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Title: Against the Gendered Nightmare
Author: baedan
Date: 2014
Language: en
Topics: gender, civilization, domestication, feminism, history, critique, science, anthropology, green, nihilism, queer
Source: authors’ manuscript, baedan — a queer journal of heresy — issue two

baedan

Against the Gendered Nightmare

In the past several years, the question of gender has been taken up

again and again by the anarchist milieu. And still few attempts amount

to much more than a rehashing of old ideas. Most positions on gender

remain within the constraints of one or more of the ideologies that have

failed us already, mainly Marxist feminism, a watered down eco-feminism,

or some sort of liberal “queer anarchism.” Present in all of these are

the same problems we’ve howled against already: identity politics,

representation, gender essentialism, reformism, and reproductive

futurism. While we have no interest in offering another ideology in this

discourse, we imagine that an escape route could be charted by asking

the question that few will ask; by setting a course straight to the

secret center of gendered life which all the ideological answers take

for granted. We are speaking, of course, about Civilization itself.

Such a path of inquiry is not one easily travelled. At every step of the

way, stories are obscured and falsified by credentialed deceivers and

revolutionary careerists. Those ideas presented as Science are separated

from Myth only in that their authors claim to abolish mythology.

Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, History, Economics—each faces us as

another edifice built to hide a vital secret. At every step, we find

more questions than answers. And yet this shadowy journey feels all the

more necessary at the present moment. At the same time as technological

Civilization is undergoing a renewed assault on the very experience of

living beings, the horrors of gendered life continue to be inextricable

from that assault. Rape, imprisonment, bashings, separations,

dysmorphia, displacement, the labors of sexuality, and all the anxieties

of techniques of the self—these daily miseries and plagues are only

outpaced by the false solutions which strive to foreclose any

possibility of escape; queer economies, cybernetic communities, legal

reforms, prescription drugs, abstraction, academia, the utopias of

activist soothsayers, and the diffusion of countless subcultures and

niche identities—so many apparatuses of capture.

The first issue of Bædan features a rather involved exegesis of Lee

Edelman’s book No Future. In it, we attempted to read Edelman against

himself; to elaborate his critique of progress and futurity outside of

its academic trappings and beyond the limitations of its form. To do so,

we explored the traditions of queer revolt to which Edelman’s theory is

indebted, particularly the thought of Guy Hocquenghem. Exploring

Hocquenghem still proves particularly exciting, because his writing

represents some of the earliest queer theory which explicitly rejects

Civilization—as well as the families, economies, metaphysics,

sexualities and genders which compose it—while also imagining a queer

desire which is Civilization’s undoing. That exploration lead us to

explore the bodily and spiritual underpinnings of Civilization:

domestication, or “the process of the victory of our fathers over our

lives; the way in which the social order laid down by the dead continues

to haunt the living... the residue of accumulated memories, culture and

relationships which have been transmitted to us through the linear

progression of time and the fantasy of the Child... this investment of

the horrors of the past into our present lives which ensures the

perpetuation of civilization.”[1] Our present inquiry begins here.

To explore the conflict of the wildness of queer desire against

domestication is to take aim at an enemy who confronts us from the

beginning of Time itself. While our efforts in the first issue of this

journal were a refusal of the teleology which situated an end to gender

at the conclusion of a linear progression of time, we’ll now address the

questions of origins which hint toward an outside at the other end of

this line. As we’ve denied ourselves the future, we now turn against the

past. In this, we abandon any pretensions of certainty or claims to

truth. Instead we have only the experiences of those who revolt against

the gendered existent, as well as the stories of those whose revolt

we’ve inherited. In the spirit of this revolt, we offer these fragments

against gender and domestication.

I

Domestication, the integration of living beings into the civilized

order, must also be the integration of life into the dualism and

separation which we experience as gender. The concept is thrown about in

a variety of contexts and under various names, and yet very few have

attempted to thoroughly define it. It is used colloquially to discuss

the vast gulf which exists between wild creatures and those tamed and

clawless ones whose existence has been reduced to economic necessities.

It is linguistically tied to the realm of the Domestic, and by extension

to the Economic through the management of the home, oikonomia. It is the

violence implied in the concept of primitive accumulation, the first

(but also the originary) tearing of a being away from its self and its

subsequent imprisonment in class society. It is further implied in all

the theories of subjectification, the construction of all the identities

and roles which populate the social order. Being so central to the world

we inhabit and the subjects we have become, the concept warrants a more

precise and consistent definition.

In our previous engagement with domestication, we primarily looked at

the writings of Jacques Camatte. He comes to his theory of domestication

through an exploration of the ways that Capital empties, transforms and

colonizes human beings; in his words, Capital’s anthropomorphism.

Capital dissects and analyzes the human being, ruptures the mind from

the body, and reconstructs the human as a willful subject of the social

order. The consequence of this rupturing and suturing of life is the

recuperation of the vast range of humanist means of resistance;

communities become communities of capital, and individuals become little

more than consumers. Separation evolves into an image of wholeness which

replaces the unity it abolished. Domestication, which limits the

possibilities of what we can become, promises a future without limits,

because it ties our future to an undead and all-devouring system. We are

evacuated of our desires and instincts, and the vacuous space left

within us is filled with all the representations of what was taken.

Instead of a vast multitude of potentials and ways of relating to the

world, our lives are reduced to a microcosm of the linear progression of

society. Domestication does more than enslave us to the social order’s

future, it creates willful slaves. As individual living beings are

reduced to spectators and functions of dead things, the non-living

itself becomes autonomous. All the scientific disciplines, the linguists

of this autonomous non-living thing, proclaim alongside the fascists:

long live death! These disciples of Capital use their methodology to

prove that this is the way things always were, they naturalize Capital

and demonstrate its inevitability. We are split and dominated in the

same way as physicists split and dominate the atom; managed in the same

way cyberneticians manage their networks and feedback loops; as above,

so below. Thus for Camatte, Capital conquers our imagination both with

regard to our future, and also our past.

Capital has reduced nature and human beings to a state of domestication.

The imagination and the libido have been enclosed as surely as the

forests, oceans, and common lands.

The process of domestication is sometimes brought about violently, as

happens with primitive accumulation; more often it proceeds insidiously

because revolutionaries continue to think according to assumptions which

are implicit in capital and the development of productive forces, and

all of them share in exalting the one divinity, science. Hence

domestication and repressive consciousness have left our minds

fossilized more or less to the point of senility; our actions have

become rigidified and our thoughts stereotyped. We have been the

soulless frozen masses fixated on the post, believing all the time that

we were gazing ahead into the future.

This moment of Camatte’s thought is interesting because it marks his

personal shift away from Marxism and toward a critique of civilization

(a shift which would be significant for a whole generation of

anti-civilization thinkers). Unfortunately though, it is precisely its

situation in that shift (an obsession with one particular mode of

production) which creates the limit of his definition of domestication.

For him, the autonomous non-life which domesticates life is Capital, and

he situates this process in a specific moment of capitalism where

Capital “escapes” and forms its own community. This is tied up in his

esoteric, (and in its own way, exegetical) reading of Marx. He locates

domestication at the point at which capitalism has developed into a

representation and is thrown into crisis. He calls Capital an endpoint

of the processes of democratization, individuation, and massification.

He speaks of these processes as presuppositions to Capital which may go

as far back as the Greek Polis and its representational break of humans

from the rest of wild life, and to the “domination of men over women.”

And so if we can locate Capital at the endpoint of this ancient chain of

separations, how can domestication (separation itself) begin with

Capital? Moreover, if gendered domination predates domestication by

millennia, how can his version of domestication account for the

separation and colonization of life for which gender is a euphemism? His

origin myth fails at the point where it begins. His story is not enough

for us, because we know this colonization of our very existence did not

begin in the last century, or even the one before it. We can still hear

the distant cries of those who’ve resisted since long before. Clearly,

we must leave Camatte behind if we want to comprehend domestication in

its totality.

II

Camatte’s critique of domestication is most clearly articulated in his

essay The Wandering of Humanity, which was first published in English in

1975 by Black and Red of Detroit. At the time, the press was run by

Lorraine Perlman and her husband Fredy. They self-published the text in

a beautiful pamphlet after Fredy completed its first English

translation. In reading Perlman’s own writing, the influence of the text

is readily apparent. Perlman himself would go on to incorporate these

ideas into a scathing critique of Civilization which still inspires much

of the anti-civilization perspective within the anarchist milieu. His

efforts would largely be motivated by seizing upon the precise limit

we’ve identified in Camatte’s story: that of origins.

In her biography of Fredy, Having Little, Being Much, Lorraine narrates

the way that he spent the following seven years almost single-mindedly

focused on exploring the history of the domesticating monster. In

particular he spent those years tearing through accounts of the European

colonization of the North America, and the domestication process which

they unleashed upon all of the living inhabitants of this continent. He

stole from Hobbes in naming this monster Leviathan, and undertook the

monumental task of telling the tale of those who’ve resisted it. He

self-published his findings in 1983 in a wonderful and tragic book,

released among friends at a party at his and Lorraine’s house in

Detroit. The book was titled Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!

Asserting that “resistance is the only human component of the entire

His-story,” Fredy suspended his in-depth study of resistance to

Leviathanic incursions in the woodlands around the Great Lakes to

examine the “barbarians” and untamed tribes who, in earlier times,

unequivocally refused the bondage of civilization. Where His-story

exults in civic and military achievements, calling them Progress,

Fredy’s story views each consolidation of state power as an encroachment

on the human community. He addresses the reader as one individual

speaking to another and makes no claim to follow scholarly rules: “I

take it for granted that resistance is the natural human response to

dehumanization and, therefore, does not have to be explained or

justified.” The resistance story follows the chronology of Leviathan’s

destructive march, but avoids using His-storians’ conventions of dating

the events. This, as well as the poetic visionary language, gives the

work an epic quality.

Fredy begins his narrative by attempting to isolate the way that other

available ideological positions fail to grasp the enemy in its fullness.

His method is instructive in that he points to how each ideology is too

narrow, and can only offer incredibly superficial solutions to the

problem of domestication. In the first chapter, he writes:

Marxists point at the Capitalist mode of production, sometimes only at

the Capitalist class. Anarchists point at the State. Camatte points at

Capital. New Ranters point at Technology or Civilization or both...

The Marxists see only the mote in the enemy’s eye. They supplant their

villain with a hero, the Anti-capitalist mode of production, the

Revolutionary Establishment. They fail to see that their hero is the

very same “shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and

pitiless as the sun.” They fail to see that the Anti-capitalist mode of

production wants only to outrun its brother in wrecking the Biosphere.

Anarchists are as varied as Mankind. There are governmental and

commercial Anarchists as well as a few for hire. Some Anarchists differ

from Marxists only in being less informed. They would supplant the state

with a network of computer centers, factories and mines coordinated “by

the workers themselves” or by an Anarchist union. They would not call

this arrangement a State. The name-change would exorcize the beast.

Camatte, the New Ranters and Turner treat the villains of the Marxists

and Anarchists as mere attributes of the real protagonist. Camatte gives

the monster a body; he names the monster Capital, borrowing the term

from Marx but giving it a new content. He promises to describe the

monster’s origin and trajectory but has not yet done so...

The problems that he draws out about Anarchist and Marxist politics

resonate as much today as they did in 1983, and those who’ve drawn other

conclusions largely have Fredy to thank for helping to rejuvenate an

anarchy without an attachment to industrialism, technology or other

fetishes of production. It is from this last point, the failure of

Camatte to sketch the origin and trajectory of the monster, that he

sketches his own. He draws on the writings of Frederick Turner to

articulate the spirit of the monster, but criticizes Turner for his

inability to speak of the monster’s body; the cadaverous body which

tears apart wild things and incorporates them into itself. Fredy’s

narrative strikes out against this body.

Fredy’s project is an important one, because it pushes the critique of

domestication beyond the comfortable answers. He interrogates the

beast’s machinations before late capitalism, before the colonization of

the ‘new world,’ before the rise of capitalism itself. What he

accomplished was to write a story about the rise of every Civilization

since the first in Sumeria, and thus also of Civilization itself.

Significantly, he told this tale while indicting the historians,

anthropologists and economists who justify the rise of Leviathan.

Instead he told the story from the perspective of those who resisted

domestication at every juncture. This is one of the many stylistic and

ethical reasons that make the book so genuinely beautiful to read.

Whereas I can’t in good faith recommend that one reads the tedious works

of Edelman or Camatte, I’d happily gift Against His-Story to any of my

dearest friends. This is also the reason that it doesn’t make a great

deal of sense to attempt a comprehensive paraphrasing. Trying to capture

the magic of Fredy’s storytelling would be difficult, if not impossible.

Rather I’d suggest that anyone who wants to experience the depth and

weight of the book’s critique should simply read it themselves. That

being said, we’ll identify a few themes within the story which will help

us in our own. These understandings will be useful in moving further

with an exploration of Domestication.

In no particular order, some useful themes about domestication which

emerge through the text:

• The language of the domesticated always serves to hide widely accepted

lies, if barely. Clearly only those outside of the monster are free, and

yet the civilized will use this word to describe themselves. Even the

dictionary contains this contradiction: it describes ‘freedom’ as

belonging to ‘citizens,’ yet then says that something is free if not

constrained by anything other than its own being. There isn’t any way to

reconcile this contradiction. Wild birds and trees and insects which are

only determined by their own potential and wishes are free. Citizens are

constrained by an infinity of un-freedom. The domesticated will refer to

those humans who are still free as ‘barbarians’ or ‘savages,’ and yet

these terms designate those very people as legitimate prey for the most

barbaric atrocities at the hands of the ‘civilized.’ This

meaninglessness and deception inherent to language is true of almost

every word that the domesticated will use to describe themselves: that

which destroys communities is named a Community, that which has a thirst

for human blood beyond any reason is called Humanism and Reason. This is

important when faced with the writings of those who aim, through words,

to justify domestication.

• Leviathan takes the form of artificial life; it has no life of its

own, and thus can only function by capturing living beings within

itself. Following Hobbes, Leviathan (or Commonwealth or State or

Civitas) is an artificial man. A blond, masculine, crowned man bearing a

sword and a scepter. This artificial man is composed of countless

faceless human beings, tasked with moving the springs and wheels and

levers which make the artificial beast move. Hobbes, in turn, would see

these individual human beings as nothing more than a composite of

strings and wheels and springs. Fredy imagines that the beast might not

be an artificial human but rather a giant worm, not a living worm but a

carcass of a worm, a monstrous cadaver, its body consisting of numerous

segments, its skin pimpled with spears and wheels and other

technological implements. He knows from his own experience that the

entire carcass is brought to artificial life by the motions of the human

beings trapped inside... who operate the springs and wheel... Human

beings regress while the worm progresses. The worm’s greatest

accomplishment is to remake the people within it into individual

mechanized units. These human machines are ultimately replaced by

entirely automated machines, more amenable to existence within the labor

camps of leviathan. This is a haunting proposition because it implicates

us as complicit in the machinery of our own nightmare: both as the

living force which animates the monster, but also as having internalized

that animation.

• Leviathan constitutes itself through institutions of domestication;

these institutions are impersonal and immortal. Immortality is found

among no living creature on the earth. In being immortal, these

institutions are a part of death, and death cannot die. Workers,

prisoners and soldiers die; and yet factories, prisons and armies live

on. As civilization grows, the domain of death grows while the

individuals living within it die. No resistance movement has yet been

able to deal with this contradiction. Monasteries were an early

innovation in these immortal institutions. In these establishments,

which are nothing but early schools, human beings are systematically

broken, the way horses or oxen are broken, to bear weights and pull

loads. They are separated from their own humanity, from all natural

activities and sequences, and taught to perform artificial activities

and identify with Leviathanic sequences. They become disciplined springs

and wheels engaged in a routine that has no relation to human desires or

natural cycles. The clock will be invented by monastic beings because

the clock is nothing but a miniature monastery whose springs and wheels

are made of metal instead of flesh and blood. No amount of institutional

reform has exorcised this monstrous aspect of institutions.

• Domesticated humans are defined by their adornment with masks over

their faces and armor over their bodies. These masks and armors are the

ways in which the individual internalizes the constraint of Leviathan

and acclimates themselves to life within it. These are necessary for

surviving the everyday domination and humiliation which is life in this

society. They protect individuals from their own emotions, perception

and estrangement from being. The armor wraps around the individual and

invades their body just as all ecstatic life and freedom is evacuated

from the body, save for a potential. All that’s left is the armor. This

can also be understood as the formation of civilized identities.

• Domestication is perpetuated through a civilized spirituality which

emphasizes dominion over all living things, but more importantly,

self-management and self-domination. All monotheistic religions hold in

common that man must have dominion over the fish and foul and all living

things. The Catholic church in particular has enforced this decree by

declaring war against all living things; the same living things which

constitute the autonomy and independence of free people. The church

innovated upon this doctrine through the concept of sin. In response to

sin, people are compelled to do to themselves what God does to all

living things and what the nobles do to the peasants. They turn violence

against their own urges and desires, above all the desire for freedom

and escape. The war against all life continues as a war against one’s

self. No previous leviathan had so thoroughly degraded its human

contents. Not only do humans domesticated into the Christian

civilization suffer, they suffer a self inflicted violence at their own

hands and from their own minds. They enforce a slow tortuous murder upon

themselves. This war on the self would be externalized as the Holy War

which the Church would later wage against infidels, both domestic and

abroad. Such conquest is democratized through the decree that every man

should be an emperor in his own home: peasants and nobility alike are

joined in this frenzy of violence and control over their subjects. At

this point, even the most secular civilized society has been entrenched

in this self-constraint for so many generations that such a spiritual

form of domination appears also as secular and natural.

• While some Leviathans could be seen as worms, others appear more as

octopuses carrying out a pillaging of the earth more intense and

widespread than ever before; this expansion is necessary to Leviathans’

survival, but no living being willfully submits to accumulation into

these monsters. Economists and Historians will describe a natural

material dialectic by which people willfully enter these beasts, because

of their supposedly superior amenities. And yet at every turn, violence

must be used to force people to accept these amenities. There is no

‘demand’ until people have been broken from the wild world and from

their own abilities to care for themselves. European clothes are only

worn by those who have lost their own. These communities of free peoples

are attacked by an unprecedented chemical and biological warfare which

exists nowhere outside of Civilization itself. All that exists outside

of Civilization is viewed as raw materials to be accumulated. This

outside is often constructed through a racialized and gendered

categories. This accumulation does not happen at the hands of

economists, but by lynch mobs, militaries, armies, and all the rest of

Leviathan’s police. The genocide carried out by Europeans against native

peoples and animals and land bases on the American continents amounts to

the most unprecedented of these accumulations. Through the activity of

grave diggers (known as archeologists), even the dead become

commodities. All of this violence is necessary for Leviathan’s growth,

the dead commodities become the seeds of the next wave of accumulation.

• Those whose communities have long since been defeated will carry the

banner of their lost community in an attempt to regain that lost freedom

by battling an imagined enemy. The civilized humans wear the mask of

something they no longer are or never were, all in an attempt to hide

what they’ve become. It amounts to a frenzied rush away from ones self.

Christianity, the Reformation, Marxism and Naziism are but a few

examples of movements which begin by projecting an image of rejecting

the industrial hell, but in fact only reproduce industrial civilization.

In fact, most new Leviathans begin as resistance movements.

• “By undergoing what will be called Industrial and Technological

Revolutions, the Great Artifice breaches all walls, storms victoriously

through every natural and human barrier, increasing its velocity at

every turn. But by the time the beast really gets going like a winged

rodent out of Inferno, its own soothsayers will be saying an object

which approaches the speed of light loses its body and turns to smoke.

Such object’s victories are, in the long run Pyrrhic.” Civilization is

marked by over-extension, rapid growth, and a movement toward infinity.

This movement is ultimately self-destructive, producing contradictions

and break-downs which threaten the machine itself. All of history is

littered with the carnage and wreckage of this hubris. This is a complex

point about decomposition which warrants more attention. We will return

to it later.

These points barely scratch the surface of eloquent argumentation in

Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, but they are worth drawing out

because they help us to understand and elucidate a functioning

definition of Domestication beginning with the first Civilizations.

Deception, capture, domination, accumulation, annihilation, decline; we

will see these themes repeating in all the stories which follow our

inquiry.

III

In the years since Fredy published Against His-Story, Against

Leviathan!, the topic of domestication has been taken up by a whole

range of anti-civilization anarchists and projects. In most of the

writings emerging from this milieu, domestication is nearly tautological

with civilization. (Civilization is understood as the web of power

between the institutions, ideologies, and physical apparatuses which

perform domestication and control; while Domestication is understood as

the process by which living beings are trapped within the network that

is Civilization.) This tautology is instructive, as it points to the

autonomous existence of a monster which has the sole purpose of

perpetuating itself by bringing all life inside. Fredy would call such a

monster a world-destroyer. While different tendencies of

anti-civilization thought tend to understand domestication from

different angles,[2] it remains central to the thought and practice of

those who believe civilization must be destroyed.

Contemporary anti-civilization writers (many anonymous or pseudonymous)

have elaborated the critique of domestication into daily life, indicting

countless small operations which serve to domesticate life.

Domestication is the process that civilization uses to indoctrinate and

control life according to its logic. These time-tested mechanisms of

subordination include: taming, breeding, genetically modifying,

schooling, caging, intimidating, coercing, extorting, promising,

governing, enslaving, terrorizing, murdering...the list goes on to

include almost every civilized social interaction. Their movement and

effects can be examined and felt throughout society, enforced through

various institutions, rituals, and customs.[3]

Others have devoted their explorations to the conditions and events

which lead to the establishment of agriculture and symbolic thought ten

thousand years ago, trying to force the far past to give up its secrets.

From this perspective, that originary moment of domestication

inaugurated millennia of war, slavery, ecological destruction, and the

annihilation of free creatures.

All of these elaborations are useful in that they explain what

domestication means in various instances and phenomena, but it is still

rare to find a concise and functioning definition of what it means all

together. If we need to do so, we could say rather simply that

domestication is capture. Further, it is the capture of living beings by

a dead thing, and the integration of those beings into all the roles and

institutions which comprise the dead thing. Furthermore it is all the

practices which force those beings to spiritually accede to their

capture. And lastly it is the discourse and ideology which justifies

that capture. This capture is unending, and the dead thing can only

continue its immortal reign if it continues to bring new living beings

and commodities within itself.

