The Anvil

All Things Are Nothing to Me is one of the latest books to emerge from the ongoing revival of interest in the work of Max Stirner. The title is taken from the opening line of the first English translation of Stirner’s The Unique and its Property, which can also be translated literally but more prosaically as “I have based my affair on nothing.” In his introduction, the author, Jacob Blumenfeld, says that his intention is to “reconstruct” Stirner’s unique philosophy¹ and show a “contemporary, critical, and useful Stirner”. This already makes the book ambitious, as Stirner is all too often reduced to merely a meme or a punchline by both his detractors and his champions. Blumenfeld acknowledges this, considering and rejecting Stirner as a precursor to the troll culture of the alt-right as well as a would-be accommodator of the neoliberal status quo. Instead, he prefers to see Stirner as a kindred spirit of the notorious Invisible Committee, as both offer critiques of ideology and alienation. As he wraps up his introduction, Blumenfeld says that in the first chapter of his book he “discover[s] something interesting, namely, that one does not need the concept of the ‘ego’ to understand Stirner at all. In fact, this might have been the biggest stumbling block toward understanding his philosophy.”

It’s curious that Blumenfeld calls this a discovery, when anyone capable of reading German could tell you that Stirner never used the word “ego” in his book, only “egoist” and “egoism.” The confused picture of Stirner as a philosopher of “the ego” mostly stems from the mistranslation of Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum into English as The Ego and its Own. Blumenfeld acknowledges the mistranslation (unfortunately the majority of his book was written before Wolfi Landstreicher’s new, much more accurate translation became available), but continues to make references to the ego throughout the text anyway.

This “discovery” highlights what is by far one of the most frustrating things about Blumenfeld’s book: his habit of writing as if he’s being heretically original even if he’s only saying what people interested in Stirner have been saying since at least the 1990s and very likely earlier. For instance, later in the book he spends a few pages hemming and hawing about whether Stirner actually believed in Hegel’s racial (and racist) philosophy of history or was parodying it, eventually ruling in favor of the latter, calling it one of Stirner’s “allegories.” I feel that this should be obvious to anyone familiar with Stirner’s background or the decent secondary literature. Even if this is simply a stylistic choice, it’s tiring, and undermines the genuinely original aspects of Blumenfeld’s work.

In chapter one, “Stirner’s Revenge,” Blumenfeld touches on Stirner’s relationship with Hegel, in a more in-depth way than the usual biographical bullet points about Stirner’s time at university and among “the Free” Young Hegelians. Those who (like me) haven’t read much Hegel will probably find this information interesting and useful. Blumenfeld then presents several “versions” of Stirner from various sources: Stirner the Young Hegelian, Stirner the petty bourgeois, Stirner the nihilist, existentialist, post-structuralist, and a dozen other Stirners. For Blumenfeld, what mars all these Stirners is historicism, which he defines as “the tendency to reduce one’s work (or thought) to a necessary result of a socioeconomic, political, and philosophical aggregate which one can call ‘historical context’ or ‘age.’” Instead, Blumenfeld wants to fashion a non-historicist practical and ethical Stirner. Blumenfeld reads Stirner as a practical philosopher in the same way that Deleuze reads Spinoza: “a…. philosopher…. who develops a whole grammar for living which fears no death,” placing him and Spinoza alongside Nietzsche and Levinas as the developers of a “non-moralist ethics.” It is this practical, ethical Stirner that Blumenfeld seeks to develop throughout the book, reading Stirner “not only at a point in time, but as an interruption of time, as someone whose thought defiantly evades time.”

Blumenfeld wishes, very appropriately, to consume and, he says, desecrate Stirner. He spends the remainder of the chapter examining how exactly to go about this, proposing “translations” of typical Stirnerian terms. For example, he brilliantly glosses property as expropriation and unique as nonidentical. Less successfully, he equates ownness with responsibility, which is fairly nonsensical, and union with commune, an interpretation he owes to the heavy influence of The Invisible Committee, one I would only be prepared to accept with some extremely careful qualifications.

Blumenfeld nicely points out the difficulty of expressing what is ultimately nonsymbolic and nonconceptual in symbolic and conceptual terms. Stirner had to use language to express himself, but the words that he used were arrows pointing to his target, not the target itself; as Blumenfeld says, “the content exceeds the form.” Blumenfeld also takes the time to clarify the very important differences between Stirner and Fichte, with Fichte’s absolute I that “is everything” standing in sharp contrast to Stirner’s transitory I that “destroys everything.”

Returning to issues of language, Blumenfeld is unhappy with Stirner’s use of the term “egoist,” considering it an invitation for misunderstanding and mistranslating “unique” as “ego.” He seems to either not realize or not care that Stirner was being deliberately provocative, even though he quotes Stirner’s admission late in his book that the “egoist” is just the old spook, the devil, under a new, secular name. Anarchist, he says, would be a better label, without pointing out that the only person calling himself that at the time was Proudhon, for whom moralism, as Stirner noted, served as a surrogate religion. He finally seems to join Juliet and ask, What’s in a name? “For who needs an identity when one has nothing left to identify?”

The next chapter explores the structure and logic of Stirner’s work, particularly Stirner’s use of triads and subtriads to organize his arguments; in effect, using Hegelian structures in order to advance his own anti- or post-Hegelian point. Something that is a major strength for the entire text but that is particularly useful here: the original German words are often printed in brackets next to their English translations, which helps readers see how how Stirner exploited words with related etymologies or formal similarities to make points.

There are a number of charts throughout this chapter that annoyed me on my first read through, but when revisiting it for this review I actually found them to be very helpful. For example, Blumenfeld illustrates what he calls Stirner’s “quasi-dialectic” of alienation, in which owned property (“one’s power over an idea, relation, thing;” keep this definition in mind throughout the book) becomes alienated from its creator and ultimately reified into alienated property or alienty, like so:

[Owner (property) > Property (owner)] > Alienty

Stirner goes on to use more or less this same formula with different components throughout his book, and Blumenfeld interestingly points out that Karl Marx, hostile as he was to Stirner, also used a similar logic in Capital when describing commodity fetishism:

[Labor (commodity) > Commodity (labor)] > Commodity-Fetish

In the remainder of the chapter, Blumenfeld points out Stirner’s use of parody, satire, allegory, and humor throughout his book, especially in the context of his apparent dialectically progressive view of historical, individual, and political development. While exploring Stirner’s attacks against political liberalism, social liberalism (socialism or communism), and humane liberalism (humanism), he notes in a few very amusing paragraphs that all three of these are still with us. Political liberalism is now called “democracy” and is the framework of most political discourse in the world today. Socialism is still the driving force between most attempts at establishing an alternative to capitalism, and humanism is the basis of international human rights discourse. I was particularly interested in the way Blumenfeld addressed Stirner’s critique of socialism. Stirner largely agreed with the communists in their criticisms of the bourgeois order; however, he recognized that these critiques were coming from a deficient standpoint: the standpoint of labor. As Stirner observed:

“That the Communist sees in you the man, the brother, is only the Sunday side of Communism [so conceived]. According to the work-day side he does not by any means take you as man simply, but as human laborer or laboring man. The first view has in it the liberal principle; in the second, illiberality is concealed. If you were a ‘lazy-bones,’ he would not indeed fail to recognize the man in you, but would endeavor to cleanse him as a ‘lazy man’ from laziness and to convert you to the faith that labor is man’s ‘destiny and calling’.”

Labor has become the standpoint of critique, but not the object of critique. The critique of the standpoint of labor is now considered a contemporary development, says Blumenfeld, citing Baudrillard and Moishe Postone. I think that if he was willing to dig a little more he would find that it isn’t such a contemporary development after all², but it’s hard to object when he says “Stirner is then already our contemporary.”

In the third and longest chapter, “My Stirner,” the author gives his own reading of Stirner’s text, “articulated not in the order Stirner himself laid out, but as I reconstruct it through the text, perhaps even despite it.” The sections elucidating key aspects of Stirner’s thought such as ownness, property, union, and insurrection are Blumenfeld at his strongest and a genuine joy to read. These alone would make the book worth reading, and I prefer to let them speak for themselves rather than to spend a large portion of this review dissecting them. Even where the occasional lapse in rigor (or gratuitous quote from a David Lynch movie) shines through, it’s not enough to be very distracting.

Unfortunately, his attempts to put Stirner in a dialogue with other thinkers are also scattered throughout this chapter, drawing all-too-often tenuous connections between Stirner and Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, and Gustav Landauer. In the introduction, he says that he does this in order to “sharpen the argument,” but most of these digressions, in my opinion, confuse more than they clarify. The two strongpoints are the sections on Spinoza and Nietzsche.

Blumenfeld uses Spinoza, mentioned earlier as a practical and ethical philosopher in the same vein as Stirner, in an attempt to show that Stirner’s “individualism” is “an ontological statement about what there is, not a moral statement about individual persons.” Spinoza, says Blumenfeld, helps divorce the meaning of singular from the meaning of individual by tying the meaning of singular – the identity of an individual – to action and effect. “An individual does not have an identity except in its relation to a series of causes and effects which are determined by other individuals, which themselves have no identity except in their relation to a series of causes and effects, and so on ad infinitum…. How can many things be one individual, and how can many individuals be a singular thing? Through their composition in forming a single effect, whether or not their individual causes are completely different.” This “dialogue” between Stirner and Spinoza produces something fresh and useful.

Whether Nietzsche was influenced by Stirner has remained an open question since the 1890s. Certainly many people have taken it for granted that he was, some even accusing Nietzsche of plagiarism, and in many books on anarchist theory and history Stirner and Nietzsche are referred to as if they were conjoined twins. Others have dismissed the idea out of hand. Blumenfeld takes a fairly neutral approach, admitting that the question is still “up in the air,” even if elsewhere in the book he appears to forget this. He still touches on many similarities between the two: Stirner’s emphasis on the use and abuse of property as consistent with Nietzsche’s On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, the using or burning up of life, and mutual advocacy of a type of autonomous self-mastery. Both were outspoken critics of the socialism of their day, though for different reasons. Stirner’s critiques of what he calls social liberalism or communism are aimed mainly at the utopian socialism of the 1840s, not actual revolts of the poor and exploited. Nietzsche saw what Blumenfeld calls “the actual socialist movements” as poisoned at the root by slave morality; he provides a lengthy quotation criticizing socialism as nothing more than a means of agitation employed by weak individualism, the “most modest stage of the will to power.” The socialist “does not oppose [the state or the church] as a person, but only as an individual….” Though I personally found this section too brief, before he concludes Blumenfeld offers a memorably-phrased summation of the differences between Stirner and Nietzsche:

“While Nietzsche’s individual gives birth to gods, Stirner’s I consumes them. This is perhaps the greatest difference between Stirner and Nietzsche. Stirner eats gods, dissolving their potency and using their power for himself. Nietzsche births gods, creating new ones beyond himself that one day will exceed him as well.”

Consciously or not, Blumenfeld here echoes the attempts of figures such as James L Walker, Enzo Martucci, and even the Christian theologian JN Figgis to clarify the differences between Stirner and Nietzsche’s approach. Unfortunately, he hardly develops this point at all before moving on.³

Oddly, with the exception of Landauer and possibly Foucault, Blumenfeld makes no effort in these digressions to explore the impact of Stirner’s thought on those influenced by him more directly and explicitly. Blumenfeld presents Landauer’s anarchism as some sort of hodgepodge of Stirner and the Kabbalah, which he regards as essential to understanding Landauer, even though the article he quotes, “Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism,” was published long before Landauer expressed any interest in Kabbalah. He goes on to say that for Landauer, demanding, wanting, hoping for new forms of freedom (as opposed to acting and doing) was “too Christian.” This would have surprised Landauer, whose writings are filled with references to Christianity; he was heavily influenced by figures in the Christian mystical tradition such as Meister Eckhart. Blumenfeld goes on to quote Landauer’s declaration that an anarchist is someone who realizes “the way to Heaven is narrow,” which is taken from an esoteric reading of the Gospel of Matthew. Landauer’s eventual break with Stirner goes unmentioned, as does Nietzsche’s significant influence. Blumenfeld also seems to treat Landauer’s anarchism as synonymous with communism, even though Landauer was not a communist. Bearing all this heavily in mind, Blumenfeld’s treatment of Landauer’s views still make the section worth reading. It at least partially succeeds in showing us ways to “consume Stirner without letting his thinking get stale.” The misrepresentations, however, make me wonder if Blumenfeld has done the same thing to the other thinkers explored throughout the chapter, especially the ones I’m less familiar with.

Blumenfeld concludes his book by putting Stirner in a dialogue with Karl Marx, usually treated as the main villain of Stirner’s story even though Marx himself was content to leave his massive, unpublished diatribe against Stirner “to the gnawing criticism of the rodents.” Blumenfeld explores the possible influence of Stirner on Marx and Engels’ development of the materialist conception of history and presents a series of quotations showing Marx’s most “Stirnerist” moments. How faithfully this represents the “real” Marx is a moot point; this chapter could have easily been titled “My Marx” as a counterpoint to chapter three’s “My Stirner.” Blumenfeld’s formula “Stirner’s egoism is Marx’s communism seen from the first-person singular perspective” is bound to be challenging, if not outrageous, to more than a few people. Blumenfeld praises the short-lived Bay Area pro-situ group For Ourselves, who in their most famous tract, The Right to be Greedy, observed that “The essence of communism is egoism; the essence of egoism is communism. This is the world-changing secret which the world at large still keeps from itself.” Bob Black, in his preface to the pamphlet, lamented that “For Ourselves didn’t try to Marxize Stirner as it Stirnerized Marx: then we might have a better sense of the level at which it just might be possible to harmonize the two great revolutionary amoralists.” Blumenfeld’s book goes a long way toward “Marxizing” Stirner, though I would have to disagree with him when he says “the ‘secret’ of communist egoism has not been taken up since – neither by communists nor individualists, Marxists nor anarchists.” Whether they use the term egoist or not, I feel that this “secret” has indeed been taken up by many post-leftists, ultraleftists, “type three” anarchists, some communizers, and so on. As Blumenfeld concludes, he characterizes the proletariat, in its role as the class of negation, as a creative nothing alongside Stirner’s unique. As the unique both negates and realizes property, the proletariat negates and realizes capital, which amounts to the same activities – insurrection and expropriation. I have no objection to this, though I think the conclusion could be reached without Blumenfeld’s heavy reliance on Marxian categories and analysis.

