The Erupting Insurrection

by Haukur Már Helgason

By one swift, decisive act, it has paralyzed Europe’s airline industries for almost a week, delayed 64 thousand flights (and counting), affecting millions of travellers, reminding a whole continent that geography and distance still exist, while lessening the airlines’ carbon footprint by an amount equal to the annual output of several smaller states combined, and possibly hindering the meagre 1% economic growth expected in the EU zone in 2010. Surely Eyjafjallajökull (“Ay! You fergot la yoghurt!” or just EJ for short) is an anarchist.

In the severely underreported student uprisings throughout California last October, one of the novelties in their published materials was the declaration, rejuvenated from the sixties, to ‘demand nothing’: occupying and paralyzing universities throughout the state the students declared they made no particular demands, no structural reforms: ‘a free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life.’ (Communiqué from an absent future” After the fall – Communiqués from Occupied California). Published February 2010). Instead, paraphrases the volcano, we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed tourists and airline workers into a declaration of war.

Now, sorry for the harsh interpretation – it was the radical students in California who spoke of war, and went surprisingly unnoticed by the global media. EJ is far more sophisticated in its approach, not saying a word, so not a word can be misinterpreted. As is quite evident from its course of action it means no harm to people. This is a precise operation, designed for maximal effect in the following three ways:

1. To bring a huge industry to standstill for as long as possible, considered good per se, by radical volcanoes, as economic growth in a capitalist system equals strengthening hierarchies, while


2. thus revealing to the general population who relies on the services involved how vulnerable it is, this system taken for granted by as all, supposedly serving our needs, economic and otherwise – laughing in the face of globalization and opening up a gap in the veil of alienation, society’s wilfully enforced ignorance of its actual truths and


3. – delaying global warming catastrophe for a day or two.

All this amounts – or so the theory motivating the volcano obviously goes – to a wake-up call.

In the face of that wake-up call, the volcano would hope that collateral damage, such as underpaid workers in Kenya, in the UK and elsewhere losing their jobs, will channel their frustrations into a demand for radical change, a system sustainable to humans and the rest of life, that would make livelihood and human dignity independent from whimsical market conditions and unsustainable means of travel.

As other anarchist activists before it, the volcano does not reveal its face – even underneath the hood of its smoke it shows only a mask, its three craters resembling a distorted version of Munch’s Scream, according to some interpreters. Having no particular face, no identifiable person or organization behind it, the volcano stays out of reach of counter-strikes or retaliation. Unlike, for example, France’s Tarnac 9, the group of young anarcho-communists who in 2008 were arrested on the basis of suspicion that they had written The Coming Insurrection (officially written by ‘the Invisible Committee’, available in English translation here) – a booklet urging action to interrupt the flows of capital more or less precisely the way EJ currently does, though never hinting at any action of such volcanic magnitude.

For those interested in events, the eruption is already far more interesting than parliament’s 3,000 page report on Iceland’s financial crisis, or even its appendix on ethics. There are those who would like to see the volcano as a mercenary mountain on the state’s payroll. They cite the fact that the Nordic heathen society’s high-priest and Sigur rós collaborator, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, did invoke a curse against the UK and Holland for the unsettled IceSave accounts, over a year ago. After the ritual he concocted this rhyme in English:

“In London town this lying clown

our land he drowns and shatters.

Gordon Brown is going down,

his good renown in tatters.”

Proponents of this theory will also find support in the fact that the €200 million losses that the ashes cause the airline industry alone – daily – already amount to approximately the whole unsettled IceSave debt. This, however, is merely so much nationalist propaganda, belittling the autonomy of independent actors and thwarting the volcano’s more radical and far-reaching agenda under a screen of natural mysticism and foreseeable over-interpretation of coincidence. No, this mountain may address all those who hear it, but it acts only in its own name, in defiance of all hierarchies and orders, a defiance underlined in the details of its calculated side-effects: deployment of arms to Afghanistan gets delayed, while soldiers on their way back home on leave make a detour on train and ferry.

The event is ongoing and remains open for interpretation. Perhaps come next week, it will not be amusing at all. Geologists tell us nothing about what lies ahead, but musicologists insist that if this piece is composed, the first two acts clearly have the structure of a prelude and there must be more to come. Behind the corner the more easily pronounceable Mt. Katla lies dormant, less of an anarchist, more of a potential Stalin, purges and all. Its eruption might mean the end of Iceland. Last time it erupted it meant the end of monarchy in France, which most of us have come to appreciate.

Not that being stuck with your family for an extra week in Tenerife is any laughing stock, let alone calling out the Navy for your rescue. – Googling “I hate Iceland” already gives 147,000 results, dwarfing “I love Iceland” and it's meagre 46,000 hits. Then again, anarchists have never really been strong in popularity contests. As of yet – unlike September 11, 2001, the last time airlines got interrupted on a comparable scale – this catastrophe has not become a deadly one, and the activist volcano shows no sign of fascist tendencies. The event remains nearly as virtual as a computer meltdown – and its potential just as real. As long as that’s the case, I feel mildly proud of my place of origin. Never mind the people or its politicians: this tectonic intersection is intelligent and daring.


"Unmarked helicopters circling the anarchist volcano - this ring a bell?"

Self-Exile & Poetry

Secessionist Outernational: Self-Exile & Poetry

from Datacide #10

“Still today I am only counting on what comes of my own openness, my eagerness to wander in search of everything, which I am confident, keeps me in mysterious communication with other open beings, as if we were suddenly called to assemble.” - André Breton

It has been the practice of groups to expel, to exercise the ‘sovereign ban’.These groups take kudos from expulsions, they rehone their position, and grow closer together. The one expelled is normally a one that troubles the group; the unconscious anxiety of the group is personified in the expulsed one. Cohesion grows in such cases because the group, based to a large extent on shared belief and an interest-consensus, can, once the anxiety is expelled, untroubeledly continue believing and idealising in the same way.

The claims to collectivity of such groups, in neglecting the unconscious dimension of its ‘hidden third’ and expelling it symbolically, fails to be fully cognisant of the creative surplus of the collectivity. This surplus, a modality of the affective charges of any ‘putting-into-relation’, is the very stuff of collective production. Ostensibly abstract, this impersonal force, when recognised, modifies the individuality of the group members, making them both object and subject. Without such an individual dispersion and internal contradiction - which is the equivalent of letting desire diffuse through the group and, overflowing its bounds, animating its practice of sociality - the group remains at the level of a collection of individuals.

