Our Downgoing

To be civilized is also to reject the term ‘animal’ as it applies in the negative; hence, it would seem to be all too easy to say that being uncivilized is to accept this term as a warm one, as a term of privilege, as a badge of honor. To say that becoming animal, nay, barbarian, would be sufficient to meet the litmus test of true anti-civilizational thinking, is a very strong claim; proof would be a matter showing such to be essential.

We can show something to be essential only if we can exclude every counter-example; and the history of essence, in particular, its gradual uselessness, is a counter-proof. In any event, to say something is essentially X is to say that there is something unique about all the members of the set X, and, furthermore, that the set is complete, or, rather, that the set doesn’t intersect with any other sets. Consider the set of humyns. Traditionally we have defined these as rational animals; but it is not that the animal part is unique to humyns, since humyns are clearly not the only animals; nay, humyns are a subset of “the set” of animals. It is that the rational part is supposed to be unique to humyns; it is the rational predicate that is unique. Of course, this can only be taken as true if we qualify our statement saying, in an idealist tonality, all things being equal (ceteris paribus).

The trouble in general is that nothing is equal to anything else; there are just individuals. It is one thing to say that we both have various similarities, accidental, presumably; it is another to transcend these non-necessary conditions of being-X to reach and connect (via reference) with that which is ultimately responsible for being this kind of being. Light can be shed on this matter by attending, quickly, to a tricky nominalist-realist disagreement. For Duns Scotus, an individual just is, essentially, a vague set of formally distinct formalities. (A humyn is essentially rational and essentially animal; but there is no existing thing, if it is manifested by the substance humyn that is rational without at the same time being animal—of course, there are many animals that are not rational; it is just that rationality and animality are simultaneously present in this humyn substance). For William of Ockham, the very idea of a formality is confuses the law of noncontradiction; but this is more of a clue to what is at stake for Ockham; an unnecessary third, on a nominalit reading. The trouble is that Scotus is not just a nominalist; he is also a realist; but his doesn’t eschew nominalism. What’s the difference? It has often been put that Ockham’s meaning of necessity is altered by Scotus: “As many as necessary”, could follow a rigid metaphysics; for Scotus, it precipitates a pragmatism that multiplies placeholders, as Pini, and Rorty would say.

To say that Socrates is a man is to say that there is something about Socrates, really at the individuated site of Socrates, that justifies the application of the term, man-ness. For Scotus, Avicenna’s universal correlate is here crucial; no real thing can stand for anything else; only mental predicates (universals) stand for many. Hence, even prior to the moment that Socrates exists, there is a moment that his man-ness is carved out as would-be being; upon ‘creation’, such becomes part of a less-than-numerical unity, which is just the referential correlate for a set, or, in more conventional terms, that which justifies being in the extension of a class. The point that I am trying to make here is that man-ness was taken to be something that every man has in common; and with Scotus, having this man-ness is not had by any other man. That which unifies a set against all else then is the universal. The relationship between the idealist naming of X as such, is linked to the being of X, but these do not have the same properties. Hence, with Scotus we have a way out of questioning the application of a universal; such may not be exemplified, unless, of course, it is obvious that it does. And now, perhaps, we might have the capacity to reject the application of terms used against us. Set theory is a whole lot of pie in the sky, usually made for numbers, or things that do not exist; at best they are things we invent to order the world. They are not lifted from reality, but imposed upon perhaps unwilling material correlates. And we always have to qualify our statements with ceteris paribus. What is interesting about this foray into medieval metaphysics is that we might now be able to see the ridiculous bird-cage of oppressions for what it is: a creative act and merely a willingness to give a shit and perform as such. In the very least, we modify our being, individuated according to the parameters of others, a form of power over in an inverted hierarchy that denies the already individuated uniqueness of being this. What we must ask ourselves is whether it is an essential fact that one is a settler, or whatever various modes of resentment suggest we are, or whether the applied terms are accidental. If accidental, presumably the fact can be altered. If it can’t be altered, if privilege theory is permitted one more pass, then the accuser has to make an argument for why we have to care about their grasping at straws. That is to say, arguments for essentialisms are always a matter of replacing real living beings with idealistic (strawman) components.

What we are after is that which makes one essentially civilized. Often we are coddled into believing that it is rational to live in the shitty; that humyns (and domesticated animals within cruel bounds) belong in the city despite a huge anthropological literature that spells the opposite. Even domesticated animals are penned in; taught tricks; and fed meals, just as humyns are, only we are programmed to transfer labor for these privileges. What I am after is some proposition that makes one civilized; and I think we can sketch out a phenomenology here.

We often use terms to signify undesired traits. We refer to cops as pigs, not only because this is fashionable in anarchist circles but because cops do not appreciate being labeled ‘pigs’. There is something problematic about being swine-like. The distinguishing response to this, that pigs (not cops) are good, misses the point that anti-civ thinking may want to figure. What is it about being a pig that is problematic in this context? Does its being negative and undesirable help build the city? Perhaps this example is a little too difficult to work; but maybe it has something to do with pigging out, and the cultural figuring of cops and donuts, being overweight, etc. Still, it’s curious. Perhaps we are saying that their being privileged in a particular way, being rewarded for having the unchecked monopoly on violence, is a sickening indeed grotesque form of domestication, and as such, is unfair, etc.? Yet, the pig is to be abolished, presumably. Does this mean that our desire is for everyone to be piggish?—Perhaps only those that have the natural capacity to take space?—Those that have a right to it independent of monopolies of violence? The power of negation here is clearly to point us to a better utopia in which we manifest our own consequences, our own acts of revenge, unbridled from morality, or at least, this is what I tell myself so that finding affinity with anarchism isn’t a disturbing priest based morality.

