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Title: Desire Armed
Author: Wolfi Landstreicher
Language: en
Topics: creativity, desire
Source: Retrieved on February 13, 2012 from https://sites.google.com/site/vagabondtheorist/desire-armed-anarchy-and-the-creative-impulse

Wolfi Landstreicher

Desire Armed

Creativity is essential to anarchist practice. This is a banality that

should go without saying. But when an endless rehashing of old ideas and

practices, repeated demands for models and, perhaps worst of all, a turn

toward marxist and academic leftist ideas as sources for intellectual

stimulation indicate a withering of practical imagination within

anarchist circles at least in the US, perhaps it is time to explore the

question of creativity more deeply. Certainly it would be a more

pleasant task than going through all the failings of present-day

anarchists in this regard. So I would like to share a few ideas about

creativity, imagination and desire that I have been mulling over for

years, exploring and experimenting with ways to apply them in my life

and relationships, in the hope that those who want to get beyond this

malaise may find them of interest.

I start from a basic premise: it isn’t possible to talk meaningfully

about either creativity or desire without referring to both of them. The

reason is quite simple. Desire, in its vital, healthy, fully living form

is nothing more nor less than the creative impulse, which realizes

itself through the practical application of imagination to one’s life

and one’s world. But somewhere along the line, even anarchists seem to

have lost track of this dynamic conception of desire, accepting instead

the passive conception of desire as nothing more than a mere longing for

some external object that one lacks, a conception that is quite useful

to modern capitalism.

This conception of desire is economic in its essence and like all

economic conceptions is based on scarcity, which is to say, poverty. The

object of this sort of desire exists before the desire arises, either as

an idea or as a concrete thing, but is not immediately accessible to the

individual who wants it. Since this sort of desire is nothing more than

a sense of lack, it can be easily channeled toward these already

existing objects in the interests of whatever powers have the strength

to harness this lack. William Blake rightly understood that this sense

of lack was not truly desire, but rather the mere ghost of desire, the

weak afterimage left behind when desire is drained of its vitality, its

capacity to act and create its own object.

It is only in relationship to this ghost of desire that the pathetic,

poorly thought out theoretical assumption, “Society creates our desires”

makes any sense at all, but even on these terms the statement remains a

load of shit, a symptom of the marxian intrusion into anarchist circles

with its implication that it is impossible to experience freedom now.

The fallacy of the statement lies in its assumption that society acts

and creates. In fact, society creates nothing. Society is nothing more

than a shorthand we use to describe an interweaving set of activities

and relationships between individuals that tend to reproduce themselves

within a specific context. Capitalism is simply one of the terms used to

describe the most recent, economy-dominated set of such activities and

relationships. Thus neither society nor capitalism create anything at

all. Rather, an unquestioning acceptance of the currently existing set

of relationships and activities leads to an acceptance of devitalized

desires, mere ghosts incapable of creating their own objects and thus

satisfying themselves. And this leads people to continue to act and

relate in habitual ways that reinforce this condition.

There are many factors that can drain an individual’s desire of its

vital energy: desperate poverty, emotional trauma, repressive onslaughts

from those with greater power (parents, teachers, cops, soldiers,

priests, government and corporate institutions,...), but on the large

scale, desire is drained of its creative essence when life is drained of

its voluptuous generosity, its luxurious excess. To some extent, this

begins to happen anywhere that authority and hierarchies of wealth and

power exist. But most social orders have simply contained these effusive

aspects of life in festivals and carnivals rather than fully suppressing

them. Even Catholicism in the Middle Ages continued to leave room for

such contained expressions of voluptuous excess. In the Western world,

the puritanical morality of Protestantism managed to suppress this

tendency in a timely manner (though not without quite a fight...)

serving the needs of the rising bourgeois class. Condemning voluptuous

pleasures, luxurious excess and the generous squandering of life, this

morality instead gave value to work, thrift and measured moderation.

Tellingly, the first two were also called industry and economy. And the

last corresponds well with bookkeeping. By suppressing the values that

gave desire its basis as a creative force, puritanical morality

suppressed desire itself, ultimately driving it into unconsciousness.

Here it no longer exists as a vital, living energy, but as an often

monstrous and always sterile ghost. Without the generous, luxurious

fullness of life as a basis, it is transformed into a lack, a longing,

that seeks an object outside itself to fill its emptiness. Life becomes

mere survival, the desperate hunt for such objects to sate an endless

hunger. Only this utter degradation could allow desire to be harnessed

to the machinery of industry and the economy.

