimes the bureaucrat seems to say:

My language is the only good way to refer to these matters; I am using

language only in this proper way. You should not use it differently in

responding, or suggest that activists might be using it differently in

the way they speak.

Listen, she is preventing deviation from her script.

How is orientation to action—as the criterion of concreteness and

propriety—a problem? In two ways: first, because action is usually

defined too narrowly. It is likely to mean a process or event that is

interpersonal, public, somehow forceful, often requiring muscular

effort, loud, and so on. Which is to say that it is political, and not

infrapolitical, micro-political, anti-political, or apolitical. These

sorts of processes or events are adequately modeled, “represented”, so

the activist supposes, in her language. When it is a theoretical

language, it is deployed with an eye to application in practice (which

means the kind of narrowly construed political action I’ve just

described); when it is a practical language, it is deployed as almost

pure instrumentality: “go there,” “do this,” etc.

If you question the moral of the story that says you are theoretical and

the activist is not, you will meet the push to “do something”—to prove

the “this-sidedness” of what you have to say with actions the leader or

the bureaucrat will recognize as political.

By now it should be clear that our gratitude to the activists is for

showing those of us who are listening how this operation works. At the

same time it should be clear that, aside from the activists, there are

many, many actionists, if by that word I may be allowed to refer to

those who define action in roughly the way I have above, whether or not

they are activists in terms of their tactics or their morality.

And what is the second problem with orientation to action? Simply put,

that action is not the solution to every situation. At least I clamor

for the perspective wherein action has neither priority nor primacy.

Inaction, doing nothing, stopping, quitting, and so on, are not

secondary or invalid, morally deficient and politically ineffective

though they may appear to the actionists.

• * *

The word radical, so often used by activists (but not just them), in our

milieu generally means very little other than good. Most know the

etymological story, which is often repeated at meetings or other

instructive scenes and teaches that a radical is one who, given a

problem, issue, relation, or situation, gets at its root. A radical

claims to think, wishes to act, in terms of the root. A simple

illustration. Many years ago someone explained radical feminism to me as

that feminism which conceives the subordination of women as the root of

all oppression and domination—i.e. that all other asymmetries of power

are either directly derived or analogically modeled on this root.

Despite the undeniable fact of the subordination of women (easier to

affirm than to determine who in the last instance is a woman) I found

and continue to find it painfully naïve to claim that power could ever

be exercised so simply (in one primary or root form with its analogues

and derivatives). In this case the radicalism would amount to pursuing,

or at least believing, such an analysis (and actively not pursuing or

believing others); at a deeper level, it has to do with believing in a

certain purchase of analysis (in the especially non-analytic way that

activists tend to use this term) on realities of social and other kinds.

One could be more generous to the radicals (or just concede more to what

they claim is ordinary usage) and suggest that by getting at the root

they mean something more like: discovering the true matrix of relations

of force underlying whatever problem, issue, relation, or situation is

at stake for them. They would then be radical not in the sense that they

seek a root or assume that there is one but in a vaguer sense, implying

a kind of downward-seeking motion that we could call looking for basic

structures, root-like structures. So a radical does not stop until some

component relations of force, the asymmetrical relations of power, have

been discovered. It seems to me that this is closer to how radical is

generally used: those who are habituated to the downward-seeking motion.

They speak—by extension: act, move—in characteristic ways. Analysis or

theory works for them first as an unveiling, digging up, finding out;

then, as a guide to action.

The supposition that what one discovers in the downward-seeking motion

is liberatory is perhaps part of what is at stake in the use of radical

more as a noun than as an adjective, or its adjectival use in a sloppy,

all-purpose manner, indicating another kind of social identity, meaning

roughly the right kind of activist, equivalent to activists like us or

activists who agree with us. We pass from repetition to gregariousness.

In that mode radical, the adjective, may be coupled with countless

activities, situations, places, tasks. What does it add?

It adds a morality, or rather it is an index that a moral code is at

stake. As I noted, radical is just a synonym for good, where what is

good is delineated in a largely unspoken and thus unquestioned morality.

This might explain such otherwise confusing constructions as:

radical mommy

radical cheerleader

radical stripmall

If we try to understand these constructions according to the first

definition I suggested, they are almost incoherent. What is the

fundamental or root aspect of being a cheerleader, for example? Whatever

it is, a radical cheerleader would be an excellent cheerleader.

According to the second sense, what is intended might be something more

like this: there are radicals, habitués of the downward-seeking motion,

and as such they have earned the right to call themselves and what they

do radical. If one of these radicals takes up cheerleading as an

activist project, cheerleading, otherwise under suspicion as a practice

of mainstream society, becomes radical cheerleading. This means good

cheerleading, not as cheerleading but as a suitable activity for a

radical. But then radical does not really mean one who goes to the root

of cheerleading, but rather one who can make an activity (otherwise

under suspicion) good, adjectivally radical, by lending interest and

energy to it. It is the valuation associated with the downward-seeking

motion. It is also the value that margarine-words bear as passwords or

code-words. Cheerleading can in this sense be recuperated, but this

changes nothing about it—the routines, contents of chants, etc. is not

what one would claim was at the root! What changes is the “message”—it

is now margarine-words as enthusiastically repeated cheers.

Can we say anything different about other instances of “radical”

politics?

• * *

In 2006 AK Press published a book called Horizontalism. It is sub-titled

“voices of popular power in Argentina” and has to do with mutual aid

networks and forms of neighborhood and workplace autonomy after the

financial collapse in 2001. Marina Sitrin, who edited the book and has

done the most to popularize the titular word in Anglophone contexts,

writes:

Horizontalidad is a living word, reflecting an ever-changing experience.

While I have translated it as horizontalism, it is more of an anti-ism.

Horizontalism is not an ideology, but more of a social relationship, a

way of being and relating.

Indeed, the oral histories and interviews in the book testify to an

extreme suspicion about established politics of any sort. This

suspicion, which sometimes spills over into hostility, is manifest among

other things in the descriptive term used for the organization of

meetings, neighborhood assemblies, occupied spaces, and so on:

horizontalidad.

It was not long after I read this book that I met a number of activist

anarchists who regularly used the term horizontalism, in obvious

reference to the book, to describe their own practices and those of

others. In fact, it seemed that these folks used the terms horizontalism

and anarchism almost interchangeably, except that anarchism was for

those in the know, what I would call the milieu, and horizontalism was

for negotiating with other activists, or for “the community”—the latter

meaning in this case those to be organized. The initial conflation makes

some amount of sense, as the organizations these activists are a part of

were the kind populated by anarchists who do not advertise their

anarchism to “the community.” Their emphasis on organizing as such made

it easy to refer to what was happening as horizontal organizing. Still,

it struck me when I realized that with this crowd horizontalism had

become a euphemism for anarchism, a way to mince words at best, at worst

to dissimulate or confuse their convictions.

One could perhaps trace this back to Sitrin’s decision to translate the

adjectival noun horizontalidad, literally horizontality, which models a

state of affairs or a process, as horizontalism, the, as she puts it,

anti-ism. But it is also a perfect illustration of how those used to

margarine-words comfortably adopted horizontalism as a way to purposely

make their position more vague when engaging in activism, while, in the

doing, adding one more note of imprecision to that position.

• * *

Should we distinguish how militants talk and how activists talk? Only to

some extent. I have known many less militants than I have activists.

It’s possible I’ve never met a militant, only would-be militants, which

drives me to say that these folks were a species of activist, not so

much in their political opinions or organizational forms but in their

general orientation to action—and their relation to language. Tiqqun

wrote some instructive pages on militants in This Is Not a Program,

wherein they emphasize the militants’ separation from their communities

(activists seek rather to integrate so as to organize). The world of

militants is always tendentially the world of secrecy and clandestinity.

As if to escape the bureaucratic deployment of language, militants often

turn to a completely operational language, trimming analysis down to a

series of simple presuppositions about which no further discussion is

necessary. Would-be militants imitate this minimalism in their brief

statements claiming actions.

But if, as Barthes suggests, the militant is a limit-point, the one who

does not see language, one could see activists, in their exhortatory and

managerial modes, as being just a little bit more aware of language,

because they must be more integrated into ordinary speech. Integrated

into

...the most banal of apparatuses, like a boozy Saturday night among

suburban petit bourgeois couples [...] it often happens that we

experience the characteristic, not request, but possession, and even the

extreme possessiveness involved with every apparatus. And it is during

the vacuous conversations punctuating the dreadful dinner party that we

experience it. One of the Blooms “present” will launch into his tirade

against perpetually-on strike-government-workers; once performed (the

role being well known), a counter-polarization of the social-democratic

type will issue from one of the other Blooms, who will play his part

more or less convincingly, etc., etc. Throughout, these aren’t bodies

speaking to each other, but rather an apparatus functioning. Each of the

protagonists sets in motion the series of ready-to-use signifying

machines, which are always-already inscribed in common language, in

grammar, in metaphysics, in the THEY.

THEY = SOCIETY, as anarchists use the word. This constant of political

speech that is what the horizontalism example suggests: there is a

minimum consciousness of the experience of language as a raw material to

be rendered instrumental, even as there is a generalized amnesia about

how this process works. As a guideline, the demand for ordinary speech

is always repeated when people deviate too much from the preferred

margarine-words (which, being passwords, get a pass). And this ordinary

speech is itself dense with other (older, unknown) margarine-words, the

keywords of the society that activists seek to change, that we

anarchists want to dismantle, transform or destroy.

Our Operation Margarine

This story is about something that repeats: a loophole, a silent

acrobatic maneuver accomplished in the course of political speech.

At an anarchist gathering, I attended a workshop whose stated intent was

to question the notions of justice and accountability.[34]

Accountability is another margarine-word, the use of which that day

stretched from the leftist demand for “police accountability” to our own

“accountability processes” and their implied moralities—not to mention

their interminable slowdowns and failures. The hour or so of discussion

went like this: at first, everyone who spoke dared to call police

accountability into question, describing it as a reformist slogan, and

so on; to a lesser extent, our own use of the word in accountability

processes also came into question. For a time it seemed as though no one

who spoke wanted any kind of accountability. The word was effectively

being crossed out: any positive use began to feel suspect. As the hour

wore on, and with no one explicitly recanting their initial statements,

a kind of discursive inertia seemed to be doing its slow and even work.

(Here we might consider silence: what was not said by the majority of

those in the room who did not speak, so the dynamics of the group, the

crowd—and the pauses and hesitations of those who did speak up.)

Eventually, everyone was talking about accountability again: not their

kind, but our kind; not the bad kind that is ours, but the good kind

that could be ours; not fake accountability, but true accountability.

Perhaps some felt for a time that it was possible to discard

accountability, the slogan, the bad word we had crossed out, and gesture

towards the true relation, the word we might eventually just use without

crossing it out verbally or otherwise. Around then someone spoke up and

said something like:

despite all this critique, everyone here has returned to using the word

more or less in the way initially questioned and objected to.

My first thought was: that comfortable circle is one of the ways

critique works! Which may as well mean: does not work. Even those who

continued to speak against accountability treated it as a reality, gave

the word traction, importance as that which we might, we could, maybe

should, with great deliberation, refuse, cross out... so that what would

replace accountability as a demand or goal needed to be provisionally

referred to as... accountability.

• * *

The idea of margarine-words occurred to me after that gathering, when I

recalled reading an essay by Roland Barthes about a commercial involving

a subtle and effective ideological operation. Barthes describes

Operation Margarine as a way of “inserting into Order the complacent

spectacle of its drawbacks” and suggests that is a “paradoxical but

incontrovertible way of exalting” Order.[35]

Paradoxically—exalting—order. This is the “schema” he offers of the

Operation:

take the established value which you want to restore or develop, and

first lavishly display its pettiness, the injustices which it produces,

the vexations to which it gives rise, and plunge it into its natural

imperfection; then, at the last moment, save it in spite of, or rather

by the heavy curse of its blemishes.

He calls Operation Margarine a kind of “homeopathy”:

one cures doubts about the Church or the Army by the very ills of the

Church and the Army. One inoculates the public with a contingent evil to

prevent or cure an essential one. To rebel against the inhumanity of the

Order and its values, according to this way of thinking, is an illness

which is common, natural, forgivable; one must not collide with it

head-on, but rather exorcise it like a possession: the patient is made

to give a representation of his illness, he is made familiar with the

very appearance of his revolt, and this revolt disappears all the more

surely since, once at a distance and the object of a gaze, Order is no

longer anything but a Manichean compound and therefore inevitable, one

which wins on both counts, and is therefore beneficial. The immanent

evil of enslavement is redeemed by the transcendent good of religion,

fatherland, the Church, etc. A little ‘confessed’ evil saves one from

acknowledging a lot of hidden evil.

The master-stroke of the essay, which takes us from propaganda or

ideology to what Barthes called myth, passes from the initial examples

about the Army and the Church to an advertisement for Astra margarine:

The episode always begins with a cry of indignation against margarine:

‘A mousse? Made with margarine? Unthinkable!’ ‘Margarine? Your uncle

will be furious!’ And then one’s eyes are opened, one’s conscience

becomes more pliable, and margarine is a delicious food, tasty,

digestible, economical, useful in all circumstances. The moral at the

end is well known: ‘Here you are, rid of a prejudice which cost you

dearly!’ It is in the same way that the Order relieves you of your

progressive prejudices.

It should be obvious enough how such a schema is at work in the

discourse around the Army or the Church (or all the institutions that

resemble Armies and Churches). Extending it to Astra margarine was

Barthes’ way of saying something about how utterly common of an

operation is at work here, how natural or naturalized this inverting or

turning-inside-out gesture is. That is where Barthes leaves us, in the

diffuse world of advertisements, tiny shreds of propaganda. The calque

of Operation Margarine I have been discussing here, ours, if it is a

myth, is larval or malformed, probably because, like our politics, it

belongs to a different kind of order. Our side is, let’s assume, the

side of the critics of Order; our speech, often enough, bears or

formulates critiques of Order. Our stories, our myths, accordingly, are

the stories and myths of Order, critical though their form may be.

ASIDE 3

This is in part because critique in anarchist circles means more speech

against what I don’t like than undermining-questioning the grounds of

claims. This has a lot to do with why we talk so much about Society.

• * *

Of necessity our Operation Margarine is more curious. We are, most of

us, critics of ideology, of Order as such, perhaps, so our version has

less to do with Myth as ideology, as a confusing veil, and more with

that kind of myth we secrete as with a gland in the brain. How stories

go; how they turn out... In my story, we saved accountability,

ultimately by leaving it as the name for what was to replace

accountability. This leaves open the possibility of someone who will see

fit to extend its range back from our processes (where it seemed to be

more acceptable because now under our control) to the police and their

allies (Order), because in saying everything bad we could think about

the idea in practice, we left unchanged its status as Good. This has

less to do, then, with an incontrovertible master narrative (we were

indeed able to say we were against accountability) and more about the

slow and silent work of gregariousness and repetition on behalf of a

morality it is hard to think of, or outside of.

A conclusion about margarine-words: most of the time our speech cannot

separate itself from what has been captured by the category of the Good.

When we speak in such a way as to repel away from a word associated with

the good (crossing out as “critique”), its magnetic force will attract

either that same word, or another, to do very similar work (continuing

to use the crossed-out word or a euphemistic variant).

One might well ask what a different outcome for the workshop could have

been. Maybe none. Maybe we have them just to state problems. One could

well consider that many anarchist gatherings happen primarily to make

possible a kind of cathartic venting, especially for those who are less

than activists or prefer to avoid meetings, which have their own ritual

catharsis. But I doubt this would satisfy most. We move on to ask how to

shut down Our Operation Margarine. A radical proposal might have been:

let us stop using the terms justice and accountability Moratorium! What

would happen if we really could be disciplined enough to abandon these

words, or any of our other margarine-words? Not an escape from myth, or

from morality, certainly. For a group to choose to eject a word or words

from its speech seems more like an experiment for a poetry workshop than

a political operation.

The advocates of Order retain an arsenal of terms that we use otherwise

for their own purposes. They do not erase the word anarchy; they rather

use it in a way that we feel is either wrong or has the incorrect moral

valuation (i.e. responding either that’s not anarchy! or that is

anarchy, and it is good, not bad). To temporarily attempt to erase a

word would be to, temporarily, make it powerful, attractive,

interesting... To permanently erase a word? First, words do not show up

in the dictionary with the dagger-cross next to them because of anyone’s

conscious action. That is the great work of collectives, one thing you

can count on the masses for: anonymous forgetting... Second, it is

preposterous to think the milieu’s ban on a word could have any lasting

effect on anyone not involved. The milieu (our gray space) is porous,

characterized by constant entry and exit; the ban would never work,

because it would have to be constantly announced. This repetition would

amount to graduating the terms to the status of negatively charged

margarine-words.

Beyond these practical problems of usage, accountability, like all

margarine-words, is not just replaceable by euphemisms, but is itself a

stand-in for other words we are more likely to avoid (we and the police

and their allies) for some reason or another—guilt, for example. We can

continue to play the game of replacing one word with another while the

underlying morality changes very little if at all, and do so for the

most part beyond anyone’s purview. Our Operation Margarine, or something

like it, is probably a major aspect of how these margarine-words get

circulated in and out of fashion as they do, part of our larger tennis

match with Order, which might be more pessimistically described as

Order’s tennis match with itself. From the point of view of such

pessimism, which is to some extent the necessary point of view of the

milieu, perhaps the only way out is to play the replacing-game very

crudely, to play it backwards instead of forwards, using the wrong word

instead of the right one. Recall the Situationist-esque vocabulary that

was based on a pretend version of this game:

[]

and so on. If we cannot stop saying accountability, we might as well

call it guilt, mismatching behavior and speech. Later this year we can

talk about Evil, because the mismatch, the glaring, and, for many,

unpleasant contrast, is what is really at stake. Guilt is indeed the

relatively true feeling or desideratum hidden behind accountability, but

saying so is worth our while only to disrupt. Our next step in this game

should not be to repeat ourselves, but to pass on to the more absurd

place. This is the logic of détournement and plagiarism, which sidesteps

the supposition that one can speak in earnest in such gatherings,

meetings, workshops, and so on. This play can also turn ugly, as

described in the pamphlet Cabal, Argot:

When arguing, it is preferential to argue for the sake of being

difficult. Semantics are absolutely worth fighting over.

