Holes in the dominant grid, barbarians everywhere

"If a dominant cultural system relies on taking certain things for granted, the refusal to do so places one outside the dominant cultural system, as a cultural outcast. This Barthesian view suggests that the ‘dropout’ or ‘activist ghetto’ nature of certain strands of activism is not necessarily a bad thing. In contrast to critics who remain within leftist versions of myth and the supposed folk-wisdom of the majority, a marginal person can escape from bourgeois ideology at least enough to see its existence."

– Andrew Robinson, on Barthes

– see In Theory, think different, think local
– Barbarians: The Disordered Insurgence

Nihilist Utopianism

The logic of ultra-leftism has led historically to an end-point where life that is lived in opposition to capitalised social forms is constrained by the accumulation of certain critical discoveries made by the ultra-left and which concern leftist organising. These compounded discoveries have reappeared historically as nihilist communist precepts. The following list of precepts will necessarily influence the passage of anyone seeking out a route by which they might leave this world. Therefore, whatever such lonely wanderers attempt as their method, they must, if they are to remain in good faith, keep foremost in their thoughts the following constraints: no factories; no beliefs; no hopes; no projection; no counter-transference; no first person plural; no recourse to transcendence; no positive role for ideas; no identification with the class; no long term projects; no positive visions; no propaganda; no accumulation of achievements; no transitional stages; no plans, no models; no venerated texts; no reductionism; no practical solutions; no substitutions; no expropriations; no representation; no formality; no future; no organisations; no category errors; no instrumentalisation; no self as living example; no lessons or lectures; no negotiations; no demands; no programme; no objectives; no fixed principles; no political organs; no specialised discourse; no history; no tradition; no final analysis; no allegiances. And above all these, no factories, no hopes and no beliefs. Then, what remains?

– the end of a lollipop, plop

What remains? Well, that accounts for the nihilism, and for many, that list represents the totality of existence; it's been the message of every education or ideological apparatus, drilled in since before we called any civilisation capitalistic. Yet that other word persists past this massacre of the known: communism, something only guessed at or the subject of fantasy and certainly experimental (or deceptively intentional) error – it is currently a phantasm whispered only if the coast seems clear. Is it then a seed that can only sprout when nourished on a dung heap like any other organic poetry of blossoms and sex and infinitely generative entendre? That would make it a utopian seed, what with the destruction of the romantic movement in literature. What remains? Despair? Possibility! ... and a different sort of possibility than we currently imagine. It is a possibility without certain constraint, the certainty of a misery which is now guaranteed at a higher level of probability than the fifteen minutes of fame which has theoretically been allotted to everyone, if only as the caption on a grave-stone, just before it is erased to make way for a more privileged corpse.

Ah, but I didn't quite live up to the nihilist task by leaving hope unscathed. So be it, the list above maintains the category, only dismissive of error. The dismal truth of any category is only its divinity. Where truth is beauty and destruction means creation, hope translates to expectation, as any old farmer scrounging through the garbage pile can tell you, pointing to just the right scrap which, with minor modification, might just suit you. We may even find interest and voluptuous attraction there, a handy replacement for the lost consciousness destroyed in the nihilist conflagration, the consciousness which had only previously been aroused by our resistance to a world none asked to be born into. The only distinction between hope and expectation is the degree of faith one has in an outcome, and the grand commitment in the futility of resistance is more a matter of ideologic faith than any belief in possibility. The latter at least has some induction behind it: life goes on. If there wasn't the attached word, communism, we'd have to resort to "paradise", which is at most a blind faith if not literally death.

Everyday life, on the other hand, if only during remote moments, displays communing, communication and commonality. If a body had no pleasurable nutrition it would call it quits at the most basic biochemical level, no matter the overall ontological mood or position. In fact, everyday life was named for the latter quality – "common". At one time, mundane meant worldly and common meant free! Released from its constraints, utopia loses its place value, escapes the future and is transformed into nutrition for fantasy, a consumable which only grows with the eating. But of course, you still have to spread it around thickly. Contrary to Goethe's opinion, there are no hermits in utopia except the starving ones, and that is self-limiting if not relieved by occasional acts of kindness, where hermitage itself becomes self-limiting. Mutual aid is merely the fertilizer for community

