White Ally

1. Morality is sometimes distinguished from ethics—perhaps fruitfully. Typically the distinction intended is the one indexing the difference between happiness as a function of the rule of association, and Morality as a come what may rule. Duty based ethics, often referred to as Kantian in essence, here takes the name Morality; and by this distinction even utilitarian ethics might pick up the tip. Given that anarchism is essentially anti-authoritarian, the best of anarchists mitigate the lacuna about back pocket morality with a healthy dose of irony, while the rest attempt to differentiate their versions of power-over as collectively constituted. It is no wonder then that Alessandro de Acosta has resurrected the difference between ethics (eudaimonia (the good life) or ataraxia (freedom from suffering)) and morality, as one that earmarks a rupturing of anarchist morality. Therefore, while it is not necessarily the case that morality and ethics must be distinguished, it is useful to see them as distinct, even if the original terms that clarify the difference aren't so. We follow De Acosta and reject Morality, choosing ethics; and what this means is that our project for living is not a priori—prior to experience—but is, rather, a muddling through without foregoing agency, a power-with; a growth of voluntary participation, so long as we find it works, which is our right to association—which doesn’t fail to include disassociation. Given this, what does it mean to reject the morality of white ally?—Obviously it is we who accept this will to morality especially if we ironically play the game of privilege. But if we adopt the principle of being performatively white, we watch ourselves domesticate ourselves in a matrix of power-with.

2. Given that the distribution of privilege is a function of a morality that divides, a margarine word in the writings of de Acosta, for the nihilist, the produced position of the one with power-to is always problematic in the network of power-with. To say nothing of rigidity, this word-machine fixes discourse—without style. Objectively speaking it is simple to say that X has an advantage over Y, given, say, various abilities; but the potential attribution of fitting into the way things are, which is the language of passing in society, is far from clear at two levels. The first point is the assumption of experience—that if you are white, you just get privilege—; the second point that is often left unaddressed, is whether one ought to desire to pass, a move that completely ignores the question whether one should. Following the problematizing here it it proposed that certain individuals just have potencies—unactualized actualities—that set them at an advantage. The principle of white ally as a Moral essence, ends in the one necessarily with power-to yielding to those without power-to so that power-with becomes a revolution-machine in which the white ally is a special and boxed in instantiation of white-performativity. I propose that just as the passing transgendered person is left unmarked and invisible in the gaze, what is meant by being white is that one passes as such. I can always make myself invisible by passing easily and without effort; but it’s tough to want to be perceived as fitting in, unless, of course, such is to my advantage. This is how we pragmatically have ethics, over and against being had by Morality: my power-to is mine, to do with what I will; it cannot be yours, unless I gift it.

3. The assumption of Moral essences ought to be replaced with the answer of ethical passing. But if the language of passing here is permissible, we can say that performativity is a matter of fit. Given that my body has a white cover to it, it is often assumed by other bodies that I fit into their project of success, or better, that I could more readily. But there is nothing normative about whiteness per se unless a morality is added: How one is white, and how one ought to be white. And only after this question is settled can we begin to discuss how one fits or fails to fit. “It’s easy to spot the white person”, you might say: “It’s skin tone, after all”. With the language of ethical passing, we might say, with a tone of jealously if we do not share the pertinent quality, that it’s easier for a white person to become invisible. But is it really so impossible to play society for the fool? To fit in as a civilized human? Its simple: just go to work, buy things, be normal, play the game, at whatever level of poverty you find yourself. Irony requires performative disguises; and it’s easy to neutralize yourself as a subject—which is what the state is trying to do anyways. The difficulty here is not that there is some quality that you possess to the exception of anyone else that stands in the way of being neutralized. The problem is that the whole fucking thing feels fucking gross. To be courageous enough to attack the state has nothing to do with determinations that follow from bodily constitution. This requires a choice and techniques of invisibility—even if you have a white cover. After all, the liberal term “terrorist” is colourblind.

