Pasamontañas

Epilogue

2006-09-20T14:41:00.000+02:00

Since we have now discussed the main concepts we set out to discuss, and since the constallation assembled to produce the texts posted here now has been disbanded (the last two posts or so being the products of less than a third of the original hood of nothingness), we feel the desire to leave this particular shape of existence for history's termites and recyclers. After all, this blog has only been a vehicle for our movement along the flight-lines provided by ourselves and others, a hastily gathered chronicle of our journeys away from the present, an arsenal collected and hoisted, and sometimes dropped. We leave it like that, like a bunch of sharp and blunt objects in a seemingly neat box on the side of the road, while we move towards new battlegrounds.
Like the romantics say: La lucha sigue.

Creation II

2006-08-06T11:36:00.000+02:00

Recently we have pondered upon the act of writing. Is it not a form of action, a most concrete and creative endeavour? To work with language in relation to a given concept, closing in on it, surrounding it, penetrating it and making it work in accordance to the flow you are following... Moulding new concepts out of the apparatus of language, making new lines of thought and action sprout from the ready-made assumptions no longer capable of containing the constant and rebellious striving ahead... The Maybe manifesting itself through gaps in the language of the Now, just as the constant thing Other, the true Utopia, can be glimpsed through the homogeneous logic-attempts of the machine-park's streets, buildings, corridors, factories and expressways, the impossibilities immanent in-spite-of the network, opening windows to future possibilities...

The art of theory is a many-headed production process, where the "individual" is merely an agent, working together with a whole system of interacting assemblages and shifting flows of meaning. You connect to a current, to a particular outlet of an immense machine of words, thoughts, experiences, and reality, feed your own creative energy into it and are in turn exposed to a manifold system of creation, making you traverse unknown and familiar terrains not yet existing, but waiting to be made.

However, this is not always the case. Obviously, theory can also be a most dull process of reproduction, of following-in-line, of repetition and safe-guarding. When it is used as a part of the State or in the ideological apparatuses of Capital, it is more like work, or rather labour; an introvert performance of a duty, a backwards-looking (or at least a motionless) part of a unity trying to keep itself intact. This type of theory/repetition can be found everywhere; in fact, it's the kind of language-thought-machine most dearly cherished by the megamachine, for apparent reasons. This type of theory is a kind of slave to the logic of the Now, serving it ideological excuses for its concrete actions, constructing plausible explanations to the contradictions inherent in society. Basically, we identify two kinds of theory-practices serving these purposes: the system and the critique. They work closely together and are in practice two parts of the same wannabe-whole.

The system is a closed construction, a park of concepts neatly fitting into one another, a network of logic that can expand only by stretching itself. It is an image of the network of Capital and State which we have touched upon before (Assemblage), and it is connected to it like a sister-machine. The system does not take kindly to dissenters or flight-lines trying to leave it; it punishes them by ridicule, silence, or open confrontation. The only way one can change the system is from the inside, i.e. not by opening it up to the outside through a process of creation, but by adapting yourself to its logic and filling up voids. This is when the critique enters the scene. The critique is a sketch or a plan of the system, illustrating its weak points and the gaps and holes existing in the network (because of it or in spite of it, does not matter). Thus, the critique remains within the framework, criticizing it in an attempt to make it stronger, scrutinizing the assemblage for weak points that need to be strengthened or gaps that need to be filled in. The system, thanks to this service, is able to reproduce itself and copy parts of its body into the absences found by the critique.

On the other hand, when theory is creative, it is a ballistic process, a matter of projecting, working forward. Creative theory does not concern itself with keeping Status Quo intact, with filling up gaps in the existing framework. Instead it aims beyond, constantly beyond. This however, does not mean that it, like Capital, is a mental slave to the concept of novelty. Creativity is not a matter of constantly reproducing innovations, but of creating Other-ness. And this process finds comrades-in-arms in many different camps, "new" as well as "old", "radical" as well as "conservative", "political" as well as "a-political."

It exists only through movement, but not necessarily of acceleration. One must understand that one can move in many different ways. Acceleration is a necessary component of Capital; it is a fundamental principle of the inner dynamics of the logic of the Now. Faster and faster it goes, higher and higher, always trying to mirror the ideal picture of rationality's straight arrow, but at the same time always repeating itself, closing itself, maintaining the walls and the borders, the straight channels and the square blocks. Acceleration in this sense is a speeding-up of circulation, nothing more.

The speed of creativity is not always fast. On the contrary, it can be performed without motion; through a "travelling without moving." It does not recognize its place inside borders, except when it tries to destroy them. It expands by taking unexpected turns, by inventing other passageways than the ones already in existence. "When forced to choose between two alternatives, we make a third one." It is fast in relation only to itself, to the flow it is a part of. It adopts its strategies to the moment and to the concrete surroundings. It distributes itself amongst a multitude of singularities, travels freely along the field of shared interests and connected creativity, not claiming individuality or subjectivity or even a place in the ranks, only co-anti-production.

The texts we have published here are not finished works of theory. They are experiments, ballistic clusters of words trying to form new windows and extend gaps already existing. Therefore, we will never take responsibility for what we may have written before, never "defend" old projectiles no longer on their way forward. We are not interested in critique or in completing an ideal construction supposed to "stand strong" on the platform of today's Truths and Absolutes (whatever forms these may take). Instead, we like to keep thrusting ourselves towards unmade terrain, and to keep producing away from the Now and its systems, machine-parks and wannabe-hegemony.

Quote: Paul Virilio

2006-08-03T14:22:00.000+02:00

"When riches, accumulations and modes of production were freed from their enclosure, therefore, it was not to reach free enterprise, their socialization, but to reach their own vehicular power, their maximum dynamic efficiency. This is the 'futility' of wealth that dissappeared in the essence of dromological progress. Western man has appeared superior and dominant, despite inferior demographics, because he appeared more rapid. In colonial genocide or ethnocide, he was the survivor because he was in fact super-quick (sur-vif). The French word vif, 'lively', incorporates at least three meanings: swiftness, speed (vitesse), likened to violence - sudden force, abrupt edge (vive force, arête vive), etc. - and to life (vie) itself: to be quick means to stay alive (être vif, c'est être en vie)!

With the realization of the dromocratic-type progress, humanity will stop being diverse. It will tend to divide only into hopeful populations (who are allowed the hope that they will reach, in the future, someday, the speed that they are accumulating, which will give them access to the possible - that is, to the project, the decision, the infinite: speed is the hope of the West) and despairing populations, blocked by the inferiority of their technological vehicles, living and subsiding in a finite world."

Quoted from Speed and politics (New York 1986, originally published in 1977). Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti.

Action

2006-07-28T12:48:00.000+02:00

Action to us is an unmediated, immediate process of movement, distribution, and change. Action is the connection between human beings and the concrete world of things, flows, borders, walls, channels, networks, assemblages and machine-parts. We do not consider the pre-programmed, ready-made theatre of everyday reproduction (working, consuming, pursuing reified ideals or fulfilling the social rôles given to us by the machine) to be action, since it is only a process of repetition, feeding the Now with the maintenance of the assemblage without actually changing any part of it. Action to us is a production process, a creation of interactions not pre-designed by the wannabe hegemonic logic of capital and State.

When humans act, they use authority to pursue their desires, they take possession of their immediate environment and re-direct the paths they are supposed to follow when traversing it. They take command over items; tools, words, machines, thoughts, buildings and vehicles, and make weapons out of them, thus trying to maintain their authority and keep the space created inside-but-outside of the assemblage their own. A rioting metasubject makes the street into a war-zone of new distribution of movement, meaning, and belonging; a factory-worker metasubject stops working and changes the factory building into common property no longer accumulating value but housing a refusal and a breaking of work logic; a metasubject of neighbours stops using the national currency, instead giving each other necessities and favours without the need of any kind of monetary equivalent, bystepping market logic and the rule of value; a revolutionary conscious group of Italians, a communist metasubject, stops paying for commodities and services, collectively expropriating food and other goods, collectively going to the cinema without paying, etc; an unemployed metasubject, trapped in the factory of workfare and the underpaid labour enforced - as a gift to the ideology of work - upon those keeping inflation down, gets enough of the modern slavery it performs, starts sabotaging and destroying, keeping down the pace, extending breaks, opposing the bosses and so on, in this way acting against the assemblage, producing a difference and an Other-ness, utilizing the holes in the network of logic and domination and filling them with rooms of new relations between human beings and their existence.

