The Smooth Transition & the Conservative Instinct

Just like the virtual ownership and distribution of a flailing appendage or a brief facial grimace at a wood-tick with his head buried in your scrotum, it may very well be that the authority of rampant property is a mere postcard confused with the landscape – it's often beside the point (or behind it).

– Old Wives' Tale

Kublai Khan liberated the Chinese from both their own tyrannic government AND from Big Daddy's barbarian horde intent on razing it to the ground. It's been the same story since well before Apollo the Apostle offed his own dad, Zeus (still hanging on a cross in oblivion) for the benefit of disgruntled Greeks everywhere (except, of course, the Dionysians). Mao wasn't the last to sign off the revolution in the interest of a smooth transition (humanitarian, I'm sure), paying off corporate bureaucrats 'til the time they're no longer needed. Every Union negotiator does the same, especially when handed a pitchfork and a train ticket to the nearest livery stable in the country-side for some brief R&R. It would seem that, while everyone is up for a radical change, no one wants to notice should it come along. This must be why even the most liberal progressives remain politically conservative once they take hold the reigns and kick their gueldings in the kidneys.

Since the Iron Age and aside from Ghengis and his crew, our era is among the first to witness rising numbers of people doing a work-around on that conservative instinct, calling for the rough over the smooth. The word gaining ground since the nineties is "rupture". They tried to revive the civil war sentiment in the interest of an us-against-them dialectic, but folks seem hip to the idea that even a fully automatic AK-47 with a thirty round clip would be no match for an F-16 or "drone" bomber, especially when the ensuing explosion is written off as another natural gas disaster negating any accrual of martyr value.

Revolution is definitely out, since we've come to notice it's always been just a polite way of saying "reform" like an electric blanket in the Alaskan Bush. The point is, when you're being drug to the bottom by a giant squid, the only things left in Captain Nemo's bag of tricks are the thrust ahead by rip and tear after an electro-shock to the hull. It's very hard to consider this an expression of any will to destruction or escalating death wish: in the midst of a real disaster, peace and violence are even meaningless as talking points. Anything which precludes your own mortality at the bottom of the proverbial drink is the most conservative expression one can make. Did you notice that "the will to live" has been all but erased from the dictionary?

"We can at least take one thing for granted about our era: it - the era - will not rot in peace.

...What's the point of their new, high-yield investment in doom-saying, as they paint their black canvases with images of hypothetical disaster, and hold their alarmist discussions on the subject of these problems that the atomized populace has no way of confronting by direct action? They intend to hide the real disaster, which one doesn't need to be a physician, climatologist or demographer to articulate. Everyone can see the constant impoverishment of the world of men by the modern economy, which develops only at the expense of Life: it destroys the biological bases of life with its devastating power; it submits all social space-time to the policing required for its proper functioning; substitutes for every once commonly accessible reality an ersatz reality whose residual authenticity content is proportional to its price"

– Encyclopedia of Nuisances

Reification & Tragedy"we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words!"

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
'T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, — you're straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

– emily d.

By reification, I mean any or all of the following:

to attatch an absolute or only mildly relative value to a particular significatum which excludes other possibilities 'before' they come into focus, suggestive that the category or class has prior claims on 'reality' over its content or members;

to establish an identity between a significatum and the metaphor we use to bespeak it, thus creating a "dead metaphor";

to think of a process, experience or activity as if it were a "thing";

to confuse "subject-matter" (of discourse) with material object;

a matter of thingifying and arithmeticizing the universe, bringing it to a standstill, extinguishing meaningful possibility in favour of 'blind' convention, yet not by intention.

It can take years of training as well as proceed from an immediate loss of interest.

– Post-Structural Structures

SO, EXCELLENCY, AFTER FIFTY YEARS, HOW GOES THE WAR ON POVERTY?

"...After such a cheerful commencement, a serious word would fain be heard; it appeals to the most serious minds. Take care, ye philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering "for the truth's sake"! even in your own defense! It spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you headstrong against objections and red rags; it stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes, when in the struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse consequences of enmity, ye have at last to play your last card as protectors of truth upon earth—as though "the Truth" were such an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors! and you of all people, ye knights of the sorrowful countenance, Messrs Loafers and Cobweb-spinners of the spirit! Finally, ye know sufficiently well that it cannot be of any consequence if YE just carry your point; ye know that hitherto no philosopher has carried his point, and that there might be a more laudable truthfulness in every little interrogative mark which you place after your special words and favourite doctrines (and occasionally after yourselves) than in all the solemn pantomime and trumping games before accusers and law-courts! Rather go out of the way! Flee into concealment! And have your masks and your ruses, that ye may be mistaken for what you are, or somewhat feared! And pray, don't forget the garden, the garden with golden trellis-work! And have people around you who are as a garden—or as music on the waters at eventide, when already the day becomes a memory. Choose the good solitude, the free, wanton, lightsome solitude, which also gives you the right still to remain good in any sense whatsoever! How poisonous, how crafty, how bad, does every long war make one, which cannot be waged openly by means of force! How personal does a long fear make one, a long watching of enemies, of possible enemies! These pariahs of society, these long-pursued, badly-persecuted ones—also the compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos—always become in the end, even under the most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without being themselves aware of it, refined vengeance-seekers and poison-Brewers (just lay bare the foundation of Spinoza's ethics and theology!), not to speak of the stupidity of moral indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a philosopher that the sense of philosophical humour has left him. The martyrdom of the philosopher, his "sacrifice for the sake of truth," forces into the light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks in him; and if one has hitherto contemplated him only with artistic curiosity, with regard to many a philosopher it is easy to understand the dangerous desire to see him also in his deterioration (deteriorated into a "martyr," into a stage-and-tribune-bawler). Only, that it is necessary with such a desire to be clear what spectacle one will see in any case—merely a satyric play, merely an epilogue farce, merely the continued proof that the long, real tragedy is at an end, supposing that every philosophy has been a long tragedy in its origin.

...The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us."

– F. Nietzsche

Catastrophe and Implosion

"The “fiscal cliff” crisis is an artificial emergency, put in place last year as part of the bipartisan deal to raise the federal debt limit. Its purpose is to create a crisis atmosphere and facilitate the passage of rightwing measures that are opposed by the overwhelming majority of the American people.

The entire framework of the budget debate is reactionary and false. It is based on the lie that “there is no money” for vital social programs, even as trillions are made available to the banks and the military, and corporate profits and the personal fortunes of the ruling elite reach new heights. Its unstated premise is that the wealth of the financial aristocracy is inviolable, while the social needs of working people are expendable."

– Barry Grey, Obama, Boehner pledge to continue talks on social cuts

"...Possibilities of resistance arise around the issue of implosion. The system insulates itself against crisis by resisting explosion. It converts the explosive force of crisis into a homeopathic dose of simulated catastrophe. Against this constant drip-feed of simulated catastrophe, Baudrillard suggests, the only means of mitigation is to make a real catastrophe arrive. This is perhaps why events like Hurricane Katrina are almost euphoric for some survivors, though traumatic for others. Disaster unties the knots of anxiety and terror in which people are caught. This is also why terrorism is so fascinating. Real violence makes the invisible violence of security disappear.