Being difficult and other ludic, non-serious activities in our speech,

playing the replacing-game but doing so backwards and wrong, touting the

bad as the good and making the weaker argument the stronger, are the

only means we have so long as we remain in a more or less political

space. And often enough, we awaken to the fact that we have been forced

into such spaces. Fortunately, there are other spaces.

• * *

As I was in the course of writing this essay, an exchange between

Kristian Williams and Crimethinc. appeared addressing topics close to

what I’ve been discussing here.[36] Setting out from Orwell’s

denunciation of vices in political speech and writing, Williams aptly

points out a range of words quite similar to what I have been calling

margarine-words. About such vague jargon he notes:

People who write this sort of thing may have some general idea of what

they are trying to say—but they needn’t have.

I was pleased to see the very word that first triggered some of these

thoughts noted in his article:

“Accountability,” “community,” “solidarity,” and “freedom” are used, in

the overwhelming number of cases, simply as markers to signify things we

like or favor.

Agreed. What I think I am adding to this, what Williams does not

discuss, is that the “things we like or favor” are held together not by

vague agreement but also by an undiscussed moral fabric. Presenting the

problem as a problem of shoddy writing and vague speech is deceptive. He

comes closer when he writes of the jargon:

The words serve instead to indicate a kind of group loyalty, an

ideological border between our side and the other side: we believe this,

and they don’t. Or rather: we talk in this way and say this sort of

thing; they talk in some other way, and say some other sort of thing.

Again, agreed, but rather than being concerned with a contrast between

jargon that says little and a supposedly attainable speech or writing

that is both political and communicative, I respond that the jargon is

not just a bad choice, but in some important sense a condition (of being

a political subject, our neurotic speech as such; of our time, the

Spectacle, about which more later). It is also important to note that

what Williams is pointing out here is mainly to be noticed in speech,

and only derivatively in writing.

I said margarine-words were not just jargon terms, but slogans, compact

phrases, sometimes whole fragments of speech. To their ready

instrumentality I can now add the trait that reading Williams made me

realize was missing: fear. Margarine-words mobilize fear; they result

from a fearful impression, and their use perpetuates that same fear. The

flight away from that fear could result in adopting a different set of

margarine-words (and attempting to frighten the frighteners: turf-war as

debate), or developing a taste for mutant speech or even acid-words.

I suppose I am more pessimistic than either Williams or Crimethinc., but

I will agree with the latter when they write

if we stay within the bounds of language that is widely used in this

society, we will only be able to reproduce consensus reality, not

challenge it

and (this is of equal importance):

those who are convinced that they speak precisely—yet see imprecision

virtually everywhere they look—rarely communicate well with others.

That’s not how communication works. It is a mutual undertaking, for

which rulebooks are no more useful than they are for any other kind of

voluntary relationship.

In any case, when Williams repeats Orwell’s “principle”,

Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about

and his six rules for English prose, adding

were there a contemporary anarchist style guide, nearly all of these

rules would be reversed,

it is easy enough to agree. But that is because I take Orwell’s rules as

an excellent means to dismantle the imagined style guide (of anarchists,

of activists, of leftists, of identity politicians, of many others).

That, however, is the limit of their usefulness. For it is not really a

question of better writing in a space where so few read and even less

write. The tensions at work in our speech will not be resolved by

codifying written language, or even improving its style.

That is why it is telling that Crimethinc. returns to speech.

Questioning the normality that margarine-words depend on and reproduce,

and the communication that can only be assumed as given and available by

the frightened, the path to mutant speech is another road to what

Crimethinc. calls a mutual undertaking; and the challenge to reality is

the path to acid-words, speech and writing beyond hope and fear,

“if it really is dangerous.”

Part 2: Amoral

Beneath the poetry of the texts,

there is the actual poetry,

without form and without text.

— Antonin Artaud

Mutant Speech

The preceding is mostly a critique of the continued use of words whose

significance is exhausted by the context they are caught in. I am now

led to an argument in favor of words that function differently, the

mutant speech I’ve already had occasion to reference. Détournement is

sometimes a sign of being trapped, and at other times the operation of

those who are capable of entering another space. It depends on whether

one regards the overall effect as purely destructive, or whether the new

content generated in moments of negation and obfuscation is of any, even

temporary, use.

A kind of ludic strategy unfolds in the second case, an idiom

characterized not by the oily morality of margarine-words but by the

attraction and repulsion of mana-words. Mutant speech, the strange

constructions formed when mana-words are assembled into talk, is another

form the compulsion to repeat may take. It is, on the whole, more

conscious and deliberate than the repetition of margarine-words; it

appears at the edge of politics, there where it spills over into the

anti- and a-political.

Mana-words are the seemingly untranslatable terms that anthropologists,

philosophers and other theorists invent or radically repurpose, their

clumsy or graceful neologisms, and their redeployment of ordinary words

from living and dead languages. Mutant speech is recognizable in that

its repetitions are not of the familiar margarine-words, but citations

of more or less rare mana-words. Mutant speech is not just the use of

mana-words judged competent by experts and specialists, but encompasses

an entire range of hesitations, creative mistakes, more or less willful

misinterpretations, and qualifications that betray, sometimes, a

hyperconsciousness of language, and, at other times, a kind of psychotic

break-out from the neurotic repetition of margarine-words. This last

phenomenon could be described as a successful but involuntary

détournement of margarine-words as described earlier.

Our action-oriented milieu tends on the whole to respond badly to

mana-words unless they are old and familiar (often in the process of

becoming margarine-words). In our gray space many are not comfortable

with mutant speech, preferring what they take to be ordinary language,

which always includes a set of socially or sub-culturally approved

margarine-words. When mutant speech arises in their presence, or when

reading presents them with too many mana-words, many immediately hurl

the accusation of abstraction, and some also deliver a judgment of

complicity with oppressive institutions. As to the accusation, first,

mana-words are not necessarily abstract. Abstraction is rare, and that’s

what is desirable about acceding to it; mana-words are rare as well but

only sometimes abstract. At one point potlatch was a mana-word, as was

mana itself, which gave me the idea (Mauss glosses it as “spiritual

force”). Nothing especially abstract about them, just the novelty of

their appearance in our language. In the case of truly abstract words,

such as singularity, no one really knows what abstraction is or does; we

have precious few opportunities to discover what it can do as a

linguistic operation. I have already outlined why and how an activist or

actionist would respond to it with hostility. Part of the way

margarine-words operate is such that many reserve the right to declare

that their speech (e.g a word like people or community) is not abstract,

while other terms (e.g. biopower) are. This is more or less willfully

misinterpreting the rarity of the word’s appearance (which in many cases

signals precisely the novelty or fragile instability of mutant speech)

as the only index of its present and future purchase or effects. As for

the judgment of institutional complicity, such a reaction is obvious

enough to predict: anyone who is trained to read or speak in an academic

setting (usually the institution in question) is taken to respond

primarily to that social/work space and only secondarily to the milieu.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that an individual’s allegiances are

very important when deciding whether to collaborate with, trust, or

befriend them, and not very important at all in appraising their speech

or writing in its sheer functioning or manifestation. But then those

concerned would have to allow themselves to be drawn (or not) by the

mana-words themselves instead of trying to determine what team their

user is on. Rather than a lazy dismissal of terms due to their

abstraction, one could simply opt out of their circulation and not use

them, sparing the rest of their circle their ressentiment-in-language.

It is not so different to say: I will not use this term than to say: I

do not enjoy this poetry.

The idea that what is said in mutant speech can be always translated

into the talk of margarine-words is ultimately a prejudice in favor of

the latter that costs us the potentials of the former. Though it is not

always activists that do it, its most stereotypical form is the

activists’ bid to translate other forms of speech and writing into what

they deem ordinary language (whatever is meant by this, it is a medium

for margarine-words). The accusation of abstraction amounts to

preparation for such translation, since margarine-words are equally

likely to be abstract, their apparent familiarity coming down to the

greater rate of their repetition, their more successful function as

passwords or codewords. I would recommend to those that demand

translation into common terms that they merely respond to mutant speech

with I don’t understand this speech, which should mean something not too

different from I don’t like this music or this poetry.

Someone who finds they hate all music or all poetry and feels that it

can and should be expressed in another form, or not be expressed at all,

might in that moment consider the silence they are wishing for, as the

best possible form of what otherwise has to be taken to mean I do not

know what music is, or I have no true experience of poetry. As saying so

would usually be taken as a request for acquaintance or explanation, the

most I can recommend to one who finds themselves in such a relation is

not forced translation but silence. About which more further on.

• * *

The rarity of mana-words, their degree of abstraction, is tied to

extraction procedures. It is a rare thing to be able to extract a word

from its context and redeploy it. In its extracted form it can become

useless in its former context. The function and use of extraction is

precisely this newly generated specificity and orientation, which can

also be a kind of studied uselessness. The détournement of

margarine-words takes place when speakers recognize the speech situation

into which they have been placed, or into which others are trying to

place them, and begin to speak from the perspective of the extraction of

terms (sometimes even hinting at a possible extraction will do to

destabilize the situation).

When one finally accedes to mutant speech, it is easy enough for another

to point out that such speech, what is called its theory, cannot be put

into practice. Indeed, that uselessness is precisely the desired

interfering effect that the détournement operated. It is more difficult

to understand in what sense the circulation of extracted mana-words is

itself a practice of language, a different kind of repetition. The

mana-words so circulated (cited alongside practices) always generate

confusion. If they do not, it is because they are in the process of

becoming, or have already become, new margarine-words. So people are

right that abstract concepts, and mutant speech generally, cannot be put

into practice without a process of interpretation and concretization.

This process could render them margarine-words, or it could produce

bizarre new practices (but bizarre practices could also appear on their

own with no forethought on anyone’s part).

One might note, for example, that it is precisely mana-words that never

return to us from propaganda machines in spectacular forms.

Margarine-words are shared with and to a large extent take their motive

power from the mass and its leaders. Some will always be engaged in

saying what freedom, justice, and hope really mean, and it will always

be a waste of time. These words do too much work for the mass and its

leaders in a society like ours. Mana-words are non-recuperable precisely

because they have no generalized use. That is why I write mana-words and

not theory, placing them besides what is most compelling about poetic

speech and argots of every sort, as three instances of linguistic

creativity too underdetermined to reliably motivate and parallel power

operations. Mana-words are effective situationally, for some people, in

some ways. They are repeated, but not on condition of being recognized.

They do not always assume contect, but often require context to be

established in the real time of speech—mutant speech.

• * *

Everything I’ve written on mutant speech so far has been an engagement

with the imagined (always imagined and imaginary) ordinary speakers of a

language, those whose life is a perpetual risk of margarine-words. On

the other side, those who have opted for a less ordinary path, familiar

with mutant speech, exhibit different relations to mana-words. Mutant

speech could also be called queer speech, being close to what is

discussed in the journal bædan as

a force which can interrupt the domination of language over life

Though I would call that language Language, the ordinary Language with

its margarine-words. In bædan we read

We engage with language insofar as we can deploy it in service of the

body. We speak, we put word to paper in order to send a wink to those

with whom we have not yet or cannot at present conspire in a practice of

jouissance

Jouissance, parenthetically, being a perfect example of a mana-word.

Some take maximum pleasure in their repetition, enjoying an almost

uninterrupted flow of mana-words. Here I will resort to some analogies

that are less than analogies, along the bodily lines laid out in bædan,

to show that mutant speech does not just have to be more or less

successful communication. It is first of all attempted communion. Play

with mana-words is not unlike covering one’s body with water or make-up,

or fragrances or lotions, or also smearing oneself with a stream of

spit, cum, piss, or shit that one wishes were continuous. The criteria

at work here are aesthetic or hedonistic. Others are begged, sometimes

commanded (if the speaker or writer is a top), to smell, to feel the

mana-words. The speaker or writer appears for a second as they cover

themselves in these words-marks, smearing themselves and sometimes

smearing others. From the specialized and academic point of view, this

is the least competent kind of mutant speech; in the milieu, it is one

of the most common forms, the little dance some do when they first

become enamored with what we call theory.[37] It is repetition for its

own pleasurable sake, repetition discovered as a pleasurable event, the

breakdown of the passwords and codewords and joy in that failure.

A second form, more competent from the point of view of the specialists,

deploys the mana-words in baroque combinations and ornate arrangements.

The speaker or writer shows, not their smeared skin, but their entire

body as it approaches escape velocity... no ordinary language can catch

up to this theory machine. The repetition becomes communicative to an

extent, though the effects of extraction are still felt: this is

repetition with a difference. Though the more pedestrian critics cannot

distinguish between this spaceflight and the smearing, those who discern

the difference are left asking: why these terms and not others? Why

these theorists? The recession of this mutant speech from what is most

oppressive about margarine-words is clear enough: but who is satisfied

with a merely reactive strategy, with one more critique? Is anything

really gained by sublimating the pleasure of sloppiness?

A third form of mutant speech would be to generate the mana-words

oneself. But that would already be something else, translation or

creation. In short, no longer repeating. I call those words, as they are

created, or when they are recharged with mana, acid-words.

Jabberwocky, the language

The language Jabberwocky came up, as I recall, in a conversation some

years ago, one among many conversations with anarchists where a

discomfort with language was manifest. I later diagnosed this discomfort

as an anxiety. I only remember some of the participants, many of whom I

had just met that night, and, as usual, I think more people were

listening than speaking.

How the discomfort was manifest that night, what repeats in such anxious

conversations, is not difficult to outline. First, there seems to be an

ambient impatience, some frustration with language as such. This can

begin with a few words on the language of an enemy, with the

vilification of a politician or a onetime friend, but it eventually

extends to anyone’s use of language. From bullshit to ideology; from

dishonesty or disingenuousness to a generalized paralysis of expression.

Here’s the second part: someone will make an implicit or explicit

reference to a certain primitivist refusal of language, or what some

call “symbolic culture” generally, a kind of reference to its existence,

without taking it on—for good reason. As these conversations often show,

primitivism is something more like a commonplace reference than a stated

position... Really, what is there to debate here? For a few engaged

interlocutors, it is easy enough to include someone named John Zerzan in

the twentieth-century philosophy category in Wikipedia, or to write an

article criticizing his “philosophy of language”, but this kind of

classification and attempted engagement completely misses the affective

withdrawal of the not-so-thought-out refusal. The gesture I am writing

about is the gesture of the many who feel primitivists are right about

something, while not wanting to discuss it as a matter of philosophy or

theory. The point— the symptom—is the feeling, the acceleration of the

refusal. That is why, finally, there is some vague sense in the

conversation, if it gets this far, that the refusal of language is part

of a long list of refusals, and the reference to language is one more

way of talking about Everything or The Totality or Capital or

Civilization, etc. The conversation I recall was an unremarkable example

except for one detail. Perhaps in jest, one of the speakers said that he

advocates “speaking in Jabberwocky” as a way out of the Language he

knows.

I think he meant that Jabberwocky, the language, is not an other to

English, but an other to Language—to language as we know it. “Speaking

in Jabberwocky” takes the refusal of Language into account; it is in

fact a hypothetical practice emerging from this refusal. And in this

refusal I imagine a demand that repetition, conscious or unconscious,

dull or creative, come to a halt. Language appears to them as part of a

Totality that cannot be simply sidestepped, because some urge to speak

is inevitable, and Language is precisely the government of those urges,

their guidance, standardization, branding, and so on. But since these

individuals will not be governed, and since, so desperation says,

eventually all speech decays into margarine-words, and perhaps that is

all it ever was, they conclude that we should just somehow stop. Without

positing an immediate way out (or a way out to immediacy), “speaking in

Jabberwocky” intimates something else: what one could do with that

inescapable urge is to speak in a way that is nonsensical. What was my

interlocutor getting at with this reference to nonsense? A parodic

speech, a parody of speaking? Speech in a very different kind of code,

in an invented language?

I am not sure. It would have been easy enough to object that he

explained the idea using ordinary English and not Jabberwocky. I would

rather emphasize—what has made this conversation stick in my memory—that

when seeking a way out of Language (as Spectacle, with all of the

implied traits of Spectacle—totalizing, mediating, representative,

communicative—that speech, in short, that places us on the side of

instituted authority and authority to come), he gave it the name of a

poem. The name of the language is the title of a poem; and the title of

the poem is a nonsense word. He invoked for me, that is to say, the

studied play with language that poetry can involve.

To get to acid-words, I set out from this insight. It is perhaps a

paradox, or maybe just the weird way things go, that the greatest

refusal of the urge to repeat becomes the motor of creation, of

differentiation. To get to acid-words, I take inspiration from a poetic

outlook, not to recommend poetry in one form or another, but rather to

speak as one who has been transformed in his relation to language by

poetic speech and writing. This is something other than a defense of

art, much less of literary institutions or canons. I am less concerned

to defend the arts than to acknowledge the fact of their various

existences, valued for some, dangerous and despised for others, as one

aspect of that inevitability of speech I referred to above. I would now

recast it as an inevitability of expression. On the side of writing,

this fact is greater than literature, though literature flows from it;

on the side of speech, it includes all sorts of symbolic and linguistic

creativity, including the anonymous productions of slang, argots, cant,

and various other oral joys: the poesy that happens as if by accident

(though what is accidental is knowing it is poetic, knowing it as

poetry).

• * *

“Jabberwocky”: the poem, and then the imagined language. The poem first:

it was of course the first stanza, identical to the last, that my

interlocutor had in mind. You have probably seen it:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

It appears in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, where Alice

first encounters it as a mirror-image. Upon reading it, she remarks “it

seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t know exactly what they

are.” The five stanzas between the first and last, though they all

include nonsense words, follow a kind of adventure narrative.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!

And so on. Gillian Beer observes:

The syntax in ‘Jabberwocky’ is stable, although the semantics are odd,

so the story is stable though its elements are obscure.

A little less than twenty years earlier, Carroll had published the

first/last stanza as a “curious fragment” under the title “Stanza of

Anglo-Saxon Poetry.” Definitions for the eleven key words followed; in

Through the Looking-Glass, the anthropomorphic egg Humpty Dumpty offers

similar (but not identical) definitions to Alice.

