Militant Researches the Phenomenologies of Desire: Autoethnography of Affective Activist Scholarship

Militant Researches into the Phenomenology of Desire:

AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHY OF AFFECTIVE ACTIVIST SCHOLARSHIP

By Story Teller Collective

Table of Contents Preface: Anthropology in a Time of War Militant Ethnography: Inquiry as a Weapon of War Undoing a Naturalized Suffering: The Role of Sensual Scholarship and Pragmatic Solidarity in Exposing and Transforming Symbolic Violence, Structural Oppression, and Racial and Class-based Hatred An Ethical Militancy: Inquiry, Love, and Pre-Cultural Revolt in the Ethnographer’s Craf Of Paradigms and Pragmatics: Activist Scholarship, Militant Research, and the Resolution of Crisis in the Academy Something Dangerous Carefully Done: Self-Science and Empirically Verifiable Rage as a Basis for the Validity of Revolution and Other Emancipatory Endeavors……

Towards a Revolutionary Practicum: Work-Stoppages, Integral Education, and the Material Base of a Post-Liberated Fieldwork…

On Resisting the Suffocating Trauma of the Cityscape…

Why Emo Slit It’s Throat Wargames of Desire: Militant Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self

Technotopia, E-Narchy, and the Philosopher’s Stone: Angels, Unicorns, and The Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow Separation and Solidarity: Accompanying those who Suffer the Conflicts of History as a Method of World-building Restoring a Methodological Balance: Activist Ethnography and Social Science as Militant Doula and Medical Practitioners Midwifing the Birth of a New Era in Militant Scholarship Civilization as a Cosmic Crime: Psycho-Physical Energy Blockages, Ecological Resistance, and the Insurrectionary Approach to Ethics….

A Tale of Two Anarchies: A Conversation between Contemporary Anarchist Criminology and Insurrectionary Theory

Preface: Anthropology in a Time of War In this booklet, introductory materials about militant anthropology are presented through three themes that come up in these chapters:

While I no longer remember the paper, I do remember the core argument: “If a state cannot prevent terrorist attacks against another country from inside their borders, then the country has a right to invade a state and prevent the terrorist attacks.”

1) Anthropology in a Time of War: the idea we are in a war (class, invisible…)

This simple, formulaic logic became the basis for an entire culture shift and untold suffering.

2) Anthropology as a Social Science: the role of inquiry in mapping the system of power and battlefields for which and on which the war is waged

Over the next years I studied cultures and theories of magic through Frazer, Maus, Malinowski, Harris… where cultural and cosmological orders were based on how words were used to translate ideas. After various entheogens and what amounted to a spiritual emergency, I began to realize spells, curses, and charms were everywhere being used by those with power. The spells contained power. They embodied power. From policies to screenplays to newspapers to mathematical formulas, writing expressed a creativity that shaped human activity.

3) Core Assumptions of an Optimistic Anarchist Anthropology: the degree to which sustained inquiry can challenge assumptions to erode and undermine the logic upon which oppressive power stands, thereby generating conditions in which the ability to wage war is destroyed.

In this regard, the book attempts to cultivate an attitude able to determine and enact ethical actions through a process that itself produces alternative possibilities and ways of being.

It is perhaps worth sharing a personal story about how an “anarchist anthropology” helped challenge what I considered “common-sense” assumptions.

9/11 provides an example of a political awakening. I remember weeping hearing the radio, screams, and collapse of these towers, with three strong feelings coming up: a) a feeling of national victimization b) a desire for retaliation by an angry young male (me) c) a later paper wherein I used Christian Just War Theory to justify the invasion of Iraq

The ecological and social egalitarian impulse were contrasted against state and capital, emergent properties of civilization and domestication whose use of symbols manipulated symbolic consciousness (hence, “magic”) to maintain order and control reality, either for healing those in need or for the sake of power-accumulation.

In a cosmology of internal violence, this amounts to a kind of “invisible war,” where power is seen as a kind of institutionalized evil, where ritual and magic becomes a way to mitigate that violence.

I bring this traumatic event up, followed by my somewhat immediate theoretical inquiry because, turning back to the original logical proposition I came to (“if a state…”), and developing context surrounding 9/11 attacks with a somewhat mystical interpretation, I came to realize the logical consequence of invading an integrated indigenous network like the Taliban is a counterinsurgency – specifically one that weaponizes anthropology to better subjugate these populations.

Anthropology is thus at risk of being coopted by the scientific community like every other science that is weaponized: biological, chemical, and

nuclear weapons are obvious examples, but psychological, economic, information, and cyber warfare are developed as well. Here, we consider cultural and subcultural warfares that may engage in any kinetic or nonkinetic force when it comes to resolving conflict.

Further, a doctrine of counterinsurgency against a global threat of insurgency is being adopted by increasingly militarized domestic forces – police—against activists. In a real way I, and I imagine many others, identify as those activists, insurgents, terrorists and extremists, acting against those interests that systemically generate conditions of terrorism in the first place.

What’s more, terrorism provides its own performative logic, where the desperation in resistance reflects a counter-image and negation of empire. Its contribution to peace studies is such that the solution to insurrectionary attempts becomes evident as a systemic, or structural change that reduces domination in the first place.

To summarize, my inquiry in a sense functioned much liked Marx’s Workers’ Inquiry, deepening my understanding of context and the geography of power to realize my own structure-bound assumptions reproduced the systemic logic, and in turn work to subvert it, reordering my own position in a different relation to a truth only accessible once I began to challenge the logic of power.

In this way Militant Researches into a Phenomenology of Self becomes for the activist a kind of niche creation, where organism, challenging the premises of a logic that gives order to the environment, in fact changes that environment to better survive and evolve.

This kind of full-spectrum resistance to dominant forces is part of a coevolutionary power struggle, requiring a coordinated network to help resolve this crisis.

Militant Ethnography: Inquiry as a Weapon of War “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

–Karl Marx “The magic of the saving Word is as dependent on man’s openness to the order of love as is the magic of the disordering word on his inclination to resist and hate truth.”

-Eric Voegelin What I appreciate most about an activist approach to research is the objective to both overcome a logic of separation and investigate new possibilities for alternative systems, militating for new forms of life. In this regard, David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Karl Marx’s “A Workers’ Inquiry,” and Ed Emery’s “No Politics without Inquiry!” provide an excellent introduction to such a discipline. These three authors help situate the role of scholar in mapping a system of power relations for the sake of waging a more effective “warfare” against dominating actors and abusive relations through rigorous inquiry.

Karl Marx, for instance, attempts to “weaponize” his inquiry into workers’ conditions by structuring his questions in ways that allude to and expose systemic injustice and inequities present in the contemporary complex of legal, economic, political, educative, and military forces of his day: “…don’t your employers or their clerks resort to trickery, in order to swindle you out of part of your wages?” By asking workers to think about the system they labor within, tracing the flow of capital and energy and the biophysical and their socioemotional effects on the worker, in a sense he deploys rhetorical devices as weapons, provoking responses by demonstrating a sense of powerlessness endemic to the situation of wagelabor, presumably so they might rethink these relations and ultimately resist the violations they are subjected to; violations they might reproduce without such an inquiry.

As a teacher, reading through the Inquiry reminded me of “Bloom’s Taxonomy of Knowledge,” seemingly present in the way the questions were structured. Bloom’s Taxonomy is a pedagogical tool

designed to extend one’s depth of thinking through layers that teachers use to design assessments to demonstrate understanding: remember/recall facts, understand/ explain ideas, apply information, analyze/connect ideas, evaluate/justify decisions, create/ produce new works. [Another variation is Webb’s Depth of Knowledge Levels, with recall, skills/concepts, strategic thinking, and extended thinking making up the several levels] I could not help but think that as Marx’s questions asked workers to recall answers for surface level questions, they would inevitably reflect upon his questions, applying them to their own work or hypothetical situations, before analyzing the complexities of the power systems and evaluating their own situations within them, finally turning their minds to consider how to change these conditions by creating circumstances to improve their lives.

Similarly, Marx seemed to use the survey to teach new terms and options to workers, helping make connections between work, rent, school, commodities, while taking a macro view of their own lives and economic trends like inflation, the labor theory of value, creative destruction, etc. to compare their situation as a class, consider options like striking, even using answers to possibly organize like-minded workers of revolutionary consciousness to imagine those possibilities (“State the obligations of the workers living under this system”). As many of these questions likely provoke emotional responses, Marx might use this typical ethnographic device to do so, providing outlets (organizing, revolution…) that would intend to change the conditions that provoked the initial response—an effective method of communist recruitment perhaps.

Emery’s “Proposal for a Class Composition Inquiry Project” similarly seeks to develop an empirical method to study conditions under which struggle takes place. He details how scholars should speak “the language of tactics, strategy, fields of battle, mobilising of forces, application of technologies, and a theory of war,” to provide an “operating system” that operationalizes the “new circuits, cycles, and patterns of production,” asserting the interests of a class composition, strengthening it, consolidating it, ultimately leveraging its collective power for an “incitement to action”—presumably one whose object of desire would be uncovered during the course of inquiry. I enjoyed this militant research proposal as well, as the “analysis of the everyday conditions of living labour” was again done to determine crimes of an exploitative power system so as to intervene for the sake of improving one’s life and the conditions of the laboring class as a whole. It seemed like the goal here was

“to set up an intercommunicating network of militants doing more or less detailed work on class composition in their local areas; to meet as and when appropriate; and to circulate the results of our collective work.” I do not know much about Marx, but his focus on the dictatorship of the proletariat would likely benefit from such a project, where a “think-tank” would provide methods, sources, a theoretical framework and epistemological basis for such a “science of struggle,” where the relationship of profit to class health would make vulnerabilities explicit, develop the knowledge base, and work to strategically apply new techniques designed to improve and implement successful projects in other sectors as needed. In this regard, I felt a metrics of success would be helpful so as to determine what constitutes “winning” or “losing” activities.

