Even Feminism Desires the Text of Power & A Few Clarifications on Key Concepts

Even feminism? Yes even feminism desires the text of power

Theory is another word for nothing left to lose. The Institute for Experimental Freedom is beyond masochistic with its bodies, murmurs and texts. We publish, print and distribute works foolishly against their future renditions. The typo or technical error pale in comparison to the shame we experience the moment our desire codified in digital mappings of vectors and typography brushes against the docile or eager appetite of whoever reads PDFs, blogs or printed zines. This shame, a sort of abjection, reverses onto us as it returns ten-fold in so many little confusions: a misinterpretation of a key term, a refusal to love our refusal to be governed by value in its textual form, an anxiety regarding one's own capacity to be acted on by the text, or feeling outside of the ironic horror we cannot help but know as a world we are attached to. Years ago, we might have simply turned deaf ears to these confusions which come in the way of half-critiques. We may have been mobilized as yet another faculty of the impoverished subversive text apparatus. We could—and have, in other incarnations—modify our words, and our practices of the text as a text of pleasure, in order to suffice as rational discourse. We could be resubjectivized by the grammar of ideology and its pathetic cry for attention; the “ideas matter” of the infant in an IWW shirt who just won't shut up about Noam Chomsky, or that of the internet forum poster who believes that he might not be such a lonely loser if everyone would just read The Coming Insurrection and talk to him about it. But, we'd prefer not to.

The Institute for Experimental Freedom practices a text of pleasure and text of power, both on paper and on the body. The CrimethInc jabs in Rolling Thunder are no misnomer. We are experimental material, and we're in it for us, our friends and the friends we have yet to meet. However, this is not to say we are not a part of a stupid milieu like everyone else, nor is it to say we are not trying to find the exit; we are, carefully.

We take the practice of thought, the practice or writing, the practice of power, the questions of “what is an artist?” “what is a writer?” “what is history?” “what are our conditions?” very seriously. And we think through a ruthless experimentation with our lives—by subjecting ourselves and our friends to high frequencies of cruelty, banality, joy, and sadness—we might stumble upon something which we would carefully put close to our hearts and share—with the milieu and with what survives it. Which is perhaps another way of saying, although ideas don't matter, the practices of a discourse require critique and provocation with which we will lovingly shock the face of any of our comrades or opponents. We have been hoping this would be reciprocated. Alas, still we sit on our knees, while our “insurrectionist” and anti-state communist peers merely stumble on their dirty-talk in front of the mirror.

Nonetheless, The Institute is a warm calculating assemblage. The comments between stories on anarchist websites which have nothing to do with it, the subtle jokes of our friends and hostiles, and the horror of our lovers' Fathers do a rudimentary violence to our corporeal topographies. From the tidy paper cuts, we excrete just a little red—enough to paint our lips or a small American flag. However, perhaps we underestimate the force of nagging slits on the skin—whether it be political or otherwise. Nothing itches more than a thousand paper cuts.

So we scratch; we'll give in a little bit. But, rest assured we have no illusions that scratching will make the itch go away. On the contrary, we're hoping to pull the wounds open just a bit more.

From these rips in our texture we'll offer these humble gifts: a series of elaborated descriptions of the terms we hold close to our hearts, which demand to be shared.

Still very much wanting the text inscribed against our unsurprisingly thick skin,

-Liam Sionnach | IEF | '10

A few clarifications on key concepts within many of the texts we publish and distribute in the way of a series of complex glosses to be irregularly posted online.

Without further adieu:

World Civil War | Gloss 1.

Civil war presupposes the modern state. In some ways, civil war can be read as both what was outside of history and then, with the development of the modern state, what became included in history. A comment like “The history of societies thus far is the history of class struggle” has a secret intelligence contained within it when we read it through our magic decoder matrix: civil war.

History and society were only really unified with the development of the modern state. The modern state in Hegel became the subject of history for his philosophy. Marx, among other Young Hegelians made this their object of critique. However, lurking bellow the surface of such idealism in Hegel was Hobbes and the concept of sovereignty. The state of nature in Hobbes was a sort of permanent potential of war of all against all. Law, enforced by the state, would create a clear divide between what was inside the law and what was outside of it; generating “civil society” (or “the civil state) on the inside, and civil war on the outside. This meant that living beings would only be included in human society (and thus, history) once they became subject to the rule of law; all manner of imperial practices come with ease. However, even in Hobbes's hypothesis, there remained a permanent problem. Law, which gives human society its so-called order, can only be enforced through means which appear indistinguishable from civil war. What Marx discreetly references is not that class struggle is the history of living beings on the planet, but that class struggle is civil war inside the gates; and is the general conditions of capitalism.