In sum: though an exemplar of nonsense verse, “Jabberwocky” is hardly

nonsense in the usual sense of the word. A narrative may be discerned in

it, and tone, and feeling; and the words that seem to make that

discernment difficult are not beyond explanation—explanation that the

author did not even leave to the reader. As Beer writes: stable syntax,

strange semantics. Additionally, the prehistory of the first/last stanza

as a fake sample of old English shows Carroll’s concern, in his

construction of portmanteau words for nonsense effects, with real

linguistic history and processes of word formation. So what strikes us

about “Jabberwocky” is not just the initial shock of nonsense, but also

the pleasure of inventiveness, and the related pleasure of commentary on

that invention.

Jabberwocky, the language, would then have some or all of these traits:

first, speaking and hearing it is pleasurable for most: it is patterned

and tuneful, sharing some traits of language as we know it (or whatever

dominant Language it exists in initial relation to) and some traits of

language as it could have been. Jabberwocky makes enough sense that

speakers/readers of Language can follow a story in Jabberwocky, while

still feeling the need to call it nonsense. Upon closer examination,

speakers/readers of Language will determine that Jabberwocky can’t be a

complete other to Language. It is not an other Language; it dramatizes

something of the coming-into-being of language itself. At the same time,

in showing this coming-into-being it is recognized as nonsense and

designates sense itself as the precarious factor in speech. Here again I

would essay an analogy that is something other than an analogy and say

that what is dramatized here is the image of an animal that speaks, as

in myth, as in fable, as in reality. In the essay in bædan I’ve already

cited, there is a discussion of birds in Edelman’s theory and

Hitchcock’s film, indomitable birds that symbolize “our struggle”:

in describing this domestication of the world by meaning, Edelman is

borrowing heavily from Hocquenghem’s understanding of the body as

colonized by language through the process of domestication. Edelman, one

last time: “Thus the birds in their coming lay to waste the world

because they so hate the world that will not accept them that they, in

turn will accept nothing but the destruction of the world.”

The writer in bædan concludes:

Here we must understand ourselves as the birds or else the text offers

us nothing.

We are the birds, the animals that speak. Which is to say that

Jabber-wocky, the language, is not only a pastime, but also something

corrosive, destructive, the vehicle of a bodily shift, yes, as with

mana-words. It is deployed not only conspiratorially with the aim of

orgiastic communion, but to destroy the world (though I would write

World, as I write Language).

Jabberwocky, the language, mirrors Language, and it recedes from it,

carving out another space for itself; it recedes as it mirrors. What is

it showing in its reversal? A fact.

• * *

This fact could be stated as follows:

Poesy happens.

Or:

Acid-words are possible.

The inevitability of language, which is experienced as the urge to

speak, to sing, to write, to mark—it sometimes manifests as poesy. Gary

Snyder wrote

language rises unbidden.

The other ways language manifests are partially relevant here, but what

is truly remarkable is that something like poesy happens, not as

literature, not as a secondary aesthetic or artistic consideration, but

foremost as the unbidden arrival of language—of speech, of the marks

that become writing. Showing us our ancestors speaking exclusively in a

poesy that preceded the distinction between literature and myth (as

though gripped, at the dawn of language, by that indistinct firstness,

its fascination), Vico suggested that poesy might be the event of

language.

people living in the world’s childhood were by nature sublime poets

Or more precisely:

in all nations speech in verse preceded speech in prose.

But not necessarily the advent of what, in all those conversations, we

felt the need to reject. Not Language. Of course the history that

follows the Vician poetic dawn, the history of civilization, more

recently of capital and Spectacle, is the history of Language, of the

mediating image, of representation. There is indeed a poetry written in

and as Language. Poetry in service of the state; surrealism in service

of the revolution. (Debord called the Spectacle the epic poem of the

commodity’s competition with other commodities.) But there is also—there

has never ceased being— poetry in the service of nothing, or in the

service of itself, new and irresponsible, another image, another speech,

and that is what I think the reference to “Jabberwocky” amounted to in

my imagination, and that is how this mask came to life. From there I

write to acid-words.

Spectacle/Language

Debord wrote of the Spectacle that it is a social relation between

persons mediated by images. Here mediated renders mediatisé, which must

be both the mediation philosophers speak of, the forceful introduction

of a third term into what one would otherwise call an immediate

relation, and also the way something or someone is forcefully placed

into a medium, into the media. Or, more weirdly, the forceful irruption

of a medium in a person or relation between people. In the former case,

since mediation is often assimilated to alienation, a tremendous amount

of metaphysical and even moral consequences seem to follow from

generalized mediation, as separation from the real, the authentic, or

the genuine. In the latter, which could be rendered mediatization, we

are considering separation itself: separation as a cleavage not only

between us but in each of us; as ruined communion and forced

communication; as the taxing propagation of detached images.

To dismantle the Spectacle has usually meant to undo mediation, its

technological or at least material work of representation, in some way;

a good deal has been written about how to do that. Here I would like to

consider the undoing, or at least troubling, of mediatization. It is

notable that Debord structured Society of the Spectacle in a markedly

different manner than his earlier Situationist texts. At first, the

constructed situation was to be

built on the ruins of the spectacle

holding out the promise (to some, a threat to others) of expressive

communion, perhaps of an immediate relation. This construction was up to

the individual or group as creator. In Society of the Spectacle, as

explicated in at the climax of a dense historical narrative, the undoing

of the reign of representation is a strictly political affair, the

business of the workers’ councils. Here I, too, will invoke history: the

decades that it has taken some to become unsure that workers’ councils

could be the unbinding of spectacular mediatization (and so spectacular

society) or, more generally, that political solutions will unbind

political problems without setting the cycle of recuperation back into

motion. We who feel this way are at an impasse.

Debord also wrote of the Spectacle

the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of

universal separation.

More recently Giorgio Agamben stepped forward to amplify Debord on this

point, adding:

Today... it is clear that the spectacle is language, the very

communicativity or linguistic being of humans ... in the spectacle our

own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted.

There are at least two ways to understand this statement. One is that it

is a clarification, because the Spectacle has always been Language. The

other is that it is written to register a historical shift, in the sense

that something has happened in or to the Spectacle in the course of the

decades between 1967 and 1989. It could also just be a provocation. In

any case, for those committed to talk of Spectacle and disruption of

Spectacle to pass over to this interpretation would mean apprehending

the political impasse (impossibility of situations, absence of councils)

as something that unfolds in our speech.

Indeed, the principal form this impasse takes today is the frustration

or anxiety about language, usually in the background of our speech (most

apparent in those conversations not governed by margarine-words). The

impasse is manifest in the borderline nonsensical primitivist allegation

that language is the first ideology, a crude translation of the idea of

Spectacle as mediation, both as explicit claim (rare), and reference or

implicit awareness (common). In these uses of the idea of Spectacle,

what is principally accessed is its aiming-at-the-totality, which is how

Language earns its capital L. We come to such an idea, as Debord perhaps

did with images, by first aiming at the totality, all of it. We come to

the anxiety, the primitivists to their refusal, by asking how to cross

it all out. Here is an example, less hysterical than most, again from

bædan:

All discourse consists of nothing but an endless series of affirmations

no more insightful than remarking that water is wet, phrased in more or

less interesting and more or less roundabout ways. The rest are lies.

Aiming-at-the-totality, we get what I’ve denominated Language. The

endless series of affirmations (yes, yes, yes...) suggests for me a

representational language caught in its tautology, as margarine-words

wait to be affirmed (code words or slogans to be said yes to) or are

offered as ways of being said yes to (passwords), as images are produced

in a way completely determined by the medium in which they anticipate

circulation. Expressing ourselves with such words or such images may or

may not be mediation, but it is certainly mediatization.

As I have noted, the most common attempted escape from margarine-words,

mutant speech (and the less common one, acid-words), leads to a staging

of this anxiety (as incomprehension or hostility from readers or

listeners, as the speaker or writer’s own anxiety before the risk of

meaninglessness). From the point of view of Language, these escape

attempts are the incorrect way to play the game and will always register

as wrong moves, or morally improper gestures (lies). Those who adopt

this point of view, bureaucrats or not, would push us back to the stale

comforts of small talk or private exchanges with our intimates, those

little spaces we suppose we control—and this fantasy of control over

private life, true only for a few, is precisely meant to remind us that

public or political space is completely covered, altogether occupied, by

an impenetrable web of images, representations, or... words. When they

arise unbidden we are to recognize, not words, but the web, the medium.

• * *

Suppose resistance is possible. What does the undoing of the Spectacle

mean when one considers that the Spectacle “is” language, is Language?

First option: one could hazard decentering an idea and practice of

Language tied first of all to nationalism, to a standardized grammar,

secondly to a familiar, largely unconscious cultural conservatism (“the

old language is good, the new language is bad”), and third, these two

wrapped up in a mediatized dissemination of standard terms and usages.

Decentering it, we no longer have Language but languages—not just in the

sense of the thousands of world languages but also as a congeries of

language-games, speech genres, little discourses and narratives within

any given language. The idea or representation of Language breaks down

into languages, but languages themselves splinter into dialects, slangs,

argots, and so on. This is the sense of the project of accelerated

fragmentation set up in Cabal, Argot: if we are convinced that

in-group/out-group dichotomies are the tension that will tear society

apart. Disparate groups who do not understand each other are destined to

become separate

then we see that their advocacy of difficult argument is also a kind of

test, a test of who understands (gets it, the joke or reference) and who

does not—the real-time, in-person formation of the inand out-groups. And

so, understandably,

we choose to associate with, or support, particular factions, particular

groups, or particular persons. By always taking the side of those within

our in-group, we repudiate the representation of the social order that

maintains capital, the state, and its technics.

First option, then: the groupuscles and their cant.

Second option: one could save the workers’ councils strategy by

rendering them as communications councils, working on the premise that

language is for communication, and trying to do it right. This is the

solution of Society of the Spectacle, but also of an article in

Internationale Situationniste 8, “All the King’s Men” (the title,

incidentally, being a reference to Caroll):

In-group languages—those of informal groupings of young people; those

that contemporary avant-garde currents develop for their internal use as

they grope to define themselves; those that in previous eras were

conveyed by way of objective poetic production, such as trobar clus and

dolce stil nuovo—are more or less successful efforts to attain a direct,

transparent communication, mutual recognition, mutual accord. But such

efforts have been confined to small groups that were isolated in one way

or another. The events and celebrations they created had to remain

within the most narrow limits. One of the tasks of revolution is to

federate such poetic “soviets” or communication councils in order to

initiate a direct communication everywhere that will no longer need to

resort to the enemy’s communication network (that is, to the language of

power) and will thus be able to transform the world according to its

desire.

To the question: how do workers’ councils undo spectacular

representation? the answer is: because they are communications councils,

poetic soviets. They federate the very groups that the cabalists want

separate and create a kind of communicational dual power. This idea is

also legible in Mohammed Khayati’s “Captive Words,” published in

Internationale Situationniste 10:

It is thus essential that we forge our own language, the language of

real life, against the ideological language of power, the terrain of

justification of all the categories of the old world. From now on we

must prevent the falsification or recuperation of our theories.

It is not clear how this is is to be done other than through the process

of fragmentation-federation suggested by the anonymous author of “All

the King’s Men.” Khayati concludes by calling for a Situationist

dictionary, a linguistic federation tool,

a sort of code book enabling one to decipher the news and rend the

ideological veils that cover reality. We will give possible translations

that will enable people to grasp the different aspects of the society of

the spectacle, and show how the slightest signs and indications

contribute to maintaining it. In a sense it will be a bilingual

dictionary, since each word has an “ideological” meaning for power and a

real meaning that we think corresponds to real life in the present

historical phase.

Second option: the councils and their dictionary.

Third option: one might consider unmediatized life or activity somehow

beyond Language or Language games. The Spectacle is Language, Language

is the Spectacle, insofar as our speech and our writing are bound to

this representational form. Part of that is being forced to speak,

expected to confess, and desiring it ourselves too—endlessly botched

silence. Language rises unbidden... at the incitement of a power

relation that demands your participation. We are still thinking about a

mode of relating here—what is called, and is, and is not, representation

and communication. But the Spectacle is not Language because language is

representational and informational; the Spectacle is Language as

representational and informational. Forced communication, excluded

communion, botched, endlessly botched, silence.

Interestingly, some version of this approach is also legible in the two

aforementioned Situationist essays. If communications councils are their

major theme, this is their minor theme. Khayati discusses détournement

in a way that anticipates the cabalists:

The critique of the dominant language, the détournement of it, is going

to become a permanent practice of the new revolutionary theory.

[...]

Détournement, which Lautréamont called plagiarism, confirms the thesis,

long demonstrated by modern art, that words are insubordinate, that it

is impossible for power to totally recuperate created meanings, to fi x

an existing meaning once and for all.

And this détournement is itself possible because of the “insubordination

of words”, which Khayati ties to poetry—not poetry as we know it, but an

abolished poetry:

Modern poetry (experimental, permutational, spatialist, surrealist or

neodadaist) is the antithesis of poetry, it is the artistic project

recuperated by power. It abolishes poetry without realizing it, living

off its own continual self-destruction.

The author of “All the Kings’ Men” proposes the other available meaning

of poetry; in fact, the entire piece is in the main about another way to

grasp poetry:

What is poetry if not the revolutionary moment of language, inseparable

as such from the revolutionary moments of history and from the history

of personal life?

[...]

poetry must be understood as direct communication within reality and as

real alteration of this reality. It is liberated language, language

recovering its richness, language breaking its rigid significations and

simultaneously embracing words and music, cries and gestures, painting

and mathematics, facts and acts.

There is, again, the warning against what is known as poetry:

One thing we can be sure of is that fake, officially tolerated poetry is

no longer the poetic adventure of its era. Thus, whereas surrealism in

the heyday of its assault against the oppressive order of culture and

daily life could appropriately define its arsenal as “poetry without

poems if necessary,” for the SI it is now a matter of a poetry

necessarily without poems.

[...]

Realizing poetry means nothing less than simultaneously and inseparably

creating events and their language.

And how is that to be done? Again, fragmentation-federation... But what

concerns me more here is that these texts come close to the position

that, not poetry as we know it, but something importantly akin to it,

what I called poesy above, what a writer in bædan calls lying, is a kind

of primordial activity that can be tapped into or unleashed as the

creation of

events and their language.

In a society like ours we do this through détournement, understood as a

critical, destructive engagement with bureaucratic language or the

language of power, a

language that cannot and need not be confirmed by any previous or

supracritical reference

The other, corrosive, side of acid-words. Not acid as hallucinatory

creativity, but as corrosive, destructive nonsense on the way to

silence.

Third option: [someone(?)] and their silence.

• * *

What I have written here concerns language, then, but only sometimes as

Spectacle, as Language. Sometimes one is bound to spectacular Language:

In analyzing the spectacle we are obliged to a certain extent to use the

spectacle’s own language, in the sense that we have to operate on the

methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in the

spectacle

wrote Debord. Fortunately there are other things to do than analyze! If

I were to remain in the language of Spectacle, I would say that, yes,

one can sometimes unbind spectacular representation (and my sense of how

that can be done, acid-words, is indeed closer to a constructed

situation than to workers’ councils). But, unbinding representation,

beyond Language, we do not move beyond language as such. Here we must

face our collective anxiety about language. It will still arise

unbidden, incited by stranger forces than our human power games. Even in

our silence we participate in the semiosis at work in nature. And nature

has its own far more ominous silences to which we are not invited. It is

possible (which is not to say that it is probable) to use language in a

ludic manner; it is also possible to get used by language, to get played

by it or be in its play in a way that has nothing to do with being

represented or symbolized or representing or symbolizing. Something of

that sort was always at work in poesy. And this reciprocal use is

related to what the concept of Spectacle intends; in fact, it seems to

me to be its sheer possibility (that representation or symbolization

presupposes some other kind of language-play, another usage, as work

presupposes play or non-work generally).

Read Robert Duncan as he writes about an available shift in attitude,

the change from the feeling that poetic form is given to or imposed upon

experience—transforming matter into content—to the feeling that poetic

form is found in experience—that content is discovered in matter. The

line of such poetry is not free in the sense of being arbitrary but free

in its search and self-creation, having the care and tension (attention)

almost of the ominous...

Everything I have for the sake of convenience called Language,

everything we have (out of what is now almost habit) called Spectacle,

corresponds perhaps to the first feeling, which disturbs matter

endlessly. It translates the matter of speech (poesy) into a

communicable and informational form, botching communion, ruining

silence. If it were only a genre, a game to opt into, a dream from which

we could still awaken... or turn the page on to see what is next in the

anthology... By contrast, the feeling that the form is found in

experience, and content in matter, allows for the care and tension that

are needed to make and share acid-words. Part of their operation is to

destroy Language, but this is not what they are for. They are not for

anything. This is the freedom of the line sensed by some poets, and also

what is also ominous in acid-words: in their play they do not deny or

elude silence.

For words are not thoughts we have but ideas in things, and the poet

must attend not to what he means to say but to what what he says means.

—To turn away from those who, in a doubly hostile gesture, did not care

that levy wrote, and later demanded of him to explain what he meant. So

you hide, take acid-words... (It is pleasant to imagine Duncan

whispering sweetly in levy’s ear, calming him momentarily, a kindly

apparition in the course of the trip. To remind him he took acid so as

not to have to take acid.)

It remains to ask who is capable of saying they are poets, and why. But

as that is something to discuss elsewhere, I will return for the

destructive fun of it to talking about anarchists.

• * *

There is no reason to bother with saying you are an anarchist or talking

to others if you are not seeking another relation to the world, to life,

to thinking, and to language. In this essay I have been especially

concerned with the relation to language, but all of these relations are

implicated, are at stake. The other relation that we are seeking

involves a paradox: we are so concerned with ending the relation we do

have with world, life, thinking, and language that in the undoing of the

other term we are brought to consider the possibility that the relation

itself is impossible. I mean that in some sense we cease to think that

there is a World at all, that Life can become a pernicious concept, that

Thinking is revealed as not being ours or for us. Following this

treacherous path it may turn out that there is simply nothing to be said

about language itself, about Language. We are left with this strange

idea of crossed-out Language instead of a theory or concept of language.