As far as its goal of reconstructing a contemporary, critical, and useful Stirner, the book is successful in spite of its shortcomings, though the reconstructed Stirner is certainly Blumenfeld’s Stirner. Each reader will have to decide how much they wish to appropriate as they construct their own. It’s refreshing to read a Stirner-focused book that neither deliberately misrepresents nor uncritically accepts his ideas. While at times frustrating, the book is never boring, and I highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in Stirner, especially for those also interested in communization theory. Even people who have been grappling with Stirner’s work and its implications for quite some time will find new insights, new challenges, and , one hopes, new weapons on reading it.

1 Some Stirner enthusiasts (notably Jason McQuinn and Wolfi Landstreicher) have questioned the classification of Stirner as a philosopher, saying Stirner’s logic followed to its conclusion necessarily leads to the refusal of philosophy. For the sake of readability and a desire to deal with Blumenfeld’s book on its own terms, I use the words “philosopher”and “philosophy”when he does.

2 For instance, Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy, William Morris’s “Useful Work vs Useless Toil,”or the writings of Charles Fourier.

3 For more thorough explorations of the Stirner/Nietzsche relationship, see Welsh’s Max Stirner’s Dialectical Egoism and Nishitani’s The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism.

The pamphlet Betrayal was recommended by someone as a good reading on something… I don’t remember what: abuse, or rape, or rape culture, so I read it, as I like to keep up with what people are saying about this topic. And as I read, I found myself furiously typing up responses on sticky notes throughout the pdf. Here I formalize and cohere those notes, for all the breathless hordes waiting to read what I think of a pamphlet that I now find came out about ten years ago. Late again.

Some Background:

First, whatever cred I have in my analysis comes from working weekly for almost fifteen years on a battered woman’s hotline (which is what it was called back then, I’m sure there’s better language now); being involved in many, many situations among anarchists and friends and anarchist friends who were being abused or abusing or both; having an affinity group about the topic and from that writing a zine that never got much play (we were mostly older folks, and not active on social media), but that I still think is one of the better readings for anarchists; reading dozens of books on rape and domestic/intimate violence–between same sex couples as well as het ones–, and thinking critically about what practical solutions there might be to real life problems (which anarchists almost never have the resources to address as we would like, even if/when we know what that is)¹.

Second, I am an anarchist. I don’t support laws, I don’t support reified hierarchies, I don’t like it when people try to represent other people, especially for anything like “their own good.” Rape and abuse are deeply personal and subjective experiences. While it can be important and empowering to find commonalities with other people who have lived through hardship, that frequently comes at the cost of hiding or ignoring how our experiences are different from those of the people we’re trying to bond with.

The combination I bring of real world experience, stringently anarchist ideas, and interest in the topic (as well as a willingness to occasionally write about it) seems to be rare. So, I started reading this pamphlet with some skepticism, not because I knew anything about the authors, but because there is a lot of verbiage in general about abuse of various sorts, and most of it seems lethally simplistic, if not manipulative, useless, and/or malign.

Mixed Messages:

What I leave this pamphlet with is a strong sense of how confused the authors seem to be about how to address this topic. This could always be a function of writing skills, or collective writing process, or my own stylistic differences from the authors, but I read the essay as having strong internal conflicts.

The most significant instance of this is probably the overall tone of decisiveness and clarity, which conflicts with the occasional acknowledgment that everyone’s experience will differ, and the lack of any actual suggestions for practically dealing with abuse (I use the word abuse as an umbrella term that includes the more specific rape).

Here are a few examples of the general tone and/or universalizing language:

1. the survivor gets to determine everything, “survivor’s autonomy” (according to the authors, the correct response to a survivor) means that whatever they say goes. (More on this later…)

2. with the possible exception of doing what a survivor wants, everything is or could be a manifestation of rape culture (the definition they use is so broad that it’s hard to imagine any interaction between people as outside of rape culture, which might be fine as far as it goes, but gives no guidance for what or how to do things better than we do them now.) If everything can be interpreted as an aspect of oppression, then no one can do anything, we’re all paralyzed, and there is no point to even writing pamphlets like this. The out that the authors give, the one thing that is safe to do, is whatever the survivor wants, which puts a phenomenal weight on survivors, and isolates them as somehow different from non-survivors, putting them on pedestals from which the only direction is down. (Again, more on this in a later section.) I agree with the authors that something I would call rape culture (or sexism, or patriarchy) is involved in every interaction (as are most of the -isms), but their attempt to foist the responsibility for addressing that onto someone else, rather than acknowledging that we all have to make our best choices and decisions all the time, is where we strongly part ways.

3. their definition of apologist: Those who, through action or inaction, seek to uphold either the power of a perpetrator(s) and/or the disempowerment of a survivor(s), thus reproducing Rape Culture. Since there are multiple reasons why someone might uphold the power of a perpetrator or the disempowerment of a survivor, not to mention the extremely common case of it not being clear what is actually going on (in other words, who is what), and/or survivors having conflicting desires and requests, just to start the extensive list of complicating factors, this definition is so broad and takes so much for granted that it is useful only as a justification for treating people badly.

4. Perhaps it is not the silence of survivors, but of those around them, which is truly revealing. With no one to say otherwise, a survivor can only assume that they will be given the same treatment as every other survivor before them. Really? Every other survivor?

In contrast, here is some acknowledgment of specifics:

1. We feel insulted and embarrassed that we have to constantly point out that we aren’t speaking on behalf of all survivors, as though that were even possible.

2. We also wanted to recognize that people of all identities, from all walks of life, can be both survivors or perpetrators, or even both at the same time.

3. There are surely survivors whose experiences will seemingly contradict the arguments made here. But of course the examples cited throughout this text are not meant to be exhaustive or all encompassing. We do not see our own experiences as exemplary of the experiences of all survivors, or even most survivors.

4. But all we’re talking about are our own experiences, a topic on which we are all experts.

So it seems clear that they’re trying to ground their analysis in their own experience, but that they have fallen into the common trap of universalizing, which is so tempting when we are trying to convince people who we suspect won’t or don’t believe us, a frequent problem with talking about abuse, which, again, is both extremely common and extremely subjective.

Clarity and Definitions:

I appreciate that Betrayal starts out with a glossary, not because the definitions are good, but because they make it scintillatingly clear how broad and therefore almost meaningless their definitions are. There is no better or more important example than the definition for the central premise of the pamphlet: Rape Culture–A culture that seeks to excuse, condone, normalize, and encourage interpersonal violence. Since they use the word culture in the definition, clearly they are trying to define rape. In Jargon to Watch Out For, I mentioned the danger of using words like rape (or lynch) to de-mystify and broaden people’s understandings (my most generous reading of the practice), because it also trivializes and devalues the word(s). In other words, if rape is the same as any kind of violence, then there is no reason to have the word rape. While it is totally valid to have differing opinions about what rape means, to be distinguishable from other words for abuse or violence or attack, it has to have some significant characteristics that are historical, cross-cultural, physical, and sexual.

While in today’s culture strong words, words with deep emotional content, get pushed into doing labor for ever-broadening ripples of meaning, that ends in essays like Betrayal, in which the words that mean the most become diffused and so confusing that they no longer mean anything. I recognize that I am bucking the modern trend here. Perhaps the current trends in language will result in new words that carry the particular weight that rape has had in the past. But what the shifts mean in this moment is that people are confused, dismissive, and outraged, far more than they need to be, and certainly more than is helpful for people working with the actual experience and ramifications of violent sexual assault.

I appreciated the authors’ frustration with things like “trigger warnings,” which is a tactic that is used against us (and against informed conversations about difficult topics) as often as it actually avoids upsetting someone in the middle of dealing with something. The authors trouble concepts like “safety” (defined in the loaded way that it’s used these days), and expertise, and I fully support being critical of, or occasionally rejecting, both or either.

But then they say things like “…we’re not there yet… Our words hold the tremendous potential to do harm… we must take care when we speak, so as to not become inadvertent allies of the forces we mean to oppose.”

The authors express frustration with the concept that information will free us, even if they’re not sure where to go with that. “For instance, the need for good consent practices becomes confused with the belief that informing people about consent will transform our communities, as though rape were the result of ignorance and misinformation, rather than deeply entrenched structures of power. Strategies that anarchists have adopted, such as the accountability process, more often than not fail to address the interpersonal violence in our midst.” It has also been my experience that accountability processes usually aren’t that helpful. I think that’s because people expect too much of them and also have conflicting goals for them (assisted, perhaps, by the high standards implied by pamphlets like Betrayed). On the other hand, accountability processes are an effort to address the problems we have outside of a legal process that anarchists don’t believe in and don’t want to replicate. Not saying that makes them work, but it does make them worthwhile efforts, something to keep working on (especially if our only other option is going back to the cops, or becoming cops ourselves). The aspect of consent workshops that I do find valuable, however limited, is how they serve to teach people a) some common patterns, b) some words for those patterns, and c) a shared vocabulary, at least for the participants in that workshop.

The survivor gets to define everything…

Really, because this is such a common response for those who feel like they have to make a policy to address really different situations, this stance deserves its own essay. But for here, I will just list a few problems with this response. (And here I am also simplifying the conversation by leaving aside the extremely common situations where abuse is murky, complicated, different from just one person hurting another person.)

First, I absolutely agree that one of the biggest issues with someone who has been in an abusive relationship (including a single instance, but especially multiple and/or long-lasting ones) is the diminished or lacking sense of autonomy, or respect for or trust in one’s own capacity. And renewing or encouraging that sense, respect, trust, is one of the first things that supporters and survivors need. It is also true that survivors are angry, and appropriately so.

However, insisting that survivors get anything they want, that their desires are always valid and should always be catered to, is like insisting that someone who’s been in a hospital with broken legs recover by running a marathon.

It is denying the subjectivity and specificity of every individual’s experience, it is denying that people have mixed motivations, it can even be a way to infantilize the survivor; sometimes people stay in abusive relationships for some sound reasons (in other words, sometimes even abusive relationships have both good and bad aspects to them, and assuming they’re only bad denies the survivor’s assessment of their situation).

My second, less-but-still important point, is a tactical one. If we have knee jerk reactions to accusations of abuse, then we are setting ourselves up to be played by hostile actors. The state is fully capable of accusing anyone of anything, in order to destabilize networks and relationships. We can’t stop them from doing that, but we can refuse to be predictable, the kind of predictable encouraged by policies that universalize.

Being flexible, paying attention to the actual situations, personalities, power dynamics, etc that we’re confronted with is hard. It means that we have to take into account our own biases, the specifics of situations that we might not have (or ever get) good information about, and we might only ever be able to be slightly less crappy than we are now. So of course policies that are clear and simple are extremely tempting. And just as dangerous.

Rape Culture:

If I had to define Rape Culture, I would say it is a set of assumptions and expectations that allow, underlie, and strengthen the belief that some groups of people are the sexual prey of a different group of people. This is obviously a foundational concept to our current culture, and I agree with the authors that we are all complicit in it, if to various degrees at different times. And of course that includes survivors, who are not exempt from the culture just because they’re the most obvious victims of it. The premise that the worst sufferer of oppression has the most valid critique of that oppression, is Maoist, and in this case supposes that any of us are not sufferers of rape culture, which I reject (although of course some experiences are much harder and/or more obvious than others). While as a woman I am more likely to be raped, and to fear being raped, the behaviors that men are socially constrained to are as brutally dehumanizing (arguably sometimes more so). In other words, this culture is bad for all of us, and I most value writings that reflect that. That means that no one is automatically trustworthy on the topic of abuse, which is hard to deal with and increases the complications, but is no less true for that.

Conclusion:

My overall take away from this reading is a sense of doom and urgency, with the only suggested recourse of putting way too much authority into the hands of survivors, aka people who have either been through or are in the middle of an extremely difficult experience(s).

Pros: The attempt to grapple with what they call Rape Culture: something that is frequently left undefined, and that is big and amorphous, contradictory and complicated. The acknowledgment–at least in words, if not in spirit–that people’s experiences differ, and that each situation should be judged on its own merits. Their clarity about the emotions they bring to the piece: anger, frustration, and bitterness, which we can surely all empathize with. The fact that the authors are people with different histories of the topic, and they acknowledge that. And again, it’s helpful that they explain what they can of their terms and biases, given that so many people come to the topic of abuse from such different places, and frequently express diametrically opposed things using the same words, which adds more confusion than clarity.

Suggestions:

For people who want to write something on this or other important and complicated topics, here are some suggestions that I think would’ve helped this pamphlet:

a. be clear about what you’ve read or experienced that you’re responding to. If readings, list them in a bibliography. Consider referring to specific sentences that are helpful or terrible. If experiences, no need to name names, obviously, but telling actual stories is very clarifying.

b. if you’re involving different perspectives, consider breaking up the piece so that individual voices get the room to say what they think separately, rather than smooshing different perspectives into the same paragraphs.

c. if you’re responding to a really specific place, and/or set of circumstances, consider saying that, with or without details, to be clear that you are not making universal(ist) statements.

d. the broader and more complicated your criticism is, the more significant it is to offer concrete examples, because otherwise it is either impossible to see a way out, or the people who most need the criticism you offer will find it easy to assume you’re not talking about them (or both).

1Anarchist-friendly options could be a crowd of people to follow someone around to make sure that they don’t contact or harass the other person, therapy sessions of various sorts (group and/or individual), support groups for either or both (or all) of the parties concerned, living spaces and/or employment far from each other, and so on. These are usually only partially available, if at all. And using what is available is complicated (almost always, though not always) by conflicting feelings of love and fury and grief and revenge and fear on various sides.

Now that the controversy and indignation over Kanye West’s early May comment has been forgotten and replaced by a dozen other moral outrages, each evidently so important for fine-tuning the ethics of a society that doesn’t actually change, I want to return to his assertion that four hundred years of slavery was “a choice”. I would argue—not out of any desire to play a role in a spectacle of controversy, one that has long since expired, but out of genuine conviction—that Kanye was right about one thing, and wrong about another.