Here we have the problem that afflicts groups of all sorts: the repression of the unconscious dimension and thus this disavowal of the affective charge, not only permanently thwarts the collective production of the group but, a priori, maintains the individual member as an ‘identity’ rather than as a ‘field of energy’ (circulation of affect) and fences-off the outside of the group; it demarcates a boundary. In this way the group becomes a pseudo-collectivity that adopts the stasis of an identity. Its visibility is conditioned by the irrepressible joy of belonging in the midst of an alienating society, and is sustained by the absence of the expulsees who, furthermore, become hypostatised as ‘individualists’.

These principles of non-contradiction and identity that afflict such groups, that give them a pseudo cohesion and a super-ego function, are a main cause of alienation and repression in that the ‘affective charge’, seeking a form of expression, is often subject to de facto censorship in that it can be tangential to the content and aims of the group. When a group has come together to combat the alienation of capitalist society this unconscious identitarian and cohesive effect leads to a surplus of alienation, a double alienation that is mirrored by the valorisation of the manifest sociality of the group. A value that obscures the latent labour of the affective.

These affective elements become unspeakable because the group, emotionally unaware of its unconscious dynamic and through a functional, aim-centric, use of language, lacks the verbal equipment to deal with these matters. It lacks the necessary objectivity that comes from a dispersion of individuality, a secession from identity, that allows for a de-personalisation by means of the group’s ‘hidden third’. Personal conflicts are heightened in such groups because the individual is not retroactivised as a ‘field of energy’, a cluster of emotions responding to an ‘impersonal force’, but maintained in identity. Information, as identitarian expression, takes the place of the ‘expressible’ (1).

In this way, then, there is, it seems, no scope to be alienated from a group that purports to be unalienated, that enshrines the image of communicative collaboration at its ‘heart’. To be alienated from such a group leads to a vicious feedback whereby continued belonging amounts to a passive acceptance and growing resentment; ennui transforms into a narcissism of minor differences that, fruitful in other circumstances, is exacerbated by the unconsciously competing individualities of the collective that colour the atmosphere with the odour of ‘oppressively disguised thought.’ (Gombrowicz)

But, in the midst of such groups and with a will to remain opposed-together, it seems there cannot be ‘other circumstances’. An implosion occurs in the ones whose emotional vocabulary, an unvoiced underlife, has been extended through processes of felt-contradiction. There is an in-break of repressed material that reveals the fellows as gaining a disavowed psychic sustenance from belonging ‘in-itself’. This reified sense of belonging, contiguous upon the maintenance of identitarian perspectives, maintains the group in an idealist equilibrium, a steady-state that de-charges ‘fields of energy’. The group is instituted but not instituting.

The host-group ‘wards-off its outside’ which was internally figured by the expulsed one. It ‘repeats itself without differentiation’ and encircles its own raison d’etre (ideological core) because, unresponsive to the expressible of affect, its access to the unconscious dynamic and hence to the impersonal force of its social production, does not provide the necessary nuances through which to effect a dispersion of identity (becoming-singular). Moreover, this repression leaves the ‘hidden third’ of the collective production as an abstract entity that faces it oppressively. This abstraction is unconsciously recognised as being ’outside’ the group; a source-object of fear that provokes a controlling impulse.

In these circumstances, and increasingly in the more informal groupings of today, there is, then, a growing practice of ‘self-exile’; a strategy of secession, dropping-away, from the epistemological and paranoiac oppositionists in order to overcome the recursive abstraction of ‘individuality’ and the concomitant disavowal of unconscious dynamics that are enshrined in the group (2). This ‘self-exile’ is chosen in place of what is increasingly transparent in the host-group as ‘self-exclusion’. The host-group, motivated more and more by ‘ideas’, becomes a protective vesicle that grows socially inept, de-differentiated, the more it hones down an acceptably denigrating and unenigmatic language.

The ‘self-exiled’ are those who, in the clinic-prison of the group, have experienced the dialectical swaying of ‘being’ and ‘non-being’. Not meaning ‘death’ as such, this non-being, conditioned by the affective vacuum in the group’s idea of itself as a collectivity and its increasing alienation from an ‘outside’, is felt, by means of repression of the affective, as non-being in the sense of frozen feeling (affects cease to circulate). Without this de-individualising dynamism of expressible affect and the concomitant immersion within the ostensibly abstract collective surplus (general intellect), continued belonging is felt as both a loss of the ‘group being’ of the ‘self’ and as a hardening of a ‘being-self’ in the group. Breton: “…this being must become other for himself, reject himself, condemn himself… abolish… to the profit of others in order to be reconstituted in their unity with him.” (3)

To remain transitive and poised between being and non-being, to remain potentiated in a state of becoming, to remain open to objective chance and the fortuitousness of encounter (‘surrealist’ markers of the abstract collective surplus), the self-exiled, rejected by themselves and on pain of possible denigration, leave the group whose inability to perceive, let alone articulate, the affective charge of the ‘hidden third’, means that the possibilities for collective requital and sensual appropriation of the alienated are gravely handicapped. The vacuum of relation, mediated by information and individualised through the double-reflection of personal identity and group identity, has the effect of nullifying the ‘general intellect’ as symbolised by the ‘hidden third’, and, through self-exclusion, reinforces a personalised pessimism about wider social possibility: the onus is always on the ‘self’.

The self-exiled, in leaving rather than being expelled, may have been expected to remain and articulate their critique of the group. Not only is this not possible as a result of the affective vacuum that negates the ‘expressible’ but, strategically, the self-exiled no longer wish to either affirm the discourse of the group or, more troublesomely, assume the discursive power to do so. In silently leaving, in becoming the abandoner of the group, the self-exiled ‘signify themselves as not being the source and the master of signification’; they repudiate this power in favour of a permanently instituting ‘proto-meaning’ (the expressible). Never substantified enough to remain, too emotional at times to speak, clairvoyant enough to feel the ripple of minuscule gestures, the ‘self-exiled’ embrace the abstraction of the general intellect, the surplus social product, as an enigmatic signification.