This is, as mentioned above, an immediate and unmediated process. Immediate because it happens in relation to a given moment, under given circumstances, in relation to a given collective. It is too fast to be subjected to the programming of official organization or traditional rôles of interaction (unions, parties, etc) or the subjectivity of ideology ("we, the workers", "we, the students", "we, the unemployed") because it moves beyond such borders, and therefore it is always unmediated. Action, pure and simple. Local, diverse, heterogeneous, it is never interested in quantitative measurements; it does not matter how "big" the "results" are on the scale of the Now, nor does it matter many the participants are. They will always, as long as they are actually acting, be a cluster of diverse manifolds waging perpetual war against the Now. Of course, this kind of war can not be "won"; we are not interested in making capital kneel to our command or seizing the controls of the State machine. What we want to do, what all true action is striving for, is to make both capital and State, with all their attached sub-machines, channels, networks, divisions and ideology, to be superfluous and obsolete. They need to be destroyed, of course, but if no production of Other-ness supplements this destruction, they will only re-emerge and reproduce themselves out of the ashes, quite possibly strengthened by the process and ready for the next battle. Their obliteration can therefore only be achieved by the Other-ness produced within them, the refusal created in the holes in the assemblage, expanding until the external is no longer external, since no internal remains to oppose it; the megamachine will then only be a fossil. And the action will carry on, of course, since this is when real history begins.

Ideology

2006-07-26T14:41:00.000+02:00

We often speak of ideology, and we do it in a very broad sense; the term is not simply referring to the different thought-packages bought and sold on the market of ideas (i.e. liberalism, socialism, fascism, etc) but to a whole system of interaction and production of existence. In a sense we are inspired by Althusser, since we like to discuss ideology as an imaginative relationship between a subject (or metasubject) and its concrete, real circumstances. It is a matter of viewpoint, lines of thought, notions of truth, rights and wrongs, and so on, but primarily of the production of subjects. Ideology is manufacturing the notion of individuality as well as the notion of belonging to a group, the borders between "individual" and "collective", between "me" and "society". The false dichotomy between the lone person and the group is one of ideology’s foremost victories, for without it, the mode of production we are witnessing would be impossible.

The subject-production is a separating business and the ways of separation are manifold and diverse. From the main axis of society, that is, division of labour, lines of difference springs through the whole social spectrum. We must point out that we have no problem with difference in a general way, on the contrary. Variations and the shifting of singularities are our closest allies, the multitudes of swarming rebellion our only hope. But these changing flows and anti-productions are something quite other than the separation of ideology and its counterparts in the physical machine-park (distribution of work tasks, organization of labour, formal hierarchies as well as informal ones, firm policies, and so on). Ideology maintains borders, keeps straight canals running, paints everything in black and white. It reproduces combat between polar opposites, reduces warfare to a question of winning or losing. It recuperates words and meanings, uses them as banners and unquestionable truths ("we must defend democracy", "the open society is threatened", "freedom needs to be obtained", etc). We are constantly confronted by these tendencies in diverse fields and are seldom surprised by the firm grip of striated thinking, at least not when we see it where it is bound to be at its strongest (news, politicians' talk, school-industry and capitalist propaganda, etc). Neither do we expect the supposedly rebellious "anti-movement" to be free of ideology; such an assumption would be utterly naive. But still, we are sometimes struck by the almost obscene one-mindedness penetrating every pore of human interaction.

For instance, much of the Left is operating under the banner of ideology, a fact that lies at the bottom of leftist self-strangulation and the "movement's" inability to produce something other than capitalist clones and cliché-ridden parodies of revolutionary romanticism. We need not mention the most obvious cases of this, since it should be clear to anyone; the belief in mass organization, manifestations, strict codes of analysis, etc, is swiftly declining, even though it always keep giving birth to new ways of safe-guarding Status Quo. It is a seemingly inescapable tendency working inside the leftist movement, a tendency dooming the "counter-culture" to being the simple inversion of the "mainstream culture." "Bad" capitalism becomes "good" capitalism, with an etiquette calling it "socialism", "direct democracy," or some other brand. Notions like "freedom", "justice" and "equality" become fixed ideals with very unclear and imprecise meanings, making the leftist struggle with an evangelic conscience telling him that the world needs to be saved and that only the righteous Left can save it. Ideology thus blinds honestly struggling people to the fact that they are only strengthening the logic they claim to oppose.

Also, the borders drawn by ideology spread discord and division in a way that cripples resistance. Among the struggling metasubjects, ideology directs attitudes and conflicts; for example, the ultra-feminist metasubject hates the "male chauvinist" metasubject (which, according to ultra-feminist ideology, includes all men - people with penis - that are acting according to their "male" ideology of conduct; one should not forget that "male" behaviour also is a product of ideology) and sees it as its rightful duty to attack it in every given situation, verbal or physical. In the same way, fascists and anti-fascists, Muslims and Jews, Stalinists and anarchists, are attacking each other. This division, this imaginative separation based in non-factual matters, is keeping (re-)production running and maintaining the dynamics of Status Quo.

Why is it non-factual? Because it is based upon imagined differences. That someone is trapped in a "different" ideology (not that they are really different; since they are all supporting the Now, they are rather variations of a theme: the theme of subjectivity) than yourself does not mean that you have conflicting real interests; ultra-feminists, chauvinist men, fascists, anti-fascists, Muslims, Jews, Stalinists, and anarchists could all be in the same actual position in the machine-park, for example producing surplus-value or distributing information on the market. Of course the differences in ideology are real and, needless to say, influential. But still they are fictive, and possible to change and remove with clear analysis and a recognition of the common collective interest. The positions in the machine-park are not. They can change only through a complete destruction and production, a making of Other-ness, of new ways of interacting and knowing. And this process, which if course is a slow and difficult one, is a dismantling of subjectivity, an erasing of the striated differences of the Now and an outlet of the diverse manifolds of the Maybe. Ideology, in the sense we experience it today, will not be needed when the contemporary mode of production is completely annihilated.

But let's not succumb to the ideology of utopian futurism. It does not matter what tomorrow could look like, as long as we do not take decisive action in and against the Now of today. We do not abide waiting around. The Other-ness will not present itself ready-made of the Day of The Revolution. It needs to be made and work, to keep expanding and growing. The gradual destruction of capitalist ideology is of course an important aspect of this process, one that needs to be maintained on an everyday basis. And let's not forget that the union of common interests is a very constructive force; once the fictive differences between metasubjects are seen through, mergings and concrete collective warfare produce solidarity and affinity that can destroy the old borders and separations.

Quote: Bruno Latour

2006-06-22T12:28:00.000+02:00

"Let us start at the relatively 'easy' part, the ontological one. The first move is a counter-Copernican revolution that forces the two poles, Nature and Society, to shift to the center and to fuse into one another. This fusing, however, is no simple matter, and the properties of the two poles have to be completely redistributed, since it was their separation that defined them. The main property of the object pole was to guarantee that our world of knowledge not be human-made (whatever the definition of 'human' we chose: self, mind, brain, collective); while the main property of the subject pole was, on the contrary, to guarantee that our knowledge be human-made (whichever definition of human activity one sticks to: transcendental Ego, society, subject, mind, brain, epistemes, language games, praxis, labour). In addition, the very distinction between the two poles - the distinction which Kant made so sharp - warranted that that those two contradictory guarantees would not be confused, because the two transcendences - that of the object 'out there' and that of the subject/society 'up there' - are sources of authority only if they are as far apart as possible. They should not mingle with one another any more than the executive branch of government with the judiciary branch.