Another figure is Animal, a character from the Muppets, which might be taken to signify animality in general. He doesn’t talk; he tends to make noise; and manifests this language on the drums. While he is good, he’s out of line, or just off the rails enough, irrational, perhaps: perhaps destined for the psychiatric-camp. Being animal is a matter of being out of touch with etiquette, being a disturbing or unbearable whatever. Now, being whatever is unbearable for most sharpening the knives of identity politics; but this is not what we wish to seize. This whatever includes the privative forms in the oppression Olympics, those forms of life that are targeted as generating oppression, and are therefore in need of transvaluation, according to those sheep that fail to create their own tools. Animality is precisely to fail to even be on the radar. It is to be the underbelly, the most intense target of oppression. Being like an animal is to be deserving of the camp; and it is expected that if you are like an animal (and if you are caught of course, as a wolf wearing wool), you will be domesticated and tamed. But we also wish to not be like Animal in the sense that we do not wish to perform long, somewhat out of place drum solos; our animals are those that are not yet domesticated. Animal is therefore bearable; whilst we wish to be very un(bear)able, perhaps hungry like a wolf. We nihilists know no morality; and in this way we are like animals. We tend to do what we can get away with; and if we are hidden properly, we can take it all for ourselves, in a glorious winning through.

Perhaps we can say unequivocally that if we are called animals, we are on the right track. Like ITS, we must be willing to confront our embarrassments, we must get used to shame, given that we are obviously following animals without morality here. Do animals feel shame? According to David Hume (Treatise), the mark of civilization, what the entire apparatus depends upon, is the promise; the promise that one will go to work; the promise that one will not steal: the promise that one will abide by the rules and repay debts. We are hampered here, plain and simple, by the fact that we fear consequences, that we fear jail. So what kind of animals are we to become? The ones that fear hungry bellies?—Not at all. We desire to be the ones that over come fear in a glorious ‘downgoing’. Our love affair is with necessity, so that every day we might get closer to qualitative living, and, simultaneously, further away from retirement.

When I die, when I am only too happy to go, forget my name, and cast me to my favorites. 

True Totality

When we talk about the reality of base categories in structuralism it has often been the case that we take capitalist relations to be primary; that class is primary, fist on the chopping block; way more serious than everything else. But nowhere in experience are these relationships bare; for actual experience shows capitalist relations to be also racist and gendered. Is this relationship necessary? Can we pinpoint examples of capitalist relations without race or gender hierarchies? Perhaps, but only if we start with a weird definition of racism and patriarchy, one that doesn’t challenge capitalism, or rather, merely reforms capital without tending to anti-humanist critique. I want to say that the very idea of work depends on patriarchy, clearly, but not patriarchal masculinity, which is only a harm-reduction program. And fuck that.

If we say that oppressions as units intersect, then these remain distinct and can be considered as primary or secondary. I am suggesting that these components link together and diminish their individual signification, and that there are two contenders for that which is primary. Perhaps this is trivial. But what I want to argue is that we need to consider intersectionality as a starting point, but without poor liberal descriptors. Our meaning of race is not discrimination in the work place, but the destruction of wild-being. Our meaning of patriarchy is not womyn not getting equal pay, but the very idea of being disabled from living one’s own desires, which is a question of consent and complicity. If we go this way, we have a rhetorical approximation that gets us out from under the left, its uselessness in particular. Reality is not just capital; capital, which establishes bodies as property, operates to coerce bodies against their will, which is (at once) a process of domestication in a fucked up nonconsensual stance. In short, everything is already enclosed, except, perhaps, that which has been used up. But in this using, difference is denied, and it does so without genuine asking. Hence, enclosure is racist raping. The two primaries then are the naming of X as property, the capitalist sense, and the simultaneous becoming of X as not-X (race-), which can be nonconsensual (gender-). And here, even if it is teased out that one might choose to work, and so, gender is not linked necessarily with racism as a contender for the primary, it is clear that race as I think it is fruitful to define it, must be operative in the appropriation of surplus energy, which doesn't just start at the unit of production. In order to be ready for work, one must not be wild.

So then what of the negation of enclosure? The primary mode of capitalist relations is re-sourcing; taking an object from a place, not necessarily a subject, but perhaps, and making it operate as a subject in another register. According to Perlman (The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism), this is necessary for building economies, in the concept preliminary capital. Nothing appropriated within the old shell can avoid this racist raping in the new. So even if class relations are dissolved, while there wouldn't be subjects of a kind, there would still be domestication. 

But it might be that an objects’ being as such operates without anything like the shell. This is what I have suggested elsewhere is present in the distinction between tools and technology, and in particular, with the idea of the background relation.

It seems clear enough that beings are substances that operate according to whatever flows, to varying degrees of decision. Yet those objects that find themselves within society are simultaneously structured as subjectivities. And all sorts of nonhuman objects find themselves structured by domestication/society. 

They are not subjects, one might say, because they do not have the right to leave work, vote, or be a liberal douche. But surely they are subjected to limitations. It seems more correct then to suppose that they are mere capitalist objects for use, a bottom limit case of oppression that makes a sweatshop seem like paradise. But if it is good for the goose, it follows that racist raping occurs here too because these mere working class bodies are always enclosed. What we need to think about is what is means to negate enclosure.