The concept of a “world” may be important in some of the ways “world civil war” is used. “The evident is not merely a matter of logic or reasoning. It attaches itself to the sensible, to worlds” (p4, Call). A world is a zone of meaning, sense—“before time, absolutely, there is sense.”(Ok, War it is Tiqqun 1) History is the reification of time as Man's time, and perhaps even the concealment of civil war. It locates a living being as subject to the sensuous praxis of generating and reproducing human society. Civil war is the free play of bios, of forms of life; life which acts in a world. “Civil,” because worlds are not limited by the boundaries or laws of nation-states and because conflict can take place in myriad of spheres, with a multiplying array of techniques. “War,” because the potential for doing violence to the most just must not be discounted, ever. On a terrain with a multiplicity of worlds, only forms of life who feel their power can act decisively.

Even in Hobbes, if there were not civil war, there would be no need for Leviathan. Leviathan wasn't a god on earth, as much as the political equivalent of someone who's afraid of the dark. The modern state therefor had as its object the warding off of an ever present civil war. It coded civil war as “evil”, and put religious apparatuses to work. We could say the modern state's practices of government had the character of a war against civil war. The development of techniques of governing which corresponded (liberalism) excluded and disciplined dangerous elements. At certain times these elements were juridically coded as “the hostis” (hostile, unknown, outside), and came in the way of invading parties, but also in the way of crime, and later, sickness.

What we call “world civil war” develops out of the modern state's failure, and each and every elaboration of civil war. Reading its history religiously, we learn that good does not triumph over evil; moreover we learn that coding the state as the hand of god reaches a threshold because its teqinches of power continuously collapse into the terrain of evil. Law cannot be enforced without the possibility of doing violence to the most just. Civil war is then the omnipresent aporia of the modern state. It cannot prevent transgression and revolt and yet it is logically demanded to develop itself to do just that.

On the other hand, we can read “world” synonymously with “global.” World civil war develops as the excess of liberal techniques of power. Capitalism generates a fracture in the being of Man's time, elaborating the fracture caused by the state. Two representations develop. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie, who managed, tuned, and attempted to master capital, and on the other hand, the proletariat, who produced all value and whose subjugated existence pulls the two into an intense conflict. Because war between nation states is governed by international law, a war between non-state actors forces both parties to develop techniques of war which are out-side the law. From the moment the first partisan disrupted the separation between solider and civilian, the development of an exceptional and irregular technique of war was set into motion. Whereas capitalism created the conditions where the state was no longer the authorizer of the political, and in fact becomes another technology for the bourgeoisie to deploy in order to neutralize intense political relationships, class struggle within capitalism returns the question of the political to forefront and cuts across national boundaries by deploying the figure of an irregular fighter in the image of the proletariat across the earth. Class struggle was the prior most intense configuration of civil war, because of its international dimensions, its ethical character which transforms any conflict into absolute enmity, and because of the proletariat's capacity to hold the threat of a self-negation: The proletariat is the class which abolish class society through its own self-abolition. However, if the proletariat who came in the way of the working class general strike, and later the diffuse irrationality of autonomous armed joy were defeated—as it was—then what would survive this condition was the representation of the bourgeoisie (at a planetary level) with a new paradigm of war without the limits of national boundaries and international law; who stood on a new terrain without a stable enemy but rather a globe of hostilities which could be intensified, if need be.

With the development of a War on Terror and permanent counter-insurgency, world civil war now returns to its initial terrifying presence. Capital, liberated from the tyranny and stupidity of bourgeois management acts as its own sovereign force and subsumes all hostile forms of life: The phase of real subsumption. The state as an appendage of capital is deployed to give meaning to the world of images by imposing the category of enemy on any one of its own excessive consequences. The ontological character of this gesture is completed once the enemy has been reintegrated into the symbolic-order, either through rehabilitation (democratization) or exclusion (a fair amount of killing).