The word 'fact' sums up this threefold system of guarantees. A fact is at once what is fabricated and what is not fabricated by anyone. But the two meanings of the word are never simultaneously present, so that we always feel the it necessary to alternate between two assymetric explanations for the solidity of reality - constructivism or realism. "

Quoted from One more turn after the social turn (1992)

Assemblage

2006-05-25T14:48:00.000+02:00

The idea of the individual, i.e. the notion that rational subjects proceed through existence as isolated entities in some way separated from the external circumstances, is a cornerstone in the logic governing our perception of reality. Even though few persons would argue that the individual is completely above or beyond the natural and social world, we still need to believe in the rational free choice, the individual life-project, and the duty to take responsibility for our actions if we are to fit in smoothly in the systems of production and consumption which make contemporary society work.

These systems, however, does not work according to any basic assumption of individual freedom. On the contrary. Even the most idealistic of neo-liberals could not deny that the State, for example, or the big corporations, are functioning according to the combined efforts of many human and non-human actions, which means that one individual’s wishes and desires become unimportant in the perspective of the assemblage. Even the Market, the capitalist god, is something-beyond, something-bigger, than the lone subject (even though the market-worshippers often like to speak of it as the sum of many individual desires and nothing more, an idea that only illuminates the contradictory doctrines of liberal thought). Thus, individual freedom is always subordinated to a structure, to the functioning logic of an assemblage. And this assemblage is non-personal. It is more than a metasubject, since it easily subjects many diverse and conflicting metasubjects to its hegemony. In fact, these inner dynamics, the conflicting interests within the assemblage, is what makes it grow and expand. As we have stated before (and many before us): Capital is defined by its immanent antagonisms. But these antagonisms also provide the possibility to destroy Capital itself. This contradiction, full of more complexity than it superficially proposes, we will discuss in a moment. First, permit us to regard the logic of assemblage more closely.

The machine-parts
There are, from our horizon, not One machine. Even when we speak of the megamachine, this does not mean that there exists a single logic governing life globally. It is a convenient simplification to regard Capital as such a logic, but one must also keep in mind that Capital itself is not One. Rather, it is a constant striving to bring together conflicting unities in ways suitable to its own interests. It is a gathering-in of disparate productions: a wannabe-logic, if there ever was one. But it is still not hegemonic in any essentialist manner. It does not have any essence outside of the diverse productive functions, combining to make the whole work, both producing and subjecting to the network they are creating.

An assemblage is, consequently, the production of logic. It is not a question of which comes first: the production or the logic. Rather, they are both parts of the creative process; none precedes the other (this might be hard to grasp if one is locked in chronological thought, but on the other hand chronological thought has always been part of a conservative outlook and needs to be dismantled). This production of logic will never be completed, will never reach its ultimate destination. It will continue to create itself, to discard that which has become useless and to find new ways of providing itself with energy and spatial manifestation.

The manifold and diverse machine-parts contribute to the production in many different and sometimes contradictory ways. The factories produce commodities, consumer goods and other machine-parts, culture produces values, ideals, dreams and life-stories (as does “counter-culture”, by the way), science produces truth, technology, and frontiers, the State produces spatial limitations, judicial barriers, and apparatuses of physical control and supervision, human beings produce surplus value, dreams, and innovation (operating under the logic it also is creating), the food industry produces energy, surplus consumption and pathological eating-disorders, the branding industry produces meaning, prestige and lack of meaning, etc.

These different forms of production always overlap and feed off each other, forging bonds, splitting up, competing or co-operating. The fundamental point about the assemblage is that it is a closed system. The canals and sub-systems of circulation that it creates are always constructions, things that need to be made and kept operational. The streams of energy, the truths and meanings travelling through the assemblage and keeping it intact and growing, does not work outside of the assemblage itself. They only keep their productive capacity as long as they are kept inside the assemblage. They are dependent on each other and on their respective positions in the system to work as reliable parts of the whole. Soon, it is their only wish and their exclusive desire to keep producing the way they are supposed to. And that is why Capital uses brute violence and naked oppression only when no other opportunities of control present themselves. After all, the production of logic works much better if it is supervised only by its own production.

So far the assemblage of Capital as it is-becomes. What of the potential for destruction of the wannabe-logic inherent in the system itself, what of the conflict-lines and their supposed rôles?

Immanence/transcendence
In contemporary revolutionary theory, discussions often touch upon the fundamental question whether the system’s immanent antagonisms in themselves, as they are, are enough to provide the moving-beyond Capital’s logic. The most obvious answer, in our opinion, is of course no. The antagonisms as they are are nothing more than the motor of Capital’s operation and expansion; to stress these conflicts’ self-directing path to revolution in any deterministic or fatalist way would then be contra-revolutionary.

But still, the conflicts, the impossibilities contained in the assemblage’s logic, are the only possible points if departure of a striving without. Anything else would be idealism: to suppose the construction of Without from anywhere else than Within is indeed a transcendental outlook. We have discussed this topic briefly before (Utopia); the Maybe, the outside, is a constant thing Other. It is a distant thing, but still it is conceived here and now, it is a desire within the Now striving to move without. The striving, the battles fought within, are always subordinated to the logic of Now, since they always are operating due to the conflict-lines serving this logic. Thus, they are limited battles, wars erupting along the lines inside the assemblage. They can never be “won” as long as they follow these lines, as long as they do not contain a serious element of crossing-over, of refusal against the logic provided by the assemblage.

The important thing is therefore not just to engage in war, but to try to move the battle away from the most obvious battlefield, i.e. to make the act of war something that does not serve the production of logic within. For example, activism is a kind of warfare typical of the logic of Now: a group of people assuming the rôle of antagonists, shouldering the responsibility to change things, using radical jargon inherent in the system, acting according to the assumed logic of revolutionaries. In many ways, this serves the production process of the assemblage. Therefore, activism should try to move beyond this process, to refuse to be activism, to be something working against the pacifying channels and compromises of Capital. If it truly wishes to be a revolutionary activity, it should simply move away from the assemblage instead of closer to it.

This is of course a very difficult matter. We do not have the answer to how it should be done in any “pure” way. As we said, the refusal and the moving-without must start in the struggle, anything else would be impossible (the flight lines must begin in the conflict lines). Activists still serve a different purpose than for example cops do in the antagonism, and activism sometimes (but far from always!) focuses on the most dire and fragile conflicts, the ones of the greatest destructive potential. But this goes for non-activists, too. After all, most people are not activists. What is essential is that also these conflicts, the struggles outside of the activist field, are being reinforced, provided with fuel and articulated (and understood) in a way not serving the logic of Capital. Anti-production, we would call it; flight-lines will only start to sprout if they are produced; otherwise they will only remain assemblage-producing conflict-lines.

Hatred

2006-05-21T16:29:00.000+02:00

We are usually very sceptical towards the branding of emotions, the formulation of that which is non-verbal. Even to speak of "emotions" as something separated from the other aspects of experiencing reality (thought, attitude, sensations past and present, etc) is typical of conformist thought, the ideology of separation and transcendentalist idealism. But that it is difficult to use language without succumbing to ideology does not mean that one can not be trapped inside words and still remain fiercely critical towards them. As Deleuze and Guattari aptly observed in their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus:

Why have we kept our names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking.

Thus, we will speak of hatred without feeling bad about ourselves. After all, what usually is called hatred is full of the impossibilities and destruction necessary for true creativity. It is one of the important motors in human existence, one of the fuelling powers of being. Of course hatred is also derived from and vital to the production process of society (society is, as we all know, not separated from the experiences of humans, even though that is how it’s sometimes portrayed). But, as with the concept of destruction, hatred is often regarded as something "negative", something bad. It is usually found in the lower regions of the hierarchy of attitudes towards reality, together with dislike and contempt, while for example love, respect, tolerance, etc always seem to be the sentiments with the highest exchange value.