Just to recap. A humyn animal that works is not a mere object for use; one that works is a subject that is complicit in ones’ own misery. Of course, an animal that works for humans might commit suicide; and so we might be willing to say that they are complicit too. But surely the capacity to say ‘work sucks’ depends on whether one knows anything else. It is granted then that animals taken from the wild appear to have these memories, and are, accordingly, more resistant.--For even domesticated animals resist. But in either case, it seems true that those ripped from Nature are the best moral exemplars for us, for hate and for the creation of genuine enemies. So let’s become barbarians, shall we?

I am not saying that humyns are free because they can leave work; that they come and go as they will. One is only free if one is no longer bound by capital at all, and that surely has something to do with negating saving to consume. One is not free because one can go to Los Angeles; but the possibilities of doing whatever for humyns, is surely more quantitative than the poor domesticated beings that work in the technological death machine.

I also reject the argument that a domesticated animal might as well be eaten because it knows nothing else. This position fails to address enclosure, and is therefore a racist raping. If we go with rhetorical approximation, as suggested in opposition to liberal intersectionality, getting out from under capital also means that we have to fuck off and yield to objects with independent desire the possibility to consent to whatever our projects of living might be. And our moral exemplar here might be just that we eat those that are gifted to us.

Am I advocating equality? Of course not. There are the strong and the weak; and the weak ought to perish; but it takes genuine strength to minimize 'place' so that one can determine ones’ strength. Living is too easy; there is here in the shitty no meaning of strength. To be outside of enclosure is see how strong one really is. In other words, it is weak to depend on an apparatus to make predation possible. We are therefore not predators as such. Yet we can be, with our tools, and with our steps towards destroying enclosure. Preying on the weak means feasting on leviathan and all its consequences.

Essentially Speaking: Notes on Technology II

To say that X is essential for Y seems to be a difficult task for proof given the underdetermination of causes. How can we locate an essential cause given that there are too many possible candidates? And, more importantly, the impossibility of assigning a cause as individuated from everything else? What if something prior X to the determined cause Y is responsible for Z? This is fairly easy to see. If I steal something from the store, it would seem impossible to say that there is just one reason for my doing so. Therefore this is an issue of free will; for it may not be that I simply chose to steal. I cannot rule out other contributing preceding causes: poverty, having read anarchism, etc., For similar reasons, no set of causes will be sufficient. Distributively, to say that X is necessary for Y is to know, which is merely probable and obviously not certain; collectively, to say that set X is sufficient for Y, is to clearly confuse certainty for probability. For why should we rule out this or that preceding cause, this or that set, or even, this or that effect or this or that set of effects? Why did I do X? Because Y produces Z? The difficulty of necessary and sufficient explanation goes both ways temporally. And such is David Hume’s point against explanation in general; and the tone suggests that sufficient explanation in the least is a joke, or at least dubious upon inspection (Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding; Treatise). What we have instead, having razed this idea to the ground, is likely stories, or better, myth making.

Essences have this explanatory feature; they at once explain what it is that many things have in common, as well as explain that which is being as such. To say that something is essentially X is to say that X is responsible for X being what it is, such that it is (or, modally, can be) no other thing. The latter point is difficult to see short of final causality; and it is this purpose for which X is, that also contributes to an understanding of essence (Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays). Jointly, and in overlapping rough fashion, which is to say these two sets of differences are not ‘really distinct’—that is they always come together—it is ‘formal’ and ‘material’ causes that explain the way that it is, and it is efficient and final causality that explain that it cannot be another thing. 

The rough point I am making can be shown here: The chalice is divined according to the purpose for which it is made by a creative act, according to inessential (accidental) materials—they need not have been silver—and an essential form. Hence, while material causes could have been of other material, its being as such, which is to say essentially, required manifestation. Materiality of some sort is presupposed in the reality of a thing essencing. In other words, the form and the final are tied together necessarily, in most stories of essence, and some efficient cause is necessary, but it need not have been that particular creative act, stemming from that substance, or stemming at that time. We could say my making a chalice for consecration is not necessary in terms of consecration. And in terms of use, only materiality of some sort is necessary. Now, consider the potential rigidity here. Very specific practices and rules govern the creation of a sacrificial chalice. It might have been any authoritative creative act on the matter to be genuine, and it might have been silver of a particular grade, but to be called a chalice requires only form. To be one for a specific use requires a very rigid set of guidelines; specifications that muddle the term essence and fudge the rough distinction I'm making above. Still, the difference is helpful, which is to say, useful, for what I mean to project below.  

When it comes to technology the issue is that those actors participating in it, say, making it go, are formed according to the modes of this technology, its prefigured trajectories, even in the context of making it otherwise than what it is intended for. Yet the trouble goes beyond this or that technology; for we are caught in apparatuses here: even though we are relatively free in relation to this technology, its going or its denial, we are already modified according to the trajectories of the net that is technological civilization which supports the possibility of this technology (Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld). To say that we can distinguish ourselves from anything else is to suppose that sufficient causality isn’t a joke. So, minimally, we have to care for this technology, and shape ourselves according to its materiality to do what “we” want with it; and definitively, we are already caught up in its background technologies if we are even considering the very technology under consideration. The exception is the tool, which is only an exception apropos humyn labor.