The failure of archaic utopias was the annihilation of nihilism itself, when the assholes in the fairy tales were relegated to "fiction" and buried by cruel "reality" (they said "every thing's peachy"), unbeknownst that monsters are quite real, and without their situation in stories taken at least metaphorically, such that anyone has the potential to play the part and be recognised for the performance, monsters will not be eliminated but reduced in statistical significance. When everyone knows shit happens, only the toxic will be weeded from the garden or contained, not ironically, by communication. And a dandelion will then be just another wonderful flower suitable for any display or spirited beverage. There's no one more dangerous or sickly than the emerging adult after a childhood of over-protection or censorship and drillings into the head. A peck of dirt consumed when young has prevented more disease than all the vaccines, nasal sprays and moral education taken separately or in cocktail, and here's the moral of this story: "Even in Utopia, there be dragons".

– Revolution is no mere excuse for poetry

Fourier as Trickster: The Poetry of Utilitarian Truth

"The hieroglyph of truth in the animal kingdom is the giraffe. Since the characteristic of truth is to surmount error, the animal that represents it must be able to raise his head higher than all the others: this the giraffe can do, as it browses on branches 18 feet above the ground. It is, in the words of one ancient author, “a most fine animal, gentle and agreeable to the eye.” Truth is also most fine, but as it is incapable of harmonizing with our customs, its hieroglyph, the giraffe, must be incapable of helping humans in their work; thus God has reduced it to insignificance by giving it an irregular gait which shakes up and damages any burden it might be called upon to bear. As a result we prefer to leave it to inaction, just as nobody will employ a truthful man, whose character runs counter to all accepted customs and desires."

– Charles Fourier, 1808 quoted in Lars Band Larsen

Truth for Fourier is also an approximation which could only account for seven eights or eight ninths of any proposition. Thus, in his day and age, civilisation produced only between 87.5 and 88.9% misery. If you were miserable, you might blame the 11 or 12% for your conditions, but there would entail a larger degree of error with the bisection of agents from conditions or mathematizing life bearing standards, and then confusing them like a flag and its condotieri: the demographic error transposes what was only a likelihood or probability statement to a body count. With inflation and two centuries of progress, the certainty is increased by natural inflation to total-minus-one percent misery, which is a pretty sure bet, but still, any culprit delegated to represent the minority would have an equivalently probable claim to innocence.

To increase levels of certainty increases uncertainty in direct proportion. Perhaps this is why reactionary regimes end with a thousand days of terror if they do not instead choose to navigate a thousand bedrooms and deSade probabily did understand that merging bodies was no property transaction when the head is decapitated prior to the engagement, neither perverse, transgressive nor economic. Unfortunately, we are still prone to count bodies like coins in the till: the one percent are thought to cause our misery. The error persists because we've habituated to the use of a single sense organ tuned to track the smell of money. It goes clear beyond our olfactory range that the one percent of bodies are in fact the most miserable and rank offal saturating the lower atmosphere, only illustrating that the most rank can flatulate from the least particle with an orifice for exclusion.

There is another error concerning Fourier. He is, despite his insistence to the contrary, described as a philosopher of Utopia. That is absurd, and Ms. Marx and Engels may more properly fit that description. A brief glance will illustrate that Charles, like Jarry, is an absurdist and a poet. Here is the logic: If we could manage to create a phalanstery as a permanent, self-contained city with a mathematically set population (1620) settled in situ, operating on the principle of fluid movement driven by passional attraction or a cosmologic aesthetic, then you should have no problem with the idea of a tropical arctic paradise and all the oceans turned to lemonade.

But still, we are to expect at an 88% level of probability (the expectation, not the proposition) of truth value. When the phalanstery is an event, not a topical trope or stand, the city is a festival, not a habitation. It took the inhabitants of Togetherness, a Fourieran (hippy) commune near San Francisco only three years to discover that the permanent situation is impossible, and voluntarily disbanded in 1969. The cops have recently discovered this too, but it took forty five years to sink in, hence the permanent eviction of the various occupations last year instead of the old tactic of kidnapping any children issued therefrom. When the occupiers discover the potlatch as the provisional party lasting only as long as the provisions, the cops will be overwhelmed by a puff of logic which cannot be detected through the filtering effect of any gas mask, but is deadly all the same – they'll stop getting a paycheck. Before this can occur, the exchange paradigm will crumble, and rumble will be something one does (with or without switchblades, chains and crowbars) behind the back seat of a '28 ford coupe, and when the moon goes round nine times, a harmonic will emerge from the harmony of the duet with no strings attached as they've all been bitten through and through with no loss of attachment.