This is not a matter of denying hatred, it is a matter of valuation. Society fears destruction that is not easily subjected to the disciplinary apparatuses, and thus hatred is only encouraged in such apparatuses (the army and police, the football team, the prison, and so on). In civil life, we are not supposed to hate. If we still do it, we end up on the analyst’s couch, in some institution designed to brake down our destructive tendencies, or in religious fanatism.

It would be utterly meaningless for us to try to oppose ourselves against this valuation process by some kind of counter-valuation; it does not matter if we romanticize hatred or try to depict it as something desirable in its own right. We will not deny the importance of love, respect or tolerance, either. We simply want to investigate the concept of hatred and its functions, both the ones prescribed by society and the subversive potential immanent in the diverse sentiments trying to cooperate within this narrow word. As we have stated before, hatred and its "opposites" are parts of a disparate and impossible unity, a production of diversities. It can never be interesting to start with the ideological presupposition that hatred and love are polar extremes. Such categorizations we leave for the romantics, together with the will to "upgrade" or "revaluate" any kind of word or concept locked in the matrix of language.

The hatred of the State
As most subversive persons and revolutionaries are aware of, the State is the machine privileged with the exclusive monopoly of violence. And as any person knows, hatred is important in the exercise of violence. To subject someone to "kind" or "loving" violence would of course be an absurdity. Regardless of this, State propaganda would like us to believe that the violence practiced by the State (i.e. the only legitimate violence) is for our own good; a necessary way of keeping the holy stability stable. But "law and order" would be impossible without the hatred of the metasubjects of the State machine. The individuals in command maybe consider themselves to be benign parents gently correcting the unruly children who are unaware of their own interests, but the ones actually performing the violence have no such illusions. Ask any policeman serving in a riot situation if he has any loving or respectful sentiment towards the rioters.

Naturally, the same goes for all kind of warfare. In national war, no one expects the soldiers to love their enemies. On the contrary. If they did, the war would be over. In the destruction carried out by the megamachine and its sub-machines, hatred is an absolute must, provided it is properly channelled through the disciplinary functions of institutions, hierarchies and ideologies.

In this context, consequently, hatred is a fuel, an energetic flow which the State utilizes according to its own interests along with all the other energies provided by human and non-human actants. The State itself is of course unable to experience hatred. It is a numb assemblage dependent on the input of its diverse components, living off the intensities it consumes and produces. That hatred has an officially low value has nothing to do with its real function in the State. The valuation of sentiments is not something connected to the "essence" of the State or anything like that, but a simple function of control. Hatred is something which has to be denied a high status in our everyday lives, because of its destructive potential.

The hatred of the revolutionary
Also in the sense of revolutionary hatred, violence plays a crucial rôle. Again, the basic fact that violence needs hatred mean that revolutionary soldiers need to feel hate if they are to confront the Now in a violent situation. This observation is trivial and needs no further proof or investigation.

But for the revolutionary, hatred is more than a fuel for the use of violence. It is a whole attitude, a view on society and a constant striving, a refusal and contempt for the futile solutions provided by ideology. We would argue that hatred is what distinguishes the revolutionary from the ordinary person, when he is stripped bare of word-play and "radical" rhetoric. Hatred is present among all the metasubjects consciously or unconsciously rebelling against the Status Quo, among all the refusals to participate in the production process of reproduction. This observation returns to the initial analysis: hatred is basically non-verbal.

So, why are we talking about it? Would it not be better to leave it be, to let it work its own way to the surface and exert its uncompromising power upon all attempts to constrain it? Is not theory contra-productive when it tries to verbalize that which can not be put into words?

No. Such deterministic views are blind to the potentially self-destructive sides of hatred and violence. You should not generalize and claim that hatred (or violence, or refusal) is creative always and everywhere, at least not if your interest lies in revolution. The eruption of hatred can be very contra-revolutionary, and since the State always will try to channel it into the boxes of society and order, and the contra-revolutionaries into acts of war against us, revolutionary hatred needs to be analyzed and put into action in ways serving its own purposes. This does not mean that we should build a new ideology of hatred, or brain-wash the unconscious refusals to suit "our" ends, only that we need verbal tools to counter our enemies’ attempts to capture by verbalization.

Anti-thought
We will always be trapped within the logic of the Now. A hegemonic privilege of formulation is not a necessary consequence of this, however, at least not in the way it works right now. We are convinced that another way of articulation is possible even within the compromising system of words serving the megamachine. Not as an accomplished fact, but as a constant production. We need a continuum of re-invention, not a completely new language (not that that would be possible anyway), and by creating new ways of approaching concepts, alternately creating new ones where the old ones are inappropriate, we will strive to keep that production running. We call it anti-thought. It is not a re-valuation on the scale provided by the Now, but a matter of creation, of producing meaning. It will be what we make of it, nothing more. We regard it as weapons of mass-destruction contained in the everyday packages of words, in the word-plays superficially succumbing to the logic of the hegemonic verbal machines. Consider this verbalization a part of the counter-assemblages performing the same kind of anti-action in all fields of society. It will always be sucked up by the machines, marginalized or even forgotten. But what does it matter? It is not a question of presenting an alternative, but of a constant and imperfect refusal. As we all know, no pure struggles will ever exist.

Quote: Yukio Mishima

2006-05-08T14:18:00.000+02:00

"Provided certain physical conditions are equal and a certain physical burden shared, so long as an equal physical stress is savored and an identical intoxication overtakes all alike, then differences of individual sensibility are restricted by countless factors to an absolute minimum. If, in addition, the introspective element is removed almost completely - then one is safe in asserting that what I had witnessed was no individual illusion, but one fragment of a well-defined group vision. My 'poetic intuition' did not become a personal privilege until later, when I used words to recall and reconstruct that vision; my eyes, in their meeting with the blue sky, had penetrated to the essential pathos of the doer.
And in that swaying blue sky that, like a fierce bird of prey with wings outstretched, alternately swept down and soared upwards to infinity, I perceived the true nature of what I had long referred to as 'tragic'.[...]

"Once I had gazed upon this sight, I understood all kinds of things hitherto unclear to me. The exercise of the muscles elucidated the mysteries that words had made. It was similar to the process of acquiring erotic knowledge. Little by little, I began to understand the feeling behind existence and action."

Quoted from Sun and Steel (Tokyo 2003, originally published in 1970). Translated from the Japanese by John Bester.

Quote: Louis Althusser

2006-04-30T19:07:00.000+02:00

"How is it possible, theoretically, to sustain the validity of this basic Marxist proposition: "The class struggle is the motor of history"; that is, sustain theoretically the thesis that it is by political struggle that it is possible to "dissolve the existing unity", when we know very well that it is not politics but economy that is determinant in the last instance? How, other than with the reality of the complex process with structure in dominance, could we explain theoretically the real difference between the economic and the political in the class struggle itself, that is, to be exact, the real difference between the economic struggle and the political struggle, a difference that will always distinguish Marxism from any spontaneous or organized opportunism? How could we explain our necessity to go through the distinct and specific level of political struggle if the latter, although distinct, and because it is distinct, were the simple phenomenon and not the real condensation, the nodal strategic point, in which is reflected the complex whole (economic, political and ideological)? How, finally, could we explain the fact that the Necessity of History itself thus goes in decisive fashion through political practice, if the structure of contradiction did not make this practice possible in its concrete reality? How could we explain the fact that even Marx´s theory which made this necessity comprehensible to us could have been produced if the structure of contradiction did not make the concrete reality of this production possible?"

Quoted from For Marx (London 2005, originally published in 1965). Translated from the french by Ben Brewster

War

2006-04-14T10:23:00.000+02:00

We strongly believe in the necessity of armed conflict. Warfare, however, is more than simply the strategic moves of soldiers employed by conflicting nations. Such things are surely war, but not in any revolutionary sense. Conflicts between nations nowadays are just police-acts, a question of keeping the global order intact. Since states are the machines handling the demographic issues on large scales and instruments for the administration within Capital, they sometimes collide and contradict each other. While global capitalism grew and large-scale industry extended all over the planet, such conflicts were more common and served different purposes; all the national wars fought during the last centuries were products of separated units of capital striving to merge and form bigger circulation areas. The nation-states were necessary forces in the accumulation of surplus value and the dynamic competition for resources (colonization being the most obvious example of this), and as results of their conflicting interests, long and bloody wars were fought between them.