The ‘self-exiled’ find a muster-point in the Secessionist Outernational.
Communicating by means of a poetic collision, that, objectively abreactive and foreshortened, wards off the valorisation of their sociality, the Secessionist Outernational, not so much a ‘group’ but a ‘zone of proximity’, an aggregation of ‘fields of energy’, participate in the ‘unconstituted praxis’ best described by improvised musicians (4). Here the affective charge is not individualistically overcoded as a ‘libidinal organisation’ (the reduction of affectibility to personalised genital pleasure) but is enabled, by means of social-doing, to open up a field of desire and proto-meaning that is wider than the participants yet, as the ‘hidden third’, materially arising from the ‘intellect-in-general’ of their relation. In contrast to such a sensual re-appropriation of the ostensibly abstract, the abandoned group’s pursual of meaning and the means by which to become effectively active leads to ‘constituted unpraxis’ and an accumulation of ideological produce (overvoiced supra-life).

As affective dynamism, now additionally propelled by the dialectic of being and non being, creates ‘experimental positions’ of proto-meaning that correspond to the ‘expressible’ of emotional states, it becomes clear to the ‘self-exiled’ that the problem of speech in the abandoned group was one of ‘mastery’ rather than a transitive, poetic means of expression. The indentitarianism of groups, their enshrining of individuality, makes such transitive, poetic, utterances become indications of fixed, personal positions: attempted mastery. The self-exiled of the Secessionist Outernational overcome this by using the form of poetry as an objectively abreactive means of speech: cognisance is given not only to the alteration of position as an indication of affective dynamism, but to the reappropriation of the abstract generality of language – contradiction, as an individualised marker of non-coherence and failed mastery, is superseded by a form of the poetic that that enables the unspeakable to be said; intimacy unfurls from the edges of inner speech.

This ‘poetic’ aspect enables the Secessionist Outernational to maintain itself as continually constituting for it is permanently open to the outside, predominantly porous: at the level of each of the ‘self-exiled’ there is the maintenance of the permanent otherness of the psyche (the endowment of socialisation from the monadic core by means of the psychical agencies of ego, super-ego, id etc); there is an openness to the ‘tracks left by feelings’, to the affective dynamism of relation as it is creative of personae that can come to expression;
there is, in embracing language as a praxis of proto-meaning, an openness to the permanent otherness of the general intellect in which portions of individuality (combinations of psychical agency) are subsumed to become ‘anonymous capacities of affection.’ (Paresi) (5).

But the ‘poetry’ here is not of a formalistic variety, it is not a matter of bringing to expression within the confines of meter and standardised forms of sonnet. It is not even a matter of free verse. For the Secessionist Outernational the poetic form is the form of feelings-in-action, is the form of thought-affects (passion) as pre-articulations, is the form of the articulation of the enigma of the self as other, the enigma of the perpetual acentric motion of transitiveness. In this way the ‘poetic’ can be a matter of objective abreaction: the disavowed can find their ‘unvoiced underlife’ by means of an oblique refraction in a manner akin to a novelist ‘fleshing out’ a character. But with the crucial difference of being actually living conceptual personae that are not prone to ‘development’ in a milieu but to endless relational modification in mobilelieus.

This sense of poetry as an ‘emotional-volitional tension of form’ (Bakhtin) means that the poetic within the Secessionist Outernational becomes more a matter of conjoining the materiality of language with the transitiveness of the psyche. The ‘poetic’ is thus not abstracted from its utterer in some reified ‘artwork’, but becomes a ‘characterological’ aspect of the multi-contexed person, a temporary unity, a reappropriation of the abstract surplus of the ‘hidden third’. Breton: “I intended to justify and advocate more and more choice of a lyric behaviour” (6). The self-exiled, nomads in the ostensibly abstract social product of language, become congruent poet-persons involved in a raising of language from its informational utility (tendency to become ‘signal’) to its being inhabited as a polysemantic co-relational breadth (tendency to become ‘enigmatic signifier’ beyond language). The poetic in the form of the person, as human life, passes from sign-value to the invaluable.

Such a ‘poetry made by all’ is not solely comprised of stanzas and an always manifest meaning, but by unsolicited honesty, disarming frankness and semi-formed utterances. This means that the poet-person is not fixedly in an authorial position but is, at the same time, an auditor. The ‘poetic’ is thus informed by a ‘sympathetic co-experiencing’ that, with a vari-directional and historically dynamic relation to the latencies of language, helps to solicit the expressible. Attempted and unfinished expressions mean that there can be a lack of clarity and informational directness, an opaqueness that makes the utterance enigmatic. It is these very ‘enigmatic signifiers’ that need to be pursued, over time, by an openness to proto-meaning, that itself has transformational qualities: the poetic as ‘affectibility’ has the extraliterary effect of opening up ‘existential territories’.

At play here with the poetic is not a sense of an interpretation leading to an accumulation of facts (group as enterprising organisation) but a sense of proximity conduced by the unconscious of the text that is akin to a transference, a proceeding by affect rather than any logical causation. The ‘poetic’, as the inviolable invaluable, which cannot be informationalised, becomes more a matter of an ability to ‘empathise-into other states’, more a matter of the ‘desire of the other’ as it affects its auditors with the challenge of the enigma. This willing in the direction of the enigmatic and proto-meaning means that the ‘signifiers’ come to take on a radical potential: with nothing defined they have a tendency, once they are cathected, to veers towards the ‘transmental’. The poetic in this sense could be said to ‘open for the subject an access to meaning as open meaning and to signification properly speaking, as the virtually interminable putting into relation mediated by the absolute other of the psyche….’ (7).

It is this ‘absolute other’ that propels the ‘self-exiled’. The absolute other in regards to the psyche; in regards to the desire of the other; in regards to the surplus social product, the ‘hidden third’; in regards of the ‘enigmatic signifier’. The ‘absolute other’, then, is what is ostensibly abstract and what the host-groups, jettisoned by the self-exiled, are gathered together to keep at a distance and ward-off. In this light such groupings are means of protecting individualities in their identity rather than having being exposed to the ‘absolute other’ that is creative of haeccity and identity dissolution. This, to some degree, explains the continued fascination that the surrealist project continues to exert. The ‘sleeping fits’, the group analysis of dreams, was a brave attempt to bring the social surplus into play, to make its ostensible abstraction manifest. As with the surrealist project the Secessionist Outernational also puts its faith in an expanded poetics that through processes of heteronymy, and active attention towards the enigmatic signifier, enables them to re-appropriate what has been alienated from human powers by processes of individualisation set going by capitalist social relations. Of course, the confusing thing is that this all begins with the ‘unsurpassed trope of our internal murmur” (8).