Two questions I found myself asking was whether a “language of war” was necessary, even counterproductive, as calling someone with power an “enemy” might mobilize sectors against labor in the first place if they feel threatened. If we are all living under the parameters of this conflict called capitalism (or kyriarchy, or “the totality…”), then seeking ways to resolve conflict between parties as opposed to conquering another —thus inciting the use by capitalists of economic weapons against labor— might be more effective? The second question I had was with regards to the “professionalization” of activist-scholars. Emery writes he envies the scientists in the physical sciences that have teams of researchers, international networks, machines for observation and analysis, community outreach campaigns…the tools and resources that make them effective in integrating with mainstream society to get their innovations accepted by the paradigm, comparing it to those on the Lef attempting to generate social change. This was an contentious point I thought, because it necessitates the role of empirical evidence in reconstituting approaches while providing a set of standards, asking whether activists hold approaches that don’t work because their ideologies paralyze activity, precluding successful innovations that “work,” or are simply incapable of successfully integrating their findings due to inferior methods or inadequate resources. If so, what then?

Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology proposes creating an inquiry program (“anarchist anthropology”) capable of developing a theory of social order and revolutionary counterpower that is capable of breaking down these elements of institutional power, while at the same time cultivating attitudes against it and innovating new social

forms. He, like the others, contextualizes this process within an “[invisible] war,” but instead of advocating direct confrontation, focuses on those political projects engaging in “revolutionary exodus,” simultaneously challenging the “common-sense” assumptions to erode the fundamental basis of the systemic logic of power and encourage the rejection and revitalization of social relations. Here it seems the critical approach to the largely unexamined assumptions and premises of human “sciences” can do more to subvert power than even direct attacks. Graeber offers anthropology as a discipline providing epistemological support for anarchy, the tendency to seek free agreements based on egalitarian principles and just praxis.

In all examples, three themes are present: 1) the idea we are in a war; 2) the necessity of inquiry in discerning the extent of the system that wages war against us; and 3) the degree to which sustained inquiry can challenge and erode the fundamental premises upon which oppressive power is built to generate conditions for liberation. While I question the efficacy of a war-based rhetoric in achieving freedom, justice, autonomy, etc. I appreciate the objective of, as Marx states, “energetically apply[ing] the healing remedies for the social ills….to prepare the way for social regeneration.” Three questions I had were 1) whether anarchists advocating insurrection were similarly guilty of “imposing their visions through a machinery of violence” (via coercion) as Graeber says of state power, 2) whether consensus remains a barrier or vehicle to freedom and justice, and perhaps in a related way, 3) whether existing institutions may be reformed or are inherently oppressive. If we have the “right to be lazy,” does that include avoiding consensus processes, allowing for political processes we don’t participate in. I bring this up because Graeber points out “one might say that the function which in the US constitution is relegated to the courts, of striking down legislative decisions that violate constitutional principles, is here relegated to anyone with the courage to actually stand up against the combined will of the group….” (85) Could it be possible that anarchy can peacefully coexist within a majoritarian democratic state with individuals participating in both, building that “new world in the shell of the old?” Or even, can majoritarian democracy peacefully coexist within an international confederation of (p)anarchist praxis? It is easy to say yes or no, but any comprehensive answer to these questions would have to do the militant inquiry each of these authors seeks to do, setting their own conclusions against others in order to better

determine the legitimacy of multiple perspectives. Even so, consensus may still never be guaranteed.

Undoing a Naturalized Suffering: The Role of Sensual Scholarship and Pragmatic Solidarity in Exposing and Transforming Symbolic Violence, Structural Oppression, and Racial and Class-based Hatred

"Politics is nothing but medicine on a grand scale."

-Rudolph Virchow, 1848 Seth Holmes’ Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Workers in the United States represents one of the more profound ethnographies I have read thus far, mapping a system of power as it relates to indigenous migrant farmworkers in the United States. In doing so, Holmes details how the geography of one’s birth, in relation to the geopolitical and geoeconomic pressures of international neoliberal market forces, work together to create conditions that generate suffering through multiple layers of symbolic and structural violence justified as such power relations are internalized, naturalized, and further normalized through prejudice to reproduce the structural racism of the system he immerses himself within for his research.

What I appreciate most about his writing is the clear sense of directive he has as an anthropologist. Holmes recognizes that his role as a participant observer holds subjectivity that he employs through what he calls “embodied anthropology” and “sensuous scholarship.” That is, it is his bodily experience that produces the fieldwork, and as such, he pays attention to this experience to help convey systemic and structural violence that he witnesses first hand, whether aches and pains, rage, shock, tiredness, etc. His research of social relationships in immigrant and indigenous migrant labor communities – “he wants to experience for himself how the poor suffer”—makes explicit social categories that are mapped onto different bodies and thus their place in the power structure he comes to know. Moreover, by doing so, he is able to clarify the varied “streams of causality” by which violence links structural and symbolic forms in a “continuum of violence.” Thus by “studying up,” he performs an “ethnography of suffering” to expose the (re)production of everyday power

relations as well as the forms of resistance that accompany them for the sake of providing tools to make structural change.

Holmes’ first great insight is the hierarchy of value that is generated out of the market forces and coercive institutions and social structures. The economic system, he demonstrates, keeps pickers poor; but it is also the case that corporatization and market rules mean growers would go bankrupt in a global system if they did not maintain such oppressive conditions. This in turn shows why vulnerable classes are legally excluded from protections, and why part of a picker’s contract mandates s/he does not organize for better conditions: industry is dependent on exploitation for profit, creating a downward pressure on wages, benefits, and even the quality of the food as competitive advantage incentivizes oppressive conditions. Further, the structural vulnerability of those at the bottom of this labor hierarchy is based in a complex interrelatedness of race, citizenship, education level, ethnicity, language ability, and gender, which together determine the degree to which workers garner respect, value, income, and their position within the labor field to remain impoverished or economically mobile. This power-complex further coerces the complicity of each role (picker, checker, crew boss, crop manager…) who internalize, normalize, and naturalize unjust relationships in physical and symbolic ways, generating different stresses and injuries while at the same time hiding and justifying their root causes in a complex but largely unconscious feedback loop.

A second insight offers the idea of symbolic violence as particularly helpful in analyzing the major findings of the fieldwork, where the structural violence of social hierarchies is embodied in mechanisms of suffering that give rise to sicknesses and injuries. Here, a “cognitive naturalized hierarchy” and “violence continuum” provides feedbacks that reproduce inequalities on the farm, across the border, inside medical institutions, and within society as a whole, whether through misinformation, common sense fallacies, stereotypes, or other physical expressions of a racialist dogma.

The varied classes within the labor hierarchy teach and naturalize hierarchy, reinforced through racism and prejudice, so that pickers are afraid to complain and lose their jobs to more “desirable” workers who would be willing to keep silent; checkers round down on time and poundage, acting as gate-keepers at the behest of management, at the same time learning

their own place above immigrant labor; crew bosses are able to threaten to take away livelihoods or deprive individuals or classes of respect or benefits; while the entire operation is dependent on the geographic and climatic realities of weather conditions that threaten to destroy the entirety of the economic endeavor.

This suggests to me something fascinating—that racism itself might be a social construction meant to procure competitive advantage as factions go to “war” with one another to survive a capitalist system that domesticates nature to be turned into profit.

Thus an economic system has been racialized, directing violence to the bottom of the hierarchy as a system of exploitation is set up, literally from the ground up, turning soil into sales by way of a mediating and alienating structures.

A third insight that Holmes’ referred to occasionally is the American mythology – the Alger Hiss rags-to-riches myth—which further justified suffering. The idea that populations suffered in earlier decades or centuries helps ensure vulnerable populations continue to participate in roles where systemic exploitation and oppression remains unaddressed, at the same time giving impetus to internalize a logic of separation, fear, and ultimately, hatred. This I thought was best represented in Holmes’ depiction of medical institutions as well as in the wider society, where institutions meant to treat or improve individual lives were complicit in reproducing oppression. The hospitals for instance, seeking to put profit over patient care, depoliticize health by ignoring the social structures causing patients’ stresses, sicknesses, and injuries, leading to a “structural medical racism and classism” that applies a myopic analysis of injury to migrant health, ultimately blaming the victims for their own suffering, dismissing their experiences, misrepresenting information due to language barriers, incentivizing an unwillingness to take time to do paperwork, justifying structural racist oppression with anecdotes of temporary discomfort, or even just performing shoddy medical practice. In these cases, Holmes points out, perception deeply affects material conditions, but is itself informed by unconscious drivers that may be based in the very prejudice and stereotypes and structures that cause suffering in the first place.

In the same way, the socio-politically encoded oppression, for instance with the NAFTA agreement, can similarly reinforce racial doctrines. Holmes details how in schools and in the wider communities, new linguistic categories are used to produce or identify symbolic dichotomies (“dirty,” “Mex…”) that normalize or cause suffering and exclusion. He brings up a fascinating point, that racial categories are themselves unnecessary without racism, which assumes a biological determinism to naturalize hierarchy. Phrases like, “they want to,” or, “they’re better at…” or “they like it,” or “they can’t,” or “they are built to…” all generalize certain bodies based on an erased and mythologized reality which normalizes dehumanization and violence, justifying and internalizing historical relationships that are further reproduced. Whiteness, in such a context, becomes a system of accumulated privilege that is damaging, not only because it reifies a hierarchy of value to naturalize oppression, but also because it stays silent about the role of international pressures, blaming classes of laborers for their own oppression which are generated by economic forces that are both erased (distracted from) or normalized through mythologized and racist narratives.

What Holmes’ does in the concluding chapter is, in a sense, a core objective of militant/activist ethnography and anthropology: identifying problems while advocating solutions that arise in this complex field of research. Without listing the many proposals that extend throughout each social sector that would have an impact on indigenous migrant workers (political, economic, social, psychological, medical, educational, etc.), one might point to the overall theoretical lens the author employs as a framework to approach such necessary changes: the position these laborers hold, and their political and economic meaning that is attached to such positions, are those “historically accreted dispositions” that arise in the body, added in layers over the course of time. As such, both these positions and their meanings can change, as the “dichotomous schemata” that informs one’s perception, and is produced by “asymmetric power relations” that have become normalized, are challenged and remade. For this reason, micro-local forms of advocacy can become sites for potential transformation, negotiating social interactions while ensuring a solidarity that challenges structures and representations by creating conditions for liberation. By treating the sociopolitical and historical conditions that generate suffering, the roots of disease can be recognized in social causes,

necessitating a reformulation whereby “social structure analysis” can be integrated in these various social sectors, moving social positions toward greater political health through “liberation medicine.”