According to Baudrillard, power is collapsing. Institutions and “the social” are collapsing. Implosive events take this process further, speeding it up. They are necessarily incalculable in terms of their effects. The endpoint of this process is catastrophe. For Baudrillard, catastrophe is the abolition of causes and the creation of ‘pure, non-referential connections’. Such connections are inherently beautiful and seductive. Catastrophe is not necessarily disastrous as is usually assumed. It is a disaster only for meaning and power.

Implosion offers possibilities because of the generalisation of the remainder. When the system becomes saturated, everything turns to and becomes the remainder. The remainder – what is barred – continues to exist. Because the system has claimed to be everything, it comes back inside and shatters the system. This may be why the system now imagines itself under siege from enemies within. Without the imaginary, without a space beyond the system’s coded functioning, it can no longer keep what it excludes outside. He suggests, for instance, that architects could form a conception of cities based on their remainders, such as cemeteries and waste grounds. Such an act would be fatal to architecture.

It is thus on the remainder that a new intelligibility is founded. For instance, sanity is refounded on the basis of madness (the theory of the unconscious). Metropolitan societies exclude the indigenous, only to find the indigenous at their foundation (urban ‘tribes’, gangs, subcultures…) Death is excluded, only to be seen or foreshadowed everywhere. Structures become unstable because the remainder is no longer in a specified place. It is everywhere. When everything is repressed or alienated, the entire field is repressed or alienated – so nothing is repressed or alienated, everything is within the visible field. Repressed energy is no longer available to be channelled by the system.

The totalising nature of power today makes it more vulnerable than ever. The more total the system seems, the more inspiring any little setback for it becomes. Every small defeat now carries the image of a chain reaction bringing down the system. Baudrillard proposes a strategy of forcing power to occupy its own place, so as to make itself obscene. By making power appear as power, its absence is made visible, and it disappears."

– Andrew Robinson

How malicious philosophers can be!

"The eagerness and subtlety, I should even say craftiness, with which the problem of "the real and the apparent world" is dealt with at present throughout Europe, furnishes food for thought and attention; and he who hears only a "Will to Truth" in the background, and nothing else, cannot certainly boast of the sharpest ears. In rare and isolated cases, it may really have happened that such a Will to Truth—a certain extravagant and adventurous pluck, a metaphysician's ambition of the forlorn hope—has participated therein: that which in the end always prefers a handful of "certainty" to a whole cartload of beautiful possibilities; there may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience, who prefer to put their last trust in a sure nothing, rather than in an uncertain something. But that is Nihilism, and the sign of a despairing, mortally wearied soul, notwithstanding the courageous bearing such a virtue may display. It seems, however, to be otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers who are still eager for life. In that they side AGAINST appearance, and speak superciliously of "perspective," in that they rank the credibility of their own bodies about as low as the credibility of the ocular evidence that "the earth stands still," and thus, apparently, allowing with complacency their securest possession to escape (for what does one at present believe in more firmly than in one's body?),—who knows if they are not really trying to win back something which was formerly an even securer possession, something of the old domain of the faith of former times, perhaps the "immortal soul," perhaps "the old God," in short, ideas by which they could live better, that is to say, more vigorously and more joyously, than by "modern ideas"? There is DISTRUST of these modern ideas in this mode of looking at things, a disbelief in all that has been constructed yesterday and today; there is perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and scorn, which can no longer endure the BRIC-A-BRAC of ideas of the most varied origin, such as so-called Positivism at present throws on the market; a disgust of the more refined taste at the village-fair motleyness and patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters, in whom there is nothing either new or true, except this motleyness. Therein it seems to me that we should agree with those skeptical anti-realists and knowledge-microscopists of the present day; their instinct, which repels them from MODERN reality, is unrefuted... what do their retrograde by-paths concern us! The main thing about them is NOT that they wish to go "back," but that they wish to get AWAY therefrom. A little MORE strength, swing, courage, and artistic power, and they would be OFF—and not back!"

– F. Nietzsche

Four More Synchronicities: "one revolts first and foremost because words are insufficient"

The passions spoke first; and men began to act in the right direction before they had reasoned out their action. The wanton cruelty with which political prisoners were treated, the horrors of preliminary detention, the barbarous punishment inflicted for trifling offences - all this proved unendurable even to the mild, patient Russians. The spirit of revenge was kindled, giving birth to the first attacks upon the Government, known by the name of terrorism. They began with an act of individual retaliation which, in the circumstances, had all the dignity of a solemn act of public justice. A girl, Vera Zassulitch, shot General Trepoff, who had ordered the flogging of a political prisoner. On March 31, 1878, she was acquitted by the jury, though she never denied her act. In 1878 terrorism was accepted as a system of warfare by the most influential and energetic section of Russian revolutionists grouped around the paper Zemlia i Volia ("Land and Liberty"). But at first this practical struggle with political despotism was carried on under the banner of political non-interference. "The question of constitution does not interest us," said the terrorists of this epoch in their pamphlet and in their paper, Zemlia i Volia; "the essential part of our activity is propaganda among the people. In striking the worst of the officials we intend merely to protect our companions from the worst treatment by the Government and its agents. The terrorists must be looked upon as a small detachment protecting the bulk of an army at some dangerous passage."

– Sergius Stepniak

1: Decolonize the Operating system

"They were upright and correct without knowing that to be so was righteous. They loved one another without knowing that to do so was benevolence. They were sincere without knowing that to do so was loyalty. They kept their promises without knowing that to do so was to be in good faith. They helped one another without thought of giving or receiving gifts. Thus their actions left no trace and we have no records of their affairs" – Chuang Tzu

"Anarchism [as opposed to 'protests by anarchists' trying to lift off hierarchical structure and make more space for anarchism] is about invisible harmonies. It is ‘free association’ and it permeates our society in spite of hierarchical ethics and institutions. If you want to see it by ‘subtracting it out’ then you would ‘work to rule’ and remove all those natural, spontaneous, free associating moves that are the real heartbeat of social organization. Things would look very different if everyone did no more than execute, literally, instructions cascading down the 'chain of command'. In many cases the people above don't even know what the people below do or what challenges they are faced with...

If one takes a leaf from the book of ‘de-colonization’, anarchism is constituted by a ‘letting go’ of the notion of an ‘operating system’ which governs ‘how things work’, and not in devising a ‘new operating system’.

In a decolonizing system, what is needed is a return to a natural‘values system’; a values system that doesn’t believe in the need for ‘a new operating system’ or a new ‘political economy’, that orients to ‘how things works’ and to making them work in ‘correct manner’, as provided within the framework of the ‘sovereign states’ which may be hierarchically ranked on a better/worse performance scale;

...The decolonizer ‘values system’ does not start from a new American dream or a new French dream or a new EU dream which are theory-driven [common dream-driven aka common belief-driven] ‘operating systems’ governing ‘how things work’, ... the decolonizer values start from different assumptions; i.e. that we live in a relational space wherein we cannot isolate ‘how things work’ from the dynamics of the common habitat these things share inclusion in, whether we are talking at the level of individual people or individual sovereign states.

The decolonizer ‘values system’ orients to the beyond good-and-evil quest for cultivating, restoring and sustaining balance and harmony in the relational space we share inclusion in. It is a values system that transcends the moral values-based governance of common-belief driven ‘operating systems’ that describe the correct way for ‘how things work’ and the incorrect way for ‘how things work’, so as to ‘realize’ a common belief based ‘vision’ or ‘dream’. Evolution is not heading towards a particular ‘end-vision’; it is an unfolding [a continual transforming of relational space] whose forms/shapes arise from the quest for sustaining balance within an interdependent connectedness.