Suppose then that we say there are first causes and second causes. First causes are those that are prefigured from original creative time; and second causes are those that contribute to its going at all, whether along original trajectories or otherwise. The question that we are raising concerning essence and technology is whether we can be efficient causes that alter the telos of this technology, its final causality, or even technology in general, if it has a final cause. In order to make the case that this questioning is irrelevant, we would have to argue that nothing is necessary, or more precisely, that the only necessity is accidentality. But nothing in particular comes about this way; we can easily assign necessary causes, even though we cannot be precise in the matter. And it is more probable that there are causes of some kind, however darkly we see the matter, than to suppose that everything comes about by accident. This would be the opposite case than the one suggested above concerning a religious sacrificial vessel, whereby everything must be of a particular kind, given the rules of religion, although only the final, formal, and efficient causes are fixed, in particular, and there is the possibility of difference only within material being. Again, a religious (silver) chalice must be silver, trivially, but need not have been this silver; while its being made must have been done by someone that warrants a particular predicate, and in the end, it must exemplify a form and a function according to the rules. 

It seems clear enough that we can alter the purpose of something, as Scuttle in the Little Mermaid uses a fork as a comb, but this altering isn’t ex nihilo. Clearly the dingelhopper only permits particular possibilities, and in its adoption, we are limiting what we could have done otherwise, say, growing a rat’s nest instead of a lovely head of hair, brushed and conditioned. Of course we could always let this technology go, hallelujah; but any particular technology overcodes this previous desire over time via habit formation. As time goes by the ability to let go becomes less desired, which isn’t to say such is impossible, but rather, impractical for the new purposes that have been put to us, those which we have met and adopted, however consciously.

Now, there is no clear "sufficient" (efficient-final) causality for explaining what technology is going to be. As we saw, it is a thing, and it therefore comes with a form; but what is up for grabs, is that its purpose and its form are tied necessarily. But there are powers that put technologies to us, and sometimes this is a matter even out of their hands. Consider nuclear meltdowns. In general, this issue is a concentrated form of the problem of technology; for there is always an issue in the logic of solutions which create problems that facilitate their own solutions, etc.,. We might be able to come up with a tool based solution, in opposition to a technology based solution; but this is unlikely given technology in general being ready to hand, complete with indeterminate trajectories. If we see sufficient causality as the joke that it is, we must not think that we can claim to know the purpose of technology in general. Yet, we can approximate a satisfactory abductive inference, to be tested, and refuted only if there is a better story that doesn’t trivialize the desire to unhinge any technology from final causality. We must aim to be efficient causes in charge of our own final causes, and we must think real hard about the domestication/background apparatus. 

Technologies definitely shape us according to rational improvement. The form that this will take is indeterminate, but there is a logic that cannot be ignored. How then do we name it? Rational improvement is a matter of privilege, or, contrarily, in decomposition logic, it is a matter of deskilling in relation to natural techne-logos (Anonymous, Attentat). Giving up on privilege means that one will always seem uncivilized, crazy, out of touch with Revolution™. Therefore, while this comes across as Manichean in terms of the Way Things Are™, such is merely a gesture.

If we are to say that we are active in selecting technologies, we are failing to address that technologies presuppose other background technologies, and we are failing to address that it is put to us directly in its materiality. That is to say, we are also failing to see that we are only secondary causes in its material origins that come coded with particular trajectories, and furthermore, that being secondary is not to say completely distinct because there are other indirect origins that are related the very idea of making it otherwise. The ability to say that we can transcend it and make it otherwise even in some cases depends on supposing that we can be sufficient causes. In other words, sufficient causality is never given; it is only projected in an ideological narrative, in our decomposition turn, for instance, above. (A contrary transcendence is shown in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, whereby one climbs up and kicks away the ladder. For us, decomposition is a downgoing). It is the gesture of an abductive inference that explains why Zerzan is too simple. The entirety or Totality (Everything (cf. Anonymous, Hello) must be discussed, but all that we have is the possibility of walking away from this technology and its background to explore natural uncoded whatever flows. In other words, sufficient explanation is never granted; but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aim to take control of our lives, even if we cannot be clear that we are doing so.  

Sufficient causality as a joke releases us from the belief that we are being controlled, and that we can control the matter. Form and final causality are only tied necessarily given ideology, which may be useful, or pragmatic, to see something as it appears in our efforts to establish a critique, a ladder to be kicked away, preferably never having ascended. The question isn't whether we can get clear on the matter, because Hume convinces the opposite; rather, the question is whether we can weigh the value of its probable final causes, whether we are in a position to say that we can. It we can, it loses its affect, its necessity, and we are disclosed (alethia) to options. In other words, it is not that this is a question of less or more, that we have more (or less) if we lose technology and reskill; rather it is a matter of 'qualitative' variety and the ability to see value for what we seem to take it to be, rather than how it is too often given. I'm far from invested in other anarchists being intelligent, but I expect them to see domestication for the slavery that it is, or else, to offer a non-trivial refutation of this position, and to provide one that explains without sweeping away its grounding facts. We cannot get anything back, but we can reskill in the present and only then can we see the terrible value of depending on work to survive, to gain "freedom". It's not that knowledge is power, it is that ignorance is failure, a being-joke, folly, and never worthy of life, however it arises.     

Derridian Nihilism

 

It seems clear enough that John Zerzan’s critique of postmodernism turns on an interpretation of passive nihilism. But what does passive nihilism have to do with postmodernism? Let us look into this matter.