Here, the limits of a science that does not seek to advocate, militate, or activate liberation can be seen, so that without broad coalitions able to identify, resist, and dismantle those institutions that form barriers to international equity and humane and healthy work, there will be a lack of “biopsychosocial health” across the body economic, so to speak.

Information alone cannot change structures that imbue social relations.

Rather, by denaturalizing social suffering, uncovering linkages, exploring conditions, challenging military operations, identifying linguistic misrepresentations, and incorporating this wider analysis in an inquiry of hegemony, we can perceive and critique the physical structures that generate forced migration and reproduce labor hierarchies, symbolic violence, and structural oppression.

To conclude, it seems to me that such violence is itself a mimetic ritual that stems from our relationship to the land as mediated by an exploitative economy. As such the inherent crises of geographical and climatic problems are both internalized and externalized within and across the value hierarchy that extends to all social sectors, for instance as rotten berries or bad harvests cut into profits and impoverish the most vulnerable classes in labor. In this regard, one can see how repression of these classes, on whom the entire structure depends, is necessary (the book, Drug War Capitalism might also be a good example of this process, whereby land redistribution movements or workers’ unions are repressed in furtherance of enforcing neoliberal market forces under the guise of protecting people from drugs, thus forcing migration), which in turn provides a theoretical basis for resistance: organize to liberate. The second consideration I see worth pointing to is the necessity of both linguistic accuracy and empirical verification with regards to epistemology and truth-claims. That is, so much of the oppression and suffering that culminates in this book arises due in large part to the value hierarchy that mediates access to land, but also in the false statements based in stereotypical and prejudice premises, deployed in racist linguistic devices that preserve the oppression and entire system of violence that is directed downward in the hierarchy. Clearly, sustained inquiry into the primary data on which those assumptions and

structures rest is critical, so that falsehoods can be challenged by contradictory evidence; which in turn makes it necessary to both convey those truths, or challenge those falsehoods when they present opportunities for communication in conversation.

In this regard, I saw Holmes’ advocacy lacking at times, unwilling to challenge such claims as they came up during his inquiry due to his own position of vulnerability within his field studies—during his time in jail, talking with administrators, or with those white workers who had been displaced by migratory farmers—saving his responses to the empiricallybased contradictions for his book’s analysis. While understandable, this likely did not help those he worked with at the time (perhaps there was no way to) but I was curious what kind of reactions such a conversation would have had, and its value to the larger ethnography.

A major point of Holmes’ book was that so much behavior is blamed on race and such actions are judged by the ethnocentric metrics we construct, with the wider public struggling with the fact that they hear a lot of information on media, but cannot see the social context that produces the “sickness,” and so are in real need of crafing lenses to understand these phenomena and events, as they are not yet trained to see with what Jonathan Metzel calls “structural competency.”

To begin “de-naturalizing” the social suffering we can turn our gaze towards the social formations that have historically constructed the experience of migrant workers and the American working class, bringing these experiences to consciousness, at the same time practicing transforming these structures in ways that accommodate various class and individual positions’ needs within the hierarchy of value, and comparing any new treaty we came up with to whatever new treaty this administration produces, ultimately connecting some of the same themes and pressures to other parts of American history—colonization, slavery, civil war, imperialism, globalization…--so as to begin to contextualize positions and themes that may be present during this election cycle, help each other develop new meanings with regard to the people whose lives are determined by the policies that will be crafed, and understand why certain trends are in fact occurring.

An Ethical Militancy: Inquiry, Love, and Pre-Cultural Revolt in the Ethnographer's Craft “Civilization is a youth with a Molotov cocktail in his hand; culture is the Soviet tank or the L.A. cop that guns him down.”

–Edward Abbey Reading Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ “Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology,” I found myself in much agreement. The difference between theorizing about cultural logic and witnessing that theory first hand ofen times requires a “suspension of the ethical” if one is committed to cultural relativism, in her case when accused witches are being murdered. However, this brings up questions of operating with an ethnocentricity, and specifically, if our own ethnicity and cultural baggage are inseparable to our identities, is it possible to “suspend” them, or should we “lean in” to them instead, acknowledging the political nature of such identities while leveraging them to witness and address social ills?

Scheper-Hughes’ experience moving from objective anthropologist to community organizer is an interesting example of moving beyond directives “to observe, to document, to understand, and later to write about their lives and their pain as fully, as truthfully, and as sensitively” as possible. It is interesting to see her shy away from that role, at first citing colonial dispositions and other theoretical considerations that academics use to justify objectivity, yet changing her position as she realizes the community does not care about such academic sensitivities, asking for her help, and as such, prompting her to reconsider who her anthropological loyalties are to and who they help, her career, the academy, or the community in question.

It is here she seems to break with the “false neutrality in the face of the broad political and moral dramas of life and death, good and evil, that were being played out in the everyday lives of the people,” becoming a fierce critic of the mythology of objective science.

As I understand it, there are four ways to do research: total observation (where the community is not even aware of the research), participantobservation (where the observer stays in the community but does not influence events), observer-participant (where the observer might participate in interviews designed to get information), or total participation

(where the researcher actively participates in the community, going even so far as to attempt to influence the events at times). I bring this up because as Scheper-Hughes questions her role, recognizing objectivity as a fallacious premise to be challenged, I began to see her move toward thinking of participation as a premise for becoming conscious of ethnographic factors in the first place, so that immersion in the community could more fully give insight. To some degree this seems like a “no-no” in anthropological circles—“going native,” so to speak. Another point this brings up is if a community internalizes violent oppressive social forces due to colonialism, is there an obligation in interfere with such unjust circumstances, intervening to create more just conditions? That is, while many times I heard something to the effect of “we need to document these voices to know the truth,” I wonder if it may be critical to propose liberation as a necessary predicate for those voices to even be able to speak freely in the first place.

To me this brings up another question, specifically is it time to leave anthropology behind? That is, whereas we can accompany people in a political process as part of some anthropological topic, unless these anthropologists are able to provoke responses that can resolve these issues, training new generations to do so as well, might there be a racist element in simply “witnessing” harms while refusing to judge and reconcile? We would likely engage politically if these oppressive forces were bearing down on us, but then refuse to do so when it comes to others? I am sure we are all familiar with the degree to which injustice has been reproduced by the court systems, so that the credibility of witnesses are destroyed without regard for truth, so as to “win a case” by the best legal argument. Similarly, is there a worry that this anthropologist-aswitness can be perverted to support interventions that do not address underlying issues, or even reproduce them?

For that reason, I was interested in the idea of “pre-cultural moral repugnance” that Scheper-Hughes uses as the basis for an ethical “militant” anthropology, where “objective” rationalizations may really just be extensions of the physical, intuitive reactions that we in turn orient ourselves by. For that reason, I was fascinated by her use of this idea as the basis of a science that takes sides, makes judgements, personally engages, and commits politically to a community or constituency, and felt that she

was right in much of her positions, though I disagreed a bit with what seemed to be her assertion that anthropological writing could be a site of resistance that could help comrades “collude with the powerless to identify their needs against the interests of the bourgeois institution” in the sense that it alone could change it. More on that later…

What surprised me most I thought were my reactions to the comments on her paper, specifically how ofen her approach was called “dangerous,” a threat, uncontrollable, that it made other anthropologists “nervous,” as if she had gone rogue or she was some sort of renegade. I admit my first thought was, “you’re goddamn right it is,” but this view changed as I attempted to integrate their nuanced positions.

First of all, as Crapanzano suggests, anthropology boundaries are in constant flux, and “to argue for the separation of moral and scientific models is not necessarily to argue against the moral grounding of scientific epistemology.” That said, I found myself wondering if morality results from a debate, perhaps it is only liberation that is able to hold space for that debate, creating conditions for that debate to proceed honestly. Or, if morality is pre-cultural, perhaps the desire for liberation is pre-cultural as well, and so there is a sense that oppression is anti-cultural, and so to effectively understand such cultures requires solidarity with cultures in their own liberation. But what of those cultures not seeking liberation? Is liberation a western category imposed on them, or is there an internalized oppression that should be addressed? Friedman’s response provided a potential response, in that one could objectively study oppression without choosing sides. This again made me wonder if this was what “bourgeois science” or “bourgeois morality” might be classified as, and again, why bother with the ethical standards of careerists, when activists have access to ethnographic tools too, and they can go the step beyond “mere” anthropology? Is it to preserve one’s career? The discipline? Would careerism exist in a truly liberated society?

Marvin Harris’ response was one I was looking forward to reading, since I had read his Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches before, and knew he was a firm believer in science, but also with a commitment to political action on behalf of the oppressed, castigating those who perform shitty science as attempting to use magic to change society, that is, an ineffective method.

His point then that science is more effective than political doctrine in discovering truth was well taken, as well as his point that anti-science paradigms “provide no such foundation [for politico-moral decision making] and therefore cannot be regarded as morally superior to… [scientific] paradigms.” His then was a critique of bad science in general, and a critique of Nancy’s in particular. This made me wonder what specifically was problematic with hers, and whether he was suggesting that she was rejecting science or reliable knowledge for the sake of liberation as moral imperative. That is, he provided an attack on her credibility as not only a scientist, but a competent ethnographer at all. Kuper takes this line as well, suggesting her ethnography is “unreliable,” even “outrageous,” bringing up a question I found myself wondering as well: if oppression is situational, is choosing sides problematic as you may be ignoring one side and therefore preventing yourself from being aware of the whole truth? As he writes, “there are many situations in which political activism will inevitably close off various avenues of information and cloud judgment.”

Moreover, does this pave the way for ultra-conservative activisms that use ethnography to deploy fascist agendas? What I liked especially is his pointing to a fundamental contradiction in militant ethnography: that 1) objective research is an illusion, but that 2) we can know for certain where justice lies. I think this can be addressed only at a personal level, and in dialogue, hence the necessity of this format of peer review and response.