And yet we find many who speak about language in general, assimilating

it to Language. They have not earned the fullness of our attention. They

would do better to listen than to speak—to attend, that is, to the

speech practices of those around them, and eventually to their own

words, just as he who says he hates poetry or music is best invited to

read or listen and not to further discussion.

That is to say, if a word or phrase is not taken to the limit where it

is (at least in passing) shown to be devoid of sense or purchase, then

we will remain beholden to a liberal, or relativist, or pluralist

sensibility, the hope for better margarine-words or an unmarked and

universal ordinary language that all can share in equally. Mana-words

sometimes go to the limit, but usually in cabalistic settings.

Acid-words always go to the limit: to discover or invent them is to stop

repeating, to repeat with a difference, to risk nonsense; and to arrive

at nonsense is to approach silence or, often enough, to become silent.

And silence is beyond difference and repetition. * * *

A word is not necessarily the unit through which we encounter language.

A phrase or an entire discourse could bring us a happy insight as well.

However, word is the word I’ve retained for the insight-catalyst through

most of this writing; I think of each one as a shard, a fragment of an

impossible Totality, the nothingness of Language. After that happy

insight dawns, the discourse, the phrases, and, yes, a little word will

each remind you of its own plenitude. Fortunately, such memorabilia are

all that remains after acid-words do their delicate or grisly work. No

hoary nihilist theory of language will appear to conveniently repeat to

you what you already silently suspected: that sense is the most fragile

matter, a fleeting purchase. However, as a silent accompaniment to the

discourse, the phrases, and the little word, maybe there is this

nihilist idea of what language is not, that Language is not, witness to

its dissolution, along with world, life, and thought.

History as Decomposition

“History as Decomposition” was first anonymously published in 2013 in

the “journal of collision” Attentat. I hereby clone it and republish it

under the name A. de A., inserted into a middle place in the trilogy I

mentioned before “Its Core is the Negation”. It is an extension of some

of the ideas in a presentation about time for the BASTARD conference in

2012. But that presentation happened before the conception and writing

of “Its Core is the Negation”, which this essay directly followed. As

though, after the schematics of “Its Core”, older concerns needed to be

restated, reinterpreted. At the same time, almost immediately, the

stakes of writing about nihilism began to shift around me: upsurge of

the parody I had predicted. In any case, I imagine all of this

information might make it possible to read it differently. This is also

probably the best place to acknowledge the stimulating company of the

Austin Anarchist Study Group; our reading of Perlman was helpful in

articulating my ideas. They are present elsewhere in this collection as

well.

§ 1

Supposing the word is in one’s vocabulary, it is easy enough to dismiss

others as nihilists in deed or in intention. Like atheist, the term

first appeared as an accusation. Used in this traditional manner, it is

a simple way to pathologize your enemies. Many dedicate their time to

this kind of symptomatic hand-wringing. It places your enemies in

accepted moral scripts that redefine them in a range from careless to

evil. It is more difficult, but hardly a great feat in itself, to

declare oneself a nihilist. In its simplest form, this is to perversely

and excessively embrace being dismissed as a badge of difference and

pride. In a more developed form, it is to argue and act from a range of

positions we currently recognize mostly by slogans of the “no

future”/“everything must be destroyed” sort. A more difficult variant of

the embrace of the term is one that claims it drives a wedge between two

kinds of nihilism. Whether they are posited as two visions of the Void

or different methods of destruction (moral and anti-moral, social and

anti-social), this version of the nihilist position is ultimately

descended from a distinction made by Nietzsche between active and

passive nihilism. But the Nietzschean inheritance is double: there is

the above-mentioned wedge position; and there is the diagnostic sense of

nihilism. The latter suggests understanding a condition psychologically,

as Nietzsche did in his late notebooks, or metaphysically, as Heidegger

did in his Nietzsche seminars. Such attempts to diagnose render very

difficult the separation of the thinker and the thinking, the writer and

the writing, from the condition (which may be understood as a corrosive

phenomenon variously affecting a place, a time, a culture, a

civilization, an empire, and so on).

Now and then the diagnostic sense reappears, severed from the

wedge-distinction. In recent years some have taken up the diagnosis of

the nihilistic society as the most powerful tool of a kind of critical

theory (and, probably unbeknown to them, a contemporary echo of the

traditional use of nihilist as an accusation). At the same time, others

have taken up the wedge, severed from the diagnosis, as their way of

distinguishing a nihilist position that is able to act in a space clear

of social implosion.[38] By that I mean: to distinguish the destructive

action that comes from agents in the milieu (or our presumed allies)

from the self-destruction, implosion and dissolution, of social forms

and probably of society in general. Both are done with too much ease

precisely to the degree that they ignore each other.

There are a few of us, at least, for whom nihilism is a vital problem in

a way that exceeds the action of the wedge and the contemplation at work

in the diagnosis. It is something I feel I have to think through, as

well as live out; and neither of the above ways of understanding it

seems sufficient. I suspect that this means that the problem is not what

it was. (Or at least that, like Nietzsche, I feel implicated in the

diagnosis.) We are not satisfied with lining up the conditions and our

position, saying: our epoch (dominant moralities, culture, civilization,

etc.) are nihilistic, and so are we—as if we were merely expressing the

disintegration around us as theory or as smashy. Even to say that there

is a general tendency and that some we is pushing it farther, driving it

to its limit, etc. sounds perilously close to the old Communist idea of

exploiting the contradictions of capitalism so as to overcome it. The

question always remains as to whether that we, at the farthest reach, at

the limit, is not doing the innovative work that future systems will be

built upon. From this questioning we may take “no future” and

“everything must be destroyed” less as slogans of a supposedly

self-evident sort and more as dark mottos that guide our explorations of

a complicated and dangerous terrain.

§ 2

I begin with the wedge position, not the isolated diagnosis, because I

feel closer to it. But I also need to set out what separates me from it,

since I do not understand by what criterion one could claim to clearly

distinguish what is on either side of the wedge.

Our nihilism is not christian nihilism.

We do not deny life

wrote Novatore, who, inspired by The Antichrist, was perhaps able to

live out or live with the wedge position. Well, as with much of what he

wrote, I am inclined to say that I share his perspective, but with a

superadded sense of uncertainty. The uncertainty arises from a sense of

impossibility, the impossibility gaining the proper distance from

society, Humanity,

... the collective tempests and social hurricanes …

insofar as today this society-weather is a technological issue and not

merely a spiritual one. —Did I write spiritual? I might as well have

written psychological, or mental, or referred to character, taste or

temperament. All I have done here is enumerated the beginning of a list

of phenomena that we only know in their ruination, or, in political

terms, in and as their complicity with mass phenomena. Or, in ethical

terms, through their betrayal.

I may well deny life, if life is unlivable: narcotic life, cyborg life.

And the nihilist position we both claim and seek—for us it is never

simply not Christian, just as our atheism echoes the atheism of those

raised with religion. A certain kind of transition is at stake:

By becoming aware of spectacular decomposition, a person of ressentiment

becomes a nihilist. Active nihilism is prerevolutionary. There is no

consciousness of transcendence without consciousness of decomposition.

Juvenile delinquents are the legitimate heirs of Dada

wrote Vaneigem. Here the wedge is something else: not their nihilism and

ours, but nihilism as consciousness, active nihilism as the transition

between ressentiment and revolution; the tempting idea that the symptom

will become the cure. I do think one can describe the difference between

active nihilism and passive nihilism as an awareness. I do think that

awareness matters in terms of how one might live beyond ressentiment and

beyond the spectacle of society. But I must part ways when it comes to

describing awareness as prerevolutionary (or, for that matter, anyone as

the legitimate heirs of Dada, tongue in cheek or not).

Some of us need to experience the full consequences of this parting of

ways. This means to show and to witness what the awareness of

decomposition is now or to us, and what it contributes to stating the

problem of nihilism as some of us understand it. What is most dramatic

in this new understanding is the tension between realizing that this is

a new understanding, one that is of our time, and simultaneously that we

are grasping to what extent the question of nihilism has become detached

from a historical understanding.

§ 3

Of the definitions offered in the first issue of Internationale

Situationniste, two are notable for their recent underemployment:

unitary urbanism and decomposition.[39]

Unitary urbanism: The theory of the combined use of arts and techniques

as means contributing to the construction of a unified milieu in dynamic

relation with experiments in behavior.

This is the most noticeably obsolete of the situationist definitions. It

suggests to those familiar with the early SI the exploration of the city

as the setting for the practices of constructing situations,

psychogeography, and the wandering they called dérive. The city figures

here as a “unified milieu.” If unitary urbanism has been abandoned, it

is because that side of the SI was not of much use to anyone—to the

popularizers or the inheritors. Tom McDonough explicates the project

competently enough:

There was, in fact, a curious strain of situationist thought, little

remarked today, that was precisely concerned with the destruction of the

subject, with the vision of a new, malleable humanity. This vision was

particularly apparent in early discussions of the construction of

situations and the linked problem of unitary urbanism, both of which

were conceived as means of inciting new behaviors, and as such would

have access to all the methods offered by modern technology and

psychology. That peculiar neologism, “psychogeography,” conveyed exactly

this desire for rational control over ever greater domains of life.

Just a strain. But the popularizers were never concerned with such

dramatic changes to our lives. And the inheritors—here I mean those who,

like Fredy Perlman, translated and expanded on the ideas of the SI—

understood sooner or later, if not immediately, that this strain

represented a wager the SI played and lost. The side of the optimistic,

the historically rational in the SI—the defense, therefore, of progress,

a possible progress buried but to be unearthed (a common enough story

for communists and many anarchists, of course)—was ravaged by historical

and political events. Without entering into a detailed discussion, I

think it is fair enough to say that the last fifty years have been all

about “inciting new behaviors” and the confluence of “modern technology

and psychology.” In some inverted sense, unitary urbanism was

realized—by its enemies.

Decomposition, on the other hand: who has really thought this idea

through? In one sense the definition seems to belong to the same strain

of Situationist thought that opted for unitary urbanism.

Decomposition: The process in which traditional cultural forms have

destroyed themselves as a result of the emergence of superior means of

controlling nature which make possible and necessary superior cultural

constructions. We can distinguish between the active phase of the

decomposition and effective demolition of the old superstructures—which

came to an end around 1930—and a phase of repetition that has prevailed

since that time. The delay in the transition from decomposition to new

constructions is linked to the delay in the revolutionary liquidation of

capitalism.

The first sentence certainly appeals to the same sense of progress. Such

progress would be predicted and measured according to “superior means of

controlling nature” (in French the phrase is domination de la nature).

As the means appear, cultural forms destroy themselves, a necessary

sacrifice, one might suppose, for progress to carry on. In the most

immediate sense, which relates decomposition to art movements, this

corresponds to the

active and critical

destruction of forms (so wrote Anselm Jappe) that came to a head with

Dada but could include Impressionism, Symbolism, Futurism, Cubism, and

so on. What follows troubles this interpretation, however. It seems that

“around 1930” everything was marching according to plan. Since then

decomposition carries on as

empty repetition,

(Jappe again) which would mean that cultural forms farcically continue

to destroy themselves without any “new constructions.”

The decomposition of artistic forms has thus become perfectly concordant

with the real state of the world and retains no shock effect whatsoever.

In other words, the eternal return of an Art that was declared dead

countless times—its repeated resuscitation by the market. This dynamic

of repetition is referred to a “delay” in the “liquidation” of

capitalism. The dynamic of decomposition in the arts is coupled with the

impasse in urbanism in the “Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary

Urbanism”:

The development of the urban milieu is the capitalist domestication of

space. It represents the choice of one particular materialization, to

the exclusion of other possibilities. Like aesthetics, whose course of

decomposition it is going to follow, it can be considered as a rather

neglected branch of criminology

wrote Vaneigem and Kotányi. The necessary question is why one will

follow the other. (A provisional answer is that the unity of the

phenomena under investigation is revealed when one notices that separate

spheres are decomposing in the same way. It could also be that it is in

the realm of aesthetics that the awareness of decomposition is greatest,

and that the awareness accelerates the process, so that other separated

spheres of life must follow it, at least for now.)

What decomposition seems to mean so far is that if material conditions

do not improve along the lines of true progress, culture breaks down. It

changes, yes; but these changes are to be understood as a

self-dismantling, and then the indefinite repetition of that

self-dismantling. When Vaneigem composed his enumeration of “Theoretical

Topics That Need To Be Dealt With Without Academic Debate or Idle

Speculation,” he included

Dialectics of decomposition and supersession in the realization of art

and philosophy but

there is room to question whether what is under consideration here has a

dialectical structure when the supersession (dépassement) never comes.

Decomposition can be provisionally interpreted as the invocation of an

ethico-political ideal against an aesthetic one, the refusal of the new

in art, or even the refusal of art as such, insofar as, in its separated

existence, it cannot act on the economy, cannot alter material

conditions. But it can also be seen as a way of beginning to understand

the “delay” from within the “delay”; and in that sense already suggests

the refusal of the production of the new in every sphere when we are

aware that it is empty repetition.

§ 4

This tension between longing for supersession, if not progress, and

refusal of the present can be detected everywhere the term was used by

Debord—already, for example, in three proto-Situationist texts of 1957.

“One Step Back,” published in the journal Potlatch, opens by invoking

The extreme point reached by the deterioration of all forms of modern

culture, the public collapse of the system of repetition that has

prevailed since the end of the war…

and on this basis warns:

Undoubtedly the decision to make use, from the economic as from the

constructive viewpoint, of retrograde fragments of modernism entails

serious risks of decomposition[40]

The risk being to participate in decomposition (as opposed to contesting

or undoing it) by hanging on to the creations of the past, now shattered

by that decomposition into fragments. “One More Effort If You Want to Be

Situationists” is notable for its parenthetical subtitle, “The SI in and

against Decomposition”:

The Situationist International exists in name, but that means nothing

but the beginning of an attempt to build beyond the decomposition in

which we, like everyone else, are completely involved. Becoming aware of

our real possibilities requires both the recognition of the

presituationist—in the strict sense of the word—nature of whatever we

can attempt, and the rupture, without looking back, with the division of

labor in the arts. The main danger lies in these two errors: the pursuit

of fragmentary works combined with simpleminded proclamations of an

alleged new stage.

At this moment, decomposition shows nothing more than a slow

radicalization of moderate innovators toward positions where outcast

extremists had already found themselves eight or ten years ago. But far

from drawing a lesson from those fruitless experiments, the

“respectable” innovators further dilute their importance. I will take

examples from France, which surely is undergoing the most advanced

phenomena of the general cultural decomposition that, for various

reasons, is being manifested in its purest state in western Europe.

Most of those who would have spoken of progress in 1957 would have said

it was farthest along in Western Europe or the United States! So

decomposition is clearly a place-holder for progress-delayed. The

article contrasts the bleak terrain of what “decomposition shows” with

the description of the nascent group as the “beginning of an attempt to

build beyond it”—beyond what it shows. That same year, the booklet

Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of

Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency,

presented by Debord at the founding conference of the SI, significantly

broadens the sense of the term. In some places it seems we are still

asked to think about what is a dead end in art. In others, though, it

seems we are being asked to consider the dead end of culture itself:

Decomposition has reached everything. We no longer see the massive use

of commercial advertising to exert ever greater influence over judgments

of cultural creation; this was an old process. Instead, we are reaching

a point of ideological absence in which only the advertising acts, to

the exclusion of all previous critical judgments—but not without

dragging along a conditioned reflex of such judgment.

[…]

The history of modern culture during the ebb tide of revolution is thus

the history of the theoretical and practical reduction of the movement

for renewal, a history that reaches as far as the segregation of

minority trends, and as far as the undivided domination of

decomposition.

§ 5

Look at “Theses on Cultural Revolution,” a piece that Debord published

in Internationale Situationniste 1 (the same issue as the definitions).

The fifth thesis begins:

We are excluded from real control over the vast material powers of our

time. The communist revolution has not yet occurred and we are still

living within the confines of decomposing old cultural superstructures.

The seventh thesis adds:

The practical task of overcoming our discordance with this world, that

is, of surmounting its decomposition by some more advanced

constructions, is not romantic.

For Debord decomposition was always a cultural phenomenon. Faced with

art objects, mass media contents, and with their commodity-forms, the

situationist would only respond that they were to be seen as the

products of decomposition. I think this illuminates the accompanying

definitions: détournement is a way to refuse to produce new decomposing

art, provisionally turning decomposition against itself by rearranging

existing elements; dérive and psychogeography are techniques for

wandering in, and analyzing, cities that one has no idea how to

transform, in search of the elements to be transformed. These are the

practices of “building beyond” decomposition. All of this unfolds in a

larger “presituationist” historical framework in which “the communist

revolution has not yet occurred.”

Not yet… Almost ten years later, Debord did not make much of

decomposition in Society of the Spectacle. He mentions in a few theses

in the context of cities and in the context of the implosion of modern

art. More or less the original context and usage, then:

The mutual erosion of city and country, resulting from the failure of

the historical movement through which existing urban reality could have

been overcome, is reflected in the eclectic mixture of their decomposed

fragments that blanket the most industrialized regions of the world.

As is well known, although the communist revolution had “not yet”

occurred in 1967, either, Society of the Spectacle did include some

proposals as to how to bring it about. For many, the way in which the

book has continued to be important is in its theory of spectacle and

separation, which could be considered a way to understand decomposition

writ large. The counterbalancing notions of “cultural” resistance,

détournement, dérive, and situation are only hinted at in its theses,

while a great emphasis is placed on the worker’s councils, which were to

bring about the revolution that had “not yet” occurred…

Around the same time, Vaneigem raised a more troubling question:

In the end, by dint of identifying ourselves with what we are not, of

switching from one role to another, from one authority to another, and

from one age to another, how can we avoid becoming ourselves part of

that never-ending state of transition which is the process of

decomposition?

How long until “not yet” turns into “never-ending”? How long can a

“delay” be? And consequently, how long until a provisional idea of

culture as decomposition develops into another idea about culture— about

civilization itself?