Now, when Capital indeed has become global and the machines of its concrete manifestation have colonized every area on earth, the nation-states have played out their old rôles. In fact, they now stand in the way of the all-encompassing tendencies of control produced by the megamachine. That is why war between nations (or between ethnic groups within nations, which is the same thing) is not as common now as it used to be. The liberals like to depict the declining number of armed conflicts between states as proof of the success of the spreading market economy. As usual, they deceive themselves, even when they are right. Of course, the fact that national war no longer appear as often as they used to is a result of Capital’s fulfilment as a hegemonic, global apparatus. But this does not mean that war does not exist. Nor does it mean that the world is moving towards its own salvation under the banner of liberalism, democracy and free trade.

The soldiers
War, in its revolutionary sense, is the violent eruption of the conflict-lines inherent in society. This happens all the time. Because the conflict-lines and the energy they produce are motors in the megamachine, war is unavoidable. The antagonisms can not always be kept under control; when repression reigns supreme and all conflict is suppressed, no dynamics are being born and society becomes a stiff relic, incapable of providing Capital with the movement vital to its mutation and growth. Thus, when the circumstances provide the means, the antagonisms become more than dynamic. They force their way out of their bonds and create scenes of rebellion, confrontation and war, realizing their potential as subversive action against the Now.

The primary actors in this kind of warfare are the revolutionaries. A revolutionary is not a party man; he is not someone who has read a lot of theory and leads the masses to victory with discipline, speeches and organization. This type of "revolutionary" actually died with the Russian "revolution", when Leninism, the middle-class ideology designed to stall the actual potential in the workers´ rebellion, usurped the title "communist" and proclaimed itself the sole path to emancipation. Now we know that the revolutionary is produced as such by his or her actions, by the way he or she refuses to be a part of the motor of Capital. This is not a matter of opinion; to regard yourself a revolutionary does not make you one. Many truly revolutionary individuals do not style themselves "communists" or "anarchists" or even "subversives". Instead, they take action against the conditions under which they are forced to exist, in ways suitable to their position and desires.

In other words, soldiers in the revolutionary war against Status Quo are the ones who act against the present circumstances in a concrete manner and manifest a movement away from the Now towards the Maybe. This must not always be manifested in violent actions, of course. It can also be a strategic (i.e. a theoretical) enterprise, at least when the strategic plans are being produced from the standpoint of the soldier. We need theoretical projects as a guarantee that the real movement of destruction is not being articulated in a contra-revolutionary or even reactionary way. By making strategic plans for actions, by analyzing past moves with a clear mind, by critique aimed at the fundamental functions of society, we are able to discern what really matters from the ideological sentiments provided by our enemies.

Thus, revolutionaries appear in diverse areas of society and present their existence in various ways. Theory and action being two sides of the same thing, they produce a dynamic movement of their own when working together in a truly war-like fashion.

The metasubjects
Some people like to talk about classes and their opposing interests. We regard the concept of class as problematic, because it always needs endless definitions. "Who is really proletarian?" is a question without a useful answer today, but it is an inescapable consequence of the orthodox "radical" view of society. If our only hope lies in the proles, we need to find them and make them act. If we are the proles, we need to make ourselves conscious and revolutionary. But in our times, the proletariat is more diverse and heterogeneous than ever, and harder to find than in any previous era. And even if we find it, how do we make it act as a collective? Are not ideas like this, notions that the revolutionary subject (an enormous and united one) must be properly described and then guided to revolution by the right manoeuvres, a most patronizing one? Class is too broad and too ideological a concept to be really useful in the strategies of war.

Do not get us wrong. We do not represent any kind of revisionist perspective with the purpose of denying the existence of class society. Neither do we wish to deny that class consciousness is a vital tool in the critique of society. What we want to do is to move beyond the locked and romantic conception of class as something which is revolutionary in itself. Sure, the working class is real, the capitalist class is real. But the working class (regardless of how one chose to define it) is not revolutionary per se. The workers will not bring about revolution by being workers, but by not being workers. It is a question of refusal and action, and if one locks oneself up in word-play about organization of the masses, a unified worker’s party, etc, one misses the fundamental fact that "the working class" as a global homogeneous entity is just an idea, and ideas can not be revolutionary in themselves.

It is collectives, acting in subversive ways, who are revolutionary. This is where the concept of metasubjects becomes important. A metasubject is the consciousness of a given collective, regarding its place in society and its actions in this society. It is a conception of collective interest, an attitude towards other metasubjects, and most of all, the actions it carries out as a collective. You could, in a liberal or sociological fashion, speak of "social groups", "ethnic minorities" or other misleading etiquettes designed to divide and spread discord. But we speak of metasubjects because we believe that they are not static, given social forms but moving, expanding, merging entities capable of exercising tremendous powers given the proper circumstances.

For instance, the vision of the proletariat is the one of all workers in all nations as a collective, acting together for the same purposes and driven by the same desires. We would argue that the proletariat is not a homogeneous group, that it is not driven by the same desires everywhere, that its purposes are not globally equal. Rather, we would regard it as a very broad term encompassing many diverse metasubjects who only share one common trait: that they are workers. Sure enough, this is a vital common characteristic. But it is not enough. If it were, we would already be somewhere else. Because of the colliding interests of the diverse metasubjects within the proletariat (interests whose conflicts of course are being exploited by the powers governing society), the "working class" will not be a revolutionary force as a whole, at least not under the present conditions. We can see the "white" metasubject fighting the "black" or "immigrant" metasubjects; we can see the "educated worker" or the "union man" metasubjects competing with the "unemployed" and the "welfare" metasubjects for employment and the means of existence. And this diversion is not something that society will want to remedy, of course.

The "capitalist class" is likewise a broad term with many diverse metasubjects acting under its name. They compete, they merge, they form alliances, with the sole common purpose of making money for themselves and in this way driving the machine-park along within the Now. They are allied to the metasubjects of the State (the politicians, the repressive forces, the judicial, medical, and educational institutions) and the metasubjects of ideology (culture-workers, artists, advertising-producers, "intellectuals", preachers of religion, and so on), by the common interest of power. It is not enough to own money, workforce, and means of production; one must also have the back-up of the State machine and all its sub-machines to stay in control.

A metasubject will always act according to its own interests, and defend itself against competing interests, even if these are being forwarded by metasubjects sharing a common trait. All these conflicts within the "classes" and between them provide a powerful dynamic factory for the Now. But because of this, it also has the capacity to destroy itself.

The battlefields
The collectives whose interests are far apart will naturally be more inclined to oppose each other than the ones sharing many desires. When the framework of reality no longer has the power to withhold the conflicts within it, war will erupt. The war is fought everywhere; in the streets, in schools, in factories and work-shops, in stores and parks, sometimes in all places simultaneously in general ways, sometimes in isolated loci in particular ways. Sometimes this will result in "race riots", in coup d’etats, or in mob violence and destruction of property; always it will create reactionary action from State and reinforced repression. Sometimes it will result in a return to Status Quo or an even older mode of production, but sometimes it will instead give birth to the re-formulation of society, the abolition of the present order of things and the refusal to play out the productive rôles prescribed by the Now.

What happens is entirely up to the soldiers. When metasubjects merge, when common interests become more important than superficial division and difference, major armies will march. And then the people in charge, the metasubjects of State and Capital, will find their own union a most fragile, weak, and pathetic one. But then, of course, it will be too late.

Creation

2006-04-08T19:33:00.000+02:00

The construction of objects is a very human endeavour. Actually, humans are the only animals equipped with the ability to create tools, a talent which has the double capacity to emancipate us and enslave us. For most of our history, humans have used tools as ways to change the immediate environment, supposedly to our own benefit. This is work; the production process of creation, the metamorphosis of the outside world according to human wishes.