First Mythos: Enkidu and Shamhat

Fredy begins his account of the first civilization emerging in Sumeria.

He describes the rise of the first king, the Lugal, and from it all

subsequent worm monsters. Sumeria is interesting to our inquiry because

it is the birth of civilization, but also of the written word. From this

ancient civilization, the oldest written story, that of the Sumerian

king Gilgamesh, was etched into tablets of lapis lazuli. As its hero,

Gilgamesh is responsible for instituting the ultimate domination of the

Sumerian Leviathan over the wild world. He does this because he:

In his endless mobilization of human beings, Gilgamesh built a human

machinery which waged war against the wild earth. In response to

Gilgamesh and his imposition of order, the Gods created an equal who

could oppose him. His name was

But the hunters and shepherds were angry and terrified of Enkidu, who

sabotaged their traps and released their animals. They went to Gilgamesh

and asked for his help. He devised a plan involving Shamhat, one of the

sacred prostitutes of the temple. He said:

Enkidu agreed, but for the possibility of challenging the mighty

Gilgamesh, but Shamhat convinced him otherwise. Gilgamesh had already

dreamt of Enkidu’s coming, and the king would take the wild one as a

dearest friend, would treat him as a wife. He would domesticate Enkidu.

The story of Enkidu and Shamhat is a story of domestication from within

the mythology of the first civilization. It shows of the taming of

Enkidu through the imposition of sex roles, the wearing of clothes, the

drinking of alcohol, and his separation from the wild beasts. Shamhat is

a sacred prostitute of the Sumerian temples, a spiritual practitioner of

the oldest profession. She serves the goddess Ishtar through the rite of

hieros gamos, the sacred marriage between the king and the goddess of

the city. Ishtar is the goddess of nature, yes, but of nature within the

city. Heiros gamos, the sacred prostitution, is a ritualistic submission

of nature to the power of the king; the bringing of the wild within the

walls of the city. In this way, the nature goddess was also the goddess

of arts of civilization. These arts included the practices of government

and religion, war and peace, crafts, profession, eating, drinking,

clothing, bodily adornments, art, music, sex and prostitution. Theirs

are the arts of living applicable to every aspect of civilized life. The

goddess rules nature within the city, so her ars vivendi are the rules

of civilization, of domestication. And so it was through these rules

that Shamhat, a priestess of Ishtar, made Enkidu into a man. After he is

torn from his world, Enkidu becomes a virile and bloodthirsty destroyer

of the wild. The imposition of gender unleashes a continuum of

separation which endlessly separates the city from the forest, humanity

from the rest of wild life, and splits humans into genders.

Contemporary readings will of course illustrate a degree of misogyny

around Shamhat, implying that women tamed the wild men. But this is

incorrect and only reveals how deeply seated gendered domination is to

civilization. Enkidu is domesticated by all the ars vivendi which define

life in the first civilization; by women’s work and men’s work. Enkidu

is made a man through these domesticating laws; he is civilized by

gender itself.

IV

It could be said that perhaps no tendency has taken the question of

gender further than primitivism. We say this, because the primitivists

view the question through the lens offered by a critique of

domestication. While there are obviously heinous examples of masculinist

and misogynist theories and individuals within anti-civilization

thought, the most lucid and careful writers have always located the rise

of patriarchy at the very beginning of civilization. For many (Fredy

Perlman and John Zerzan to name just two), Patriarchy emerges alongside

domestication and the two are practically synonymous. We can even see

small fragments of this perspective in Camatte’s later writing, Echoes

of the Past, for example. It is also acknowledged in the 2009 editorial

statement of BLOODLUST: a feminist journal against civilization. The

editors articulate that their desire to publish the journal was a result

of what felt like a superficial treatment of the critique of gender, and

yet they still celebrate that the anti-civilization tendency is one of

the few that consistently indicts Patriarchy as a central enemy. While

sadly the journal only released one issue, the task of fleshing out the

anti-civilization critique of Patriarchy seems like a step toward

understanding domestication’s centrality to gender itself.

The primitivist perspective on gender is problematic for reasons we’ll

elaborate later, but for a moment we’ll suspend our criticism so as to

fairly lay out the argument. Whatever its flaws, this perspective on the

rise of patriarchy is useful because it situates the emergence of

gendered domination with civilization itself. In doing so, it refuses

any ideology which fails to do so. By constantly demonstrating that such

misery is older than most other institutions and systems of domination,

it equips us with the necessary pessimism to respond to those who assure

us that gendered violence will disappear after their specific reform or

revolution.

Camatte (and consequently those who are influenced by his writing) is

indebted, with regard to his fleeting thoughts on gender, to a French

writer named Françoise d’Eaubonne. D’Eaubonne is credited as the person

who coined the term eco-feminism in her 1974 book, Feminism or Death.

More interestingly, she was also one of the cofounders of the

organization Front Homosexuel d’Action Revolutionnaire (FHAR), the same

militant gay liberation group which Guy Hocquenghem joined and which

shaped his later perspectives. It makes sense then, that two

anti-civilization theories of gender would emerge from the same action

and discussions; d’Eaubonne’s eco-feminism, and Hocquenghem’s homosexual

desire. It is a tragic detriment to our inquiry that almost nothing of

d’Eaubonne’s writing is translated into English. Most Anglophone

primitivists and eco-feminists have only been exposed to her ideas

though secondary sources (Camatte among them). We’ll cite an excerpt

from Feminism or Death as it is unlikely that most readers would have

access to the text:

Practically everybody knows that today the two most immediate threats to

survival are overpopulation and the destruction of our resources; fewer

recognize the complete responsibility of the male System, in so far as

it is male (and not capitalist or socialist) in these two dangers; but

even fewer still have discovered that each of the two threats is the

logical outcome of one of the two parallel discoveries which gave men

their power over fifty centuries ago: their ability to plant the seed in

the earth as in women, and their participation in the act of

reproduction.

Up until then the male believed [women were] impregnated by the gods.

From the moment he discovered at once his two capacities as farmer and

procreator, he instituted what Lederer calls ‘the great reversal’ to his

own advantage. Having taken possession of the land, thus of productivity

(later of industry) and of woman’s body (thus of reproduction), it was

natural that the overexploitation of both of these would end in this

threatening and parallel menace: overpopulation, surplus births, and

destruction of the environment, surplus production.

The only change capable of saving the world today is that of the ‘great

reversal’ of male power which is represented, after agricultural

overproductivity, by this mortal industrial expansion. Not ‘matriarchy,’

to be sure, nor ‘power-to-the-women,’ but destruction of power by women.

And finally, the end of the tunnel: a world to be reborn (and no longer

‘protected’ as is still believed by the first wave of timid

ecologists)...

Therefore, with a society at last in the feminine gender, meaning

non-power (and not power-to-the-women), it would be proved that no other

human group could have brought about the ecological revolution; because

none other was so directly concerned at all levels. And the two sources

of wealth which up until now have benefited only the male would once

again become the expression of life and no longer the elaboration of

death; and human beings would finally be treated first as persons, and

not above all else as male or female.

And the planet in the feminine gender would become green again for all.

While simplistic and essentialist, this line of argument stands out for

its singular elaboration of the intrinsic connection between

agricultural production and human reproduction. We’ll look at others

who’ve expanded on this theory, but we would be hard pressed to find

anything in the primitivist canon that deviates too far from this

straightforward position. All of it will center the role of man as the

husband to his wife and the practitioner of agriculture and animal

husbandry. The argument is useful because it is an articulation of the

way domestication captures both those humans assigned female and also a

vast diversity of non-human life.

One can clearly see the echoes of this in a primer[4] written by the

Green Anarchy collective:

Toward the beginning in the shift to civilization, an early product of

domestication is patriarchy: the formalization of male domination and

the development of institutions which reinforce it. By creating false

gender distinctions and divisions between men and women, civilization,

again, creates an “other” that can be objectified, controlled,

dominated, utilized, and commodified. This runs parallel to the

domestication of plants for agriculture and animals for herding, in

general dynamics, and also in specifics like the control of

reproduction. As in other realms of social stratification, roles are

assigned to women in order to establish a very rigid and predictable

order, beneficial to hierarchy. Woman come to be seen as property, no

different then the crops in the field or the sheep in the pasture.

Ownership and absolute control, whether of land, plants, animals,

slaves, children, or women, is part of the established dynamic of

civilization. Patriarchy demands the subjugation of the feminine and the

usurpation of nature, propelling us toward total annihilation. It

defines power, control and dominion over wildness, freedom, and life.

Patriarchal conditioning dictates all of our interactions; with

ourselves, our sexuality, our relationships to each other, and our

relationship to nature. It severely limits the spectrum of possible

experience. The interconnected relationship between the logic of

civilization and patriarchy is undeniable; for thousands of years they

have shaped the human experience on every level, from the institutional

to the personal, while they have devoured life. To be against

civilization, one must be against patriarchy; and to question

patriarchy, it seems, one must also put civilization into question.

Fredy Perlman expands on this premise in a few ways. Firstly, he

consistently centers rape and the weaponization of the phallus as

methods intrinsic to domestication. He connects the phallic towers at

the center of early Leviathans to the weapons used by their armies. For

him these institutions and apparatuses function to naturalize an

unnatural form of domination and power, to subject women to men and to

pretend that this arrangement is the natural order of things. At times

he describes Leviathanic men as ‘women haters.’ Secondly, he believes

His-story to be the process by which the men who control Leviathan

narrate their own conquests and achievements. For him His-story is

specific to civilized culture and only emerges as a violent annihilation

both of a pre-existing matriarchy, but also through the deification of

an image of militaristic, Leviathanic men as opposed to former nature

goddesses. For him, the earth itself is feminine; a mother who gives

birth to all life. By contrast, Leviathan gives birth to nothing but

death, and as such, despises the mother Earth. In the following

fragments we’ll criticize much of this theory, but it is worth

acknowledging that it is rare to find another theory of His-story

(especially one written by a man) which locates patriarchy as absolutely

inseparable from civilization.

John Zerzan expands upon the theory from a different angle. He primarily

concerns himself with studying the work of over a dozen anthropologists

(all of them women) who analyze the role of women in social arrangements

before domestication. Many of these anthropologists were part of the

shift in Anthropology referred to as the shift from “man the hunter” to

“woman the gatherer.” Based on their research, he argues that the vast

majority of sustenance in most non-civilized societies was provided by

gatherers, who tended to be women. He argues that as a consequence,

women had significantly more social power and autonomy, because they

were not reliant on patriarchal agricultural arrangements for survival.

He also follows other anthropologists in claiming that hierarchies

around gender were rare among American indigenous tribes, specifically

noting the absence of fetishes for virginity and chastity, expectations

of monogamy for women, or male control over reproduction. He argues that

the sexual division of labor, imposed by domestication, was the first

form of the division of labor which constitutes contemporary

civilization. He also criticizes the shift from communal tribal

relationships of sharing to the privatized and gendered existence of the

family-form, arguing that the family is neither inevitable nor universal

in human communities. Zerzan argues that the shift toward domestication

is marked by the emergence of specialized labor roles, the limiting of

women’s labor to reproductive efforts, and the strengthening of kinship

bonds above all else. For him, the presence of a gendered division of

labor by the time of the earliest recorded symbolic art indicates that

it is this division which gave rise to all others. He refuses to believe

that these phenomena are coincidence, instead pointing toward a causal

relationship between the rise of gendered existence and that of

domestication. Both are shifts away from non-separated, non-hierarchical

life. He says: “nothing in nature explains the sexual division of labor,

nor such institutions as marriage, conjugality or paternal filiation.

All are imposed on women by constraint, all are therefore facts of

civilization which must be explained, not used as explanations.” His

explanation for these shifts involves both the ways that agricultural

life immiserated the women it captured, but also that the introduction

of patriarchy was a key strategy of colonial civilizers and missionaries

around the world. He argues that any attempts to destroy civilization

must also be an attempted return to “the wholeness of original

genderless existence.”

Much of the primitivist perspective on gender doesn’t sit well from a

queer perspective, significantly the emphasis on gender essentialism and

the lack of substantive critique of compulsory heterosexuality, to say

nothing of the role of Anthropology. And yet still there is something

which resonates in the theory. Perhaps the appeal of the primitivist

answer is that it implicates literally everything about this world in

the horror of gender: the food we eat, the cities we live in, the

language we speak, our families, our fetishes—all of it interwoven into

the fabric of gendered existence. The implication, then, is that any

break from gender would require a break from literally all the

assurances and comforts which maintain our capture in it. Even more

powerful, is a fiery insistence that our gendered existence is not

inevitable nor laid out in the stars. Primitivism could be understood as

an attempt to give words and evidence to a visceral experience of

not-belonging in this world, to the feeling in our bones and muscles

which cries out against the gendering of our lives and possibilities.

Primitivism asserts an outside and makes claims to certainty regarding

the nature of that outside. We’ll dispense with them on the point of

certainty; but the outside itself calls to us.

V

One of the most lucid points that Fredy Perlman makes in Against

His-Story, Against Leviathan! is his critique of Anthropology. He often

speaks of anthropologists and archeologists as “grave robbers,” whose

intention is to enforce their own story about human existence while

erasing all other stories. He pays particular attention to the efforts

of anthropologists to describe the role of work in primitive societies.

Many anthropologists, sympathetic to primitive societies, will claim

that the people in those societies worked significantly less than

domesticated people. They call them Hunters or Gatherers. They will

speak of the four hours a day that are devoted to work. Fredy critiques

this position by claiming that it is the operation of the managers of

work camps to naturalize work into all other human and animal existence.

Yes, primitive people worked less, but because they did not work at all.

Modern anthropologists who carry Gulag in their brains reduce such human

communities to the motions that look most like work, and give the name

Gatherers to people who pick and sometimes store their favorite foods. A

bank clerk would call such communities Savings Banks! The [workers] on a

coffee plantation in Guatemala are Gatherers, and the anthropologist is

a Savings Bank. Their free ancestors had more important things to do.

The !Kung people miraculously survived as a community of free human

beings into our own exterminating age. R.E. Leakey observed them in

their lush African forest homeland. They cultivated nothing except

themselves. They made themselves what they wished to be. They were not

determined by anything beyond their own being—not by alarm clocks, not

by debts, not by orders from superiors. They feasted and celebrated and

played, full-time, except when they slept. They shared everything with

their communities: food, experiences, visions, songs. Great personal

satisfaction, deep inner joy, came from the sharing.

(In today’s world, wolves still experience the joys that come from

sharing. Maybe that’s why governments pay bounties to the killers of

wolves.)

The assertion is simple, but profound: those who live in a world of work

can only understand the activity of others as work. Work is a

historically determined institution, and yet our civilized metaphysics

operates to naturalize this institution; to obscure the violence of our

domestication into it. The implications of this operation is all the

more sinister, as we live in a world where more and more non-waged

activities are subsumed into the world of work. In a sense,

domestication functions as a linear enforcement of the world of work,

colonizing our past as it does our future.

S. Diamond observed other free human beings who survived into our age,

also in Africa. He could see that they did no work, but he couldn’t

quite bring himself to say it in English. Instead, he said they made no

distinction between work and play. Does Diamond mean that the activity

of the free people can be seen as work one moment, as play another,

depending on how the anthropologist feels? Does he mean that they didn’t

know if their activity was work or play? Does he mean we, you and I,

Diamond’s armored contemporaries, cannot distinguish their work from

their play?

If the !Kung visited our offices and factories, they might think we’re

playing. Why else would we be there?

I think Diamond meant to say something more profound. A time-and-motion

engineer watching a bear near a berry patch would not know when to punch

his clock. Does the bear start working when he walks to the berry patch,

when he picks the berry, when he opens his jaws? If the engineer has

half a brain he might say the bear makes no distinction between work and

play. If the engineer has an imagination he might say that the bear

experiences joy from the moment the berries turn deep red, and that none

of the bear’s motions are work.

If we are to attempt to imagine that none of the bear’s (or our distance

ancestors, for that matter) activity is work, then we are forced to

abandon to scientific disciplines which aim to make claims to certainty

about what vanquished peoples’ activities were like. This is an

important break from a primitivist orthodoxy which prioritizes the use

of anthropological methods. It is understandable why one would want to

make such claims as to the precise nature of an outside or a before

civilization. We would assert, however, that such claims aren’t simply

wrong (by virtue of their entrenchment in the scientific worldview) but

that they are unnecessary to our critique. We do not need to be able to

claim with certainty that our ancestors “worked less” in order to refuse

the world of work that captures us. That we can point to the world of

work as a historically determined institution of domination which

emerged with domestication and continues to immiserate our lives is

reason enough that world should burn.

This is a different orientation to the outside. There is surely comfort

and peace of mind in believing the scientific answers about what is

outside. There is also a dignity and certainty which comes from

believing that utopia once existed on the face of the earth. But what is

left to us if we abandon these certainties? What remains is the a

mystery and a chaos which evades any rationalist attempt to capture and

put it to use. This unknown is precisely that which drives those who

speak with certainty crazy. It is the dark and magical world of mystery

which all the violence of the scientific operation aims to annihilate.

Our proposal is simple: instead of deceiving ourselves about the unknown

with this or that Positive Evidence, the unknown itself is something to

celebrate. Rather than a primitivist return to an outside that is

supposedly mapped into our biology; we’ll pursue an escape into an

outside which is at the same time a mystery and an uncertainty. Should

we fight less to escape if we don’t know what the outside looks like?

One needs only look at the world which presents itself as all too

certain to know the answer.

VI

In considering this provocation in the context of our inquiry into

gender and domestication, a glaring contradiction emerges: why is

Fredy’s willful embrace of the unknown (with regard to work) not

likewise applied to gender? It takes very little effort to extend the

critique of anthropological certainty into the gendered world. We could

easily parallel it in saying: Anthropologists, sympathetic to primitive

societies, will view the relationships between Men and Women as more

fair and desirable in these societies than in civilized societies. They

are wrong in that there is no relationship between Men and Women. They

live in a world of gender, and so they can only perceive the varied and

ineffable existences of others as conforming to those categories. An

anthropologist with half a brain will say that these gender

relationships are less rigid and dominating than the ones we experience;

an anthropologist with an imagination would say that these are not

gender relationships in the way we understand them at all.

This critique can very easily be applied to almost all primitivist

writings on gender. Perlman and d’Eaubonne are obviously implicated in

this type of essentialism regarding the roles that women and men played

in primitive cultures. The archetype of woman as the nurturing and

pro-creative center of the universe is clearly as historically

constructed by the division of labor, and yet it is all the more

sinister because it operates as if natural. While Zerzan’s theory of

gender is more overt in mobilizing anthropology, it opens space against

essentialism by identifying gender as a socially constructed institution

sutured on top of a natural sexual difference. This still warrants

critique, however. One of the most worthwhile understandings offered by

queer theory is the provocation that the sex/gender dichotomy referred

to by feminists over the last several decades is not two systems, but

actually one. Sex as a binary is no more natural than gender. It is the

historical and retrospective arrangement into two categories of a vast

range of organs, hormones, gestures, dispositions, body shapes, sexual

capacities, etc. The efforts on the part of transgender liberationists

are relevant to this shift, as they demonstrate that there is no

determinacy or cohesion between any particular arrangement of the above

characteristics, but rather that the arrangement of them into categories

is always a coercive attack on an individual. The recent struggles of

intersex people goes further to clearly undermine the certainty which

naturalizes binary sex. The quiet scientific and medical mutilation and

reshaping of untold infants to fit into binary sex demonstrates that it

is no more natural than binary gender. This institutional capture into

one or another sex is just the newest form of what is an ancient regime

of diet, medicine, labor, bondage, religion and taboo which functions to

shape and exaggerate two sexes out of the vast infinity of possibilities

contained by the human body. Sex and Gender are the same his-storical

operation of categorization and separation, they are simply different

articulations.

It is not uncommon for primitivist thinkers and anthropologists to have

a critique of heteronormativity, pointing to evidence of widespread

homosexual practices in tribal societies before their colonization.

Others will also point to the existence of ‘third genders’ in certain

tribes. These stories are relevant in that they undermine the

naturalized view of heteronormativity (and with it reproductive

futurism), but as long as they function scientifically, they still

maintain the stability of gender (even third genders). They point to a

more favorable gender arrangement, but lack the imagination to

understand that people may have had relationships to one’s body and

sexuality outside of the gendered cages which have been built around us.

Furthermore, the tendency to universalize these conclusions is a

tendency of Leviathan; homogeneity is intrinsic to the domestication

process.

If we follow the analogous critique of work, we must come to a place

where we can say that we do not know for certain what gendered existence

was like before civilization. And yet this revelation in no way alters

our certainty that gender as we know it begins with civilization. If we

invoke an orientation to an outside of civilized gender, then we are

actually invoking another mystery, an ineffable which evades definition

and capture. What would it mean to participate in life or death struggle

against gender without knowing what existed before it? This would mean

pursuing an outside which presents itself to us as shadows and chaos. It

would mean fighting for the wild, without recourse to the natural. As

we’ve intoned before: though we forego the privilege of naturalness, we

are not deterred, for we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and

blackness from which Nature itself spills forth.[5] What we’ve elsewhere

called queer desire is a tendency toward this primordial chaos. The task

is to live it.

VII

Having unveiled this contradiction within primitivism, we are left

wondering how this blindspot has remained for so long.

One of the beautiful aspects of the primitivist critique is that is

provides a lens through which to explore every relation and institution

that is naturalized in Leviathanic thought. Within the primitivist

canon, one can readily find incisive attacks against the family, race,

psychiatry, agriculture, the division of labor, specialization,

militarism and countless other dimensions of civilized existence.

Primitivists are perhaps at their most imaginative and insightful when

they explore a world outside the more deeply embedded abstractions of

Leviathanic culture: symbolic thought, numbers, art, language, even

nature. Several texts even offer dreamlike attempts to imagine how free

people have conceived of different shapes to time itself.