To be clear, I think Kanye is one part hack and one part provocateur, but my opinion holds very little water. Exactly zero of my friends habitually come to me for my knowledge on pop culture or rap. So let’s move on to what was false about his statement. In a consumerist, comfort-driven society, the word “choice” suggests an effortless and even facile decision. Such a word minimizes the brutality of slavery and invisibilizes the resistance. In fact, Native and African peoples engaged in constant, multiform, heroic, and often bloody resistance against the regime of slavery in North America for the entirety of its 400 year history. Progressive whites and institutions like the New York Times that rushed to condemn Kanye and win cookies have a consistent position of recognizing the brutality of the regime of chattel slavery, but only as a way to overshadow subsequent forms of racism and exploitation, from which they directly or indirectly benefit. Nor have they done very much to rescue the history of resistance against slavery, given that such resistance breaks the narrative monopoly of nonviolence that has been mandatory since the Civil Rights Era, and de-centers the benevolent State as guarantor of rights and freedom. It’s also problematic that Africans in America continued their resistance into Reconstruction, often rejecting the northern wage regime in the same terms they had rejected chattel slavery.

And as a lesser historical quibble, it’s worth pointing out that Kanye’s emphasis on the 400 years that slavery continued, as though the longevity of an oppressive system were evidence of its popularity, is misplaced. Oppressive systems generate conflicts that undermine them, and some seek to forestall this mounting pressure through systems of reward, amelioration, and recuperation, while others hold no illusions and try to stay together through uninhibited use of repression and terrorism. The Roman slave system, based on aggressive conquest, torture, mass terrorism, and sometimes genocide, lasted for considerably longer than 400 years.

In the end, though, these are questions of insinuation and misplaced argumentation. Kanye’s central affirmation, that slavery is a choice, is one hundred percent correct. Slavery is always a choice. The fact that plantation owners and the rest of the ruling class exercised a whole range of terroristic methods to force the enslaved into compliance does not mean that they determined the entire range of choices that enslaved people had, and this is an important distinction.

We can link this distinction to the crucial imperative of the Existentialists, that all life is and must be a choice, that we must consider suicide as our right and our constant guarantor of emancipation, and if we choose not to use it, then we should embrace life as a positive choice, rather than just accept it as the absence of other choices. Tangential to this philosophical reframing is the historical fact that suicide has often been a form of resistance to totalitarian regimes: the masters need us alive, or they need to use our deaths to keep the living in line. If we reappropriate death, we rob them of one of their most vicious weapons.

We can also consider the dialectic of the Master and Slave, elaborated by Hegel and expanded upon by Stirner and Nietzsche. These philosophers were not talking about choice as an easy affair, like taking one product or another off the shelf of a supermarket. Supermarkets didn’t exist back then, no, not even internet shopping existed back then. But they did correctly recognize that the master and the slave are interlocking roles; they require and they reproduce one another. In the end, tyranny only works if people submit to it, and all submission manifests as a choice. Perhaps this is the ugliest aspect of the torture and terrorism that is used to achieve domination. But it may also be the key to liberation.

Recognizing the presence of our own will on the other side of the table from us, amongst our enemies, the moment we sign our unconditional surrender, is paramount to the question of resistance. Only by liberating our will, by wresting back our own volition from the system that would dominate us—only, in a word, by choosing—can we ever speak of freedom. Thus, it is vital to anyone interested in freedom to recognize that, yes, domination is a choice.

Unknown reader, I despise bad faith writings, but I must admit that I have tendered you a trap. Sartre, Hegel, Nietzsche, is this dude serious? Is anyone still that clueless in the 21^st century? I know that some of you are thinking, these are all white men, they have nothing valid to say about slavery. This Alex Gorrion is an out of touch racist for even citing them in such a context. Others were going a step further, wondering if I, too, am a white man. Perhaps you recognized that “Gorrión” is a word in Spanish, but not a common last name. You may even be subconsciously frustrated that Alex is an androgynous name. Curse such ambiguity! If only everyone were clearly labeled. Meanwhile, a couple, the truly stupid among you, are thinking, Wasn’t Nietzsche a fascist? I’m afraid I don’t have Alexander Reid Ross’ number, but surely there’s a hotline somewhere you can call to report me.

But oops, look at me. I got my notes all out of order. I meant to start with this quote:

“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”

Yup. That quote you’ve almost certainly sent out in an email or posted on your Facebook wall at some point in your life. By Frederick Douglass. Philosopher, abolitionist, freedom fighter. Hero, who lived under, escaped from, and spent the rest of his life fighting against, slavery. Saying, quite eloquently, that we either choose to submit to slavery or we choose to resist. In fact, he goes significantly further than Kanye, saying that the degree to which we will be oppressed is an inverse function of the degree to which we choose to resist.

Preceding the Existentialists by a good century, he also said, commenting on resistance:

Hence, my friends, every mother who, like Margaret Garner, plunges a knife into the bosom of her infant to save it from the hell of our Christian slavery, should be held and honored as a benefactress. Every fugitive from slavery who, like the noble William Thomas at Wilkes Barre, prefers to perish in a river made red by his own blood to submission to the hell hounds who were hunting and shooting him should be esteemed as a glorious martyr, worthy to be held in grateful memory by our people. The fugitive Horace, at Mechanicsburgh, Ohio, the other day, who taught the slave catchers from Kentucky that it was safer to arrest white men than to arrest him, did a most excellent service to our cause. Parker and his noble band of fifteen at Christiana, who defended themselves from the kidnappers with prayers and pistols, are entitled to the honor of making the first successful resistance to the Fugitive Slave Bill. But for that resistance, and the rescue of Jerry and Shadrack, the man hunters would have hunted our hills and valleys here with the same freedom with which they now hunt their own dismal swamps.

There was an important lesson in the conduct of that noble Krooman in New York the other day, who, supposing that the American Christians were about to enslave him, betook himself to the masthead and with knife in hand said he would cut his throat before he would be made a slave. Joseph Cinque, on the deck of the Amistad, did that which should make his name dear to us. He bore nature’s burning protest against slavery.

(Also, notice how he trolls his New England audience, repeatedly linking Christianity with slavery.)

Here we can learn several things. The most paltry—though the most relevant to the absurd controversies that fill our shallow lives in this most pitiful of decades—is that identity is not existence. A white woman can never know the experiences of black slavery, but only because one person can never know the experiences of another. There are certainly clusters of commonality and long flattened plains of difference, but there are no essential and impassable barriers between tidily defined groups of people. Someone’s identity category does not mean that they have nothing valid to say on topics that are potentially relevant to everyone. The fact that we were taught for centuries that only property-owning white men had anything important to say does not mean the opposite is true (though in the current iteration, the class marker—the only one that actually refers to someone’s choices in life—is notably absent).

It also does not mean that we should expect Kanye to have anything worthwhile to say about slavery, although maybe he can surprise us. Maybe, just maybe, someone’s experiences and choices in life are more important than the boxes we put them in, whether these are the evil and antiquated Boxes of Oppression, or the new and improved, sweeter-smelling Boxes of Intersectionality and Movement-Building. Power is everywhere, and privilege aside, no one is free unless they choose to be free.

This was a recurring theme of Frederick Douglass’ 1857 speech in Canandaigua, quoted above. The principal target of his speech, alongside the slave hunters, were white progressives. These white progressives wanted abolition without black people taking a leading role in the movement. And they wanted emancipation without insurrection. In fact, such “Garrisonians” believed that “the insurrectionary movements of the slaves were […] prejudicial to their cause.” It was in response to such people, such hypocritical allies, that Douglass found it so important to make the argument that submission to the yoke was a choice, and that refusal and bloody resistance were also choices – choices to be celebrated. Liberation wouldn’t come from enlightened progressives, and it wouldn’t be doled out by the state. “If there is no struggle there is no progress,” he said.

This may come as a shock to the Facebook generation, but struggle does not mean getting offended by stupid comments that breach the etiquette of polite society. Struggle means taking risks and staking out unpopular positions that allow us to win back ground from the structures of centralized power.

The difference between a victim and a survivor is agency. The difference between blame and responsibility is that one is useful for explaining away why society is the way it is, and the other is useful for changing it. We are always responsible for our lives and how we respond to the shitty things society does to us.

More than 150 years have passed, but Douglass’ words are still relevant today, when the rebellions of Oakland, Ferguson, and Baltimore have been drowned out in the NGO and social media framework of Black Lives Matter (a useful sentiment with a mediatic bent), when the Democratic Party is mobilizing people to put all their struggles aside and pray for another Obama.

Nowadays, explicit racism is already non-hegemonic. Roseanne will get canceled when the star makes an openly racist comment, and even drug companies will chime in as defenders of anti-racist sensibilities. Meanwhile, COPS, which has done far more to advance the cause of white supremacy than Roseanne ever has, has just entered its 31^st season. All they have to do to stay on air is to edit out any time one of the officers on camera uses the N word. Back in the ’90s, perhaps not being a racist in the public eye just meant having a good lawyer. In the internet age, it means having a good editor. In any case, Roseanne explicitly voiced a racist stereotype that is more subtly and constantly reproduced by COPS, a stereotype that is directly related to police, judges, and juries treating black people more violently, whether shooting them down or locking them up for life. And it is a stereotype that works best when it is subliminal.

Ignoring the heroic resistance and all the brutality that the government and the plantation system used to impose slavery is extremely hurtful. But there are those who profited and continue to profit off the ways that white supremacy and obligatory labor were adapted after the Civil War, and these people and institutions were there in sheep’s clothing together with all the rest, condemning Kanye’s reckless comment. Surely, what they found most controversial about it is that it suggests that we are ultimately responsible for achieving our freedom.

A continuation of “For the Love of God”

Elaborating an idea that was left mentioned but unexplored in the previous essay, we wish to outline some central arguments of our belief that Western science or Enlightenment rationalism constitutes a mythical worldview, a state religion, and a productive modality, which is to say, a worldshaper. While it is true that all religions are worldshapers, since understanding is one of the first forms of shaping, by being integrally connected to capitalism Western science is the most powerful worldshaper to date; far from neutral, it is a most potent machine. Not only do we argue the religious nature of science, we also assert that it is a direct ideological descendant of Christianity, and while the ascendance of Enlightenment rationalism constituted a rupture with Church power and doctrine, we would qualify this as an evolutionary rupture, incurring no more breakage or damage to Church structures and thinking than was strictly necessary for Science to gain its independence and make a qualitative leap as the hegemonic worldshaper, as the butterfly must break the chrysalis.

Mere Empiricism

From the outset we find it necessary to make a crucial distinction between Enlightenment rationalism, a category that contains nearly all the attributes people wish to communicate when they refer to “science,” and the empirical method, which rationalism’s coreligionists would have us believe is the pure essence and extent of real science, a method unencumbered by worldview.

In rejecting Science we do not reject the empirical method, which we consider a useful but severely limited way of gaining knowledge; rather we reject all of Western science’s dark matter, all the elements it claims not to possess. We can use the empirical method without believing in Science just like we can appreciate a cathedral without being Catholic or use fire or wheels without being animists (as were the probable inventors of those tools). In fact, the comparison is faulty, given that Enlightenment thinkers were not the sole nor the first inventors of empiricism, just as Johannes Gutenberg was not the sole nor the first inventor of the printing press. Experimentation is widespread in human history, and in many cultures it has taken on methodical forms.

Because scientists from the “hard” branches have studied neither discourse, nor symbols, nor logic, they tend to be unaware when they are speaking metaphorically, and often confuse fact with fiction (to be fair I should point out that this problem, which I had grasped but could not articulate, was first elucidated to me by a PhD candidate of the humanities). Believers in Science will generally assert that Science itself is nothing more than empiricism. This is balderdash. We enumerate below a whole host of religious elements of the rationalist worldview and characteristics that the Enlightenment uncritically inherited from Christianity. But first, it would be good to point out a chief limitation of empiricism itself. This element can be summed up as the following non-falsifiable article of faith: “believe only what you can see.” Such a belief is wholly ignorant of the fact, now empirically proven, that observation changes what is being observed, and it also predisposes us to a knowledge of aliens rather than a knowledge of self, relationships, or fields.

Leaving behind positivism and the faith in one kind of knowledge alone, we would state that “only what can be observed and tested counts as empirical knowledge.” The implication is that there are many other kinds of knowledge, a recognition unknown to men of “Science,” who have chosen to name their doctrine, simply and presumptuously, “Knowledge”—in Latin of course, suggesting an entire other train of baggage coming along on tracks clearly laid down by the Catholic church.

Objectivity

While we can appreciate a limited but significant validity in empiricism, we must attack objectivity wholeheartedly as a philosophically and empirically preposterous idea, as well as a morally disturbed way of looking at the world. Nevermind the insistence that contradiction or paradox constitutes a logical fallacy (which in some cultures would be viewed as a sign of a simplistic immaturity), the belief that there exists a complete, internally aligned, finite set of facts to describe every situation implies a worldview screaming for an absent god. All facts are processed knowledge resulting from personal involvement in a situation, guided by a specific cultural and historical framing as well as individual motivations. Regardless of whether a falling tree makes noise in an empty forest, how someone understands a forest and what features of it they decide to, or are even able to, measure, are all subjectively determined factors. There are no facts without personhood, and the tendency to try to alienate the facts from the producers of those facts not only trains people in a non-ecstatic disembodied view of their own lives, it also suggests dishonesty as well as an extreme discomfort with one’s place in the world. In a world not ruled by Science, psychologists would be speaking about “objectivity neurosis” rather than “oppositional defiance disorder.”

Empirically and philosophically speaking, objectivity is a concept that has been thoroughly problematized, if not to say discredited; nonetheless it continues to make the rounds and play a central role in shaping people’s worldview (a dynamic that we will see pop up a number of times throughout this essay). It is now a well produced and difficult to deny fact that observation always changes that which is observed.

This holds true across the disciplines, from the thermometer slightly changing the temperature of the matter it is inserted into, to the velocity of one object being relative to the velocity of the object from which it is being observed, to people changing their behavior, even pandering to the scientist’s expectations, when being observed by an anthropologist or sociologist. This boils down to a truism that should, at least philosophically, hold great weight: it is impossible to know the world without us.

In terms of physics, it is hard to talk about objective velocity and position because space is not a neutral, static field of fixed coordinates against which objects can be measured; in fact on a number of levels even the firm distinction between object and space is illusory, stemming from a human (or at least Western) preference for seeing things and not seeing the field that contains them.