However, perhaps the proletariat has not been defeated. Perhaps the proletariat is still the class, or vocation, which abolishes class society—and elaborates civil war. In the conditions of civil war against the bourgeoisie with the development of industrialism, the proletariat's force of negation was contingent on a strategically positioned portion of workers: the industrial working class. However with the dissolution of the both the factory and its inhabitants, and with the integration of subculture and all manner of past “revolutionary subjectivities” into the rationality of commodity production; perhaps there are different conditions and different contingencies from which a more terrible proletariat is awaiting to be revealed. In these different conditions, civil war is elaborated by an equally diffuse, almost imperceptible irregular fighter. The pure negative potential of a planetary multi-cultural petite bourgeoisie. An impure hostis humani generis. An army of sleeper cells with allegiance to no identity; with no more statist fascinations or illusions of a just society; and with no use in the economy of superfluous labor, already begins to advance civil war to its logical and redemptive conclusion: the dissolution of society, social war.

Family and Historical Materialism 2010 has this way of making me oh-so proletarian

Another Cold Year for the Warmth
Death and Redemption

“Theres a man goin' round taking names and he decides who to free and who to blame. Everybody won't be treated all the same.”

The fold of our history is either death or redemption. The history of the vanquished and the history of preemptive alienating and policing apparatuses yearn to conclude. We all have a door and a rotting carpet; a family and a dynasty of fuck ups; advanced social dissolution from worlds and senses to answer for. They say men make history, but not in conditions of their choosing. If it is our sensuous activity within a world, a praxis, which generates a world, then by what means do we confront the millions of potentialities which are taken from history? Those souls who are irrevocably lost, or worse yet, rendered bare life through processes of subjectivation, are prepared to be judged, not by history, but by the police. Each death is a tragedy because in “each” there is a shame of separation. The private life only becomes public in death. But this public death is itself a technique of exposure, which links the family and society to the church, to the school, to the prison. The tragedy which the living are constantly exposed to is not merely their own telos but capitalism's continuous merciless holiday. In this society, no one dies. Everyone is murdered.

What is pathetic in death is not the loss of a container of memories and affects or the fleeting away of another productive member of the family, of society, but the loss of the capacity to speak. Death acts like a nightmare on the living. Conjuring images of “once upon a time,” the living attempt to answer for the horror of a brisk wind which extinguishes light in one subtle swoop. But the sad conclusive cough of a body judged guilty of living in capitalism is repeated and shared. Each voice is rendered mute. Each potentiality perfectly aware of what strangles it daily. The tears of the living for the dead, while representing a real sadness, never conjoin to form the flood which will redeem the past. Instead, the mouth opens, limbs shake with anxiety; our small, light-colored hairs stand up searching for a warmth which is not in this world. And in the end, what could be communicated—the single gesture of communicability itself—is once again lost, irretrievable, amidst blinking lights and the flow of commodities which live so much longer than any of us.

What is redemption in such circumstances? Is it forgiving our trespasses, and forgiving those who trespass against us? By what means do we admit a presence which annuls memories, scars, blood?

My family is connected through Facebook. The eulogy for my grandmother stumbled on her truth. She took on a predictable position of women married to husbands in the twentieth century. She mothered many children and formed the foundation to a family whose care was held by a second-generation Italian pater. She, and all the other shes of the family, suffered only the absence of en-courage-ment. It is not surprising: they all left. My grandmother quietly lived as if she had been redeemed, doing the books to my grandfathers photography business, never once elaborating her own passions for paint on canvas. The eulogy concluded, as my grandmother often would, that if anyone felt despondent, the eulogist would happily go shopping with them. The analogy to government orders following the events of September eleventh to go shopping is not lost on me. There were some really good sales at Macy's

On the other side of the family, between drinks, and with far too many teenage mothers, I learned cousin Ian had been sentenced in 'Oh-four. My absence from Facebook excluded me from hearing this bullshit earlier. Was it three-strikes you're out? Did he have guns too? How long is a life-sentence? The silence of social death touches even the Midwestern Irish working class. My other cousin, who used hockey like how the black body uses football or basketball, or how southern whites use the military, received a terrible back injury and was sentenced to a fancy new oxycodone addiction. Again, if only I had Facebook... One of my sisters still clings to the myth that we're different because we didn't grow up in these fucked up conditions, but she conveniently forgot about all the suicides and boredom; the drive-by's and the addictions, even the empty refrigerators, which painfully illustrate our miserable upbringing. We all ran too, and we ran for a reason.