How then, has this critical onslaught missed a relation so obvious and

entrenched into our being? Those who claim that Civilization inaugurated

gender disparity, still maintain the naturalness of those genders. Even

those (like Zerzan) who call gender into question, still hold to a

natural dualism which is perverted by domestication. That this dualism

is considered natural by those who would otherwise refuse any other

dualism (human/animal, mind/body, etc.) as a civilized constraint is not

proof of its naturalism. Rather it is proof of how deeply entrenched it

is in the process of domestication—so deep that we can scarcely imagine

a world before it. Zerzan, to his credit, says the divide (which varies

in its form, but not its essence) is the most deeply seated dualism;

giving rise to the subject/object and mind/body splits in turn. He calls

it a “categorization... that may be the single cultural form of greatest

significance.” It introduces and legitimizes all other dominations. This

line of argument is echoed by Witch Hazel in BLOODLUST, who writes that

the construction and devaluation of the feminine archetype is a parallel

to the mind/body split and enables the turn toward domestication and

Civilized conquest. This central underpinning of Civilization already

divines, without knowing it, the enmity between Civilization and queer

desire articulated by Guy Hocquenghem and others; the way that queer

desire reveals what is common between the family and the automobile and

every other civilized apparatus. This lens allows us to see that in

gender, more than anywhere else, the enemy has projected itself

throughout time in order to preclude our dreams of an outside. As Fredy

narrates this dynamic of projection:

The strait that separates us from the other shore has been widening for

three hundred generations, and whatever was cannibalized from the other

shore is no longer a vestige of their activity but an excretion of ours:

it’s shit. Reduced to blank slates by school, we cannot know what it was

to grow up heirs to thousands of generations of vision, insight,

experience. We cannot know what it was to learn to hear the plants grow,

and to feel the growth...

It becomes very important for the last Leviathan to deny the existence

of an outside. The beast’s voices have to project Leviathanic traits

into pre-Leviathanic past, into nature, even into the unknown universe.

The post-Hobbesian artificial beast becomes conscious of itself as

Leviathan and not as Temple or Heavenly Empire or Vicarate of Christ,

and it simultaneously begins to suspect its own frailty, its

impermanence. The beast knows itself to be a machine, and it knows that

machines break down, decompose, and may even destroy themselves. A

frantic search for perpetual motion machines yields no assurance to

counter the suspicions, and the beast has no choice but to project

itself into realms or beings which are not machines.

A telling story is that of the interaction between colonizing French

Jesuits and the indigenous Montagnais-Naskapi in 17^(th) century Canada,

as recounted by Eleanor Leacock, a feminist anthropologist cited by both

Zerzan and Silvia Federici. She describes how it became necessary for

the Jesuits to ‘civilize’ the Montagnais-Naskapi in order to ensure

they’d be disciplined trading partners. This endeavor started with the

introduction of hierarchical gender roles.

As often happened when Europeans came in contact with native American

populations, the French were impressed by Montagnais-Naskapi generosity,

their sense of cooperation and indifference to status, but they were

scandalized by their ‘lack of morals;’ they saw that the Naskapi had no

conception of private property, of authority, of male superiority, and

they even refused to punish their children. The Jesuits decided to

change all that, setting out to teach the Indians the basic elements of

civilization, convinced that this was necessary to turn them into

reliable trade partners. In this spirit they first taught them that ‘man

is the master,’ that ‘in France women do not rule their husbands,’ and

that courting at night, divorce at either partner’s desire, and sexual

freedom for both spouses, before or after marriage, had to be forbidden.

The Jesuits succeeded in convincing the newly appointed chiefs of the

tribe to implement male authority over the women. Several Naskapi women

fled such novel and offensive constraint, causing men (at the

encouragement of the Jesuits) to chase after them and threaten to beat

and/or imprison them for their disobedience. One Jesuit missionary’s

journal proudly includes an account of the incident:

Such acts of justice cause no surprise in France, because it is usual

there to proceed in that manner. But among these people...where everyone

considers himself from birth as free as the wild animals that roam in

their great forests...it is a marvel, or rather a miracle, to see a

peremptory command obeyed, or any act of severity or justice performed.

Another interesting story is recounted in a brief segment from the

journal Species Traitor about homosexuality outside of civilization. The

segment has the humility to acknowledge that while we can indict

universalized homophobia as being unique to modern society, we can know

very little about the vast and divergent sexual practices of the

majority of cultures that have walked the earth. The segment goes on to

cite an example of two anthropologists living among the Huaorani people

in the Amazon region of what is now Ecuador. The two anthropologists

witnessed two Huaorani men in an intimate embrace. When the Huaorani men

saw that they were being watched, one quietly whispered to the other

kowudi, after which they looked embarrassed at the anthropologists and

walked away. Kowudi means outsiders.

Both of these stories succinctly illustrate the truly partisan role

played by those who operate under some notion of objectivity or

neutrality. The journals of countless missionaries, explorers and

anthropologists show that their accounts are tainted by their civilized

attitudes toward gender and sexuality, but also that one of their

primary operations is to force those attitudes upon the people they

study. In Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, Arthur Evans points to

several of these, including a rather humorous example of the Greek

historian Diodorus Siculus’ disgust at the behavior of Celtic men in the

first century BC:

Although they have good-looking women, they pay very little attention to

them, but are really crazy about having sex with men. They are

accustomed to sleep on the ground on animal skins and roll around with

male bed-mates on both sides. Heedless of their own dignity, they

abandon without a qualm the bloom of their bodies to others. And the

most incredible thing is that they don’t think this is shameful.

All of this points to the great flaw of anthropology in regard to the

question of gender. As the existence and universality of gendered

categories is taken for granted, their accounts (and often their

actions) will always function to enact a violence upon a wild range of

human experience, severing it from its whole context and recounting that

experience as an amputated and gendered one. This isn’t to say that we

shouldn’t read these stories. Instead it instructs us on how to read

them. If we can glean any useful direction from them, it is by reading

these scientists as we would read any other enemy; critically, and with

attention to the secrets hidden between the lines. And even when we can

distill this or that, we still only have one story, from one culture, in

one moment. To universalize these stories as representations and truths

about all of humanity, as is often done by primitivist anthropology, is

to falsify our understanding and erase an infinity of other

possibilities and stories of people beyond civilization’s snares. It is

a reverence for this infinity which sets our inquiry apart from a

scientific one. Science, after all, is also one myth among many. It is

different only in that it refuses all stories but its own.

Some interpret these stories to mean that Patriarchy is one of the first

pillars of civilization to emerge from domestication. Others glean that

the gender division is the first duality, which makes domestication

possible. Both versions draw circles around a third possibility:

Gender is domestication.

The two supposedly distinct phenomena appear as mutually constituting

because they are one and the same phenomenon. Earlier we said that

domestication is the capture of living things by something non-living.

It is also the process where capture is internalized by living beings

who are then shaped into pre-determined roles. The non-living thing is

immortal and continues long after its captives are dead, and that it is

constantly accumulating new lives in order to reproduce itself. Gender

is precisely this non-living institution which tears individuals away

from themselves and reconstitutes them as a pre-determined role. Gender

would be an empty husk if it wasn’t for its constant capture of new

bodies; bodies which in turn give it life. Isn’t the first incursion of

Civilization into the life of a wild newborn always to proclaim its

gender? It is the first separation which gives rise to all others.

Gender is the cipher through which Leviathan categorizes and understands

each and every one of the beings trapped in its entrails. A whole

destiny of experience is inscribed on our bodies from it.

We should also remember that we previous identified a theme where

domesticated people invoke the image of those they are not and never

were to justify their own machinations and violence. In gender, we see

all the ways that the gender binary is naturalized as sex and projected

into pre-history as a way of explaining and rationalizing

(essentializing) all of these experiences of violence. We are told those

assigned female are meant to be mothers, and therefore it is in their

nature to endure pain, to be caretakers, to submit to external

authority. Those assigned male are virile hunters and warriors, violence

and rape are supposedly intrinsic to their nature. Homosexuals are

aberrations in nature, and thus they are fated for exile in their short,

brutal and diseased lives. Every mask of the natural is only ever a lie

told by Leviathan to justify its own activity.

An understanding of gender as domestication is supported by the

inquiries of a handful of anti-colonial theorists of gender such as

María Lugones, Andrea Smith and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí. Smith, for example,

horrifyingly illustrates the use of sexual violence as strategy of

Leviathan’s conquest of the Americas.[6] More so, she argues that

colonialism is itself structured by sexual violence. Lugones, as another

example, argues that gender itself is violently introduced by colonial

civilization.[7] She says it is consistently and contemporarily used to

destroy peoples, cosmologies and communities in order to form the

building ground of the ‘civilized West.’ She argues that the colonial

system produces different racialized genders, but more importantly

institutes gender itself as a way of organizing relations, knowledges

and cosmic understanding. This is useful because it refuses a universal

or natural understanding of Patriarchy that lacks a critique of racial

and heteronormative colonialism. Instead, her argument helps us to

describe the gender as something that spreads, consumes and destroys.

She describes this process as the Colonial/Modern Gender System. This

system entails the naturalization of the sexual binary, the demonization

of a racial and hermaphroditic other, and the violent eradication of

everything outside civilization: third genders, homosexuality,

gynocentric knowledges and non-gendered existence, etc. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

in The Invention of Women describes how gender was not an organizing

principle in Yoruba society prior to colonization. She says that

patriarchy only emerges when Yoruba society is “translated into english

to fit the western pattern of body reasoning.” She locates the dominance

of civilization’s gender system in its documentation and interpretation

of the world. “Researchers always find gender when they look for it.”

Within colonialism, new subject categories were created by western

Civilization and were racialized and engendered as the foundation of the

new colonial state. This creation process is composed of several

operations: the introduction and entrenchment of gender roles, the

imposition of Male gods, the formation of Patriarchal colonial

government, the displacement of people from their traditional means of

subsistence and the violent institution of the Family. These operations

serve as a revision which recasts and genders tribal life and

spirituality. This engendering does more than create the victimized

category of women, but also constructs men as collaborators in

domestication. Lugones cites the British strategy of bringing indigenous

men to English schools where they would be instructed in the ways of

civilized gender. These men would work within the colonial state to

deprive women of their previous power to declare war, bear arms and

determine their own relationships. She also cites the Spanish strategy

of criminalizing sodomy among colonized populations, intertwining it

with racialized hatred of the Moors and other ‘primitive’ people.

These theorists employ stories and examples of ‘third genders’ not as a

literal description of a three gendered system, but instead as a place

holder for the infinite range of bodily possibility which exists outside

the colonial system. They argue that domestication has to be imposed as

gender in order to disintegrate all the communal and free relationships,

rituals and overlapping means of survival. And as the civilized ideal of

racial gender is naturalized, everything outside of itself is fair game

for capture, domination and reshaping. Colonialism itself is often

described through the racial and sexual metaphor of the white male

explorer uncovering and pillaging the dark female continents, forcing

her to submit and planting the seed of civilization.

From this perspective, we can recognize all the incidents of gendered

and racial violence in our lives as repetitions of this first capture.

Sex work, abusive relationships, body dysmorphia, marriage, sexual

abuse, familial constraint, date rape, gang rape, queer bashing,

psychiatry, electroshock therapy, eating disorders, domestic labor,

unwanted pregnancy, fetishization, emotional labor, street harassment,

pornography: each instance is a moment where we are torn from ourselves,

taken by another, captured and determined as a brutal repetition of the

primary rupture which denied us a life lived by and for ourselves. In

this schema, the assimilation and medicalization of queer and

transgendered people can be understood as a re-capture of rebellious

bodies. Police murder and racist vigilantism can likewise be understood

as functions of this capture.

It is worth noting here that to understand gender as domestication is

crucially different from understanding patriarchy as a consequence of

domestication, in that the former is a break from the trap of

essentialism. None of the above is limited to one subject of the

gendered world. Rape, for example, is not solely the experience of women

(as is often claimed by various regurgitations of second wave feminism),

but is a disgustingly widespread experience among people of all genders.

The assertion that any form of gender violence is the exclusive property

of one category of people would be laughable if it weren’t for the

litany of horrors which serve to disprove it. More sinisterly, these

type of essentialist assertions obscure and shame those experience an

entire range of very real experiences of gender violence.

Situating gender as domestication is a way to understand gender violence

outside of an essentialist and white framework. Without this

understanding, all theories which attribute some natural dimension to

sex/gender (from eco-feminist to Marxist feminist) are structurally

unable to account for the violence, capture, and exclusion experienced

by anyone who deviates from the gender binary or the heterosexual

matrix. These ideologies will expand to pay lip-service to queer and

transpeople, but they never alter the structure of their theory. This

amounts to little more than the liberal politics of inclusion. If,

however, we understand gender as something which captures us, rather

than something natural to us (or extracted from our biological

existence), we can begin to analyze all the methods of domination

experienced by queer or transgender people. Brutality and exclusion come

to be recognized as the policing methods by which individuals remain

captured; assimilation and exploitation represent a more sophisticated

capture. From here I can see the line which binds together the boys who

called me faggot as a teenager and the gay men who would pay me for sex

a few years later. Everything about the refusal of gender follows from

this. The criticism of identity, assimilation, medicalization or any

technique of the self becomes meaningful once it is placed in this

continuum.

VIII

We’ve said there are some stories which can be stolen from anthropology

that might help us in our understanding of gender as domestication. One

such story is told by Gayle Rubin in her essay The Traffic in Women (not

to be confused with the Emma Goldman piece by the same name). This piece

is one of the many examples of feminist anthropology which influenced

Zerzan and other primitivist writers in their theory of gender. We chose

to critically engage with Rubin’s piece for a few reasons. Firstly,

within her work, there is a shift from feminist anthropology to queer

theory; this feels analogous to shifts within our inquiry. Secondly, she

conceives of her own writing as a practice of exegesis, of reading

others against themselves to draw conclusions which are opposed to the

author’s intentions. Specifically, she heretically reads Levi-Strauss

and Freud, (apologists and technicians of gender) for the ways their

theories can be subverted. This practice aligns interestingly with our

abuse of a whole range of texts. And lastly, she defines her own project

as being an attempt to understand the origins of ‘the domestication of

women.’ While our own inquiry is more thorough than to be interested in

only the domestication of one gendered subject, we cannot help but feel

intrigued by a theory of gender that directly interrogates

domestication.

In her text, she aims to find the ‘systemic social apparatus’ which

transforms ‘females as raw material’ and ‘fashions domesticated women as

a product.’ Rubin contends that this apparatus is significant because it

dominates the lives ‘of women, of sexual minorities, and of certain

aspects of human personalities within individuals.’ She calls this

apparatus the sex/gender system and she believes that both anthropology

and psychoanalysis inadvertently describe mechanisms by which this

system constructs domesticated gender out of the occurrence of

biological sex. It is unfortunate that Rubin advocates the sex/gender

dichotomy that we’ve critiqued above, but this oversight doesn’t prevent

us from being able to use her study. After all, even without a

conception of naturalized sex, we are still interested in understanding

the social apparatus which transforms wild beings into domesticated

gendered products.

Interestingly enough, she begins her exploration of this apparatus by

first outlining the failure of Marxist feminism to account for it. She

wrote Traffic at a time when Marxist feminists such as Selma James,

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici were articulating a theory of

‘reproductive labor’ and specifically the labor performed by housewives

as being the root of women’s oppression and exploitation. This theory

stemmed from a desire on the part of these women to locate a theory of

gendered oppression that was a concomitant of the capitalist mode of

production.

Food must be cooked, clothes cleaned, beds made, wood chopped. Housework

is therefore a key element in the process of the reproduction of the

laborer from whom surplus value is taken. Since it is usually women who

do housework, it has been observed that it is through the reproduction

of labor power that women are articulated into the surplus-value nexus

which is the sine qua non of capitalism. It can be further argued that

since no wage is paid for housework, the labor of women in the home

contributes to the ultimate quantity of surplus value realized by the

capitalist. But to explain women’s usefulness to capitalism is one

thing. To argue that this usefulness explains the genesis of the

oppression of women is quite another. It is precisely at this point that

the analysis of capitalism ceases to explain very much about women and

the oppression of women.

This limit—the conflation of the exploitation of subjects by capitalism

with evidence that capitalism is the origin of those subjects—is a flaw

of all self-proclaimed ‘scientific’ disciplines which aim to generalize

one story into a materialist theory that locates economics as the cause

of all woes. Following from this, she identifies a wide range of

non-capitalist cultures which are vehemently patriarchal, including

pre-capitalist feudal Europe. She then details several practices of

gender domination (foot binding, chastity belts, and other fetishized

indignities) which cannot be accounted for by a Marxist analysis of the

reproduction of labor power. She argues that at most, Marxist Feminism

can explain the way capitalism seized upon and tinkered with already

existing forces of social control. ‘The analysis of the reproduction of

labor power does not even explain why it is usually women rather than

men who do domestic work in the home.’ She argues that economics cannot

account for the moral element which determines that a wife is among the

commodities needed by a man, that only men can talk to God, and that

women are the ones who perform domestic labor. To her, this moral

element is the massive and unexplored terrain from which gendered

violence emerges and that it is the basis of the femininity and

masculinity that capitalism later inherited. It is into this element

that she’ll direct the rest of her study. She concludes her critique of

Marxist feminism by illustrating the silliness of reducing the vastness

of the sex/gender system to being simply ‘the reproductive’ sphere. For

her, there is far too much excess in that system to be solely the

reproductive aspect of industrial production. Not to mention that it is

also productive in its own way: producing gendered subjects, for

example. The origins of gender domination, she claims, must be located

outside the ‘mode of production.’

Her attempt to find this outside is to first look at the writings of

Levi-Strauss in his explorations of early kinship structures. His

writing places gender and sexuality at the center of these structures;

he develops a theory that links their essence to the exchange of women

between men of various social groups. In doing so, Rubin believes he has

sketched an implicit theory of gendered oppression. He primarily comes

to this conclusion after studying the role of gift exchange in pre-state

arrangements. He finds that the exchange of gifts was the first measure

taken in the long road toward the development of ‘civil society’ and the

state. For him, marriage is one of the most significant forms of gift

exchange, with women themselves being the gifts given from one man to

another. From here, he analyzes the incest taboo as a means of policing

and enforcing this exchange of women as gifts. The taboo is less about

preventing endogamous sexual relations, and much more about obliging the

exchange of sisters and daughters into exogamous relations; it is an

early expression of commodity society. The exchange of human beings is

more powerful than other gifts because it is not simply an arrangement

of reciprocity, but one of kinship. This results in a more long-lasting

and expansive relationship which orders all other types of exchange

through the established kinship network.

The marriage ceremonies recorded in the ethnographic literature are

moments in a ceaseless and ordered procession in which women, children,

shells, words, cattle, names, fish, ancestors, whale’s teeth, pigs,

yams, spells, dances, mats and so on, pass from hand to hand, leaving as

their tracks the ties that bind. Kinship is organization, and

organization gives power.

Organization, then, is an original structure of power between those who

exchange others. This difference between the exchanged and the

exchangers is a primary split in the system we’ll call gender. For

Rubin, the split is between men as organizers, and women as conduits to

organization; men as exchange partners and women as gifts. The

circulation of women provides the mystical powers of kinship to the men

who exchange them; the men benefit from the subsequent social

organization. The vast permutations of gendered organization today will

not deviate from this unending exchange of bodies. Women are given in

marriage, taken in battle, exchanged for favors, sent as tribute,

traded, bought, and sold. Far from being confined to the “primitive

world,” these practices seem only to become more pronounced and

commercialized in more “civilized” societies. Rubin finds this concept

useful because it locates gender’s emergence in social structures,

rather than in biology. Further, it understands gender domination to be

more rooted in the exchange of bodies than in the exchange of

merchandise. Here, gender is not explained away as a function of

reproduction, but is production itself. It is an entire system where

individual bodies are produced as gendered subjects and exchanged in the

production of kinship structures. This system does not just exchange

women, but ancestry, lineage names, social power, children. The

inauguration of gender violence emerges from this system within which

sex and gender are organized; the economic exploitation of this or that

gender is secondary to this.

This story is relevant to the larger one we’re trying to weave because

it features gender as inextricably bound to a monster which is Rubin

euphemistically calls social organization. We would call the monster

domestication, and from this story we can determine a lot about its

character and tendencies. Rubin of course, in typical academic fashion,

shies away from the totality of these conclusions. She says that, since

Levi-Strauss located this exchange as the beginning of the culture of

civilization (“his analysis implies that the world-historical defeat of

women occurred with the origin of culture, and is a prerequisite of

culture”), holding to a firm interpretation of the theory would also

imply that her “feminist task” would require the destruction of that

culture. This destruction remains unthinkable in her system of thought.

Again, we’ll choose to go where others will not. That an argument points

to a necessary destruction of everything is precisely why we’d follow

it.

The second story that Gayle Rubin recites is one more common:

psychoanalysis and its Oedipus complex. Rubin correctly berates

psychoanalysis for its tendency to become more than a theory of the

mechanisms which reproduces gender and sexuality; she argues it has

largely become one of those mechanisms. She follows that a revolt

against the mechanisms of gender must then also be a critique of

psychoanalysis. This critique isn’t new for us; Hocquenghem’s queer

refusal of civilization is predicated on this very refusal of

psychoanalysis. Rubin looks at the same concepts as Hocquenghem in an

attempt to flesh out her theory of gender’s emergence. Primarily, she

concerns herself with how psychoanalysis can hint toward the way

children are forced into the categories of boys and girls. Her exegesis

of psychoanalysis mostly centers around Lacan, who views his efforts as

an attempt to identify the traces left in the individual’s psyche by

their conscription into kinship structures, as well as the

transformation of their sexuality as they are integrated into civilized

culture. For Rubin this is a nice complement to Levi-Strauss; whereas

the she had already examined the exchange of individuals within a gender

system, she now turns to the interior realities of those exchanged. She

begins from Oedipus:

Oedipal crisis occurs when a child learns of the sexual rules embedded

in the terms for family and relatives. The crisis begins when the child

comprehends the system and his or her place in it; Before the Oedipal

phase, the sexuality of the child is... unstructured. Each child

contains all the sexual possibilities available to human expression. But

in any given society, only some of these possibilities will be

expressed, while others will be constrained. Upon leaving the Oedipal

phase, the child’s libido and gender identity have been organized in

conformity with the rules of the culture which is domesticating it...