Marx' error was in taking Fourier too seriously (or was it the literal translation), an error in linear thinking always generating the eternal return or logical tautology. I expect there is seven eights truth value, once one dispenses with utility, in Furier's assessment that savagery, barbarism and civilisation all emerged in only three centuries after eighty thousand years of harmony, back before dialectics was invented in 492 bc, except as an absurd statistical anomoly, just like, according to Alfred Jarry any absurd truth – one's as good as another – the equivalence of all absurdities.

The Collège d'Sociologie also disbanded when fondling too much the babe of transaction in swaddling clothes none would consider pederastic as through ever-circuitous logic the cosmos remains enframed by the economy, ensuring its eternal return. To de-nominalise a share is to verbalise it, and that is a direct action (sharing) which, no matter how reciprocal it appears, is no matter to barter nor steal and then feel like shit in the morning.

The power of suggestion, the value of exploitation or the fetid theatre of cruelty as acceptable fetish & simulacron

Industry uses as the fundamental principle behind all its initiatives the idea that all human phenomena, like all natural phenomena, may be treated as exploitable material, and thus may be subjected to the fluctuations of value, but also to all the random chance involved in human experience. So the same goes for the simultaneously spiritual and animal character of the voluptuous emotion, considered on the basis of its power of suggestion.

...One might say that aggressiveness comprises the very substance of the game being played. But by elaborating the various drives in the form of activities that remain merely their simulacra, said play aims to capture and thus channel the outcomes of the perverse basis implicit in the voluptuous emotion. Either this play empties of its content that which it had intended to make blossom, or it only manages to make it blossom as a playful activity by leaving that very basis intact. In order for there to be a simulacrum, there must be an irreversible basis for it, since that reality is inseparable from the fantasy controlling the reality of a perverse behavior. Sade says that the fantasy, acting within the organism and its reflexes, remains ineradicable; Fourier contests this: the fantasy can be reproduced as a simulacrum.

...The simulacrum in this sense is not however a kind of catharsis - which is only a redirection of forces - because it reproduces the reality of the fantasy in the realm of play, by staging the aggressive reality.

...the destruction of its object is inseparable from the perverse emotion: the death instinct and the life function cannot be dissociated from one another. Fourier championed the malleability, the plasticity of human drives: they were only “life” drives or “death” drives relative to how immutable, or how mutated, the fantasy was. And Fourier in turn never ceased to affirm that the lived events of resistance, aggressiveness, in short, of violence, formed the driving force of play. And if it is indeed a simulacrum, how could it fail to diminish the lived event of violence, as soon as said violence furnishes substance to the simulacrum?

– klossowski

The power of suggestion is the "set" of contingencies enfavouring an association. Suggestibility is here seen under a positive lamp, a synonym of sentience, that sensually participatory word (almost erotically) preceding "intelligence", its mere commodification. It brims with agency, the ability to move toward or with the association (as well as to break it when the spirit moves or the gas dissipates). The dissective effort to replace the polycontingency of child- (or horse-) play with narrow exigency transforms a suggestion toward persuasion and certainty; possibility to lack or otherwise, necessity; and agency to helplessness, the quality of slaves and bureaucrats. Such was the magic of Moses when he descended from the mountain with stone engravings, paradoxically outlawing their worship. Those alchemical tools – the police – metamorphosed the magic to science with pointed sticks. Science describes it, artists inscribe it, technicians erect it but cops make the conditions of need and their masters, superfluous (we only think it is greed), it just gives them prestige, full not of desires but demands so all will proceed to supply them – "good deeds" are righteous – none go unpunished. Trust is irrelevant to any civil situation, abolished by legislation but really only locked in a bank vault. In this sense, the fetish represents the total endorsement of a lack of imagination, the outright rejection of fantasy. In every other sense, the fetish superinduces it like a brick through opaque windows.