The fold of this history is uncertain. On the one hand, everything about today, and even yesterday, just points toward the production of death. Enduring high school, when anarchy was merely a secret which Propagandhi attempted to whisper to me through power chords; or when struggle was just some band that that dude from the Locust was in, Columbine seemed perfectly reasonable. We sketched pictures of it all the time. We searched our history books, attempting to discover any time when the underdog wreaked its vengeance. We had no voice then, no words to call our own, and no world which affected us. We had only the conditions of all of that dissolving. In that time, many of us were quite literally unwanted children; and judging by the fields we set on fire, the plots to blow up schools, the churches we vandalized, and unfortunately, the animals which we tortured, we were capable of some fucked up shit. The youth of today are even worse.

On the other hand, maybe we can once more be affected by “Death to death!” Which is not to say, “peace.” But more specifically, our time, capitalist time, is a time of living-dead. Techniques of government expose life's limits to itself and generate bare life. No one knows sovereignty better than the life which is judged not worth living by the police or the life which is let to live by its manager. And because of Biopower and the Spectacle, it's increasingly difficult to separate any of these figures. Redemption in this world is not repaying a debt, atoning for guilt which we owe society. Capitalism is guilt. We owe them nothing. Redemption is giving them just that.

Walter Benjamin writes: “For we have been expected upon this earth. For it has been given us to know, just like every generation before us, a weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim. This claim is not to be settled lightly.” The day after my grandmother died, I set off for New York to do a panel about the messianic analogy within the proletariat. The day before my grandmother's funeral, I spoke of becoming sensitive to the imperceptible civil war which has taken place as class struggle and now takes place as social war. In the conditions of social war, this civil war can be felt as a war between normality and its cracks. The proletariat within this civil war is a force who is contingent on history but whose possibility lies outside of it. The proletariat cancels and fulfills history through its own self-negation. At one time, in the conditions of industrialization, classical politics, and a strategically positioned portion of the oppressed, the proletariat took form in the messianic-gesture, what Benjamin called the “divine violence” of the general strike. The proletariat, who was contingent on “a class of civil society but not of civil society,” was expressed as the industrial working class using their own labor-power—what produced value—to negate value and class society itself: redemption.

Benjamin continues, “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. Only a redeemed humankind receives the fullness of its past. Which is to say, only for a redeemed humankind has its past become citable in all moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour [order of the day]—and that day is Judgement Day.”

“The hairs on your arm will stand up. At the terror in each sip and in each sup. For you partake of that last offered cup, Or disappear into the potter's ground. When the man comes around.

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers. One hundred million angels singin'. Multitudes are marching to the big kettle drum. Voices callin', voices cryin'. Some are born an' some are dyin'. It's Alpha's and Omega's Kingdom come...

Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still. Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still. Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still.”

The horror of death in capitalism must be met with a greater horror. Hollywood produced this a representation of this horror some forty-two years ago. How appropriate that in a world, where all death is murder and all life is bare life, the dead would come to life to feed on the living. The death which the proletariat brings with it is the reversal of the operation which lets bare life live or die. The violence of redemption fulfills all past antagonisms. Its operation returns everything to use, especially our fragile bodes, especially the rot of the world. The proletariat—who perhaps takes us, affects bare life—strikes against being human when human progress is analogous to capitalist development. It turns all things which have been given value above life to toys to be ruined. It makes common everything, and like the Spanish militias who danced with the corpses of nuns, it brings our dead grandmothers to share in the collective arson of beauty salons.

The insurrection which comes is not generated from the desire for a better world: there is none. It is not even the accomplishment of democracy. It is the nightmare of the past holding the future hostage, and publicly killing and feasting on it on youtube, over and over again. In our conditions, that of an absolute social war, insurrection and its total extension is the rhythm we must collectively write and impose on capitalist society. Through these experiments and repeated gestures we develop a new sentimental intelligence and different sensuous praxis which no longer accepts our shameful conditions. We impose different collectivities beyond family, nation, and society exactly at the point of their negation. We find we are not alone, exactly at the point we lose our selves. We share exactly at the point when we begin to seize. When each funeral loses what was attempting to kept it a private affair—when newspapers are terrified to write a single obituary because the will of the dead keeps leaving ruin in its wake—then we will begin to know what redemption entails.

-Liam Sionnach | IEF | Jan '10

Oh yeah, We made a book

The Institute for Experimental Freedom (IEF) is proud to release the little book: Politics is not a Banana: The Journal of Vulgar Discourse, What are you Doing After the Orgy or Insurrection or Whatever?