Oedipal complex is an apparatus for the production of sexual

personality. Societies will inculcate in their young the character

traits appropriate to carry on the business of society... such as the

transformation of the working class into good industrial workers. Just

as the social forms of labor demand certain kinds of personality, the

social forms of sex and gender demand certain kinds of people. In the

most general terms, the Oedipal complex is a machine which fashions the

appropriate forms of sexual individuals.

Psychoanalysis largely concerns itself with how a child can properly

adapt to this machine. Rubin would say that the machine needs to be

changed. We’ll assert that the machine must be destroyed. Rubin details

how the machine functions along with an equally familiar concept, the

phallus. She emphasizes that rather than being a biological object, the

phallus is primarily a symbol of belonging to a gendered social order.

The father possesses it, and so he can exchange it for a woman; if a boy

behaves and is properly domesticated, he can one day have the phallus

too. The girl is denied it, and thus has nothing with which to bargain

for it. The phallus is transmitted through particularly gendered bodies

and rests upon others. In the same way as the kinship system detailed by

Levi-Strauss gives certain people the ability to exchange others as a

commodity, the phallus is the mystical dimension of belonging which is

traded for these bodies in turn. For Rubin, these systems cohere into a

mutually reinforcing dynamic where women are dispossessed of their very

being, and are possessed and exchanged by men. The linkage of these men

through their exchange of the woman and phallus creates the social bonds

upon which organized civilization is based.

Rubin emphasizes that any part of the body can be a site of active or

passive eroticism. But by imbuing certain categories of similar anatomy

with the social power of the phallus, domestication concentrates erotic

power in certain geographies, tearing all other possibilities away from

gendered individuals. Psychoanalysis argues that those gendered as girls

are forced to accept their position within a gendered order where

they’ve been separated from their access to the phallus, or to socially

recognized eroticism. Traditional psychoanalysts describe this as the

formation of feminine personality. Rubin breaks from them in describing

it instead as a socialized enforcement of psychic brutality which forces

young children to internalize a logic of submission. The normative

interpretation is that one learns to accept this submission and take

pleasure from it. Here the scientists of psychoanalysis allow for the

triumphant return of biological essentialism—linking the pain of

penetration and child birth to a now rationalized internalization of

submission. Rubin will argue that this theory normatively functions to

naturalize and justify the gender order, and must be attacked for this

function. She proposes a more subversive reading of it as a diagnostic

of exactly how this machine functions. Our reading of it should

elucidate how that machine can be irreparably sabotaged.

For Rubin, a subversive reading of these two stories begins to unveil

aspects of the gender system which would otherwise remain hidden. She

calls them preliminary charts of the social machinery. Others today

would call it a study of apparatuses. In these charts, she reads a

system that is so intractable and monumental that it cannot be exorcised

through miniscule reforms. For her, the neat congruity between the two

stories indicates that the ancient methods of capture and exchange are

still at work in the present. She calls these methods domestication. She

argues that domestication will always happen and that the wild profusion

of sexual possibilities in the human body will always be tamed. And so

she rather cynically argues for a ‘feminist revolution’ to seize this

machinery and use it to ‘liberate human personality from the

straightjacket of gender.’ We don’t have any hope that this machinery

will ever be destroyed on a global scale, but this does not mean that we

believe in seizing it for our own use. (Just as we are not interested in

seizing state power or the means of production). Our anarchy is the

destruction of these machines and our escape from them. Fredy Perlman

argued that Leviathan is a dead thing which only has an artificial life

when living things inhabit it as captives. If we say that gender is

domestication, then Leviathan is one and the same as the gendered

machinery described above. Seizing the machinery will only continue the

nightmare that is gender: we have to find an escape route.

Rubin argues that these disciplines, psychoanalysis and anthropology

function as the most sophisticated rationalization of the sex/gender

system. We can see this as parallel to the argument made earlier

regarding anthropological documentation/enforcement of

heteronormativity. Surveillance is always a function of policing. Those

sciences which aim to analyze the world become blueprints for how the

world might be structured to fit their vision of it. We believe that

this is true of science in general; later we’ll contend that the same

holds for the science of historical materialism. And so just as we must

develop an antagonistic reading of anthropological stories, we must also

develop a reading of these maps. In them we aren’t looking for how to

maintain or even alter the machines. We are reading them as a prisoner

might study the stolen blueprints of a prison; as an enemy operation,

seeking the points at which they fail. These blueprints are of

absolutely no interest for us, save for the image of the world we aim to

leave; and even still, these images are two dimensional, bare lines,

inscrutable symbols.

The map presented to us is not the one drawn by Marxist feminism.

Economics form a dimension of our entrapment, but it is not the end all

and be all of gender. The terrain is sexual, psychological, ancestral,

familial, technological and moral. It may be economic and political too,

but not in any privileged sense. The gender system approaches a totality

of all the ways we are captured and the ways in which we internalize

that position. Rubin even suggests that the state-form itself may have

emerged from this shadowy web of phallic kinship. If we cannot

understand and combat gender as a totality, we will never be able to

break the curse of the ancient fathers.

While we disagree with Rubin on several of her (mostly political and

feminist) conclusions, and are rather bored by her form and obsession

with the writings of men of science, we have to appreciate her for her

line of inquiry. We can draw on her both in terms of her practice of

heretical reading, but also for her unwillingness to accept the simple

answers. By problematizing both the conceptions of gender as natural and

also as economic, she offers a way of avoiding the pitfalls of an

eco-feminist or Marxist-Feminist theory. Her approach is one that is

worthwhile if our intention is to locate gender at the moment of

domestication; no more and no less.

Perhaps most usefully her two stories correspond to what we might

identify as a twofold nature of domestication: bodily and spiritual. On

the one hand, domestication takes the form of the capture and exchange

of bodies within a social order. On the other, it involves the spiritual

taming of those individuals; the internalization of a spirit of

submission. These are not two isolated phenomena, but are mutually

constituting elements of a self-reproducing dynamic of gender. Form and

content. After all, a spiritual linkage is the result of the exchange of

body-commodities, just as the Oedipal logic of submission accompanies

the entrapment within a particular arrangement of the body. Each assault

and constraint upon the body fosters the development of a docile

spiritual disposition. Each alienation and dispossession from some

dimension of our bodily existence leads to an analogous fragmenting of

our psyche. The dualities of sex and gender can be understood as bodily

form and spiritual content of the domestication process. The symbolic

re-ordering of the body (as in the Phallus) has an accompanying fetish.

All the victim subjectivities follow directly from this capture of the

body. Equally so, our spiritual complicity with the gendered Leviathan

drives us to exchange bodies in pursuit of some mythical belonging. This

interplay leads to the creation of the gendered body and the

domesticated spirit. This is elsewhere called identity formation. The

dualities of sex and gender can be understood as bodily form and

spiritual content of the domestication process.

We must take the understanding further than Rubin, by conceptualizing

the duality of race as intrinsic to this bodily and spiritual dynamic.

In the same way that gender splits bodies and marks them for

circulation, race further elaborates this separation. Those captured as

black women, for example, were circulated within the slave system and

marked as hyper-sexual, perverse, and strong; justifying their rape,

hard labor and forced reproduction. The children they produced were

taken from them and circulated, while they themselves were forced to wet

nurse the white children of their masters. The racist figures of the

mammy and the sexually aggressive woman were (and still are) put to use

to justify the circulation and domination of the bodies of black women.

We obviously must also take Rubin’s account to task for the latent

essentialism within it. While she herself mimes some critique of them,

she ends up importing far too much of a conception of naturalized gender

from the men she reads. It is up to us to locate this dynamic of bodily

and spiritual domestication as being the foundation of all gendered

violence, and not simply of the violence against women. We’ve already

said that no gendered violence belongs to any one category, but it bears

repeating. This dynamic is at much at play in the systematic abuse of

young boys by priests as it is in the gang rape in military barracks and

fraternities, as it is in and sex slavery in prisons. The circulation of

bodies is obvious in these extreme instances, but it is also more

subtle: in advertising and pornography (gay and straight), in dating (of

the monogamous or polyamorous varieties), in sex work and service work,

in the technophilic ways we cruise, and in the ways we learn. It is

present in the ‘my’ which always corresponds to boyfriend, wife,

daughter, partner. It is what remains unspoken in initiatory rites of

secret orders of husbands, rapists and jailers. All of it—from the most

abominable to the most minute—is the unending dynamic of bodily capture,

spiritual submission, and circulation.

IX

While the ecstasy of the former living community languishes within the

Temple and suffers a slow and painful death, the human beings outside

the Temple’s precincts but inside the State’s lose their inner ecstasy.

The spirit shrivels up inside them. They become nearly empty shells.

We’ve seen that this happens even in Leviathans that set out, at least

initially, to resist such a shrinkage.

As the generations pass, the individuals within the cadaver’s entrails,

the operators of the great worm’s segments, become increasingly like the

springs and wheels they operate, so much so that sometime later they

will appear as nothing but springs and wheels. They never become

altogether reduced to automata; Hobbes and his successors will regret

this.

People never become altogether empty shells. A glimmer of life remains

in the faceless... who seem more like springs and wheels than like human

beings. They are potential human beings. They are, after all, the living

beings responsible for the cadaver’s coming to life, they are the ones

who reproduce, wean and move the Leviathan. Its life is but a borrowed

life; it neither breathes nor breeds; it is not even a living parasite;

it is an excretion and they are the ones who excrete it.

The compulsive and compulsory reproduction of the cadaver’s life is the

subject of more than one essay. Why do people do it? This is the great

mystery of civilized life.

It is not enough to say that people are constrained. The first captured

may do it only because they are physically constrained, but physical

constraint no longer explains why their children stick to their levers.

It’s not that constraint vanishes. It doesn’t. Labor is always forced

labor. But something else happens, something that supplements the

physical constraint.

At first the imposed task is taken on as a burden. The newly captured

one knows that he is not a ditch-repairman, he knows that he is a free

Canaanite filled to the brim with ecstatic life, for he still feels the

spirits of the Levantine mountains and forests throbbing inside him. The

ditch-fixing is something he takes on to keep from being slaughtered; it

is something he merely wears, like a heavy armor or an ugly mask. He

knows he will throw off the armor as soon as the manager’s back is

turned.

But the tragedy of it is that the longer he wears the armor, the less

able he is to remove it. The armor sticks to his body. The mask becomes

glued to his face. Attempts to remove the mask become increasingly

painful, for the skin tends to come off with it. There’s still a human

face below the mask, just as there’s still a potentially free body below

the armor, but merely airing them takes almost superhuman effort.

And as if all this weren’t bad enough, something starts to happen to the

individual’s inner life, his ecstasy. This starts to dry up. Just as the

former community’s living spirits shriveled and died when they were

confined to the Temple, so the individual’s spirit shrivels and dies

inside the armor. His spirit can breathe in a closed jar no better than

the god could. It suffocates. And as the Life inside him shrivels it

leaves a growing vacuum. The yawning abyss is filled as quickly as it

empties, but not by ecstasy, not by living spirits. The empty space is

filled with springs and wheels, with dead things, with Leviathan’s

substance.[8]

X

We’ve discussed domestication as a process that ensnares us within a

monster and infests our very being with the monster’s essence. We

continue to endeavor to name this monster gender. Fredy Perlman called

it Leviathan, but he also had a name for its spirit: His-story. If

domestication integrates us into the form of Leviathan, then it enchants

us with His-story. So we turn to this enchantment:

His-story is a chronicle of the deeds of the men at the phallus-helm of

Leviathan, and in its largest sense it is the “biography” of what Hobbes

will call the Artificial Man. There are as many His-stories as there are

Leviathans.

But His-story tends to become singular for the same reason that Sumer

and now the whole Fertile Crescent becomes singular. The Leviathan is a

cannibal. It eats its contemporaries as well as its predecessors. It

loves a plurality of Leviathans as little as it loves Earth. Its enemy

is everything outside of itself.

His-story is born with Ur, with the first Leviathan. Before or outside

of the first Leviathan there is no His-story.

The free individuals of a community without a State did not have a

His-story, by definition: they were not encompassed by the immortal

carcass that is the subject of His-story. Such a community was a

plurality of individuals, a gathering of freedoms. The individuals had

biographies, and they were the ones who were interesting. But the

community as such did not have a “biography,” a His-story.

Yet the Leviathan does have a biography, an artificial one. “The King is

dead; Long Live the King!” Generations die, but Ur lives on. Within the

Leviathan, an interesting biography is a privilege conferred on very few

or on only one; the rest have dull biographies, as similar to each other

as the Egyptian copies of once beautiful originals. What is interesting

now is the Leviathan’s story, at least to His scribes and His-storians.

To others, as Macbeth will know, the Leviathan’s story, like its

ruler’s, is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying

nothing.” The ruler is killed by an invader or a usurper and his great

deeds die with him. The immortal worm’s story ends when it is swallowed

by another immortal. The story of the swallowings is the subject of

World His-story, which by its very name already prefigures a single

Leviathan which holds all Earth in its Entrails.

A friend, writing in the nihilist journal Attentat[9], takes this to

mean that Leviathan is constantly decomposing and that its biographers

are trained not to see this decomposition. Instead, historians and

intellectuals engineer stories to explain the movement of the beast

through time. This is often called History, but can also Progress,

Destiny, etc. The writer in Attentat says that this subtle contention in

Fredy’s thinking entirely breaks from any linear (either progressive or

regressive) view of history, arguing instead that history is

a process of increasing complication, destructiveness, falling-apart of

previous epochs (along with their attitudes, ideas, practices, and so

on)... 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.’

In the first issue of this journal, we explored this sense of delay as

the perpetual displacement of a future utopia promised to us by the

soothsayers of Historical analysis. It gets better if only we are

patient enough to wait. Most accounts of history are simple variants of

this impetus to wait—for the material conditions, for heavenly ascent,

for the messiah, for any number of ways to describe the wholeness which

awaits us at the end of this or that dialectic. Camatte called this

delay the wandering of humanity away from its course. We’ll follow our

nihilist friend in giving up on this understanding of delay and looking

instead to decomposition. This sense of delay cannot be trapped in any

periodization (however technical or refined), but rather is descriptive

of the whole of time consumed within history. This is the same reason

that apocalyptic visions have also always defined the endpoint of

Leviathan’s conception of itself. History is the narration of perpetual

decomposition.

Attentat argues that such a conception of history would mean an

awareness of the unique character of events, but without locating them

in any temporal logic (order, progress, explanation, justification). We

interpret this as a collection of stories which hint toward the beast’s

tendencies, but never ascertain its totality. Taken as a whole, these

stories do not offer a cohesive metanarrative, only fragmenting.

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-historial, or anti-historical currents.

Any attempt to systematize the episodic explosions of revolt only

rationalizes its defeat, reducing it to just another triumph in the

perpetual motion of the decomposing beast.

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 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,

organized 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.

If the question of his-story is always already the gender question, then

this perspective is crucial to our inquiry because the dead thing in

question is gender—the ordering of life, the stiffening of our gestures.

But gender has no life of its own. It destroys everything before it,

then breaks down, it decays, and its decomposing parts are reorganized

again. We are split in half, body and soul are recomposed into a

gendered unity which itself decays, we rebel and then this rebellion is

identified, split once more. It is this interplay of decomposition and

recomposition that concerns us. What is this re-capture of life other

than domestication all over again? Where do we locate gender as

domestication if we can see decomposition and recomposition everywhere?

The theories we’ve critiqued have all been attempts to tell an origin

story—to historically place gender. But gender cannot be situated at any

point along a linear narrative: it is our very inscription into the

line. Some theorists of gender will become obsessed with this task:

universalizing and totalizing what is really incidence. The outside to

gender is not situated at either end of this line, (nor within any neat

periodization) but rather where the line breaks apart. If we decide to

listen to the self-narration of this breaking apart, then it is because

we might hear something within it (maybe a background noise, or a

meaningful pause) which shows us where the decomposition can be

hastened, where we might sneak out, or ways that others have attempted

to evade being recomposed. This is how we can situate our perspective

against his-story, Leviathan, gender, et al.

XI

In the last few years, there have been several attempts within the

anarchist milieu to historicize gender. These attempts have largely

focused on readings of two books about the same time period: Caliban and

the Witch by Silvia Federici, and Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture

by Arthur Evans. Caliban represents a very thorough analysis of the

mechanics of gender during the imposition of capitalism, specifically

exploring the European colonialism as well as witch hunts in western

Europe as a case of the accumulation of women’s bodies and labor.

Witchcraft narrates the same story, but from a different perspective.

While Caliban is worth reading for its wealth of information, its

structure is largely problematic. Federici holds to an essentialist view

of gender; she wants to tell the story of capitalism’s relationship to

women, a category she firmly defends. She dismisses all challenges to

the naturalization of the gender binary with little more than an

assertion of its correctness. Her tautology (that the category of women

is valid because it is a valid category) is all the more absurd in that

she conflates the experiences of women in one part of the world, during

one time period, as being the basis of the gendered reality for women

all over the globe, at all subsequent times. Consequently, her work

wholly ignores the gendered violence against bodies which do not fit

within her neat categories. The vast persecution of faggots during the

Inquisition and witch hunt, to name one example, is afforded little more

than a scarce mention in her book.

To her credit, she does challenge the orthodox Marxist interpretations

of History: she claims that the rise of capitalism cannot be seen as

progressive if looked at from the perspective of gender, but also that

there is no linear transition to capitalism—only a series of violent

episodes of capture and reversal. And yet still her perspective remains

all too limited by her own autonomous variant of Marxism. For her, all

of the atrocities of the witch hunts are to be explained by analyzing

the economic necessities of the capitalist mode of production. More

specifically, these atrocities are necessitated by the requirement that

women perform reproductive labor within the newly forged proletariat.

This could be read as a useful movement away from the absurd notion

(held by Federici and her contemporaries) that contemporary gender

violence can be uniquely and primarily explained in the domestic labor

of European women in the last century. Yet still her cathexis upon

economics feels like an attempt to project the same notion into the more

distant past. We’ve already discussed the limitations of this approach

with regard to gender; the re-orientation toward an earlier period

doesn’t change these limits. The text feels all the more limited for the

fact that she makes maybe two mentions of the existence of gendered

violence before this period and offers no explanations as to how that

violence came about. This leaves us with that same poverty of

naturalized gender.

A central theme of her work is primitive accumulation; the first

accumulation of a population by Leviathan. She sees this as a transition

in her own teleology. However the beast against which her subjects

revolt is not born of this or any fixed period, it is constantly

decomposing and being born anew. Its mode of capture in the form of

gender is not predicated on its mode of production; it is firstly a

bodily and spiritual operation upon which an economic mode is sutured.

Her story begins amidst a revolt precisely because its subjects are

rebelling against their earlier capture. The following round of

accumulation, consequently, cannot be the first. It is also worth noting

that in her exhaustive narrative of the history of the witch hunts, she

remains dismissive if not silent about the role of magic itself. This

amounts to a purely Materialist reading which cannot account for the

spiritual dimensions of domestication as capture. Federici’s tale is one

story about an intensification of the process we call gender. She may be

wrong in situating that story within a specific periodization, and in

her account of why the events played out, but we’re willing to sift

through to glean what we may from it. Our instinct is that she may well

be correct to pay particular attention to these events, but only on the

chance that those rebels burnt at the stake may reveal some occult

secrets regarding their own conflict against Leviathanic gender.

Arthur Evans’ book is more interesting in that it diverges from

Federici’s on these exact points. Where she asserts an essential Woman,

he specifically explores the witch hunts as an attempt to destroy a

whole range of sexually deviant and gender variant people. Where

Federici limits her critique to the rise of capitalism, Evans indicts

all of western civilization in his. Where Federici is indifferent to the

practices and beliefs of her story’s victims, Evans tries to listen and

perceive what arcane revelations they might offer in a violent and

anarchic war against gendered civilization. He also weaves a critique of

History throughout his text; indicting (as Fredy Perlman does elsewhere)

historians for their complicity in the aggrandizing of Leviathan and the

erasure of those it has tried to destroy. Most provocatively, he carves

out space for myth within his narrative. And yet still he doesn’t go far

enough. Instead of an anti-history, he counters with Gay History, as if

history’s only problem was its homophobia. As with Federici’s

naturalization of the category women, we must also flinch at Evans’

uncritical deployment of some universal Gay People into which all the

divergent and unique heretics fit. This categorical construction is the

exact recomposition alluded to in the Attentat piece; the swallowing

whole of so many decomposed fragments by a reincarnation of gender. A

queer critique must sidestep this trap.

So why read these books? What remains of them if we strip away the grand

metanarratives about the movement of abstractions like History; or if we

refuse to impose our contemporary subject categories back through time?

The remainder is a collection of stories. And these stories differ from

his-story, in that they are about the exploits and adventures of

individuals, not the machinery which holds them captive. Stories

interest us also because they do not seize upon this or that time, but

enchant the teller and the listener into active participation. The story

is the primary method of the magical practices of oral culture.

His-story is the Socratic Ideal of these stories, the One story which

cannibalizes all the others. Critical histories like Caliban and

Witchcraft (or any ‘people’s history’) only serve to integrate these

tales into the all-consuming one. This becomes a game of abstraction;

how a collection of trial statements, handbooks on inquisition,

heretical documents and biographies of accused witches become The

Accumulation of Women Within Capitalist Mode of Production or Gay

History or The Old Religion. Interestingly enough, it has been argued by

some (such as David Abram) that

the burning alive of tens of thousands of women (most of the herbalists

and midwives from peasant backgrounds) as “witches” during the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries may usefully be understood as the attempted,

and nearly successful, extermination of the last orally preserved

traditions of Europe—the last traditions rooted in the direct,

participatory experience of plants, animals and elements—in order to

clear the way for the dominion of alphabetic reason over a world

increasingly construed as a passive and mechanical set of objects.

It is not surprising that as a consequence most accounts of this period

suffer from the tragedy it imposed upon our conceptions of ourselves and

of time. To truly read against His-story is to read with attention to

the stories themselves, without an attempt to systematically or

universally place them.

In a world that lacks the abstract ideals, directionality and universal

moralism of His-storical thought, stories are useful in that they tell

us discreet lessons that might assist us in our day to day conflicts.