This is the way of nature; i.e nature is continual ‘organizING’ that does not allow ‘ego’ to get narcissist about an ‘organizING’, notionally creating an ‘organizATION’ driven from some ‘common belief’ or ‘common dream’, and establishing ‘dream-police’ to enforce dream-convergent behaviours on all of the participants with ‘the organizATION’.

The anarchism in decolonization is by way of values that suspend this reifying of balance-and-harmony-sustaining ‘organizINGs’ into ‘common-belief driven local organizATIONs’ [the latter being ‘genomes’ that have cast aside their ‘epigenomes’. Without the 'epigenome' the 'genome' becomes an internally directed 'mechanistic organizATION'. With the 'epigenome', which ensures continuing resonance between the dynamics of the relational spatial-plenum and the dynamics of the diverse multiplicity of inhabitants of that plenum, interdependent connectedness is acknowledged."

– emile

2: Southern Hospitality (Apache style) is no friggin' joke!

"Since the hardening of White supremacist cultural norms in the 18th century, it has always required a level of violent rupture for White, Black, and Native rebels to actually find themselves side by side in true affinity.

This is true of the aforementioned stockade wars in Tennessee, of the long history of maroon rebellion along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, of early slave rebellions alongside Irish indentured servants, of those conflicts like the Lowry Wars, of early labor battles, and of later prison riots, just to name a few. Obviously this is not to say that the reverse is true, that violence of any kind automatically creates the conditions to break down racial hierarchies. Yet for actors of various racial privileges and disadvantages to find themselves in true affinity requires a rebellion whose content is somehow fundamental to the nature of our society, and such rebellion will always be violent. The progressive view tends to abhor this reality in favor of a perspective that freedom is something which comes over time, rather than an experience we immediately create for ourselves as we rebel together against those who would oppress and exploit us. When historians reflexively fall back on this progressive way of understanding history, they often have to ignore much of what is right in front of them. How else could entire armies of Left academics and politicians sincerely portray the Republican Party in the South as a well-intentioned but tragic attempt at racial equality, or the mass theft of plantation property as aimed at securing "rights" for Indians rather than what it clearly (albeit temporarily) resulted in – immediately communist relationships of black and brown people? For a historian to use the political discourse of one who is at peace with State and Capital to explain away the motives of those who were at war with these systems, represents to us an extreme kind of intellectual dishonesty and theoretical laziness.

Anarchists can also be guilty of this. All too often our own struggles make the same mistake, using the discourse and frameworks provided to us by our enemies with little examination. Civil and workers' "rights," "amnesty" for immigrants, economic and social "justice," an end to police "brutality" – the words we use about the problems we face say something about our position towards the society that gives us these problems in the first place. Rights discourse, this concept of "justice," the idea that police could be anything but brutal – framing solutions in this way only make conceptual sense if we plan to stay inside this world we currently inhabit. They both reflect and reinforce a constrained imagination towards what is possible. Anarchist history should be about discovering or recovering those moments when something entirely different emerged on the scene, to help us expand our imagination and ability to describe such moments in their own terms rather than in those of our enemies. Such history should work to grow our sense of joy and wonder at the possibilities implied in rebellion, and our appreciation and sense of heritage for those who came before us."

– The Lowry Wars: attacking North Carolina's plantation society in the age of Reconstruction.

3: "The universal hypocrisy of modern society", or was it just a mirage?

"In one of Edgar Allen Poe's tales he recounts how a little group of wrecked seafarers on a water logged vessel, at the last extremity of starvation, are suddenly made delirious with joy at seeing a sail approaching them. As she came near them she seemed to be managed strangely and unseamanly as though she were scarcely steered at all, but come near she did, and their joy was too great for them to think much of this anomaly. At last they saw the seamen on board of her, and noted one in the bows especially who seemed to be looking at them with great curiosity, nodding also as though encouraging them to have patience, and smiling at them constantly, showing as he did so a set of very white teeth, and apparently so anxious for their safety that he did not notice that the red cap that he had on his head was falling into the water.

All of a sudden, as the vessel neared them, and while their hearts were leaping with joy at their now certain deliverance, an inconceivable and horrible stench was wafted to them across the waters, and presently to their horror and misery they saw that this was a ship of the dead, the bowing man was a tottering corpse, his red cap a piece of his flesh torn from him by a sea fowl; his amicable smile was caused by his jaws, denuded of the flesh, showing his white teeth set in a perpetual grin. So passed the ship of the dead into the landless ocean, leaving the poor wretches to their despair.

To us Socialists this Ship of the Dead is an image of the civilisation of our epoch, as the cast away mariners are of the hopes of the humanity entangled in it. The cheerfully bowing man, whose signs of encouragement and good feeling turn out to be the results of death and corruption, well betokens to us the much be praised philanthropy of the rich and refined classes of our Society, which is born of the misery necessary to their very existence. How do people note eagerly, like Arthur Gordon Pym and his luckless fellows, the beautiful hope of the softening of life by the cultivation of good feeling, kindness, and gratitude between rich and poor, with its external manifestations; its missionary enterprises at home and abroad hospitals, churches, refuges, and the like; its hard working clergy dwelling amidst the wretched homes of those whose souls they are saving; its elegant and enthusiastic ladies sometimes visiting them; its dignified, cultivated gentlemen from the universities spreading the influences of a refined home in every dull half starved parish in England; the thoughtful series of lectures on that virtue of thrift which the poor can scarcely fail to practise even unpreached to; its increasing sense of the value of moral purity among those whose surroundings forbid them to understand even the meaning of physical purity; its scent of indecency in Literature and Art, which would prevent the publication of any book written out of England or before the middle of the 19th century, and would reduce painting and sculpture to the production of petticoated dolls without bodies. All this, which seems so refined and humane, is but the effect of the distant view of the fleshless grinning skull of civilisation seeming to offer an escape to the helpless castaways, but destined on its nearer approach to suffocate them with the stench of its corruption, and then to vanish aimlessly into the void, leaving them weltering on the ocean of life which its false hope has rendered more dreadful than before.

...Yet even now it is necessary that a certain code of morality should be supposed to exist and to have some relation to the religion which, being the creation of another age, has now become a sham. With this sham moreover its accompanying morality is also steeped, although it has a use as serving for a cover of a morality really the birth of the present condition of things, and this is clung to with a determination or even ferocity natural enough, since its aim is the perpetuation of individual property in wealth, in workman, in wife, in child.

The so called morality of the present age is simply commercial necessity, masquerading in the forms of the Christian ethics: for instance, commercial honour is merely the code necessitated the by needs of men in commercial relations which without it could not subsist, and which has found nothing in common with the Christian "do unto others as thou wouldst," etc., maxim, in the name of which it is on occasion invoked. The only connection that current commercial ethics has with the Christian is, as we said above, a purely formal one. The mystical individualist ethics of Christianity, which had for its supreme end another world and spiritual salvation therein, has been transformed into an individualist ethic having for its supreme end (tacitly, if not avowedly), the material salvation of the individual in the commercial battle of this world. This is illustrated by a predominance amongst the commercial classes of a debased Calvinistic theology, termed Evangelicalism, which is the only form of religion these classes can understand, the poetico-mystical element in the earlier Christianity being eliminated therefrom, and the "natural laws" of profit and loss, and the devil take the hindmost, which dominate this carnal world, being as nearly as possible reproduced into the spiritual world of its conception."