4. For those of us that have our physical constitution covered in a colourless cover, are we supposed to perform whiteness? or are we to destroy the performance? Surely we are not going to try to mutilate our bodies. So, it is argued that if we perform as white, rendering ourselves invisible because of the passing power-to that a white substance carries, we can necessarily receive privilege that can be utilized in a power-with matrix. If we accept white-ally performativity and we adopt the principle of moral essence with its ends gestated in the belly of prefigurative politics, we filter our power-to into a form of power with. (From the consequences of adopting this moral principle, I think we can say: we pass for being white whether or not we are invisible; that if we fail to preform whiteness, we can still pass; and that if we destroy our performance, we become very visible, but never strictly outside the morality generated by privilege.—Importantly, it seems irrelevant if privilege politics fails to address this last difference given that the state hates back really well.) But being performatively white, is split according to ends and means, which casts a dark shadow on the possibility of prefigurative politics. Whitey is urged to performatively follow the conditioned means of the state, but to filter ends differently, for the revolution. One is urged to pass, and pass well, visibly; neither invisibly, nor visibly as a failure. Obviously these dictated behaviours only resemble an anti-authoritarian power-with if one sips the Kool-Aid. The important thing to remember is that power-over has many forms; and it may be the case that according to Uri Gordon, power-to is always the fixed gear, forever fighting power-over like a nihilist in a network of means without end. Such is where we start.

5. One might say, “different outputs, different principles; there cannot be an analogy between the state and the activist.” On the contrary, the liberal stands at the end of the just state, and in both cases, the state and the activist, a morality is given. In the case of the state, the given morality is a solidarity mechanism that occludes class difference by eroding its sense. In the other, in the case of the inverting activist, it is a prescription of performative whiteness as virtually wealthy, and therefore, as having a greater capacity to rise the ranks of privilege; to be a contributing sort in building power-with, in the broadest (and therefore most useless category). Becoming uncivilized, going against the grain of privilege is a starting point for a deepening into freedom; it is most certainly not a trajectory from whence one starts on the way to becoming moral and civilized. Instead, reject moralities, and opt for ethics. And so, we say that our possibilities, too, are away from the cities; and that, as such, privilege isn’t well defined.

Because the term freedom is more fundamental to our sense of life than collective self-sacrifice, we see privilege, in the reformist sense, to be civilized through and through, and that becoming uncivilized, becoming monstrous individualities, achieving qualitative success, is what it means to determine revolution. The inversion, rev-for-us, is something that anarchists accept because some of us are too weak to reject it and aim for our own liberated desires. We think there are better ways to orient oneself with respect to this inversion, precisely because the term ‘freedom’ is up for grabs. Being white is to maintain the way things are; and if one wants to see civilization razed to the ground, one is not only a bad whitey, given the state’s morality, but also a bad whitey given activist morality. The inversion that precedes us, our anarchist utopia—given to us by manufacturers of revolution—would delineate being a good whitey. The state may want this too. Since we neither have an idea how to define what we mean by revolution, nor wish to, to say that there are options plays rather well with the notion of living your life. Only a morality can say that one is failing the rev-for-us, whatever that means. This nihilist ruptures all of it by rejecting morality. And the reasoning might be that one doesn’t want to be a recuperable, reformed, assimilated. Being bad whitey, however the activist looks at it, could be a goal, if one cares enough to take a position. If, after all that, that were advantageous.

touchy topics

Those of us that are tired of the identity politics game tend to suppose that its easy peasy to distance oneself from purported behavior. But this is experientially false because people tend to impose structures onto us, assuming that since one is white, one is racist, for instance; or that since one identifies as male, one is sexist. And if not actually so, more than likely potentially so. Two problems already arise: what does it mean to be white? and what does it mean to be racist? One way of painting the (performative) picture in today's world is to note that the all-amerikkkan family is quintessentially white and quintessentially racist given a general failure to understand the way the world works, how wealth accrues through exploitation, theft of preliminary capital, etc., and that the defense of these values and actualities produces borders, and a keeping out those that have had their lives stolen for the possibility of being performatively white. Built into this concept of being performatively white is being-heteronormative, or what's the same, being reproductive of the same (shitty, one dimensional) future. The domestic family is a machine of a larger machine, named Gender in Baeden 2, that produces the experience of alienation, distancing the other, even to the point of dejection, among a whole host of other divisive features--but most importantly--the separation of self from oneself through capture and recombination.

