Re: <nettime> Nein, danke [was Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 7:26 PM Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:

This pamphlet reads like an American redux of The Invisible Committee. Its concepts and general outlook go back to a text like "Civil War" in Tiqqun #2. Its production values are within reach of anyone who can afford a laptop, an Amazon bucket and a domain name. Its imagery is of a piece with the rest; and by looking around on the web you can see that it was originally published as an orange-tinted book, so maybe the pseudo-print aesthetic has a simple explanation.

The idea that it's a psychologist's honey-pot crafted to catch the naive is far-fetched. This is anarchy. The positions codified by Tiqqun and popularized by the Invisible Committee have become widespread through the experiences of Exarchia, the ZAD, Standing Rock and many others, with the Palestinian resistance and the Kurdish war of independence blazing in the background. The elemental question to be asked is, do I make common cause with these authors? A corollary line of questioning would be: Is civil war inevitable in the capitalist democracies? Could it have positive effects?

I say no on all three counts. The serious threat of civil war comes from the extreme right, they have both the numbers and the guns. Throw gasoline on that fire and it will explode in your face. Punching a Nazi has become legitimate, yes, and it's a good thing. The legitimacy, I mean. That makes it possible to gather large numbers for anti-fascist demos and to seek criminal prosecution against the extremists, while city governments topple the statues of racists and carry out investigations of police abuse, etc. The rule of law is definitely not all it's cracked up to be, but its absence would be worse. The potential of life degrades exactly to the extent that societies are not able to keep violence of all kinds in check. In militarized countries like the US it has degraded a lot, and the point is to reverse the process, not accelerate it.

The really weird thing here is the typeface, for sure. I think that in the age of atrophied thought and controlled imaginations there is an unconscious sexualized attraction to the passions of war, symbolized by the aesthetics of the 1930s. In this sense I agree with the gist of Ted's analysis: the intention is that of normalizing a largely fantasmatic violence, without realizing how enabling the practice of that fantasy can be for the hard right.

Where I agree with Ian is that we do have to discuss these things. Energy companies ARE expanding their operations. Cities ARE being smashed by hurricanes. US troops ARE camped at the border with Mexico (and possibly militias too). How do you respond to a dystopian reality? What is the best strategy? With whom can you carry it out? How can you bring it up to scale? These are the questions we should be answering.

best, Brian
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