There are several practical considerations that can be drawn from these

ideas. First of all, there is the basic anarchist idea, which

unfortunately seems to have been forgotten by many present-day

anarchists, that society creates nothing, that rather everything is

created through the activity of individuals relating to other

individuals and to their environment. It follows from this that any

genuinely anarchist practice begins with individuals taking possession

of their activities and relationships, becoming the conscious creators

of their own lives. This leaves no room for victimism and stands in

utter contradiction to the marxian idea that no one can experience

freedom as long as this society exists. This marxian concept reifies

freedom, making it a thing external to us that will only be achieved in

some distant future and on a global scale. But I prefer the dialectic of

Heracleitus to that of Marx. For me, freedom is not a promise for the

future, but a way to continuously confront the world where I exist now,

taking possession of my life with all my might, in conflict with

everything that stands in my way. This ongoing conflict (which will not

end simply because we somehow manage to eradicate the entire

institutional framework of authority) is what makes the essential

destructive, negating aspects of anarchist practice one with the

creative aspects. Consciously creating our lives as our own means

destroying every chain that holds as back, smashing through every

barrier that gets in our way. Thus, there is no use in waiting for some

condition to hand us our freedom. We need to act now for our own sakes

and on our own terms, not for any cause nor on terms set by those who

want to maintain the ruling order.

In light of all this, the liberation of desire takes on a particular

meaning: it is the revitalization of desire as a creative impulse, its

liberation from its impoverished, sterile condition as a desperate

longing for an external object. This project means creating our lives

and practice in direct opposition to the social world that surrounds us

and its values. In other words, rejecting the impoverishment that

resides in the values of thrift, industry and measure, of lives and

goods for sale, in favor of voluptuous pleasure, luxurious excess and

the generous squandering of life, freeing life from the chains of

survival. I think it should be obvious that this is another situation in

which our anarchic end coincides with the means, in that creating our

lives in a luxurious, voluptuous manner is already the freeing of desire

as a creative force.

But those of us who want to take on this project need to, first of all,

examine the ways this impoverishment has inserted itself into anarchist

circles. I don’t want to go into a detailed critique of identity

politics (including the transformation of one’s personal choices into

moral identities) and political correctitude. Suffice it to say that

these intrusions from the post-whatever, academic left into anarchist

thought and practice have always been about creating rules, limits and

boundaries, not about destroying them. They are the measured voice of

impoverishment intended to put and keep each of us in our place. But

there have been some other trends within anarchist circles in recent

years that could have had a potential for enriching it, that did seem to

do so briefly before falling into moralistic and mystical thinking. I am

speaking of the critiques of certain broad areas of human activity like

language, art, symbolic activity and the like. Where these critiques

have been examinations of the limits of these activities, they have

opened the door to interesting explorations of how we might expand

beyond these limits, enriching our lives and our worlds. But expanding

beyond the limits of these activities does not require their destruction

(unlike the institutions of power, language, art and symbolic activity

are not barriers, cages or chains, simply specific tools/toys with their

limitations), but rather their enrichment. Unfortunately, the most

strident voices proclaiming on these matters moved away from exploratory

critique into mystical and moral condemnation. Rather than challenging

the limits of these oh so human activities with the aim of enriching our

lives, these prophets of despair declare that until we could be rid of

these things, we cannot know freedom, because for them freedom consists

of a return to a universal oneness that they claim once existed. As

puritanical as any Calvinistic theology and as deterministic as the most

vulgar marxism, this sort of theory (or rather ideology) offers nothing

to any sort of practice. Like the ideologies it imitates, it drains

desire of any life turning it to mere longing, and so we end up not with

interesting critical explorations, but with primitivism. Those

anarchists who want to live creatively, enriching their existences,

making their lives expansive, voluptuous and rich, don’t just need to

refuse these pseudo-critiques, but also to attack them fiercely, using

exploratory practical critique that provides a basis for an ongoing

theoretical practice to expose the ideological nature of these sad

sermons.