§ 6

To my knowledge no one has underlined Fredy Perlman’s transformative use

of decomposition in Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!. He introduces

the term in a passage that could be used to explain one of the ways in

which the situationist critique of culture was transformed in the

direction of the current array of primitivist, green anarchist, and

anti-civilization perspectives.

The death of Egypt’s gods is recorded. After two or three generations of

Pharaoh’s protection, the figures on the Temple walls and pillars no

longer jump or fly; they no longer even breathe. They’re dead. They’re

lifeless copies of the earlier, still living figures. The copyists are

exact, we would say pedantic; they seem to think that faithful copying

of the originals will bring life to the copies.

A similar death and decomposition must pale the songs and ceremonies as

well. What was once joyful celebration, selfabandon, orgiastic communion

with the beyond, shrinks to lifeless ritual, official ceremony led by

the head of State and his officials. It all becomes theater, and it is

all staged. It is no longer for sharing but for show. And it no longer

enlarges the participant, who now becomes a mere spectator. He feels

diminished, intimidated, awed by the power of Pharaoh’s household.

Our painting, music, dance, everything we call Art, will be heirs of the

moribund spiritual. What we call Religion will be another dead heir, but

at such a high stage of decomposition that its onceliving source can no

longer be divined.

The situationist inheritance is clear.[41] Ritual and repetition replace

life and creative action. Except this is not the decline of art, but art

itself as decline. Decomposition is presented here not as the culture of

an advanced technological society whose history has stalled on the way

to communist revolution; not the culture of the “not yet”, but culture

as such. This is one sense, and one source, of what is called

Civilization in the perspective of anti-civilization thought. An

attitude that Debord outlined with respect to capitalist or spectacular

culture was now shaken loose from its grounding in our epoch, and

granted the broadest historical sweep possible. Has all history been

decomposition?—But if the answer to this question is affirmative, then

the very notions of epoch and historical sweep (let alone spectacular

and capitalist culture) have to be re-evaluated from the perspective

that has redefined decomposition. The priority of organization and

breakdown are reversed, and the breakdown is now primary—primordial.

To detail this anti-historical grasp of history, I will need to isolate

a conceptual core in Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! [42] Three

axioms:

• History (not as cosmic time, but as His-Story) begins accidentally, as

the runaway cascade of problems and complications beginning with a

situation of ecological imbalance; this event is also the constitution

of the first Leviathan.

Corollary:

The Leviathan places human beings in a situation they do not meet

anywhere else in the Biosphere except in rare places like Sumer.

That is, Sumer is the place of an accident; and the Leviathan is the

generalization and reproduction of that accident. To say it is an

accident is to say that the accident was a contingent event, an event

that did not have to happen.

• Every Leviathan is in a state of decomposition (its artificial life in

some sense is decomposition). Perlman hints at this throughout the book

until putting it plainly towards the end, referencing

the decomposition that accompanies every functioning Leviathan.

Corollary:

The scribes (historians, intellectuals by extension) are trained not to

see the decomposition as such.

• Once the decomposition of a given Leviathan is complete, its

decomposed fragments can reorganize into a new Leviathan.

We’ve seen that earlier Leviathans were always in a state of

decomposition. When one decomposed, others swallowed its remains.

Or should this be:

• Once the decomposition of a given Leviathan is complete, its

decomposed fragments will reorganize into a new Leviathan.

It is difficult to say. It is clear enough that the beginning of the

process is accidental. But is its unfolding accidental? Is the movement

of complication from one Leviathan to another, the increasing

globalization of decomposition, a process that Perlman thought of as

necessary?

§ 7

I am not sure how to answer these questions, nor do I think Fredy knew

how. He begins the penultimate chapter writing about his impatience to

finish the story, the book… to finish His-Story. It is not much further

on that the last passage I cited continues:

… when there are no others, when Leviathan is One, the tale told by an

idiot, signifying nothing, is almost at an end.

Civilization, synonym of Capital, Technology and The Modern World,

called Leviathan by Hobbes and Western Spirit by Turner, is as racked by

decomposition as any earlier Leviathan. But Civilization is not one

Leviathan among many. It is The One. Its final decomposition is

Leviathan’s end. After twenty centuries of stony sleep vexed to

nightmare by a rocking cradle, the sleeper is about to wake to the

cadences of a long-forgotten music or to the eternal silence of death

without a morrow.

This passage is deeply ambiguous. Is the image offered here of “final

decomposition” another version of the “delay”? Or is the word final to

be taken literally, meaning that decomposition—and so history—are coming

to an end? And is this end itself the result of a certain accumulation

of complications, a tension to be understood naturalistically and

ecologically, as the resonance of the primordial accident? Are those who

are aware of this decomposition even a little set apart from it through

this knowledge? Can they move in a way that does not belong to its

process?

it is not yet known … if the new outsiders do indeed still have an

“inner light,” namely an ability to reconstitute lost rhythms, to

recover music, to regenerate human cultures.

It is also not known if the technological detritus that crowds and

poisons the world leaves human beings any room to dance. What is known

is that Leviathan, the great artifice, single and world-embracing for

the first time in His-story, is decomposing.

What is clear is that Perlman broadened the relevance of decomposition

by definitively breaking with the progressive and optimistic aspects

that it bore in its first situationist version. By making the process of

breakdown primary, he invented a new kind of diagnosis of the present,

and a new way to understand history. This diagnosis suggests:

• That history, as a whole or in segments, has not been progressive, in

either a linear or cyclical way, but rather a process of increasing

complication, destructiveness, fallingapart of previous epochs (along

with their attitudes, ideas, practices, and so on).

Corollary:

The very phenomenon of history (as His-Story), its possible unity as

narrative and idea, is peculiarly undergirded by this process, which is

itself a fragile hanging together of fragments of fragments, endlessly

shattering, strangely recombining, giving most observers the sense of

“delay.”

• That what we might be inspired by in history has to do with turning

decomposition against itself in the negative manner of détournement. Or,

as some friends recently put it,

we locate ourselves within the subversive current of history that

willfully attempts to break with the ongoing progress of society.

To identify this negative movement, or this subversive current, is to

lose, to give up on, the sense of “delay” and to become aware of

decomposition.

§ 8

Awareness of decomposition is then, most immediately, a new kind of

diagnosis of the present and an alternative to historical thought. This

diagnosis belongs to the subversive current; it does not take place in

isolation. We are and are not Society. We know we are in—we do not know

if we may be out of—decomposition. In this awareness we discern that

decomposition is not Decline, as though the film of Progress were run

backwards. Decline as a general logic would mean that everything gets

worse. But the idea here is to undermine any global, world-historical

scale for judging what is better or worse. Only from within

decomposition has Progress seemed possible; and only from within

decomposition would history appear to be complete disaster, or

completely anything (the victory of one race, culture, or religion, for

example, as vindicated by history, or the defeat of another). Such an

awareness could come as a shock. It could lead to the denial of temporal

logic (order, progress, explanation, justification). But it is not a

relativism that flattens out the differences between events.[43] It may

amount to a perspective from outside civilization.

§ 9

One could reply that in my presentation of this awareness, in the

overall thrust of this essay, I have exemplified the anarchist allergy

to history that Debord diagnosed in Society of the Spectacle,

It is the ideology of pure freedom, an ideology that puts everything on

the same level [qui égalise tout] and loses any conception of the

“historical evil” (the negation at work within history). This fusion of

all partial demands into a single all-encompassing demand has given

anarchism the merit of representing the rejection of existing conditions

in the name of the whole of life rather than from the standpoint of some

particular critical specialization; but the fact that this fusion has

been envisaged only in the absolute, in accordance with individual whim

and in advance of any practical actualization, has doomed anarchism to

an all too obvious incoherence.

I would answer: as to losing any conception of the negation at work in

history, yes, excessively, I hope. Evil is not a term I find useful. But

the negative or destructive side of history is for some of us more or

less all that history has been or done. In the strict sense, nothing is

being worked on or built up in or through history. The places, people,

and events in past time that we enjoy or claim, appreciate or

appropriate, must be creatively reidentified as non-historical,

extra-historical, or anti-historical currents. There may have been, may

continue to be what Foucault called insurrections of subjugated

knowledges: counter-histories. It is true that certain moments of revolt

are coupled with strange perspectives on history. But it is also true

that these counter-histories have an odd way of becoming ordinary

histories, either by incorporation into universal His-Story, its

narrative, or by becoming the local his-stories of smaller groups and

communities. As the latter they may have a temporary or even

long-lasting protective effect for those groups or communities, but they

weigh in the same way as His-story on those who purposely or

accidentally put in their lot with them. Foucault’s attempts to write

what he called histories of the present could be described as last-ditch

attempts to see what could be done with history; but even he, in his

wise ambivalence, wrote history as genealogy. The genealogical

perspective sometimes locates or even summons counter-histories, but

usually only the lives of the infamous:

Lives of a few lines or a few pages, nameless misfortunes and adventures

gathered into a handful of words. Brief lives, encountered by chance in

books and documents. Exempla… not so much lessons to ponder as brief

effects whose force fades almost at once.

It is the awareness of that fading, another name, perhaps, for

decomposition, that we can no longer do without.

§ 10

As to incoherence, this remark was aimed at the anarchists Debord knew,

not the ones we know. But one might say that the “incoherence” of

“aiming at the absolute” is precisely what our discourse will sound like

to someone who still and always relies on historical explanations. What

we are doing with history is what Debord himself recommended we do with

decomposition: to turn it against itself parodically, in détournement.

And here the third rule of détournement applies:

Détournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply.

I took the phrase “awareness of decomposition” from Vaneigem. I have

already cited part of the passage:

People of ressentiment are the perfect survivors—people bereft of the

consciousness of possible transcendence, people of the age of

decomposition. By becoming aware of spectacular decomposition, a person

of ressentiment becomes a nihilist. Active nihilism is prerevolutionary.

The age of decomposition: a global diagnosis. It is populated by two

types: people of ressentiment, survivors, are those who continue to

believe in progress and contribute to processes of decomposition.

Artists or not, their production is repetition. These are the passive

nihilists of the wedge position. The person who is aware of this, aware

of decomposition, thereby becomes an active nihilist. For Vaneigem this

is prerevolutionary; it is not for the likes of Novatore, or many of our

friends these days. But what studying Against His-Story perhaps shows is

that the pre- in prerevolutionary has something of historical progress

about it. As though there really were three stages and the middle one

was conscience, consciousness, awareness! To take up nihilism as a

problem today means precisely this: that nothing in particular seems to

us prerevolutionary because revolution sounds too much like

decomposition to our ears. Thus my penchant for the wedge position,

insofar as it affirms active nihilism without positing something else

after it; thus my insistence on some version of the diagnosis—the

awareness of decomposition that is part of our thinking, not the

contemplation of a historically achieved reality to be understood

historically and overcome by making history!

§ 11

I would suggest that all of the interminable discussions of cycles of

struggle, the various and competing periodizations of capitalism and

technology (for starters), especially as they have desperately sought to

appraise and orient us in terms of the history of the twentieth century,

have been deceptive. They have traced outlines of decomposition without

discovering their complicity in its logic. Yes, decomposition tempts

everyone to periodize. To each her own perverse history. Think of our

pastimes—think of gossip! Think of the idle talk of generations or

decades in discussions of the character of individuals, their politics,

or their modes of consumption of culture. What we bring forward in such

sleepy analyses of culture and character are our own repetitions, our

own novelties, our own crappy contributions. It is the work of culture,

after all. Some of us feel a need to remain silent, sovereignly neutral,

in the face of this folk art of milieus and subcultures.

It could be good practice, at least, for it is just this neutral gaze

with which we have learned to read certain of our contemporaries.

Empire is not the crowning achievement of a civilization, the end-point

of its ascendent arc. Rather it is the tail-end of an inward turning

process of disaggregation, as that which must check and if possible

arrest the process.

wrote Tiqqun. This perspective seems close to the one I have been

elaborating here. But they immediately follow that proposition with:

At first glance, Empire seems to be a parodic recollection of the

entire, frozen history of a “civilization.” And this impression has a

certain intuitive correctness. Empire is in fact civilization’s last

stop before it reaches the end of its line, the final agony in which it

sees its life pass before its eyes.

It is just this familiar reference to the final and highest stage

towards which we have become skeptical. We are as eager to find a way

out of the process, supersession or overcoming, as we suppose many of

our friends to be. And yet a few of us have had to abandon this temporal

logic, the apparent necessity of the highest stage. For us it has come

to seem a rhetorical crossing of the wires, where description spills

over into prescription. Psychologically, it makes sense: to insist that

this is the highest stage and the final moment means that if you have

any inclination to act against Empire et. al., you must do it now! Hic

rhodus, etc.—

This is the place to jump, the place to dance!

that is how Fredy began, too.[44] But, as I have noted, he did not end

there, but in ambiguity, in questions. Our thought decomposes, too…

§ 12

In sum, the perspective that says that decomposition is the logic of

His-Story elucidates two things. First, that we were right to deny

Progress; second, that we are not believers in its opposite, an inverted

Regression away from a golden age. As I imagine it, a principal

characteristic of whatever preceded His-Story (civilization, etc.) would

be its neutrality, its stony silence at the level of metanarrative.

Rather than Progress or Regression we could describe historical

decomposition as the accelerating complication of events. This

acceleration is violent and dangerous. Here and there an eddy may form

in which things either slow down or temporarily stabilize in the form of

an improvement. What we can say with some certainty is that as

historical time elapses, things get more complicated; and that these

complications so outrun their antecedents that the attempt to explain

retroactively becomes ever more confusing.

Situationally, we may be getting some purchase for the moment, an angle,

a perspective. But what Debord perhaps could not admit, what Perlman

perhaps understood, is that decomposition had always been there in our

explanation, our diagnosis, and the actions they are said to justify;

and that His-Story is decomposition’s double movement: as Civilization

unravels, it narrates its unraveling. The dead thing, Leviathan,

organizes life, builds itself up as armor in and around it (which would

include machines and a certain stiffening of postures and gestures, and

concurrently thinking and action, in human bodies). But the dead thing

remains dead, and it breaks down. It functions by breaking down. It

creates ever more complex organizations (analyses of behavior) that then

decompose, i.e. break down.

§ 13

Returning to the analysis of nihilist positions with which I began, I

would say that the wedge position and the diagnostic one, the active

nihilist and contemplative critical-theoretical appraisal, are both the

results of running the Nietzschean diagnostic through a political

machine, turning its psychology into political psychology. And the

political machine is one of the devices of decomposition. To appraise

all of society critically, or to divide the friend and the enemy once

and for all, are the respectively theoretical and pratical Ur-operations

of politics. All debate about the priority of the one over the other

aside, I recognize in them the basic moves of the constitution of a

polis.

The councils represent order in the face of the decomposition of the

state…

wrote Vaneigem in his “Note to the Civilized.” It is possible to read

this, not as the political opposition of order and chaos, organization

and disorder, but as an understandable misprision of the tension that,

whoever wins, pushes decomposition farther by temporarily concealing it.

And in this temporary concealing, followed by its inevitable

unconcealing, it pushes nihilism farther in its diffuse, passive, social

direction. Unitary urbanism…

May 1968 revealed to a great many people that ideological confusion

tries to conceal the real struggle between the “party” of decomposition

and the “party” of global dépassement

wrote Vaneigem in 1971. Quotes or not, what he is invoking are parties,

sides. The entire text “Terrorism or Revolution” is based on the wedge,

drawing lines and making the same kind of claim we have by now become

used to: “this is the highest stage,” or its variant, “if not now,

never.” These claims issue from a confusion deeper than ideological

confusion, the confusion that is decomposition.

§ 14

Those who echo an ancient military rhetoric, invoking necessity in the

political and historical senses, drawing lines and insisting “now or

never” as if by habit, will always confuse the problem of nihilism. The

few of us who feel it as a problem, and only secondarily, if at all, as

a position, understand that we cannot divide ourselves from

decomposition to diagnose it and to act on it. Our psychology is

anti-political, so we have to explore in other ways. Our awareness of

decomposition leads to certain insights that are disconcerting and

fascinating as well; they may well be visions from outside Civilization.

This awareness informs our action without distinguishing us from events.

I am referring to what is most question-worthy: the passing sense of the

weird and meaningless way in which things happen, beyond causality and

so beyond lasting explanation. I am referring to what might be called

events as signs of non-events, or historical events as masks of

non-historical events. So if and when we call ourselves nihilists, know

that we are wearing a mask. It might be what we need to face others in

decomposition. Facing them we might also come to understand Baltasar

Gracián’s saying,

It takes more today to make one sage than seven in years gone by, and

more to deal with a single person than an entire nation in the past.

Green Nihilism or Cosmic Pessimism

Men have been so mad as to believe that God is pleased by harmony

Spinoza

Some of us have read

Desert

, and opted to reprint it, to promote its discussion, maybe to

promulgate (at least repeat) some of what is said in it. Despite our

efforts, I still feel it has not had the uptake it deserves. I am

beginning to think that the issue is less about our limited ability to

distribute texts and discuss ideas, and more about the limits of the

milieu itself. As to the reception Desert did get, the most one can say

is that a few literate anarchists quickly processed it, either absorbing

it into their position or rejecting it. This

scanning-followed-by-yes-or-no operation pretty much sums up what many

anarchists consider reading to be. One sort of rejection was documented

in the egoist newspapers The Sovereign Self and My Own (and

responded to

in The Anvil): it concerned the idea that the anonymous author of Desert

was engaging in a pessimistic rhetoric for dramatic effect while

concealing their ultimate clinging to hope, perhaps like those who

endlessly criticize love, only to be revealed as the most perfectionist

of romantics in the last instance. That exchange on Desert tells much

more about the readers—what they expected, what they are looking

for—than the booklet itself. As does the other, sloppier, sort of

rejection of the writing, which has for obvious reasons not appeared in

print. More than one person has been overheard to say something to the

tune of: “Oh, Desert? I hated it! It was so depressing!” And that is it.