Only when we stop trying to decipher the Truth of His-story, can we

actually notice the subtle web of meanings and messages hidden between

the stories at our disposal. Here are a few we’ve noticed:

• Most of the stories about the imposition of gender are also stories

about the creation of institutions and the flight of individuals from

them. At times called enclosure or industrialism, these institutions

tend to separate us from the vast experiences of life. Once we could

find our own food, make our own clothes, discover our own sexual

practices, heal ourselves and commune directly with the wild spirits.

Now all of these experiences are mediated through farms, schools,

churches, and hospitals. The institutionalization of the world could be

understood as the material armors of the spiritual poverty imposed

through domestication. This institutionalization is always violent. The

ascendency of institutional medicine, for example, emerges out of the

ashes of herbalists burnt alive by witch hunters. Gender, is constantly

re-defined and re-inscribed through these institutions. Foremost among

them is the Family. The enclosure of forests and fields corresponds to

an enclosure of peoples’ means of care and survival into this private

familial unit. The family becomes the primary unit for enforcing private

property, enforcement of discipline, and policing of sexuality.

• While Leviathan attempts to swallow the entire world, devouring any

divergence, it inadvertently brings the outside within. Christianity

made this law: Thou shall have no other gods before me. The Nazis

attempted to perfect this racist science as Gleichschaltung. But the

elimination of wild diversity is never total. The newly internalized

divergence often re-emerges in the form of a heresy. This constant

rupture of hegemony often seems like a widespread decomposition of the

unity of this or that institution. Regarding gender, this heresy is

elsewhere called the queer. Leviathan will, from time to time, deploy a

specialized force of police to put down these heresies; these are called

inquisitions. The holy war comes home, the war against the outside is

turned inward. Little will be known of the doctrines and practices of

these heretic sects, for the inquisition’s method is also His-storical:

it aims to annihilate their stories as much as their bodies. These

inquisitions, whatever century they occur, will each emerge as a more

advanced and innovative laboratory of torture and subjection; the most

perverse in the recorded history of state repression. No expense will be

spared in eliminating these internal colonies.

• Active resistance to Leviathan often takes on an ecstatic character.

Fredy Perlman will refer to the great dances spreading like fire

throughout leagues of deserters. Inquisitors and witch hunters will be

haunted by the image of nighttime orgies and sabbats. Elsewhere we’ve

written that queer desire is the locus point of the dread of an entire

social order’s self-annihilation. The most beautiful moments of

insurgency are immanent to a decomposition of gendered and sexual roles.

Ecstasy, from ekstasis, is to be outside one’s self. To flee from

domestication is also to flee from the selves (in both their bodily and

spiritual dimensions) to which we’ve been constrained. To be outside

these selves is the initial break. These breaks are often couched in the

language of their times: as animism, or renewal of long vanquished

deities, the apocalypse as an immanent lived reality. What is consistent

is the emphasis on direct and immediate joy. These eruptions of revolt

are not limited to this or that historical period, but are universal

throughout His-story. They happen in cities, in the countryside, amidst

the peasantry, and in labor camps.

• The repression of this ecstatic revolt will always include a sexual

dimension. This repression aims to reinscribe the body and spirit of the

resisters into their domestic selves. The use of sexual violence as a

repressive tactic or the almost universal conflation of criminal charges

against homosexuality, heresy and witchcraft help to illustrate

this.[10] Many witch hunters implied or explicitly accused witches of

having sexual relations with their animal familiars, continuing the

Christian tradition of separating humanity out of the rest of the living

world, while marking the beastly as worthy of domination. Nudity,

hallucinogens and unkempt hair all become sensual crimes of the body.

Collective forms of sexuality and sociality are criminalized in order to

maximize productive time. Rape is consistently used as a tactic of

domination by conquering armies, torture by inquisitors, and division

amidst rebel populations. The state, at various moments,

institutionalizes and subsumes prostitution, both as a pressure valve

against revolt, but also as a cure for deviant sexual practices.

Non-reproductive sexualities are annihilated both for the challenge they

pose to the emergent heterosexual matrix, but also for the conspiracies

and escape plots implied in these relations. Indigenous resisters are

always denounced by missionaries as lacking morality regarding sexuality

and gender; this immorality is mobilized in expansive fantasies of

colonialists and pioneers. The bodies of colonized resisters are marked

for rape and execution. These operations lay the groundwork for the

genocidal endeavors of witch hunts and holocausts. As we are alienated

from the world, we are alienated from our bodies.

In order to pre-empt this type of escape from ourselves, Leviathan must

institute ever more complex Subjects for its constituents. These

subjects are the end result of a litany of techniques aimed at

mechanizing, disciplining , emotionally manipulating and controlling the

human body. The reduction of certain bodies to baby-factories is a prime

example, but also the scientific diagnostics of various sexual deviants

or the disciplinary control of gender variant people. Those who

willfully or instinctually resist these techniques must be classified as

Other. This othering is often composed of racializing and gendering

processes. Against these Others, no violence is excessive. The Other,

whether Witch or Terrorist or Drapetomaniac or Faggot or whatever, is

the legitimate recipient of all sorts of brutalities designed to either

assimilate or annihilate the deviancy. These crimes become crimen

exceptum.

Once Leviathan has constructed its institutions and the corresponding

machine-like bodies, its primary project becomes the movement of these

tendencies toward infinity. All of our efforts to critique the The Child

in the previous issue of this journal are in response to this project of

uninhibited growth. Those who practice any form of resistance to this

project must therefore be the Other worthy of annihilation. The Child

functions as the fantastic future of the parent’s race. Any decline in

the (civilized) population will be seen as a threat to the state, which

in turn will ramp up the techniques of sexual repression described

above. Workers and Slaves will be encouraged to produce more workers and

slaves. In these moments, the sexual and abortive dimensions of heresy

and witchcraft will come to the forefront of the inquisition trials. It

is not a coincidence that witches and queer heretics were executed for

having allegedly sacrificed children to the Devil. The demonization of

birth control can also be understood through this lens. This fanatical

desire to increase population lead even the most misogynist religious

and state leaders to proclaim that women’s sole virtue was their natural

capacity for childbirth. As Martin Luther said: “whatever their

weaknesses, women possess one virtue that cancels them all: they have a

womb and they can give birth.”

Rationalism, Reason, Enlightenment (or any other lie told by Leviathan

about itself) never lead to the abolition of these genocidal and

bloodthirsty practices. Rather, these ideologies only lead to the

institutionalization and increased technological sophistication of

violence. These ideologies end up serving as justification for brutality

against the irrational Other. There is no linear progress out of this

brutality. While the good subjects are may be encouraged to infinitely

reproduce, the actual children of the racial or colonized Other will

often by slaughtered with impunity. Even while promoting the ideology of

the Child, the state is constantly and discreetly acting to impose a

scientific campaign of eugenics, extermination and forced sterilization

upon those it deems to be a racial outside.

These are only a few of an infinity of lessons we might extract from any

constellation of stories—lessons which have as much relevance today as

they would in centuries past. Rather than a narrative about

Domestication as an Idea, we have a fragmentary and esoteric set of

tales that each describes what domestication looks like in a particular

moment. More excitingly they also describe how people chose to rebel

against this process. To tell ourselves these stories is to connect to

the individuals and moments which have attempted an escape from the

nightmare of His-story. This connection becomes most meaningful when the

stories enchant our own being and are given body through our own

experiences. These stories only matter insofar as they produce a

visceral understanding of flight from this ancient protocol of

separation and capture. This is the dimension that must always be

centered in a newfound reading of His-story as decomposition.

Decomposition isn’t only a force of nature or accident; it is primarily

the willful refusal of Leviathan by individuals and groups. Leviathan

breaks down when those who maintain its springs and wheels refuse to do

so—when they flee to the mountains, sing, dance and practice ecstatic

ritual; when they scream, loot and burn; when they rip out the armor,

tear off the mask and burn the beast to the ground.

If these stories illustrate instances of domestication, they also

illustrate the imposition of gender. The inherent decomposition which

afflicts gender is what we call the queer; not this or that historically

constituted subject category, but all the divergent bodily and spiritual

expressions which escape their roles. In the first issue of the journal,

we said that this was a queerness understood negatively. As

rebellion/decomposition is intrinsic to stories about domestication, so

is the outpouring of queer desire.

For this reason, dogmatists (particularly of the Marxist variety), have

accused us of being ahistorical and idealist. To the former, we have no

rebuttal. We’d happily find ourselves outside of the Story of mass

rapists, kings and industrialists. We certainly won’t cling to any of

the Identities offered within it, nor trust any of the prescriptions

laid out by its Scholars. Even worse would be to be organized by such a

prescription of history. When our friends in Attentat described the

recomposition and further decomposition which follows any decay of

history, we read this as the Organization which follows moments of

rupture, and the predictable falling-apart of all such political

organizations. If we follow Rubin to say that all Organization is

predicated on the exchange of gendered bodies, then we must also

recognize inevitable rebellion of bodies against political organization.

Radical or Feminist organizations are not exempt from this

decomposition; it is routinely referred to as burnout or infighting,

though we could understand it as an instinctual refusal to be captured

and mobilized by this or that Organization.

After all, the tendency of queerness against his-story has always been

the ecstasy of life lived outside of time; without concern for whether

the time is right, for the material conditions or for the Children.

Queerness must always emerge as out of its time, deviant, irrational.

To the latter charge, we can only shrug. The Socratic trick of Ideas

doesn’t really concern us. We’ll leave the universals and the big

stories to the His-storians. We’ll concern ourselves instead with the

beautiful moments of heresy and revolt—the lived experiences, bodily

practices and spiritual intensity—which hint toward our own.

The resistance is the only human component of the entire His-story. All

the rest is Leviathanic progress.

Second Mythos: Lilith and Eve

In the patriarchal mythology of Judeo-Christian civilization, Adam was

the first man, and God gave him a wife. Most know about Eve, his second

wife. Fewer tell of his first; Lilith. Lilith differed in that she

refused to be subservient to Adam. She wouldn’t lay beneath him in the

missionary position, and so she was expelled from Eden. Upon her

expulsion, she became a demon, a succubus who travelled through night

and through time, breeding with other demons and unleashing evil

spirits. It is said that at night she still tempts women to leave their

husbands, turns men into faggots, encourages all manner of

non-reproductive sexuality, and even steals and eats children.

God the father couldn’t make the same mistake twice, and so he fashioned

Adam’s second wife, Eve, out of one of Adam’s own ribs, ensuring her

obedience. And still she disobeyed, she ate the fruit from the forbidden

tree of knowledge and both she and her husband were banished from Eden.

Some, such as Walter Benjamin, will view this as the expulsion of

humanity from primitive communism. All the subsequent stories of The

Holy Book of this religion is largely a lament of civilized life. Its

first chapter narrates the fall, and the following chapters tell of the

miseries within and exodus from various civilizations.

But what was this forbidden knowledge? What was the original sin? A

certain heresy tells that the forbidden knowledge was the realization

that a certain type of sex leads to reproduction. Once Adam and Eve knew

this, they couldn’t unlearn it. From here, all of their activities were

tied to an emerging symbolic order of domination. Whereas before they

had simply indulged in utopia without a future, now their actions had

consequences. From this knowledge stems the invention of the role of the

Father, as well as the knowledge necessary for agriculture, and even the

first form of the rational thought which would later become Science.

Patriarchy, Civilization, Reproductive Futurism. All of it stems from

this abominable discovery.

The church’s misogynists will blame Eve for this discovery and

expulsion, but as we well know, it is the fathers, herders, husbands,

inquisitors and witch hunters who put these arcane secrets to use in the

mechanization of the body. These same woman-haters will sentence

countless women and faggots to burn for having fallen under the

influence of the rebel demon Lilith.

If we cannot unlearn these secrets, what would it mean to destroy the

machinery which dominates us through them? Can we recall Lilith and fly

with her at night?

XII

Of all these stories, there is one which occurs consistently in almost

any worthwhile history of gender: the splitting of the mind from the

body. Various accounts will attribute this split to different times and

places, but its centrality and power are beyond question.

Anti-civilization critiques will often locate this as a primary

emergence of dualism in the world (Zerzan will say it stems immediately

from the dualism of gender), whereas Federici will find it in the

machinations of the witch hunts; Evans in the rise of industrialism.

Again, the precise origins interest us less than its repeated and

unending operation. Wherever it started, the split widens and continues

to tear us away from ourselves.

It is intuitive that such a split would be necessary in order to

acclimate wild beings into those beings fit for labor in the world of

work. If one is solely reliant on their own sensual perception of the

world—the relation of their body to the bodies of other animals, plants

and humans—then that bodily awareness is precisely what must be

destroyed for the workers to be born. The disciplining of the body is

the precondition of industrial existence.

This disciplining of the body can be understood as an internalization of

the warfare occurring outside of it. The battleground of social control

becomes the body itself, the site of an eternal conflict between Reason

and Passion; Enlightenment and Darkness.

On the one side, there are the ‘forces of Reason’: parsimony, prudence,

sense of responsibility, self-control. On the other, the ‘low instincts

of the Body’: lewdness, idleness, systematic dissipation of one’s vital

energies. The battle is fought on many front because Reason must be

vigilant against the attacks of the carnal self, and prevent ‘the wisdom

of the flesh’ (in Luther’s words) from corrupting the powers of the

mind. In the extreme case, the person becomes a terrain for a war of all

against all.’[11]

Others will call this Civil War, we will say it is part and parcel of

the capture of the body in domestication. The body is a microcosm for

this phenomena.

The commodification of bodies and of their capacities leads to an

estrangement from self; a disassociation from the majority of one’s

activity and experience. The body is reified and reduced to an object.

This separation and objectification of the body reaches arrives at its

own self-realization through Cartesian philosophy. Hobbes will enact a

related attack upon the body in reducing it to the functioning of a

machine. In later times, this mechanized view will reach a new apex

through the theory of genetics. More esoteric theorists of genetics will

argue that body is a machine-vessel for sentient and selfish genes which

deploy said bodies in an effort to eternally perpetuate themselves. The

philosophical mechanization of the body becomes so total that it is

projected back through history and into our very biology. In a strange

paradox, science revives God as the ultimate refutation of free will:

genetics. Genetic manipulation and nanotechnological methods of

surveillance and control are only the most contemporary manifestations

of this archaic split.

But the projection of this invention onto the physical world is not done

philosophically, it is done through bodily violence. The torture

chambers of witch hunters, Nazi doctors and vivisectors are also the

laboratories for the emergence of the mechanized body. This is also, of

course, the violence of gendered domestication, as gender is that first

dualism and remains the primary operation upon the body. The body is

continuously dissected so as to identify and naturalize the biological

differences which supposedly justify the entirety of the gendered world.

The sex/gender dichotomy, but also the dichotomies of race are neatly

mapped over the body/mind, and corresponds to an unending set of

disciplinary measures and techniques of the self designed to maintain

binary conformity. Black and feminine bodies are imagined as indocile

and in need of disciplining, while white masculine bodies are believed

to be rational and tame. Bodies viewed with any innate connection to

animality can then justifiably be exposed to hard labor, sexual

violence, and extermination.

Personally, any inquiry into the split between the mind and body yields

a crazy diffusion of revelations. I immediately think of the experience

of motion sickness as a worthwhile example. As an instinctual response

to feeling motion without consciously perceiving it, this nausea is a

helpful defense mechanism against the inadvertent consumption of various

poisons. Outside of industrialism, this phenomenon is only experienced

on the off chance that someone eats a hallucinogen. Yet in a world like

our own, where we are constantly disassociating from the movement of our

bodies, this nausea becomes universal. The repetitive motion injuries

from my performance of service work (where the quick movement of the

wrists and knees corresponds more to the needs of a Point-of-Sale system

or bag of groceries than to any other agency) is another reminder of a

nearly total disconnect of my perception from the actual movement of my

body. The split widens through our acclimation to this constant pain and

dizziness; the further severance of perception functions as a tragic

survival strategy.

Regarding gender, the split is all the more blatant. As a teenager, my

own experience of dysphoria and body dysmorphia led to the

self-enactment of a whole range of disciplinary measure and torture in

the form of anorexia. This was an experience I shared with the vast

majority of my friends who grew up as girls and queers. These techniques

of self-control reappear in the context of sex work. In order to more

profitably sell our sexual labor, we are constantly project the Ideal of

gender upon our bodies; mutilating them and reducing them to objects of

our own mechanization. More than just physiology, this domination

concerns itself with gestures, grooming, communication, sexual

propensity. In the actual experience of sex work, the split widens

again. While some horrifying John is touching me, my mind struggles to

be anywhere but my own body. I think about the capital, about my bank

account, what I’ll have for dinner; anything besides what is actually

occurring to my body. I’ve experienced this flight from the body in

countless other moments; while being arrested, while being sexually

assaulted, while drunk. Even the experience of walking through the

hallways of a high school can tear us from ourselves: how should I carry

myself today so as not to face the predictable violence of a queer

basher?

The story of the mind/body split gives us a helpful tool in

understanding the complexity and nuance of the contention that

domestication is the capture and engendering of our bodies. Where Fredy

Perlman saw springs and wheels filling the armor encased body, we can

read this as the re-ordering of the living body through its conflict

with the rational mind. The fantasy of Biological Sex, of Race, and all

other supposedly natural categories correspond to this same logic of

severance of bodies from each other and the mind from the body.

Taxonomies of the body consistently serve to rationalize, systematize

and place the varied happenstances of the body into a Leviathanic

structure. This mechanistic theory of biology attempts to lay down our

destiny.

XIII

Most theories of the split between mind and body miss a concomitant, yet

unique, split: the material from the spiritual. The separation and

obscuring of the spiritual dimension of gendered existence leaves us

with a tragic inability to express or even really comprehend the

implications of these operations of capture. To ignore the spiritual

dimension of domestication leaves us with only half the story; with a

crass, mechanistic materialism that can only offer us crass, mechanistic

solutions.

If the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was

the first machine developed by capitalism, then what is remains of all

the capacities of the body which cannot be efficiently put to use or

rationalized by this technological innovation? The imposition of a

Cartesian Master/slave dynamic between the mind/body also means the

generalization of that dynamic toward all of the forms and capacities of

life which once enchanted the body’s sensual connection to the wild

world. Our being was inscribed into a soulless world and a machine-body.

Francis Bacon lamented that magic kills industry. And this is precisely

because the continued relation of human beings to their magical

capacities was also their capacity to find meaning and sustenance

outside of the world of work and industry. Magical and spiritual beliefs

were dangerous simply because their refusal of linear, empty time itself

was a source of insubordination. In order for Leviathan to achieve its

restructuring of the body, it had to first divorce the body of its

participation in a cosmology of power and spirit. The perceived wildness

of the witches had to be crushed alongside the wildness of the world.

Leviathan alone would possess the ability to alter, enchant and deploy

the body. This control over the body certainly happens in a largely

metaphysical operation, yet it obscures itself and pretends toward the

Natural and Objective. Perhaps the most sinister aspect of the spiritual

decimation which mechanizes the body is that it denies the existence of

spirit at all.

The mechanization of the body is so constitutive of the individual that,

at least in industrialized countries, giving space to the belief in

occult forces does not jeopardize the regularity of social behavior.

Astrology too can be allowed to return, with the certainty that even the

most devoted consumer of astral charts will automatically consult the

watch before going to work.[12]

This mechanization was achieved through the twofold operation of denying

the spiritual existence while also destroying the rebel body. Hobbes:

“As for witches, I think not that their witchcraft is any real power;

but yet they are justly punished, for the false belief they have that

they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they

can.” Fredy Perlman and Arthur Evans will both criticize historians of

the witch hunt for reiterating this same domesticated

analyses—justifying the massacres of the witch hunts by projecting the

mechanistic understanding of the body through time and into the

‘natural’ world.

The stakes on which witches and other practitioners of magic died, and

the chambers in which their tortures were executed, were a laboratory in

which much social discipline was sedimented, and much knowledge about

the body was gained. Here those irrationalities were eliminated that

stood in the way of the transformation of the individual and social body

into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. And it was here

again that the scientific use of torture was born...

This battle, significantly occurring at the foot of the gallows,

demonstrates both the violence that presided over the scientific

rationalization of the world, and the clash of two opposite concepts of

the body, two opposite investments in it. On one side, we have a concept

of the body that sees it endowed with powers even after death; the

corpse does not inspire repulsion, and is not treated as something

rotten or irreducibly alien. On the other, the body is seen as dead even

when still alive, insofar as it is conceived as a mechanical device, to

be taken apart just like any machine. [...] The course of scientific

rationalization was intimately connected to the attempt by the state to

impose its control over an unwilling workforce.

Feral Faun put things another way in “The Quest for the Spiritual”:

This civilized, technological, commodity culture in which we live is a

wasteland. For most people, most of the time, life is dull and empty,

lacking vibrancy, adventure, passion and ecstasy. It’s no surprise that

many people search beyond the realm of their normal daily existence for

something more. It is in this light that we need to understand the quest

for the spiritual...

I discovered that this dualism [between the material and the spiritual]

was common to all religions with the possible exceptions of some forms

of Taoism and Buddhism. I also discovered something quite insidious

about the flesh/spirit dichotomy. Religion proclaims the realm of spirit

to be the realm of freedom, of creativity, of beauty, of ecstasy, of

joy, of wonder, of life itself. In contrast, the realm of matter is the

realm of dead mechanical activity, of grossness, of work, of slavery, of

suffering, of sorrow. The earth, the creatures on it, even our own

bodies were impediments to our spiritual growth, or at best, tools to be

exploited. What a perfect ideological justification for the exploitative

activities of civilization... as exploitation immiserated the lives of

people, the ecstatic joy of wild existence and of the flesh unrepressed

became fainter and fainter memories until at last they seemed to be not

of this world at all. This world was the world of travail (from the

Latin root word which gives all the Romance languages their word for

work) and sorrow. Joy and ecstasy had to be of another realm—the realm

of spirit. Early religion is wildly orgiastic, clearly reflecting the

lost way of life for which people longed. But by separating this wild

abandon into the realm of spirit, which is in reality just a realm of

abstract ideas with no concrete existence, religion made itself the

handmaiden of civilized, domesticated culture...