(January – July 2005)

NOTES
(1) “The expressible is something that can somehow take shape and exist apart from expression”. (Voloshinov: Marxism and Philosophy of Language, p84)
(2) See Tiqqun, conscious organ of the imaginary party - “To start again means: to rally social secession/ opacity, to join/ demobilisation”. http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/09/28/1235231&mode=nested&tid=16.
(3) Breton: Communicating Vessels (p137). In relation to ‘non being’ Toni Negri speaks of the ‘edge of being’: a poise between the past-as-eternal and the yet-to-come. See Time For Revolution p 174.
(4) See, for instance, Mattin: Going Fragile. http://www.mattin.org/essays/Going_Fragile.html
(5) Luciana Paresi: Abstract Sex. These ‘anonymous’ capacities are related to phrases we have been using to describe the collectively generated surplus as a de-individualising force i.e. ‘hidden third’, ‘field of energies’ and ‘intellect-in-general’. There is a non-human element: neither being nor non-being but a dehiscence of the subject, a psychic forcefield that, to echo Andre Breton, makes humans no longer the focal point but ‘sensitive points’. See Andre Breton: Prolegomena to A Third Surrealist Manifesto. In this connection see Gellu Naum’s ‘condition of requital’ in his Zenobia novel.
(6) Breton: L’Armour Fou. See also Rene Char: “Daring to be for an instant oneself the accomplished form of the poem”.
(7) Cornelius Castoriadis: Imaginary Institution of Society (polity, p? )
(8) Gherasim Luca: The Inventor Of Love. http://www.durationpress.com/kenning/Luca.html

Merry Christmas from Athens

Announcing PARSER

P A R S E R : New Poetry & Poetics May 2007 | Issue 1 Editor: Roger Farr Advisory Editor: Reg Johanson No friend of the Standards, PARSER is a journal of poetry and poetics with a penchant for anarchism. PARSER wants to help extend our social horizon. But PARSER wants you to read PARSER first.

Writing by:
- Alice Becker-Ho

- Alfredo Bonanno

- Roger Farr

- P. Inman

- Reg Johanson

- Wolfi Landstreicher

- Dorothy Trujillo Lusk

- John McHale

- Aaron Vidaver

- Rita Wong

$10 until the end of 2007.
$12 in the future.

To:

PARSER
Box 2684
Stn Terminal
Vancouver, BC
CANADA V6B 3W8

w: http://www.parsermag.org
e: parser@shaw.ca

Anarcho-Constructivist Composition

COMPOSITION

from Anarchestra

Composition is anticipation.

In a literal sense anything put together out of a group of elements is a composition.

The generally accepted idea of musical composition is that it expresses the completed idea of a single mind (this hierarchic paradigm is essentially incompatible with the ethos of anarchism). In this sense a composer is analogous to an architect, one who anticipates the future on an abstract symbolic basis and presents a set of instructions to be realized by others. This ignores the reality that a builder may have an innate sense of structure and does not require the instructions or the symbolic language of an architect.

The traditional idea of the composer is as obsolete for anarchists as is the idea of the land baron or the pope, but the idea of a generative mind is not. Anarchism does not seek to eliminate or suppress creative original thinking, only the treatment of ideas as dicta. Ideas are welcome, but they must persuade others of their usefulness and inspire their co-operation. They are tools, not monuments. Anarchism does not seek to negate the individual, but to grow outward from individuality toward the collective through a process of inclusion. The composer idea seeks to stop the development of ideas before they reach that stage in order to limit them to what can be defined and considered as property. The commodity idea of ‘intellectual property’ is inimical to the community idea of mutual participation and responsibility (this does not mean we should let capitalism exploit our work).

[...]

_________________________________________

The assumed goal of composition is to enable a relationship with coherence through the anticipation of the future. The anticipation of future, even when it is propositional or speculative, is based on the ethos of control. This is not necessarily a bad thing, provided the goal envisioned is sought in the spirit of quest rather than conquest.

Composition need no longer be confined to anticipation. With recording it can be accumulation in a non-temporal context (i.e., the cut and paste work of samplers).

A primary distinction to be made is between music that expresses the completed idea of a single mind (basically a hierarchic concept) and music that expresses the response(s) to a suggestion of a single mind (or a group of minds) subjected to interpretation (revision, selection, opposition, consensus, etc.).

Beyond that there are an infinite number of gradations ranging from free collective improvisation through conduction -an interactive, human based version of the sampling idea- and other forms of direction (including concepts of style).

All of these methods have their strength and weaknesses. None is superior to another except in its appropriateness to the people involved. The only really viable ideal is "from each according to his ability to each according to his need". Different aspects of music engage different musicians in different ways and the goal of composition ideally is to provide opportunities for positive engagement to all who participate in it.

It may turn out that the traditional idea of the composer as a single entity will only exist in the studio (ivory tower) where technology allows overdubbing and computer generated parts. The paradigm that arose with visible notation and the printing press emphasized the constructivist and materialistic aspects of music as it devalued the spontaneous and the sensual and ignored the ideas of contribution and consensus. Defining music by what could be committed to paper – an inherently absurd idea - was also the beginning of commoditization (recording has continued the process). The great weakness of constructivism is that, to function efficiently, it seeks to limit the number and complexity of usable elements, to shoehorn sonic phenomena into definable categories and discourage the investigative examination of them. In many cases the aspects of music (pitch and duration) that can be written down are among the least significant.