The entire apparatus of privilege theory functions in a similar way; that is to say, functions to distance oneself from oneself by way of capturing bodies into its functional (socialist) future. The only question then is how it is that the desired world, the utopia of a completed revolution, fails to look like the world that we hate? If domestication keeps us in place, what of the world that would do the same, and yet, nevertheless, call itself transformatively radical? 

Ask yourself: is privilege good or bad? If it is bad--say, because it is predicated on a wholesale dismissal of non-humyn peoples, or because it fails to have a healthy relationship with the land (gelassenheit)--why should one that has it, give it away, rather than destroy it? Because it will always be projected? And if it is meant to be shared because it is only bad in its form, and yet good, if equalized, how can we overlook the privileging of the humyn, the production of Agamben's anthropological machine? (Agamben says that whenever a distinction is posited between humyns and animals, it follows that those that do not fit (rectudio) become excess to be destroyed, like those animals that fall under the privative term and are, as such, destroyed. Here, it's easy to paint the picture: those that do not work, those that cannot, those that hate the white bread of the state (hell); these are so many failures of futures that suck. And yet, even as failures, these are still captured by privilege.) So, through all this we have to ask ourselves always: Is privilege good or bad? And if we say always, without question and equivocation, bad, it will always be obvious that those that would make us do something with it, fail to understand what they are talking about.

Perhaps a vanguardist temporary state is necessary to force the state to "wither away"; and so, mutadis mutandis, privilege must be adopted ironically, until it withers away--until it is meaningless. But I thought that was what we are doing when we render our bodies uncaptured, monstrous? Perhaps privilege association is always a lacking in reference when it comes to us. And this is the ultimate root about why we think identity politics is forever insufficiently anti-politics.

Exploring Passive Nihilism

Fuck.
Ive been reading Christian Anarchism lately and I'm troubled by the linchpin word 'non-violence', and, in particular, how this term means in the milieu.
Fuck.
Of course, sorting the term in a subsequent way produces differences. But what if one doesn't accept ones' sorting?

Fuck.

Some Quakers suppose that property damage, like fires and shit, falls square within the orbit of non-violence. And so it would seem that the difference is not clearly given by the state; nor is it therefore a simple matter of acceptance, a willingness to abide. Nor is it therefore enough to read Gene Sharp's (Otherwise excellent) writings on non-violence to get clear on the term.
Nope: doing violence in the milieu, isn't cut and dry, friends; and with Quakers making the intuitive point that you can't hurt property (even if scumbags find themselves in their stuff), the problem is only made explicit.

If then anarchism wants to distance itself from one small aspect of nihilism (assassinations), then this distancing completely demolishes any a priori, theoretical effort to untangle the terms. Is an anarchism sans assassination non-violent? We want to say no because we don't want to be seen as pacifists; but can we say no?

Fuck.

Oh you shitty Christian Anarchists; you bastards that turn againstness away from non-action into action of a curious sort; you bastards that confuse the difference between pacifist and passive-ists; how can we still say we aren't Christian anarchists; how can we claim that we are not non-violent, against douchey liberals, when "pacifist action" is taken up in opposition to passivity, when these pacifists without passivity produce violence as a well defined term that we can support?

On this reading, the orbit of permissible pacifist actions doesn't reduce to non-action, to bearing witness, to doing nothing. Until anarchists define what they mean by violence, thereby making explicit their differences, it would seem that they confuse the whole (non-violence) for a part (non-action).

Fuck.
Fuck
fuck

(Solid)arity

One more word, to be dissected and discussed—if adequately labeled a “margarine word”—is Solidarity (A de A, The Impossible, Patience). Notes from dissecting this word stem from a discussion held in "Hamilton", on July 14^th, 2015. If there are conversations missing from this account, or if it sucks, please do not hesitate to critique everything.

1. One might argue thus:

Material solidarity is distinct from lip-service.

Therefore, it is not enough to say one is in solidarity; one must show it.

Some say this latter term “lip-service” functions rhetorically as if one were to distinguish rhetoric from that which has “substance”, words from deeds, the game from the politico-aesthetic.