This transformation of the body into predictable and controllable

operations is absolutely central to the naturalization of the category

of sex. The uterus becomes a machine—controlled by the state and

doctors—for the production of new bodies. The incomprehensible diversity

of the human body becomes reduced to a simplistic and quantitative

relation between various chemicals and hormones. Certain shapes are

deemed healthy while others abnormal and in need of surgical

intervention. The binary of the so-called sex organs is almost achieved

through this ongoing mutilation. Certain ratios of the distribution of

fat, hair, bone structure and other occurrences come to be immutable

proof of the eternal existence of the social prison of sex. In order for

this prison to be totalizing, our conception of ourselves must be

debased to these material operations. The engendering of humanity into

the rational sexual body required the destruction of magic precisely

because a magical view of the world holds that it is animated,

unpredictable and that there is an occult force in plants, animals,

stones, the stars and ourselves. Within this animist worldview, our

individual capacities are not limited to the supposed biological destiny

of sex; instead we can create, destroy, love, and take pleasure in an

infinity of situations. This anarchic, molecular diffusion of powers

throughout the world is antithetical to a gendered and social order

which aims at capturing and dominating all life. The world had to be

disenchanted to be dominated.

Here is science born. The disenchanted world can now be explained

through rational, objective inquiry. And yet it is a meaningful

contradiction that this new science did not mean an end to what it would

have seen as an irrational persecution of witches. Instead, mechanistic

philosophers celebrated the witch hunts as the advancement of the

rational worldview. Francis Bacon, one of the early high priests of

science, is explicit in taking methods of scientific inquiry directly

out of torture chambers of the inquisition. For science, the whole world

becomes analogous to a witch: a body to be interrogated, tortured, raped

and unveiled. Far from relegated to this particular period, we can see

repeating over and over again in Nazi death camps, the medical

experimentation on prisoners, the vivisection of animals, etc.

Scientific rationalism is not some progressive intervention against

brutality, it is simply the universalization of that brutality against

all the wild world, against the body and against the spirit. This

scientific approach to the world becomes all the more terrifying when it

is taken up by revolutionaries. The bourgeois revolutions fought in the

name of Reason and Justice, ended up carving those abstractions into the

flesh of individuals through the Guillotine, committees of public safety

and health, and other implements of systemic terror. This terror took on

a new dimension in the communist revolutions which followed.

We’ll have to say, along with the editors of Green Anarchy that the

scientific understanding of the world is the culmination of the

segmentation of reality which first occurs in gender and in

domestication:

Science is not neutral. It is loaded with motives and assumptions that

come out of, and reinforce, the catastrophe of dissociation,

disempowerment, and consuming deadness that we call “civilization.”

Science assumes detachment. This is built into the very word

“observation.” To “observe” something is to perceive it while distancing

oneself emotionally and physically, to have a one-way channel of

“information” moving from the observed thing to the “self,” which is

defined as not a part of that thing. This death-based or mechanistic

view is a religion, the dominant religion of our time. The method of

science deals only with the quantitative. It does not admit values or

emotions, or the way the air smells when it’s starting to rain; or if it

deals with these things, it does so by transforming them into numbers,

by turning oneness with the smell of the rain into abstract

preoccupation with the chemical formula for ozone, turning the way it

makes you feel into the intellectual idea that emotions are only an

illusion of firing neurons. Number itself is not truth but a chosen

style of thinking. We have chosen a habit of mind that focuses our

attention into a world removed from reality, where nothing has quality

or awareness or a life of its own. We have chosen to transform the

living into the dead. Careful-thinking scientists will admit that what

they study is a narrow simulation of the complex real world, but few of

them notice that this narrow focus is self-feeding, that it has built

technological, economic, and political systems that are all working

together, which suck our reality in on itself. As narrow as the world of

numbers is, scientific method does not even permit all numbers; only

those numbers which are reproducible, predictable, and the same for all

observers. Of course reality itself is not reproducible or predictable

or the same for all observers. But neither are fantasy worlds derived

from reality.

Science doesn’t stop at pulling us into a dream world; it goes one step

further and makes this dream world a nightmare whose contents are

selected for predictability and controllability and uniformity. All

surprise and sensuality are vanquished. Because of science, states of

consciousness that cannot be reliably disposed are classified as insane,

or at best “non-ordinary,” and excluded. Anomalous experience, anomalous

ideas, and anomalous people are cast off or destroyed like

imperfectly-shaped machine components. Science is only a manifestation

and locking in of an urge for control that we’ve had at least since we

started farming fields and fencing animals instead of surfing the less

predictable (but more abundant) world of reality, or “nature.” And from

that time to now, this urge has driven every decision about what counts

as “progress,” up to and including the genetic restructuring of life.

XIV

A critique of science now poses a tremendous problem for most theories

of resistance. So many of the old means of resistance (especially those

which are predicated on science and industrialism) have only reaffirmed

this ordering of the world. The blindspot of this resistance is

specifically that we ourselves have been domesticated in a biological

dimension, in the capture of our bodies and the denial of our spirits.

It wouldn’t be enough to destroy all the computer infrastructure in the

world, so long as we hold an unspoken view of ourselves as primitive

computers. Any attempts to deploy science in the pursuit of liberation

can only deepen the tragedy of separation and control which is the very

essence of domestication.

This can perhaps be more easily realized in Marxism than in any other

system of thought in the last century. Fredy Perlman’s text The

Continuing Appeal of Nationalism is brutal on this point:

Marx had a significant blind spot; most of his disciples, and many

militants who were not his disciples, built their platforms on that

blind spot. Marx was an enthusiastic supporter of the bourgeoisie’s

struggle for liberation from feudal bonds—who was not an enthusiast in

those days? He, who observed that the ruling ideas of an epoch were the

ideas of the ruling class, shared many of the ideas of the newly

empowered middle class. He was an enthusiast of the Enlightenment, of

rationalism, of material progress. It was Marx who insightfully pointed

out that every time a worker reproduced his labor power, ever minute he

devoted to his assigned task, he enlarged the material and social

apparatus that dehumanized him. Yet the same Marx was an enthusiast for

the application of science to production.

But this progress had to contend, at every juncture, with the

decomposition which accompanied all Leviathanic organization. In order

to do this, Leviathan has consistently needed new populations from which

it could squeeze surplus. At times, the capture/domestication of these

populations was achieved through colonialism, whereas at others it was

to be found in domestic colonies (of Jews, witches, faggots, Muslims,

heretics, etc.) This process of primitive accumulation

is responsible for the takeoffs, the windfalls and the great leaps

forward. [...] new injections of preliminary capital are the only known

cure to the crises. Without an ongoing primitive accumulation of

capital, the production process would stop; each crisis would tend to

become permanent.

Genocide, the rationally calculated extermination of human populations

designated as legitimate prey, has not been an aberration in an

otherwise peaceful march of progress. This is why national armed forces

were indispensable to the wielders of capital. These forces did not only

protect the owners of capital from the insurrectionary wrath of their

own exploited wage workers. These forces also captured the holy grail,

the magic lantern, the preliminary capital, by battering the gates of

resisting or unresisting outsiders, by looting, deporting and

murdering...

Human communities as variegated in their ways and beliefs as birds are

in feathers were invaded, despoiled and at last exterminated beyond

imagination’s grasp. The clothes and artifacts of the vanished

communities were gathered up as trophies and displayed in museums as

additional traces of the march of progress; the extinct beliefs and ways

became the curiosities of yet another of the invaders’ many sciences.

The expropriated fields, forests, and animals were garnered as bonanzas,

as preliminary capital, as the precondition for the production process

that was to turn the fields into farms, the trees into lumber, the

animals into hats, the minerals into munitions, the human survivors into

cheap labor. Genocide was, and still is, the precondition, the

cornerstone and groundwork of the military-industrial complexes, of the

processed environments of the world of offices and parking lots.[13]

Perlman goes on to follow this blindspot—the capture, genocide, and

exploitation necessitated by industrialization—through the thought of

the vast majority of revolutionaries since Marx; anarchists, socialists

and Leninists alike. All of them glorify industrialism as key within the

progressive movement of history. For Fredy, the most innovative and

horrifying consequence of this blindspot can be seen in the Bolshevik

revolution and the thought of Lenin.

Lenin was a Russian bourgeois who cursed the weakness and ineptitude of

the Russian bourgeoisie. An enthusiast for capitalist development, an

ardent admirer of American-style progress, he did not make common cause

with those he cursed, but rather with their enemies, with the

anti-capitalist disciples of Marx. He availed himself of Marx’s blind

spot to transform Marx’s critique of the capitalist production process

into a manual for developing capital, a ‘how-to-do-it’ guide. Marx’s

studies of exploitation and immiseration became food for the famished, a

cornucopia, a virtual horn of plenty...

Russian countryfolk could not be mobilized in terms of their Russianness

or orthodoxy or whiteness, but they could be, and were, mobilized in

terms of their exploitation, their oppression, their ages of suffering

under the despotism of the Tsars. Oppression and exploitation became

welding materials. The long sufferings under the Tsars... were used to

organize people into fighting units, into embryos of the national army

and the national police.

The presentation of the dictator and of the Party’s central committee as

a dictatorship of the liberated proletariat seemed to be something new,

but even this was new only in the words that were used. This was

something as old as the Pharaohs and Lugals of ancient Egypt and

Mesopotamia, who had been chosen by the god to lead the people, who had

embodied the people in their dialogues with the god. This was a tried

and tested gimmick of the rulers. Even if the ancient precedents were

temporarily forgotten, a more recent precedent had been provided by the

French Committee of Public Health, which had presented itself as the

embodiment of the nation’s general will...

The goal of the dictator of the proletariat was still American-style

progress, capitalist development, electrification, rapid mass

transportation, science, the processing of the natural environment. The

goal was the capitalism that the weak and inept Russian bourgeoisie had

failed to develop...

Lenin did not live long enough to demonstrate his virtuosity as general

manager of Russian capital, but his successor Stalin amply demonstrated

the powers of the founder’s machine. The first step was the primitive

accumulation of capital. If Marx had not been very clear about this,

Preobrazhensky had been very clear. Preobrazhensky was jailed, but his

description of the tried and tested methods of procuring preliminary

capital was applied to vast Russia. The preliminary capital of English,

American, Belgian and other capitalists had come from plundered overseas

colonies. Russia had no overseas colonies. This lack was no obstacle.

The entire Russian countryside was transformed into a colony.

The peasants were not the only colonials. The former ruling class had

already been thoroughly expropriated of all its wealth and property, but

yet other sources of preliminary capital were found. With the totality

of state power concentrated in their hands, the dictators soon

discovered that they could manufacture sources of primitive

accumulation. Successful entrepreneurs, dissatisfied workers and

peasants, militants of competing organizations, even disillusioned Party

members, could be designated as counter-revolutionaries, rounded up,

expropriated and shipped off to labor camps. All the deportations, mass

executions and expropriations of earlier colonizers were reenacted in

Russia.

By [this] time, all the methods of procuring preliminary capital had

been tried and tested, and could be scientifically applied.

Perlman will contend that this innovative method of capture will later

inspire the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Mao, most of whom will

dispense of the rhetoric of the Bolsheviks, but maintain the boiled-down

scientific essentials of the method. And since the revolution which

first implemented this method failed in its rhetorical aim of liberating

humanity from wage labor, this too was dispensed of as an embarrassment.

Instead, the progress of the techno-industrial state is itself the

justification. The primitive accumulation needed for the ascendence of

later totalitarian states would be found in the internal enemies of the

Parties. Domestication no longer needs to justify itself through

anything other than its own scientific method. And science itself would

invent methods that earlier genocidal colonialists could only have

dreamed of; Eugenics, Gas Chambers, Laboratories. These industrializers

will each imagine a triumphant reduction of the entire Eurasian

continent to a site of resources to be domesticated and accumulated.

Western Rationalists will attempt to explain these mass murderers as

irrational, and yet would see people like George Washington and Thomas

Jefferson as perfectly reasonable leaders,even though these men

envisioned and began to enact the conquest of a vast continent, the

deportation and extermination of the continent’s population, at a time

when such a project was much less feasible.

What is consistent in all of these situations is a deeply seated belief

in human progress through the expansion of industrial civilization.

Modern day Marxists will say that these applications of Marx’s theory

were incorrect and that they were deviant or revisionist. But isn’t this

horror the consequence of every attempt to impose any theory on a mass

industrial scale?

Applied scientists used the discovery [of the atom] to split the atom’s

nucleus, to produce weapons which can split every atom’s nucleus;

nationalists used the poetry to split and fuse human populations, to

mobilize genocidal armies, to perpetuate new holocausts.

The pure scientists, [nationalist] poets and researchers consider

themselves innocent of the devastated countrysides and charred bodies...

every minute devoted to the capitalist production process, every thought

contributed to the industrial system, further enlarges a power that is

inimical to nature, to culture, to life. Applied science is not

something alien; it is an integral part of the capitalist production

process.

What becomes clear is that any attempt to flesh out a scientific theory

of domination (whatever the intentions of the theorists) becomes put to

work by domination itself as a blueprint. This could be understood as

the de/recomposition of history. More significantly it ties into the

critique articulated above of other Scientific disciplines: Anthropology

and Psychoanalysis. The pure theories of Anthropologists, Psychoanalysts

and Marxists always tend to become new means of domestication:

universities, asylums and work camps. Camatte is at his most lucid when

critiquing the role of theory:

Theory, like consciousness, demands objectification to such an extent

that even an individual who rejects political rackets can elevate theory

to the status of a racket. In a subject posing as revolutionary, theory

is a despotism: everyone should recognize this. After the domination of

the body by the mind for more than two millennia, it is obvious that

theory is still a manifestation of this domination.

For this reason, it is all the more important that we dispense with

scientific certainty and methodology in our inquiry into gender.

Otherwise, the solutions will continue to be more of the same:

cyber-feminism, the virtual flight from the body, automated

reproduction, a flight which is “illusory, a forgetting of the whole

train and logic of oppressive institutions that make up patriarchy. The

dis-embodied high-tech future can only be more of the same destructive

course.”[14] In the same way that the mind/body split assures us that

idealist solutions to gender will always fail (Queering the economy!

Queering the State!) so too does the material/spiritual split guarantee

us that the blind spot of industrialism will continue its course of

annihilation and control.

To return momentarily to Feral Faun:

Materialism still accepts the matter/spirit dichotomy—but then proclaims

that spirit does not exist. Thus, freedom, creativity, beauty, ecstasy,

life as something more than mere mechanical existence are utterly

eradicated from the world. Mechanistic materialism is the ideology of

religion updated to fit the needs of industrial capitalism. For

industrial capitalism requires not only a deadened, dispirited earth,

but deadened, dispirited human beings who can be made into cogs in a

vast machine.

XV

Throughout the body of this text we’ve been weaving together a critique

of the scientific view of gender, as well as resistance practices which

remain rooted in this domestication. We’ll now turn explicitly toward

one of the most prominent of these ideologies regarding gender: Marxist

Feminism (or its contemporary euphemism, Materialist Feminism). This

ideology largely emerged in the seventies as an attempt to synthesize

the critique of capitalism with the critique of Patriarchy. Gayle

Rubin’s inquiry, which we’ve detailed above, was largely a critique of

the limitations of the Marxist perspective. Queer theory and black

feminism and transfeminism also emerged largely in reaction to the

inability of this theory to account for the majority of gender violence

experienced by a whole range of subjects excluded from the scientific

sample. The theories of contemporary Marxist feminists haven’t deviated

all that far from their roots, but the questions posed decades ago

remain largely unanswered.

These interventions are relevant to our own critique, but we begin from

a different place. Because it is materialist, Materialist Feminism

ignores the spiritual dimensions of gender, and as a consequence has not

been able to ascertain or critique gender as domestication. Because of

its prioritization of the Historical and Economic it offers very little

regarding the experience of the individual bodies ensnared or excluded

by these Leviathanic abstractions.

In the seventies, Rubin and others said that the primary limitation of

Marxist feminism was its conception of origins. For them, the

exploitation and domination of women was based in the separation and

gendering of the spheres of productive and reproductive labor. Rubin

contended that the domination of women originated outside this

separation, but also that both the sex/gender system and the economic

system had their own modes of production and reproduction (the

sex/gender system is productive of gender and sexual identities

themselves, while there is also unquantifiable reproduction of the

economic system that happens ways irreducible to domestic labor).

Already then it was sloppy to reduce the two systems as being simply the

productive and reproductive spheres of the capitalist mode. For her, the

origins of gender are far more archaic, emerging at the beginning of

civilization itself. While obviously feminist anthropologists will win

against Marxist feminists on the origins debate any day, our inquiry

takes us outside this theoretical pissing contest. Rubin’s perspective

isn’t interesting to us because its evidence is older (after all, the

anthropological method is as rooted in the failures of science as the

historical economic one). Instead, we’re interested in the way her text

contributes to the elaboration of gender and domestication as being one

and the same process with both bodily and spiritual operations.

We’ll contend that in order to plot an escape from a system which holds

us captive, let alone to strike out against the beast itself, we must

understand not only where it comes from, but more importantly how it

operates in the present. Marxist feminism feels inadequate in both these

regards. To locate a theory of domination in the performance of domestic

labor without starting from a critique of domestication will always

amount to a partial story; a description of specific moments (or

fantasies) in specific times and places, but will miss the discreet

enemy function which ties it to all the other moments of gender. More

sophisticated iterations of Marxist feminism will say that gender is

obviously older than capital, but that capital takes up and consumes all

pre-existing social relations, therefore exploiting gender along with

all the others. And while it is true that there is a dimension of the

unique in every moment, and that genders within capitalism are different

than within other modes of production; this does not prove that the

essence of gendered domination has changed all that much. Rather, the

gender-form emerges from millennia before and stays consistent in its

twofold bodily/spiritual assault on human existence.

The moments of the accumulation of domestic labor (in the witch hunts,

or within Fordism) are two worthwhile stories about how gender has taken

its contemporary form, but they remain two stories among many. To

over-prioritize these moments of economic exploitation is to silence and

undervalue the countless stories which do not fit inside the neat

narrative. It is popular for thoughtful Marxists to assert that the

State may be far older than capital, but that their inseparable

interweaving has completely transformed and reconstituted the state; and

the two forms must be destroyed together. And yet all attempted Marxist

revolutions have only ever reproduced the state, precisely because the

form is more ancient and thoroughly colonizes our being. In this same

way, a simple assertion that gender and capital have become terribly

intertwined and must be destroyed together is not a theory of how that

will happen or even much of an analysis of how this came to be. Just as

a focus on the state as part in parcel of capital will in practice

function as a blindspot, so too will this situation of gender. We’re

reminded of the laughable moments in the last decade where various

communist parties had to make a complete reversal of their positions on

queer people, without ever altering the structure of their

understanding. The effort to expand and adapt the ideology (to account

for categories it previously ignored) consistently feels like the same

politics of liberal inclusion sutured on top of vulgar Marxism. Yes,

gender is exploited by capital and the two are largely indistinguishable

and inseparable in the present, but this is not sufficient. Just as a

refusal of the state-form would require an understanding of its

emergence and function up until the present (without vulgarly

systematizing it within capital) so to does gender require such an

inquiry. If we want to destroy it, we cannot limit our canon to those

moments which fit neatly into a story about capital. We’ll also need to

draw upon the archaic origins of gender and the voices and biographies

of those who attempted to burn it out of themselves.

The Marxist feminist perspective will always fail on the discussion of

origins, because even those who critique the social construction of

gender will affirm a naturalized view of sex. For them, socialized

gender is a corruption of the biological realities of males and females

of the species with regard to reproduction. We’ve already discussed how

this split is itself domestication and that it is Leviathan’s function

to universalize and naturalize its machinery into the wild. If Marxist

feminism has refused this naturalization of sex, we have scarcely seen

it. Even those who go as far as to problematize essentialist gender,

will still default to discussing a transhistorical ‘men and women’

within all their complex formulations.

Even if we only explored gender in the present, we would still find the

story of domestic labor inadequate to the task. The narrative situates

the Family as the primary site of the exploitation of women’s

reproductive labor, labor which is necessary for the continued function

of the capitalist mode of production. It is true that the Family does

serve this purpose, but to stop our critique here is to be limited by a

mechanistic and materialist view. We’ve already explored a theory that

the Family is a structure which emerges out of the exchange of the

bodies of others as commodities, and that it is imbued with a mystical

power through the enactment of ancient rituals regarding sexuality and

kinship. The consolidations of these mystical kinship structures were

the basis of more complex human social relations including Leviathan and

the State. A specific power of inclusion enchants those who participate

in these Families, for they become the inheritors of millennia of

lineage and tasked with the transmission of that heritage into the

future (we’ve discussed this previously in the symbol of the Child).

Fascism fetishizes these bonds, but so too do most political traditions.

The Marxist analysis of the Family will tell us that this structure

emerges out of the specific economic conditions of capitalism, but this

is empirically untrue. Capital has shaped the Family in unique ways, but

the bonds which animate and give power to the Family (bonds of kinship,

transmission, ancestry, sexuality and reproductive futurism) stream

through His-story and constitute an inheritance of millennia of control

and domination. To take seriously the task of destroying this unit, we

must comprehend it in its totality—in its economic function, sure,but

also for its imprisonment and shaping of both the body and the spirit.

Why does the family hold such a intrinsic place in all domesticated

culture? Why do people form them? Why do they remain in them? Why do

some actually claim to love and enjoy their abusive positions within

them? Why does it remain the shadowy realm of open secrets and quiet

little violences? These questions cannot be answered through economics

alone.

A Marxist attempt would answer that women remain in the family because

they are denied the wage, and men because they need the free

reproductive labor, but this answer feels paltry compared to the

enormity of the questions posed. How could this or that arrangement of

the wage relationship be the glue which holds together the most

formative social relation within civilization? It isn’t. We’ve said

already that science is a narrow view of the world which reduces the

diversity of reality into the shape of its view. This tendency is all

too clear in the scientific interpretation of the family. This view is

far too narrow to account for most people’s experiences of gender and

violence, but even too narrow to describe most people’s families. Black,

brown and indigenous feminists have consistently critiqued the Marxist

formulation as being a primarily white understanding which has little to

no application to their lives. The formulation even excludes many white

families, especially those which are very poor. My Mom, for example,

worked two jobs in a factory and a nursing home to support us when I was

a child. Her mother still works at the same diner where she has worked

for decades. And yet the content of my family retains its domestic

character. We’ve followed Fredy and Attentat in asserting that history

is the decomposition of Leviathanic forms. So too is the family

constantly decomposing and rising anew from the ashes. At this point, so

many ‘new normal’ familial arrangements exist, none of which are

accounted for in the simplistic binarist understanding of gender. How

does a Marxist view account for this prolonged moment of the Family’s

decomposition?