– William Morris & Belfort Bax, Socialism, from the root up

4: Black Bloc

"It is also what is left in the hands of our discontent, at the stage of society we have reached, despite ourselves: the impossibility of marching together while shouting out phrases so that they can be heard, the incapacity to engage in indirect and representative actions, the urgent need to unload one-thousandth of the cruelty the State, money, and advertisements inject in all our veins every day.

The category black bloc doesn’t designate anything or anyone, or more precisely, maybe it designates anyone as such. A distinctive feature of one who finds themselves in what we call a black bloc is to demand nothing for themselves or for others, to cut across public space without being subjected to it for once, to disappear in a mass that has at last come together in places that are not office or factory exits and public transportation at rush hour. Rampant hypocrisy makes us associate the black bloc with a specific and organized entity—like Sony, Vivendi, or Total Fina—and this same hypocrisy considers as “crimes” the minor damage that the desire for willful indistinctness leaves behind when it takes the form of a spontaneous demonstration.

In this night where all demonstrators look alike there is no point in posing Manichean questions. Especially since we know that the distinction between guilty and innocent no longer matters, all that counts is the one between winners and losers. Punishment always lands on the latter, not because they deserve it but because somebody has to be repressed. Trying to figure out if someone has infiltrated a black bloc is like trying to know the extent to which rain infiltrates a river, a lake, or seawater.

...Putting insurrections into words has simply turned into a not very attractive task. For one revolts first and foremost because words are insufficient."

– Claire Fontaine, This is not the Black Bloc

More Fetish:

"The sea is beautiful; looking at it, we never think of being dissatisfied with it, aesthetically. But not everyone lives near the sea; many people never in their lives get a chance to see it. Yet they would very much like to see it, and consequently seascapes please and interest them. Of course, it would be much better to see the sea itself rather than pictures of it; but when a good thing is not available, a man is satisfied with an inferior one. When the genuine article is not present, a substitute will do. Even the people who can admire the real sea cannot always do so when they want to, and so they call up memories of it. But man’s imagination is weak; it needs support and prompting. So to revive their memories of the sea, to see it more vividly in their imagination, they look at seascapes. This is the sole aim and object of very many (the majority of) works of art: to give those people who have not been able to enjoy beauty in reality the opportunity to acquaint themselves with it at least to some degree; to serve as a reminder, to prompt and revive memories of beauty in reality in the minds of those people who are acquainted with it by experience and love to recall it..."

– Nicholas G. Chernyshevsky
(but see Cool World, perhaps it's already here?)

Or perhaps a fetish is like an enzyme, literally, that walking, talking, smoking and drinking, live being which metamorphoses the sludge in the stomach vat into wonderful tidbitts for all the little people on the inside? Or is it, perhaps, whatever it is, that glint in the eye of a lizard which transmits letters of introduction to both fragrance and image, right there in the middle of the dance floor? Consciousness itself might just be a dance of metaphors. What's the matter, is it alive?

“A work of art strives for the harmony of idea and image” no more and no less than does the shoemaker’s craft, the jeweler’s craft, calligraphy, engineering, moral resolve. “All work should be done well” – such is the meaning of the phrase “harmony between idea and image." (ibid)

I would more rather say "harmonic" and even more importantly (especially for the enzyme), "generative". Without the ripples, the entendre itself disappears back into the pit. As they say, the more the merrier, and that creates movement, if only a lizard snapping at a fly. And what is a legless lizard anyway but a snake, and no gutless wonder at that! What is not beautiful is still natural, especially when it bites, and that's the beauty of it.

For Chernyshevsky, love is an enzyme – "the base to which everything else is tied with Gordian knots; without it everything loses coherence and meaning." I call it "Sativa". But without the occasional monster, we're reduced to a lump of romantics, and then, where's a movement to go but to the work camp or toilet? Sometimes the enzyme is just fun, and that can reproduce paisley, just for the hell of it. To capture an essence, one must always refer to the context, as there is no owning an object outside of hell – who'd want to? As commentaries and audience, the Doodles are the real artists in Cool World, which only goes to show, there's always a critic waiting to fall from the attic like a bank vault or attack in the Fall like a pen sucking ink.

On the other hand, there's Henry Thomas Buckle for a good game of chess.

And then there's Sergius Stepniak on Nihilism and Narodnichestvo,`
Stepniak's bio and Historical Nihilism.

Constitutive Lack or Lack of Constituency?Deep structure is always injected just under the surface.

There is no irony in a constitutive lack: Standing together in absentia is no antagonism except between an ox and a moron, and that empty constitution can be a deadly simulacron whose hyper-reality is the schizophrenia of civilisation, depending as it does on eviscerating those who already have no stomach for it. If there is no center, there is no space for a master signifier – no deep structure, no operating system. Lack is (by definition) always an ex post facto destitution if not a positive refusal where the only absent presence is a void, not to be confused with a vacuum which is merely the flip side of gravity like suck and blow is to a straw. Antagonism (literally posited as the death instinct) is a stand against life such that arguments need no justification, being sufficient unto themselves like any proper fictional phantasm. It is not the antimagnetic repulsion or bounce of a back to back or belly to belly dance which may produce a gravitational spin and future entanglement which is also to say, if one is up on Poe, "electrifyingly shocking" and in no way lacking in possibility (see Pitter-patter & Pata Pata, where an exchange is never the intention nor an uncontested crossing of lines, and if that generation is antagonistic, where the fuck are the storks when we need them?).

"The imperative in Lacanian theory is to “accept” lack, whereas the logic of a non-mythical idea of contingency is to use opportunities for openness as a basis for creativity. The difference between mythical and non-mythical versions leads politically to the difference between acceptance of blockages and attempts to overcome them. Lacanian theories involve a strong commitment to slave morality, as exemplified by Laclau’s insistence that every chain of equivalence involve a unity against an external threat.

...Žižek’s “revolutionary” insistence on the need for masochistic selfdegradation,‘subjective destitution’ and identification with a Master and a Cause, not to mention his directly reactive insistence that self-awareness amounts to awareness of the negative, of death and trauma, prior to any active identification or articulation. This is a reterritorializing “contingency” which fits closely with the operation of capitalist ideology, where ‘under conditions we recognize as desperate, we are told to alter ourselves’, not the conditions,

...According to Deleuze, there are two models of contingency: the creative power of the poet, and the politician’s denial of difference so as to prolong an established order. It is for the latter that negation (lack) is primary, ‘as if it were necessary to pass through the misfortunes of rift and division in order to be able to say yes’. For the poet, on the other hand, difference is ‘light, aerial and affirmative’. ‘There is a false profundity in conflict, but underneath conflict, the play of differences’, differences which should be affirmed as positive and not overcoded by negativity

...‘Ours is no art of mutilation, but of excess, superabundance, amazement’, declares Hakim Bey. Though ‘truly fearful things’ exist in the world, they can perhaps be overcome - ‘on the condition that we build an aesthetic on the overcoming rather than the fear’ (1991, 37, 78). A constitutive “I-don’t-know”, if such a concept is thinkable, would involve precisely such a free play of differences, and not, to use Žižek’s term, the ‘good terror’ which ensures that this free play is brought to a halt."

– A. Robinson

see – The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique

From The Book of Irrevelations

"Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe."