Once a boundary has been crossed, the transgression renders that boundary obsolete as a permanent or absolute structure. A provisional boundary, on the other hand, is by definition both temporary (shiftable as well as igno(ra)ble) and gifted, or free "for the taking" (or leaving). I'm thinking of the boundaries of Aristotelean, academic categories as well as national and pan-national or federation borders painted on the landscape. If mental health is indeed "well-being", it must entail the freedom (as opposed to right) to move, and not just in Euclidean spaces. Constraints, particularly ideological constraints, have never freed anyone from entrapment.

Where it may correctly be perceived that I endorse violence and therefore (incorrectly), terror, it is a positive violence which is intended at the expense of terror. It is the violence of a question which is not in search of answers – the finality of absolutism is the terror of dogma and its iniquitous need for absolution and omnimorality. Death is, after all, the answer to the question of life, and that is always enframed in terror for the Western thinker. Already, people are beginning to see that with all our political, economic and techno-religious progress, the power-over semantically crushing the power-of making "free" a word comfortable only in death or romantically idealist Utopias, we have truly constructed a living hell on earth and it's starting to sink in, that idea of Einstein, that a new kind of thinking is required over that which produced the problems. With Vico, I say it's an old kind of thinking – it is thinking itself. Without poetry, there can be no iconoclasty and without violence to the icons and false illusions of the status quo, the avant garde of normality as image without substance, there will be no room in the brain for anything different, and that is the picture of intolerance, where sentience only runs interference to the accumulation of trivia contained and then quantified there-in. I'd have to say poetry and iconoclasty, more than merely compliment, demand each other just like a magnet before it's been bisected. Thus, Heidegger spoke of the "saving grace" of poetry, certainly a sentiment as well in common with Vico.

Poetry then is negatively defined: that provisional discourse which is not an exchange of information, antagonistic or otherwise. A good metaphor can never be bought and sold – Baudrillard's symbolic without the transaction of exchange. The commodity is the greeting card, not the rhymes lying within. Almost always superfluous to the situation, that's why we call jingles (representing the sound of sense as it falls away from your pockets) banal or mundane lines and why no one but priests and police any longer believe in intellectual property, no matter how quaint or sentimental. It's the sentiment which is the thing, and that's voluptuous experience and not a phantasm at all: you can feel it.

Aristotle certainly didn't invent property, but rationalised it with his excluded middle, a gut amputation just like seppeku. This exclusion (the category as fenced enclosure) is the basis of property and creates the state (the British enclosure came pretty late), that phantasmagorical beast he called "The Greater Good" more recently labeled the stupid economy. The category itself prevents or whittles away the subtleties of language available to everyone, the ability to "read between the lines" or even put them to the question and not just up your nose. To extend the horizon, if only by innuendo, one can witness the outer reaches of a situation and escape or explode it. This means not only a view to history and etymology superinduced upon the future, creating the genre, fiction, as the present, but the eschatology of every corpse (or dead metaphor) emerging from our own mouth (or keyboard) – the autopsy as exorcism. It may be the ghost is merely the unconscious habit refusing to enter oblivion, and every investigation breathes life back into it. It may even resurrect in the process, such that we will need to erase the accompanying caption, "archaic" from every dictionary. No doubt we'd wish some to go into the void, but that is fruitless, should we stick to the first law of physics – Ex nihilo nihil fit – "From nothing, nothing never comes" (or goes). We put them on display in poetry and theatre just so we can share with others the cruelty of their intentions. Some have called this consciousness-raising. It's nothing that special. It is merely raising the dead so they can do no more harm behind our backs. Enlightenment? We merely flip on the floodlights to illustrate their sneaking about with daggers in the dark.

All of the above, above all, the fetish (and "thanks" for all the fish).

Myths play a basic role in human existence, even for people who claim to live life wholly “rationally”. Indeed, the myth for such people is that it is both good and possible to be an unemotional intellect that controls everything.

– Peter Hannes

That which appears before the community, appears as a stable field of projected significances.

Is the third aspect of the commodity nameable? Can we identify the secret about humanity that the commodity holds within itself? Can we say it is the unconscious? Or the unrealised surplus of any given moment? Or is it the past? A residue, a wound? Futility? Or, merely a half-life trace? Is it impossibilism? Is it proximity? Is it duration? Either one abyss or another? Slime? The Law? Is it the mortified flesh of an other’s relinquished existence? Magnetism, surface tension, an unblinking gaze? Is it crime? Could it be nothing? Or materiality? Grit, dregs, sediment? A bacillus? Is it fascination? Is it community? Is it the alien set before itself? Decomposition? A rusted portal? Is it excess? Contamination? A maggot?