More than anything I think, these first responses brought up the question of how one actually does good research at all. Nader talks this through in terms of the “scientific adequacy” of white-coat vs. barefoot approaches, and the necessity of integrative models, empiricism, and attention to what constitutes a “best anthropology,” while O’Meara points how the vagaries of “ethics” are problematic, and epistemological relativism is evil… suggesting militant ethnography and activist anthropology is to a degree elitist and private, and therefore unscientific, dangerous, and immoral. Are there ways then to objectively study subjectivity? This reminded me of the dilemma of proving the existence of god to some degree: is an individual experience of revelation as epistemologically sound as a logical proof? If we can’t have faith in other people’s experience, are we really going to have to convince everyone else for it to be “true?” Is militant ethnography for the anti-science “true believers” and zealots, or would it be the necessary conclusion of good, applied anthropology? Perhaps such

militants will never be in the majority, in which case, what should be done with a good anthropology? Can we simply decide for ourselves, arguing about it to try to persuade others we are right, but ultimately accepting it is an individual choice? And more importantly perhaps, as Ong mentions, will this be dangerous for the people such anthropologists work with?

complicity in violence that would not be possible without political engagement.

While I did not read D’Andrade’s original essay about the need for objective science, I found myself in agreement with him, which was perhaps most surprising. It is the scientific adequacy he cares about, and as he states, moral models may hinder while objective models may help. Perhaps, but I wonder if models in general are hindrances. Further, the “special kind of knowing,” may lead to demagogy, he writes, and moralistic fascism, or political religions. Is militant anthropology proclaiming morality, or are its practitioners moral and simply focusing their anthropology? The big agreement I found myself totally aligned with however, was this line:

What is it that militant anthropologists seek to do?

My argument is that while Scheper-Hughes describes the situation of these women in rich detail, her use of the moral model of oppression oversimplifies and misrepresents the causal relations involved, leading her to put the onus on the “power structure” and moral failings such as “complicity” and “bad faith.” This moral stance leads her away from a search for realistic solutions toward an approach in which “witnessing,” with its quasi-religious overtones, becomes an end in itself. I doubt that “witnessing” is sufficient to help either these Brazilian women or the “necklaced” unfortunates of South Africa.

I agree with this especially because 1) Scheper-Hughes comes to witnessing as somehow capable of itself creating change which I disagree with, and 2) I worry an ideological position that has identified an enemy and righteous side may overlook critical details factoring into the complex system that creates conditions of suffering, thereby being ineffective, or impotent, in alleviating it. However, I think I may disagree with D’Andrade in the sense he seems to suggest overturning the power-structure may not be realistic?

I would like to think it is, while acknowledging the correctness of his critique in general. Scheper-Hughes addresses his concerns by inviting followers to complete and develop the project, considering how it should be used, and suggesting anthropology break out of its objectivist paradigm so as to better understand the data, able to discern links that reinforce

Alex Khasnabish’s “Zones of Conflict” article was equally provocative in terms of providing me with more questions than answers.

What would “meaningfully challenging relations of power” look like?

Are we overstating the relevance of a field report to ending oppression?

How does giving a voice to the powerless serve as a vehicle for realizing social change as opposed to merely articulate social critique?

Are witnesses enough to achieve emancipation from systems of violence?

How? Does this necessitate a theory of successful emancipation in the first place?

Emancipated how? From what? Are there historical examples?

Does speaking out actually do anything?

Should we serve the interests of the oppressed if they have internalized their oppression and their desire would reproduce their oppressive conditions?

Is that an elitist neocolonial dismissive attitude?

Is it ethical to move from participant-observer to total participant, seeking to influence the community under study towards their own liberation?

What if the people’s understanding of their source of oppression is different from your understanding?

Whose takes precedent?

What does successful political struggle look like?

When are its goals achieved?

Is militant-ethnography another form of savior complex?

Is it victim-blaming to some degree in the sense that it sees people as without the ability to liberate themselves?

If the struggle which aims to subvert systems of domination and oppression requires violent insurrection in which people will die, is that ethical?

Are there successful examples of militant ethnographers or communities achieving goals of emancipation?

What productive role do witnesses serve?

What about studying those who make others live wretched lives with the intention of “staying the hand?”

Are witnesses more necessary than co-conspirators, accomplices, or coinsurgents?

Does “do no harm” apply to oppressing communities? What constitutes harm?

Why not study the oppressors in order to covertly infiltrate oppressive structures and subvert their ability to oppress others?

Are there various modes of engaging power structures?

Should we bother obtaining informed consent from the powerful if they wouldn’t consent if they knew their power to oppress would be abolished?

Are social systems emancipatory or inherently oppressive?

Are the structures themselves to blame or are they simply concretized systems based on larger moral and human dimensions that need be addressed?

What does substantive anthropological debate about ethics look like?

Is it possible to make fighting back more successful?

How can nation-states or corporations be stopped?

Is it time for militant anthropology to embrace naivety and arrogance by offering definitive prescriptions?

If you can only obtain important research by disobeying power, ethical concerns, or review boards, should you?

Does militant anthropology have its own review board, or should it have one?

Is struggling for rights effective if by doing so it reifies the power of state enforcement mechanisms that may be the cause of human rights abuses?

Does oppression result from exclusion from, or exploitation by these social systems?

Should anthropologists intervene where communities are complicit in their own oppression?

What if a community’s political agenda does not include addressing oppressive conditions or liberation?

What are the limits in “witnessing” for emancipation?

Why choose one community over another if the oppressive totality is everywhere in society, just more extreme or concentrated in different areas?

Is militant anthropology closing itself off to non-oppressed spaces?

What political power do scribes have?

What is the most productive forum anthropologists can have to end conditions of violence and suffering?

Do witnesses simply testify about oppression without ending it?

Can witnesses be coopted by power that uses them against the oppressed?

Are oppressed people capable of ending their own oppression (why wouldn’t they have done so)?

Is liberation a necessary condition for a true recording of genuine voices?

Do we assume one way or another that such voices would not demand liberation, or that voices can speak freely without liberation?

Is the desire for liberation pre-cultural, like ethics supposedly?

In this regard, I saw Khasnabish’s writing as a good critique to be aware of with regards to witnessing and an anthropology of liberation, but ultimately stifling, without holding the possibility to adequately address and transform oppressive structures without an external agent. Rather, as I have said in different ways, I wonder if the struggle for liberation is necessary in illuminating the complexities of the field in the first place, as well as whether liberation is an objective goal of a complex culture. If this is the case, then liberating space for voices to speak is a primary task, but also the need to potentially act in total participation as a way to more fully capture the experience, even perhaps going so far as to push such communities beyond their comfort level so as to achieve the liberated qualities such groups may not even be able to conceive of that might free these voices more fully. I will say that the above questions give me real pause and in a real way make me reconsider wanting to do an ethnography in an “other” community without being invited. Rather, an autoethnography might seem more ethically appropriate, since self-liberation is a goal I know I want, so that I can insist on full emancipation and abolition of concentration as opposed to minimum protections, and could “accompany” or play witness to my own experience in that process.

One point the author makes I find interesting is that, “in asserting the obligation of the anthropologist to operate as an agent of emancipation and social transformation, the very issues of how ethics and morality are constituted and how relations of power are constructed recede from

debate.” (80) True. And, by continually debating and self-reflecting, and critiquing, this can be prevented. In a sense, any conclusion about how ethics and morality are conceived of as the basis of a militant inquiry would themselves arise from such an inquiry.

To circle back to some original questions, Nancy’s use of the term companera strikes me as an ideal meant to invoke solidarity with the oppressed, invoking an epistemological basis for a militant anthropology that stems from a pre-cultural instinct towards helping those who need help. This is a noble and powerful goal, and as such holds immense responsibility that may similarly be prone to abuse, hence it constitutes an academic discipline ofen described as “dangerous.” Yet this danger is multifaceted, as it requires good empirical data, fidelity to a scientific process, constant critique and self-critique, and rigorous debate with others across the political spectrum. Khasnabish’s preferred “witness” seems more aligned to an “objective” science that achieves much of what Scheper-Hughes is going for, however it seems to lose the political agency inherent to an anthropology of liberation.

Such a move is understandable, if disappointing, to address the legitimate concerns of those who critique her, but may in fact discard the greatest tool anthropologists have at their disposal—namely the will-to-action their passions may engender in their work. Certainly, revolution as political project may influence the findings of anthropology, in that it becomes a deductive reasoning, whereby research will necessarily be contorted to fit that end goal.

However, if we see liberation as the pre-cultural aspiration upon which culture arises, then revolution becomes a conclusion only where it makes sense in a particular cultural context.

For myself, I fall somewhere between all of these academics with regards to the role of researcher. I see a militant anthropology as critical, with witnessing and accompaniment as certainly important techniques is describing the conditions.

However, I also see the necessity of objectivity when it comes to discernment, so that one can see clearly without being blinded or biased

by political perspective. This of course is difficult, as one cannot even comprehend the paradigm they are operating within, and so requires constant critique and self-critique, as well as rigorous peer-review and discussion to facilitate inquiry and map out problems and solutions. More than anything however, I think anthropology, like all academic disciplines, is stuck in the sense that it simply seeks to produce knowledge, where it is my opinion that this knowledge needs to be applied and acted upon. For this reason, I see the role of researcher, in so far as I would like to engage in research, as co-conspirator, accomplice, and insurgent engaged in an emancipatory project. For this reason, I see the researcher as necessarily discerning the relationships, but then stepping out of the role of academic in order to deploy such research in an unapologetic way. However, this can only happen through sustained self-reflection and dialogue that approaches ethical considerations in the spirit of open inquiry.

It cannot be the goal of anthropology to merely identify a problem and speculate as to possible solutions. Rather, those solutions must be attempted and adjusted for, so that the problem not only can be solved, but is solved, otherwise we might be unethical in allowing a problem to remain, if it causes suffering. To a degree, this might require a kind of radical experimental anthropology, that produces experiments meant to emancipate, while also putting up for consideration many of the methods, ethical standards, etc. the discipline takes for granted.