No discussion, no engagement, just stating in a fairly direct manner

that, if the writing did not further the agenda of hope or reinforce the

belief that mass movements can improve the global climate situation,

then it is not relevant to a discussion of green issues (which are

therefore redefined as setting out from that agenda and belief). In the

background of both exchanges is a kind of obtuseness characteristic of

the anarchist milieu: our propensity to be as ready to pick up the new

thing as to dismiss it either immediately after consumption or soon

after another consumes it. This customary speed, which we share with

many with whom we share little else, is what necessitates the yes-or-no

operation. Whatever the response is, it has to happen quickly. (We are

the best of Young-Girls when it comes to the commodities we ourselves

produce.) To do something else than mechanically phagocyte Desert (or

anything else worth reading) and absorb it or excrete it back out onto

the bookshelf/literature table/shitpile, some of us will need to take up

a far less practical, far less pragmatic attitude towards the best of

what circulates in our little space of reading. In short, it is to

intervene in the smooth functioning of the anarchist-identity machine,

our own homegrown apparatus, which reproduces the milieu, ingesting

unmarked ideas, expelling anarchist ideas. Of course all those online

rants, our many little zines, our few books—the ones we write and make,

and the ones that we adopt now and then—are only part of this set-up,

which also includes living arrangements, political practices,

anti-political projects, and so on. All together, from a few crowded

metropoles to the archipelago of outward- or inward-looking towns, that

array could be called the machine that makes anarchist identity, one of

those awful hybrids of anachronism and ultramodernity that clutter our

times. But, trivial though the role of Desert may be in the reproduction

of the milieu, its small role in that reproduction is especially

remarkable given that it directly addresses the limits of that

reproduction, and, indirectly, of the milieu itself. Its reception is a

kind of diagnostic test, a demonstration of our special obtuseness. If I

am right about even some of the preceding, then the increasingly

speculative nature of what follows ought to prove interesting to a few,

and repulsive to the rest.

• * * *

I intend the or in the title to be destabilizing. It does not indicate a

choice to be made between two already somewhat fictitious positions.

(Quotation marks for each would not have been strong enough. To say this

or that position is fictitious may seem to be belied by the advance,

here or there, of those who present themselves as the representatives of

positions. This is where we need to make our case most forcefully,

arguing back that to take on a position as an identity simply eludes the

what of position altogether, making it rest on a different, more

familiar kind of fiction.) By placing the or between them I mean to mark

a slippage, which I consider to be a movement of involuntary thought.

Not being properly yoked to action, to what is considered voluntary, it

is the kind of thought most have little time for. It has to do with

passing imperceptibly from one state to another, and what may be learned

in that shift. It is a terrible kind of thought at first, and, for some,

will perhaps always be so, all the more so inasmuch as we are not its

brave protagonists… Compare these passages:

The tide of Western authority will recede from much, though by no means

all, of the planet. A writhing mess of social flotsam and jetsam will be

left in its wake. Some will be patches of lived anarchy, some of

horrible conflicts, some empires, some freedoms, and, of course,

unimaginable weirdness.

And:

The world is increasingly unthinkable—a world of planetary disasters,

emerging pandemics, tectonic shifts, strange weather, oil-drenched

seascapes, and the furtive, always-looming threat of extinction. In

spite of our daily concerns, wants, and desires, it is increasingly

difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are a

part. To confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit to our

ability to adequately understand the world at all.

The first passage is from Desert, an anonymous pamphlet on the meaning

of the irreversibility of climate change for anarchist practice. The

second is from Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet, a collection

of essays that leads from philosophy to horror, or rather leads

philosophy to horror. I bring them together here because they seem to me

to coincide in a relatively unthought theoretical zone. As Desert

invokes the present and coming anarchy and chaos, it admits the

weirdness of the future (for our inherited thought patterns and

political maps, at least); when Dust of this Planet gestures to the

weirdness and unthinkability of the world, it invokes the current and

coming biological, geological, and climatological chaos of the planet.

They should be read together; the thought that is possible in that

stereoscopic reading is what my or intends. (I mean to gesture towards

the passage from one perspective to the other, and perhaps back.) If

Desert sets out from the knowability of the world—as the object of

science, principally—it has the rare merit of spelling out its

increasing unknowability as an object for our political projects, our

predictions and plans. Dust of this Planet allows us to push this

thought father in an eminently troubling direction, revealing a

wilderness more wild than the wild nature invoked by the critics of

capitalism and civilization: the unthinkable Planet behind the

inhabitable Earth. As we slip in this direction (which is also past the

point of distinguishing the voluntary from the involuntary), all our

positions, those little compressed bundles of opinion and analysis,

practice and experience, crumble—as positions. No doubt many will find

this disconcerting. But something of what we tried to do by thinking up,

debating, adopting and abandoning, positions, is left—something lives

on, survives—maybe just the primal thrust that begins with a question or

profound need and collapses in a profession of faith or identity. That

would be the path back to the perspective of Desert (now irreparably

transformed). What is left, the afterlife of our first outward

movements, might be something for each to witness alone, in a solitude

far from the gregarious comfort of recognizable positions, of politics.

To say nothing of community.

• * * *

All our maneuvering, all our petty excuses for not studying it aside,

there is still much to be said about this wonderful, challenging

booklet, Desert. To wit, that it is the first written elaboration of

sentiments some of us admit to and others feel without confessing to

them. And, moreover, that it hints repeatedly at an even broader and

more troubling set of perspectives about the limits to what we can do,

and maybe of what we are altogether. If the milieu’s demand were

accepted and these feelings and ideas were narrowed down to a position,

it could indeed be called green nihilism. In this naming of a position

the second word indicates one familiar political, or rather

anti-political, sense of nihilism—the position that views action, or

inaction, from the perspective that nothing can be done to save the

world. That no single event, or series of events clumsily apprehended as

a single Event, can be posited as the object of political or moral

optimism, except by the faithful and the deluded. Moreover, that the

injunction to think of the future, to hope in a certain naive way, is

itself pernicious, and often a tool of our enemies. As to green—well,

those who have read Desert will be familiar with the story it tells.

Irreversible global climate change, meshing in an increasingly confusing

way with a global geopolitical system that intensifies control in

resource-rich areas while loosening or perhaps losing its grips in the

hinterlands, the growing desert… It is the story, then, of literal

deserts, and also of zones deserted by authority or that those who

desert the terrain of authority inhabit. But let’s be clear about this:

Desert does not name its own position. It is less a book that proposes a

certain strategy or set of practices and more a book about material

conditions that are likely to affect any strategy, any practices

whatsoever. What is best about Desert is not just the unflinching

sobriety with which its author piles up evidence and insights for such a

near future, without drifting too far into speculation; it is the way

they do not abandon the idea of surviving in such a decomposing world.

It is neither optimism nor pessimism in the usual sense; it is another

way to grasp anarchy. That is why I write that much remains to be said

about it. One way to begin thinking through Desert is to concentrate

less on what position it supposedly takes (is there a green nihilism?

for or against hope?) and to consider how to push its perspective

farther. This means both asking more questions about how it allows us to

redefine survival and taking up the possibilities for thought that it

mostly hints at. For example, to say the future is unknowable is a

pleasant banality, which can just as well be invoked by optimists as

pessimists; but to concentrate on what is unknowable in a way that

projects it into past and present as well is to think beyond the dull

conversation about hope, or utopia and dystopia, for that matter. Here

is one example of how such thinking might unfold: Desert seems to offer

a novel perspective on chaos. There have probably been two anarchist

takes on chaos so far: the traditional one, summed up in the motto,

anarchy is not chaos, but order; and Hakim Bey’s discussions of chaos,

which may be summed up in his poetic phrase Chaos never died. The former

is clear enough: like many leftist analyses, it identifies social chaos

with a badly managed society and opposes to it a harmonious anarchic

order (which, it was later specified, could exist in harmony with a

nature itself conceived as harmonious). This conception of chaos, which

is still quite prevalent today, does not even merit its name. It is a

way of morally condemning capitalism, the State, society, or what you

will; it is basically name-calling. Any worthwhile conception of chaos

should begin from a non-moral position, admitting that the formlessness

of chaos is not for us to judge. That much Hakim Bey did amit. What, in

retrospect especially, is curious about his little missive “

Chaos

” are the various references to “agents of chaos,” “avatars of chaos”,

even a “prophethood of chaos.” It is a lovely letter from its time and

perhaps some other times as well; I have no intention to criticize it.

It is a marked improvement on any version of anarchy is order, and yet…

and yet. It comes too close, or reading it some came too close, to

simply opting for chaos, as though order and chaos were sides and it

were a matter of choosing sides. The inversion of a moral statement is

still a moral statement, after all. What is left to say about chaos,

then? The explicit references to chaos in Desert are all references to

social disorder. But a thoughtful reader might, upon reading through for

the third or fourth time, start to sense that another, more ancient

sense of chaos is being invoked: less of an extreme of disorder and more

of a primordial nothingness, a “yawning gap”, as the preferred gloss of

some philologists has it. The repeated reference to a probable global

archipelago of “large islands of chaos” is directly connected to the

destabilization of the global climate. And this is the terrible thought

that Desert constructs for us and will not save us from: that from now

on we survive in a world where the global climate is irreversibly

destabilized, and that such a survival is something other than life or

politics as we have so far dreamt them. The meager discussion we’ve seen

so far on Desert revolves around questions such as: is this true? and,

since most who bother thinking it through will take it to be true, does

the “no hope”/”no future” perspective (the supposed nihilism) which

Desert to some extent adopts, and others to some extent impute to it,

help or hinder an overall anarchist position? A less obvious discussion

revolves around two very different sorts of questions: what myths does

exposing this reality shatter? and, if we are brave enough to think

ourselves into this demythologized space that has eclipsed the mythical

future, is an anarchist position still a coherent or relevant response

to survival there? The myth that is shattered here is first and foremost

that wonderful old story about the Earth:

Earth, our bright home…

Shelley

There are two main versions of this story. In the religious version, a

god intends for us to live here and creates the Earth for us, or, to a

lesser extent, creates us for the Earth. In either case our apparent fit

into the Earth, our presumed kinship with it, usually expressed in the

thought of Nature or the natural, has a transcendent guarantee. In the

second version, which is usually of a rational or scientific sort, we

have evolved to live on the Earth and can expect it to be responsive to

our needs. Here the guarantee is immanent and rational. It is true that

this second story, in the version of evolutionary theory, also taught us

that we could have easily not come to be here, and that we may not

always be here. That is why Freud classed Darwin’s theory as the second

of three wounds to human narcissism (the first being the Copernican

theory, which displaced the Earth from the center of the cosmos, and the

third being Freud’s own theory, which displaced conscious thought from

prominence in mental life). But a certain common sense, or what could be

called the most obtuse rationalism, seems to have reintroduced the

religious content of the first version into the second, and concluded

that it is good or right or proper for us to be here. Natural, in short.

In any case, the lesson here is that the psychic wound can be open and

humanity, whoever that is, may limp on, wounded, thinking whatever it

prefers to think about itself. What Desert draws attention to is a

congeries of events that could increasingly trouble our collective

ability to go on with this story of a natural place for (some) humans.

Irreversible climate change is both something that can be understood (in

scientific and derivative, common-sense ways) and something that,

properly considered, suggests a vast panorama of unknowns. It is true

that Desert makes much of its case by citing scientists and scientific

statistics. But the real question here is about the status of these

invocations of science. This is where a subtler reading shows its

superiority. If the entire argumentative thrust of Desert relied on

science, the pamphlet would be fairly disposable. Desert invokes science

to put before the hopeful and the apathetic images of a terrible and

sublime sort. We could say that its explicit argument is based on

science, plus a certain kind of anti-political reasoning. But its

overall effect is to dislodge us from our background assumption of a

knowable and predictable world into a less predictable, less knowable

awareness. After all, it would be just as easy to develop a similar

narrative in the discourse of a pessimistic political science,

emphasizing massive population growth and social chaos: an irruptive and

ungovernable human biology beyond sociality. Let’s try it. From a red

anarchist perspective, this could mean more opportunities for mutual

aid, for setting the example of anarchy as order; chaos would be a kind

of forced clean slate, a time to show that we are better and more

efficient than the forces of the state. From an insurrectionary

perspective, the chaos would be an inhuman element making possible the

generalization of conflict. General social chaos would be the macrocosm

corresponding to the microcosm of the riot. For them chaos would also be

an opportunity, in this case to hasten and amplify anomic irruptions. In

sum, one could make the same argument about the biological mass of

humanity as about the Earth—that its coming chaos is an opportunity for

anarchists because it is a materially forced anarchy. This does not mean

that we are inherently aggressive or whatever you want to associate with

social chaos, but rather ungovernable in the long run (or at least

governed by forces and aims other than the ones accounted for in

political reasoning). It does mean, however, that the idea we are

ungovernable in the long run, the affirmation of which is more or less

synonymous with the confidence with which the anarchists take their

position, is now closely linked with another idea, that in the last

instance the Earth is not our natural home. It may have been our home

for some time, for a time that we call prehistory. Indeed, Fredy Perlman

marks the transition from prehistory to

His-Story,

or Civilization, as the prolongation of an event of ecological

imbalance, a prolongation whose overall effect is destructive, even as

the short-term or narrowly focused results along the way are to make the

Earth more and more of a welcoming and natural place for humans to be.

And now our parting of ways with Hakim Bey may be clarified, for, even

if he did not simply take the side of chaos, he did write:

remember, only in Classical Physics does Chaos have anything to do with

entropy, heat-death, or decay. In our physics (Chaos Theory), Chaos

identifies with tao, beyond both yin-as-entropy & yang-as-energy, more a

principle of continual creation than of any nihil, void in the sense of

potentia, not exhaustion. (Chaos as the “sum of all orders.”)

He was making an argument about what is

stupid

about death-glorifying art which, parenthetically, still seems relevant.

But I simply don’t see why chaos (or tao, for that matter) is somehow

better understood as creation than as destruction, or why it is

preferable to invoke potentia and not exhaustion. In the name of what?

“Ontological” anarchism? Life? And the sum of all orders… is this a

figure of something at all knowable? And if not, why the preceding

taking of sides? The chaos that Desert summons is not ontological. No

new theory of being is claimed here. The effect is first of all

psychological: stating what more or less everyone knows, but will not

admit. If Desert deserves the label nihilist, it is really in this

sense, that it knowingly points to the unknowable, to the background of

all three narcissistic wounds. (This is my way of admitting that talking

or writing about nihilism does not clarify much of anything. If it was

worth doing, it is not because I wanted to share a way of

believing-in-nothing. I see now that I was going somewhere else. The

analysis of nihilism is the object of psychology… it being understood

that this psychology is also that of the cosmos, wrote Deleuze.)

• * * *

In the Dust of This Planet introduces a tripartite distinction between

World, Earth, and Planet. Thacker states that the human world, our

sociocultural horizon of understanding, is what is usually meant by

world. This is the world as it is invoked in politics, in statements

that begin: what the world needs…, and of course any and all appeals to

save or change the world. It is the single world of globalism (and of

global revolution) but also the many little worlds of multiculturalism,

nationalism, and regionalism. But one could argue that our experience

(and the gaps in our experience) also unfold in another world, the

enveloping site of natural processes, from climate to chemical and

physical processes, of course including our own biology. This is the

Earth that we are often invited to save in ecological politics or

activism. A third version of what is meant by world is what Thacker

calls the Planet. If the world as human World is the world-for-us, and

the Earth as natural world is a world-for-itself, the Planet is the

world-without-us. Visions of the World and the Earth correspond roughly

to subjective and objective perspectives; but what these are visions of,

the Planet, is not reducible to either, however optimistic our

philosophy, theory, or science may be. In terms perhaps more familiar to

some green anarchists, the World corresponds to the material and mental

processes of civilization, and the Earth to Nature as constructed by

civilization. Civilization, so it would seem, produces nature as its

knowable byproduct as it encloses the wild, leaving fields, parks, and

gardens, along with domesticated and corralled wild animals, including,

of course, our species. Does the wildness or wilderness of the green

anarchists then correspond to the Planet, as world-without-us? Only if

we can grasp that the wild, like, or as, chaos, is ultimately

unknowable—not because of some defect in our faculties but because it

includes their limits and undoing. When green anarchists and others

invoke the wild, we must always be sure to ask if they mean an

especially unruly bit of nature, nature that is not yet fully processed

by the civilized, or something that civilization will never domesticate

or conquer. Planet is an odd category, in that it seems to correspond

both to the putative and impossible object of science (a science without

an observer) and an inexplicable and strange image emergent from out of

the recesses of the unconscious (which itself raises a troubling

question as to what an unconscious is at all if it can be said to issue

images that exclude us). I think about this third category in terms of

Desert as I read this passage from Thacker:

When the world as such cataclysmically manifests itself in the form of a

disaster, how do we interpret or give meaning to the world? There are

precedents in Western culture for this kind of thinking. In classical

Greece the interpretation is primarily mythological—Greek tragedy, for

instance, not only deals with the questions of fate and destiny, but in

so doing it also evokes a world at once familiar and unfamiliar, a world

within our control or a world as a plaything of the gods. By contrast,

the response of Medieval and early modern Christianity is primarily

theological—the long tradition of apocalyptic literature, as well as the

Scholastic commentaries on the nature of evil, cast the non-human world

within a moral framework of salvation. In modernity, in the intersection

of scientific hegemony, industrial capitalism, and what Nietzsche

famously prophesied as the death of God, the non-human world gains a

different value. In modernity, the response is primarily existential—a

questioning of the role of human individuals and human groups in light

of modern science, high technology, industrial and post-industrial

capitalism, and world wars.

In the light of the ongoing and growing disaster called irreversible

climate change, Desert clearly exposes the theological-existential roots

(the modern roots, that is to say) of anarchist politics, not

particularly different, as far as this issue goes, from the panorama of

Left or radical positions. What matters to me is the opportunity to

strike out beyond these positions, elaborating an anti-politics thought

through in reference to a point of view Thacker calls cosmological.