The most famous professed anarchist composer is Cage, but his work seems bent on absolving himself of taking responsibility for it (chance operations) and to my mind doesn’t offer very much to build upon besides the doors he opened. As interesting and stimulating as his concepts and works are, they emphasize absence (of will, of personality, of control, even of sound –at the same time celebrating his personality) and exclusion (of common musical elements and techniques). I consider him an individual (libeterian) as opposed to a social anarchist, one who took the label for the (narcissistic) purpose of separating and distinguishing himself rather than from any sense of responsibility shared with his fellow beings. In many ways I find myself wanting to dismiss him, but I consider him (along with Cornelius Cardew, Cecil Taylor, and Pauline Oliveros) among the deepest conceptual thinkers about music in the second half of the 20th century and I think it is worthwhile to explore his body of work as long as we can avoid being seduced by its sophisms. The equation of anarchism with chance operations seems shallow and childish to me. To my mind anarchism includes and encourages the wills, desires, the contributions, and, possibly most of all, the responsibilities of everyone involved generally.

There are surely other composers who were or are anarchists, but I’m not aware of anybody who’s made a point of it, nor am I aware of any anarchist theory of musical organization that relates the structural elements directly to the social constructs we seek to live with.

. . . the composition is a powerful agent of possessive individualism in general, whilst improvisation proposes and practices a freer dynamic of human relations, however problematic.
-Edwin Prevost

To recapitulate.

Anything put together from a group of elements is a composition.

The assumed goal of composition (as a precursor of performance) is to enable a relationship with coherence through the anticipation of the future.

It will be noted that neither of these statements requires an individual composer. In the ethos of anarchism all participants are composers. The extent to which the music is pre-conceived is irrelevant so long as the pre-conceived aspects of the music are collectively generated and agreed upon. It is not necessary to dichotomize between ‘composed’ and ‘improvised’ – that distinction is artistic rather than social. The social (hierarchic) pitfall of composition results from the (unnecessary) assumption that a composition requires a single composer whose ideas are carried out by others who did not participate in the process of arriving at those ideas.

Breton On Going Postal

"The simplest surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level."

-- 2nd Manifesto of Surrealism

~

SOME TERMS

Assonance: a limited plan of action based on a conception of how, in a restricted phase of a conflict, to use effectively the available means of action to achieve a specific limited objective. Intended for use in implementing a wider strategy in a phase of the overall conflict.

Ballad: an area to which access is controlled through an entry point and limited to authorised, appropriately screened personnel and properly escorted visitors.

Couplet: a non-market mode of economic integration where goods are moved between symetrical groups.

Diction: unrestrained by convention or morality.

Foot: a minimum of defense against attempts at political or ideological recuperation by power or against repression.

Free verse: measure of disorganization or degradation in the universe.

Iamb: activities, transactions and assets, often illegal, which are not registered or otherwise acknowledged by respective state authorities.

Limerick: the system of cogs and chains by which power is transmitted from the periphery to the centre.

Line: an interruption in the train of thought perceived by the person as someone removing or taking away his thoughts.

Meter: arranging the members of a society into a pattern of superior and inferior ranks.

Pastiche: the imitating, copying or counterfeiting of products. Systematically breaching trade mark rights, patent rights, copyrights and other commercial rights.

Realism: a cage from which there is no escape.

Repetition: a delusion that the self or part of the self, part of the body, other persons, or the whole world has ceased to exist.

Sestina: traps based on control of the center or loss of control of the center.

Sonnet: the flanks of the opponent are attacked simultaneously in a pinching motion after the opponent has advanced towards the center.

Terza rima: any provision in a contract that allows one or more parties to end the contract upon the occurrence of certain events.

Tone: deliberate action aimed at weakening an enemy through subversion, obstruction, disruption, and/or destruction.

THE LANGUAGE OF THOSE IN THE KNOW

by Alice Becker-Ho
Digraphe (1995)
Translated by John McHale (London, 2001)

---

We had several points of resemblance with those other devotees of the dangerous life who had spent their time, exactly five hundred years before us, in the same city and on the same side of the river. Obviously, I cannot be compared to anyone who has mastered his art like François Villon. And I was not as irremediably engaged as he in organized crime; after all, I had not studied so hard at university. But there had been that “noble man” among my friends who was the complete equal of Régnier de Montigny, as well as many other rebels destined for bad ends; and there were the pleasures and splendour of those lost young hoodlum girls who kept us such good company in our dives and could not have been that different from the girls others had known under the names of Marion l’Idole or Catherine, Biétrix and Bellet.

-- Guy Debord, Panegyric

ONLY WITH THE CREATION of a new language did the criminals of the fifteenth century effectively organize an independent and unified practice. The term argot (brotherhood of rogues 1), the name they gave to themselves, became fused later on with their language.

This language is not simply discreet and defensive. It theorizes what is about to be done: it already is a project. It never talks for the sake of talking. For those who can understand this language, every aspect of it carries the permanent confirmation of their vision of the world. Slang is not a mere specialized jargon, nor is it a language grafted on to conventional speech. It is precisely the manifestation, as I have shown in L’Essence du Jargon 2, of an outlook exclusive to the so-called dangerous classes. If indeed “We speak as we judge, and we judge as we feel” (Alfredo Niceforo, Le Génie de l’argot, 1912), then the dangerous classes enjoy the superiority over ordinary people of having created out of nothing a speech which is artificial in form, but not arbitrary, and in which the meaning of words is divorced from the sound and image commonly attached to meaning by those languages in current use. In this way the so-called dangerous classes put both themselves and their language firmly “in the picture” [affranchi 3 in French]. The language of slang is essentially the enemy’s vernacular turned upside down, then disguised. When speech ceases to be the individual exercise of resolve and intelligence, it becomes the mere instrument of a higher power. Speech represents this power and is represented by it. Anyone then speaking this language comes to identify with it; they will talk the way it does. Thus it was only when they came into contact with those dangerous classes making their way out of the European old world that most American blacks stopped speaking the enemy’s language that, along with slavery itself, they had been learning. Slang is the complete opposite of a language spoken by slaves: it is therefore alien to all forms of ideology. Authorities everywhere know this only too well, and dread the thought of it.

Being the true speech of those in the know because they “have caught on”, slang is also the only language that names and defines itself: it goes just as well by the names of jobelin, argot, bigorne, cant, Jenish, javanais, pidgin, sabir [ex Spanish saber (to know)], or lingua franca, ladino, langue verte, etc. 4 It is in short the sum total of every criminal argot 5 whose terms, linked to the “special” skills of each “corporation”, came to enrich accordingly the body of slang in general use, by proceeding in the same frame of mind. "One slang is like another, for in slang there is a unity of thought. It merely translates the same words." 6 To talk slang is above all to be recognized by one’s own kind: in Spain the term Germanía (Spanish thieves’ cant) conveys this fraternity very precisely; moreover the Latin for brother germanus gives us the Spanish hermano.