Postmodernism has been defined by Lyotard as incredulity (disbelief) towards metanarratives; Platonic metanarratives such as Truth, Justice, Beauty, all of which are tangled and mutually reinforced in an epistemological stance. Whether or not we have access to these is up for grabs; whether or not they exist—whether they are really real—is claimed to be something beyond our capacities to know. Instead, a form of relativism is advocated: Since we can know what we believe, and that there are others that disagree, there are only our lights on the matter and muddling through with others in conversation.

Traditional defenders of such Platonic universals as being the genuine object of Inquiry tend to suppose that the relativists’ position is incoherent because, plainly, relativism is touted as a metanarrative. The obvious response is that you can only go as far as you know, and that it is foolish to suppose that one knows beyond what one does. It is clear that others have different opinions about ways to live. Can we come to agreement with everyone to come? Who knows!

Now, Derrida is an interesting case, especially the later Derrida. There is no guarantee that the ideology that we force onto others in agreement, say Marxism, Socialism or Anarchism, will not, in the unfolding on khôra, be unraveled. That is to say, what is not-deconstructable, perhaps, according to Derrida, is only the logic of différance. Is this logic necessary, like khôra? Perhaps. Listen: everything unfolds in différance; nothing is stable because Derrida predicts that the logic of time and growth, external, and internal, will undo everything we take to be protected. Such is the meaning of différance, which makes everything possible via spatial and temporal différance and impossible via this being not just collective in its affect, but also distributive. Might this distributive logic undo the proprietary logic of différance? Perhaps, but that just reveals more différance. Might everything crystallize? Might time and decomposition come to an end? It seems possible, but about as hard to care about as a mean spirited eternal bliss that can never improve.

This point of view has everything to do with nihilism in the sense that the universe doesn’t really care about language, humyns, life, or whatever. Everything will be broken down. The logic of life and death go hand in hand, like a snake consuming its own tail. Such is the machine-like logic suggested by Deleuze and Guattari. Being (khôra) cannot help but be the plane of existence generating immanent différance upon all that is within its containment. The political upshot is that there is nothing in the way of being able to create something new, or permit being to do so through us; yet, there is no assurance that what we create will remain stable, whether in its physicality or “meaning” (which has nonlinguistic origins), because nothing in the universe is stable, except, perhaps, the logic of instability.

The important nihilistic lesson from Derrida, which echoes Epicurean indifference in the void, is that there is no-thing in the universe that is actually stable. The lesson that appears to be coming from Zerzan is that we have to make certain things stable.—There must be the rule of anti-agriculture (rewilding). Such is the vision; and the means are to be now configured according to this version of Outside (cf Hello). Derrida, on the other hand, opens the view to the reality that Nature is not patented by anyone. There is only the slow logic of undoing materialities, as well as an undoing of the theoretical apparatuses utilized to signify those materialities. Now, for Derrida, everything is undoing text written by différance/khôra; but this means that there is no remainder; that there is nothing for Zerzan to take issue with. “There is only text” doesn’t mean that there are only words, trapped behind the veil of appearance--an ignorant reading; it is that the metaphysics of the universe is an aesthetic writing, a drawing, a constitution and a continuous slow decomposition. Questions about 'the point' are illusory; and so, the point is not that everything is pointless. 

Some anarchists have values of a particular order. These values are to be freely chosen in theory, but more often than not we have our values imposed upon us by certain persyns that take up the mantle of victim-hood.—Whatever. Nihilism, on the other hand, advocates a complete abolition of these humyn values, as well as any forms of power-with that exclude individual desires, and deconstruction is a valid method in dismantling such hierarchies. Now, if deconstruction were to show itself as pure relativism, it would seem to lose its purpose; for in that case, there is nothing positive shown by way of deconstruction. On the contrary, while it comports ultimately with nothingness, this doesn’t mean that it shows itself as actually nothing because, plainly, it is a logic that moves, and doesn’t remain stagnant; a logic that moves hard distinctions into soft intersections, ad/in infinitum. There is still constitution therefore, it is only modified in a decomposition logic, just as the call “Hello”, may not arrive.

Where deconstruction becomes problematic is if it is taken to be a name rather than a verb. So we might say that deconstruction is the mode of active nihilism, whereas the artificial end that it is taken to be in the name (by Zerzan), and specifically by rationalists demanding it fit their logic, is passive. Deconstruction can never be passive because it is always at work undoing, negating. To suppose that it is something stagnant is to completely miss the point.

Either you are a nihilist and you realize that there is nothing that undermines reality, no purpose, no God generating functions for us to fit; or, you are not, and you are filled with hope. Sometimes one hopes that we can build something together, failing to realize that the other simply may not find joy in doing so, and may fuck right off. More to the point, we should take issue with the idea that we should be shocked. The best thing that we can do for the other is leave it to be whatever, unless, of course, their being left alone to be whatever produces them as my enemy. In my opinion, the free unbound individual that disagrees with me is not sufficient for their fitting as enemy. What is required is that their being whatever is cutting into my capacity to live my own desires.  

Passive nihilism is a philosophy that supposes that everyone has the right to their own point of view. It breeds a version of quietism; there are no enemies; everyone can get along. Such is not what deconstruction is all about; deconstruction as a verb merely blurs lines purported to be clear and distinct. And it can undermine every project, except (perhaps) the project of undermining projects; for in that case it would no longer be active, which it is essentially (perhaps). Nihilism loses its potency when it aspires to answer itself with a positive foundational platform, unless, of course, negation is seen properly as positive precisely because such is actively deconstructive. But decomposition and so constitution, as decomposition, continues, despite our efforts to shut down its movement. Deconstruction is an individualist philosophy in that it doesn’t preclude alternative desires; and it is for this reason that Zerzan doesn’t like it. It is too radical for his moderate agenda to somehow magically produce a new essence, namely, the essence of communal sharing. Individualists and Deconstruction, together, undermine his goal. The point of deconstruction is to shine a light on Zerzan’s claim that there ought to be hope at all. Hope in what? (That we might be released from Hope!)   