And in terms of knowledge production focusing on other humans, we can take a moment to mock medical studies (the medical industry, ahem, profession, will be a favorite whipping boy of this article). The supposedly passive subjects in medical studies are engaged in the study for specific reasons opaque to the researchers who are ostensibly in control; they know how to give the researchers what they want, and even to play them. In many cases, they are more able professionals than the researchers themselves. And if we are to believe that an uncontrolled “placebo effect,” purely psychological in terms of Science’s mind-body dualism, can corrupt the results of a study, what about the psychological effects of living for several days inside a research facility, under artificial lights, an altered diet and daily routine, and constant observation, not to mention the tapping of bodily fluids? The objectivity and “control” in a medical study is a convenient lie, an industry convention designed to produce credibility, which is nothing other than an appearance.

As for statistics, the ultimate in objective information, anyone who cares to knows how easily statistics can be cooked and manipulated, at the moment of presentation, of analysis, or even at the moment of data intake. Which is not to say, relativistically, that all statistics are meaningless or equally valid; only that they can never be honestly used as anything more than one of many forms of knowledge, nor do they convey that chimera, objective truth.

And though scientists are not always directly involved in the production of the following discourse, the pedantic idea of objectivity that is a cornerstone of the news media only functions in a society that holds Science as sacred. The journalistic hoax that allows an infinity of perspectives to be silenced so as to present “both sides” of a story, and their refusal to educate viewers about the invisibilized questions of framing, can only fly for a public that still believes that objective information exists. It would probably not be exaggerated to view this hoax as a cover-up. If people realized that the best that can be hoped for (and not even in a pessimistic sense) is multi-subjective knowledge, they would not constantly have to devalue and suppress their own subjective knowledge, which is to say their life experiences, in the search for a superior yet unattainable objective knowledge. And someone who suppresses their own viewpoint is easier to control.

Heresy

Additionally, before we enumerate rationalism’s myths and religious features, it would also do to touch on a middle area: knowledge that is validated by the empirical method, but marginalized or obscured by the acting priests of Science. We can refer to this field as heresy, an exploration conducted within the terminology and cosmology of the faith, rather than external to it, but one that contradicts the interests of those who hold power over the faith.

To validate our terminological comparison to heresy within the Christian paradigm, we can consider the Anabaptists. As with all heretics of their era, they were also true Christians. They used the objective material and tools of the Church, namely the reading of Scripture, to subvert the unspoken goal of the Church institution, which was Power, the accumulation of which its heir Science has realized to a far greater extent and in a more dissimulated, innocent fashion. And just as the Anabaptists were marginalized once their ability to contest the Church exercise of power was violently eliminated, so too are heretical forms of Science marginalized, though the mechanisms of marginalization are quite different, owing in part to modern media technologies and the universalization of literacy, and in part to the functioning of research grants.

Gaia theory, the Kropotkinian view of evolution, and Reclusian theorizations in geography are three examples of heresy in the rationalist paradigm. Articulated by trained scientists with a scientific terminology, compatible with systems theory and other contemporary theories that are given more credence, modifiable in the face of empirical testing so as to separate them from pseudo-science; nonetheless they all have been effectively marginalized. The latter two, theorized by anarchists who won great praise in their day, have been largely erased from the history books, only starting to make a reappearance today, whereas the former has been marginalized primarily through derision. Rather than being subjected to scrutiny, it is affixed with an aura of mysticism (granted, the name helps) enough to keep away research funders and scientists concerned about their careers. Simultaneously, the police on multiple continents wage a fierce and bloody war, under the rubric of antiterrorism, against anyone who would attach the Gaia theory worldview to a social force (in other words, radical environmentalists who see life as a planetary quality, and the earth as a living system that can only be protected holistically). As much as the skeptics would insist that these two maneuvers in the current war on heresy are separate—the derision and the repression—we must not forget that the police today, like most other professions, conduct themselves scientifically, and that they generally do not attack social groups granted legitimacy by other powerful institutions.

A fact published by Silvia Federici illustrates the link between the enthusiastic explorations of science and of the police; Francis Bacon, the father of empiricism, was also the Attorney General for the British Crown. He conducted political repression for the State, becoming involved in the interrogation and torture of subjects, an activity that perhaps expanded his understanding of the methodical acquisition of knowledge. And even though today, given centuries of complexification, the ecologist and the police investigator, both scientifically trained, are not the same person, it is hard to ignore the community of interests they work for. One is employed by Exxon to carry out investigations that will either raise doubts about global warming or open up new product lines for “clean energy,” and the other has a “domestic terrorism” assignment that was created after political lobbying by Exxon in the face of a direct action campaign against a pipeline. Or perhaps his job post was indirectly created by Weyerhauser, or Monsanto, or Huntingdon Life Sciences, but in that case one only need go a level higher, to find that both companies use the same bank.

Mythical Inheritance

One of the prime hand-me-downs that is pervasive in Enlightenment rationalism is the tension between the material and the ideal, which is perhaps the definitional tension of Western civilization, apparent in Plato, apparent in Christianity, and apparent in Science. Although each of these paradigms has seized on somewhat different resolutions to the tension, the dichotomy itself is peculiar, arbitrary in the way that all cultural values are arbitrary.

Science pretends to resolve the tension by producing a dead universe (a philosophical projection that Science as a worldshaper may be close to achieving). The ideal or the spirit has been abolished, assumed to be a fiction of the material world, which in rationalist terms is the only world (almost an inversion of Manichaeism, which is curious given the fury with which the medieval Church attacked the followers of Mani). Scientists still are not any closer to furnishing ultimate explanations of consciousness, life, or creation—though their “I don’t know” has gotten fascinatingly more detailed—and they continuously have to return to their relationship with religion, their explanations of the power of the mind, the placebo effect, reports of altered consciousness among people who experienced temporary death, and so on. This wouldn’t be a problem if Science did not pretend to be an absolute system of knowledge. As far as answers are concerned, Science is much better at cobbling them together than most other systems of knowledge, but the weight of its pretension to absoluteness causes it to stumble painfully over these few details, again and again, that it still cannot smooth down.

It is worth noting that, even though today, pre-Enlightenment Christianity is portrayed (in anachronistic terms) as fanciful and mystical, in fact Christianity took many important steps towards the dead universe of Enlightenment rationalism. Notably, Christianity succeeded in enclosing the sacred, which had once been a commons. The heresies that the Church attacked most violently were precisely those heresies that claimed that everyone could talk to God without priests as an intermediary. The Church was founded on the erection of barriers between common people and the sacred. What’s more, Christianity was a notably skeptical religion for its day, discussing doctrine and evidence with a high premium on logic, method, and objectivity. The chief difference is that the primary materials they operated on in their theoretical laboratories were not observations of the world around them, but Scripture; nonetheless Church scholars regularly debated with vigour what stories, traditions, and documents were fraudulent rather than accepting any tall tale placed before them.

True, the Catholic Church certified a great many miracles in order to canonize their saints, but their actions must be compared with what came before them, not what came after. Catholicism constituted a much less miraculous universe than the pagan one that had preceded it, a universe in which miracles could not be commonly experienced and proclaimed, but had to be granted institutional recognition. Moreover, the honoring of sainthood was a necessary Catholic concession to the paganism it worked hard to supplant. Much of the opprobrium reserved by Protestantism and then rationalism for the Catholic Church was directed at its worldly compromises with a decentralized spiritual practice that, by the 17^th century, had already been stamped out. It is no coincidence that the countries where the witch burnings were most thorough and the bloodiest forms of Protestantism most active would also be the cradles of scientific rationalism.

Nor is it a coincidence that many of the early men of science were monks or trained ecclesiasts, such as Copernicus, Mendel, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Georges Lemaitre, Nicolas Steno, and many more, while others like Linnaeus were educated for the priesthood before branching off into other fields of study.

Science has gone one further, abolishing the sacred sphere that the Church had enclosed and placed beyond easy access. Nonetheless, it not only suffers this absence, it continues to produce a world ruled by abstraction, often to a neurotic degree. Far from solved, the tension between matter and spirit it inherited from Christianity remains alive in Science.

We can also fault Science for its proliferation of simplified myths. Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, articulates perfectly how our scientific society is based on anthropocentric myths about evolution. Ask anyone to explain the evolution of life, and they will tell you a story that starts with single-celled organisms and ends with humankind, the pinnacle of progress. Scientists have an easy out, for they can always claim that this is not really a factually rigorous or “objective” explanation of evolution, and they can’t be blamed for other people’s ignorance. What they can’t explain is why that myth has always been reproduced at a far greater frequency than any empirically accurate rendition of the evolution tale, and often issues from the mouths of trained scientists themselves.

In fact, practitioners of Science are far more guilty of this simplification process than their predecessors. With the Christians, the simplified myths tend to involve simply glossing over contradictions. It is my impression that most Christians don’t know that the Bible is actually full of contradictions, or that, for example, Genesis actually contains multiple creation stories that differ on important details. With Science, however, the mythical simplifications tend to be far more crass, often flying in the face of empirical evidence in order to articulate a myth that is calming or convenient to the social order. Examples abound, from the already cited evolution myth that depicts a hierarchical progression culminating in homo sapiens, to apologia for nuclear energy, to essentialist justifications for traditional gender relations. Frustratingly, such myths are hard to challenge, because scientists are not usually instructed in the nuances of symbolic communication, and thus do not recognize a myth if it slaps them in the face (on the contrary, they tend to operate in the Christian realm of truth, taking their own narratives as objective, and those of other religions as preposterous absurdities). If effectively confronted, any of these myths can be conveniently jettisoned as pseudo-science, but an explanation is never offered as to why such myths are so often produced by scientists themselves, and why opportunities are systematically generated for their distribution.

Because Science is operating in a much more complicated textual terrain than Scripture, and because of the attendant professionalism, no scientist has a global picture, the way an erudite Biblical scholar might have a global picture of his respective textual terrain. In other words, scientists inevitably have to address aspects of empirical knowledge that are outside their field of expertise. Their vision of other fields is often fed to them by the same mass media that take the fall for being the propagators of pseudo-science. But what we are dealing with is something systematic. In a knowledge system that is far too complex for any one mind to appreciate all of it, or even a tenth of it, the mechanisms by which knowledge is simplified for the non-specialists, and by which a global portrayal of the knowledge is produced, must be analyzed as a structural part of that knowledge system. Western science, however, dodges the bullet on this one by avoiding holistic analysis of its methodology. Against such a laughably broad claim as “Science produces a mythical view of evolution,” the institutional body need only trot out an expert on, say, the evolution of color-perception among insects, to give a suitably detailed description of evolutionary processes and thus deny responsibility for the inaccuracies of pop science. But the pop science and the mechanisms that produce it are an integral part of Science itself.

In the most charitable analysis, individual scientists or scientific institutions (because of course it is inappropriate to speak of them as a cabal, the recognition of individual differences and distances being important, especially if it can prevent outsiders from developing a systemic analysis) would do well to analyze this enduring failure to communicate. Why are so many inaccurate narratives and so much misinformation distributed and reproduced, long after the advent of the Age of Reason? No doubt, politicians or television can be blamed, but any sincere skeptic cannot help but to see the way these mythical narratives are structurally reinforced, and the way they are beneficial to power-holders in a hierarchical society.

The structural component is important, and reveals other forms of Christian heritage. Similar to the medieval church, the advancement of Western science is accomplished by professionals who are patronized by financial and territorial powers, free to research and debate within the informal but very real boundaries established by patronage, while bringing no empowerment or enlightenment to the masses, only instructions. After all, the average citizen of a modern, scientific country gains no real tools for understanding or influencing the world around them. On the contrary, they are consigned to believing their doctor or the scientists who quality control the products they consume (a frequently foolish and sometimes even fatal mistake), and gleaning simplified versions of larger truths from copies of National Geographic or a productive half-hour spent watching the Discovery Channel.

Like the Church hierarchy, the hierarchy of scientific tenures is not a meritocracy as they would like to believe. One encounters an endless number of nincompoops with PhDs. And while we may find academic, peer-reviewed journals to be an invaluable resource for research, as well as a useful vehicle for the production and evaluation of empirical knowledge (this is of course a meek understatement), it is not infrequently that one comes across authors in such journals who are total hacks incapable of marshaling facts or analyzing their own data; and the only reason they were published is because they boasted a fancy piece of paper and a prestigious post.

And while that nebulous network we can ironically refer to as Science is not as nepotistic as the one that, with more precision, we can refer to metonymically as the Church—although tell that to the Harvard Admissions Board—entry into the club and ascendance in its ranks is determined at least as much by class considerations, dexterousness at university politics, alignment with other power structures, and success in publishing and receiving funding (which means selling to a market) as it is by merit or ability. We personally know of an intelligent scientist and excellent professor who was prevented from getting tenure in her department simply because her politics differed from those of the department chair.

Such personal anecdotes are hardly scientific and can’t be taken as solid proof of anything, of course, but the day the professionals publish an empirical study revealing once and for all how many of their colleagues are total idiots, perhaps we can give up on our rude, country mouse ways and stick to The Facts rather than bewildering readers with romantic little jaunts through Storyland. In fact, this absence of data reveals an important point: scientific institutions will not produce knowledge that is not useful to the exercise of power. They would only conduct and publish a study revealing how many accredited scientists were airheads if there were some institutional pressure to reform admissions processes; in the meantime, such studies are useless because they would serve to discredit the institutions.

Science, like Christianity in the Middle Ages, is the custodian of collective memory. Whereas before it was only clerics who recorded the history of society, now nearly all primary research is conducted by trained scientists (social and other). Subsequently, the masses may do with this data what we will, but the questions of what forgotten epochs or aspects of history will be opened up to us and from what angle they will be mined are decided entirely by professional researchers.

Another artifact of Christian inheritance is the progressive, unilinear view of time that rationalism has strongly favored. This was the dominant Christian temporality once the Gnostics were defeated around the 5^th century and while since Einstein it no longer holds water in physics and has been challenged in recent decades in many of the social sciences, the myth of progress is still firmly entrenched. Examples include the evolution myth already discussed, in which humans follow chimpanzees, or the long dominant and still taught anthropological framework that has states following chiefdoms following tribes following bands, another story with no basis in fact. In his excellent research, Stephen Jay Gould documents a number of scientific blunders among linguists and others who assumed that the simple must be followed by the complex, as well as an abundance of examples from the natural and social sciences demonstrating the non-progressive multilineality of evolution.