From the introduction:

The insurrection has not transformed our rotting teeth into pure indestructible diamond grills. The orgy only spreads our combined STDs, unless we cover our filthy used bodies in saran wrap—which is pretty cool. Whatever; we made more than $6.50 plus tips but then blew it all on wine, cigarettes, rope, and ceiling hooks. The insurrection gives us this opportunity though, to forget, to practice, and even to run up on some doctor and force his medicalizing ass to nurse our irrevocable rot; to re-imagine our relationships with our stupid dying bodies. It makes us become attentive to the force of our little deaths and the inexhaustible desire we can embody.

The book is a collection of texts, images, and design sensibilities which combine insurrectional theory, critical theory, and post-structuralist inquiries about power and subjectivization with experimental fiction, flarf poetry, Brechtian pornography, and Swiss-influenced post-ironic typographic design.

Following a strange popularity of the '07 printing of Politics is Not a Banana 7x7 journal, the IEF put out a call for submissions for another issue. Contributions were overwhelming, and resulted in our decision to print this beautiful magenta 4.25x6 book/textual war-machine.

Contributions range from the IEF's own Liam Sionnach and Maxamillion Stihl, to new English translations from the collectively written French journal Tiqqun, to a lesser known French group “The Enlightened Avant-Garde” (aka The Movement for the Apocalypse of Montpelier) to Parser's Magazine's Robert Farr flarf poetry to Wax Poetic's own Idris Intifada.

Distributors and Bookstores Get in touch for wholesale prices or use the order form at the bottom of the post.

Politics is Not a Banana is currently available in the US at:

Firestorm cafe and books in Asheville, NC

Internationalist Books in Chapel Hill, NC

Blue Stockings in NYC

Book Thug Nation in Brooklyn, NY

Spoonbill and Sugartown in Brooklyn, NY

The Cream City Collective via Burntbookmobile, in Milwaukee, WI

Sporeprint Infoshop in Columbus, OH

City Light Books in San Francisco, CA

Modern Times Books in San Francisco, CA

Needles and Pens in San Francisco, CA

Bound Together Books in San Francisco, CA

Online Distributors:

Little Black Cart

Last Earth Distro

(this post will be kept up, and updated as new locations come in)

Order the damn book!!!!!1!

Politics is Not a Banana | What are you doing?...

1 x book at $7 retail + priority mail $10.95 10 x books at $5 wholesale + priority mail $53.95 25 x books at $5 wholesale + priority mail $138.95 50 x books at $5 wholesale + priority mail $276.95

Email for media mail options

Also, who likes reading books online and printing terrible bootlegs?
[aka: readable Politics is Not a Banana | What are you doing...? PDF on issuu]

Oh and by the way, in part because our absurd negligence, and in part because of riseup.net's low file space, some contributors may not have received a copy of PNB in mail, please email us if you contributed and have not received a book. We'll totally make it up to you, if you know what I mean.

Get Paid | Wil' Out | Push the University to Crisis

Here's a recent post on infoshop which touched us in the most charming lumpen-bourgeoisie ways. Although ruining the University financially through a sort of self-abolition of the student is quite a good start, we'd like to point out there are other means with which to elaborate this practice, and other ways which a university is occupied.

From infoshop news

Bankrupt the System, Exploit The University

The recent student struggles in California to transform their universities have been inspiring examples of what people can do when they come together, and begin to collectively believe in the future rather than fearing the threats issued in the present. Social wars need money, as Alfredo Bonanno (a 74-year old anarchist recently arrested in Greece for bank robbery) can attest to, and the university has put the gun in your hands. All you need to do is pull the trigger. Max out your credit cards, max out your student loans. Bankrupt the system that is bankrupting us!

All my life, I've been washing dishes, delivering pizza, bagging groceries, and hustling to make enough to pay rent. I've always been a working class, Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher kinda guy. You betcha!

In the past, I've dumpster dived, telling myself it was because I wanted to. But really, I would've preferred to eat the fresh food in the store. I did it because I didn't want to waste away my entire life in that hot, wet, greasy dishwashing room. I did it to be able to save up money so I could quit my job and travel before I became a shriveled up old prune with arthritis, whose only way to see the world was using an RV, something that I would probably never be able to afford.

Anyway, I got into some shit with the law, you know the deal. The cops love to make their quotas. It was military, prison, or college and some time on probation for me. I applied to college solely to save my own ass, not for some stupid degree that I can present to a potential boss for the "opportunity" to spend the next decade kissing his ass.

College is a social structure full of the privileges the state gives to the middle class. No one ever explained this dope ass scam to me before! My parents didn't go to college, they didn't know what the deal was. No wonder you middle class students are so content, I'd think to myself. No wonder you didn't want a revolution.