– Anatole France

Learning Theory, aka "the psychology of learning", may be a misnomer. If we exerted a bit of the principle of reversibility, a possibility witnessed in every natural language (and I use that term, natural, in the broadest possible sense exclusive of certain mathematical systems which deny the possibility of error, their own error being found in the equally-witnessed fact that blunder seems to drive civilisation itself more rigidly than could any accurate collective of acuity, demonstrating that a mathematically precise universe is inductively unreasonable), and instead called it "Teaching Theory", we might easier deduce that it is "a theory of instruction in obedience" as well as "in-stilling an obedience to theory": "When the alarm sounds, I know it is time to eat; hunger is irrelevant". Such was the discovery of Pavlov. But more commonly, we hear: "When the clock winds down, I must deliver massive jolts of electricity to the subject at hand". This will produce the desired effusion, dispensed from the lubricious glands, to induce ravenous desires for consumption. Repetition ensures we can dispense with the electricity altogether, as the merest ringing noise or tinnitus will turn the trick of induced performance, as if an armored armydildo just shouted "Associate this, motherfucker!" and it is no longer of any concern to watch out the fingers aren't bitten off in the frenzy of the "thirst" for knowledge manifest by apt pupils – this is why aptitude and attitude are thought to co-vary with turgid dilation. Teaching must foremost instill a proper attitude before any performance will be forthcoming or worthy of remuneration. Like every student in every school, Pavlov's dogs not only lived in cages, but were taught to call them "home" – wander too far and the bell will be inaudible, producing a snap like an overdrawn bungy-chord or the sound made in the intervening space twixt a turtle and a crocodile, irregardless of what your nose tells you might be palatable ahead. Only a dictionary would fail to equate the synonymic relation between security and tragedy, although it is quite handy at producing a concussion.

"One must recognize that the mental health establishment, which the National Institute represents, assumes (a conventional assumption in this society) that the expenditure of vast sums of money on so-called research will eventually reveal the "causes of mental illness" – that money in research can reveal the cause and cure of anything. This is not merely a scientific idea, but is deeply related to the fact that the tragic contradictions of life have little or no standing in our society. We seek to cure people of everything; we tinker with the machine. All the ills that the flesh and spirit of man are heir to, are reduced to abstractions. We are dedicated to the proposition that pain can be eliminated. An instrumental, hyper-civilized, consumer and clinically oriented culture such as ours generates, and simultaneously avoids acknowledging the contradictions that are the occasions for tragedy. Moreover, we are led to confuse the merely pitiful with the tragic. We perceive the crack-up of the individual in society as we would an automobile accident: hardly as a struggle for awareness that is at once moribund and transcendent. In the broadest sense, schizophrenia is the process through which the inadequacy of the culture is concretized in the consciousness of individuals; and that in-adequacy may be as deeply sensed, without being named, as it is reflected in "pathological" behavior. Yet the tragic struggle for awareness remains a catastrophic, insurmountable challenge because it cannot be located in a culture which fails to serve as the ground for the development of the self. But it is precisely the tragic experience which is the hallmark of the healthy culture, where persons have not been converted into objects, and where the struggle for meaning is a drama enacted and re-enacted in the decisions confronted during the ordinary course of life."

– Schizophrenia and Civilisation by Stanley Diamond

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.

An old carnival in the shell of new ruins.

In Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin discusses carnivalesque (or ‘folk-humour’,) a particular speech-genre which occurs across a variety of cultural sites, most notably in carnival itself.

A carnival is a moment when everything (except arguably violence) is permitted. It occurs on the border between art and life, and is a kind of life shaped according to a pattern of play. It is usually marked by displays of excess and grotesqueness. It is a type of performance, but this performance is communal, with no boundary between performers and audience. It creates a situation in which diverse voices are heard and interact, breaking down conventions and enabling genuine dialogue. It creates the chance for a new perspective and a new order of things, by showing the relative nature of all that exists.

The popular tradition of carnival was believed by Bakhtin to carry a particular wisdom which can be traced back to the ancient world. For Bakhtin, carnival and carnivalesque create an alternative social space, characterised by freedom, equality and abundance. During carnival, rank (otherwise pervasive in medieval society) is abolished and everyone is equal. People were reborn into truly human relations, which were not simply imagined but experienced. The body is here figured not as the individual or ‘bourgeois ego’ but as a growing, constantly renewed collective which is exaggerated and immeasurable. Life manifests itself not as isolated individuals but as a collective ancestral body. This is not, however, a collective order, since it is also continually in change and renewal. The self is also transgressed through practices such as masking.

Carnival is a kind of syncretic, ritualised pageantry which displays a particular perspective. It is a brief moment in which life escapes its official furrows and enacts utopian freedom. It is a form of life at once real and ideal, universal and without remainder. Its defining feature is festivity – life lived as festive. It is also sanctioned by the highest ideal aims of human existence, not by the world of practical conditions.

Carnival is also taken to provide a positive alternative vision. It is not simply a deconstruction of dominant culture, but an alternative way of living based on a pattern of play. It prefigured a humanity constructed otherwise, as a utopia of abundance and freedom. It eliminated barriers among people created by hierarchies, replacing it with a vision of mutual cooperation and equality. Individuals are also subsumed into a kind of lived collective body which is constantly renewed.

On an affective level, it creates a particular intense feeling of immanence and unity – of being part of a historically immortal and uninterrupted process of becoming. It is a lived, bodily utopianism distinct from utopianisms of inner experience or abstract thought, a ‘bodily participation in the potentiality of another world’. The golden age is lived, not through inner thought or experience, but by the whole person, in thought and body.

An emphasis is placed on basic needs and the body, and on the sensual and the senses, counterposed perhaps to the commands of the will. It lowers the spiritual and abstract to the material level. It thus recognises embodiment, in contrast with dominant traditions which flee from it.

Prefiguring James Scott’s analysis of ‘hidden transcripts’, Bakhtin portrays carnival as an expression of a ‘second life’ of the people, against their subsumption in the dominant ideology. It replaces the false unity of the dominant system with a lived unity in contingency. It creates a zone in which new birth or emergence becomes possible, against the sterility of dominant norms (which in their tautology, cannot create the new). It also encourages the return of repressed creative energies. It is joyous in affirming that the norms, necessities and/or systems of the present are temporary, historically variable and relative, and one day will come to an end.

Reading this in a contemporary way, we might say that carnival is expressive rather than instrumental. It involves the expression of latent aspects of humanity, direct contact among people (as opposed to alienation), and an eccentric refusal of social roles. It brings together groups and categories which are usually exclusive. Time and space are rearranged in ways which show their contingency and indissolubility. All of this is done in a mood of celebration and laughter.

In carnival, everything is rendered ever-changing, playful and undefined. Hierarchies are overturned through inversions, debasements and profanations, performed by normally silenced voices and energies.

For instance, a jester might be crowned in place of a king. The authoritative voice of the dominant discourse loses its privilege. Humour is counterposed to the seriousness of officialdom in such a way as to subvert it.

Carnival bridges the gap between holism (which necessarily absorbs its other) and the imperative to refuse authority (which necessarily restores exclusions): it absorbs its authoritarian other in a way which destroys the threat it poses. It is also simultaneously ecological and social, absorbing the self in a network of relations. Bakhtin insists that it opposes both ‘naturalism’, the idea of a fixed natural order, and ideas of fixed social hierarchies. It views ecology and social life as relational becoming. Perhaps a complete world cannot exist without carnival, for such a world would have no sense of its own contingency and relativity.