Another prejudice Enlightenment rationalism inherited from Christianity is the belief in a unitary cause. Just as Thomas Aquinas based his proof for the existence of God on the non-falsifiable assumption that existence needed a unitary, original cause, quantum physicists continue to perfect Grand Unified Theories in order to come closer to a “theory of everything.” And in other fields, scientists cleave to Ockham’s Razor, a prejudice towards the simplest explanation (developed by a Franciscan friar no less). And while Ockham’s Razor is clearly useful, and a necessary complement to falsifiability, it can also accustom thinkers to blind themselves to complexity, or to see causation and change occurring in unilinear chains rather than as dynamic equilibria shifting across a field.

Enlightenment rationalism directly inherited Christianity’s zeal for speaking in the name of nature; in fact as it reached maturation Science directly contested the ability of the Church to speak for the natural world, usurping that throne for itself. Just as Christianity in certain moments declared homosexuality, sex out of wedlock, working on Sunday, or going naked unnatural, Enlightenment rationalism began to justify its own social values through a particular characterization of the natural world. This new world they produced, both discursively and to an increasing extent socio-economically, is a mechanical and hierarchical world. Natural patterns were described as “laws,” originally assumed to have been drafted by a clockmaker God. This latter figure, embarrassing for later scientists, quietly disappeared, but His clocklike universe and laws remain. Living bodies continue to be characterized as machines, and with their typical obtuseness the proponents of this view generally do not know if they are speaking literally or metaphorically.

Perhaps the most important element shared by Christianity and Science is their pathologically immature fear of death. A large part of scientific production is designed to seek everlasting life for individuals (those who can afford the treatments, of course) and for the species. Nevermind that scientists claim to speak for the natural world and in nature species die out; humanity must survive. Does Science, therefore, think to change the productive processes it has given rise to, since they are the greatest current threat to human survival? Of course not. These processes must be accelerated so that humankind can colonize Mars before we destroy the biosphere, colonize other solar systems before our sun dies, and in the meantime set up a planetary defense system should any asteroids come too close. Scientists evidently cannot get over themselves and accept that everybody dies.

Why is our species more important than all the others, and more important than the inorganic processes of the universe? The only possible justification for getting ourselves, at the cost of all others, off the planet is, “because we can.” If that is the ultimate ethic of our civilization, it is only fair that it be applied not only to scientists but also to their opponents. We can hope the luddites and primitivists take note. Anything that can be done, must be done. Any scientist that can be killed, should be. Why not? It’s not like there’s anything, in the grand scheme of things, to lose.

Therefore, any supporter of Western science and in particular the project to send human life out into the stars should recognize that Ted Kaczynski and more recently ITS in Mexico were absolutely right in assassinating scientists. They had the power to do it, therefore it was right. But if, perhaps, they feel reluctant to place their lives in the hands of such a mercenary ethos, maybe, just maybe, it’s because their only real morality is the belief that everything they do is right. Not so different from the Christians in the end, are they?

Partial Knowledge

As we have stated earlier, Western science constitutes a knowledge system. The knowledge it produces is frequently valid, up until the point it claims to be absolute. Since it is very difficult to think outside of a paradigm, it might be useful to review the kinds of knowledge that Science is predisposed to produce. This will further reveal the mythical, religious nature of rationalism. And in case our position is unclear, we must insist that there is absolutely nothing wrong with myths—on the contrary humans cannot live without myths—unless they are myths that claim to be objective truths. Rationalism, like any other cosmovision, is spiritual at its core, but on this point we will take sides to argue that the spirituality of Enlightenment rationalism is fundamentally sick, corrupted, alienated, authoritarian, ecocidal, patriarchal, and sociopathic.

Given its background in Christianity and platonic philosophy, Science is predisposed to produce the following types of knowledge:

–The charting of ahistorical genealogies (as in the classification of species not according to their role or relation with other species, to name one of many possible organizational schema, but according to their presumed genetic descendance; perhaps it is not unreasonable to see in this a marked Old Testament influence);

–An awareness of alienated units (swallowing—until recently uncritically—the Enlightenment concept of the individual, along with other sovereigns like the nation, scientists have overwhelmingly favored an analysis of discrete bodies rather than of fields, fluxes, or interconnections, which is akin to analyzing the ocean as a large collection of waves);

–The development of mathematics as the language of nature (revealing something approaching a kabbalist mysticism, rather than simply understanding numerical relations as one of multiple ways to describe the world, examples abound of scientists and mathematicians talking about numerical relations comprising a secret language behind the façade of the physical world, even as a sort of key to decoding existence; fractals enthusiasts promote this thinking with particular frequency);

–The articulation of mechanical relationships (as opposed to reciprocal or dynamic relationships: what is overwhelmingly interesting for Science is not to discover how to maintain or effect states of balance that foster well-being, but how to achieve reproducibility and control, isolating operative factors so that a certain input will always produce the desired output);

–Discoveries resulting from divisionism, or the search for pure elements that cannot be divided or cut (in the popular parlance, the search for the “building blocks” of life, matter, the universe, etc., which belies a rather simplistic view of how things are constructed, as well as a zeal to identify component elements so that reality can be reconfigured).

What other kinds of knowledge are there, and what is wrong with the types of knowledge enumerated above? After all, as of the 20^th century Science can also boast a knowledge of field dynamics, dynamic equilibrium, and chaotic systems. Give them enough time, and our boys in labcoats will discover it all, right?

Naturally it is hard to talk about what we don’t know or haven’t been able to discover, and perhaps even harder to reveal the presence of a lens when our whole lives we have been trained to look only at the object, and from the same perspective no less. Objectivity is an extremely pervasive, subtle philosophy specifically because it trains its adepts to believe that the only meaningful differences are, well, objective. If they are aware of the existence of, for example, ecosystems, they are unlikely to recognize that another culture understands ecosystems better or possesses knowledge that the rationalists do not, especially if that other culture has no quantitative studies to demonstrate their knowledge. It will be hard for them to grasp how much perspective, emphasis, and mythical framing can affect knowledge. If both knowledge systems perceive the same objective facts, that wolves eat deer and deer eat plants and plants feed off the soil and the sun, then in objective terms a food chain as a theoretical heuristic lacks nothing that another knowledge system might contain, even though it puts all the attention on discrete agents rather than the living field constituted by the dynamic relationships between them, and therefore leads to a number of disastrous misunderstandings about ecosystems (remember the Cane Toad!).

Nonetheless, we will try our best to reveal what is lacking, similar to how astronomers must discover black holes by looking at the things around them.

Quantum physics and Cartesian geometry may be a good place to start. Just as Cartesian dualism remains embedded in Enlightenment rationalism, the Cartesian geometry of flat planes and right angles remains integral to the scientific worldview, even though it has been invalidated by the principle of relativity (whereas the determinism of classical science up to and including general relativity has been contradicted by the uncertainty of quantum mechanics). If space itself is not a neutral, static phenomenon, something as stable and happy as a square or a triangle can be nothing but an illusion or a convenient lie. (This is a part of Science’s mythical simplification, elements of the worldview that it cannot actually defend, but that it nonetheless perpetuates, through mechanisms that will be dishonestly chalked up to “pop science” if ever called to account.)

Nonetheless, it is useful to train people to think in terms of Cartesian geometry, because the discipline has been extremely active in enclosing and dividing land or rationally governing construction through blueprints (as Deleuze and Guattari have written, blueprints are not required even for the construction of complex buildings, unless the construction process needs to be subordinated to an external and rational authority).

It would be easy to say that this whole line of argument is flawed, since it was scientists themselves (Einstein and the like) who discovered relativity and revealed the shortcomings of Cartesian geometry. However, well over a thousand years earlier, Daoists and Buddhists were already promoting a worldview that clashed with Cartesian geometry but was largely compatible with the discoveries of quantum physics. We reference Einstein because it is the only way to get the faithful to listen; believers in Science refuse to recognize outside sources. Quoting the Dao De Jing to back up a certain worldview would be about as effective as quoting the Quran to convince a Christian that a part of their doctrine is flawed.

But the empirical method, one might argue, should not be abandoned. Scientists cannot go chasing down every last traditional spirituality as the basis for its worldview. Scientists had to pass through the fallacies of Cartesian geometry in order to arrive at relativity, because they could not have discovered quantum physics or field dynamics without prior discoveries, adequate microscopes, and so forth. Is this credible? Maybe not. The concept of atoms comes from the ancient Greeks, who lacked microscopes. Yet the concept fit with their worldview. Were they really intuitive, or is it just a coincidence? Or is it possible that atoms do not objectively exist, that they are just one of multiple ways of understanding the composition of things? But I have seen atoms, some readers will no doubt react, referring to the drawings and diagrams in any high school physics textbook, just as students a century earlier were treated to pictorial renditions of the Garden of Eden (and how perfect, in the end, that objectivity comes to us in a series of representations that we forget, from one moment to the next, are representations). What is objectively true is that what we call atoms are not atoms, or otherwise the category of “sub-atomic” would be meaningless (see: a-tom, etymology). And it turns out that at the subatomic level, according to current research, the division between particles and waves, matter and energy, breaks down.

On the one hand, it is only reasonable that the schematics placed on a subject become more nuanced as the study of that subject progresses—in other words it would be unfair to fault scientists if earlier models proved insufficient, when we should be congratulating them for their honesty. On the other hand, we should also consider that these schema—particles, matter, even circles and squares—that are sold to us as objective representations (this phrase is a hilarious oxymoron, though we doubt anyone who has only studied hard sciences is capable of getting it) are not the fruit of testing and experimentation, as the mythology of empiricism would have us believe, but are rather cultural, spiritual constructs born of a specific worldview that are imposed by the scientist on the object of study (revealing at a deeper level what in superficial, quantitative terms has already been accepted as scientific fact, that all observation changes what is observed, another of these new discoveries that other cultures have known for a long time). In other words, atoms, squares, and the dualism between matter and energy were not discovered; they already existed in the Western imaginary and were used as symbolic tools, imposed on the inchoate knowledge that was gradually being produced in order to simplify and organize it.

Consider another example. Referring to a case of heresy in Milan in 1028, a Church chronicler writes about the heterodoxy as a disease that needs to be eradicated before it can “contaminate” the rest of Italy. Is it a mere coincidence that the scientific understanding of disease that would arise centuries later (now with the aid of microscopes) would promote this exact same vision of a neutral field invaded by impure agents that spread through contact? They did not know about germs and bacteria, but they already spoke of unclean agents that caused contamination. Could it be that scientists utilized a pre-existing logic to simplify and describe the complex reality of sickness? Yet we all know that germs are an objective reality. There is no other valid theory of disease, right? On the contrary, a worldview based on fields and relationships would have us overlook the germs and focus on the diet, the body, the weather, the community—all the things that Western medicine ignores or at least minimizes. And without a doubt, this latter theory would have a much better track record at dealing with disease, because rather than doing essentially nothing until antibiotics could be invented, it would have encouraged people to question food monocultures, urban crowding, air quality, poverty, and more.

To speak more concretely, we could state that saying germs cause sickness is like saying air causes fire. At least with many common sicknesses, the germs are always, or often, present in any human community, but people don’t get sick as long as their immune systems are working well. Likewise, air is always present (on the planet’s surface, anyway), but fuel and a spark are needed before you get fire.

To draw another example related to health, since in this field (along with ecology), the ignorance and blundering of Science has been most apparent (and, come to think of it, the health of our bodies and the health of the environment are basically the two most important things one might study), we can consider acupuncture. In our own lifetimes, acupuncture has gone from a treatment that was ignored or ridiculed in the West, to one that has been confirmed as effective by scientific studies. This reaction belies the hypocrisy and also the implicit racism of empiricist mythology, as acupuncture is based on thousands of years of observation and testing, only it wasn’t bearded white men who were in charge, so it clearly doesn’t count. And despite its proven effectiveness, acupuncture is still belittled or dismissed, providing more evidence of the cultural supremacy (an important component of any religion) implicit in Science.

Part of the reason that scientists cannot easily promote acupuncture is that they have no idea how it works. People trained in Chinese medicine know how acupuncture works, but their explanations are completely useless for believers in Science, since they rely on concepts like energy meridians, yin and yang, that are meaningless within the worldview of Enlightenment rationalism. To fully accept acupuncture or any other component of Chinese medicine would be to acknowledge that Science is partial rather than absolute, that it is only one knowledge system of many, and that would be unacceptable.

Let’s compare their treatment of Chinese medicine with their adventures in psychiatry. True to their preference for mechanistic and divisionist forms of knowledge, as mentioned above, they have “isolated” (a truly spiritual term that accurately reflects their depraved philosophy) the components of the brain that produce the chemicals connected to certain emotions. Once you know what chemicals need to be blocked and what chemicals need to be produced in greater quantity, you’ve got the emotions all figured out. Simple, right? (Hopefully, readers read those last two lines in a Mickey Mouse voice, or at least with the voice of Joey from Friends).

The result of this kind of brilliant thinking are antidepressants that cause higher rates of suicide, as well as other forms of intimately disturbing unpleasantness. Some highly civilized people might not believe that extreme stupidity is just cause for execution. Nonetheless, we are confident that many who have been at the mercy of psychiatrists (for they, along with other scientists, do nothing if not exercise power over people) would agree with us that certain of these experts should be dragged out into the streets and shot. But, since the shoe is on the other foot, we can at least start with a bit of well earned mockery.

A Worldshaper

Science has perfected a knowledge of aliens. An alien is an Other, but not an autonomous Other necessary for the understanding of the self; the alien helps the scientific self promote its alibi of non-selfhood or objectivity, that it is not a being intervening in the world and producing specific kinds of knowledge but a simple, non-interfering gaze that could belong to any subject, simply observing already existing facts that lie scattered across the terrain. An alien, of necessity, is violently uprooted from its surroundings, and it is the very process of observation, categorization, and analysis, as part of greater socio-economic processes, that achieves its alienation. Science, upon knowing an alien, has already fucked it thoroughly and irrevocably, yet it pretends that the alien already existed as an alien before the intervention of the scientific gaze.

Rationalism has perfected a number of apparatuses ostensibly intended to display knowledge. In practice, these apparatuses are factories of alienation that train us to understand things as dismembered bodies whose relationships and histories are as invisible as they are extraneous. These apparatuses are the encyclopedia, the museum, the zoo. In order to appear in a zoo or a museum, a body must already have undergone a process of colonization, uprooting, kidnapping, trauma, muting, and domination. For Science to claim (and to do so without speaking, to naturalize the idea) that a zebra in a zoo is the same thing as a zebra in its herd in the Serengeti, or that a ceremonial mask stored with reverence and used to bring the rains in Borneo is the same as a mask sitting in a display case in London, it must engage in a very powerful and evil kind of magic. It is a transformation of the most pernicious kind. In one kind of transformative magic, a person can be made a fish or a bird, and discover the interconnectedness of all things, and the mobility of the spirit. In rationalism’s transformation, two beings that are completely unlike—one free and the other imprisoned—are made into the same being, teaching us the sameness of all things and the transferability of objects.