There is a common notion of creativity as something that only artists and other muse-befriended people are blessed by; an idea of "expression" and the "creative mind" of great geniuses. Such nonsense we leave for the art-industry. All humans are creative, that’s what makes us human. In fact, most human actions are creative in a sense, since being human is interacting with the world and producing something else out of that which is. But since we are living in an enormous park of machines, a striated space where all things are corrected and directed into pre-produced areas of control, creativity is no longer the activity it used to be or what it could be. Instead, it is used in the constant reproduction and mutation of the machine-park in question. The megamachine was originally designed and built by human creativity, but soon it became a self-directing process without the need of humans as anything else than numb units, power-generating machine-parts whose activity serves no other purposes than the great megamachine’s. A golem with gigantic proportions, a beast without mind, an amoeba swelling beyond its own limits.

This megamachine has long since incorporated all human actions in its reproduction process. Daily, at millions of workplaces, billions of people use their energy vitalizing the accumulation of Capital, making the huge machines all work together, sprouting new lines of production, keeping the old ones alive, inserting their personal creative power into the tasks assigned to them by the networks of power and in the process both creating new energy for the megamachine and preserving the old one. Regardless of what kind of work is performed, it is always a part of the motor of Capital.

The creative energy left over, the one not necessary to the actual industry, is used up in the survival strategies vital to the homo sapiens living in the twenty-first century; the strategies keeping us alive in the fuming forest of concrete, asphalt, glass, steel and electricity. Depending on where you live, the survival energy manifests itself in different forms. In the poorer districts of the global city, it is spent on simply avoiding death by starvation or violence, on the brute escape-or-confront position of the ones without assets or alternatives. In the "developed world", it is used on pursuing individual happiness as depicted by the channels of ideology: the horizons of ideals, forever changing, are keeping the mind busy making creative plans for its personal completion while the body consume. Thus, the creation immanent in man is being sucked up both in the immediate production of surplus value and in the consumption necessary to the reproduction of the Now. After all, it still needs us, and it needs us alive.

So what, someone argues. Production needs to be maintained, or we would all starve. Work is the only activity able to create a surplus, to produce the necessities of life.

Of course, we say. Work is essential, work is fundamental to human existence. But work should not simply be the generation of surplus-value for Capital. It should not be something performed under the moralistic notion of a duty (be it to society, oneself, one’s family, the king, God or some other abstract deity), because it is always necessary and need not be justified by morals. We have to work to survive. That this circumstance has developed into the alienated status quo of Now, where we work for someone else’s benefit with the sole purpose of producing more than is needed, is simply something we have to remedy. Only if these conditions of production, this machine-park of reification and extortion, are annihilated, will work be what it really is; a necessity, a creation process, an act of human will inflicted upon the world with the purpose of human benefit.

But in the process of destroying the present, we need the power of creation. The "emancipation of work" can not be a distant goal to be accomplished. It is, like everything else, a becoming. Thus creativity is a double agent; it is both the subject and the object of our movement against and beyond this world; without it we would be lost completely in more than one way (so would the megamachine, of course, but we do not want to drag ourselves down with it, do we?). And that is why it’s meaningless to speak of subject and object as separated in this sense. The creative force is both the fundamental motor of conflict within and the constant striving without. And this motion will never stop. It is not a matter of freedom; we will not reach a state of things where creation will finally rest. It will always oppose itself toward the Now and manifest the Maybe. And it will do it in manifold ways, in different places, in diverse forms. As the conditions of energy-extortion shifts, so will the forces of creation bound to rebel against them.

Destruction

2006-04-06T14:07:00.000+02:00

Bakunin stated that the will to destroy also is a creative force. He was in no way the first one to observe this basic fact; it is an insight that has followed humanity since the dawn of history. But in our blind times, in the moralistic worldview of the present, destruction is depicted as an evil force, something that unmakes all the good things created. You talk of war, of murder, the slaying of foes, as something that should not be, acts committed against the natural, balanced and humanistic order of things. In civil society, you are supposed to love thy neighbour and die for his right to speak his mind. Democracy tells us that violence is not needed anymore, because it is a way of handling things that belongs to the past.

Well, the order of things is not balanced or humanistic. Humanism is just an idea, as is democracy and civil society. One glance at the world tells us that the order of things is chaotic, violent, and amoral, without pity and based on the continuous slaughter of individuals for the benefit of others. Why assume that society is something else than this, something outside the rest of existence? The idea that human interaction follows its own laws and in someway stands above nature is another creation of the human mind. Pasamontañas does not find this illusion very comfortable, since we know that "nature" and "society" is part of the same thing and in no way represent dichotomous opposites. Why some people like to believe that humanity is driven by teleological rationalism towards its own redemption, away from the lawless "state of nature", says more about the delusions of ideology than about the actual order of things.

If we are able to confront the aspects of existence branded "evil" by ideology, instead of blinding ourselves to them while dreaming up a morally spotless world, we might actually transform humanity into something better, stronger, and less hypocritical.

The will to destroy
The universe is a constant becoming, based on the destruction of that which is. In every instant, something is destroyed and something else is born. In the great cosmic cycles, destruction and creation are inseparable.

This fundamental rule is reflected in all aspects of existence. In all living beings, there is an immanent wish to destroy other things. Even the most vegetative of life forms, species that live by the nourishment of algae or minerals, still devour the energy of others in order to survive. And the higher you get in the hierarchy of existence, the more the destructive tendencies grow. Man is certainly the most aggressive, cruel, destructive race on earth, especially towards his own kind. That he is also gentle, generous and emphatic does not contradict these trivial facts. Why would the one exclude the other?

Everywhere we find hatred and love, cruelty and pity, destruction and creation, existing at the same time, not as oscillations between extremes, but as constant co-existence and becoming. The dynamics stemming from these factories of energy is what keeps things evolving and merge, splitting up and vanish. Both in "nature" and in "society". Flows of energy travels through the bodies of individuals, the bodies of machines (man-made, nature-made, or animal-made does not matter), creating new flows in new directions through the destruction of the ones who have played out their role. To call this "cruel" or "unfair" is to reveal one’s position as extremely anthropocentric. Why would the greater order of things succumb to the moral prejudices of a particular instant in the ridiculously short breath of human history? Could we possibly bend the enormous mega-structure of existence to our will, to our conceptions of right and wrong? The liberal, the idealist, the humanist, answers yes - at least in the world of ideas (where the liberal, the idealist and the humanist lives his entire life). Pasamontañas would beg to differ.

The will to destroy is an always-present component of human existence. Except from the basic ontological state of affairs roughly outlined above (i.e. the need to destroy to live) there is also a more refined urge to inflict death and pain upon others, something that undeniably derives its energy from the necessary conditions of life but which has developed a more sophisticated approach in the minds and acts of humans. We observe it among the more developed animals, too; the predators of land and sea often kill because it amuses them, because it gives them pleasure. The Darwinist could call these activities some kind of practise, an exercise necessary for the survival of species dependent on cruelty for their existence. Let the Darwinist talk. He is just as dogmatic and prejudiced as the other ideology-ridden theoreticians. Like most people, he sees a false difference between "human" and "animal". Let him explain Sodom, the Holocaust, the million ways of torture practiced all over and all through the history of civilization. If he calls those things practises, he also will have to explain what purpose they serve. For what are they a practise? Why are they necessary to the survival of the species? To explain that within the humanist framework would indeed be a difficult matter.