A queer position contends that the family is a site of our exploitation,

yes, but also has been a consistent operation of torture, constraint and

domination which vastly outpaces the needs of domestic labor. For

others, we often find the family also as a site of exclusion,

specifically at the moments when we rebel against it. The Marxist

worldview has nothing to say about either our mutilation within the

family-form or our expulsion from it. Further, it derides our individual

and collective revolt against this form as ahistorical and idealist. We

are acting too soon or without the right conditions; but these

rationalistic approaches have only ever affirmed the family (even if

critiquing its role economically). Our revolt will never be

comprehensible from within it.

Even for the proponents of this theory, it explains very little about

their own lives. In the seventies, the situation already was based on a

group of women objectively studying an Other. In the present, we have

academics studying the ideas of academics who studied this Other body of

women (and then calling it historical materialism). I think of those

feminist professors whose liberation comes through hiring a housekeeper.

Our inquiry begins firstly from our own lives, and then follows the

lines along which we can locate our own struggles within and against

gender in the struggles of others. Outside of this, all inquiry feels

meaningless and empty. In my own life and experiences, Marxism’s

formulations around the split between reproductive and productive labor

is incredibly superficial in addressing gender violence. It doesn’t

explain why old men pay to have sex with me or to watch videos of my

sexual labor. It doesn’t account for what investment people outside my

family would have in policing my sexuality and gender expression. It

doesn’t explain why rape and sexual violence happens to those of us who

don’t have the biological capacity to give birth. It definitely doesn’t

account for the prevalence of date rape drugs at queer bars and parties,

or for our murder at the hands of bashers and police. While I won’t

preclude that possibility that such an accounting could happen someday,

we’ve seen no efforts in this direction. A refusal of Materialism isn’t

an affirmation of some sort of queer Idealism, rather it is an attempt

to explore what has been cut out and discarded by both of these

worldviews, the body and the spirit. These experiences require a bodily

and spiritual exploration, one which takes seriously the simultaneous

question of domestication. Such an exploration seems entirely necessary

if we want to comprehend the vast range of gender violence (both the

exclusionary and imprisoning violences against queers and gender variant

people, and also the more mundane daily exploitations in the family),

and to recognize them as one operation.

That the theory of Marxist feminism is flawed is only the beginning of

the problem. As with any other theory, its applications will always be

haunted by the blind spots within it. We’ve already shown that pure

sciences tend to produce horrifying results. The application of this

theory, of course, is Organization. Often the organization is so banal

and reformist as to not warrant exploration (Wages for Housework!, for

example). Other false solutions (mechanized reproduction or self-managed

housework) have thankfully not been put into practice on any notable

scale.

Another application of Marxist feminism is separatism. It is worth

focusing on because of the specific tragedy that its history shows. The

Separatist project begins from an awareness of the dynamic we’ve also

illustrated in organization (for all organization to be constituted

through the exchange circulation of gendered bodies), but strives to

self-manage this circulation. Women must be organized into this or that

group or party, where other more conscious women will help to structure

their thought and activity. The exclusion of certain genders from the

separatist group has never exorcised the demonic quality of organization

itself. Beyond this, it has actually taken on a particularly sinister

dimension through its willful and vitriolic exclusion of transgendered

women and others. Marxist feminist activists were instrumental in the

formation of state policies of excluding these women from state

services, from activist groups, from shelters. These feminists served as

the frontline of the formation of transmisogynist policies in countless

political and cultural institutions. As with all scientific theories of

domination, this variant of feminism has historically helped to

materialize the exclusion of those who cannot fit within its theoretical

constructs. Contemporary Marxist feminists will contend that since they

are avowedly not transmisogynists, they do not have to answer for this

tradition. And yet the theoretical underpinning of this attitude amongst

their foremothers has not been changed in any meaningful way. Inclusion

of a few references to transwomen at best, repetition of the past at

worst. If the tendency is going to substantially break from this

history, it would require a thorough analysis which is very far from

happening. How can a purely materialist conception of gender explain the

choice of individuals to risk their lives, freedom, and wellbeing in

order to live openly as a gender other than what they were assigned at

birth? It can’t, obviously, unless it explores the interplay of the

spiritual and also bodily operations of gender. We have very little

faith in the emergence of a categorical theory of gender which does not

become an apparatus for policing those categories. This policing is

accompanied by the age old problem of politics: that of representation.

Claims to be The Women or The Feminists or even The Queers will always

tell one tale of gender, at the exclusion of so many others. Those who

draw these lines will always draw them through the bodies of others.

One recent answer to these critiques has been the introduction of the

concept not-men[15]. Most attempts at defining this category are

extremely clumsy. At times it is used to mean not-cismen, or to

explicitly say that faggots are not welcome at certain meetings. At

others it simply means women plus trans people. Some feminists have even

said that the category at times includes ‘emasculated men of color.’

Usually it is just postmodern shorthand for women. As with any other

categories, it only functions if it has a firm border, and this border

will always be policed. At every step of the way, it is ceaselessly

problematic. The least problematic definitions of it (such as the one in

“Undoing Sex”[16]) are so vague as to not have any practical

application. And it is always in the practical applications that these

theories enact their violences. The prospect of a political body of

largely cisgendered women determining which genderqueer or transfeminine

individuals are not-men enough to participate in their groups is quite

nauseating. This categorical policing mirrors all the others. Meet the

new binary, same as the old binary. A way out of this dilemma may be to

start from experience rather than identity. To seek out conspirators

based on a shared experience of a range of gender violence. Some

proponents of not-men have defined it similarly (‘those who are raped,’

‘those who do caring labor’) but none of these experiences are limited

by identity, and to accept a phenomenological or experiential framework

would dispense with the utility of the category at all. If the concept

is either problematic or useless then why has there been so much fancy

footwork put into an attempt to save the concept? What we’re really

seeing is a desperate attempt to save binary categories, in a world

where they’ve long been decomposing.

XVI

There is a trend within communist thought which aspires to transcend the

limitations illuminated in the various attacks on Marxism:

communization. While it is beyond the scope of these fragments to

explore and critique this textual body in its entirety, we will engage

with it because its recent proponents have taken on the question of

gender. Most of the writings of American communizers dealing with gender

has been influenced by the French group Theorie Communiste. TC posits

that in addition to the contradiction of labor and capital, there is a

second contradiction between men and women. For them, these two

contradictions intersect in the present to form the central dynamic of

capitalist society. In this way, TC is similar to Gayle Rubin; imagining

two distinct systems of production and of gender which become

interwoven. While it is laughable to reduce the dynamic of the present

to being two contradictions, we are also not interested in any

quantifiable arrangement of binary contradictions. Domestication is an

infinitely complex and diffuse splitting of life; it introduces

countless contradictions which cannot be summarized as any one, two, or

five systems. We’ll break from both of them in asserting that there is

never a period where these systems are distinct, but rather that they’ve

always been examples of the fracturing of domestication.

However contrived TC’s theory of gender feels, it seems worthwhile to

explore the ideas of those who’ve drawn inspiration from them. As the

cutting edge of Marxist thought on gender, it is here that we’ll look to

see if we can find a common critique of domestication. Specifically

we’ll briefly look at three texts: “Communization and the Abolition of

Gender” by Maya Andrea Gonzalez, “The Gender Distinction in

Communization Theory” by P. Valentine from LIES journal, and “The Logic

of Gender” in the third issue of the journal Endnotes.

Gonzalez’s critical reading of TC is interesting for a few reasons.

Primarily, she critiques TC for having sutured their theory of gender on

top of the already existing theory of the Capitalist Mode of Production,

thus dispensing of the historical specificity of gender at the point

where they intersect. She criticizes their fetishistic focus on the role

of unpaid domestic labor performed by women and says that their

domination is tied up in the way class society accumulates their

capacity to give birth. This interests us firstly because of its shift

outside the more vulgar Marxist understanding, but also because it

relates to our critique of reproductive futurism laid out previously.

The fantasy of the Child remains the primary structure of the shaping of

the social order, and as such has to be indicted as central to the

gendered matrix. We are also excited by her attempts to denaturalize

both the categories of sex and gender.

Not all human beings fit into the categories of male and female. The

point is not to use the language of biology to ground a theory of

naturalized sexuality, as distinct from socialized gender. Nature, which

is without distinction, becomes integrated into a social structure—which

takes natural averages and turns them into behavioral norms. Not all

‘women’ bear children; maybe some ‘men’ do. That does not make them any

less beholden to society’s strictures, including at the level of their

very bodies, which are sometimes altered at birth to ensure conformity

with sexual norms.

This denaturalization fits nicely with a conception of gender as

domestication, precisely because it is the domestication process which

integrates the wild proliferation of bodies into social structure. The

social structure which takes ‘natural averages’ and turns them into

police mechanisms is the oldest social structure, the emergent kinship

structures which give rise to the first leviathans. To the text’s

credit, it situates this policing and categorical construction at the

very beginning of class society. Gonzalez’s writing on this point is

almost entirely unique in a terrain of thought which otherwise holds

sex, if not gender, to be essential. We smile on this point, but have to

remind ourselves why this shift feels necessary. To situate gender as

domestication is crucial for us, only if our task is also to break

genders hold over our lives.

Gonzalez calls for the abolition of gender, and does so through

theorizing communization as its overcoming:

Since the revolution as communization must abolish all divisions within

social life, it must also abolish gender relations—not because gender is

inconvenient or objectionable, but because it is part of the totality of

relations that daily reproduce the capitalist mode of production.

Gender, too, is constitutive of capital’s central contradiction, and so

gender must be torn asunder in the process of the revolution. We cannot

wait until after the revolution for the gender question to be solved.

Its relevance to our existence will not be transformed slowly—whether

through planned obsolescence or playful deconstruction, whether as the

equality of gender identities or their proliferation into a multitude of

differences. On the contrary, in order to be revolution at all,

communization must destroy gender in its very course, inaugurating

relations between individuals defined in their singularity.

While we have a great deal of skepticism about this type of total

revolution, there is much common ground here: the desire to inaugurate

relations between individuals in their singularity, to abolish gender

and not simply proliferate it, and to destroy gender alongside our

destruction of all the rest. Our disappointment then is precisely at the

point where this line of inquiry stops. Gonzalez’s work in this piece

amounts to an elaboration of why this would have to happen, but remains

almost entirely silent on how, when or by whom. In this sense, her text

has a problem which is consistent in communization theory. As with most

other arguments around communization, it remains stuck as a sort of

aspirational tautology. Communization destroys capital; capital is

gender; communization destroys gender; if the revolution does not

destroy gender then it is not communization. The moments in the text

which hint toward what this destruction would look like are just a

reiteration of the tautology.

That overcoming is only the revolution as communization, which destroys

gender and all other divisions that come between us.

We want to read this aspiration as a beginning of a struggle against

domestication, but we have not seen this line continue. Gonzalez is

correct in articulating the necessary destruction of gender in course,

but has yet to give a shape to the course itself. It is notable that she

points to a ‘loosening of the straight jacket of the heterosexual

matrix’ but says that queer theory cannot account for this. We’ll argue

that this loosening is not a phenomenon deterministically bound to the

unfolding of demographics and economics, but rather is the willful

activity of many who have attempted to give their own shape to the

course of the matrix’s destruction. The materialist historical account

of gender is precisely why we feel disappointed by the prescriptions of

communization: the possibility of a willful revolt against the straight

jacket of gender remains absent.

P. Valentine’s piece begins by reading both the work of TC and Maya

Andrea Gonzalez. She affirms much of the same contention, saying that

communization theory is uniquely on the brink of being able to offer a

theory of gender and capital as a single system. Beyond this, for her,

communization is a demand for the abolition of fundamental material

elements of the reproduction of gender. She, like Gonzalez, critiques TC

for their suturing of gender on top of the capitalist mode of

production, and strives to find the ‘real material ground’ of the

production of gender difference. She contends that this will be the

basis for a ‘non-idealist’ theory of the abolition of gender. At best it

is funny that she searches for this material ground in the theoretical

demand of esoteric communism. At worst, this attempt to create

‘non-idealist’ content feels eerily complicit in the typical Historical

operation of justifying the extermination of those rebels whose escape

attempts are not easily rationalized within these material contexts. For

Valentine, this ‘real material ground’ is located in the separation of

productive and reproductive spheres, but also in the realm of

childbirth. To her credit, she explicitly says that neither of these

phenomena account for the emergence of the gender distinction, but she

has no other theory on this regard.

Further, and more fundamentally, how does this appropriation of women,

on whatever basis (childbearing or no) begin? In other words, what is

the origin of the gender distinction and how is it reproduced? These

questions are outside the scope of this article, but we do believe that

the answers both involve gendered physical violence and sexual violence.

What does it mean to assert the necessity of finding the material ground

for the emergence of gender, and then to refuse to do so? The material

ground is based in sexual violence, but this violence is a tool of

domestication’s exchanging of bodies and enforcing of spiritual

submission. This dead-end in communization seems like a willful refusal

to follow the inquiry to where it should take us. Valentine actually

interjected into a panel discussion with Silvia Federici in Oakland when

another speaker was beginning to discuss this very question of gender

and civilization by mocking ‘what is civilization, even?’ She may not

want to let that discussion happen, but it is precisely the discussion

we are interested in. Civilization is the archaic monstrosity which

produces itself through this very sexual violence and gendering

operation Valentine alludes to. It is the holy grail of ‘material

ground’ that Marxist feminists search for but can never find. Valentine

is unique in situating sexual violence as the basis of the accumulation

of women’s labor (and not simply a consequence of accumulation, as

almost all other Marxists would say), but still cannot speak about when

and why this violence emerges.

She says that “understanding sexual violence as a structuring element of

gender also helps us to understand how patriarchy reproduces itself upon

and through gay and queer men, trans people, gender nonconforming people

and bodies, and children of any gender...” but she gives absolutely zero

content to this ‘understanding.’ She says “that communization opens

avenues toward new and more rigorous theories of gender oppression that

are able to link the exploitation and oppression of women with violence

and oppression based on heteronormativity and cisnormativity.” She can

cite that this violence exists, but does not begin to traverse the

avenue that is supposedly opened by communization theory. The only heavy

lifting she does on gender violence is explicitly limited to ‘violence

against women.’ This feels like the same lip service and politics of

inclusion we’ve derided already.

This is a noticeable trend in the essay: Valentine identifies limits

within other communizer thought, and offers platitudes about how these

limits must be overcome, but does little to start the process of that

overcoming. This is true of the questions of origins, sexual violence,

the gender violence experienced by queer and transgender people, and the

violence imposed upon children. She does the same with race, identifying

it as a limit to communization thought, but ending there. This strategy

appears as a tragic repetition of the academic worldview, but also as

the hard limit to the usefulness of communization in our own inquiry. We

aren’t interested in academics’ self-congratulatory pontification on how

they should start considering our experiences: we want a way out.

At the time of writing, the most recent contribution to the gender and

communization discourse appears in the third issue of the journal

Endnotes under the title “The Logic of Gender.” Were we to wager a hope

that this piece would flesh out some of the limits set in the first two

texts, we would be sorely disappointed. If anything, this piece takes a

hard turn away from the questions of origins, sexual violence and the

means of destruction. Instead, Endnotes is explicit in being only

interested in those forms of gender specific to the capitalist mode of

production. Ironically, their definition of those forms centers on the

trading of bodies as gendered commodities, a process which Camatte,

Rubin, Perlman and countless others have identified long before the

capitalist mode of production. The piece limits its focus to the

contemporary split between two spheres of labor central the capitalist

production. Elsewhere defined as public/private,

productive/reproductive, or waged/unwaged, Endnotes devote most of their

intellectual labor to defining more precise, specific and sophisticated

terms for these spheres. What they settle on are humorously long-winded

directly market-mediated sphere (DMM) and the indirectly market-mediated

sphere (IMM). True to form, they go on and sketch a periodization of

these spheres beginning with the primitive accumulation of the 16^(th)

and 17^(th) centuries, jumping forward to Fordism, dwelling for a moment

on the seventies and concluding with the present Crisis. We could accept

this as an interesting constellation of stories, if it wasn’t for the

insistence by the storytellers that this is empirical, material

His-story—the one story which consumes all others. This His-story is

noticeably thin for people who pride themselves on their erudite and

meticulous historical analysis; to say nothing of its fixation on those

exact same periods on which previous Marxist accounts of gender fixated.

This new formulation of DMM and IMM spheres is maybe the most vulgar of

all the Marxist formulations we’ve explored so far.

And yet there is one moment of the text which we may find useful. The

piece specifically denaturalizes gender and sex (with the help of queer

theory) and says that groups of individuals are anchored into these

binary spheres—spheres which are constantly changing which maintaining

the universal binary structure itself. It describes the naturalization

of sex and gender as moments of this anchoring, and claims that this

process happens over and over again, reimposing and reproducing gender.

They criticize a formulation for self-managed reproductive labor (put

forward by Federici) as just another dreadful reimposition of gender.

We’d agree with this, but are interested in locating the other moments

of reimposition. If we are to be generous, this process of anchoring and

reimposition of gender could be understood as a euphemism for what we

call domestication. Sadly the text explores this no further.

In keeping to the motifs of communization theory, the author(s) will

allude to more limits that they do not actually explore. In what is

essentially a footnote to an addendum, they say that their theory is

predicated on taking for granted mechanisms such as the institution of

marriage, the availability or not of contraceptives, the enforcement of

heteronormativity, the shame around non-reproductive sex acts, etc.

These moments which cannot be systematized within their rigorous system

are noteworthy in that they amount to a vast and unquantifiable sphere

of gendered activity. It is through these untheorized mechanisms that

the anchoring of gender occurs. If we want to theorize the abolition of

gender, we need to depart from the Marxist cathexis upon the spheres of

labor, and look also at those mechanisms which naturalize, capture and

anchor individuals into them.

The piece concludes by repeating another motif of communization theory,

an assertion that this or that movement of history now makes it possible

for us to recognize this or that aspect of identity as an external

constraint. Specifically they say that “the process of denaturalization

creates the possibility of gender appearing as an external constraint.

This is not to say that the constraint of gender is less powerful than

before, but that it can now be seen as a constraint, that is, as

something outside oneself that it is possible to abolish.” This

assertion inadvertently serves the naturalization process through the

unfounded implication that gender has not been seen as an external

constraint up until this point. Gender is of course something outside of

ourselves which imprisons us, but this has been realized from its most

primal origin; this realization has been the continuous source of the

revolt which tends toward its decomposition. The faggot heretics,

witches, and gay rioters show us that domesticated gender has always

been experienced as an external constraint. This is exactly why it must

be constantly re-naturalized and re-imposed.

The Endnotes piece ends in the same way as the others, in asserting the

need for a communization theory that can explain how gender will be

abolished, without even beginning to conceive of how that abolition will

occur. In this way, communization can only be experienced as having a

tragically messianic character, as something we must wait for and never

something in which we participate. It is a scientific study, constrained

like all other theories which stake a claim to certainty and truth. If

it has an application outside of this purely academic framework, it

remains to be shown. The assertion (that gender and Capital will be

overcome together) is merely rhetorical if gender is only understood in

its capitalist permutations. If the assertion is to have any content, we

must understand the gendered world that Capital inherited as well as the

contemporary operations which cannot be explained by Marxist

formulations.

XVII

The preceding fragments point to what we should now state clearly:

domestication did not happen to us 10,000 years ago, nor in the 16^(th)

and 17^(th) century, and certainly not in the rise of Fordism.

Domestication is constantly happening. There is no singular origin to

gender as domestication. It is done to us everyday in countless diffuse

and often invisible ways. It is a rhythm that is imposed upon our lives;

escape and capture, decomposition and recomposition. If

gender/domestication is active in all the origin stories, but also in

every moment of the present, then we need a tool to explain how this

happens, and what mechanisms enforce this rhythm. The method of

storytelling is one such tool, enchanting us with occurrences not bound

in any particular temporality.

Foucault, through Agamben and later Tiqqun, gives us another tool in the

concept of the apparatus. An apparatus is a network of relationships

between a heterogenous set of discourses, institutions, architectural

forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific

statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions.

It is a heterogenous set that includes virtually anything, linguistic

and nonlinguistic, under the same heading: discourses, institutions,

buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on.

The apparatus itself is the network that is established between these

elements.

Apparatuses are the pure enforcement of governance and the formation of

subjectivities. They include anything useful in governing, controlling

and orienting human behavior. In this sense, the system of gender can be

understood as a network between all these mechanisms which produce

gendered subjects in order to control and orient our very being.

To quote Agamben:

I wish to propose to you nothing less than a general and massive

partitioning of beings into two large groups or classes: on the one

hand, living beings (or substances), and on the other, apparatuses in

which living beings are incessantly captured. On one side, then, to

return to the terminology of the theologians, lies the ontology of

creatures, and on the other side, the oikonomia of apparatuses that seek

to govern and guide them toward the good.

Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I

shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the

capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or

secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living

beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon,

schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so

forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but

also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes,

navigation, computers, cellular telephones and—why not—language

itself...

To recapitulate, we have then two great classes: living beings (or

substances) and apparatuses. And, between these two, as a third class,

subjects. I call a subject that which results from the relation and, so

to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and

apparatuses. Naturally, the substances and the subjects, as in ancient

metaphysics, seem to overlap, but not completely. In this sense, for

example, the same individual, the same substance, can be the place of

multiple processes of subjectification: the user of cellular phones, the

web surfer, the writer of stories, the tango aficionado, the

anti-globalization activist, and so on and so forth. The boundless

growth of apparatuses in our time corresponds to the equally extreme

proliferation in processes of subjectification.

In this description, we cannot help but read a process by which wild

life is captured by a dead thing, and is mutilated into a gendered

subject. This theory of apparatuses gives us a helpful way to conceive

of domestication without origins, of domestication in the present. It

also allows us to indict all the emergent non-normative and innovative

subjects as new machines of capture along with the old.

All of this means that the strategy that we must adopt in our

hand-to-hand combat with apparatuses cannot be a simple one. This is

because what we are dealing with here is the liberation of that which

remains captured and separated by means of apparatuses...