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The dangerous classes and the representation of the executioner

In the period which first saw the emergence of the dangerous classes and their language, the executioner did not speak, he merely got on with his work. In accordance with the nature of the crime, he was the individual who variously branded, lashed, cut off the hand [poe, in medieval French], or the ear [ance], but more often than not the one who carried out the hanging [romp le suc]. In marked contrast to what subsequently obtained down through the ages, there was at first no one single executioner. Instead there were as many as were required in order to deal with the whole array of jurisdictions 7 and the numbers of people sentenced. From the very beginning the figure of the executioner was well understood as a mere executor [exécuteur des Hautes Œuvres]; this is why both the vocabulary and the spirit characteristic of slang tend to dismiss the executioner as a mere underling. He appears as the matchmaker [marieux] who organizes the marriage ceremony - the hanging - between the person condemned and the death [la camarde 8] they are to meet with, after which the gallows, and later on the guillotine, is left a widow [Veuve]. This conventional image of death draws its inspiration from the medieval “Danse macabre”. “Être de noce” [lit. to be invited to a wedding], thereafter “baiser la Veuve” [lit. to kiss the widow] both mean to be hanged. The other theme relating to death can clearly be found in the rotwelsch (German thieves’ cant) terms bebaisse gehen or baiern meaning to die or to be under sentence of death, which carry the literal meaning of “to go back home”, and are based on the Hebrew words ba’yis/ba’yit [house, home]. Out of these elements French argot would then go on to create basir [to kill], bazisseur [killer], and sbire [henchman], in addition to butte [killing] and the verb butter [to kill], the former to be found in the expressions gerbé à la butte [sentenced to death], and monter à la butte [to be guillotined].

One could compare this almost cheerful, verging on the relaxed, conception of death to an end game where on the whole the losers graciously accept defeat; thereby marking the brutal end of a life of adventure. Only with the coming of the French Revolution and the unfolding of its aftermath did loss of freedom become a punishment whose length “had to be commensurate with the gravity of the crime or offence. Dating also from this period we come across the first reformatories intended for children under the age of sixteen and for those juveniles arrested and detained at their parents’ request.” (Abbé Moreau, “Souvenirs de la Petite et de la Grande Roquette”). From that time on, the “Penitentiary” would nearly always take the place of the executioner. What the crook gained in longevity however, he lost many times over in happiness, with the “Maximum Security Wing” seeing to all that! Escape from the slammer and the “break-out” are thus abiding dreams. “At that time argot held sway over the steep little streets of Montmartre. You picked it up quickly from the rough bits of songs that managed to lend a certain mystique to military prisons and which conferred on that sombre piece of slaughterhouse equipment known as the guillotine a kind of social poetry that was very nurture to some youths … It was for having lived in just such an unreal and sensual world however that the poet François Villon nearly consigned his worthless body to the gibbet.” (Pierre Mac Orlan, “Villes”, 1927)

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Totally cleaned out: the lot of the modern mug

Those who, having demonstrated all-round zero understanding, doubtless remain oblivious to the fact that they have lost everything, are merely the latest historical incarnation of the sucker or mug [le cave, in French]. To outlaws’ way of thinking these same mugs had always been hopeless dupes. But in times gone by the world they inhabited was a more unified and more coherent place that afforded them protection from what they feared the most: those social classes dubbed dangerous. The figure of the executioner had been conjured up for their benefit and served to reassure them. Nowadays modern governments are hoping to reassure them with nothing more than the magic of words. The mere mention of democracy begets the “rule of law”. Through the agency of slang, communication took place all along at the expense of the gull and his armed representatives. By re-using slang’s methods to fit its own agenda, government plays those who still had faith in it for fools. One category amongst the dangerous classes, one moreover that in former times supplied the authorities with their executioners, has thus changed sides. Victimized anew and as submissive as ever, there is at present nobody left for mugs to turn to for protection. Those who in the past had clung so tenaciously to masters, to gallows, to high walls, to religious, academic, or scientific guarantees, in a word to solid bearings, have ended up in a shambles that has to be seen to be believed. At every turn they come up against the ever more complex machines that have replaced the guillotines [“les bois de justice”] of yore. They are baffled: such is their longing to believe in progress. For the moment however, it is these machines that conduct the business of passing judgment, chopping off, and executing. Their mission hardly stops there though: machines establish, or for that matter just as quickly modify, any amount of criteria in line with the economic and political opportunities of the moment. They get to raise or lower the thresholds of tolerance to poisons, whether in the form of alcohol or drugs, food additives, toxic gases, or other industrial flotsam. They get to count up too the number of "dead souls" in order to trumpet increases in “life expectancy”; they programme one demolition to carry out a rebuilding somewhere else, only to end up tearing it down again. We are talking about machines here that call their own blunders "natural catastrophes” and their all too modern genocides “ethnic strife”. They provide the punter with a grounding in how to speak in “politically correct” wise, how to be a “computer-assisted “ reader, or how to fuck “rubbered-up”. Questions asked by machines are met with answers they themselves have devised. “By sowing doubts and then pruning them back they make the world produce abundant crops of uncertainties and quarrels … All I can say is that you can feel from experience that so many interpretations dissipate the truth and break it up.” (Montaigne, “Essays”, Book III, chapter 13)

Forever “let down”, the mug had all the same dreamt of better days, if not heaven. He opined that fairer consideration was his due and that rewards would ever and always be showered upon him in return for no end of submission and ingenuousness. Poor sucker [daim 9].

For their part, having had “the devil and long habit as their teachers” 10, few have had to grasp quicker than outlaws the danger of a language wielded by a government and backed up by its slaves. For my own part, argot is the only thing that has enabled me with any assurance to hit upon not only the etymologies but also the exact meaning of certain words derived from argot which have passed into ordinary language in such numbers. To achieve this, all I had to do was proceed and think like the dangerous classes: with distrust and lucidity. If, as seems to be the case, a wholesale reform of slang is currently underway, it will re-emerge naturally from the process as the language of those in the know. Take it that the latter will move to denounce the sham and confusion that come with machine language, not swallow them. Given that these machines have zero knowledge of reality and regularly blow the fuses in circuits overloaded with contradictory bits of information, it will scarcely be a difficult task. As for the specialists who handle them, they will finish up the “machine’s cuckolds”, just as the executioner was at one time called the “Widow’s cuckold”.