The inadequacy of the moral order
We do not claim that holocaust or torture are desirable ends in their own right (Sodom might be, though). We do not promote human suffering. But we do not deny it, either. It is a necessary aspect of existence, an unavoidable consequence of life. This does not mean that we have something against humanity. Rather, we are much more humanitarian than the humanist will ever be, because we wish to see all aspects of man. We will not deny his destructive sides or claim that they must be constrained by the good society, that some Idea of Good will free man from his dark and animal background, that the enlightened society finally has built barriers against evil. Such claims are hypocritical, because they deny that Capital and its tools of management, i.e. civilization, actually reinforce all the destructive parts of human beings, and use them in its own growth and mutations. Society has not freed man of his wild and evil animal self. Instead, it has put the animal in a box, channelled all its aggression and cruelty into pipes and canals appropriate to the systems of accumulation desired by the megamachine. The Holocaust and the massacres of national wars were not anomalies; they were the natural consequences of the large-scale industrialization of human existence. They made the destruction immanent in man, the production of pain and death; operate on a scale comparable only to the production of surplus value going on in modern society. The megamachine of Capital produced the megamachine of Death.

Of course, this is denied by the moral order designed to make us believe that we are good if we only try to be good. Morality is supposed to bring absolution from our destructive tendencies, and the bloodshed resulting from civilization is said to be the effects of failed morality, not from morality itself. The wars and sufferings are portrayed as warnings; some individuals are selected as scapegoats and branded "monsters", as were they exceptions. But they will never be exceptions, just examples. Actually, we are all monsters.

Utopia

2006-04-04T10:30:00.000+02:00

We know that the concept of Utopia is associated with the kind of idealist systems developed by Saint-Simon, Fourier, and others in the early nineteenth century, and that it has a faint smell of impossibility and dreams. However, Pasamontañas is fond of impossibility and withhold that dreams are the stuff the Maybe is made of. And without the Maybe, we could just as well surrender to the tyranny of Now. We need the horizon of the shifting and distant future if we are to move away from the present in any creative way.

But of course, we are not idealists. We do not believe in ready-made systems fresh off the writing table of some enlightened genius who thinks he has found the solution to all human misery. We don’t believe in the power of great Ideas, either. It is surely possible to imagine something else without being a slave to such limited conceptions of reality.

Gilles Deleuze wrote that a creator who is not grabbed by the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator. We agree, and add that not only is the creator in need of impossibility, but the impossibilities present in reality are in dire need of creators to explode and release their potential. Human dreams, materialized in movement inside and away from the Now, can be great powers of destruction and creation. But they can also be tools of reaction.

The reification of the stuff of Maybe
It will not come as a great surprise to clear-thinking persons that the massive apparatus of the present constantly impose processes of reification upon all things human. It lies in its interest to transform everything into things, objects, commodities. At the same time, the marketplace of society needs the individuals who constitute its human components to act and think as if everything they do is an act of free will and rational judgment; we need to believe that we are autonomous subjects choosing our own paths among the many alternatives presented to us on the capitalist market.

This, as we know, is an illusion. There are no autonomous subjects, only commodities. Human beings are explicitly called "human capital" and handled exactly the same way as the other machines of production and reproduction. But since the workers of the west have become consumers instead of producers, they need to think that they are free individuals making choices appropriate to their individual life-projects. Hence the growing tendency to exploit human dreams and fantasies as things to be bought and sold. It is a natural consequence of the shifting conditions of the megamachine of Capital and its needs of production, but also a way to pacify potentially subversive currents. If we think that the market is providing everything we need to satisfy our desires, the market is all we need. Then our dreams will follow the neatly structured outlet-channels that society has built for us, safely led to closed rooms instead of exploding in unpredictable and rebellious ways.

The concept of freedom
Today, the word "freedom" is used by the powers of the Now as a trademark of its hegemonic ideologies. We are told that freedom means free trade, freedom of choice, freedom of speaking one’s mind, that is, all the freedoms officially existing within the capitalist society. It is a subtle way of saying that we are living in the best of worlds; we don’t need utopias. Utopias fail, they say; look at the Soviet Union (the place usually referred to when speaking of "communism"). Look at all those dream-societies, the result of bad ideology. They all failed.

This is effective, because it tells us that ideologies are something of the past, forgotten dreams that never worked, and not something that is operating right now, in this very system where we live and think. Thus, they say, freedom is not smitten with ideology; it is a clear and rational condition under which the highest possible style of human interaction is governed. Utopia for the liberals is Now. And if Now is the only Utopia there is, the only one capable of producing freedom, no other Utopia is needed.

Pasamontañas is strongly opposed to this way of thinking, and consider freedom to be one of the worst inventions of ideology. There is no such thing as freedom. Humanity is not, has never been and will never be free. To believe in the possibility of absolute freedom is to be idealistic and utterly naïve, to claim that freedom is something that is accomplished by the conscious acts of rational individuals is to be boringly bourgeois. What the propagandists of freedom from left to right fail to see is that their style of thought is disabled by the false notion of individuality. Freedom is always personal freedom for them; they assume the existence of unique subjects isolated from the outside, repressed by structures over which they have no control but with the possibility to bloom once the evil oppressors are removed. This view on things is absolutely blind to the fact that there would be no individuals without the collective. Individuals are produced by society, by the collective assemblages of thought, speech, action and movement, by the symbols and meanings flowing constantly all over and through the concrete bodies of society. The idealist’s notion of the free individual shatter at the moment it tries to adapt to the realities of the superstructure, the machine-park, the metasubjects and the constant reproduction. That is why Capital always claims that it is serving us the best possible world; it needs to mask its own over-subjectivity and make us blind to our smallness in the vast net of production units. The shattering of its own lies is sucked in by the apparatuses of ideology and transformed into truisms. But they are open to exposure in the most apocalyptic of ways, and in those ways only. We will not revolt as separated individuals in search of personal freedom, but as many, as a counter-assemblage of broken machine-parts.

The others
The human mind is incapable of total freedom in the sense usually meant when using that word; the absolute, universal, essentialist freedom of the hopeless romantic. The mind will make itself unhappy if it sets out on a Don Quixote-like quest to find that false picture of freedom, be it in the past, today or tomorrow. Now is not Utopia, nor will it ever be.

Utopia is always something different. It is not a place but a struggle. It will never be reached or completed, because it can never be in the way that Now is. It will always redefine itself, keep itself in the distance, in the corner of the eye, behind the sun, beyond the horizon. And that is why we always will reach out for it, invent it, run after it, try to produce it. We will dream of it and in the process build a Maybe in the heart of Now, a Maybe able to break the status quo and turn the old world to ashes. There will not be One, but many, not an alternative society or a different way of organizing the one we are living in, but many others.

That’s why Utopia is always present, distant but close. It is a movement within, leading beyond. At the moment it is fighting and under constant attack from the war-mongers of reification, but it can never be totally defeated by such banal forces. It lies in its very nature that it always will triumph. Not to free humanity, not even to set itself free, but to produce something different from that which is. Utopia is not a state of things, not simply a lack of repression. Instead, it is the production of some thing other, the creation immanent in the destruction of the present. It is a making, not a being.

Authority

2006-04-03T20:29:00.000+02:00

This is important, because many people apparently regard authority as something solely exercised by totalitarian regimes or by the repressive forces of the State, i.e. something one should be against if one want to combat the status quo of Now. This is a misconception, but one that Pasamontañas is more than happy to correct. Authority is power. It is the capability to impose your will upon another, most likely your enemy, and force him ("him" could mean her, them, or it) to subject to your will. For revolutionaries, authority is a must. How can a revolutionary subject crush the existing conditions without the use of power? As Engels put it: a revolution is surely the most authoritarian thing there is.

One important remark, though. We are not interested in "seizing power", that is, adapting the existing power apparatus to our own agenda. We don’t have an agenda, and we don’t want to gain control over Capital. Instead, we want to crush it. We want to go beyond it, to another world, and that is why we have no interest whatsoever in a revolution that simply wants to overtake the means of production and administer Capital with the workers or the generals in control. Such events are not really revolutions, just shifts in the management of production, regardless if they are realized through violent uproars or democratic elections. We’ve had enough of that.