Scheper-Hughes’ “The Ethics of Engaged Ethnography: Applying a Militant Anthropology in Organs-Trafficking Research” strikes me as one example of this. While she attempts to engage in a complex field on behalf of vulnerable populations, she is forced reconstruct her practice. She explains how so much of the status-quo with regards to ethical standards and moral dispositions are constructed from a privileged and sanitized position without understanding of the human dimensions present in the conflict zones. For this reason, such positions themselves are barriers to access these areas, and as such, she is required to covertly infiltrate these places, manipulate subjects, and ultimately betray informants, destroying the very communities she is doing research on. As she said, it requires “rethinking the ethnographer’s craf,” and she justifies doing so by suggesting ethnographers do not have to be a bystander to international crimes against vulnerable populations.

While I agree with this position at a theoretical level, I would be wary of such a theory being applied in other “criminal” contexts. For instance, the Rojava Revolution strikes me as an example of an illegal operation whereby international laws are broken, and those trying to enforce them could potentially use ethnographic data to dissolve this liberation movement, in the way Scheper-Hughes provides data to the FBI to dismantle the criminal organ transplant network. In this regard, the possibility for imagination that a militant anthropology seemingly depends on would be destroyed, or used against the vulnerable population, if the scientists in question are ideologically predisposed to a seemingly neutral premise, like national sovereignty, or states as the only agent with a monopoly on violence. For that reason, while I can appreciate militant anthropology/activist ethnography as a discipline, I do indeed agree that it is dangerous, so that there must be constant conversation surrounding the work that is done and for what purposes. For instance, why is research that imprisons people or prevents livelihoods that are not state-sanctioned okay, but not research that would increase personal or professional profits? Is it because one group is oppressed and the other is not? What if poor people are no longer able to have life-saving organ transplants because the medical bureaucracies are not responsive enough?

I bring it up in the wake of our conversation of witnessing and the difference maybe between a "pure" or objective ethnography and an applied, militant one. (Shroedinger's ethnographer?) That is, should power, ethnography, divinity...be used, manipulated, directed for the sake of some ultimate goal (liberation, social change, salvation...) as a means to some greater end, or can engaging in ethnography, and purely witnessing for the sake of the simple beauty of hearing these voices be itself transformative, where union with these voices and people in the field or in a field report can be enough to create conditions by which one is able to find ecstasy, and stand outside oneself, creating an ontic disturbance that is epochal in the sense in creates a break in the continuity of oppression, separation, etc.

As to the question, "do we save or use anthropology?" I don't have an answer, but I suspect as was said, we can do both, so that both angels can dance on the pin so to speak. If anthropology is defined by praxis, we might

experience beauty through such praxis, and with it enjoy transformative experiences as we witness ourselves outside of ourselves, knowing and participating in a beauty that is the ends and means of anthropology/ethnography itself. At the same time, we can try to share the beauty of that experience with others, knowing that it may be mutilated or perverted by others. Nancy's experience seems indicative of this, as when she tried to act on her experience, sharing her knowledge of an underground network with cops, who did not even care until she was called as witness to put someone away, more so in relation to another crime case that had little to nothing to do with the international organ trade. (Watters, 2014) Such may be inevitable when speaking truth to power at times. Lesson learned?

We can judge her actions one way or another, the way we might judge Seth's or a medieval mystic engaged in "navel gazing," but at a certain point we may need to recognize that these people have chosen to "live their truth," in a way that we may simply not be able to understand, even despise, and it may even be just as valid, if not our own path. In that regard, perhaps we (I) can look at these people, still with critique or reflection, accept the strengths and limits of the effect of their praxis, and reorient my own accordingly to make up for, or simply to complement theirs, so as to together build out a more healthy culture and experience beauty in an entirely novel way.

Ultimately, I believe a final question with regards to ethical considerations with regards to a militant anthropology is simply, for what reason do ethics exist. Why bother with the intention, behavior, or consequence of a particular operationalized ethical concern? Whereas philosophically, there are many different theories that all seek to provide answers (utilitarianism, contract theory, virtue theory, Kantian positions, etc), I find myself of the opinion that whereas discussion of what constitutes proper ethical alignment may be important, eventually one will find that disregarding the logical formulations that can be crafed will return them to a basic intuitive reaction in which they are simply repulsed by a particular behavior, the pre-cultural moral repugnance and aversion to certain types of experience.

In which case, coming to understand the primary factors that drive such phenomena can be studied and changed, while integrating multiple

perspectives on the subject to better understand the nuances and more adequately address the underlying factors.

This in turn necessitates love for the community that is afflicted, and love for the epistemological process by which to better know the affliction so as to heal the community, as well as a constant willingness to engage with the beloved community as well as with the community of scholars who understand this epistemological process. Perhaps only in this way can inquiry achieve the goal of uncovering the object of its desire and achieving a world in which knowledge of this object (e.g. liberation) is sufficiently incorporated into our models of reality.

Works Cited: Khasnabish, Alex (2004) "Zones of Conflict: Exploring the Ethics of Anthropology in Dangerous Spaces" in NEXUS. Vol. 17 Retrieved from https://journals.mcmaster.ca/nexus/article/download/190/157 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy (1995) "The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology." In Current Anthropology, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Jun, 1995), 409-440. Retrieved from https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/hughes.pdf Scheper-Hughes, Nancy (2009) "The Ethics of Engaged Ethnography: Applying a Militant Anthropology in Organs-Trafficking Research." In Anthropology News, September 2009. Retrieved from https://dokumen.tips/documents/the-ethics-of-engaged-ethnographyapplying-a-militant-anthropology-in-organs-trafficking.html Watters, Ethan (2014) "The Organ Detective: A Career Spent Uncovering a Hidden Global Market in Human Flesh." In Pacific Standard. Retrieved from https://psmag.com/economics/nancy-scheper-hughes-black-market-tradeorgan-detective-84351

Of Paradigms and Pragmatics: Activist Scholarship, Militant Research, and the Resolution of Crisis in the Academy “Anthropology, abstractly conceived as the study of man, is actually the study of men in crisis by men in crisis.”

–Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive “The field experience is, then, a political experience; it demands that the anthropologist expose the forces that imprison him and that he seek to expose the forces that imprison the native.”

–Eric Wolf, Introduction to In Search of the Primitive “The Native still needs help. The anthropologist who is unable to perceive this, unable to register the tragic errors committed at times with the best intentions, at times under the stress of dire necessity, remains an antiquarian covered with academic dust and in a fool’s paradise.”

–Bronislaw Malinowski, cited in Wendy James, “The Anthropologist as Reluctant Imperialist” The amount of questions that came up for me with regards to approaching problems using moral and political models last week was perhaps due in part to the fact that the 1995 article seemed to provide the genesis for a bourgeoning discipline, prompting fearful responses to the “dangers” such a project might initiate and inquiry designed to identify future avenues of research in the responses to “Primacy of the Ethical.”

Over the course of the twenty years or so since, some of the questions seem to have been worked out at least partially, with Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship providing a helpful contribution to developing the field, offering both an approach to understanding the context in which these questions are asked, as well as how to even begin formulating responses to those questions, whether with answers or actions.

Questions, we might say, imply contradictions. They indicate a crisis of dichotomization, to an extent, so that preliminary answers will collapse a field of possibility to particular courses. However, even these dichotomies can be challenged with new inquiry, with questions opening new spaces for

theoretical breakthrough and resolution. Here, we can choose not to answer questions that are framed in an older, “classical” paradigm, but rather approach such questions using new methods and methodologies that are at once ethical, pragmatic, and ultimately participatory so as to provide answers to questions that are reframed in new paradigms that resolve would-be contradictions, without reproducing the existing oppressive frameworks of so-called knowledge that provoke the crises in the first place.

To test for something, a theory has to be considered, or conceived of, in the first place. For if one remains unconscious of the theory, any test to verify will remain unrealized. In this regard, activist scholarship provides a new development in academic discourse and knowledge production by challenging why things are the way they are and how they could be otherwise, without naturalizing the conditions that give rise to the crisis.

The answers such scholarship provides offer glimpses of how to begin engaging such contradictions, and for this reason, activist scholarship can contribute to both activist and scholarly needs by providing new methodologies and types of knowledge, building capacity to make space for new worldviews, activities, and community-based knowledges that would otherwise remain unrealized. Thus activist scholarship entails that what was previously unconscious will become conscious; if the world is how it is because we believe it to be that way, integrating new beliefs as to the way the world is will necessarily change the way the world is and will be.

In this light I especially appreciate Hale’s willingness to highlight three ways in which the field of activist scholarship can develop, in terms of methodological rigor, scholarly privilege, and theoretical innovation, explicitly in the context of an increasingly influential conservatism with regards to security studies. That is, by revitalizing methods and reclaiming tools (e.g. “positional objectivity”) scholars can better unlearn unearned privileges to challenge paradigmatic assumptions of ideological and epistemological preferences in various scholarly fields, in turn providing “special insight, insider knowledge, and experience-based understanding” to deepen understanding as to contradictions and crises. For this reason, such “productive contradictions” generating more questions should be welcomed, since alternative ways of doing research may

enact an alternative way of doing research that attempts to contribute to the social good and to modestly advance the frontiers of knowledge, while training a bright light of critical scrutiny on the inequities of university–based knowledge production and attempting to ameliorate these inequities through the research process itself. (23) Knowledge production, in this sense, is a right held by everyone. Moreover, just as new knowledge is born from contradiction, so too are social movements, so that spaces that remain free from institutional pressures and incentives of careerism, like prestige or credit (which themselves reinforce classist, hierarchical, insulated, ranking-based, capitalist, elitist, and exploitative relationships), can be nurtured. What is more, without doing so, and extracting valuable forms of knowledge from communities in question and profiting from them, academics are complicit in relations that dehumanize and discredit such communities, reaffirming their own institutional biases that skew their results as they operate with the assumption it is the researcher alone who is expert, at the same time distorting through commodification the very knowledge claims they have themselves appropriated and capitalized on.