Hello, Where Are You? A Review of Hello

We are young, heartache to heartache, we stand, 
no promises or demands, love is a battlefield

Hello, as an everyday term, has at least two uses. On the one hand we use the term as a voice-call to an other, a voice that may never arrive, as in “Hello, is there anyone there?” The term has also become a trivial everyday greeting: “hello”, and it even appends a looking: “hello, where are you?”

We can say that what differentiates these two contextual uses is the intentionality in the context; in the latter we have a greeting in which the other is known and the greeting is intended to arrive, to be heard—that there is someone to hear it. In the former it is not that one is irrationally intending not to be heard; it is that one doesn’t know if ones’ call will be fruitful. The intentional query in “Hello, where are you?” indexes the other in space-time since they are (real)ly present but remaining unlocated. The intentionality present in “Hello, is there anyone there?” must only be apparent, hopeful, because we might not be able to assign a positive value to our referential quantifier. We could then say that hello itself, as an assembled word, because of its two different uses, at once merely marks the possibility of communication. At most, “hello” might start a conversation.

If, then, hello permits a tracing to potential communication, the same potential follows for other terms given a common etymological root. For the etymological root (com-) links hello to “community” and also “commitment”, given that these two latter terms relate through “communion”. In other words, there may not be communion because the call may not arrive; similarly, there may or may not be community. As Critila reminds us: “[Hello] remains concerned with the communicative situation itself, and how we are bound or unbound in it” (Anvil #4 (16)). But how are we bound or unbound? How are we obligated?

If I promise that I will be somewhere, or do something, I bind myself to my word, and the other counts on this self-binding. But we are never really bound in our commitments, for such obligation is merely probable; the (unbound) other might never arrive, might never heed the call (hello). Hence, Hello advocates a tincture of skepticism; that we ought to be skeptical about the possibility of genuine communion, perhaps because it is unwise to deceive ourselves about the freedom of the other to dissociate from our binding, just as much as it is unwise to deceive ourselves about our own freedoms against our own binding. So we are called to be “agile” with others and ourselves, to be shifty, (Hello 9-10), to reject obligatory promise and not hope that the other will necessarily arrive. Given that the other might arrive, no more no less, given that necessity here has been deflated, all that is left to do is to test the limitations of the contract, with others or ourselves, “of finding the limitations that we are capable of and pushing past them” (Hello 16). In all of this the call is to be honest, to be true to our own potential desires, and to be true to the limitations of the other, all of which may conflict. But it is out of this honing our practice, of testing possibilities, that we are already active, which is not to say that we must be active. We do not hold others or ourselves to moralistic account; for we do not care to reduce the other to a function of our desires, and, in the same breath, we are not stupid to think that we can (Hello, 41). It is in the face of hopelessness, in the possibility that communion might fail, that we look (and test) to see if it does.

The author(s) of Hello suggest that their analysis tracks a resolution to the relationship between means and ends without bottoming out in Everything (33-5). Our (anarchist) methods of achieving ends that we want usually fall short, or worse, are co-opted. Strikes usually do not end in less work, but the same amount for more money; and even if we supposed that working less were our goal, as Bonnano has suggested, less work is now a Capitalist method to make us like working in the first place (cf. Let’s Destroy Work, Let’s Destroy the Economy). As Bonnano suggests, we need to discover ways to live outside work—to discover truly libratory ends. This text appears to be saying that we need to find ways to live outside obligation, or, better to be obligated to the absence of obligation. In deciding ends for ourselves, without consulting others, but rather, actually determining them for ourselves, without compromise, is surely a tall order; and this mode of connecting means and ends for oneself is certainly denied to us by the rulers of our ends, as well as the leftists that vilify us for rejecting their game plan. The goal is to have an end that is actually ours, a joyous life, to actually connect our means with our ends; that is, to no longer permit them to be unbound as they are truthfully disconnected from our desires in Everything, but to join these ‘unified’ moments of “means and ends every time we know how” (Hello, 34).

The term “commitment to commitment” is offered as a rhetorical approximation; it does work. At once it indicates true friendship, which is not directly reducible to a moment of connectivity between means and ends, prior to being incorporated into Everything (35). To have a stance towards a friend that is not reductive is to be committed to them as friends. This moment is already Outside Everything because it doesn’t indicate a moral contract of obligation; it is to permit them to bind themselves, should they will it, without hope that the binding will be permanent. Just as hello itself can go either way, perhaps the binding will be permanent.

Proposition 5 indicates that this commitment to commitment stands outside of any particular commitment, and certainly outside of the commitment to Everything. It is, positively, a commitment to that which is Outside Everything. Critila suggests that the text perhaps has a strain of anti-civilizational thinking; and it is precisely here that we find it; for the commitment to the Outside might very well be the commitment to that which is uncivilized, to life itself (Hello, 42)—that which cannot really, which is to say, genuinely, be co-opted. Of course, many anarcho-primitivists have tried to yield the Outside as a “more complete hug” (Hello, 38) but it would seem all too obvious that the corrosive skepticism of the text occludes such a hopeful embrace. Thinking and life come together, and thinking means being on your guard against belief in the Other to remain bound by your desires. Nature, Self and other selves (all Others) may perform as we want them to; or they may not; but we are committed to the fact that these are free to go either way, for in every moment, as such, they are Outside.

