A FEW LAST WORDS ABOUT WORDS

We have a tendency to overvalue words. We put so much time into producing them, as if they were the source of life itself. We believe that there are words and ways of using words that are inherent sources of oppression and spend vast amounts of time trying to suppress these words, impoverishing our language in the process. In the meantime, the real practices of oppression go on, often carefully using the correct words to hide the practical reality. At the same time, we think that if we find the right combination of words, this will spark rebellion. So we make flyer after flyer, zine after zine, blog after blog, with an evangelistic zeal, forgetting our own lives, our own desire for freedom, joy and the intensity of existence. By giving words such great value, we forget our own purpose in using them. They become our masters. This becomes evident in the attempt to evangelize, where our words become means for winning others over to a position, assuming that when enough people believe the right thing, they will rise up. But have those who rise up for words, and not for their lives, really risen up at all, or are they just embracing a new master? If my aim is to take back my life, to create my desire, my joy, my passion, then how can I turn my words into tools for a position? They would cease to be my own words. For me, words can only be a tool (or toy) for expressing and communicating my desire, my project, my life; one of the many tools I use to find accomplices, to create my enjoyment and to express the intensity of my passions, the wildness of my dreams. But disconnected from life, from practice, they are empty. And any word in the service of a cause, any evangelistic word, any word intended to draw followers to a position, has been disconnected from life, separated from the immediate practice of freedom, and so is empty. Thus, in overvaluing words, we drain them of meaning, because their meaning comes precisely from our lives and our choices.

MONEY

One of the greatest constraints of this world, of course, is money. A mediation that is not a bridge, but rather a fence between us and what we need to create our lives. It is money that compels us to work (or else to depend on the work of others) and so to sacrifice our lives for survival. The real attack on money must necessarily be an attack on work – that is on the society of work and commodity exchange. This attack starts with a decision to live on one’s own terms. Now once this decision is made (and preferably with a few good friends) the first task is to gather resources, to bring together the tools that are necessary for projecting one’s life as one sees fit. Here there can be no moralizing, no external rules for acceptable methods for gathering tools; there is only the principle of autonomy, of self-determination. The gathering of theoretical and material tools, along with the development of relationships of affinity, provides the basis for the creation of projected lives, and once these tools are gathered, who knows where a small group dedicated to living out their lives in revolt could go? And who knows how widely such passionate fire could spread?

THE REVOLUTION OF DAILY INTERACTIONS

Confronting separate annoying incidents without confronting the mini-social context from which they spring in its totality is no different then protesting issues instead of contesting the larger social context in its totality. Nothing essential changes. Failure of imagination, despair, feeling overwhelmed by circumstances: these are evidence of interactions gone awry.

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The entire "interior" of the "mind" is merely a social creation...a relationship created by a social context and which would best be destroyed with that context...Then maybe imagination could cease to be mainly a fantasy mechanism and become a means for creating intense moments perpetually. By the "interior" of the "mind," I mean the thoughts, imaginings and dreams that are separated from an active life of self-creation.

MINI-THEORY: aphorisms

Ruins are playgrounds whether Zapotec or Mayan, Egyptian or modern. Rather than preserve them, why not play with them ’til they wear away into nothing, and forget the cultures that created them? The memory of culture is the preservation of culture - and culture is merely the sacred limit placed on creativity and play. Insurgents destroy sacred limits.

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The consensus process subjects the individual to the group. It subjects the immediate to the process of mediation. It is conservative by nature since it only allows change when the entire group agrees to it...It is internalized control, not anarchy.

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For society to function, desire has to be tamed. It has to be colonized by the economy - turned into lack/need, the fulfillment of which is attributed to the commodities offered by society. To so direct desire requires restrictions and structures. As these increase, desire fades into a mere ghost of itself. The restrictions and structures gradually come to exist only for themselves.

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My interest in ruins stems, in part, from attempts to develop strategies for deconstructing cities playfully, through active, conscious encouragement of unconstrained rebellion. This requires extensive explorations of cities to learn secrets which can be used against them.

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There is more than one way to create an elite. Ruling classes, intellectual classes and aesthetic classes create an artificial inaccessibility of their power, knowledge and skills to "the rabble" to reinforce their position. On the other hand, self-proclaimed "class-conscious" radical activists deny themselves access to knowledge, vocabulary and well-honed analytical skills which are readily accessible, in order to prove their "class purity" or some such nonsense, and, by their absurd self-denial, create an involuntary elite of those radicals who are unwilling to impoverish themselves in this way.

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Many...anarchists are actually leftist or liberal libertarians or, in some cases, simply angry people who still "think" in terms of the images created by the social context, trapping their thought within society’s discourse. Until one gets beyond this discourse, thinking outside of its categories, one’s rebellion remains part of the structures of authority. Most anarchists are quite content with society’s discourse, happily creating an "anarchy" that is thoroughly unchallenging, mild-mannered, tame and palatable - all in the name of "education" and "action."

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Cybernetic technology is dependent upon industrial technology for its existence. So much for the pipe-dreams of cyber-utopia.

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Barter is still economic exchange. Money allows for a more efficient flow of economic exchange. Why not just get rid of economy altogether?

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Often "health" opposes vitality. Those who value "health" often pursue it in an ascetic and passive manner - by giving up something. Their longing for health is not a vital, intense desire-trajectory - it is a business transaction or a manufacturing process - an attempt to achieve an end - but such a process is never satisfactory, because it is the nature of a longing to perpetually reproduce the void that is its origin. Vitality, intensity - these are the only reasons to have health - and living them creates health or makes it irrelevant.

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The best of post-modernism fails because it removes the drift to the realm of the intellect - static lives moved by random thoughts rather than ecstatic lives created by the dialect of active conscious thinking and ec-static doing?

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If the "subject", the "self", has been destroyed/deconstructed, then all that prevents one from creating one’s own self, one’s own subjectivity in each moment is the continued belief in something greater than oneself that is creator - i.e., the continued belief in god. In the present era, god is society.