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References

1. ach denotes brother in Hebrew and guit, rogue in Dutch - the latter derived from the German term gauner, itself a borrowing from the Hebrew ganaw [a thief].

2. Éditions Gallimard, 1994. Translated as The Essence of Jargon by John McHale (unpublished).

3. ex affranchir: to free, emancipate, to put s.o. in the picture, to give s.o. the low-down, to put s.o. in the know, to tip s.o. off, hence un(e) affranchi(e): a sussed individual.

4. The meaning of each of these words along with their etymologies can be found in my L'Essence du Jargon.

5. The history of these different forms of argot, as well as the impact they have had over time, will be the subject of a forthcoming book.

6. Alice Becker-Ho, Les Princes du Jargon, Gallimard, 1993. Translated as The Princes of Jargon by John McHale (unpublished).

7. The French word abbaye (used variously in the French slang expressions abbaye des cinq-pierres [lit. five rocks abbey] or abbaye de Saint-Pierre [Saint Peter's abbey], as well as abbaye de monte-à-rebours [up backwards abbey] or abbaye à-regret) meaning place of execution is a reference to Basilica, which originally denoted a building or seat of justice, upon whose sites churches were later erected: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church".

8. The Gypsy language verb mar means to punish or to kill; cam, to seduce or to love.

9. ex rotwelsch damian [dumm in German]: silly, stupid.

10. Cervantes, Exemplary Stories.

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This piece is also reproduced on the International Situationniste site.

Alice Becker-Ho is currently publishing Guy Debord's correspondence (Volume 3 published in January 2003 by éditions Fayard, Paris) and has published 3 books on European slangs (éditions Gallimard, Paris - English publishers for which have still to be found), as well as the In Slumberpuzzleland fables, two books of poems (the second will be out shortly), translations into French of Edgar Allan Poe (all éditions Le Temps Qu'il Fait, Cognac), and a book of photos & texts on Gypsies ("Paroles de Gitans", éditions Albin Michel, Paris).

The Question as an Instrument of Torture

This 1971 talk on langauge and power by the poet Phyllis Webb has just been made available at Radio4All. Essential listening.

ALL THE KING'S MEN

ALL THE KING'S MEN
Siutationist International 1963
Trans. Ken Knabb

The problem of language is at the heart of all the struggles between the forces striving to abolish the present alienation and those striving to maintain it. It is inseparable from the very terrain of those struggles. We live within language as within polluted air. Despite what humorists think, words do not play. Nor do they make love, as Breton thought, except in dreams. Words work — on behalf of the dominant organization of life. Yet they are not completely automated: unfortunately for the theoreticians of information, words are not in themselves “informationist”; they contain forces that can upset the most careful calculations. Words coexist with power in a relation analogous to that which proletarians (in the modern as well as the classic sense of the term) have with power. Employed by it almost full time, exploited for every sense and nonsense that can be squeezed out of them, they still remain in some sense fundamentally alien to it.

Power⁽¹⁾ presents only the falsified, official sense of words. In a manner of speaking it forces them to carry a pass, determines their place in the production process (where some of them conspicuously work overtime) and gives them their paycheck. Regarding the use of words, Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty correctly observes: “The question is which is to be master — that’s all.”⁽²⁾ He adds that he himself (a socially responsible employer in this respect) pays overtime to those he employs excessively. We should also understand the phenomenon of the insubordination of words, their desertion or open resistance (manifested in all modern writing from Baudelaire to the dadaists and Joyce), as a symptom of the general revolutionary crisis of this society.

Under the control of power, language always designates something other than authentic experience. It is precisely for this reason that a total contestation is possible. The organization of language has fallen into such confusion that the communication imposed by power is exposing itself as an imposture and a dupery. An embryonic cybernetic power is vainly trying to put language under the control of the machines it controls, in such a way that information would henceforth be the only possible communication. Even on this terrain resistances are being manifested; electronic music could be seen as an attempt (obviously limited and ambiguous) to reverse the domination by detourning machines to the benefit of language. But there is a much more general and radical opposition that is denouncing all unilateral “communication,” in the old form of art as well as in the modern form of informationism. It calls for a communication that undermines all separate power. Real communication dissolves the state.

Power lives off stolen goods. It creates nothing; it coopts. If it determined the meaning of words, there would be no poetry but only useful “information.” Opposition would be unable to express itself in language; any refusal would be nonverbal, purely lettristic. What is poetry if not the revolutionary moment of language, inseparable as such from the revolutionary moments of history and from the history of personal life?

Power’s stranglehold over language is connected to its stranglehold over the totality. Only a language that has been deprived of all immediate reference to the totality can serve as the basis for information. News⁽³⁾ is the poetry of power, the counterpoetry of law and order, the mediated falsification of what exists. Conversely, poetry must be understood as direct communication within reality and as real alteration of this reality. It is liberated language, language recovering its richness, language breaking its rigid significations and simultaneously embracing words and music, cries and gestures, painting and mathematics, facts and acts. Poetry thus depends on the richest possibilities for living and changing life at a given stage of socioeconomic structure. Needless to say, this relationship of poetry to its material base is not a subordination of one to the other, but an interaction.

Rediscovering poetry may merge with reinventing revolution, as has been demonstrated by certain phases of the Mexican, Cuban and Congolese revolutions. Outside the revolutionary periods when the masses become poets in action, small circles of poetic adventure could be considered the only places where the totality of revolution subsists, as an unrealized but close-at-hand potentiality, like the shadow of an absent personage. What we are calling poetic adventure is difficult, dangerous and never guaranteed (it is, in fact, the aggregate of behaviors that are almost impossible in a given era). One thing we can be sure of is that fake, officially tolerated poetry is no longer the poetic adventure of its era. Thus, whereas surrealism in the heyday of its assault against the oppressive order of culture and daily life could appropriately define its arsenal as “poetry without poems if necessary,” for the SI it is now a matter of a poetry necessarily without poems. What we say about poetry has nothing to do with the retarded reactionaries of some neoversification, even one based on the least antiquated modernistic forms. Realizing poetry means nothing less than simultaneously and inseparably creating events and their language.