Authority for the revolutionary can not be a coup d’etat supposed to install a better order using the existing system of control. Instead, it should be a daily activity, a constant attitude towards the authority that society tries to subject us to. The revolutionary authority takes many forms. It uses words and actions as its weapons; it is collective and individual, organized and spontaneous. It is a refusal and a demand for something else. But it can not be gestures, pleas or begging; it has to be exercised with self-assurance and power, uncompromising and not afraid of using violence when need be. It must keep its frames of reference free from the ones of the liberal society; it can not subject itself to notions such as "the rational conversation", "the open society", "the democratic rules", etc. All those things are liberal ideology and attempts to reduce the revolutionary to a player on the same field as the liberal, something which automatically diminishes his chances since the field is owned by the liberal and works according to his rules. A refusal against such attempts of pacification must be an act of war if they are to succeed. Only true warfare can tear the field to pieces and throw the liberal and his allies over the edge. And true warfare is fought on a day-to-day basis; it is a continuum of hatred, refusal and redefinitions of truisms.

But one should be careful of what we would call lifestyle activism. It is a trap-device designed to capture the revolutionary currents present in society and reduce them to a lifestyle among others on the capitalist market. Just as "communism", "fascism", "liberalism", "feminism", etc, are made into commodities on the market of ideas, activism or revolutionary attitudes easily become mere attributes, a matter of wearing a certain kind of clothes, listening to certain music or hanging out in particular places with particular people. Nothing could be more devastating to a potentially subversive movement than to be sucked into the reproduction process of the Now. Unfortunately, this happens all the time and is only natural given the functions of the machines of capture. Needless to say, the authority of subversion must be ruthlessly applied to these phenomena just as fiercely as it is applied to the other machines of society. Someone is not necessarily a revolutionary because he calls himself one.

On the contrary, many individuals are part of the movement against the present without calling themselves subversives or even realizing that they are contributing to a bigger entity of refusal.

Conflict

2006-04-03T17:28:00.000+02:00

We will begin with this subject, since it is crucial to our cause. The society of Now, the global capitalist apparatus, is defined by its inherent antagonisms and derives its dynamics, its laws of motion, from these antagonisms. This is not a new observation; rather, it is a quite trivial fact. However, since the hegemonic ideologies do their best to present a picture of everlasting harmony and lack of conflict, it is important for the revolutionary to identify and emphasize the potential forces immanent in the conflict-lines present in society. This must be done both in theory and action, of course. Therefore we will first present our view on theory, to make clear the turf upon which we stand.

About theory
In many cases, theory is the result of action, the articulation of actual happenings. But we do not share the vulgar notion that theory always must be subordinated to action; this is a naïve and romantic worldview which result in spontaneous but short-lived uprisings, at the most. Please do not get us wrong here: we love riots. But we are interested in more than the most apparent expressions of violence and class warfare; the conflict-lines run deeper and have more potential than the occasional destruction of property and State repression that are displayed in the direct actions of revolutionary conflict.

Theory is a practice per se. It does not need justification from any other activity, and it does not need to present its "usefulness" to be a valid tool in the war we are fighting. We do not wish to present a dichotomy here. Theory and action are different activities, but they are both part of the same struggle and serve the same purposes. They interact in mysterious and unpredictable ways. The factory of our minds is a result of material circumstances, but these circumstances would not be what they are if they were not formulated and expressed by ideology and theory. The becoming of reality is a strange cross-pollination of thought and action, of concrete and abstract, and the process takes shape in the building of highways and skyscrapers as well as in the publishing of bad books, the sounds of street slang and the erotic fantasies of human beings.

The conflict-lines and their potential
We do not wish to repeat the Marxist clichés about class society. We agree, however, that the society of capitalism is a class society. What this means, and what rôles the different classes potentially play in the bringing about of revolution, is not easily discernible outside the dogmatic ideologies of old-school radical thinking. We believe that attempts to define the working class or the bourgeoisie today are bound to be futile, if one does not surrender to simplifications. The distinctions found in Capital are useful if one consider the conditions of industrial production of surplus value and are still valuable as an analytic tool when speaking of the basic foundations of Capital as a non-subjective, global, forever growing entity with Commodity, Value and (unpaid) Labour as its most important units. In many parts of the world, Capital still operates on the basis of industrial production of surplus value as described by Marx.

But society Now is more complex, since the apparatus has grown out of its old industrial costume, at least in the west. While sweatshops in Asia and other parts of the "third world" now perform the unpaid labour necessary to increase value and keep Capital growing, different forms of unproductive labour have taken its place in the "first world". The shift from industrial to service-oriented labour in the west is followed by a shift from production to consumption; the working classes are now consumers, not producers. Their rôle in the apparatus is thereby different from the one usually ascribed to the proletariat: the force that moves against Capital like a power of nature, fuelled by alienation and separation from the means of production.

The workers in the west are not likely to play this antagonistic part in the drama today, at least not in the deterministic sense propagated by some socialists. Alienation has proved to be more of a stupefying than a revolutionary force. Drugged on bad food, numbing work, an all-present popular culture and a never-ending flood of consumer goods, the western worker may indeed feel a strong lack of meaning, but deliberate and organized revolutionary action will probably not be the result of this feeling as it is.

Our conclusion to this analysis is by no means to "enlighten the proletariat" or any such Leninist nonsense. Rather, we would like to emphasize the importance of irrationalism in these matters. The revolutionary potential immanent in society will not be fully realized by arguing or appeals to reason. Ideology has too firm a hold upon the whole of the State-machine and its human components to be successfully countered by the rational style of argument used by the liberals and democrats; it is their language and serves only their purposes. The conflicts must therefore be stressed in other ways if they are to explode in a truly destructive manner. We see them everywhere, not in the word-play rhetoric of the politicians or newspapermen, but in the actions of people. The refusal to pay, for example, is a very important line of conflict, since it denies the assumption that Capital is a natural order of things. The refusal to vote is another - it denies that representative democracy is the highest form of government. The spontaneous destruction of property, "vandalism" and other acts of war against the ideology of individualism and its material manifestations are also a clearly visible and clearly growing crystallization of antagonism within Capital.

Actually, many people participate in these conflicts without sharing any kind of radical worldview or elaborated philosophy; they just do what they do. To steal food and other commodities is necessary for many people, because they need to live. It is political without being "political". To refuse to vote need not be a consciously thought-out political statement, just a feeling that the politicians work for their own interests and not for us. The result, however, is the same if the act is grounded in theoretical insight or just instinct. It is the refusal and its consequences that are important.

There lies great potential in this kind of conflicts. But it is not self-providing. It is in need of fuel and flame, of further impossibilities in the body of society. Ordinary people wouldn’t steal if their material circumstances did not force them to do it, nor would they decline to vote if they felt that democracy was actually working. Therefore it is not in our interest as revolutionaries that the standard of living is raised or that politicians actually start living up to their promises (as if that would actually happen). On the contrary, we will do our best to provide the potential destruction immanent in the conflicts in question with fuel, openings and further areas of existence. Only if the conflicts grow and deepen, can they have a function in dismantling the structure of civilized society.

Pasamontañas - the hood of nothingness

2006-04-03T16:52:00.000+02:00

Pasamontañas is not a person, nor is it the representative of any organization or school of thought. It is the hood hiding the face of whoever is the formulating instance of the criticisms posted here. Who we "are" is of no interest, since the goal of our activity is higher than the mere exhibitionism practised by the general blogger. We do not wish to be anything else than the tool for the real movement of destruction that will bring about the total annihilation of society and civilization as we know it. We are a part of that movement, a part among many others. As a tool of destruction, we are also a creative force, since the death of Now is the becoming of that always-mutating nothingness known as the future, the ever-distant utopia of Maybe.

The war against this world is fought on different battlefields, in different times, with different weapons. Pasamontañas is part of the war-machine of this particular instance; we are a weapon wielded by the anti-thought of resistance and breaking down of machines. We will publish texts by ourselves and others; philosophers, artists, anarchists, totalitarians, scientists, magicians. We do not care about the left and right of the parliament, nor do we bother with bourgeois moralism and political correctness. Let the small people of contemporary ideology talk and busy themselves with their babble and tiny gestures. They will not understand the nature of their own lack of meaning until the hour is upon them (probably not even then). Our motto in this matter will therefore always be:

Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti!