Revolution as (nonutilitarian) Sympathetic Magic?Manifesto of Charm: Incantation, Seduction, Transformation

Desire may be entirely, the will to experiment within new-found contexts, themselves in or out of transformation (most often, it is a simultaneity or absurd redundancy since there are no repeats, only spiraling, tangentially generative similarities). Desire's induction may be merely the openness to perturbation (the womb of interest) after-which one follows, or it fades and momentum continues after an uncertain pause.

– see Experimentalist Manifesto

Seduction

"What is seduction? It's a rather unsavory concept, bringing to mind manipulative attempts to induce others to let themselves be used for one's own ends. In a sexual context, it can imply either a romantic, charismatic, persuasive use of charm to propose a sexual encounter, or a way to trick someone into succumbing to one's advances. The connotations are discomfiting, but the salient factor is the implication that the seducer creates a desire, rather than simply unearthing it. It is this sense that we find most interesting in considering the problems of desire and consensus reality on the political level...

What is desire? Let's conceive of desires not as internal elements emanating from within individuals, but as autonomous forces that flow through them. Individuals don't desire things; whole societies produce and circulate desires, even if those desires remain submerged...The existing consent discourse presupposes static notions of self and desire. It presumes that desire is monolithic, composed of a single thrust rather than multiple pulls in different directions... the desires we experience are not fixed or unitary. They shift constantly based on our experiences and contexts. They are multiple, contradictory, and divergent, surprising us with their diversity, frustrating us with their mutability. They resist our attempts to confine or domesticate them. They simply can't fit into a two-dimensional binary model of consent, wherein we either want something or we don't.

When we seduce, we present someone who ostensibly doesn't want something with a new situation in which they may want it after all. Whereas consent focuses on obtaining the go-ahead for an external action – "Is this OK?" – seduction focuses internally, on desire: "Could you want this?" Our practices of seduction don't aim to induce others to do things they don't want to do, but to induce others to want to do them, in the most meaningful sense: to want to take on all the risks and pleasures they entail...

We don't buy into the idea that our goals are what everybody "really" wants, nor do we assume that everyone would adopt our views if only they had access to all the right information. We don't claim to represent anyone beyond ourselves, nor to stand in for any silent majority; in that sense, anarchist revolution is not a democratic project. Nor do we, despairing of those things, decide that to be true to our principles we must give up on transforming society altogether and retreat into isolation among the few comrades with whom we can establish meaningful self-determined consensus. We don't think it's hopeless to resist in the face of the stranglehold of consensus reality. We want a different path...

We neither wish to impose our will on others by force, nor to disregard their desires. Instead, we want to perform a kind of magic, an alchemical operation. We want to induce desires, not simply (create or) fulfill them.

We hypothesize that seduction unfolds via three processes: transformation, invitation, and contagion. We transform circumstances, creating space for new possibilities and thus new desires to flourish; we invite others to participate in these new situations, to experiment with different modes of action and desire; and we infect others with curiosity, an insatiable desire for freedom, and the means to experiment towards it...

We strive for transformation because if we desire on the basis of what we know, we can only induce new desires that exceed the confines of our current reality by shifting the conditions in which we live. Sometimes it can be as simple as doing things in the street without permits, or using a park or building for an entirely new purpose. Disobedience is crucial to transformation; nothing opens up a sense of possibility like literally breaking the rules. But our behavior is constrained by far more than traffic laws and zoning regulations; social norms, gender roles, and innumerable other systems shape how we act, and each way we're constrained provides new terrain for transformation. The key lies in challenging what's taken for granted in a way that opens up the possibility to act differently, and to imagine how the world would be different if those rules and borders were no longer fixed.

Invitation requires neither persuasion via rational discourse nor imposition by force. Here we maintain the spirit of consent discourse, asserting our respect for the wishes of others and opposition to coercion. We aspire to a world based on voluntary association, in which participation is based on our own free choice rather than force or manipulation, and thus we aim to prefigure that world through our methods of creative resistance...

Seduction casts the invitee as the protagonist, the one whose agency counts – in contrast to consent discourse, which merely seeks permission. The whole point is for people to discover new desires, to want to do something they didn't want before; they have to be in the driver's seat for that to be possible. In this sense, we are using seduction to mean the opposite of its traditional negative connotation of trying to get something from people against their will or at their expense.

Finally, we aspire to invite others into practices that will prove contagious: ideas that self-replicate, models that can be applied in a variety of circumstances, attitudes that prove infectious. Contagion ensures that rebellion isn't restricted to activists, scenesters, or any other particular group. Only when revolt spreads so widely that it can no longer be quarantined to a specific demographic will anarchy move permanently beyond the anarchists. We succeed when others emerge from the spaces we create feeling more powerful. We win when the ruptures of possibility we open prove impossible to close."

– Breaking With Consensus Reality

Bioengineering & the Mob

The most common criticism of critics is directed at an omission or refusal to offer alternatives. Whether in a reductive sense as genetic engineering – to which everyone but the engineer is seen critical when they respond "Leave it the fuck alone!" – or in the more expansive "social engineering" which, ironically, almost everyone supports, at least when hiding behind euphemisms like "political organization", particularly in its more revolutionary forms, I must ask the anti-critics demanding alternatives this: "why should the critic of engineering itself be expected to draft a substitute plan for a new and different fabrication?"

Why oppose the construction of blueprints in the effort of designer trees or food reeking with poison because it has been altered to resist a herbicide (or produce a pesticide) by avoiding its metabolism, but not oppose the similar plasticization of society? Did I say similar? Are we not conditioned, even medicated to resist trauma only to find ourselves exposed to increased levels of toxicity (or exploitation) tomorrow? I suppose the short answer would be "trees and tomatoes aren't prone to temper tantrums like children and other creepy-crawly critters". To conceive a social life without meddling must be as difficult as live organs without bodies. But on the other hand, "Leave me/us the fuck alone!" is the most obvious sentiment in the world observed in the targets of other's meddling.

Critique irrupts in the single generalization, "mob". Uppers protest: "They do nothing but complain!". Downers moan: "They don't complain enough!" The paranoid but wise are excluded when they insist "the mob" refers to the conspiratorial organization at the top pulling the strings (or greasing them), not to the puppets being drug along behind. Hegel said progressive democracy must always include the organizers, the counter-organizers and the counter-counter-organizers - thesis, antithesis and synthsis - rolling along like a wheel. Refined by Marx, historical materialism illustrated that even the puppeteers may be unwilling. Freud found that the force of history may be closer than the politically oriented (that is, the engineers) can imagine: they were all, one way or another reared with the force of childhood trauma. Put another way, even the bioengineers are collateral damage of bioengineering, or what sticklers for precision call biopolitics.

And so we're back to the dualist religion of utility and futility and still within the hyphenated paradox noted by Charles Fort: "One can't offend anybody with any statement that is interpreted as applying to everybody else". "The People" itself is the second most virtual (and useful) prestidigitation or trick of a magician's mirrors, except that the magician has not only gone missing from the stage, there never was one in the first place. The first most biggest social lie, of course, is that children are born naughty. We know this to be a lie, else they would have by now conscripted infants as experimental subjects to map and then modify the genetic code generating crime, rebelliousness and other sins, rather than concentrate all their forces upon pharmaceutical intervention onto childish brain chemistry persisting past puberty. I mean, who even considers kids beyond "just another toilsome responsibility" adding even more stress upon everyday struggle? Disobedience is the most frightening idea to the discoverers and their progeny of circular logic symbolized by the wheel.

The youthful genius of destruction is that the young instinctively know, as if informed by Saturn's muse, that creation comes of itself when left to its own devices. Fire is the saving grace when the sun has been occluded. And so is amusement, providing warmth to frozen spirits.

- see Reverse Engineering

Jaina

Jain is the name we mistakenly refer to as a religion, from the region between India and Persia, and underlies the colloquial traditions from a time before Little Zoroaster was in the womb and the lotus flower gave birth to god. Myth-time precedes even religion, a particularly nasty bit of artwork by every state rendering truth an absolute status justifying every authority on any matter of discourse in the pursuit of dematerialisation. The collage called "Truth" only looks systematic because of its symmetry of effort. All materialism is the extraction from or exclusion of the matrix, a word once referring to mothers. Hence the modern truism, "to prevent crimes of the aged, we must start with the young". Budding taste is always the first casualty.