Although carnival succeeded in undermining the feudal worldview, it did not succeed in overthrowing it. Feudal repression was sufficient to prevent its full utopian potential from unfolding. But it is as if it created a space and bided its time. Bakhtin suggests that it took the social changed of the Renaissance era (the 15th-16th centuries) for carnival to expand into the whole of social life. The awareness of contingency and natural cycles expanded into a historical view of time. This occurred because social changes undermined established hierarchies and put contingency on display. Medieval folk culture prepared the way for this cultural revolution.

Bakhtin almost portrays this as a recuperation of carnivalesque: it was separated from folk culture, formalised, and made available for other uses. Yet Bakhtin portrays this as a positive, creative process which continues to carry the creative spirit. Bakhtin suggests that carnival and folk culture have been in decline since the eighteenth century.

Carnivals have turned into state-controlled parades or privatised holidays, humour and swearing have become merely negative, and the people’s ‘second life’ has almost ceased. However, Bakhtin believes that the carnival principle is indestructible. It continues to reappear as the inspiration for areas of life and culture. Carnival contains a utopian promise for human emancipation through the free expression of thought and creativity. Rabelais stands out here for a style which is irreducibly unofficial and unserious, and irrecuperable by authoritarianism.

Andrew Robinson, Bakhtin: Dialogism, Polyphony and Heteroglossia
Carnival against Capital, Carnival against Power

The Corruption of Flexibility & Movement: Spectacular Democracy (is there any other kind?)

"Contemplating ruins is an activity that is well suited to intellectuals. Sitting in what remains of Catalus's drawing room, they look around bewilderedly asking themselves what on earth went wrong. First of all we need to clarify the idea of crisis. I have been examining all the interesting implications of this concept for some years. In actual fact crises do not exist. They never have. Every now and then periods of change are called crises in order to favour particular political strategies or to justify their shortcomings. As we can see, it is not simply a question of terminology. The concept of crisis implies the existence of a linear process that suddenly suffers a rebound, as though forces that are either external or intrinsic to it suddenly cease to function.

That explains the great science of predicting such moments, at times replaced by devoted expectancy or by the more or less sanguinary efforts of the mole that keeps clawing away. Unfortunately these friendly little creatures do not work for us. A linear process only exists in the dreams of economists and revolutionaries who want to attest their power, or that to which they aspire at some time in the future. It might be instead that everything simply gropes about in a jungle of relations, giving rise to a situation that is quite illogical as opposed to one that is simply of a logic devoid of order and progress. In such a varied, contradictory context we find atrocities and barbarity one believed disappeared centuries ago flour­ishing alongside technological discoveries of a future that is already present. So just as it is ridiculous to talk of progress, the idea of crises - the prod­uct of such a concept - also falls. [...]

It is indispen­sable to be aware of the conditions that are affecting the reality we are operating in when we act, especially now as they are so different to the classical formulae that once explained things in deterministic terms.

Let us make it clear right away that none of these problems interests us. We are not concerned with the political problems of those who see unemployment as a danger to democracy and order. We do not feel any nostalgia for lost professionalism. We are even less interested in elaborating libertarian alternatives to grim factory work or intellectual labour, which are unwittingly doing nothing but toe the line of the advanced postindustrial project. Nor are we for the abolition of work or its reduction to the minimum required for a meaningful happy life. Behind all this there is always the hand of those who want to regulate our lives, think for us, or politely suggest that we think as they do.

We are for the destruction of work and, as we will try to demonstrate, that is quite a different matter. But let us proceed in an orderly fashion.

The post-industrial society, which we will come to later, has resolved the problem of unemployment, at least within certain limits, by dispersing the work force into flexible sectors which are easy to manoeuvre and control. In actual fact the social threat of growing unemployment is more theoretical than practical, and is being used as a political deterrent to dissuade wide social strata from attempting to organise in ways that might question the choices of neo-liberalism, especially at international level. So, precisely because workers are much easier to control when they are skilled and attached to the workplace with career prospects in the production unit, there is insistence everywhere – even among the ecclesi­astical hierarchies – on the need to give people work and thereby reduce unemployment. Not because the latter constitutes a risk from the point of view of production, but because the danger could come from precisely that flexibility which is now indispensable to the organisation of production today. The fact that the worker has been robbed of a precise identity could lead to social disintegration, making control more difficult in the medium term. That is what all the institutional fuss about unemployment is really about. [...]

In the same way, the productive process no longer requires a high level of professional training, at least for the majority of workers. The need for skilled labour has been replaced by a demand for flexibility, i.e., an adaptability to do tasks that are constantly being changed, and willingness to move from one firm to the other. In short, they must adapt to a life of change in accordance with the bosses needs. This is now being programmed from school onwards, where the institutional cultural elements that once constituted the basic technical knowledge from which the world of work built real professionalism, are no longer provided. [...]

As we all know, this is leading to a proliferation of cultural poverty in terms of taste and choices, a uniformity of demands and desires resulting in an even greater possibility to catalogue apparently free spontaneous participation. Then there is the flight from any possible diversity. Today it is codification that makes the man: the way one dresses, uses the same objects, looks for the same labels. One qualifies oneself through this uniformity, making the same gestures, moving, eating, loving, thinking and dreaming the same way as everybody else. This is the way the democracy of the future is being built. Soon politics will be born in and among people, but not before the latter have been levelled to the lowest common denominator in order to produce the flexibility necessary for post-industrial production. [...]

The break up of association was an indispensable premise for worker flexibility, and this could only be attained by abolishing the tyranny of absolute space and time.

Everything that led to the possibility of workers building a better world on and from the ruins of the old has now disappeared. It has all been ground down in the great race of accelerated procedures, the elimination of subject and object as distinct and opposing elements of a contradictory mechanism, which was nevertheless rich in prospects and vitality. In place of this mechanism we now have the domination of passage. The simple movement of something that reaches the receiver and the transmitter simultaneously, in real time, unifying them in the ongoing capacity to respond to simple, fast, coded impulses of communication. [...]

However strange it might seem, there are no specialists here. Everyone is specialised in a few routine procedures. The same hallucinatory world where programmes produced for future projects are entrusted to telematics has been substantially reduced: fewer and fewer sophisticated programmes are capable of producing yet others and so on, to infinity. [...]

I do not believe there is a specific minority in power capable of programming such changes. More than anything it is a question of processes that connect up, often inevitably... In a word, a series of causes and effects that could not be linked together, but which produced the conditions we could sum up today in the word flexibility.

So it is not possible to speak of a project that has been mapped out in all its parts. The adjustments of power are always approximate and tend to settle along the line of least resistance. Moreover, such movements can only develop to the point where the elements which comprise them reach their full potential. Today, the present disintegration upon which the new structures of power are being built must reach the extreme consequence in every aspect. That is, power cannot materially expand fully and leave an associative mentality and culture intact. Just as it cannot go ahead with a democratic mechanism based on past processes and values. They require new political forms to correspond to the new forms of production and social life.

So the project for a new kind of democracy is materialising, and that is the final point of these notes. Like all the projects of power this one is vague, but it bases itself on needs that already exist, are clearly visible, and could be summed up in a few essential points.