Well, now that some of you do, or at least you know there needs to be some serious changes because the system is breaking down, it's up to you to pull those triggers.

This is a call for all students to take full advantage of the benefits the middle class is offered through the university. To bet on the future and not on the present: to take out as much money in student loans and credit cards as you can, with no intention to pay it back.

read more...

We're only partially responsible for the Apocaplyse

New text Regarding Social War and Climate Change: Introduction to The Apocalypse

The Institute for Experimental Freedom's European appendages and friends are pleased to announce the completed layout for a new text in preparation for the Cop15 summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Introduction to The Apocalypse gives a concise and critical analysis of the current ecological catastrophe, the climate change movement and its limitations, and the real existing potential for an immediate reversal of the future. Copy and distribute freely.

(8.5x11) Letter imposed for print PDF

(A4) Imposed for print PDF

(A4) Readable PDF

From the introduction:

“All of us secretly desire for this world to end. The future lasts forever. Or at least, it used to. The grand illusion of Western civilisation has always been the myth of progress, namely that the flow of history would beneficently extend into an infinite future. To our parents, civilisation offered houses in the suburbs, computers, and automobiles. And civilisation delivered. To the children of these workers, civilisation offered life on the moon, artificial intelligence, endless peace. All of which have failed to emerge. While our parents cling to the belief that someday the mortgage will be repaid and they can retire in happiness, their lost children know this is a lie. This world offers nothing to us: no meaningful work, no rest, no future – only fear. Over and over again, we find ourselves conditioned like rats by the images of not just our own death, but of total destruction. From the collapse of the World Trade Centre to the alien invasion, from the spectre of nuclear war to the hole in the ozone layer – and now the melting glaciers – these images ingrain themselves in our very being. These images are nothing more than modern projections of the deep-set fantasy of all religions: the apocalypse.

Today, catastrophic climate change is the image of the apocalypse. Nothing has escaped the touch of humanity, from the deepest oceans to the atmosphere itself. There is little doubt that carbon emissions caused by human activity may bring about the end of the world as we know it. It’s just a matter of listening to the ticking of the doomsday clock as it counts down to a climactic apocalypse. Never before in recorded history has the question of the earth’s survival been so starkly posed, and never before has such news been greeted with such indifference.

What is to be done in the face of a crisis so large it dwarfs the imagination? We are left with nothing but a sense of impending doom, a strange depression that keeps us oscillating between hysterical hedonism and sad loneliness, and in the end both responses are merely the two faces of the selfsame despair. Those self-appointed to “save” us from this crisis – the governments, scientists, activists –seem incapable of anything but sloganeering: clean development, carbon markets, sustainable development, climate justice, ecological reparations, green capitalism. We know in our heart of hearts that these fantasies give any sensible person as much cold comfort as a stiff drink. Confronted with the real possibility of the apocalypse, the world becomes inverted: to continue as if everything is normal in the present moment is the most refined act of nihilism.

This generalised delirium, formerly confined to only a handful of activists, has spread over the last few years to the population at large, and even the state seems a sincere believer in catastrophic climate change. Observe the reaction of the nation-states who, while in endless summits to “solve” the climate crisis, such as the COP15, continue to build airport after airport, highway after highway, giving industries the remit to emit ever-more carbon. The nation-states continue to act as if everything is normal, while at the same time lying through their gritted teeth that “we are solving the climate crisis.” No-one today, even the children, believe them. Their summits and pledges are mere fiddling while Rome burns. The absurd plots hatched by scientists to avert this coming apocalypse, from putting mirrors into space to pumping water from the bottom of the ocean, have only the virtue of being at least mildly entertaining. There is a distinct air of madness about our rulers, a madness that reminds us only too much of the monarchs of the ancien regime shortly before their beheading. Yet, what can a single person do? The despair felt when confronted by the reality of climate change is an honest appraisal of a disaster where there is no easy escape. Let us hold this despair close, let it nurture us. Honesty is always the best policy for survival.”

Two New Speaking Dates & Thoughts on Intellectual Production

Social Justice or Social War?*

Other means of War in the Time of Depoliticized Life

Monday, October 19, 8PM at New York University, New York, NY

Kimmel Center Room 912 (60 Washington Square South)

Monday, November 2, 7:30PM at Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

Hagerty Hall room 180 (1775 College Rd)

*“Social Justice or Social War?” defines a rudimentary theory of social war. It posits civil war as an underlining condition to life and the modern state as a development intended to police and conceal this. In the time where all states have lost their imaginary force of attraction, we propose that social justice is an auxiliary mechanism to “defend society.” Social war, on the other hand, is opposed to social justice as a different discourse of revolutionary change—one which has a different concept of history.