As it is etymologically related to Jin, genie, genetic, knowledge, gnostic, gonad and generous, Jainism can no longer be seen as limited to a region, religion or branch there-from. In fact, it is a better match with 1) Tao & Shinto as philosophical ontologies (neither of which represent systematization of beliefs at the colloquial level except when corrupted by statecraft, academia or schools of divinity); 2) the so-called "goddess cult", a form of poetic discourse critical of imposed social institutions (before the rapacious imposition, there may have been no cult at all); and 3) a theory of magic wherein tricks are exposed as clues to an unfolding drama of nature, itself merely a set of tricks performed on an indeterminate stage peripheral to an audience rather than front and center. At none of these performances are invited deities unless stripped of authority, where-after they are reduced to the mere life of mundane spirits muttering profanities as often as any wisdom. Therefore, there is no sense of "worship" except in the eyes of alien visitors refusing to participate because they are armed with the truth of objectivity in a geometrically bound universe, traveling the furthest but all the while seeing nothing but mirrors or crystal balls foretelling of fodder for increased production, a euphemism for maximization of the flow of tribute in the cosmopolitical river ever flowing back to headquarters. "Hey, it's just a living", they say. But you and I know better, eh?

Beneath the drama lies Jain's Epistemology of Maybe, a discourse never exposed to modern children except as a synonym for "No!". Basically, it runs thus:

"All positive affirmations are in some sense true, false, indeterminate or ambiguous, and every combination there-of."

While irony is always welcome, contradiction is without merit, including the war between positive and negative movement. For example:

I affirm that (positive)
nothing above is necessarily true (negative).

We are taught the second line renders the first absurd following the arithmetic of subtraction: (+1 -1 = Zero) producing an antimatter-matter collision resulting in universal annihilation or post-nihilist Armageddon. To the optimist comes impossibility, the pessimist sees a positive outcome.

The key to the seeming paradox is in the juxtaposition, "some sense". If the absolute is a bag, no sense can be quantified to be contained within it, except as it is written with a "C". Religion or any other state logic becomes denuded as a systematization of bags containing copper penned by sacred writes – the absolute (truth) is the bullshit of confinement in one's own bag and one is reduced in value to the currently fashionable currency.

Armed with the tactic of epistemology (a provision modern scientists so often forget to pack), sense acquires an aesthetic feeling and some is an unquantifiable 'maybe' erased from the thesaurus entry which says "See 'No'". The fruit of this union is easily picked, ever hanging from low branches so as not to break one's neck and manifests its appearance as the bullshit detector (an organ no anatomist will welcome into his treatise of organic systematics but a hint of which may be found in The 6th Compendium of Synergistic Complexities). Jaina is thereafter seen as the poetry of possibility. And back full circle to "Gen" (it is more properly a spiral when the two ends miss – like missing fingers on the street, Genny fails the drunk-test after sipping too much gin, or why the sun & moon set us to wobble in a cosmic tailspin), positive value takes on the sense of "generation". What is generated is the metaphor, another word for familiarity, and travelling along the discontinuum of meaning, an hypothesis of effective synergy, objective nature becomes provisional, just like the cornucopia of Fortuna, that hypothetical (that is, poetical) goddess of chance, questions, spinning wheels and daggers which the aestheticist, Asger Jorn wrote on prior to the great in-exclusion.

see – Fiction & Taboo

Infection

Curiously, the war on drugs, terror, poverty and the war on infection exhibit a 97% philosophical overlap. Even more curious, the members of the boards of directors of corporate medicine (an emerged cartel or syndicate of pharmaceutical, chemical and insurance companies) also sit on the boards of military contractors (although obviously in different seating arrangements, else how could we tell them apart?). They are exceedingly hard to spot, being syndicalists ("connected"), anarchist ("above the law") and internally socialist ("the bucks stop there ... all of them!"), hence the designation, "high society". Now if everyone or even "just anyone" were to so transcend law, the epidemic of viral contamination would so furiously spread, the high and low ends would outright disappear, leaving society exposed and without adjective.

– Speaking on behalf of madness...

A PROCESSION of the damned.

By the damned, I mean the excluded.

We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.

Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them -- or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.

Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they'll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.

A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety.

The ultra-respectable, but the condemned, anyway.

The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness: the aggregate voice is a defiant prayer: but the spirit of the whole is processional.

The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogmatic Science.

But they'll march.

The little harlots will caper, and freaks will distract attention, and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries -- but the solidity of the procession as a whole: the impressiveness of things that pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on and keep on coming. [7/8]

The irresistibleness of things that neither threaten nor jeer nor defy, but arrange themselves in mass-formations that pass and pass and keep on passing.

So, by the damned, I mean the excluded.

But by the excluded I mean that which will some day be the excluding.

Or everything that is, won't be.

And everything that isn't, will be --

But, of course, will be that which won't be --

It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. The inference is that some day our accursed tatterdemalions will be sleek angels. Then the sub-inference is that some later day, back they'll go whence they came.

– Charles Hoy Fort, 1919

– see The Fortunate Wheel