We prefer genuine solidarity and fake solidarity to mark the difference that is meant, and will go about the matter in this way. But problems arise almost immediately. First, when we say we are in solidarity with Marius, whether we are carrying out an action, the question of whether Marius is in solidarity with us isn’t addressed. It might be the case that he would be in solidarity with us, would he have but known us by what we do.

So perhaps the function of support, material support, visiting, paying for, helping, writing to, whatever, constitutes the prior possibility of the subsequent reality of Marius being in solidarity with us. But isn’t support just solidarity?

One point here is that solidarity is a two way street; it is not enough to say that one is in solidarity; it takes symmetry to undermine asymmetry for the adequacy of the relationship “solidarity”. The one with whom we are in solidarity must accept the gesture!

There is a nest of terms that we utilize to describe the term solidarity that means something (and remember here we are saying, if there is prior support): empathy, allyship, affinity, and complicitity.

Sometimes, in a rather disgusting way, we use the term empathize, as if to suppose (or pretend) we have crossed over into material identity. We try to identify. Obviously, putting oneself in anothers’ shoes is impossible, given contextual differences, to say nothing of differences in identity.—We have fake solidarity here, a pretending to be solid. 

Allyship strikes me as the most honest account, an account of having different interests too, a sense in which doesn’t try to identify, but rather moves towards being solid, perhaps hoping to be supportive, without supposing that one has become identical. The other has to be supported by me, in a direct way, for me to say, nontrivially, that I am in solidarity with them. Of course, not everyone would take ‘allyship’ in this direction. For those of us that do, perhaps we ironically use the term ‘allyship’. I want to note that 'allies' includes the prior implication that one has independent interests. And this is perhaps the reason that affinity and allyship are sometimes seen as synonymous.

Affinity, on the other hand, seems to be willingness to act in tandem with the tendency, or whatever, because ones’ heart is in it; yet this is an individualist implication; that one acts from one’s self. The question of affinity, I want to say, is not so much whether we are willing to be in solidarity with someone else, but rather, that the other must be in solidarity with our motives, first, before we are willing to say we want to be solid with them.

It seems almost too obvious to note that ‘allyship’ is an asymmetrical relationship. We gift our agency to the other. Affinity is reactionary to this, a reclaiming of genuine agency, or perhaps it is a function of parachuting purposes, feigned solidarity, a nihilist maskwearer. Perhaps under the last category we can discern a better sense for allyship, for here too we have a gesture of failing identification, one that avoids empathy and pity. Genuine affinity certainly comes from real mutual support. Perhaps allyship in its best sense presupposes mutual support too.

2. I want to say something about being solid with oneself. Which other? My future self. The self is a community of peoples, future selves and past selves aiming for coherency, perhaps; for just as there is no unanimous community, (with whom to be solid), there is no prior self to whom we (ourselves) are accountable. Yet, despite all this, despite that point that there are rarely unities of agreement across whole swaths of individuals—and perhaps exactly for this reason—we affirm a unity of disunities, one that is in opposition to the unifying feature of alienation. How? By way of practicing becoming solid. For instance, by becoming solid because I’m in it, not because I feel I must be, because I feel guilt—or worse, because I haven’t yet exorcised constitutive structuralist liberal demons, that fitting (however poorly) some intersectional analyis auto-obligates me into allyship. No! As individuals invested in our own freedom, we want affinity and complicity to define allyship, and affinity and complicity to blot out passive nihilism. Because, in these moments of irascible human being, of blemmyes, we find our solidities, our solidarities. It is precisely because we are untied in possibility, that we must bind ourselves, yet only if it comes from us, from below, from our own coeurage. For here we are in it; for here our hearts have achieved coeu(rage). That is, we sense the conspiring others; we are in touch with how they feel, their backgrounds; we have invested our hearts into knowing them; we sense their capacity to be in solidarity with us, and we give ourselves to becoming solid with them and ourselves. Of course finding others is more difficult than finding oneself; yet finding the capacity to be solid with oneself is difficult too, given that nothing coerces. In the least, if I cannot say that I would be willing to be had, as I have the other, perhaps I have no right to claim solidarity. And if I am not willing to say that I can have myself, or that I have myself, I have no right to call myself solid. And if I can't call myself solid, if folks know I'm not, what could it mean for me to say that "Im in solidarity with X"?