Our hand-to-hand conflict with gender must then be conceived of as that

same effort to liberate the living remainder from the subjectivities

created by the network of dead things. From this perspective, an

insurrection against gender begins as an exploration of all the

engendering apparatuses which function in our daily lives to reorient

and re-anchor our being into these subjects. Equally so, we must also

explore those apparatuses which produce racial subjects which are

inseparable form gendered ones. What are the machines that hold us

hostage? How do they breakdown? How can we evade them? How can we

destroy them? A thorough detailing of these infinite enemies is a

monumental task, but it is one which we must undertake if an insurgent

break from gender is to be possible. We have already indicted several,

but we will need to be even more imaginative and aware if we are to

indict all those ones that seem neutral if we are to permanently shatter

the spectacle of naturalized gender and escape into an ungendered

unknown.

Following from this understanding, we can realize that it requires that

we have recourse to another: to explore domestication without origins,

we need to give a different shape to Time itself. Such a new shape will

mean dispensing with the concept of the primitive as some natural

antecedent to an inevitable teleological rise of civilization. Such a

concept will always bear the naturalized image of civilization itself

into pre-history, obscuring the brutal conquest which those images

entail. Instead we need a shape to time which recognizes domestication

as a process which is constantly capturing life outside itself; erasing

the stories and cosmologies of anything beyond its control.

XVIII

I’ve been using the present tense. Ur is Now. It is not exotic at all.

It is our world...

An individual intimately familiar with the daily rapacity may remain

unmoved by critics of the rapacity. She or he must make a choice, she

must decide to turn against the authorities and to join the circle of

resisters. Such a decision disrupts a person’s whole life, and it needs

to be motivated by very good reasons. The good reasons are expressed in

the language of the time, not in the language of some future time. A

revelation or a visitation is a very good reason. The revelation might

come in a dream, or in a vision, or in what we will call a complete

mental breakdown. Before this experience, everything was noise and

nothing had meaning. After the experience, everything is clear. Now the

individual wonders why others are so blind. She might become impatient

with the others and leave them to their blindness, or she might decide

to return to the others to help them see.

All this is very understandable, very human, and it has been taking

place in human communities for a long time. But such sudden disruptions

of individual lives are also disruptions of Leviathanic existence. After

such experiences, an individual abandons the sequence of meaningless

intervals of Leviathanic Time and recovers some of the rhythms of

communities in the state of nature...

The paradox will be problematic to people trapped in linear, Leviathanic

time. [Others] knew linear time as well as rhythmic time, and they also

knew that what mattered, what was humanly important, did not take place

in linear time.... Rhythmic events were the subjects of songs, of

dances, of the frequent ceremonies and festivals. [Historical events]

will be considered ‘facts’ and “raw data” by the Leviathanized because

the linear progression of such events constitutes Leviathanic time,

namely His-story. The Leviathanized will remember only fragments of the

sole events they consider worth remembering because the memory of such

events will not be lodged in living human beings but on stone tablets,

on paper, and eventually in machines...

If tragedy repeat[s], then the event was not linear but rhythmic, and it

was already known. Rhythms were grasped with symbols and expressed with

music. Musical knowledge was knowledge of the important, the deep, the

living. The music of myth expressed the symphony of rhythms that

constituted the Cosmos.

In Eurasia, Leviathan destroyed communities and encased human beings in

its entrails. Linear His-story replaced the rhythmic cycles of life.

Music gave way to the March of Time...

These very words, written words, are inventions of the Lugal’s scribes.

They cannot convey dream time...

The Renegades from Civilization are notorious. They shed masks. They

shed whole armors. They separate from previously indispensable amenities

and experience a shedding of an insupportable burden. Mere contact with

a community of free human beings gives them insights no Leviathanic

education can provide. Nurturing contact stimulates dreams and

ultimately even visions. The Renegade is possessed, transformed,

humanized. Psyche-manipulators aware of Civilization’s discontents will

try to induce such transformations within Leviathan’s entrails, but

their most vaunted successes will be miserable failures. Civilization

does not nurture humanity...

The invasion is a silencing of music, a flattening of rhythm; it is a

linearization of time, a destruction of the myths and ways that will

later be called Culture, a war against communities that nurture freedom,

vision and life...

The resistance persists from generation to generation, in the face of

plagues, poisons and explosives. The story of that resistance has been

repeatedly and powerfully told. It is a story that does not show

Leviathan to be as natural to human beings as hives are to bees. It is a

story that shows Leviathan to be an aberration which cannot be imposed,

by wile or by force, on human beings who retain the slightest link with

community, even a link as tenuous as the remembrance of a Dream Time...

It is a good time for people to let go of its sanity, its masks and

armors, and go mad, for they are already being ejected from its pretty

polis. In ancient Anatolia people danced on the earth-covered ruins of

the Hittite Leviathan and built their lodges with stones which contained

the records of the vanished empire’s great deeds.

The cycle has come round again. America is where Anatolia was. It is a

place where human beings, just to stay alive, have to jump, to dance,

and by dancing revive the rhythms, recover cyclical time. An-archic and

pantheistic dancers no longer sense the artifice and its His-story as

All but as merely one cycle, one long night, a stormy night that left

Earth wounded, but a night that ends, as all nights end, when the sun

rises.[17]

XIX

We must pause here and ask a question which is implicit in all the

ideological understandings of gender; has there been or will there be a

world without gender?

The nihilist task is to say no. As a consequence of a rhythmic shape to

time, we cannot rely on any answers which would assert with any

certainty that a world without gender ever existed. As a further

consequence, we cannot put faith in any utopian vision of a world

without gender to come. Whatever is said by the soothsayers of feminism

and queer theory, utopia does not approach. We’ve explored countless

visions of how such a utopia might emerge, but each feels as unlikely as

the last. The eco-feminist matriarchy never existed as a universal, and

if it did it is hopelessly lost. The techno-industrial fantasies of

mechanical reproduction and automated reproductive labor are simply an

intensification of the nightmare. The abolition of gender awaited by the

communizers has yet to reveal its shape or really even a hint of its

coming. The democratic diffusion of gender in queer subculture amounts

to an ever more insidious and diffuse recomposition of gender.

Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! can be read as a biographical

account of the failures of those who resist the Leviathan. After all,

the decomposing or abandoned segments of the monster can always be

reconfigured and re-animated. Individuals and communities of resisters

will die, but the components and apparatuses of the machine can always

be revived to re-capture life anew. Living beings are inferior in this

respect. Death is on the side of the machines. The stories of those

who’ve escaped are often lost to us. And we ourselves are often so

mutilated by the machine that we may not be able to hear anyway. The

masks and armors are often to deeply intertwined with our being to tear

off, and when we can, we are left wounded.

This has tragic consequences for those who at last succeed in

disencumbering themselves of the heavy carcass. They cannot return to

the old communities, for these have been destroyed by generations of

plundering, kidnapping and murdering Civilizations. People cannot

resume; they have to start over again. We should not assume that the

ways, what we will call Culture, nurtured and cultivated over thousands

of generations, can be regenerated overnight.

The messianic stories have lost much of their power.

It is hard to imagine that any collapse or revolution of divine

intervention could truly burn this archaic constraint out of us.

All the sweat and labor expended hourly in the beast’s entrails

presupposes the beast’s perpetual existence. The notion of a Progress

that culminates in a final collapse is Christian but not Leviathanic.

The notion is of a piece with Christianity’s commitment to the absurd,

and is not altogether absurd if life is considered a vale of tears. But

for Leviathan such a notion is contradictory, and Leviathan is an

eminently logical entity.

Leviathanic existence, a vale of tears to Christians and outsiders, is

to Leviathan a paved highway, and Progress along this highway cannot

lead to an Apocalypse but only to more Progress.

Leviathanic self-consciousness expresses itself in the currents of

thought known as Enlightenment, Illuminism, Masonry, Marxism, plus a few

others. These currents supply the all-swallowing beast with a language

suitable to its last days.

Yet remarkably, we never see in Against His-Story an argument to accede

to our capture and constraint. Rather, we see a celebration of all the

moments of resistance which start in the lives of the resisters

themselves. To give up on hope for a world without gender is not to

accept defeat. Rather it unchains us from the old traps of Politics and

Ideology and allows us to begin again, shifting the scope from all of

His-story to our own lives. It allows us to begin again from ourselves,

our bodies and our spirits.

XX

If there was no pre-existing and definite world without gender, then we

cannot conceive of our struggle as being for a return to some

pre-gendered whole. Rather we must conceive of our escape as the flight

of domesticated beings into the wild. Not primitive or prelapsarian

beings, we must become feral beings. We can understand queerness

similarly. We aren’t naïve enough to project a positive or essential

queerness into the unknown before civilization. Instead, we conceive of

our queerness negatively, as escape, refusal and failure of gender. What

we pursue then, is a feral queerness which bucks against all the

apparatuses of constraint and subjection; a feral queer which appears as

out of time, irrational, inappropriate and wild. We won’t find this in

anthropology, history, economics or psychoanalysis. Instead we’ll employ

magic, heresy, myth and exegesis.

Those examples we have explored previously take for granted that such a

feral queerness must emerge through the struggle of the body against its

capture. This is largely self evident in the modes of riot, evasion and

rebel sexuality which comprise our queer stories. What is more subtle,

and requires some elaboration, is that the struggle against

domestication must also occur in its spiritual dimension. As the body

must flee the machines which capture it, the spirit must expel the

machines which colonize it. We must do violence with ourselves. To

embark on this lifelong endeavor, we’ll have to chart a course against

the multiplicity of apparatuses which compose this gendered prison.

Fredy Perlman will speak of this task as the fire which burns against

the darkness. A fire which can burn off the mask, burn out the armor and

burn Leviathan to the ground.

The last communities do a ghost dance, and the ghosts of the last

communities will continue to dance within the entrails of the artificial

beast. The council-fires of the never-defeated communities are not

extinguished by the genocidal invaders, just as the light of Ahura Mazda

was not extinguished by rulers who claimed it shone on them. The fire is

eclipsed by something dark, but it continues to burn, and its flames

shoot out where they are least expected.

This fire is largely ineffable, and attempts to enshrine it in words

often amount to yet another apparatus of capture. We cannot

scientifically articulate this fire, as it has to be found in each

individual if they are to participate in any personal or collective

desertion of the beast. The fire which burns against gender is precisely

that inexpressible moment of queerness which lashes out against any

capture in language. We cannot comprehend the fire, but we can try to

illustrate its contours.

We must reclaim the mystery, passion, intensity and depth of feeling

which has been alienated from us and enshrined in religion. We must

pursue the spiritual ecstasy which religion cohered in order to abolish.

We must pursue the unity and joy which gender has always precluded and

imitated. More specifically, we must refuse the binary which relegates

these pursuits to some spiritual realm separate from our corporeality.

Revolt must take form and content which do not deny and separate the

body and spirit. As the fire burns out the mechanistic parts of the

self, it must also burn the tethers which maintain our capture.

We’ll briefly return to Feral Faun to quote:

The revolutionary project must certainly include the end of religion—but

not in the form of a simplistic acceptance of mechanistic materialism.

Rather, we must seek to awaken our senses to the fullness of life that

is the material world. We must oppose both religion and mechanistic

materialism with a vibrant, passionate, living materialism. We must

storm the citadel of religion and reclaim the freedom, the creativity,

the passion and the wonder that religion has stolen from our earth and

our lives. In order to do this we will have to understand what needs and

desires religion speaks to and how it fails to fulfill them. I have

attempted to express some of my own explorations so that we can carry on

the project of creating ourselves as free, wild beings. The project of

transforming the world into a realm of sensual joy and pleasure by

destroying the civilization that has stolen the fullness of life from

us.

A feral queerness may appear as a wildness, as an effort to embody the

chaos of the world, while refusing the ordering that is always imposed

upon that chaos. It might appear as an orgiastic dance against

constraint, or a frenzied tearing off of the masks and armors. It may

appear as the rediscovery of all the potentials—sexual, animistic,

relational, magical—which have been stunted by domestication. It will

seem emotional, cathartic, irrational, but healing.

But it may also appear more quietly as a withdrawal. Sometimes it is

easier to discreetly flee the beast. People are constantly plotting

escapes and they often succeed. The stories of renegades, maroons,

vagabonds and defectors illustrate another form of Leviathan’s

decomposition. Rather than proclaiming some new gendered identity, a

feral queerness might not be visible at all. It may hide, flee, and make

a home for itself in the shrouds of mystery outside leviathan’s purview.

In a world which calls us to self-identify, we must make a home in

anonymity.

Any possible escape from gendered constraint will likely involve both

the explosive and clandestine tactics, but also methods which make these

forms indistinguishable. When I don the black mask, I participate in the

unfolding of a riot, but also withdraw from the apparatuses which would

locate and identify me in this or that gender. I obscure my facial

features, hair, body—anything which could be engendered; revealing

instead my violence. The State, Media, and feminist Left endlessly

insist that the violence belongs to men alone; this insistence itself

forms another apparatus to capture and engender. My violence, taken from

me by so many representations and politics of victimhood, returns and

emanates from the inside outward. The black mask forms the fabric which

stitches together the refusals of internal submission and external

representation. Above all else, the following attacks destroy the

barriers and separations within and without. I become a microcosms of

the chaos around me, suspending the regulatory practices of identity.

A feral queerness must extend this effect to the whole of life. Whatever

its form, it must take aim at life itself.

To quote Fredy one last time:

I’m impatient to end the story of the artificial beast with human

entrails. In a different work I will tell some of the details of the

resistance to Americanization on the part of some of the world’s last

communities. I cannot tell all, either there or here, because the

struggle against His-story, against Leviathan, is synonymous with Life;

it is part of the Biosphere’s self-defense against the monster rending

her asunder. And the struggle is by no means over; it goes on as long as

the beast is animated by living beings.

To cultivate the fire means to be able to start from oneself and strike

out alone. Undeniably a spreading of the wildfire would require the

interweaving of one’s personal rebellion with others, but the fire

cannot be imposed from the outside. It requires an overcoming of the

fear of autonomy, a dependence imposed by domestication. One must oppose

their life to the Leviathanic organization of a society which is death

appearing as life. Refusal, evasion, attack—all of it flows from that

internal fire, or it does not flow at all. We must burn gender out of

ourselves before we can help cultivate the fire in others. In the first

issue of this journal, we discussed the concept of jouissance, the

supersession of pleasure and pain, of duality. It is in this break with

duality that we can also break with binary gender.

There are several examples we can look to of individuals and small

groups fleeing or rebelling against the constraints of gender. In this

context we can read the self-organization for survival by street queens

of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries as an attempt to withdraw

from the subjectivizing apparatus of sexual labor, as well as an attempt

to cultivate a queer and rebel spirituality. Within prison society, we

can see a wide range of stories of queer and gender-variant people

revolting against the constraints of gender imposed on their bodies. Men

Against Sexism waged an armed struggle against the machinery of rape

culture, while the present struggle of Gender Anarky in the California

prison system illustrates a clear example of a transgender anarkists

waging a spiritual and bodily struggle against civilization from within

the hellish intersection of so many apparatuses of gendering and

control. In her text “Aspects of Insurrectionary Anarky,” Amazon of

Gender Anarky writes:

The absence of spiritual awareness in one’s life contributes to fear of

consequences. Worse, it leaves a vacuum in the person that gets filled

with the debris of the world, clogging them up, stunting their insight.

The debris of material possessions, selfishness, uncaring, ignorance,

greed, envy, egotism, fear. It is a tragedy because people so afflicted

cannot open up to the world around them and draw from it beneficially

when their sensibilities are so shut down and distracted, cannot live

full lives but live lesser, half lives... We believe in the spirit. It

is an aspect of our insurrection... Being separated from nature

separates us from spiritual awareness and impedes our balance, the

totality of our inner self, which is needed to understand and relate to

the external world around us: nature and people, the animals, the plant

life, the weather and seasons, the suns, planets, moons... In this there

is a direct relationship between anarkist insurrection, which fights for

autonomy and the earth, and spirituality.

Another inspiring example of a revolt against gender from within prisons

walls is the communique released by Olga Ekonomidou, imprisoned member

of the Conspiracy Cells of Fire in Greece. Olga refused the capture of

her body through the apparatus of full body search:

In this moment I am writing these few lines from inside isolation; 30

days of solitary confinement is the price I pay for my refusal to sell

out my dignity and obey the humiliation of a full body search, which

would last 5 minutes. I remain unrepentant in my decision. I won’t give

away even a second of compromise to prison guards. I will not exchange

my refusals and choices with the ‘warmth’ of a standard cell and the

‘liberty’ of yard time among the general prison population. I’m not

looking to become another normal statistic of an inmate who cringes

before the prison service, who serves ‘quietly’ her sentence, who trips

into hallucinations induced by wacko-pills, who forces herself as an

‘older rank’ on new-coming prisoners. I remain friend, comrade and human

with all women and men who keep the fire burning inside them. With those

women and men who choose the dangerous paths of wolves instead of sheep

pastures. When it comes to all of us, anarchists of praxis, imprisonment

is never enough ‘punishment.’ For this, disciplinary penalties,

transfers and solitary confinements are due to come down. Isolation is a

prison within the prison. You remain 24 hours a day locked up in a cage

with a bunk bed, an in-cell toilet and the vigilant eye of a

closed-circuit camera. Inside here, your only girlfriends are your

thoughts and memories. Inside here, the days and hours are eliminated,

lost, dying, pushing slowly each other...

But these 30 days of solitary confinement I was not left alone. I had

some odd and charming visitors by my side that passed secretly and

‘smuggled’ their way into my cell, breaking the isolation. 30 days of

solitary confinement and I go on, but the she-wolf inside me doesn’t

sleep, doesn’t give consent, doesn’t forgive...

Lastly, we have to mention a woman in Juarez, Mexico who goes by the

name of Diana the Huntress. The border town of Juarez is notorious for

what some have called an ongoing femicide, a mass murder and

disappearance of countless women. In September of 2013, Diana struck out

against this apparatus of capture, shooting two rapist bus drivers. She

released a communique claiming responsibility for the murder, indicting

those drivers as part of the rape machinery of the city, but also

announcing a refusal on her part to play the role of a victim subject.

In these diffuse stories we see moments, fragments, of the burning

spiritual clarity which strikes out, through explosive violence or quiet

refusal, against gender and domestication.

Third Mythos: Diana

Many today praise the greatness of the Roman Empire, the Res Publica,

the Public Thing, a civilization which recognized and hated itself as

such. This self-hatred turned outwards, conquering and destroying

everything outside its walls. Countless books have been devoted to the

greatness of Rome, to its war engines and death machines—at times to

death itself—but Rome’s greatness is posthumous. Among those trapped in

its entrails, few loved it; many tried daily to destroy it. Hating what

they’d become, many conspired to set fire to Rome.

In ancient Rome, some people worshipped a more ancient deity—one who

reminded them of a time before: Diana the Huntress. Though associated

with the Greek goddess Artemis, she independently emerges from the long

forgotten past of the time before either empire. The Romans revered her

as the goddess of the moon, animals, and the wild hunt. One of her more

well known exploits involves a hunter named Acteon, who inadvertently

stumbled upon her bathing in a forest pool. When she realized that

Acteon was watching her, she refused to be captured by his gaze. She

turned him into a deer, and his own hunting dogs slaughtered him. The

domesticated beasts slayed their master; the hunter became the hunted.

For this act of wildness and refusal, Diana gained notoriety. A

millennia later, she would still be worshipped as the queen of the

witches all throughout southern Europe. They danced to her in sabbats,

and orgiastic rites; they flew with her beneath the stars; they

celebrated her as a connection to all that was wild and indomitable.

Witch hunters of the Holy Inquisition saw her as the Devil and tortured

the accused into confessing their devotion to her. The punishment was

death. And yet the sadistic technologies of the inquisitors and the fire

of the stake were not enough to eliminate her cult. To this day,

streghas still venerate her when the moon is full, and when they strike

down their enemies. Through her we might invoke the rhythms of the moon,

the insight of the animals, a refusal of the techniques of surveillance

and subjection, a feral becoming, death to our captors.

[1] “Queers Gone Wild,” bædan vol. one, 2012.

[2] Primitivists seek to understand domestication at its origins, with

particular attention to the cultures it destroyed. Insurrectionaries

tend to explore strategies against the institutions of domestication in

the present. Others emphasize the metaphysical and spiritual

implications of domestication. Queer and feminist anti-civilization

perspectives focus on domestication as the origins of patriarchy.

[3] “An Introduction to Anti-Civilization Anarchist Thought and

Practice” by the Green Anarchy collective.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of

Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and

Gay Studies, issue 1 volume 3, 1994.

[6] Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and the American Indian

Genocide, 2005.

[7] María Lugones, Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender

System, 2007.

[8] Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!.

[9] Anonymous, “History as Decomposition” in Attentat, the journal of

the nihilist position, 2013.

[10] In the handbooks of inquisitors, homosexuality and witchcraft are

virtually indistinguishable. From the 1619 Discours des Sorciers: “You

may well suppose that every kind of obscenity is practiced there, yea,

even those abominations for which Heaven poured down fire and brimstone

on Sodom and Gomorrah are quite common in these assemblies.” The

Theologia Moralis, published a few years later, explained that sodomy

was a sort of gateway drug to witchcraft.

[11] Caliban and the Witch.

[12] Ibid.

[13] The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism.

[14] John Zerzan, Patriarchy, Civilization, and the Origins of Gender.

[15] In LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism, as well as other recent

publications and debates from within the Marxist Feminist milieu.

[16] In “Undoing Sex,” published in LIES, C.E. writes: “Effectively, the

not-man cannot speak, cannot be represented with total accuracy, as it

is defined through lack and absence. Still, it is a point in a

relationship which is constitutive of gendered class, and discussion of

it is necessary for any understanding of what it is to be a woman, man,

transgender, or queer. Not-man is a means of addressing the problem of

patriarchy—the way in which maleness and male subjectivity produces,

appropriates, and exploits a condition of silence, death, and lack—while

hopefully avoiding the presupposition of a coherent feminist or female

subject. Not-maleness is constitutive of gender’s class reality—forms of

womanhood and manhood exist only in relation to it—but it is irreducible

to one or several classes.”

[17] Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!.