The promise that we keep is kept because we want to keep it, not because there is a transcendent order of obligation set in motion by the utterance “I promise…” Hence, it is only if we decide to break our promises or keep them that such is Outside; for such is a making of space for oneself. To potentially carve a space means that it is there, reserved for occupancy in opposition to Everything—and here, especially, in opposition to feeling bound to someone else, whether it is for class war, or some “higher” historical purpose. Importantly, Everything makes keeping promises to the Outside impossible; obviously Everything hides the idea of an outside, a truly free (unbound) passion, given that Everything would have us believe that it can provide Anything. If we come together, on the other hand, if you respond to my hello, it is our non-necessary desire to respond that opens the event to the Outside. It is not the fact of your word—a tyrannical word that holds us captive, a word with power regardless of our desires—, but the desire itself that generates unbound joy. The authors of Hello want “a friendship understood as an immanent quality rather than something referred to a command from on high” (45). Seeing friends as unbound others anterior to the masks of identity politics, as Agamben suggests in ‘The Friend’ (What is an Apparatus), sets all of us free from Everything and opens up a genuine invitation.

For most, intense French style theory will be inaccessible; but for those familiar with The Coming Insurrection or The Call, this text is an important individualist intervention. Calling us beyond morality, to be committed to the Whatever Outside (necessarily not Everything), offers a distinction between passive nihilism and active nihilism without supposing that active nihilism requires a positive end. To be active is to call to anyone, and see if communion with, or commitment to, free unbound selves (self included) could happen, given that it often does not. Limits arrive to be overcome, not passively avoided, and not passively presumed to be resolvable independent of our playful desires.

Copies can be ordered from hellofriend@riseup.net or Little Black Cart.

Review of Desert

The text Desert is a much needed intervention to the traditional assumption that Civilization (Domesticator logic) is on the brink of collapse. Or, at least, it demonstrates that it is probably not the case that this will happen in the way that it is often projected. 

Green Anarchism is revolutionary in the sense that it supposes that only after this projected moment in time, the Revolution will have commenced. Green anarchy gestures at a different position, a whatever becoming, fully nihilist; and the text is more in line with this trajectory: predictably it is not that Civilization will of necessity crumble, as though this is written in stone--a point that parallels the awkwardness of presuming that the Revolution is likely if only mass expropriation were to come into play; it is in part that Civilization's leave geographical deserts in their wake; and that these places permit the possibility of anarchies outside the shitty city walls.--Obviously with little surplus to extract, capitalists move on to extract elsewhere. 

The other part is that many will not feel the call of wild insurrection because many do not dislike domestication, just as many will not feel the call of zero work because they like their things and are willing to work to forestall boredom. 

So, it is not impossible that the general argument is enthymemic. The conclusion is to give up hope in a full scale collapse, to Desert this myth; to forget trying to save the earth because 1]: it is in the interests of civilization to move--that is, it uses everything until there is nothing left that it can use without losing reasonable surplus, and because 2]: there are many individual responses to domestication logic (some like it, for fucks sake). 

It seems clear that 2] undermines the view that insurrection is inevitable--a healthy tonic for deluded anarchists. The qualification here is that sometimes this will come about. Hence, the suggestion from the author is for strategic solidarity with indigenous communities because, in those contexts, there are far fewer contradictions for green anarchy. The memories of times past are likely all that can wake the sick to health; and as proximate one is to these moments, one is ready to become resistant (Desert, 42). In other words, indigenous communities (warrior societies especially) are already resisting because they see domesticator logic as problematic, as contradictory--just as we do. 

To support the first premise it is important to see that states are not subjects, but fully intertwined in our ways of being (Desert: 47-8): Work-Consumption-Repeat-Reproduce. This is the machine logic that we must break out from under, and failure to address its operation(s), which do not fail to include a data-collecting apparatus by which we already snitch on ourselves, is part of what it means to fail to understand (Deleuzian) post-structuralism. The state is an apparatus (a pervading function) that contains us by making us desire containment, by making containment seem safe, seem lovely. It is not something that we negotiate with, but is rather, already fully embodied (and emboldened) in the very idea of negotiation, et cetera.

It is important to fully understand the scope of this argument, which has everything to do with (1) and (2), and in particular, the question of hope. While the future looks bleak, (1) suggests that it is not completely impossible that anarchy would arise where civilization retracts. Therefore, the author is not advocating giving up totally, despite the rhetoric; but is suggesting, rather, an understanding, a wisdom about how one is to proceed. Be skeptical of mythmakers! It is suggested that our desires, say, for land defense, would be most strategic, most promising, if it is largely piecemeal, in small affinity groups (Desert, 52-3), and coupled with the goal of winning, as opposed to negotiating for a future possibility. It is not fighting for the future, some distant time, but opening doors that lead to better possibilities, that thereby constitute the future already. If one desires a better world, one must eschew myths of a future kind, and focus on the present reality: in finding each other, and (so) ways to resist, while being somewhat invisible; in finding others already in the thick of it, and seeing where these desires might carry. In technical terms, this is a deflationary argument that lops the head off the empty promise of a glorious future and focuses on how one can build the present. It is pragmatic, therefore; even to the point of accepting that some unifying myths might be ok... they just need to be the right, useful, kind (Desert, 43). And if it is still believed that the author is completely without hope, consider the small section 'Nature bats last' where the author admits that even though those that are extinct and becoming extinct, are no more and will not come back, there is still "solace" in the view that the wild will recover (Desert, 44). It is important to note that the quality of recovery may not be premised on the idea of Relics (Desert, 37ff)  being saved. Whatever is to come, which will not meet our hopes for pristine nature (pr)eserves, will nevertheless be not us (undomesticated Weeds) (Desert, 39).