Picking up after their idols, the Greeks (though there is no direct intellectual continuity from the Greeks of antiquity to Enlightenment rationalism, contrary to scientific mythology; in fact it was primarily the medieval Arabs who kept the previous intellectual traditions alive, whereas the early Christians who would create the socio-political and intellectual structures that would eventually give rise to the Enlightenment were great burners of libraries, a tradition the European colonizers would carry on in modified form across the globe), scientists have continued in their search for the atom, that which cannot be cut, and which is therefore, supposedly, pure or more real. But what is cut in every atom, a priori, is its relationship with its surroundings.

The principles of the alien and the atom indicate that Science is not merely a method, nor even a producer of knowledge, but a worldshaper, a Weltanschauung that, through its connection to a complex of productive forces, codifies a modality with which to approach the world, inscribes a specific understanding of what the world actually is so that all its operations may unfold on a complementary terrain, and ends up reproducing the type of world that it believed in from the beginning, at increasing intensities and extremes of scale.

Cartesian geometry was flawed, but no matter; in the hands of surveyors, architects, and landlords it made for a more Cartesian world. Early physiologists had nothing other than muddled metaphor to support their claims that living bodies were organic machines. Nowadays, biochemists can use genetic manipulation to turn living cells into chemical factories and nanotechnicians can create robots out of artificial chemical compounds. Trigonometry can be taught as a pure math, but historically it changed the world as a mathematics of projectile warfare. Rocket science, the 20^th century’s symbol of pure genius (as in, “He’s no rocket scientist”), likewise put the eggheads of the day at the service of a military restructuring of reality.

Leaving all the alibis aside, Science as it exists is inconceivable without its unbroken institutional, philosophical, and economic connections with policing, warfare, and industrialization. Its medical knowledge of bodies corresponds to the State’s need to discipline, exploit, and torture those bodies; its funding and the areas of its advancement, its “discoveries,” correspond to the need of states to wage warfare against their neighbors and the need of capitalists to get an edge on their competitors and their laborers. It is not merely a complex of academic institutions that has advanced alongside, and been corrupted by, the institutions of the modern nation-state and of capital investment. On the contrary, at no point is Science autonomous within and endogenous to those academic institutions. It has always been a primary motor for the expansion—material and spiritual, to borrow the tired dichotomy—of the present world system that has colonized the entire globe, put all forms of life to work, reengineered the landscape to favor production and social control, and that is now busy rewriting the very matrix in which life and existence unfold; therefore its development has not been an exclusively academic affair but a chief concern of all the institutions of power with which it is coterminous.

Capitalism and therefore present-day ecocide do not exist without Science, neither technologically nor philosophically, and no amount of excuses about the individuality of scientists or the mutual independence of investors and inventors can change that fact. Just as feudal society is inconceivable without the clergy, even though the feudal relationship is typically simplified as one between serf and secular lord or vassal and liege lord, the scientific class are the lynchpin of capitalist society, despite not properly belonging to the bourgeoisie or proletariat. Scientific investigation is a major sector of production in its own right; scientists constitute a privileged caste indispensable to the self-evaluation, reproduction, expansion, and social legitimation of state and private entities; and the scientific worldview, with its popular and professional forms, is crucial to uniting ruler and ruled in the present day and explaining existence in a way that is compatible with the interests of domination.

An unwritten rule of the scientific philosophy that is, nonetheless, abundantly evident, is the non-limitation of invention and discovery. Anything that can be invented, should be. Knowledge should never be forsworn; it must always be used for the accumulation of more knowledge. A professional class that could invent nuclear weapons plainly follows such an imperative. Curiously, power within the scientific regime operates in a way that is remarkably similar to capital—there is no bad money, and all money must be invested or lost.

As we have tried to indicate in the first essay of this series, Science, not only as a producer of technologies but also as a worldview and spirituality, is indispensable in the production of golem, who are the citizens of the world system, composed of the dust of obliterated worlds, alienated from their histories and their surroundings, held together only by the false commons of the apparatuses produced to sustain them.

Epilogue

We predict that many believers in Science, especially the academically initiated, will reject this critique as uselessly broad, if they do not dismiss it outright. This is worth analyzing. First of all, someone in a position of power, someone with an accredited brain, a priest with a position in the hierarchy, need not respond to a non-professional writer, a layperson, unless the critique begins to be so widely distributed it constitutes a threat. The overwhelming silence this article will be met with, except from other laypersons, suggests that indeed there is a hierarchy at stake, rather than a free and equal community of ideas. After all, the Catholic Church did not begin to execute heretics among the laiety until subversive heresies that challenged church hierarchies were widespread and began connecting with other social fault lines between upper and lower classes (principally cleaving to the new mobile urban class of weavers) a situation that attained in the 12^th century.

Secondly, and more substantially, we have noticed a certain pattern. The academically trained will always insist that the scientific community is highly self-critical, yet at the same time they always (as far as we have seen) reject criticisms that come from outside of academia as “overgeneralized” or unfounded. We would argue that this is a structurally systematic response.

An institution with hegemonic aspirations, or one that has already achieved dominance, must never allow itself to be fit into a globalizing theory (for what we are offering here, to be honest, is not a critique, it is a theoretical explanation of where Science fits within an anarchist view of the world). Anticolonial movements have already criticized postmodernism for how theorizing other people’s identities and histories constitutes an exercise of power over those peoples. More broadly, Science cannot accept any external theorization of its role, because it is busy trying to place everything and everyone else within a theoretical system of its own making. At this juncture, we are not trying to offer criticism or feedback that might be useful to specific scientists, and which accordingly, must be particular, balanced, and fair. We are trying to theorize about a system of knowledge that pretends to be objective and all-encompassing, and a cabal (in the Biblical rather than paranoid conspiratorial sense) that claims not to exist, not to have agency, and not to have systematic patterns of behavior and ways of shaping the world.

In other words, what we are dealing with is precisely the lack of a theoretical generalization about Science as a complex of institutions with dynamic agency and an extremely important role within capitalism. Lacking this, it does not escape our attention that the only serious critiques of scientists that will be permitted are those that originate from other scientists and are published and disseminated by the structures that Science has sanctioned for its internal communications; and secondarily critiques originating from the laity that follow the rules of good form, addressing only particular scientists and particular errors, and thus never capable of contributing towards a theoretical framework that addresses Science globally. To avoid unfair generalization, we are meant to wait until the official producers of knowledge themselves conceive of and find funding for a study that could objectively demonstrate in what percentage of the cases these criticisms are founded. Pie in the sky.

Remaining cautious of the potential for demagoguery or logical manipulation that comparisons present, let us again take the example of the Catholic Church in the centuries before the Enlightenment. In serious conversation today, it is perfectly viable to speak of the Church as an institution designed to accumulate power, effect social control, mobilize myths and superstitions, and repress heresy. Are particularities lost in this widely accepted theoretical view of the Church? Of course (and ironically, when it comes to outright misrepresentation, and not just the smoothing that accompanies generalization, the scientific proponents of the Enlightenment are largely to blame, in their zealousness to differentiate themselves from their supposedly irrational predecessors). Debate was in fact encouraged in the Church in the Middle Ages. Heresy could only be punished after formal processes in which the accused usually had the opportunity to defend themselves. As for superstitions, the Church also dealt in a wealth of historical fact, they often displayed intellectual vigor in their studies, and there were many efforts to challenge and discredit fraudulent documents and data (then as now, any “fact” that wasn’t politically necessary could be comfortably disputed). And regarding the accumulation of power, there are even examples of clergy who fought for the Church to give up its temporal power.

Do all these details mean that the summarized theorization of the Church’s social role, articulated above, is invalid? Of course not. Now what if we imagine a priest in the 12^th century responding to the wave of popular dissent, deflecting a generalized critique of the Church by enumerating the following points, all of which are factually correct: the Church isn’t a unified institution, there are many internal differences and no one person or body controls everything that happens in the Church; what priests are you referring to? because there are good ones and bad ones; laypeople might be ignorant of this, but the Church is very self-critical—aside from constant debates that occur via letters that bounce back and forth across Western Europe, the popes also organize ecclesiastical conferences every few years to discuss and update dogma; are you talking about deacons, priests, bishops, abbots, archbishops, or cardinals? because the clergy function really differently depending on the level you look at.

Particularization at such a juncture is nothing but filibustering.

We don’t doubt that Science has its own mechanisms for self-criticism and accountability. In this day and age, what institutional complex doesn’t? The point is, these mechanisms are not adequate for the rest of us. It can be claimed that Science is not a cohesive body nor a religion, but we can see that sufficient coordination exists for scientists to be trained with enough homogeneity that they can be compatible and communicative internationally, and that these scientists are consistently useful in the maintenance and expansion of capitalism. True, capitalism can harness anything, even the games of children, but there really is no comparison, as scientific methodologies, the products of scientific knowledge, and trained scientists themselves play an irreplaceable role at the highest levels of global capitalism and on all the frontiers of capitalist expansion.

“The harmony of the seasons mocks me. I spend hours watching the sky, the lake, the enormous sea. This world. I feel that if I could understand it I might then begin to understand the creatures who inhabit it. But I do not understand it. I find the world always odd, but odder still, I suppose, is the fact that I find it so, for what are the eternal verities by which I measure these temporal aberrations?”

John Banville, Birchwood

It’s getting colder here. People shuffle by in hats and scarves. Fur-lined hoods appear in improbable quantities. Licensed vendors, unpacked in pleasant arrays, marshalled forth by the city in its brave quest to claim a new pedestrian shopping zone, are the first and only line of battle against the cold. They rub mittens and hunch puffy jackets against it, smile as only ascendant shopkeepers can, and roast chestnuts, slice baked goods, fetch glittery necklaces from crowded displays, and conquer what would have been a winterbarren street.

I used to be a partisan of winter, back when the seasons still promised an untamed difference. Now I too huddle against it, my fire gone, protected by an old leather jacket I found, waiting in just the right size, in a freestore near here. My friends made jokes about it, a throwback to the ’80s, evidently. When their jokes continued from time to time, I gathered they were actually made uncomfortable by my wearing of the jacket and its extinguished aesthetic.

The commodity demands its homage, even from those who must steal it. And my friends, anticapitalists to a one, go about in those sporty jackets made from materials far more polysyllabic than leather. Again the old question. Is it better to blend in, or to signal our defiance of the national religion? For myself, I just can’t turn down a jacket that still works, and my brain won’t accept that the dull brown thing actually draws attention from the citizens sunk in layers of equally mundane garb, hiding away from temperatures that still have not passed freezing.

This is a frigid race, with few defenses against even a lackluster winter. Nonetheless, this year there are fewer gloves in evidence. More people are keeping their fingers free to tap on little screens, their faces awash in blue glow, as they scuttle blindly down the streets.

The new device is finally triumphing in this economically holdout nation. Could anyone ever have doubted it? What sorts of homogeneization is something so flimsy as “culture” able to hold back? This is the difference between a hula hoop and an iPhone. One is a product that may catch on or not. The other is an army that must be quartered.

The entire citizenry has revealed their vapidity. They are mere bodies stripped of all their limbs and plugged into a vast matrix of domination, perpetually vacated to serve as conduit for the flux of power. Lost creatures who fumble around in smug devices looking for love or distraction. They are children who have never learned to read maps or ask for directions, children whose intimate haunts that they never needed to impose on paper in order to navigate have now been thoroughly mapped by the devices they carry with them. The impoverished oral culture that remains has been forced through this new apparatus. There is no more face-to-face communication; all of it is legible now to the authorities.

The cellphone that shares my room sometimes like an evil stranger heralds the arrival of a new message with a cheerful arrangement of beeps. After a time I pick it up, already seeing the number of the one person I wish most to hear from. But there are only five digits on the screen. An automatic message from the phone company, wishing me a happy birthday—did I put down this day, of all days, as my birthday?—and offering me a present, a free gift, which I only have to claim by logging on to their website. I unplug the broken thing and, batteryless, it dies. Every device should be equally crippled. I turn back to the article I am writing.

In a parallel universe where justice reigns, all those cretins who claimed the internet would bring us closer together and Twitter would make the revolution are being lined up against the wall in an old park and shot. Not out of vindictiveness or vengeance. The purpose of the executions is educational.

“Don’t worry,” each of the condemned is told as blindfolds are affixed. “It’s all okay: we’ll update your Facebook.”

 

But parallel lines never intersect, and as ours progresses, the parks and squares empty out. Only wraiths pass by, absent to themselves, linked in a psychic death pact to another wraith staring somewhere at the same glowing screen. Only a few are still resentfully here, temporarily anchored by domesticated dogs for whom no application yet exists to take on walks. But even the housepets appear more neurotic as they pull against a leash that connects only to dead weight. They stare frantically at nothing, like inmates too long interned.

I think of a resolution to make on New Years. From now on, whenever I encounter a cyborg, I will speak only to the device, the brain, and ignore the flesh-head that still pretends to be in charge. Someone should start killing cyborgs, smashing the devices and liberating the golem they hold in thrall.

A year ago a wave of graffiti appeared in a park near my house. It was the first sign of life to have appeared there in some time. The occasion, I gathered, was the premature death of a member of a circle of young people who sometimes gathered on the stairs. “Alex,” the inked etchings inscribed, “We will remember you.” “Alex, brother, we won’t forget.” “Alex, you were my first love.” The wall stood almost always alone. The kids I associated with it appeared less and less often. Had I only dreamt them? The graffiti, as such, seemed like its own tribe. When the wall was washed clean, the writing appeared again, as if by magic. Now there is nothing there. I wonder if I am the only one who remembers that unknown boy. What has become of his friends?

And what superb instinct leads us to scratch away at the indelible façade of our world right at that moment when one of us snuffs out their meaningless life? As if the excess of agony standing like stale water that no apparatus yet designed can wash away pushes us Borf-like to attempt the impermissible, the inscription of our experiences in the metallic flanks of our prison. In moments like these it seems that everyone is aware that amnesia is included in the bylaws of Order; and therefore, to not forget, we must break the law. The only walls we are allowed to transform are on Facebook, mapping for the enemy.