Could such a cosmological view, he writes, be understood not simply as

the view from interstellar space, but as the view of the

world-without-us, the Planetary view? Desert might be one of the first

signs of the paradoxical draw of this view, which, it should be clear by

now, is something other than a position to be adopted. But for those who

like the convenience names lend to things, consider the version Thacker

elaborates (in a discussion of the meaning of black in black metal, of

all things). He calls it cosmic pessimism:

The view of Cosmic Pessimism is a strange mysticism of the

world-without-us, a hermeticism of the abyss, a noumenal occultism. It

is the difficult thought of the world as absolutely unhuman, and

indifferent to the hopes, desires, and struggles of human individuals

and groups. Its limit-thought is the idea of absolute nothingness,

unconsciously represented in the many popular media images of nuclear

war, natural disasters, global pandemics, and the cataclysmic effects of

climate change. Certainly these are the images, or the specters, of

Cosmic Pessimism, and different from the scientific, economic, and

political realities and underlie them; but they are images deeply

embedded in our psyche nonetheless. Beyond these specters there is the

impossible thought of extinction, with not even a single human being to

think the absence of all human beings, with no thought to think the

negation of all thought.

Now the intention of my or will be clear for some (from the psyche to

the cosmos…). In Dust Thacker does not draw many connections between his

ideas and politics, so it is worthwhile to examine one of the places

where he illustrates the paradox his view of the Planet opens up in that

space. He cites Carl Schmitt’s suggestion, in Political Theology:

the very possibility of imagining or re-imagining the political is

dependent on a view of the world as revealed, as knowable, and as

accessible to us as human beings living in a human world. … But the way

in which that analogy [from theology to politics] is manifest may change

over time …

Thacker notes:

the 17^(th) and 18^(th) centuries were dominated by the theological

analogy of the transcendence of God in relation to the world, which

correlates to the political idea of the transcendence of the sovereign

ruler in relation to the state. By contrast, in the 19^(th) century a

shift occurs towards the theological notion of immanence… which likewise

correlates to “the democratic thesis of the identity of the ruler and

the ruled.” In these and other instances, we see theological concepts

being mobilized in political concepts, forming a kind of direct, tabular

comparison between cosmology and politics (God and sovereign ruler; the

cosmos and the state; transcendence and absolutism; immanence and

democracy).

The closed loop of politics:

The republic is the only cure for the ills of the monarchy, and the

monarchy is the only cure for the ills of the republic.

— Joubert

Thacker’s question follows: what happens to this analogy, which

structures both political theory and ordinary thinking about politics to

some extent, if one posits a world that is not, and will never be,

entirely revealed and knowable? The closed loop is opened, and the

analogy breaks down. What happens when we as human beings confront a

world that is radically unhuman, impersonal, and even indifferent to the

human? What happens to the concept of politics… It seems to me that a

question of this sort is lurking in the background of Desert as well.

• * * *

The desert may be, or sometimes seem to be, what is left after a

catastrophic event, but it has also always been with us, as image and

reality.

In what passes for a moon

On the galactic periphery,

Here is an austere beauty,

Barren, uncompromising,

Like that which must have been

Experienced by men

On the ice-caps and deserts

As they once existed on earth

Before their urbanization

Harsh and unambiguous…

— John Cotton

World-desert: the desert grows…

Earth-deserts: they are growing, too.

Cosmic deserts: on the galactic periphery… In a response to François

Laruelle’s

Du noir univers

, Thacker elaborates on the various senses of the desert motif,

suggesting both that it is the inevitable image and experience of the

Planet, as a slice of the Cosmos, or what Laruelle calls the black

Universe, and that it is a mirage, that there is no real desert to

escape to. Hermits keep escaping to the desert, but their solitude is

temporary; others gather nearby. The escape from forced community

develops spontaneous forms of community. But for being spontaneous, such

community does not cease to develop, sooner or later, the traits of the

first, escaped, community. The issue for me is double: first, that to

the two senses invoked in Desert (the literal ecological sense, and the

sense of desertion) we may now add the third corresponding to the

Planetary or Cosmic view, the desert as the impossible, as nothingness.

Second, the ethical, psychological, or at least practical insight that

some keep deserting society, civilization, or what have you in the

direction of the desert and, as stated, sooner or later populating it,

inhabiting it, somehow living or at least surviving in it. Even if these

deserters headed towards the desert in the first sense, they were

motivated or animated by the impossible target of the desert in the

third sense. Now, this apparently closed-loop operation could be the

inevitable repetition of some ancient anthropogenic trauma. Or it could

be (we just can’t know here and now) the sane, wild reaction to

Civilization: desperate attempt to return to the Earth (our bright home)

via the dark indifference of the Planet or Cosmos. Of this return

pessimism says: you will need to do it again and again. Is the pessimism

about a condition we can escape, or one we can’t? Is it the

anti-civilization pessimism of the most radical ecology, or is it

despair, no less trivial for being a psychological insight, before the

morbid obtuseness of humans? We just can’t know here and now.

Masciandaro, Thacker’s fellow commentator on Laruelle, aptly terms this

“the positivity and priority of opacity”—the opacity of the Planet and

the Cosmos, Laruelle’s black universe.

O the dark, the deep hard dark

Of these galactic nights!

Even the planets have set

Leaving it slab and impenetrable,

As dark and directionless

As those long nights of the soul

The ancient mystics spoke of.

Beyond there is nothing,

Nothing we have known or experienced.

— John Cotton

• * * *

In Desert we read:

Nature’s incredible power to re-grow and flourish following disasters is

evident both from previous mass extinctions and from its ability to heal

many lands scarred by civilisation. Its true power is rarely considered

within the sealed, anthropocentric thinking of those who would profit

from the present or attempt to plan the future. Yet the functioning of

the Earth System is destructive as well as bountiful and it is not a

conscious god with an interest in preserving us or its present

arrangement—something we may find out if the Earth is now moving to a

new much hotter state.

For his part, Thacker concludes his book by discussing a mysticism of

the unhuman, what he calls a climatological mysticism. It is a way of

thinking, and paradoxical knowing, modeled on religious mysticism rather

than scientific knowledge. But it is not reducible to the former. He

writes,

there is no being-on-the-side-of the world, much less nature or the

weather. [...] the world is indifferent to us as human beings. Indeed,

the core problematic of the climate change issue is the extent to which

human beings are at issue at all. On the one hand we as human beings are

the problem; on the other hand at the planetary level of the Earth’s

deep time, nothing could be more insignificant than the human. This is

where mysticism again becomes relevant.

This attitude of nonknowledge, as Bataille would have put it, informs

life even as it decenters it. That the Earth is our place, but the

planet does not care about us and the cosmos is not our home, is a

thought of the ways in which we might survive here. Some will remember

Vaneigem’s repeated contrast between vie and survie, life and survival.

For him it was a matter of inverting the accepted, and to a large extent

enforced, view in which one must survive first and live second. Some of

this view seems to have been taken into the perspective that identifies

life and nature, where the latter is understood as what we are or should

be—that is, that there is something normative about life or nature that

we can refer to. The perspective I am developing here suggests that we

have no way of knowing what we are or should be, and that the wild is

better conceived as that no-way, as the conditions that push back

against our best effort to define ourselves, identify our selves, or

know our world. Similarly, what is wild in us can only be conceived

(though it is not really conceivable in the long run) as what resists,

what pushes back, against any established order. But this might be

closer to survival than to life. Survival has a positive value in that

it is itself an activity, a set of nontrivial practices that refer back

to life insofar as we know it. We survive as we can, not confident that

we are living. It is this aspect of Desert that some insurrectionaries

seem to have disagreed with, in that it often talks of plans for

survival where they would have preferred to see plans for action, or at

least calls to action. We can read there of

An Anarchism with plenty of adjectives, but one that also sets and

achieves objectives, can have a wonderful present and still have a

future; even when fundamentally out of the step with the world around

it. There is so much we can do, achieve, defend and be; even here, where

unfortunately civilisation probably still has a future.

It is passages like this one, towards the end of the pamphlet, that

probably left some with the impression that its author is still attached

to hope, and left others with the sense of a form of survival that still

somehow resembled activism more than attack. As for the former

impression, that would be to confuse the climate pessimism of Desert

with a kind of overarching and mandatory mood, as though those who had

this view were of necessity personally depressed or despondent. There is

no evidence for such a conclusion. As for the latter, it is a little

more complicated. Yes, the author of Desert often sounds like someone

addressing activists; and, yes, Desert explicitly rejects the cause of

Revolution in several places. One could say this adds up to a kind of

political retreat. One could also say, however, that some are too used

to reading political texts that always end on a loud and vindictive

note! No, this is where the question of rethinking survival from an

anti-political perspective inflected by something like Thacker’s cosmic

pessimism or reinvented mysticism is critical. We make survival primary,

not so much inverting Vaneigem’s inversion of the norm in societies like

ours, but rather by noticing what in our conception of life has always

been a kind of religion or morality of life, easy adjustment to a

familiar nature. Whatever its faults, Desert was written to say that

such a conception is no longer useful, and that one useful meaning of

anarchist is someone who admits as much. Can that meaning fit with the

subcultures that most of today’s anarchists compose? Probably not. The

subcultures exist as pockets of resistance, of course; but survival in

them is indelibly tied to reproducing the anarchist as persona, as

identity, as an answer to the question of what life is or is for. To

make sense or have meaning this answer presupposes the workings of our

homegrown identity-machine, our collective, repeated minimal task of

discerning about actions whether they are anarchist or not, and, by

extension, whether the person carrying them out is anarchist. It is our

way of bringing the community into the desert. Announcement of one’s

intentions to overcome the limits of subculture and reach out to others,

or inspire them with our actions, is not different than, but rather a

crucial part of, this operation. Survival, in the sense Desert suggests

it to me, is something completely different, for in it any social group

or kin network, as it attempts to live on, cannot draw significant lines

of difference (of identification, therefore) between itself and others.

It melts into a humanity collectively resisting death. Needless to say

this is something entirely different than the revolutionary process as

it has been imagined and attempted. There is no future to plan for, only

a present to survive in, and that is the implosion of politics as we

have known it.

To survive, not to live, or, not living, to maintain oneself, without

life, in a state of pure supplement, movement of substitution for life,

but rather to arrest dying…

— Blanchot

… deserting life.

• * * *

A desert and not a garden: one remarkable aspect of the contemporary

anarchist space is an open contradiction between two perspectives on

what struggle is, or is for, that might be summed up in the phrases we

have enemies and we did this to ourselves. There are countless versions

of this contradiction, which at a deeper level is really not about

political struggle at all, but about the essence of resistance. One

version is the condemnation of the notion of enemy as a moral notion,

and another is its silent return in the emphasis on friendship and

affinity; there is also what a book called Enemies of Society may be

taken to suggest from its title on. The contradiction surfaces most

clearly in discussions influenced by primitivist positions or ones

hostile to civilization, likely because of the tremendous temporal

compression they require to make their case. In such talk, we zoom out

from lifetimes and generations to a scale of tens of thousands of years.

The enemy appears within the course of history, but the fact of the

appearance of the enemy, the split in humanity, summons the second we,

because of the need to presuppose a whole species in some natural state

(balance, etc.) that, in the event or events that open up the panorama

of civilization and history, cleaves itself into groups or at least

roles. The positions we know better tend to revolve around trivialized

versions of these perspectives, never really experiencing the tension

between them. It is only in the play of the anarchist space as a whole

(and precisely because it is not a single place, in which all involved

would have to put up with each other for a few hours, let alone live

together) that the contradiction unfolds. Some form of we have enemies

is the great rallying for a wide array of active agents, from the

remains of the Left to advocates of social war. And some form of we did

this to ourselves is in the background of all sorts of moralizing

approaches to oppression and interpersonal damage, but also the more

misanthropic strains of primitivism. I would also argue that a modified

form of it informs the deep background of egoism and some forms of

individualism (splitting the forced we from the atomic ourselves). My

question is, what happens if we zoom out farther? Here the virtue of

invoking science as Desert does may be visible. For what is beyond

history (the time of the World) and prehistory is geologic time, the

time of the Planet, which leads us to cosmic time. There is a difference

between invoking science and practicing or praising it. The latter

simply produce more science. The former may be a way to encounter what

our still humanist politics ignore. From the perspective of cosmic time,

the contradiction does not dissolve (at least not for me); but its moral

or political character seems to unravel. Something less centered on us

emerges. Perhaps both stories—the story about enemies and the story

about ourselves—ignore something much more disturbing than mere

accidental guilt or immorality, something that disturbs us precisely

because it is the disturbing of humanity. (“It is not man who colonizes

the planet, but the planet and the cosmos who transgress the lonely

threshold of man”—does this odd sentence of Laruelle’s express the

thought here, I wonder?) It makes sense for Thacker to invoke mysticism

when he considers the cosmos or the Planet, because its otherness has

most often been referred to as divine, and related to as a god. Now,

that need have nothing to do with religion, especially if we identify

religion with revelation; but mysticism is a good enough approximation

to the attitude one takes towards a now decentered life. I call that

attitude a thoughtful kind of survival. This is closely connected to a

conversation one often overhears in the company of anarchists. Someone

is discussing something they prefer or are inclined to do, and doing so

in increasingly positive terms. Another person points out (functioning

of the anarchist identity machine) that there is nothing specifically

anti-capitalist or radical about the stated activity or preferred

object, reducing it verbally to another form of consumption. Anxious

hours are passed this way. About such inclinations I prefer to say that

we do not know if they come from above or below; we know our own

resistance, and not much more. That resistance manifests in unknowable

ways, obeying no conscious plan. It could well be a particularly fancy

kind of neurosis; but survival means just this, that we do not know the

way out of the situation and we must live here with the idea of anarchy.

Another way to put this is that if our rejection of society and state is

as complete as we like to say it is, our project is not to create

alternative micro-societies (scenes, milieus) that people can belong to,

but something along the lines of becoming monsters. It is probable that

anarchy has always had something to do with becoming monstrous. The

monster, writes Thacker in

another of his books

, is unlawful life, or what cannot be controlled. It seems to me the

only way to do this, as opposed to saying one is doing it and being

satisfied with that, would be to unflinchingly contemplate the thing we

are without trying to be, the thing we can never try to be or claim we

are: the nameless thing, or unthinkable life. Which is also the solitary

thing, or the lonely one. The egoist or individualist positions are like

dull echoes of the inexpressible sentiment that I might be that nameless

thing, translated into a common parlance for the benefit of a

(resistant, yes) relation to the social mass. That the cosmos is not our

natural home is a thought outside the ways in which we might survive

here. To say we survive instead of living is in part to say that we have

no idea what living is or ought to be (that there is probably no

ought-to about living). But also that we resist any ideal of life,

including our own. Becoming monstrous is therefore the goal of

dismantling the milieu as anarchist identity machine. Being witness to

the nameless thing, to the unthinkable life or Planet or Cosmos, is not

a goal. It is not a criterion of anything, either. It is more like a

state, a mystical, poetic state (though in this state I am the poem). It

is the climatological mysticism Thacker describes and Desert hints at

for an anarchist audience, both deriving in their own way from the weird

insight that the Planet is indifferent to us. So read Desert again as an

allegory of the self-destruction of the milieu, of any community that,

as it runs from its norms, places new, unstated norms ahead of itself.

Such is the slippage from green nihilism to cosmic pessimism, which

gives us occasion to continue speaking of chaos. Well, one might say

that I have merely imported some alien theory into an otherwise familiar

(if not easy) discussion. Of course I have. My aim, however, was not to

apply it, but to show in what sense one play that is often acted out in

our spaces may be anti-politically theorized, which is to say cosmically

psychoanalyzed. Our place is not to apply the theory of cosmic pessimism

(or any other theory; that is not what theory is, or is for); our place

is to think, to continue speaking of chaos, not being stupid enough to

think we can take its side. There are no sides. We might come to realize

that we, too, in our attempts to gather, organize, act, change life, and

so on, were playing in the world, ignorant of the Planet, its

unimaginable weirdness.

If the earth must perish, then astronomy is our only consolation

— Joubert

Post scriptum. I mentioned community in passing. Most anarchists I

converse with regularly treat the word delicately or dismissively,

either ignoring it altogether, putting it in quotation marks, or

virtually crossing it out. I suppose that crossed-out sense of community

is another name for the milieu. As crappy as it is most of the time, I

will admit that the milieu is a space-time (really a series of

places-moments, some of them taking place ever so briefly) where one can

register, to some extent, what ideas have traction in our lives.

Desert‘s explicit statements are certainly more pedestrian than

Thacker’s theory; but the downside to Thacker’s exciting flights of

intellectual fancy, at least from where I am writing, is that it is hard

to know who he is speaking to, or about, much of the time. One imagines

that people do gather to hear what he has to say, or read his books in

concert. I do wonder to what extent they consider themselves to be a

community, a potential community, a crossed-out community.

Post scriptum bis. I mentioned solitude. It would also be worthwhile to

think about friendship along these lines.

Conclusion: Silence

Away, a way

I have witnessed and experienced for myself the salutary effects of

certain subtractive practices documented as far back as Zhuangzi, and

probably carried out more or less everywhere civilization has appeared

(even if the documentation is usually missing or not as well written as

the Inner Chapters). It would seem that there are two forms to this

resistance: running away, and doing nothing. Between them is a kind of

tactical neutrality of the apolitical or amoral sort. As to running

away, I have become increasingly pensive as to whether there is any

place one could exit to that is not first cleared out with fire.

Some consider that such heterotopias are only cleared out in a few,

utterly combative, ways. I say that somewhere between impatience and

spectacle, many of us became fascinated with the language of war (social

war, etc.). I find this language and its attendant practices tiresome

and limiting, as tiresome and as limiting as the language and practices

of activism and Revolution. One has to be true to one’s temperament and

one’s masks (ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn); and, though I am no pacifist, I do

think the slowdown evident in my essays is a sign of the search for an

admittedly impossible peace. Peace as what comes after, and therefore

what is not, what is attractive because it is not.

The Impossible

Another name for that peace could be silence. I am pleased by the idea

that these essays, to the extent that they succeed in showing the

hollowness of certain forms of speech (journalistic prose, slogans,

activist talk, the rhetoric of progress, the imagination of hope), do so

not so much replace it with a full and true speech (though I do want to

practice a speech that is both analytical and free) as they gesture

towards the silence in all speech—a silence that, here and now, I can

only explain as a void that we all, in our stupidest, most gregarious

moments, as we constitute a society, abhor, conceal, and deny.

The Beautiful Idea

For a long time I have known that I have nothing to say about it in

general. I wonder now if I have anything left to say about it at all.