Although the talk will contribute to a refining of these terms and their deployment, it will ultimately lack a specific conclusive direction. It will hastily engage with far too many concepts but has been said to be “surprisingly coherent.” Its surprising coherence is more than likely the result of the length of the talk and/or the performativity, which was inseparable from the talk given at the University of Wisconsin on September 11. Rather, “Social Justice or Social War?” will engage with concepts, figures, historical events as devices which we will put to use to compose atonal rhythms. These rhythms, when examined, will help us collectively write a strategy. Everything before this is conjecture—of which the IEF willfully contributes.

A few more notes regarding the IEF's intellectual exercises in impotence

The gesture of the lecture cannot be separated from the discourse it happens within. Whereas the IEF has located this gesture's site of taking-place in the university, it must be noted that many of us who are taken by the IEF and by the practices of insurrection are not the loyal subjects of academia. Our less than scholarly practices follow suit. On the other hand, the gesture of the lecture, because it is the taking-place of a discourse, reveals a world within which partisans take the practice of thought and its exposition seriously (even if that means we take being irresponsible incredibly seriously). Which means: performativity can communicate thus as thus, not just thus as that. We're like, being the communism/violence we want to see in the world, or whatever.

What is concealed by the gesture of the lecture? Because it happens within multiple discourses, the grammar of critical theory may conceal the fact of civil war. Someone in Wisconsin asked, “How, after we have sort of exploded, do we not return to normal? I mean, after the chairs which caught flight have landed; and after this room, which has been torn apart, is no longer becoming torn apart; and our bodies are not encountering each others with a joyful violence. We seem to return to performing our normal roles: You as the speaker, and I among my peers as the listener? How can we stretch it out?” Can the lecture ever be profaned in such a way that is no longer recognizable as such? The lecture, the study group, the journal of strategy always also occupy a position in the economic production of intellect. Willfully practicing stupidity, and attempting to wash our hands clean of this, will not contest that position. Likewise, occupying that position—even the wrong-ass way—may do little to contest it. Like other positions one can have within capitalism, intellectual production is work. The lecture, through the framework of the speaker/listeners, conceals the way in which voyeurs are engaged in this collective process of intellectual production. However, only a practice which leaves none of these roles intact could collectively generate intellect without value. Which is to say, only once thought's potentiality for a consistency of practices is revealed (not necessarily, “realized”) can intellectual value be attacked at the point of production.

In the past, marxists had posed the process of “socialization” as a way making labor a social entity. Such a process occurs in conjunction with a progressive concept of history where the proletariat becoming a dictatorship of its class makes private entities social. The anti-globalization movement's avant-garde sought to achieve such a process within the intellectual and artistic spheres of the economy through its emphasis on reclaiming social space. At its more honest moments it would speak of “autonomy,” but there is no autonomy within global capitalism, as the self-managed factories of Argentina demonstrate. If such spheres of the economy are going to be profaned, they must become unrecognizable and be redeemed of re-semblance. Communization in this regard immediately imposes a destruction of the faculties to generate value. It is no coincidence that the university, a factory of intellectual production, refers to its material spaces and its authoritative positions as “faculties.”

Aggressive survival practices cannot be discounted. Whereas our backsides are caressed firmly by the specters of the past generating an urgent need for negation of the present, the IEF in its erotic practices and its practices of war understands the virtues of privation. We are delighted by all the headlines which make the bourgeoisie tremble and all the events where shit goes to pieces. However, we also understand the need to extend our practices by holding positions which translate into being able to share material solidarities. If any of the colleges we speak at do not immediately become occupied in that New School sort of way, no matter. We're also occupying them in another sort of way.

We'll see you on the many roads of impotenza.

The IEF does not fight*, nor do we argue, we simply hit that person with a bottle

*Well, actually...