The main point is participation. The arrogance of the old political caste is not suitable for the changing conditions. The citizen must participate, not to make political life (which will always be a ghost in an artificial world) become real, but to make the decision-making mechanisms of power more effective.

The immediate consequence of democratic participation is the birth of the active citizen who has discarded his old disinterest and apathy toward politics, where men he considered superior were buried in the corridors of power, manipulating the lives of their subjects. The political sphere has been broken up into a myriad of possible openings for intervention. Voluntary work has been institutionalised. The monopoly of the professional politicians has given way to free political initiative where representation stays within precise credibility limits, even to the extent of certain circumscribed areas being controlled from the base. Politics begins at home. The leaflet, once an instrument exclusively in the hands of an active minority, is now commonly used as an instrument for voicing opinions. In this way everyone is under the illusion that they are reinventing the way to run public spending, by living inside and alongside the institutions rather than submitting to decisions that are made elsewhere. So democracy is widening and becoming rationalised. It is presenting itself as being equal for all in practice, not just in theory. The majority system no longer rebounds against those who use it, and a plurality of interventions makes knowledge of decisions possible.

This new pack of illusions produced itself almost spontaneously as soon as the old mechanisms of political groupings where delegates, charismatic party leaders, central committees with their dominant ideologies and the aims of liberation that imposed sacrifice and death, were all dismantled. All this has finally disappeared. What is left is flexible, objective disintegration that is clear for anyone who wants to see it, in that it comes from a process of development that is unequivocally ongoing: the process of production. So there are more ways to participate. The need for social justice, one of the fundamental aims of a movement that has responded to the putrefying old political world with total condemnation, immediately transferred itself, and it could not have done otherwise, to precisely the area of participation. This has been taken up by the new builders of ideology. It is they who are building the flexible ideology of future democracy. And this new dimension will give positive results. It will give greater possibilities to some and deny others any at all. It will guarantee the legality of political procedures of management, extend control, but make it seem as though it is being managed from the base, desired by the people, guaranteed by a plurality of opinions. It will allow greater security for the included, separating them from the excluded, building an unscalable wall around them, foreseeing new needs that are specific to the ruling class and are incomprehensible to the dominated. It will select the excluded on the basis of their possible participation, showing varying degrees of tolerance towards them according to their levels of participation. At the extreme limit, for the non-participants, the maladapted – the excluded excluded from everything – there will still be systems of segregation. Not so much the oldstyle prisons as new ones run by people in white coats.

These are the programmes for restructuring power and transforming democracy. Opposing oneself to all this is a part of the fascinating and indispensable revolutionary project that is perhaps still to be invented."

– Alfredo Bonnano, 1993-95
Let's keep our feet on the ground, please let's destroy work

 

An invention's near always just a discovery of what was already staring you in the face but only recognized when consciousness is in an altered state. Then, bam!, like it's brand new. With a little free association, the clues abound. Consider the synonyms: "share" with "participation" and then "partake", like "help yourself" or "it's on the way". That's almost a praxical algorithm, where all going in rhythm doesn't necessarily imply group-think, especially when it's practice, a feast or a dance – it might just be counterpunctual and quite unnecessary at that. Obviously, flexibility (or so it would seem) is not a big problem unless one's own taste-buds have atrophied. When neither a necessary flaccidity, nor lacking any vitality, flex should be strength mixed with grace so that each and every gratuity's free – never a theft if there's no property nor intrusion when stripped of authority.

When flex joins rexidity and movement's in form
direction's a hex to inform the forlorned
"of this genrealized idiocy" few would insist –
"trust in your taste when yer feeling lickerish"
– but who wouldn't really & truly agree
with "please do not meddle your metal on me!"
Be ever careful with what you intend
as I've made a crowbar, it could be your end.

– atka mip

Death Dive Entropy

Once (pagan) witchery was abolished, plagues spread throughout medieval Europe. Coincidence? Biological warfare was the response, euphamised as sanitation, as if cleanliness was unheard of prior to the plague.

– The Metaphysicsis

A hyper-exclusive focus or a process of repetition to the point of unconscious automation, addiction conveys a heightened intolerance to change or any minor perturbation, like a slight smudge of dirt thought harboring deadly implication (if only to your name). It would seem

"an unwitting, clandestine, unacknowledged addiction to the ordinary sets in against all idealistic pretension to the contrary".

– anomynous

The addiction may just be to invented or acquired truisms, tautologies of "selection bias" where red is ever the color of blood leaking onto a black floor and health is its opposite, the cold, disjunctive intrusion in constant need of purge or re-pare.

Like any good fix, that which can be turned toward or confused with stillness (which is peace), death (which is rest) or inert (albeit useful) object will be subjected by the state (co-opted), consumed by civilisation (this is, of course, more redundant information – if it's dead you can eat it, if alive you can use it to death!), after which it all turns to shit. Seems natural enough, just like digestion!

In 1988 or there abouts, the term extropy, a perfectly reasonable sounding antonym for entropy, was coined to represent "the improvement of mankind" (sic) via the advance of the machine. It is magical thinking at its worst, should one consider the machine as a useful, albeit disposable extension or appendage. There was a time it was only thought a clever means of getting out of work. But peace or hypo-stasis never seems to come; all work is thought a negentropic meddling to avoid the ever-present entropy, like death around the corner just waiting for your slip or a lax moment to occur – god forbid we get lazy with technology! That argument can proceed forward and reverse in perfect simultaneity, enough to get your panties in a twist.

Is it ironic that efficiency (defined as the greatest output – work – from the lowest input – energy) is said to be consistent with technological progress? (we call it "industrialisation" or "the development of productive force", and where wage is substituted for energy, "capitalism"). It would seem to me a machine prone to run out of fuel because of its own swelling (like a priapic membership) is nothing like efficiency – entropy may only mean release of pent-up energy).

Just to avoid stagnosis, as a machine-work's jutting growth is then deemed more important than its efficiency, quality steps backstage in reverence to improved or alternate fuel extraction and its accumulation. Quantity of work increases in the effort to produce more fuel and then, not even paradoxically, employment becomes increasingly scarce and competitive.

The system has, again, turned inside out (we call it "post-industrialism"), as the former output, work, is now the energy input (and perhaps a reason we treat our toys with more regard than children). In one sense, progressive entropy is a self-referencing system heading toward pure tautology – energy no longer circulates, movement stops, particularly when the inconsequential humans at the controls run out of food or can't adapt fast enough to subsist on increasingly toxic industrial excrement.

Negentropy, the incessant plugging of leaks, would only seem to produce chaos, the inductive reply to inflexibility, birthing new questions concerning any-and-all regimes or regimental representations. The thing and its negation have either merged, or were merely two heads on the same coin wagging along behind the tale from the get-go. "Exentropy" is just fancy sounding jargon for the flexibility of an in-out turn, well familiar to snow-bunnies making seasonal adjustments between margaritas and hot buttered rum.

Is it ironic that us homebodies who wonder what has become of our own lives do not question a death "urge" in wanting to see the light of day in different destinations, or even raise an eyebrow when state-of-the-art theories of cognition model themselves on the internal processing of primitive (by organic standards) computers, where intelligence is measured only by the speed of sorting increasing amounts of randomly stored (internalized) information, like a game of trivial pursuit, and proceed to call the artificial "superior", forgetting altogether that the "I" in A.I. can just as easily refer to insemination and to insurrection?