In particular, Engaging Contradictions helped me gain more of a sense, not only how activist scholarship is conducted, but also what is needed to conduct such scholarship successfully: 1) Love and Alignment. This is to say that without love, there can be no inquiry, as the desire to know prompts the journey that research requires in the first place. Further, to begin to love is to begin to develop respect for, accountability to, and investment in the relationships upon which the entire research project is founded. As Joy James and Edmund T. Gordon state, Seeking collectivities—that is, communities shaped by egalitarian sociality that reject dominance and concentrations of power—a revolutionary is guided by love…the

unfolding of self within the collective, just as the self develops in its individuality, is likely to be the foundation for radical subjectivity.

(368) 2) Potent Sites of Struggle. To be in loving alignment with oppressed communities necessitates engaging those contradictions that drive suffering in the first place, indicating prospects to engage inferior epistemological assumptions, working together to develop adequate responses based on horizontal community-driven ethical and pragmatic epistemological models. This may warrant strategic assessment as to what questions or communities can benefit most from activist scholarship in collaboration with the communities themselves. As Hale points out, “Social contradictions and political struggles are generative sources of knowledge,” and as such, represent opportunities to work with communities at sites where new knowledge and insight can be co-produced to resolve the crises the struggle against as well as the epistemological paradigms out of which they arise.

3) Relevant Skills. This I thought was especially important, for the simple reason that the needs of a community require specific processes that may in fact be technical at times. As such, understanding how to perform those tasks will go beyond simple stated solidarity, to help actualize conditions in which communities are able to operate to build capacity to solve their own problems. At a minimum this should include research design that conforms to participatory community based models, but also will depend upon the goals of the community in question.

(I must say here that reading Shannon Speed’s “Forged in Dialogue: Toward a Critically Engaged Activist Research” was a bit infuriating. That is, in choosing a side in a struggle, approaching the community with a proposal, and conducting ethnographic fieldwork that would serve as evidence in an official court hearing, participating with the community to determine research design and analytical processes that could be provided to the state, she

runs into a legal technical barrier. Considering her essay critiques the narrow view of legalistic anthropology, I wondered whether she should have incorporated that legal perspective more so she could have been more successful with regards to achieving the community’s goal, or even finding a viable case project. While I appreciate her developing a method to decolonize the discipline that could benefit other anthropologists, I had to wonder whether the indigenous community gives a fuck, and even whether she was inadvertently complicit with their oppression by introducing them to an ineffective law group. Moreover, I wondered whether the subjects were, as a result of her failure, still suffering as targets of low-intensity counter-insurgency warfare. Unfortunately, their position was never referred to again in her essay after the Mexican government challenged the legality of the case and the ILO threw the case out of court. To sum up, her story alone may be enough to see why relevant skills are critical for a movement’s liberation).

4) Good Research Methods for Radical Praxes. This perhaps was the most important and well developed contribution of the book, but also one that must be developed even further. This is to say, as Davydd Greenwood writes, there are different concepts of intelligence, some that included the pursuit of universal truths (Sophia, or Episteme), or applied, purely instrumental, technical knowledge (Tekne). However, the capacity to make practical choices, knowing how to act in particular situations, how to forge dialogue, and bring people together, etc. (Phronesis) creates conditions by which contributions are able to materialize through community participation and engagement with contradictions.

That is, activist scholarship offers a kind of cultural survival strategy and imperative to adapt to conditions and resolve crises.

As such, the methods and methodology must be forged in dialogue and constantly subject to critique and self-critique to remain relevant, effective, and able to adequately engage in a variety of ever-changing environments.

These four points are certainly critical in terms of actually conducting activist scholarship. By extension then, three other insights, or implications, are further offered by the authors.

A) The importance of a “home” where such activist/militant scholarship can take place. In which case, is CIIS, or the anthropology department in particular, a “good home?” Or should we strive for, as the World Anthropology Network seeks to create, “a fluid network of “nonhegemonic” scholars who ask all the critical questions, practice anthropology differently in accordance with their answers, yet assiduously avoid anything that could even faintly resemble an alternative structure with its own ideologies, practices, and forms of governance.” (17) In either case, are there (non)institutional limits, or barriers that prevent necessary work from being done, and therefore work to continue to reproduce structures that repress knowledge (and what can we, as participants in this community, do about them)?

This brings me to another consideration of whether…

B) Anthropology, or Academia in general, should be left behind. Being too myopic for the needs of the communities for which such research is presumably done, perhaps the academy at large and anthropology as a discipline is too limited in scope, either by its own definitions or by the political, economic, social, and cultural assault on the resources it requires, to be effective in producing the kinds of knowledge that will be worthwhile for oppressed communities at sites of struggle. If the disciplines, departments, or institutions themselves are not capable of adequately and effectively engaging the contradictions in the first place because they are either not resourced adequately or are unable to break out of the paradigms they are confined to, this may in fact require radicals to, rather than fight to create a revolutionary space within

these structures, exit the institutions entirely to avoid or circumvent those barriers that prevent knowledge, and thus liberation, from being achieved at all. Again, quoting James and Gordon, “The meaning of our productivity cannot be determined by academia alone. Seeking the exit door, we search for meaning, value, and political relevance given that our institutions are incapable of providing the conditions for radicalism as anything other than performance. Resistance to violent and premature social and biological death requires that we as activist researchers change into radical subjects.”

While I understand this line of thought however, I do wonder whether the “revolutionary” academic may provide some benefit as well. That is, whereas one can certainly leave oppressive institutional spaces for radical ones, might it serve the radical spaces more so if we can infiltrate elite spaces on behalf of, or in collaboration with, these radical spaces with the intention of coopting or destroying them, or at least their power to oppress?

That is, pragmatic solidarity with communities of struggle can still be achieved, but perhaps oppression, and those relations that reproduce oppression of radical spaces is external to them and, in being hegemonic, unable to be undone but for engaging their own contradictions head on (like, don’t go to the Shire to stop oppression, go to Mordor…though of course, one does not simply walk into Mordor…). This in turn leads to a third insight…

C) Activist scholarship as a method for addressing contradictions in oppressor communities. Seemingly in response to a concern about militant scholarship in last week’s reading, Hale suggests that an “activist research of the right” is unlikely to emerge because conservative ideologies are more effective in justifying or upholding social inequalities through value neutrality rather than

explicit political alignment with the powerful; and further, that the very activist research methods themselves would be antithetical to political goals and vision of the people in questions, so that “activist scholarship methods themselves embody a politics, which the authors affirm and critically explore…a step toward deeper reflection on the entanglement of researcher and subject and, by extension, toward greater methodological rigor.” (7) For this reason, might we seek to (covertly?) use these methods to conduct research that specifically engages with oppressor communities, so that they can be exposed to the very methodology that is itself transformative? If we look at the master-slave relationship that suggests the master is in fact dependent on the slave, then to a degree, the dominator is oppressed in a more complete way by a system of slavery because they have even lost their capacity to question such a system they believe works out in their favor. For this reason, “dialogic warfare” may be a contradiction that can only be engaged and resolved if, in a Freirian way, oppressors can be brought into dialogue on equal footing to participate in emancipatory knowledge processes that are capable of enacting transformation. In this regard I appreciate what Lipsitz suggested, in his essay “Breaking the Chains and Steering the Ship: How Activism can help Change Teaching and Scholarship,” by suggesting, following Michael Eric Dyson, that scholars should make themselves like a Trojan Horse, keeping hidden inside ourselves the knowledge that we have gleaned from all those people we have met in life who had important things to say but no opportunity to say them in public. When we gain access to the printed page, the speaker’s podium, the performance stage, the camera, the computer, or the painter’s canvas, we can be like the Trojan Horse: at the appropriate moment we can open ourselves up and let all those other people out. (90) This is to say that activist scholars should not just seek to produce oppositional identities and ideas, or theories for alienation, inequality, and

injustice, nor even to simply provide an equitable distribution of resources and power. Rather, “it requires the reconstitution of social relations on a new basis.” (95) No doubt these new relations will not be found in any “classic” institution that unquestioningly reproduces oppression, but indeed is the impetus for leaving such institutions for those radical spaces that are able to or have already undergone such reconstitution. However, is it possible or even enough to simply defend these places, produce knowledge in coordination and collaboration with these communities, and disseminate their insights so as to effectively help them to liberate and perpetuate their own novel cultural modes and by extension (or rather, hope) others as well? I do not know, but I would guess that, following the last however many millennia, that they may be hunted down or crushed by oppressor communities if those oppressor communities are not themselves reconstituted by those within them who prompt the type of inquiry and participatory action research capable of emancipation and transformation as well.

For this reason, I appreciate especially the Aferword’s suggestion to leave such institutions if they hinder knowledge production, but would like to highlight a perhaps overlooked assertion that it may be the radical scholar’s duty to eventually return, staying mobile certainly, but seeking to integrate their insight and the insight of the oppressed community so as to reconstitute the relations within the institutions as well, dissolving elite mechanisms that control praxis so that those sites that elites do not control are able to grow exponentially.

Works Cited: Hale, Charles R. et Al. (2008) Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship. Ed. Charles Hale. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA

Something Dangerous Carefully Done: Self-Science and Empirically Verifiable Rage as a Basis for the Validity of Revolution and Other Emancipatory Endeavors.

“It is true that sex workers sell a service which we all hope will be connected with intimacy and deep personal feeling. But feminists have been at pains to spell out that sexuality is romanticized to hide how it is sometimes a tragedy or disappointment or danger—or all of these—for women. It is also sometimes a job…This reluctance to admit the connection between sex and money in our own lives can express itself as a prejudice against prostitutes—whose job is to connect the two. This prejudice against the women who strip sex of some of its romantic mystique is then reinforced by their illegal status…In this way the prostitution laws make it virtually impossible for a woman who is a prostitute to live with women or with men without breaking the law.”