Perhaps it would be suggested that this is defeatist. But I think it is important to realize that we are weak; that we still have to build power against a powerful enemy. Given (1) it is not only that we haven't the might to make right, but also, further, that we cannot even localize the enemy, and further (because also), often it is already mirrored in ourselves. This is best pointed out in the section on defending the Relics, which seems likely only if state-power is leveraged--which is obviously contradictory for green anarchists. Again, to repeat, one best hope for land defense, is indigenous solidarity. But even if we stave off domestication (whatever this means in this context), it doesn't follow that everyone will see this as desirable (given (2)). 

To accept individual liberty means that many will resist our utopia; to not be stupid about power is to see that many will find it easier to fall in line. Given remote memories of uncolonized living, for many of us, it is likely that so long as there are things to ruin, and the sky is the limit (literally), there will be civilization. Having exposed this emperor as having no clothes, the author suggests that we go about carving out spaces for ourselves, for our desires; we can go about building lives worth living.

What is lovely about this text is that it reveals itself as honest and burdened. In the end, however, the text seems rather trivial, hardly new--and the author notes this (Desert 55). Most importantly, however, this text helps clarify a concept in use, and therefore detached from its author (John Zerzan). This concept is "active nihilism", originally defined in 'the nihilist's dictionary' (Future Primitive or Future Primitive Revisited), and then recently redescribed by the same author in his popular "On Hope". It is suggested that Desert be read with an eye on what active nihilism might mean, within (or outside) these boundaries.

No Compromise!

Traditional social theory places chaotic (whatever) beings into litle packages and pretends that, as represented by this packaging--not by what packs the packaging--these bound sorts fit into various forms of interlocking oppression. Sometimes the many bits of aritficiality that one wears can become confusing, but intersectionality at least makes representations less cut and dry. If we cut it all out, we'd be naked. Fuck yeh.

Being working class, a concept technically without signification today, or at least a term that has a new signification in the notion of temporary work, means, so far as I want to think about it, that you are not responsible for environmental degradation, or better, that the responsibilities of your boss cannot be compared to your own willingness to go to work. The workers are pitiable; the boss a monster--but not too much of a monster, after all; for they cut the checques that pay for the booze to make community seem pleasant. Yep: how the fuck do you balance that tasty hatred? Is it bittersweet?

In the green anarchist tradition, it is comments or arguments that challenge this proposition that alienate and drive anarchists away from anarchy and towards leftist liberalism. No one wants to be a eco-fascist! Stated unequivocally: Aim for personal anarchic Autonomy, or fuck off and die. If you, yes you…  personally, aren't working to get away from all of this shit in this shit city, it is your own fault for not being ready to face the consequences, whether from Nature herself (That lovely Indifferent Bitch!), those perpetuated by your boss due to your chosen desire to be in proximity, or those carried out by those who just want to see domestication burn--to see a thousand desert flowers bloom. A liberal would here object! What of the Babies! What of the poor! Surely they aren't to blame!?!?!?? The long answer, that I don't care to complete, is that it doesn't matter who lives or dies. The world is not a just place. And how the universe unfolds is Whatever. That is all. 

For we are no longer in the age of system building! Certain openings arise because certain realities are closed. It is not a question of Morality, or if so, it is a matter of revenge and desire, culminating in a war of the strong against the strong. Or the strong against the wise. So it goes.

So let's consider this proposition that seems ridiculous. There is a difference between worker and boss; the one cuts the checque, the other takes the money only to come back for more, making an exchange. Money(mammon) is seductive, everyone (even "the" boss) is working after all, and the only difference in this relationship is one of degree. But it seems to be the case that something more powerful than a measly measure of degree must warrant the refusal to see the oppressed as anything but victims. Nope! Just a whole bunch of mealy-mouthed rhetoric. The logical upshot to this argument, if convincing, is that it is a slippery slope, and that all that really holds it up is an arbitrary line. But maybe this is too strong, too soon. Fine!

The owners extract more surplus than the CEO's--so there is a master-slave relation--but CEO's are decidedly not working class, or not as working class as those they extract from. Scratching the CEO then, let's consider the relation between the owners of everything in the company (scratching again any instances of workers receiving company stocks), and those that just work for a wage, the temp. Still, the temp puts money in the bank, which goes into loans, and the interest received by the temp (a fraction received by the bank, of course), is extracted from the persyn taking out a loan. Whose the boss? The fact is that if we have any capital at all, it is being put to work making more, unless we literally burn on nothing, unless we are competely opposed to property, to stuff. Big walls keep us from ourselves! And how do you get big walls and targeted by eco-fascists? You clamber up the ladder of privilege. 

The world of system building is no more! There are no categories, only persyns working out communities amonst themselves! Facebook is not a community! If you stockpile capital, someone will come for you; such are the indifferent consequences in a world that doesn't privilege humyn life. No Compromise!