“Without adjectives” was for a time a good enough way of marking that,

but things are both stupider and more complicated now, so the explicit

use of partisan, subcultural, and generally group designators is most

wisely kept to an absolute minimum. Its name was the only tolerable

slogan, the most concentrated one; now I, we, will have to do without

it. Another sense of silence.

Selected References

Books, Articles, Essays

Agamben, Giorgio.

The Coming Community

. Tr. Michael Hardt. Minnesota, 1993.

Aragorn!. BOOM! Introductory Writings on Nihilism. Pistols Drawn, 2013.

Artaud, Antonin. “The Theater of Cruelty.” Tr. Mary Caroline Richards.

In The Theater and its Double. Grove, 1958 [1938].

bædan: a journal of queer nihilism 1

. 2012.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Tr. Annette Lavers. Hill and Wang, 1973.

———. Le lexique de l’auteur. Seuil, 2010.

Bruno, Giordano. Cause, Principle and Unity. Essays on Magic. Cambridge,

1998.

Butor, Michel. Histoire Extraordinaire. Tr. Richard Howard. Cape, 1969.

Cage, John. “Composition as Process” and “Lecture on Nothing.” In

Silence. Wesleyan, 1961.

———. Empty Words. Wesleyan, 1979.

———. I-VI. Wesleyan, 1997.

———. anaRchy. Wesleyan, 2001.

Carroll, Lewis. Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense: Collected Poems.

Penguin, 2012.

Critchley, Simon. Infinitely Demanding. Verso, 2007.

Dark Star Collective. Beneath the Paving Stones: Situationists and the

Beach, May 1968. AK/Dark Star, 2001.

Debord, Guy.

The Society of the Spectacle

. Tr. Ken Knabb.

Desert

. LBC Books. 2011.

Dupont, Monsieur.

Nihilist Communism

. Ardent, 2009.

Dupont, Frère. Species Being. Ardent, 2009.

———.“The Ibn ‘Arabi Effect.” The Anvil Review 1, 2010.

Duncan, Robert. The H.D. Book. California UP, 2012.

Endnotes 1.

Fénéon, Félix. Novels in Three Lines. Tr. Luc Sante. NYRB, 2007.

Foucault, Michel. “Lives of Infamous Men.” In Power (The Essential Works

of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 3). New Press, 2001.

Freud, Sigmund. The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious. Tr. Joyce

Crick. Penguin, 2003.

———. “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming.” In The Uncanny. Tr. David

McLintock. Penguin, 2003.

Halperin, Joan. Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-De-Siecle

Paris. Yale, 1988.

Heidegger, Martin. “Nietzsche’s Word: God is Dead” in Off the Beaten

Track. Tr. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge, 2002.

Kasper, Michael. “Agit-Prop” and “Short-Prose” in The Shapes and Spacing

of The Letters. Weighted Anchor, 1995.

Knabb, Ken (ed.). Situationist International Anthology. Revised and

expanded ed. Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007.

James, William. Principles of Psychology. Two volumes. Dover, 1950.

Jappe, Anselm. “Sic Transit Gloria Artis: ‘The End of Art’ for Theodor

Adorno and Guy Debord.” SubStance 28:3, 1999.

Jarry, Alfred. Opinions and Exploits of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician.

Tr. Simon Winslow Taylor. Exact Change, 1996.

Joubert, Joseph. The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert. Tr. Paul Auster. NYRB,

2005.

Impasses. Pallaksch, 2013.

Laruelle, François. “Theorems on the Good News.” Available online.

———. “On the Black Universe.” In Dark Nights of the Universe, [NAME],

2013.

levy, d.a. Collected Poems. Druid Books, 1976.

Lucie, Edward. Holding Your Eight Hands. An Anthology of Science Fiction

Verse. Rapp & Whiting, 1970.

Masciandaro, Nicola. “Comments on Eugene Thacker’s ‘Cosmic Pessimism’.”

continent. 2.2, 2012.

———. “Secret.” In Dark Nights of the Universe, [NAME], 2013.

Mauss, Marcel (and Henri Hubert). A General Theory of Magic. Routledge,

2005 [1902].

McDonough, Tom. “Introduction: Ideology and the Situationist Utopia.” In

Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Texts and Documents. MIT,

2004.

negative wallow. 2010.

Novatore, Renzo. Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore. Tr. Wolfi

Landstreicher. Ardent, 2012.

Perelman, Bob. Ten to One. Selected Poems. Wesleyan, 1999.

Perlman, Fredy.

Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!

Black and Red, 1983.

Rousselle, Duane. After Post-Anarchism. Repartee (LBC Books), 2012.

Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in

France—1885 to World War I. Vintage, 1968.

Snyder, Gary. “The Etiquette of Freedom.” In The Practice of the Wild,

North Point Press, 1990.

Thacker, Eugene. After Life. University of Chicago Press, 2010.

———. In the Dust of this Planet. Zero Books. 2010.

———. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. 2.2 (2012).

———. “Remote: The Forgetting of the World.” In Dark Nights of the

Universe, [NAME], 2013.

Tiqqun.

Theory of Bloom

. Tr. Robert Hurley. LBC Books, 2012.

———. Introduction to Civil War. Tr. Alexander Galloway and Jason E.

Smith. Semiotext(e), 2010.

———. Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. Tr. Ariana

Reines. Semiotext(e), 2012.

———. … as a Science of Apparatuses.” In

This Is Not a Program

. Tr. Joshua David Jordan. Semiotext(e), 2011.

Wark, McKenzie. The Beach Beneath the Street. The Everyday Life and

Glorious Times of the Situationist International. Verso, 2011.

Vico, Giambattista. The New Science. Tr. Dave Marsh. Penguin, 2000.

Zines, Pamphlets

Accounting for Ourselves

Anarchism and the English Language / English and the Anarchists’ Language

Burning the Bridges they Are Building

Cabal, Argot

Hello Lawless

Second Wave Anarchy

The Broken Teapot

[1] E.g. “Boredom is not counter-revolutionary”; “Seriousness is a

disease”; “Teaching is impossible”.

[2] One way to understand the phrases anarchist space and milieu (which,

despite their different origins, I use interchangeably) is that they

stand in where one might otherwise find the name of an organization or

party, actual or imaginary, or their extension in classical ideological

form: anarchism. I use space and milieu neutrally, to refer to a diffuse

idea-space in turbulent relation to punctual actions; others use milieu,

especially, to condemn those who participate in this

idea-space-inturbulent-relation-to-actions and not activist or political

organizations. My neutral use of these terms echoes, so I think, an

orientation critical of that activist and organizational rhetoric in

which the idea-space is dismissed as subcultural, even as we are

exhorted to orient ourselves around organizations and their social

outreach, which is why I rarely write about anarchism and more often

about anarchists or anarchy. The idea-space is indeed for the most part

subcultural, but that is as much something to meditate on as it is

something to criticize. That activist (and militant) organizations

repeatedly fail to do what they say they do has something to do with the

fact that they repeatedly fail to say what they are, to others, of

course, but to themselves first of all. The micro-society of activists

and organizing is not first of all a subculture, but one stage where

this comedy is played out; subculture is a variant of this comedy of

failing to say what one is doing, thinking, etc., which sometimes

overlaps with that micro-society, and sometimes, as in the case of the

facets of the milieu that concern me most, does not. I would say that

the principal characteristics of my milieu or space are, first, that it

is very silly in all its seriousness; secondly, that it sometimes

constitutes itself as a pragma, as the matter that there is to think

about, and this sometimes allows passage to thinking concretely about

other matters of greater importance. It also ceases to be that pragma

with great regularity, which is what makes some refer to generations

within it. (But sociological demographics, or developmental psychology,

for that matter, will only offer approximations in this case.) In the

former case we might indeed call it the anarchist pragma, but only if

the latter case is then to be named the anarchist middling. Which is to

say that in this oscillation “it” couples tragedy to comedy often enough

to provoke thought and stimulate action.

[3] Even if many of those topics are addressed in passing throughout

these essays, and some of the original approach is apparent, so I like

to think, in its overall attitude. This is probably even more the case

for another collection of essays, notes, and experiments I am now

gathering, How to Live Now or Never, which will appear later this year.

[4] So the impossible, patience of the title is also that of a reader

who knows the difference between a commitment to the stuff of writing in

its minutiae, and a pedantic obsession with details.

[5] Infinitely Demanding, Verso, 2007, p. 4. All other page references

in parentheses.

[6] Critchley approvingly cites David Graeber’s formula: “Marxism has

tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary

strategy. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about

revolutionary practice” (125). What is telling concerning Critchley’s

attraction to anarchism is that he usually conceives of ethical

discourse as a theory or a philosophy (emerging from an experience,

granted) rather than an ethos or even habitus, a way of life first and

discourse second, as Graeber’s ethnologically inflected writings do.

[7] They mostly appear in Infinitely Demanding as filtered through two

short texts by David Graeber (Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and

the article “The New Anarchists”) and a work on indigenous politics in

Mexico and Australia by Courtney Jung.

[8] “Il senso più comune non è il più vero,” wrote the heretic Giordano

Bruno: “The most common sense is not the truest.” The type of thinking I

invoke here takes its distance from what the Mass regards as common

sense.

[9]

Theory of Bloom

, LBC Books version, 144. These phrases condense an entire trajectory of

writing on ethics that encompasses Deleuze, Agamben, and Badiou,

beginning, naturally, with Spinoza and Nietzsche.

[10] It is also fair to say that, since pluralism is such a key aspect

of liberalism, many anarchists simply cling to a kind of radicalized

liberalism as their ethics, and their politics, not because of any gaps

in their thinking, but because they actually are radical liberals. The

problem, of course, is either that they do not recognize it, or that

they will not admit it. At least Chomsky, in the 1970 lecture

“Government in the Future,” admitted as much, advocating a confluence of

radical Marxism and anarchism as “the proper and natural extension of

classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society.”

[11] I do not intend to attack what is all too easy to criticize in a

book framed as an intervention into post-anarchism, a topic that I am

not concerned with, and which I am sure is less than popular with the

readership of AJODA. I happily leave the task of settling the accounts

of this book with the proponents and opponents of post-anarchism to

those who find it worthwhile. I similarly leave to one side the

discussion of the relation of Georges Bataille’s ideas to ethical

nihilism in the book’s final chapter.

[12] Rousselle only makes occasional references to “classical”

anarchists other than Kropotkin, who is his major case study. I take it

this is because Kropotkin is thought of as the most explicitly ethical

of the original anarchists, and also because he has been the object of

sustained attention among post-anarchists.

[13] Rousselle frames this claim as a claim about theory, and the

conditions under which theories are formulated. He does not frame this

as a historical argument, although the idea of conditions obviously

implies theory. For example, he references in passing the shared

approach of the Russian Nihilists and Kropotkin in a discussion of an

article by John Slatter: “Slatter took Kropotkin at his word when he

argued that ‘[anarchists must] bend the knee to no authority whatsoever,

however respected [...] accept no principle so long as it is

unestablished by reason’ (Kropotkin as quoted in Slatter, 261). Here,

however, Kropotkin’s rationalism was maintained but only to reveal a

useful parallel: ‘The appeal to reason rather than to tradition or

custom in moral matters is one made earlier in Russian intellectual

history by the so-called ‘nihilists’’ (ibid.). Like Kropotkin, the

Russian ‘nihilists’ (or ‘The New People’, as they were called) adopted a

rationalist/positivist discourse as a way to achieve a distance from the

authority of the church and consequently from metaphysical philosophies.

The meta-ethics of Kropotkin’s work … thus reveals, not ‘mutual aid,’

but a tireless negativity akin to the spirit of the Russian nihilists:

‘[the anarchist must] fight against existing society with its

upside-down morality and look forward to the day when it would be no

more’ (Kropotkin as cited by Slatter, ibid)” (146–147).

[14] This is my way of rewriting the contrast between manifest and

latent content that Rousselle derives from Freud. Rousselle’s way of

explicating this has but two statements, one showing the latent content

of the other through elimination. Mine has more to do with pushing a

thought to its limit. They converge in that, for this to happen,

thinking has to engage with the unthought: …

[15] This is obviously where one should reiterate the argument made by

Shawn Wilbur and Jesse Cohn against the first wave of post-anarchists:

they had built their collective case on a caricaturesque reduction of

historical anarchists in their reconstruction of “classical anarchism.”

Many egoists, for example, explicitly stated what Rousselle claims can

only be grasped as a latent content (i.e. what appears only when

explicit statements are analyzed). The best one can say about

Rousselle’s analysis in this regard is that it destabilizes what many

consider to be the center and the margins of the anarchist tradition, or

canon. But it does leave one wondering why he discusses Kropotkin at

such length instead of Stirner or Novatore, for example, who are

referenced only in passing. Is there something at stake for him in

emphasizing ethical nihilism as a latent content as opposed to a

manifest one?

[16] For those not familiar with it, this term was introduced by John

Moore to refer to anarchist theory and practice after the Situationist

International. It might be considered telling that Moore offered the

term in a review of a foundational post-anarchist book by Todd May. The

review was originally published in Anarchist Studies, but I know it from

a zine called Second Wave Anarchy.

[17]

Nihilist Communism

, 198.

[18] “Nietzsche’s word: God is Dead,” in Off the Beaten Track, 165.

[19] A useful term I borrow from Théorie Communiste. As they define it:

“a theory and practice of class struggle in which the proletariat finds,

in its drive toward liberation, the fundamental elements of a future

social organisation which become the programme to be realised. This

revolution is thus the affirmation of the proletariat, whether as a

dictatorship of the proletariat, workers’ councils, the liberation of

work, a period of transition, the withering of the state, generalised

self-management, or a ‘society of associated producers’.” “Much Ado

About Nothing,” in Endnotes 1, 155.

[20] Speaking for myself, I underestimated the negative in the political

sphere, the power of negativity (the attitude towards world, society,

spectacle, whatever sets itself up as the All). My temperament led me to

emphasize ethical questions about how to live a life of joy, about the

places of affirmation (individualism/egoism, the aesthetic sensibility

that never lies). I do think one can affirm one’s own life, affirm the

nothing in it, so to speak, as one resists. Until I realized this, I

drifted near this space, but never really knew it. I remained confused

about the negative, about the effectiveness of the prefixes a-, an-,

anti- …

[21] The novels, along with all of his other writings (including

anonymous pieces of uncertain authorship) are gathered in the two

volumes of Oeuvres plus que complètes.

[22] I mean this only with respect to Fénéon’s time. I have no idea what

it would mean to be, or even claim to be, a dandy today.

[23] Michel Butor, Histoire extraordinaire, 82.

[24] These remarks echo accounts given by Fénéon’s biographer, Joan

Ungersma Halperin, and suggestions made by Luc Sante in his excellent

introduction to Novels in Three Lines.

[25] The best known is probably Oscar Wilde. See, for example, “The Soul

of Man Under Socialism” and “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the

Young.” One might also note the coincidence of spectacular public trials

in each of their biographies.

[26] Briefly, “everyday life” and “everydayness” name a recent

historical phenomenon combining ancient urban behavioral patterns and

relatively new modes of sociality, recombined in the setting of

capitalist exchange. I follow the Situationists in thinking that

everyday life, once it appears, is already colonized. This colonization

of life was dimly grasped, though very well explicated, by Heidegger in

his phenomenologies of anxiety and boredom.

[27] “The Stream of Thought,” in Principles of Psychology, 263.

[28] An 1883 issue of Le Livre Revue announced the forthcoming

publication of La Muselée, a “psychological novel” by Fénéon. It never

appeared. Of the novels in three lines Luc Sante writes: “They are the

poems and novels he never otherwise wrote … They might be considered

Fénéon’s Human Comedy” (viii).

[29] The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, 37.

[30] Because of “a shock from the incongruity,” which I would refer to

what I have been calling “style.” “The Stream of Thought,” in Principles

of Psychology, 263.

[31] The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, 146, 163, for

example. He compares this brevity to the condensation characteristic of

dreams.

[32] Ibid., 27.

[33] Cf. Michael Kasper’s delightful essay “Short-Prose,” in The Shape

and Spacing of The Letters. I first learned of Fénéon’s novels in

another essay in the same book, “Agit-Prop.”

[34] For context on the discussion, see the zines

The Broken Teapot

,

Accounting for Ourselves

, and

Burning the Bridges They Are Building

[35] See “Operation Margarine” in Mythologies. I have modified the

translation. For example, I thought that Order did not need to be

qualified by Established.

[36] See the discussion online, or in the zine

Anarchism and the English Language/ English and the Anarchists’ Language

[37] McKenzie Wark calls this “low theory.” See his The Beach Beneath

the Street, and my comments in

“Ways in And Ways Out of the Situationist Labyrinth,”

The Anvil Review 4.

[38] Two examples in terms of recent writing in the anarchist space

would be Whitherburo, for the first, and the “Editorial Statement” in

Lawless, for the second.

[39] The definitions have had remarkably different fates.

Situation/situationist/situationism have been discussed on and off as

needed (now and then some of us enjoy pointing out the third of these to

those that need a clarification).

Psychogeography/psychogeographical/psychogeographer have, for better or

for worse (probably for worse) turned out to be the most harmless of the

bunch, leading to a variety of popularizations in contexts often

disconnected from the rest. Of the two usually untranslated terms, the

fate of dérive has been tied to the psychogeography bundle, though I’m

not sure it had to be. Détournement has also inspired both popular

(cute) and unpopular (perverse) forms. The Great Web entertains with

plenty of both; neither has any lasting importance.

[40] Parenthetically, this text accuses members of the Lettrist

International of “a certain satisfied nihilism”, presumably deploying

the term in its isolated diagnostic sense.

[41] The other possible source for some of Perlman’s uses of this term

would be Jacques Camatte. But his use of it is closer to the SI than to

Camatte. They probably have a common source in Marxist theory of the

early twentieth century.

[42] I think for too long this essay has been relegated to the realm of

appreciative private readings on one hand, and public dismissals (on

grounds of romanticism) on the other. I found another way to read it, so

I am propagating it.

[43] That it could lead to the denial of temporal logic does not mean

that it is the denial of what I called above “cosmic time.”

[44] Hic Rhodus, hic salta! goes back to Marx and Hegel, of course. In

the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx writes of a situation “in

which retreat is impossible.”