In-group languages — those of informal groupings of young people; those that contemporary avant-garde currents develop for their internal use as they grope to define themselves; those that in previous eras were conveyed by way of objective poetic production, such as trobar clus and dolce stil nuovo⁽⁴⁾ — are more or less successful efforts to attain a direct, transparent communication, mutual recognition, mutual accord. But such efforts have been confined to small groups that were isolated in one way or another. The events and celebrations they created had to remain within the most narrow limits. One of the tasks of revolution is to federate such poetic “soviets” or communication councils in order to initiate a direct communication everywhere that will no longer need to resort to the enemy’s communication network (that is, to the language of power) and will thus be able to transform the world according to its desire.

The point is not to put poetry at the service of revolution, but to put revolution at the service of poetry. It is only in this way that revolution does not betray its own project. We don’t intend to repeat the mistake of the surrealists, who put themselves at the service of the revolution right when it had ceased to exist. Bound to the memory of a partial and rapidly crushed revolution, surrealism rapidly turned into a reformism of the spectacle, a critique of a certain form of the reigning spectacle that was carried out from within the dominant organization of that spectacle. The surrealists seem to have overlooked the fact that every internal improvement or modernization of the spectacle is translated by power into its own encoded language, to which it alone holds the key.

Every revolution has been born in poetry, has first of all been made with the force of poetry. This phenomenon continues to escape theorists of revolution — indeed, it cannot be understood if one still clings to the old conception of revolution or of poetry — but it has generally been sensed by counterrevolutionaries. Poetry terrifies them. Whenever it appears they do their best to get rid of it by every kind of exorcism, from auto-da-f� to pure stylistic research. Real poetry, which has “world enough and time,” seeks to reorient the entire world and the entire future to its own ends. As long as it lasts, its demands admit of no compromise. It brings back into play all the unsettled debts of history. Fourier and Pancho Villa, Lautr�amont and the dinamiteros of the Asturias (whose successors are now inventing new forms of strikes),⁽⁵⁾ the sailors of Kronstadt and Kiel, and all those around the world who, with us or without us, are preparing to fight for the long revolution are equally the emissaries of the new poetry.

Poetry is becoming more and more clearly the empty space, the antimatter, of consumer society, since it is not consumable (in terms of the modern criteria for a consumable object: an object that is of equivalent value for each of a mass of isolated passive consumers). Poetry is nothing when it is quoted; it needs to be detourned, brought back into play. Otherwise the study of the poetry of the past is nothing but an academic exercise. The history of poetry is only a way of running away from the poetry of history, if we understand by that phrase not the spectacular history of the rulers but the history of everyday life and its possible liberation; the history of each individual life and its realization.

We must leave no question as to the role of the “conservers” of old poetry, who increase its dissemination while the state, for quite different reasons, is eliminating illiteracy. These people are only a particular type of museum curator. A mass of poetry is naturally preserved around the world, but nowhere are there the places, the moments or the people to revive it, communicate it, use it. And there never can be except by way of d�tournement, because the understanding of past poetry has changed through losses as well as gains of knowledge; and because any time past poetry is actually rediscovered, its being placed in the context of particular events gives it a largely new meaning. In any case, a situation in which poetry is possible must not get sidetracked into trying to restore poetic failures of the past (such failures being the inverted remains of the history of poetry, transformed into successes and poetic monuments). Such a situation naturally seeks the communication and possible triumph of its own poetry.

At the same time that poetic archeology is restoring selections of past poetry, recited by specialists on LPs for the neoilliterate public created by the modern spectacle, the informationists are striving to do away with all the “redundancies” of freedom in order to simply transmit orders. The theorists of automation are explicitly aiming at producing an automatic theoretical thought by clamping down on and eliminating the variables in life as well as in language. But bones keep turning up in their cheese! Translating machines, for example, which are beginning to ensure the planetary standardization of information along with the informationist revision of previous culture, are victims of their own preestablished programming, which inevitably misses any new meaning taken on by a word, as well as its past dialectical ambivalences. Thus the life of language — which is bound up with every advance of theoretical understanding (“Ideas improve; the meaning of words participates in the improvement”) — is expelled from the mechanical field of official information. But this also means that free thought can organize itself with a secrecy that is beyond the reach of informationist police techniques. A similar point could be made about the quest for unambiguous signals and instantaneous binary classification, which is clearly linked with the existing power structure. Even in their most delirious formulations, the informationist theorists are no more than clumsy precursors of the future they have chosen, which is the same brave new world that the dominant forces of the present society are working toward — the reinforcement of the cybernetic state. They are the vassals of the lords of the technocratic feudalism that is now constituting itself. There is no innocence in their buffoonery; they are the king’s jesters.

The choice between informationism and poetry no longer has anything to do with the poetry of the past, just as no variant of what the classical revolutionary movement has become can anymore, anywhere, be considered as part of a real alternative to the prevailing organization of life. The same judgment leads us to announce the total disappearance of poetry in the old forms in which it was produced and consumed and to announce its return in effective and unexpected forms. Our era no longer has to write poetic directives; it has to carry them out.

[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]

1. The French word pouvoir can mean power in general, but it can also refer to the ruling powers, the ruling classes, the ruling system, or the particular regime in power.

2. Through the Looking Glass (chapter 6).

3. The French word information also means “news.”

4. Trobar clus: hermetic troubadour style. Dolce stil nuovo: 13th-century Italian poetic school culminating in Dante.

5. Asturias: mountainous region in northwest Spain where workers (primarily miners) carried out an extremely radical and violent insurrection in October 1934. They were referred to as dinamiteros because they often used sticks of dynamite for lack of other weapons. In the early 1960s a later generation of Asturian workers carried out a daring series of wildcat strikes against the Franco regime. On the latter movement, see Guy Debord's unpublished article "La Gr�ve asturienne" (Oeuvres, pp. 657-662).

“All the King’s Men” originally appeared in Internationale Situationniste #8 (Paris, January 1963). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.