Being had

There is a difference between active nihilists with commitments, and cruel nihilists that we name as cruel, to oppose them in order to provide matter for our targeted againstness. (Depending on how well we hide these acts, we remain untargeted by their againstness). Whether active or cruel nihilist, then, one has commitments; the passive nihilist, on the other hand, is indifferent to commitments, it would seem. From this distinction it is often presumed that everyday people, because they are apolitical, they therefore do not have commitments. But everyone has commitments, in the least, they are committed to their survival, unless, of course, they are death drivers, in the sense of desiring death. Commitment then carries with it a morality, good and bad. And everyday folks fail to have the right kind of commitments.
The trouble is that this often is utilized to make predictions, predictions that are prima facie false: not every persyn that is apolitical is simply passive; apolitical people are not guaranteed to do nothing come what may. Perhaps they will act; perhaps they will riot. Perhaps we too will stay home. Of ourselves we know, come what may, that we will never be cruel nihilists because we are committed to the opposite, because we are committed to the destruction of those that intentionally manage the state and defend it at all costs; of apoliticals, these may join us or may fight against us, alongside the fascists and the pigs; or they too might stay home. With our commitments, we are explicit; apoliticals are not explicit with theirs; therefore, it is meaningless to suppose that we know what their implicit commitments are.

We argue elsewhere that it is fruitful to talk about passive nihilism in the bad sense as acting indifferently, by which we mean, passively consuming without explicit commitments. And we do this if only to mark a difference between active nihilism and passive nihilism, as well as a similarity, given that 'Nihilism' is equivalent to 'Nihilism', and 'active' is not equivalent to 'passive'. Taking the term Indifference--intuitive as placeholder for nihilism--we suggest that (politically) activated indifference involves commitments, arrows from origins, to be distinguished by origins, and that acting indifferently is another beast, but not one without commitments. It may not even be precise to say that a passive nihilist is indifferently committed, that every belief is open to revision. Perhaps we mean, undecided, simply put concerning the question of insurrection and freedom.

Given Nietzsche’s stance on the term nihilism (active or passive) and his criticism of anarchism by way of suggesting that active nihilism ends with utopia where everyone becomes passive, suddenly we became aware of the meaning of nihilism for the Geist of His-Story. Liberalism is purported to be at the end of His-Story, a point from which there is nothing left to do. We argue elsewhere contra Nietzsche that “means without end” just means the union of passive and active nihilism, forever dancing, without rest. We are nihilists in this sense of struggle, always abutting to anarchist projects and always desirous of transgressing stated limits in favor of more freedom for ourselves. As anarchism is parasitical upon liberalism, nihilism is parasitical upon anarchism.

The moral question for the passive nihilist is: Is one ready to act? This main question is different from the question of whether one wants to act, whether they can, or worse, whether there is a point, the latter being a question that “dogs” the nihilist. The insurrectionist says it well against the pessimist when they say there is always a point: Doing something in rejection or revenge is fun!

Does one have the commitment to act? Knowing what I am capable of depends on the degree to which we are friends; and even this distinction is not quite enough because there is still a deeper question of trust. We wish to distinguish the being as such of a persyn on the basis of habits as they really are, and not on the basis of habits as they appear. (An important distinction in mask interpretation). One is surely activated into politics when one has a commitment that one is ready to act on, a habit, or belief as C.S. Peirce or William James would say. Habits are those things that we have. And yet, post rationalist thinking suggests that habits, too, have us. The term (habitus) in medieval texts, has to do with a whole series of virtues and vices—and a wonderful demonology, to be sure; and yet, interestingly, medieval texts correspond with post-thinking in supposing that while we have habits, they have us too. Consider the profound irascible function of bravery which has us in Thomas’ discussion of cardinal virtues. We have fortitude too; and as such, the virtue itself is two, not one; for sometimes it is structured under temperance and prudence, and sometimes not.