“We’d bought fifty black masks; in that way prostitute and nonprostitute women would not be distinguishable from each other, and press photos of either would not be dangerous…In masks we had glimpsed what could happen: we created change. Taking off the masks, our collective power was as hidden as the reality to which it had penetrated. Going back to work— housework, whoring, office work, school work—is never a victory. It was hard to remember we had won…what we are witnessing before our very eyes is the process whereby women’s struggle is hidden from history and transformed into an industry, jobs for the girls.”

-Selma James, in Hookers in the House of the Lord The readings below are helpful in showing what militant research looks and feels like and works to do, situating it within the wider lineage of engaged, activist scholarships over the last hundred years or so.

Marta Malo de Molina’s essay, for instance suggests how movements for social transformation have historically been distrustful of traditional, scientific approaches to knowledge, at times leading to “impotence,” and the necessity of “building operative maps, cartographies in process, emerging from dynamics of self-organization, in order to be able to intervene in the real, and maybe to transform it.”

In so doing, a sense of urgency and necessity drives the project to experiment and initiate explorations into specific questions designed to flesh out this cartographic project: 1) How to break with ideological filters and inherited frameworks 2) How to produce knowledge emerging directly from concrete analyses of cooperative life and rebellious experience, 3) How to make this knowledge work for social transformation 4) How to operationalize knowledges already circulating through movements’ networks 5) How to empower knowledges and articulate them with practices, and 6) How to retrieve our capacities and ally them with collective, subversive, and transformative action, guiding them toward creative interventions.

Molina identifies four historical tendencies in which these explorations have taken place: 1) worker inquiries and co-research, 2) feminist epistemology and women’s consciousness-raising groups, 3) institutional analysis, and 4) participatory action research (PAR). The second part of her essay compares these four tendencies with the militant researches of today, asserting their “concept-tools will reappear in the contemporary initiatives that are seeking to articulate research and action, theory and praxis,” identifying four elements common to each: 1) A materialist inspiration to focus on concrete reality in service of producing action that produces a new reality.

2) Apprehending and intervening in concrete elements occurs through situated, embodied experience, prompting researchers to consider where and how to situate ourselves

3) A certainty that new co-produced knowledge processes affect and modify this embodied experience, generating new bodies and engender common (rebellious) practice.

4) The primacy of goals, process, and putting real operations into place, over formalized methods.

These common elements constitute the basis of a militant research in service of social transformation, further articulating several tendencies within this research process: 1) Knowledge production about and against mechanisms of domination, co-creating maps for mobilized communities to utilize 2) Identifying initiatives whose practices of social transformation arise through a “virtuous procedure from practice to theory to practice” 3) Research as a catalyst for political re-composition due to understanding inter-subjectivities produced in fragmented social spaces, so as to identify and describe reality, search for forms of resistance, and ultimately provide a “metropolitan materiality.”

What I like best about Molina’s ability to decipher the underlying questions, the four traditions, their common elements, and several tendencies, is that they seem to map the contours of an emergent method and discipline, one movements can adopt to address their initial suspicion and distrust, while avoiding paralysis and instead determining the generative activity needed for social transformation.

In those processes of struggle and self-organisation that have been the most vivid and dynamic, there has been an incentive to produce their own knowledges, languages and images, through procedures of articulation between theory and praxis, starting from a concrete reality, proceeding from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the abstract. The goal is that of creating an appropriate and operative theoretical horizon, very close to the surface of the ‘lived’, where the simplicity and

concreteness of elements from which it has emerged, achieve meaning and potential.

Moreover, Molina’s ability to detail this new academic domain situates the Precarias a la Deriva’s project of searching out liberatory methods within the “circuits of feminized precarious work.” That is, as a continuum of Care-Sex-Attention is externalized from the domestic sphere to commercialized public spaces and a profit-driven market, the militant research group weaponizes these methods and knowledges, using the six questions above to direct their exploration to map the territory, look for conflict, establish networks to break solitude, develop language to talk about what was happening, with the intention of making more effective a general strike.

Thus the method in question derives three tentative hypotheses from communicated experiences as “primary material for politics.”

1) “Precariousness” as the symbolic and material conditions creating uncertainty with regards to the sustained access to essential resources for the full development of one’s life.

2) The recognition of “precariousness” beyond mere socioeconomic conditions and positions, but rather as a generalized tendency – “precarization.”

3) The territory of precarization and precariousness extending beyond the workplace to include the wider everyday metropolitan territory.

These hypotheses developed from experience then provide clues for where to look with regards to propositions and points of attack: -

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Exploring the Care-Sex-Attention continuum as the environment where a web of places, circuits, families, populations, etc. emerge out of the qualities and quantities of Affect to produce diverse phenomena and strategies.

Producing slogans able to group these points and take up radical discourse.

-

-

-

Constructing points of aggregation and open and diffuse spaces, where people can come together with conflicts, resources, information, and sociability to produce agitation and reflection.

Strengthening alliances by creating materials (books, videos…) to keep conversations open Intervening in the public sphere, producing massive events that make precariousness visible and raise to consciousness latent conflicts Mobilizing common economic and infrastructural resources toward liberation, organizing to supplant the dominant logic with a collective and networked one.

Thus, a militant research creates a psychocartography, one whose anima mundi provides the field of inquiry for concrete experience, out of which four specific hypotheses are produced: 1) The Care-Sex-Attention continuum, being the stratification and professionalization of Affect and assigned to women in the division of labor under patriarchal capitalism intensifies and excludes them from certain spaces and subjectivities.

2) Tracing the circuitry of the Care-Sex-Attention continuum in journeys around the city allows for an understanding to create relationships able to join together in occasions for social transformation where care and desire are allied in a more just manner for all. To quote, “Beneath any stratum, affect flows precariously…”

3) The ecological logic of care opposes and supplants the securitary and fear and profit-based logics that reign in the precaritized world, and appear in concretized practices. Thus care, basing itself on cooperation, interdependence, the gif, and social ecology reconstitutes bodies opposed to such logic, supplanting them altogether.

4) Finally, as a consequence, the fundamental challenge of critiquing the continuum is to produce new, liberatory and cooperative

forms of affect, replacing the structural basis of human existence and social relation.

What I love most about these hypotheses is, as a case study in militant research, in many ways staying true to the outline that is provided earlier

by Molina, a definition of care is empirically grounded in several key elements (affective virtuosity, interdependence, transversality, and everydayness) that constitute a method to break with an oppressive logic, insisting on radical transformation for situations imbued with social justice: Because care is what makes life possible (care generates life, nourishes it, makes it grow, heals it), care can make life happier (creating relations of interdependence among bodies) and more interesting (generating exchanges of all types of flows, knowledges, contagions), care can give life, definitively, some meaning. (41) This method of liberation, born from the militant researches into the feminized circuitry of the continuum of the real, offers real knowledge into how best to produce social wealth and “extract from care its transformative force.” In turn, such knowledge can thereby by applied so that tools can be provided to would-be strikers. These tools include -

-

A caring strike to interrupt a securitized order by politicizing the truth of care Facilitating encounters to imagine worlds that allow affect to come through and replace oppressive logics with those that make an ecology of care primary.

The everyday and multiple practice of the strike, where care generates conflict as a public matter.

The focus on care as a constituent element of the militant research process helps demonstrate the basis of its revolutionary potential to reconstitute social relationships and replace the logic of security and profit that increasingly determine public and private life by attending to our basic human desire for freedom. As is stated in a footnote,

Why do we speak of possibilities? Because the fact that care could be the motor for happier and more interesting lives depends precisely on its continuous questioning and redefinition, that is, on its politicization: care yet, but organized and distributed in a more just manner and with qualities that tend to empower the parts that are placed in relation. We do not value, for example, paternalist, possessive, or dominant care.

To summarize then, we can see in Precarias a la Deriva, tentative hypotheses arise out of a particular method that in turn provides proposals for how a movement can more effectively self-liberate. As their hypotheses, drawn from the concrete experiences and invisible trajectories of life are refined, a definition of care is deconstructed to its constituent elements, in turn providing the possibility to apply tools that are more able to be used effectively for social transformation. This turn toward militant co-research follows a long history of precursors, following the avenues for exploration that the various tendencies similarly articulated, drawing on the elements common to these traditions to better address their own situations and circumstances. That is, militant co-research nurtures a selfempowering method whose process focuses analysis on the self-awareness on feelings and experiences about their own oppression, promoting a reinterpretation of social relations while establishing the possibility for transformation.

Theory here is built intimately, from historically marginalized voices, testing generalizations against personal experiences of living practice and action.

Methods of radical organizing provide both mechanisms of truth-making against oppressive epistemologies, as well as a critical weapon to attack and break down the paradigm that produces such realities, generating new knowledge to be adapted to the goals of each struggle to design action plans and demands rooted in the experience of (militant) action embodied within the research process itself: Both researcher and research thus become catalyzing elements, attending with care to those various planes of subjectivity (“divided into manifest, latent, and deep/profound”) whose transformative social action able to generate a new and more just reality are both object and result of the

study. This ethical relation moves from empirical realities to general theory before being reapplied to reality once more, generating action that itself challenges the epistemological basis of science as a set of abstract, formalized methodological rules divorced from concrete realities, now situated as a tool to empower social struggles by experiments designed to empower such struggles within and over the spaces of everyday life.

To end this writing in the way it began, I refer to the insight of Selma James: Politics, if it is fueled by a great will to change the world, rather than by personal ambition, offers a chance to know the world, and to be more self-conscious of the actual life you are living, rather than being taken over by what you are told you should feel, about yourself and others: a chance, in other words, to live an authentic life.

Such politics are a unique enrichment, not a sacrifice.

James, Selma (2012) Hookers in the House of the Lord (1983). In Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning, A Selection of Writings, 1952-2011.

PM Press: Oakland, CA. ---- (2012) Striving for Clarity and Influence: The Political Legacy of CLR James (2001-2012). In Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning, A Selection of Writings, 1952-2011. PM Press: Oakland, CA. Molina, Marta Malo de (2004) “Common Notions, Part 1: Workers-Inquiry, Co-Research, Consciousness-Raising.” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. Retrieved from http://eipcp.net/transversal/0406/malo/en Molina, Marta Malo de (2004) “Common Notions, Part 2: Institutional Analysis, Participatory Action-Research Militant Research.” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. Retrieved from http://eipcp.net/transversal/0707/malo/en Precarias a la Deriva (2004) “Adrif through the Circuits of Feminized Precarious Work.” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies.