Today, true grieving demands we resort to graffiti. In a time not far off—already arrived in some parts—it will demand terrorism.

Such a tragedy that suicide loses its enchantment with age. Precisely as we have nothing left to lose, we lose the resolve to go out with dignity in that ultimate, irrecuperable subversion. As though we were genetically programmed to weaken just in those years when we can claim empirical proof that, no, things will not get better, it seems the onset of a hormonal listlessness, the liquification of a certain moral fiber running through our core, enlists us to plod along with the whole of our society, look away or grimace as we might, but ever onwards, in furtherance of whatever harebrained course the species has set.

The political consequences of this resulting lack of elderly suicide bombers are immense. Social stability may lay thanks for its prosperity on the doorstep of that biological cowardice with which failures cling to failure and rebels, at their very best, cling to those same gestures that have long since failed them.

Even the engineers of each new apparatus are feeling lonely. How many start-up geeks marketing the latest Twitter spin-off or networking app sincerely believe that their invention might bring people closer? Convince a prisoner that freedom is made of walls, and they will build new cells all on their own. The guards have put down their guns but they can’t hand out bricks fast enough. The general population scouts out the new galleries and wings. Is this what we’ve been looking for?

We often tell of Baron Hausmann of Paris, the rightwing architect who redesigned the city just in time for the Commune, widening avenues and intersections, enclosing common spaces, to take the defensive advantage away from a population in revolt and allow an invading army easy access, changing the very terrain to favor a new kind of war.

We should speak more of Ildefons Cerdà, the utopian socialist architect who redesigned Barcelona in the 1860s. He sought to use architecture to bring about social justice and defuse class conflict by bringing rich and poor together in harmony. The modifications he left behind were nearly the same as those that had been imposed on Paris.

This is not new, but it is getting more common. Nowadays, hip CEOs debate whether technology will overcome alienation and powerlessness or whether civilization needs to be destroyed. One pole in this debate labors all the faster to develop new technologies, hoping to find the one that will really save us, and the other promotes conscious business and donates profits to NGOs.

Those who do not take sides in the social war and commit themselves to a path of negation maintain an affective allegiance to power, and the only way for them to reconcile this allegiance with whatever residual feelings of being human still trouble them in their new cyborg physiology is to decorate these allegiances, to pour even more affective attention into the “improvement” of the rites of power. The fact that what we are seeing is not an initiative of the traditional ruling class is evident in the selection of rites for decoration. Elections, military parades, leader cults, and similar processes are not the objects of adoration. In fact, the enthusiastic campaigns of civic improvement have tended to destabilize, delegitimize, or eclipse the rites that have traditionally been predominant in the sanctification of power. Neither have the initiatives come from the upper strata of the owning class; on the contrary, the most influential production to result in the decoration and intensification of the affective allegiances that tie people to power has been initiated by individuals from the computer-literate section of what would be defined as the working class, who in their astronomic ascent have founded companies that upset the preexisting capitalist hierarchy and now rank among the largest.

A large part of what economists might see as growth in the last few decades is an exponential explosion in the frenetically doomed activity of alienated people constructing new apparatuses to mediate alienation, with the unintended but inevitable consequence of spreading it to new heights and moments of life.

State planners and capitalists, while not the initiators of what has become an October 12, a Columbus-moment, in the field of social control, have responded in perfect form; the former by pursuing an aggressive institutional advance into the network of new and momentarily underregulated apparatuses that have been formed, and by integrating new technics into a revamped Cold War security apparatus; the latter by handing out bricks on low-interest loan, making sure that the supply never runs low and that no good deed goes unexploited.

Yet one has the feeling that they are not merely profiting off a plebian circus, that even the most powerful engineers are now moved by a quest to mediate alienation. As a historical rule, up until now it seems clear that no matter how universal alienation has been, the exercise of power acted as a drug to allow a certain class of people to find fulfillment in the midst of misery. This affective marker of the ruling class as distinct holders of power is what made Foucault’s theory of the immanence and diffusion of power an overstated argument and, if our present musings have set their teeth to marrow and not air, an argument that was ahead of its time.

Increasingly, a new measure of class (post-defeat class, as ladder and not as warfare) is how fully one can organize their lives in the space of the new virtual apparatuses.

Could it be that the charm of winning the class war has worn out? A power-holder must hold it against someone. Once the class war is won is the moment our prison guard realizes that he too is in a prison. He is no longer a heroic protagonist wielding his power against the savage masses, but a conduit through which power moves to maintain the good order of the apparatus. The emergency is past. Power no longer needs his creativity and dedication as protagonist to triumph. Put another way, power has risen out of the class of protagonists who heroically generated and organized it so as to organize itself at a higher level. Today, affective dedication and creativity are required of all those desolate souls who must inhabit a prison, regardless of their level of relative privilege.

The forerunner of this dynamic, now repeated at a greater intensity, is the patriarchal system of bribery that allowed any expendable proletarian or peasant man to play at being tyrant, and taste a small dose of the drug that made misery enjoyable.

Games of power-against played out at a continental scale color the early history of the State. Power-as-drug constituted an affective wage that roped people in to building State power. However, power-fiending protagonists do not always make decisions in the interests of stability or accumulation. The new apparatuses, organized on a logic of power-as-flux, mark a tighter arrangement whereby people are conduits of power and they pay to be played. They dedicate their affective energies to the improvement of their prison, independent of any wages, because to not do so would be spiritual suicide. While capitalism has always relied on unwaged labor, until now that labor has been provided by patriarchy or colonialism. In the Wikipedia age, the voluntary character of unwaged production is largely different.

The new apparatuses of social networking also begin to quantify informal power (the very informal power that has always held primary importance, even and especially in the institutions of formal power, which could not work without it) in “likes”, “friends”, and “followers”. But this version of informal power is not the kind created by protagonists, it is the kind produced by a mill wheel set spinning by a hundred chained bodies each chasing after their own loneliness.

There are some who attempt to pirate power at the level of property, using unregulated spaces in the new apparatuses to steal and share the digital commodities that make up such a large part of the global economy. But alienation extends so far beyond property, they can only hope to be privateers. The free circulation of the product they have liberated brings no benefit to the major concentrations of capital, whose spokespersons tell of tremendous economic losses. Surely, such crimes will not go unpunished, and in the future, prevented, as the State cannot abide unregulated space. But at a level much more dear to the world-machine than that of paltry capital accumulation, these would-be pirates are doing important work, thus they are allowed a certain license (though it is a license the most powerful nations will not recognize, just as the privateers were legally commissioned criminals in a polyarchic global system).

The service they render is to maintain and even expand the project of social control. They are the next chapter in the dilemma of the workers who occupy their factory and keep on producing. To name a common example, they have liberated music—what could be more beautiful? But this is not a pirate casette, taped off the radio and shared among friends on a boombox in the park. This is a digital file that will be added to an inhumanly extensive library, linked in to the web for the collection of metadata, and fed directly into the ears of the golem, who will continue to slide like oil over the surface of the muted landscape, blind and limbless, doing whatever it takes to avoid wondering how they got there.

Such music is the pinnacle of our civilization. What beautiful sounds we invent, to play while the ship sinks, the weight of its spite bringing the whole sea down with it.

A gust of tepid wind blows past me. I have finished my circle and found nothing to keep me. An alcoholic sits on a bench, howling at the empty streets. Young people drift by, ears plugged to the world, bobbing their heads to unheard tunes. A dog barks. A motorcycle idles. When someone passes close enough, I hear a faint, electric rendition of song.

The somewhat recent (2012) translation of Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl published by Semiotext(e) seems to be stimulating more conversation than the previous, less achieved, version. (Or at least the discussion is more above-ground and visible, likely due to Ariana Reines’ new translation as well as the wider sweep of Semiotext(e)’s distribution.) At the same time, it feels as though the conversation has barely begun—at least in a written form. It occurred to me to intervene when this piece by Moira Weigel and Mal Ahern appeared in The New Inquiry and was circulated with the customary rapidity by its proponents. Jaleh Mansoor responded to Weigel and Ahern in The Claudius App, in a vein of greater familiarity with Tiqqun, with a decidedly more marxist, perhaps communist, take on the questions they raised. It is a strong piece, and I will acknowledge it in what follows, along with Nina Power’s review in Radical Philosophy, which falls somewhere between the two in its usefulness. Unlike Mansoor, I do not think it is in their oversights that Weigel and Ahern deserve a rejoinder. From an anarchist perspective, at least for those of us who read Tiqqun with tremendous interest (without entirely aligning ourselves with some more or less imagined Tiqqunist position), what is striking about them is just how symptomatic their response is—how much it tells without setting out to be much more than a dismissal, a nice excuse not to read, or not to think about what you didn’t really read. (The dismissal is, it’s true, followed by a weak exhortation. But the exhortation feels tacked on and is unlikely to be the reason their piece made the rounds.)  Weigel and Ahern’s reading of Tiqqun reveals to us their political presuppositions and shortcomings; it also pushes us to make our investment in certain positions consonant with Tiqqun’s more explicit. Anarchist conversations can be different if anarchists are willing to read everything more symptomatically—Weigel and Ahern and Tiqqun, yes, but also our own bodies, our own lives. What follows, then, is not an attempt to defend Tiqqun, much less to show the right way to read them, and more of an outline of what I would like to discuss—a sketch of a conversation some of us are learning to have.

To begin, a summary of what is at stake in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (PM). First, it was included in the first issue of the Tiqqun journal (1999) and then published separately by Mille et une Nuits (2001). Second, there is a clear conceptual linkage between the Theory of Bloom (published in the same issue, and also republished separately) and these Preliminary Materials. Bloom and Young-Girl are figures that appear in both texts (as well as here and there in Tiqqun’s other writings). To enter into this topic I’ll cite an appraisal of Tiqqun for antagonist projects from the recent collection Impasses:

In Theory of Bloom and Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl the critical work proceeds through figures. Bloom and Young-Girl are figures. They are not concepts … they are not demographic designators. They figure social phenomena that emerge in the twentieth century. These social phenomena have to do with forms of experience and subjectivity. When we talk about these in the U.S. way, we usually use the impoverished lexicon of identity politics.

Bloom and Young-Girl are part of what Tiqqun attempted in this journal—to borrow the quaint title of another piece in that issue, a “phenomenology of everyday life.” The aim is to see what is learned if we can describe some aspects of what manifests (what is made to appear) in societies like ours as Bloom, or as Young-Girl. That is what they mean when they write that Young-Girl is a “vision machine” constructed with the aim of “making the [social] battlefield manifest.” The theory of Bloom is developed in a mostly philosophical mode; the materials for the theory of the Young-Girl are gathered as fragments and presented as preliminaries, as if work remains to be done—or must be left incomplete out of some unnamed necessity. I will return to this below. Third, Young-Girl “is obviously not a gendered concept.” I repeat this because it merits repeating; it merits repeating because it has not been understood. Young-Girl, as a figure, allows us to map out and detect ways in which apparatuses of power produce, grasp and model the libidinal sphere in every sense, including those desires which so naturally or culturally seem to cleave into the two-and-then-some of sexual difference or the immediate manyness of genders. Put differently, though the figure is not intended to render a gender visible, it does model something about how gender has come to operate, insofar as gender is a crucial aspect of certain forms-of-life well integrated into societies like ours. Our good liberals and bad radicals enjoy saying that once a sexual or gender identity has been claimed or reclaimed by someone, it is, at least to some extent, free of power relations, of domination. We counter that the model (explicit for the liberals, implicit for some radicals) for the value of this recognition is and always has been recognition by the state and the granting of legal and moral rights, of new forms of personhood; that, when it is not the legal model, it is the model of creative consumption, in which I believe I am discovering and expressing my true self as I navigate commodity-space; and concurrently that to expand the field of the normal (i.e. more rights, commodities tailored to what I think are my needs) will never amount to the kind of disruptive liberation we anarchists are after. I will return to this matter as well. Fourth, Bloom and Young-Girl are in a complicated relation of partial resonance with a third text published in Tiqqun 2, Sonogram of a Potential. This piece argues for an “ecstatic feminism” along lines I find congruent with my reading of the Bloom/Young-Girl dyad. I will make passing reference to Sonogram, though I do not mean to absorb it entirely into the theoretical space of the first two. Sonogram deserves its own discussion.

Weigel and Ahern make several symptomatic mistakes, or force several misreadings, concerning the least ambiguous aspects of Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. The first is that, after an initial reference, they refer to the book as Theory of the Young-Girl. But the book is not The, or A, Theory of the Young-Girl. To treat a text that presents itself as preliminaries, outlines, notes, “trash theory”, as a finished product, is to ignore the first and clearest sign its author or authors could give as to how to approach it. This is telling considering the amount of space they devote to inveighing against a supposed irony in PM. It does not seem to me that PM communicates in any single tone, and, if it does, it would be something less ambivalent, such as “hate [of] the Spectacle.” Second mistake: they repeatedly state (and base part of their criticism on the claim) that Tiqqun wrote anonymously. But obviously, Tiqqun did not write anonymously; they wrote in and as Tiqqun. (Inability to distinguish between true anonymity and the use of pseudonyms, heteronyms, shared names such as Tiqqun, and multiple-use names (e.g. Luther Blissett) suggests, again, willful ignorance of the most obvious clues to interpretation.) Weigel and Ahern not only assimilate pseudonymous to anonymous writing, but more strikingly claim that here such practices “abet sexism” (note legalistic language). Mansoor responds appropriately on this point, arguing that pseudonymity and non-attribution of sources are in fact “an attack on the politics of textual propriety, the law of the copyright and of the father.” To which an anarchist might add that it is no surprise that our academics insist on identification of authors and citation of sources, and that we like to write, read, and discuss writing that refuses that insistence.