If, then, the question of being had is on the table, and it is--given that we are talking about the question of what makes one incapable of acting--I think it is important to note that the way in which we are had, the tone, the strength, is the question. Obviously our commitments have us; and we need to get out from under implicit or explicit commitments that suck, say, going to work, consuming the excrement of leviathan, being completely selfish, whatever. This may require intense modification. Of course, to be clear, it’s not that being had per se is the issue; indeed, we would say we want to be had by the desires of our friends. And perhaps this beautiful idea, this obligation from below, from selection, from desire for having a right to hang out without awkwardness, is sufficient to help us develop new habits, habits that we want to have us. For we want our friends to have us, and not because we want to have them, but simply because we want to be solid.

Absolute Amorality vs. Relative Amorality

Nihilism is often associated with pessimism and apathy, a general form of indifference. Alejandro de Acosta (A de A) has deflated this 'purified negation' with content, provocatively suggesting that nihilism might also be associated with ethics, so long as one is free from the burden of obligation. That is, he articulates nihilism as "I might be ethical: some days I am; some days I am not." (The Impossible, Patience). Being indifferent to morality requires that one not be opposed to it per se, as if one were desperately trying to negate it; to be amoral is to transcend the tied together unity of morality. To be indifferent (amoral) is to be neither moral nor immoral.

I want to futz with this (art)iculation a bit by structuring a place for nihilists within the @ milieu. So let's begin by following de Acosta's reading/repetition of the logic of anti-authoritarianism through Rouselle. If I am opposed to the pope, we might ask (as if we didn't know) Why, why are you against the pope? And my giving reasons here would reduce to opposition to representation, which would then reduce further to the idea of being against all authority, and finally, even to the idea of myself having authority over my future selves (A de A, 39-40). Nihilism thus posits a rift between commitment and negation; negation is always potential. The point here is that we wiggle between the meaninglessness of the universe (pure negation) and naming it with meaning for our personal or public projects, by rendering some project meaningless, that this or that utopian project is insufficient in some respect. Of course, nihilists know that our anarchist projects are temporary, fleeting; that our utopias might not fit with future desires. But if we are always logically open to our own anti-authoritarian presuppositions, the question is the degree to which we permit ourselves this opening onto meaninglessness. Thus the growth of post-anarchism--in particular nihilism and insurrectionary anarchism, green anarchism and green nihilism--can be visualized as anarchy (negation) at war with anarchism, through a logical method of resolving internal contradictions. That is, if one is against all authority, what say the anarchists of yore that would espouse a scientific materialism; of anti-authoritarians complicit with colonial-civilization? It's those badass nihilists that are surely at war with anarchism, among other 'isms' (A de A, 46).

Yet the question remains concerning what we are to do with morality; and I want to suggest that the metaphysical distinction between absolute and relative permits a way of making sense of the rather flat idea of active nihilism. What makes action nihilistic? Surely not that it is action per se. What makes something active nihilism, according to Nietzsche, is the application of Nothingness to something, as the russian nihilists wanted to render the church and the czar to/as nothing, for instance. But we don't really call everyday activists fighting against all sorts of shitty problems in our shitty world nihilists, per se, so much as we merely nod their activity. Is there then something about active nihilists that makes them distinct from run of the mill activists? Nietzsche didn't think so. 

Historically, nihilists named those willing to carry out assassination, those willing to overlook petty human concerns in the mode of action, to achieve the end result. They are almost willing to say anything goes to get to the end; and so they remain committed to the end, to the project. What nihilists do is visualize a link to absolute amorality, in order to push the envelope, in order to define a position of negation within a project; in order to put activists into a different place, to expand the possible, to redescribe morality as relative, and as such, as linked with its complete opposite, amorality. That is: Nothing underpins morality; morality is just whatever our friends, or those we love, let us get away with.

So let me give you a few examples of how the milieu has gone down these roads. A relatively easy envelope pushing was carried out a few years back when the once amoral conception of property destruction became acceptable in the milieu (in some places). ARM carries out action that might not be acceptable to everyday liberals; but perhaps such actions might be acceptable to some ALFers. In a riot, it might be unacceptable to throw a molotov cocktail (in Toronto), but not in Chile.--And I heard last week that a pig-cop got doused with corrosive acid. How amoral! And Earth First! supports kneecapping (and the OLGA cell) through prison writing now. WTF? Nihilists push the envelope, and they are accepted to the degree that they are committed to the project. Given what we said above, the reasoning here is obvious. Nihilism in the milieu functions to show a circle of commitments for strategy and action as larger than it actually is, because, at root, anarchists are also anti-authoritarian, and so, potentially against everything.