Like Marcel Mauss' insistence on gifts, like shedding guilt or hot potatoes, a moral duty, is it surprising that Georges Bataille could not see beyond the ritual cannibalism of civilized Aztec or problematic translations of indigenous potlatching cultures which consistently avoided or destroyed accumulated excess, for his cross-cultural samples which justified a universal focus on death and excrement as the secret code of existence, informing the operating system of the cosmos itself? Or was it all just a rationalisation to justify a relentlessly lingering melancholy over the death of his sweetheart?

the connection between material flow and social relations

So for how much longer are we to com-fuse the force [sic] of attraction (that grave aesthetic principle of chemistry and geo-magnetic motion dynamics) with the sick attraction to force? In grand potlatch style, the greatest return may be to destroy the so-called wealth than expropriate and redistribute it to the poor. To end the circulation of capital is to end its system-input, the sacrificial gift of labour; to stop the flow of paper under or across tables is to burn (or /shift+delete/) it, releasing noxious clouds of vapour-bits back into the vortex to return as harmless black rain visible only to the clothed eye.

Yet the connection between material flow and social relations is reciprocal. A specific social relation may constrain a given movement of goods, but a specific transaction – "by the a same token" – suggests particular social relation. If friends make gifts, gifts make friends.

A great proportion of primitive^[1] exchange, much more than our own traffic, has as its decisive function this latter, instrumental one: the material flow underwrites or initiates social relations. Thus do primitive peoples transcend the Hobbesian chaos. For the indicative condition of primitive society is the absence of a public and sovereign power: persons and (especially) groups confront each other not merely as distinct interests but with the possible inclination and certain right to physically prosecute these interests. Force is decentralized, legitimately held in severalty, the social compact has yet to be drawn, the state nonexistent. So peacemaking is not a sporadic intersocietal event, it is a continuous process going on within society itself. Groups must "come to terms" – the phrase notably connotes a material exchange satisfactory on both sides.

Economy has been defined as the process of (materially) provisioning society and the definition opposed to the human act of satisfying wants. The great play of instrumental exchange in primitive societies underscores the usefulness of the former definition. Sometimes the peace-making aspect is so fundamental that precisely the same sorts and amounts of stuff change hands: the renunciation of opposed interest is in this way symbolized. On a strictly formal view the transaction is a waste of time and effort. One might say that people are maximizing value, social value, but such is to misplace the determinant of the transaction, to fail to specify the circumstances which produce different material outcomes in different historical instances, to hold fast to the economizing premise of the market by a false assignment of pecuniary-like qualities to social qualities, to take the high road to tautology. The interest of such transactions is precisely that they do not materially provision people and are not predicated on the satisfaction of human material needs. They do, however, decidedly provision society: they maintain social relations, the structure of society, even if they do not to the least advantage the stock of consumables. Without any further assumptions, they are "economic" in the suggested meaning of the term (cf. Sahlins, 1969).

– Marshal Sahlins, Stone Age Economics ch. 5

***

Hobbes's particular inability to conceive primitive society as such is manifest by his assimilation of it, that is of the patriarchal chiefdom, to the commonwealth. This is clear enough in the passages of Leviathan on commonwealths by acquisition, but even more definitive in the parallel sections of Elements of Law and De Cive. Thus, in the latter: "A father with his sons and servants, grown into a civil person by virtue of his paternal jurisdiction, is called a family. This family, if through multiplying of children and acquisition of servants it becomes numerous, insomuch as without casting the uncertain die of war it cannot be subdued, will be termed an hereditary kingdom. Which though it differ from an institutive monarchy, being acquired by force, in the original and manner of its constitution; yet being constituted, it hath all the same properties, and the right of authority is everywhere the same; insomuch as it is not needful to speak anything of them apart" (English Works [Molesworth, ed.], 1839, vol. 2, pp. 121- 122)...

A few last words about the fate of The Gift. Since Mauss, and in part by way of rapprochment with modern economics, anthropology has become more consistently rational in its treatment of exchange. Reciprocity is contract pure and mainly secular, sanctioned perhaps by a mixture of considerations of which a carefully calculated self-interest is not the least (cf. Firth, 1 967) . Mauss seems in this regard much more like Marx in the first chapter of Capital: if it can be said without disrespect, more animistic. One quarter of corn is exchangeable for X hundredweight iron. What is it in these things, so obviously different, that yet is equal? Precisely, the question was, for Marx, what in these things brings them into agreement?-and not what is it about these parties to the exchange? Similarly, for Mauss; "What force is there in the thing given that makes the beneficiary reciprocate?" And the same kind of answer, from "intrinsic" properties : here the hau, if there the socially necessary labor time. Yet "animistic" is manifestly an improper characterization of the thought involved. If Mauss, like Marx, concentrated singularly on the anthropomorphic qualities of the things exchanged, rather than the (thinglike?) qualities of the people, it was because each saw in the transactions respectively at issue a determinate form and epoch of alienation : mystic alienation of the donor in primitive reciprocity, alienation of human social labor in commodity production (cf. Godelier, 1966, p. 143). They thus share the supreme merit, unknown to most "Economic Anthropology," of taking exchange as it is historically presented, not as a natural category explicable by a certain eternal disposition of humanity.

In the total prestations between clan and clan, said Mauss, things are related in some degree as persons and persons in some degree as things. More than irrational, it exaggerates only slightly to say that the process approaches clinical definitions of neurosis: persons are treated as objects; people confuse themselves with the external world. But even beyond the desire to affirm the rationality of exchange, a large section of Anglo-American anthropology has seemed instinctively repelled by the commercialization of persons apparently implied in the Maussian formula.

Nothing could be farther apart than the initial Anglo-Saxon and French responses to this generalized idea of prestation. Here was Mauss decrying the inhumanity of modern abstract distinctions between real and personal law, calling for a return to the archaic relation between men and things, while the Anglo-Saxons could only congratulate the ancestors for having finally liberated men from a debasing confusion with material objects. And especially for thus liberating women. For when Levi-Strauss parleyed the "total prestation" into a grand system of marital exchanges, an interesting number of British and American ethnologists recoiled at once from the idea, refusing for their part to "treat women as commodities. "

Without wanting to decide the issue, not a t least in these terms, I do wonder whether the Anglo-American reaction of distrust was ethnocentric. It seems to presume an eternal separation of the economic, having to do with getting and spending, and besides always a little off-color, from the social sphere of moral relationships. For if it is decided in advance that the world in general is differentiated as is ours in particular, economic relations being one thing and social (kinship) another, than to speak of groups exchanging women does appear an immoral extension of business to marriage and a slander of all those engaged in the traffic. Still, the conclusion forgets the great lesson of "total prestation," both for the study of primitive economics and of marriage.

The primitive order is generalized. A clear differentiation of spheres into social and economic does not there appear. As for marriage, it is not that commercial operations are applied to social relations, but the two were never completely separated in the first place. We must think here in the same way we do now about classificatory kinship: not that the term for "father" is "extended" to father's brother, phrasing that smuggles in the priority of the nuclear family, but rather that we are in the presence of a broad kinship category that knows no such genealogical distinctions. And as for economics, we are similarly in the presence of a generalized organization for which the supposition that kinship is "exogenous" betrays any hope of understanding.

– Sahlins ch 4. The Spirit of the Gift

[1]: society without the state. One is tempted to say "uncomplicated by the state" or "incomplicit with it".