But perhaps the aspect that is most difficult in achieving the

voluptuous, expansive life that is necessary to revitalizing desire as a

creative impulse is getting beyond survival. I have tried to discuss

this question with people many times on several levels, and always the

conversation reverts back to how to survive better, with greater ease

and comfort, and so the point is missed. But this is understandable. We

all have to eat. We all want shelter at least in bad weather. We all

find ourselves in a world where money seems to make the rules. Even if

we abstractly realize that money is simply the physical (or more often

now virtual) manifestation of a particular sort of social relationship

in which we all take part — in other words, a product of our activities

— , making that realization meaningful in practice seems quite

difficult. Yet I think that it comes back to starting from oneself here

and now, what one wants to do, how one wants to go about one’s life and

projects immediately. First of all, survival is simply the postponement

of life to the future. It centers around maintaining existence, not

enjoying it. Stirner rightly pointed out that the enjoyment of life

consists in consuming it, in using it up. And this is why life, which

only exists in the present, and survival, which puts life off to the

future, are at loggerheads. So the first step to revitalizing desire as

creative impulse is to grasp life now, enjoying it immediately.

The centrality of immediacy in this endeavor fits with the idea that

desire as creative impulse does not have any preexisting object. Rather

it creates its object in the process of realizing itself. This means

that its object cannot be identified, institutionalized or commodified.

It cannot be made into a chain on liberated, vital desire. Desire, in

this sense, is thus the enemy of the civilization in which we live,

because this civilization exists only through identifying,

institutionalizing and commodifying. And these processes are nothing

less than the erection of prisons for desire. As a creative drive,

desire attacks these attempts to prevent it from moving forcefully in

the world. The objects that it creates for itself in its realization are

not external things (though such things may come into being as a

byproduct of the creative impulse) but rather active relationships, the

only sort of wealth that enriches those who squander it freely. And this

is why desire has to attack institutionalized relationships that freeze

activity into routine, protocol, custom and habit — into things to be

done to order.

Another aspect of the refusal of the domination of survival over life,

of the future over the present, is the refusal to let utility and

effectiveness dominate over enjoyment, playfulness, experimentation and

poetic living. The very concepts of utility and effectiveness again give

desire an external object, an end outside of itself. They start from the

assumption that there is a lack that must be filled, and so again remove

life to the future. Refusing utility and effectiveness does not mean

that what one creates in the process of living her life will be useless

or ineffective; it simply means that use and effectiveness will be

secondary to pleasure, enjoyment and intensity. Let’s consider one of

the most basic human needs: food. We could very easily limit ourselves

to getting a hold of just a few basic simple foods, preparing them in

the blandest, simplest ways and thus sating our physical hunger.

Instead, we enjoy exploring varieties of flavors, creating complicated

concoctions to stimulate our pleasure, transforming eating (and all of

the processes that lead up to into) into a voluptuous, sensual, even

intoxicating experience... This food remains useful, but it has gone far

beyond usefulness, because the pleasure principle has stimulated our

creative impulse. Other creative endeavors operate in a similar manner.

I may write a poem with a specific purpose behind it, something I am

trying to say, but what makes it a poem is not this utilitarian aspect.

What makes it a poem is the utterly useless play of words and images,

the dance that gives a certain voluptuous humor and convulsive beauty to

the words. In fact, in a poem, I always consider this aspect far more

important than any intended message, because this is what expresses the

attitude toward life that I endeavor to put into practice in revolt

against this world.

So, as I see it, voluptuousness, excess, squandering generosity,

immediacy, gratuitousness and playfulness are keys to rediscovering (or

rather re-creating) creativity in an anarchist manner. There is no place

here for renunciation or self-denial. Thus, the critique that grows from

this attitude asks, “Can I make this activity, relationship, tool or toy

my own or is it a barrier to my expansive creation and enjoyment of

life?” If the former, I will grasp it as part of the expansive wealth of

insurgent self-creative living, always seeking to push it beyond itself,

as I push myself beyond myself. If the latter I will attack it with the

aim of destroying it, recognizing it for the prison that it is. Having

moved in this way beyond the cages of survival, utility, tactics,

strategy and subjection to the future, it is possible for those

anarchists willing to take this route to rediscover the creative spark

and revive the practical imagination that will bring a dynamic of

enjoyment and strength back to our fight against this world. But these

thoughts are only the beginning of an ongoing exploration and

experimentation. They are unfinished and never will be finished as long

as there are those who insist upon living free and creative lives in and

against this world.