-Liam Sionnach | IEF | Oct. 09 | The Dirty

DOOM$DAY WAR MACHINEZ | a Quip from a lil' Wildness in the Midwest

Thanks to MKE comrades for this charming report back

On September 11th 2009, a slew of miscreants from all corners of the insurrectional constellation descended on the University of Milwaukee campus for a lovely evening with the IEF's own Liam Sionnach. While being fed grapes and smoking indoors (naughty, naughty) The Institute got differently-abled on profanation, the end of time and the human strikes of our disease ridden bodies. The room may have gotten wrecked a bit, chairs may have gained flight, everyone may have shared a lick, and a speaker may have been pied. It is all a blur by this point. What is certain: some folks in Milwaukee definitely got a stern-talking-to by their landlords, we practiced a trans-geographic sharing of complicities and bodily fluids, offered the gift of enmity (served cold in bottles) to some frat boys, and of course articulated our favorite gesture; sadomasochism. Oh, and we're also probably never allowed back at a certain luxury hotel in downtown Milwaukee.

THE INSTITUTE FOR EXPERIMENTAL FREEDOM 2009 TOUR:
come for the commodities, stay for the strip-searches.

1. How does it feel to be never alone, every-so-often?

Last week in the Midwest we continued a process which can only be called “beginning again”. Either because we occupy the position of being an active minority of proletarianized life, or a profoundly bored minority of proletarianized life. We are captivated with finding, and sharing each other. Perhaps a certain textual promiscuity, and a certain seductive distance brings us together. Perhaps an invisible voice acted on us collectively, and perhaps we simply like the similar clothes, music, and inside jokes. Either way, let's not reduce what could grow and become stronger by claiming to be the insurrectional queer, power-hungry, bro'd out, mean bitchez, that we also are. But let's hold on—without forgetting where the boundaries of exclusion are, which we are setting out—and keep losing ourselves in the thresholds.

2. The Other Means of War

What would it mean to engage in methods of conflict and even combat which reveal how it is done? And yet, how could this be invisible? These are some of the challenges which face the contemporary insurrectional project. The intimate event appropriates us—makes us the technologies of whatever force it may wield. How an event is populated and practiced gives it its form. If the content of insurrectional events is defined only by the intimacy between a small group, then it is far more likely that the specialized division of labor relation which alienates us daily will be replicated. On the other hand, if we engage in an open discourse of conflict, a certain potency which is located in becoming sensitized to each other's shared desire can be lost.

Of course there is a tension between experiencing hostility (unknown, outside) with new people and place, and experiencing friendships. We are not trying to become secure, or reject the hostis—which is the foundation of all relations. However, the construction of a partisan war-machine of insurrection requires that we face, and practically answer these questions. How is the rhythm of our shared-time—the history of social war—felt beyond the confines of what happens between our bodies (communication), how is is felt as what affects us—what we are taken by? How is this achieved without a protest-media strategy? Are there voyeurs within the immediate vicinity of a given gesture of insurrection who will be seduced by our gifts? If the answer is “no,” then we must either face the fact of singularities, which happen as mere representations with affective faculties (the one-off event which sucks everything into its vortex) , and/or seek out, occupy and if we have the capacity impose new topographies which we are better suited to populate with affects (the consistency of ungovernable terrains—occupied workplaces, schools, and social spaces which generate material solidarity and portals into our worlds).

3. Dispossessed are Turning to Communism/Violence

If we are turning to communism in a world without it, it means we are immediately getting organized, collectively to improve our conditions. It means we will, one way or the other, find ourselves in combat. A crass provocation: get money and power by all means. Some still want to continue their projects which help others. Cool. Others want to be able to live and fight. Both need money, and positions which we will defend.

On the other hand, how is violence shared? How are the spaces which we inhabit combustible? This week proved two weaknesses: 1.) We are not currently positioned to attack those whose bodies have been structured as military-machines. 2.) We are still afraid to start shit (perhaps, reasonably). Quite literally, the man with dog tags is better at manning-up than we who perform tough. Perhaps reclaiming force will have to take place a different level. Other material forces who perform being tough and mean are better situated to start shit and bully. Perhaps if we are going to locate a biopolitical sadism, it must happen along side a biopolitical masochism. But who wants to get hit first? Or rather, how will we hit first?

For those of you coming to get B-A-N-A-N-A-S in PGH, we'll see you in the Thug Section. Others, perhaps we'll continue to find out if we've reached our expiration date in the Spring.

Whats another word for "The partisan War Machine of insurrection?"

“Doom$Day” —or was it “Doomsgay?”

My neck, my back, my hipbones, and my crack, still ache so much, but at least I still have my shoes. How's your ass doing?
-Liam Sionnach | IEF | '09

ps: If anyone was there and would really like a copy of the text, feel free to beg ief-southeast(at)riseup(dot)net.