– Dupont

The offending aspect of the pretensions of democracy is not that in the name of what the majority supposedly thinks: we are supposed to be pleased and happy to be ruled by a clique for our good. Far from it, since, in truth, but few of us are ruled at all. It is merely our little foible to pretend we are. We give our rulers to understand they rule us because it pleases them so greatly to think they do: and then there is the consideration that a docile demeanour serves to divert their too too kind attention; probably the most servile-seeming member of a state the most bent upon fulfilling the role of step-grandmother fundamentally is untouched by rule.

The obedient attitude is a very convenient garb for the perverse to wear: and if the mere doing of it does not jar the temper too much, appearing to submit will define the line of least resistance to doing what, under the circumstances is what we please. Thus under the shelter of the servile demeanour there forms a residue of mulish waywardness, especially in those who appear to present their parts to receive the kicks which keep them going between gutter and cesspool: a waywardness which even more than temper succeeds in making them into a kind of clay unmeet to the hand which would govern.

The great unwashed will accept the infliction of the bath which cuts a slice off the space of their limited premises with resignation and reflect that it will indeed have a use as a wardrobe and coal-place. Though they are cast down by such things they are not defeated. Rule slides from them, as water slides from a duck. Rule has effect only on those who are indoctrinated with the Dogma: those who are under the spell of the Word. Even these – these intellectuals – are not placed in bondage by the rulers: theirs is a voluntary bondage – true freedom, according to the Word – and if they act as automata it is that they subscribe to the dogma that it is their duty to be as automata. They submit themselves to the law: because they approve not always indeed of the law, but of the attitude which submits to law.

– Dora Marsden

And that's the fetish of democracy.

– The Piss Test

In German, synonyms of fetish (fetisch) include in gereral:

Amulett

Talisman

Glücksbringer/charm (anmut 'encourage')

and superstitiously (Aberglaube, lit. 'mere belief'):

mascot (Maskottchen)

Fetish might then be understood as the relationship between a dog and its boy. Or merely, the relation itself, the association which is the enduring and like gravity, endearing magical synergy of the social allowing two in symbiosis to do what one cannot. Fetish is a metaphor as it discovers durative relations independent of their attachments, hence the common truism, "rockers come and go but rock 'n roll is here forever". Like rock,almost every noun can be said to be a nominalisation of a verb – an action or process – set in stone – we have "The Word". When not provisional, the noun itself is the fetish when such is considered a mystification. The metaphor is not, despite its etymological history, a suggestion of structural isomorphism, but the mere suggestion that everything is poetically – if not mathematically – commensurate: it's just comparison regardless of value or measurement, and that's not always useful; sometimes it's just fun. Esteem and not dimension brings things together; function may be handy but hardly ever tastes as well. If it is the case that magnetism persists no matter the number of slices, then it is more than mere abstraction. Matter, not the symbol, is what's ephemeral and focuses us toward death, the loss of density (hence reactionary Dada overwhelmingly related to flatulating gas rather than particles of dust).

I'd have to agree there's no getting around without the fetish, and that's no more derogatory than any mystification, the acknowledgment of a mystery, except when it revolves around commodities and democracy, the agreement making dogma every alien involved calls "the truth".

Impossible's the closing of a circle thought to counterpoise a line, but that's no post-modern oppositional opthalmology, it's just some suction to produce tautology. Only when the line is free to spiral outside control (we're talking spontaneity as well as wobble and careen) can free association generate diversity that's more than just a variation on a theme (the eternal return will never come around to the same spot notwithstanding).

But when addiction's thought impossible to rupture or destroy, one can keep the nouns within "quotes" or in (parentheses) and tale along behind each answer curvy symbols calling all to question marx? Another way to say a sense of humour's indispensable (even when contagious) to approaching mystery and generate some wonder. Sometimes sin and crime are just synonyms for wandering off persistently tread-routes warn by obsessively compelled commodity pushers like wagon-wheel ruts across the prairie.