Maybe that's magick

Ancient accounts of the universe do not include the assumption that the world is brute material; brute matter doesn't exist in this realm; on the contrary, matter is always already formed; for nothing exists without form. Is this position trivial? Of course it seems so: Nothing fails to have shape in the sense of spatial parameters, usually distinguished by difference and spatial continuity or identity. I am this 'mereological sum'; some specific amount of matter constitutes my shaped being.

I think magickal thinking involves the assumption that the universe is not just brute; that the void doesn't define bits of matter colliding in this way or that, following Derrida, following Epicurus; but rather, that things seem to gel together, functioning according to (seemingly) predictable laws, but not in a way that cashes out as perfectly necessary, surely. In other words, metaphysics was assumed to be part and parcel of ancient explanatory accounts of the universe; the (in)formed matter, fixed by an end (its final cause) gave it the air of absolute being as such because the architect (God, First Being per se, the efficient cause of this secondary beings' first being as such, etc.,) yielded a relatively absolute (X just is that way). With God no longer serving this purpose, final causality has taken on another (and via patriarchy, an analogous) sense: we just are civilized beings, structured according to reproductive futurism--which doesn't seem necessarily heteronormative if we consider 're(producing)' per se, that is, when repetition is a matter of repeating ourselves. But this second, analogous just is, is hardly absolute. We can cut the rope and hop the fence. For civilized being cannot be constitutive; it is defined by its opposite; its sin; its animality; its downgoing. 

Whether or not the absolute architect commanded its relative subject to behave as such, or whether matter formed itself absolutely comes down to a difference in narrative fit. Either story works depending on how we wish to see ourselves. Most of His-Story has been a claim of Patriarchy; and only an imaged non-power, a mirroring of lacking-patriarchy, seems better disposed to name anarchy, the rule of disassociation, the collapsing of unity, the dismantling of the propped up single pole phallic circus tent. Maybe that's magick. But if we're gonna call that Queer-Nature (avoiding matriarchy) I think the logical form/critical form we want is both-and, or, paradox; something (y) that clings to something else (x), making the reaffirmation of that something else (x) impossible. "Both unity and disunity" seems to coherently imply distributive unities and collective disunity, yet in infinitum. Our meaning of collective liberation then becomes not "for everyone", but for us; and not because we wish to rule out the possibility that anyone could join us, but rather because we are not deluded into thinking that everyone would be seduced by anarchy (cf. Terror Incognita).

This Becoming Impossible suggests utopian trajectories, perhaps little better off than the desire for unity, peace, and whatever. But deflating its import leaves us at least two ways which both can lay claim to 'better', noting here that being hopeless deflates not the better, but the best. The two ways are opposed: from the position of the civilized, outside the walls is hell; and from the position of the wild, the fortress is hardly seductive. Being hopeless, of course, applied to the better seems to be an articulation of failed intellectual fit---which seems to lack heart. That is, one might argue: how can we say the better is good enough? For unless we know the best, we cannot know the better. But we are saying that, on the contrary, there are at least two bests, and that we prefer the downgoing anti-civ trajectory, which is a rejection of civilege.

I think this entertaining whatever possibility, openness, but being committed to the opposite of civilized patriarchy, is an affect of magickal thinking. And I think its healing is as follows: Since the best is not available, since there are good reasons to be hopeless about that limit, we might as well make things better, however we mean it. And moreover, we affirm that our acts in the gift of these means without end, are all the better if our hearts will it. So against the intellectual position, we abut our hearts; not to replace intellectualism, but to temper it. We thus hold two propositions in paradox, without equivocation: If we inquire: If there is no hope for the best, why do anything?, we deflate this intellectualism with: Since there is no possible best, we might as well make things better.

We know not what is above, but we postulate this below, as a potentially pleasing sacrifice for absolute immanence. Because even if it was all for nothing, at least we can stand ourselves.