Weigel and Ahern get one thing quite right: Young-Girl is a figure. But they immediately botch their response by assimilating the figural to the real, as if Young-Girl were an idea, a concept, of actually existing young girls. They are like those who read Anti-Oedipus and get confused or offended when they “realize” that Deleuze and Guattari think psychotics should be shuffled into the place of the revolutionary subject. Or like those who read Nietzsche on the overman and think it is an argument for a genetic homo superior. (To someone who responds to PM  by asking “Wait a minute, how has all the concreteness of the world taken refuge in my ass?”, one might well answer: “Wait a minute, why are you so comfortably identifying with a figure of hyperconsumption?”) What does it mean, then, that Weigel and Ahern fail to mind the dash and so miss what is figural about the figure? It means that they are able to read obtusely, “ontically”, as Nina Power puts it, whenever they need to make the claim that there is sexism or misogyny afoot in PM. The figure loses all of its diagnostic and critical power when it is grasped so crudely. It is not a theory of young girls we are talking about here, so why read it all as though it is about girls or women? It is a satire, in some sense, but not a satire of or about women or girls. It is a satire, or really a détournement with dark satirical effects, about gender and power, about how power works through gender (not just as sexism), about how we cling to gender and so to the power that works through gender. Ariana Reines wrote a fascinating set of notes on her work on PM. Her opinion:

I’d like to point out for the Anglophone reader that although the introduction asserts that the “Young-Girl is evidently not a gendered concept,” and that the term is applicable to young people, gays, and immigrants, French is a gendered language; and that, moreover, the genderedness of French is not the only way to account for the fact that this book, as it accumulates, does become—in some sections more than others—a book about women. With everything biological and constructed the term women signifies. A book about us. It contains passages rife with heterosexist ressentiment and, occasionally, whiffs of (what seemed to me to be) female intellectual rage against the more vapid and conformist members of our sex.

Reines puts her finger on the risk that PM runs, the risk, precisely, of a response like Weigel and Ahern’s: the accusation of garden-variety sexism, or, worse, extreme misogyny. No, it is not a side effect of the French language; it had to run this risk to make its point. No, the possible “female intellectual” did not have to out and name herself to keep the text safe from such accusations; it would have botched precisely what makes it work. (“Tiqqun claims it has lady members…” write Weigel and Ahern. Identify yourselves for proper textual/political evaluation.)

A remark about what makes it work: the reason, I would suggest, that the book is called Preliminary Materials is that so much of it is a collection of détourned texts. (Reines: “You should know that when a passage in the text sounds like a women’s magazine, that’s because it comes from a women’s magazine”). Now, the  practice of détournement was conceived by the Situationists out of desperation, as they were seeking to abolish (among other things) art as a separated sphere of life. Their analysis was that any new creation  (painting, film) would either prefigure, or simply work as raw material for, future commodification—if it did not already and inescapably bear the commodity form. As a response they attempted creations composed of repurposed images or fragments, whose contrast and conflict would not just represent but enact the negativity they felt towards the world. “This combination of parody and seriousness reflects the contradictions of an era in which we find ourselves confronted with both the urgent necessity and the near impossibility of initiating and carrying out a totally innovative collective action” (Situationist International #3, 1959). That is why Weigel and Ahern are wrong to simply describe this part (most) of PM as “Situationist-ish collage.” A collage suggests a fanciful assemblage of images that go well together, like a grade school assignment to make a poster showing what you want to be when you grow up, which assumes the images of your prospective adulthood are already there, waiting for you to shop among them and creatively recombine them. Détournement, however, is primarily negative—it concerns what cannot be said, shown, or felt except by glaring, sometimes violent contrast of text and image. It shows or says that what you want to show or say can’t be shown or said—its negativity arises from the feeling that life is impossible, that you have no way of being who or what you want to be.

So if and to whatever extent this book seems to be about girls or women, those girls or women are to be understood, I would say, along the lines of such a negativity. A future theory of the Young-Girl must pass through the negative reference to woman, girl, femininity, femaleness, all of that, because it follows the articulations and investments of power apparatuses in societies like ours. “The ‘youth’ and ‘femininity’ of the Young-Girl, in fact her youthitude and femininitude, are that through which the control of appearances extends to the discipline of bodies” (PM). Reines’ other main point: sustained work with the text produced in her a disturbing somatization. “I mean it gave me migraines, made me puke; I couldn’t sleep at night, regressed into totally out-of-character sexual behavior.” I imagine this is because it produces its effects precisely by rubbing the most disgusting aspects of our culture of consumption and recuperation in your face—not just citations of sexism or misogyny but terrible evidence of your participation in them, the way that you are capable of embodying the Young-Girl. (Reines’ nausea as a symptom of the unnamed necessity that leaves the materials in a preliminary form.) That is the darkness of its satirical effects, the negativity at work in its détournement.

That said, one could go too far in thinking that the reference to girls or women is all there is to the figure. Does this not also become a book about young people? Yes, because the apparatuses also invest the “youth” of the young, the citizens and consumers of the future, and the unlucky faces of every perverse desire of the now. Why do Weigel and Ahern not discuss the Young- component of Young-Girl? The short answer is that they have a target in mind: the Man-Child (note that, since man-child is hyphenated in ordinary use, this expression elides whether or not it is a figure, the Man-Child, or just man-children here and there who are under discussion—precisely their confusion about the figure of the Young-Girl). To make their point, they must treat PM as an off-balance, sexist critique that requires its balancing answer. Mansour detects the imaginary of equality at work here, and aptly intervenes:

[They] rely on a brand of feminism that takes symmetry for “fairness,” “equity” for “equality,” as though those were not already part of the metrics on which our contemporary social relations are founded. … We are supposed to find our place, as good citizens, in the immense system of equivalence posing as equality. […]

What we need is not a program, especially one of equality when equality in the face of the uneven history, of women under patriarchy and capitalism, has served to subjugate us ever more under false promises of wealth and legal juridical recognition.

All of which is to say that, while Weigel and Ahern state that Tiqqun’s theory “is at the tail end of a radical tradition that has largely exhausted its usefulness,” we might notice that Tiqqun, in PM and especially Sonogram, set out from an exhaustion or impasse within feminism. The latter text strongly modifies the term with the adjective ecstatic in view of that impasse, while the former bluntly states: “The triumph of the Young-Girl originates in the failure of feminism.”  According to Tiqqun, the more liberal forms of feminism were easily absorbed into social institutions whose basic coercive function was not altered, whereas the more autonomist and radical forms faced the same sociocultural counteroffensive as the entirety of the revolutionary Left (in this sense it is instructive to read Tiqqun’s two histories of the Italian 70s, This is Not a Program and Sonogram, side by side). I’ll briefly add that the attention-grabbing complement to Weigel and Ahern’s (as Mansoor rightly puts it) brand of feminism, the conceit of the Man-Child, is, as a joke, a dud; as criticism, it is limited to the narrow range of dudes in humanities graduate programs (who may well be neurotic and annoying, but aren’t especially the locus of power in a society like ours). What is worst about this preconceived target, and the sloppy reading of PM that Weigel and Ahern seem to need to pass through to get there, is that “his” irony allows them to misconstrue the practice of détournement in PM, which would otherwise have been an obstacle to their literal, ontic reading. And it is in this reading and its easily “actionable” object (the desideratum of “fairness” feminism, which always knows how to act once it finds the inequality to be equalized) that the mild popularity of Weigel and Ahern’s piece lies. Who cares what some obscure group had to say about capitalism and identity? It is complicated and difficult reading. It is easier to denounce man-children—who, let me be perfectly clear, I have no intention of defending.

But some of us anarchists would rather understand what the obscure group had to say about capitalism and processes of identification, even and especially if it troubles such moral and political commonplaces as fairness and equality; even and especially if it risks the thought of the failure of feminism so as to learn a different kind of lesson from its history. Back to the figural, then. The anonymous commentator in Impasses underlines that Bloom and Young-Girl have a mutual source. “For the Young-Girl as for all other Blooms, the craving for entertainment is rooted in anguish” (PM). But Blooms sometimes resist, and part of that resistance may be to write their own theory (said theory is still “of Bloom” in the other sense of the genitive); Young-Girls, by comparison, do not resist; they consume and express themselves, they seduce and are seduced, and so their theory never comes together. For example, Bloom figures a crisis of sexuation, and Young-Girl figures the hypersexuality that is offered as the resolution to that crisis. Asexuals versus the pornosphere… It is in this sense that the figure of the Young-Girl is a diagnostic and critical tool. Its aim is not to represent or replicate a reality whose banalities (including the banality of everyday misogyny) some of us know all too well. Its aim is to allow us to understand the deployment of a particular kind of apparatus that invests the seemingly natural or culturally familiar categories of age and gender as counter-measures to the potential for social disavowal named Bloom. “Young-Girls constitute the most lethal commando THEY have ever maneuvered against heterogeneity, against every hint of desertion” (PM). We begin by cleaving society, along psycho-political lines, into those that resist, flee, or are at least capable of it, and those that do not. We note that the former can become part of the latter; and we note that the categories of age and gender are deployed selectively, qualitatively, as part of that operation.

Two provisional conclusions. First: to discuss the figure of Young-Girl as Weigel and Ahern do—not only ontically, but also apart from its relation to Bloom—is to miss precisely what an antagonist might find useful in it. The writer in Impasses observes that Bloom is a figure of anomie, of anyone’s disinvestment in society and social norms and bonds. This happens first as a seeming alienation, an implosion of the self’s reality:

… Bloom correspond[s] to a sense of being unreal without trusting the path offered back to the real. A first approach to the Young-Girl is to grasp that it is the figure of someone who abandons that sense of unreality in favor of what THEY offer as the path back to the real. Overall this is to be understood as an effect of power, a re-binding to the social real.

This is the Young-Girl as “offensive neutralization apparatus,” according to PM. It is aimed not at everyone, but specifically at Blooms, at what is Bloom in anyone and everyone. “If Bloom’s desire reveals no ultimate truths about oppression or freedom, it does on the other hand permit or prohibit desubjectivation; it increases or diminishes collective potential” (Sonogram). If Bloom is the refusal, sometimes the impossibility of work, look in what company the Young-Girl appears, according to This is Not a Program:

… work also has a more directly militaristic function, which is to subsidize a whole series of forms-of-life-managers, security guards, cops, professors, hipsters, Young-Girls, etc.—all of which are, to say the least, anti­-ecstatic if not anti-insurrectional.

With the figure of Young-Girl we name the two principal contemporary forms of reintegration: identity and consumption as lifestyle. In their closely connected functioning, as identification with the Spectacle, the fundamental ambiguity of Bloom is betrayed, and the plans for exit are botched. The Young-Girl, Tiqqun say, is a model citizen; here citizenship is redefined as an explicit response to the threat of Bloom’s indifference to society.

The apparatus produces the phenomena that are found and figured as Young-Girl. Both aspects, Young- and -Girl, are vectors of commodification and reintegration, working together to generate permanent instability. Gender is part of the operation, but not gender alone. Age may undermine gender, and gender may undermine age. By this I mean that Young-Girl indicates the spurious empowerment of (some) women and (some) youth in societies like ours (the Spectacle’s “praise of femininity” (PM)), and at the same time the way that no position or identity thusly empowered is ever safe or stable. The paths to reintegration may almost always be described as modes of consumption: for young people, to consume what will make them pass as belonging to a world to which they are not yet fully adjusted (making them either mock adults or participants in subcultural pseudo/practice worlds); for women, to consume what will show their proper integration into society (as either an “equal” to men or belonging to a recognizable and recognized political protest ideology or grouping). “Blending into a fatal and complacent intimacy with things has become the mass activity for fetish-compatible Blooms” (Sonogram). The most criminalized, the most persecuted, the most vulnerable in all these games of power are precisely those who do not or can not be reintegrated, because they do not or can not participate in the necessary kind of consumption. Though we may have to fake it for the sake of survival.

Second provisional conclusion: to clearly distinguish between a moralistic, rights-and-recognition based, pro-identification politics and our anti-political alternative would be to rearticulate what is on the lips of so many people, especially young people, these days: that it is not only for seeming to belong to the wrong group that one is put down, shut out, yelled at, chased, beaten, and murdered, but especially for not seeming to belong to any group at all. So say those who today call themselves genderqueer or gender-nonconforming or other phrases that denote not identities but gaps between identities. So say those who for one reason or another are considered less than citizens of the Nation and bad subjects of (normal or other than normal) Sexuality. So say those for whom life in public and in private is lived as an interminable series of sex tests, gender tests, pleasure tests, body tests. One position would ask those of us who feel this way to answer the test questions, to settle on an identity, a name, a social zone, a project of seeking recognition and rights, and to wait for the crumbs to be handed out. Our anti-politics asks what there is left to do to live however we can and however we like, pushing aside every attempt to commodify the way we wear our outsiderness…

The tension is clear. Bloom is the figure of those who escape from identification—their potential rebelliousness, fragility, insanity, dangerousness, and so on. Young-Girl is the figure of those recaptured by identification in a process that makes identification seem liberatory insofar as it appears as their own and not imposed on them. “Reappropriating difference, which meanwhile has become biopower’s primary management tool, is obviously a lost cause” (Sonogram). And if age and gender are at work in this apparatus then what is at stake for us is, indeed, the question of gender. It is also what is glossed over by Weigel and Ahern: the question of youth. Like Mansoor, we are stridently anticapitalist and thus we respond differently to Tiqqun’s critique of social life in societies like ours than Weigel and Ahern. Far from a project of seeking equality or rights, we are driven to observe that almost any affirmation of gender—as natural, as socially constructed, as culturally specific, etc.—may be absorbed by the Young-Girl operation. That does not mean that any given one is or has been; but we are brought to admit that we need ethical criteria where none are to be found. Which is why some of us have been trying to elaborate more clearly (which may simply mean: practically) what the abolition of gender means. And though no one is speaking about the abolition of age, there is also an implicit negativity in our conversations towards the very path of life as it is set out for us. People used to, perhaps still do, talk about the liberation of youth. Some of that is relevant here; but really the issue is that the age category itself makes increasingly less sense to those who have no discernible path to a stable adulthood, and those for whom adulthood can only be envisioned as a “comfortable” slow-motion implosion, for all of us torn from any acquaintance with a biological progression in our own bodies that is not also an awareness of the movement, pulse, gestures of power.

None of this is to say that what are clearly marked as Preliminary Materials for a Theory that, almost fifteen years later, has yet to appear, are sacrosanct or sufficient for an understanding of this tension, this terrain, this power. But it is to say that those who set out to criticize Tiqqun’s text without acknowledging such matters, or chalking them up to the rhetorical hyperbole of radical theory, are assuming precisely the normalcies and normativities that anarchists of our Tiqqun-reading stripe are out to destroy. “Because the only honorable departure from a minority status is not the achievement of recognition by the dominating majority or a change in force relations, but the deconstruction of the whole mechanism of recognition itself and of the idea of victory” (Sonogram). “A communization of bodies is to be expected” (PM).