Retrieved from http://eipcp.net/transversal/0704/precarias1/en

Precarias a la Deriva (2006) “A Very Careful Strike – Four Hypotheses.” The Commoner. N.11 Spring 2006. Retrieved from http://www.commoner.org.uk/11deriva.pdf

of attack and tools with which to carry out such attacks to transform the continuum “affective labor” operated within.

Toward a Revolutionary Practicum: Work-Stoppages, Integral Education, and the Material Base of a PostLiberated Fieldwork “The question of what is possible cannot be answered in terms of what is.

The fact that “human nature” is hierarchic in a hierarchic society does not mean that a hierarchic division of people among different tasks in necessary for social life…If [capitalism] has to fight against human nature to survive, then by the expert’s own language, the system is extremely unnatural.

“Thus while some experts define the rebellion in France as impossible because unnatural, their expert colleagues design the incapacitating gases with which cops can suppress such impossible rebellions. BECAUSE ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.” -Fredy Perlman (1968) in Anything Can Happen These papers were fascinating in their ability to show some of the specific sites where militant co-research took place, along with the methods of the research process and the various conclusions and applications of the inquiry.

I enjoyed tracing the lineage of these reports, in that, while none of them referred to Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ version of militant scholarship, many of them referred to Molina’s essay, along with the Quademi Rossi, Socalisme ou Barbarie, Kolinko’s “Introduction to Hotlines,” and the concept of operaismo, or “workerism,” as major contributions, inspirations, or catalysts in helping them think through some of the common themes.

Molina’s essay was helpful in tracing the historical tendencies and identifying common elements and tendencies, the tentative hypotheses such research produced, especially with regards to “precariousness,” “precarity,” and “precaritization” of the worker, so as to determine points

Steve Wright’s piece is similarly helpful in that it focuses on several attempts to institutionalize the kind of militant co-research spoken about, and the ways in which people sought a “vehicle best suited to lead the renovation” of the labor movement. In particular was the idea that whereas many of the Lefist groups were struggling against specific laws, many others were not seeing such struggles as specific issue-based campaigns, but rather saw them in light of a more general fight against fascism at large: “for many such young people, it discovered, fascism evoked the spectre of class domination in its purest form…we are like slaves, work is a burden and I don’t even make enough to live on. That is fascism to me – the boss’…”

This brings up the question of work as inherently exploitative, perhaps more so under a capitalist paradigm, but simply in terms of a logic of oppression colonizing new spaces (factory, universities, call centers, the sleeping mind, etc…), and imposing a hierarchy meant to maintain precarity in the workforce to further fracture and disintegrate the relationships that would be necessary to effectively resist this exploitation. In this regard I appreciated the Kolinko introduction, in that it proposed a structure of how a militant co-research process might be reported: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

Starting points Goals of the inquiry and what has been done Evaluation of the project, problems, solutions Historical context for sites of research Forms of everyday working life, cooperation, exploitation, resistance 6) Kinds of conflicts, experiences, problems, tactics 7) Proposal for next steps 8) The various questionnaires, leaflets, lists, literatures, glossary, etc.

This I thought was helpful in that it set out how such a project would be used to intervene in the site of struggle itself, but also just as important, how conclusions and insights into the concrete relations of exploitation and struggle for autonomy could be generalized and made more effective.

The Ephemera articles were also helpful in gaining a sense of how to implement a militant co-research process at a site of struggle, and the ways in which the critical questioning into class composition, the goals of the inquiry, notions of exploitation and precarity, and emancipatory responses to circumstances and ways to transform the condition changed during the course of the research. That is, while Marx’s “Workers’ Inquiry” provided a prototype to determine conditions of work, exploitation, organization, and resistance, these articles updated and adapted them to their own circumstances, where factory-life may not have held the same kind of prominence it once did in the workers’ struggle.

Curcio’s “Practicing Militant Inquiry” gave a good sense of how workers could use inquiry to make available new weapons that could break racial hierarchies and effectively produce enough material damage to capital flows and the public image of corporations: “The strike is real, in the sense that it aims to (and) interrupt the entire process of production and distribution. In this regard, the knowledge workers acquired while working in the warehouse has been decisive. It is the basis for the construction of the struggle – a chain dynamic of blockades that follows the traffic of goods by holding up the most significant hubs at various stages process.” (Curcio, 377) Thus militant inquiry is used to determine the geographic nodal points where capital flows are most vulnerable, while using co-research to better understand the power systems that depend on and (re)enforce these capital flows, so as to intervene in such exploitative relations, reconstitute previously segmented relations within the worker class, and, in doing so, leverage power into concrete gains by identifying

“the weak points at the cycle of production / distribution in the industry in the moment of circulation. They start ‘to hurt bosses’ (a claim continuously repeated by workers) by interrupting the circulation of goods. This was their main weapon.”

Further, generalizing the insights of this inquiry provides the basis of a transnational resistance to capital and the exploitative relations so as to protect workers against cycles of regression, beyond any one industry or workplace. The “subjectification process” then provided a way in which to understand how class composition could be reconstituted, at first perhaps focusing on the subject profiles, but also collecting data on how their understanding of themselves and the actions they take during the course of the struggle offer new possibilities for political and cultural struggle and transformation. Thus the primary material on which the inquiry is based “contributes decidedly to open a discussion of how the ‘objective and subjective conditions’ of politicization and political activity in general, change through the social struggles.” (Evangelinidis and Lazaris 426) Beyond doing the research for the sake of the researcher and researched, it seemed especially helpful to help the audience potentially reconstitute their own value system and sense of propriety as well. In this case there was no article better I thought than Murray’s “The Shame of Servers,” where she focuses on the negative emotional cycle of shameful experience in the affective service economy as applied to a New York City bar. In this case, whereas female workers were expected to conform to expectations involving inappropriate interaction, a culture of shame was cultivated that constituted a valuable source of study. By identifying stigma, revulsion, and inquiry as sources of shame, the author is able to, on the one hand focus on critical ways in which workers are empowered to recognize and engage their shame (and the clientele’s action prompting shame—and the culture in which these actions are reproduced) by conveying stories that emphasize resistance and agency, while at the same time sharing with the audience, the readers of the experience of those researchers and researched (the research), ways in which expectations for affective service should be adjusted in their own lives.

This means then that the research does not just have a transformative effect on those actively engaged in it, but does so also for the “exploiters” who might either happen to read the reports, or must transform their attitudes and behaviors within a culture that becomes informed by such insight accordingly.

One thing I wonder is an idea brought up by Roggero in “Notes on Framing and Re-inventing Co-Research,” that the object of study is an object of hate, that is, it is the capitalist social relationship. Even if we are researching resistance as an object of love, its origin is still traced to exploitation in the first place (hence the reason for resistance). For this reason, such co-research was considered to be necessary as a way to open up possibilities to act on and overturn the tendency for exploitation in a capitalist or hierarchical workplace, so as to overthrow the structure and apparatus altogether. That is, co-research becomes a catalyst to develop antagonistic knowledge, create new institutions of life, rethink the tools and weapons required to succeed in these endeavors, and seek out the material base of autonomy to break with capital (thereby seeking out “the material base of revolution”); and therefore, it is claimed, “co-research is at the centre of militancy.” (Roggero, 515) I wonder then, as alluded to previously, whether the logic of capital, which colonizes spaces and social relations to reconstitute them into exploitative ones, are to an extent, inherent to modern industrial workplaces, and maybe all loci of work. That is, while workers may struggle to mitigate the worst excesses, these explicit forms of violence participate in a spectrum or continuum of Capital-Colonization-Exploitation in which we labor for exchange value, or perhaps even use-value. In this regard, work is itself would be identified as embodying oppressive characteristics, and the body, with its ability to sense, feel, emote, rationalize, and refuse, is itself inherently resistant to this continuum.

Perhaps it is the case then that humans, who have built up an instinct to avoid threats over hundreds of thousands of years, and now recently forced into a modern civil industrial capitalist workplace, may in turn seek to escape this oppression altogether—attacking material points that do the most explicit damage in the occasions brought up in these readings, but also unconsciously resisting the implicit, less obvious

manifestations of the continuum as well. Lucas points to this in his “SleepWorkers Inquiry,” when he wonders whether illness is a “weapon” that is imposed on the body from within, “a holiday that the body demands for itself.” (Lucas 75) Similarly, the ultimate relief from the work week is the “boozey self-annihilation” that represents a rock-star logic that works to negate the logic of productivity by destroying itself, “the refusal to merely reproduce ourselves as workers coupled to a desire to annihilate ourselves as humans.” Especially when there becomes no separation between work and life, where the logic of capital colonizes our unconscious minds in sleep, where we are even exploited in our dreams to carry out worker relations, is there any hope for revolutionary potential when the logic and identity of wage-slaves is so nearly complete not even the worker based reforms like the 8-hour work day can mitigate?

I will end here with my favorite article, Wellbrook’s “A Workers’ Inquiry or an Inquiry of Workers?” and one I think may be most important for the work of an academy or institute seeking to develop a militant coresearch program. In all of the previous articles there seems to be an attempt to mitigate the worst excesses of hierarchy and the continuum where it does violence and physical and emotional damage to those who suffer. And yet, the hierarchy and continuum are lef intact. In these cases, militant co-research has been entirely reformist to a degree, in that their methods are not inherently emancipatory. While it is true that such research “could arm organizers with the strategic knowledge to concentrate their efforts and provide a clearer understanding of their constituencies,” there is a kind of “bourgeois” mindset that provides a barrier to truly revolutionary activity, merely reforming the structure (as progressives might seek to do), or simply inverting it (as Marxists might seek to do).

Bakunin’s demand for “complete and integral education,” that can school students to reimagine the human role in a wider spiritual economy of life seems different. That is, it doesn’t naturalize the hierarchy or continuum as a precept, and opens the door to considering what a world without the factory would look like instead: “outlining the essential relationship that existed underneath [the capitalist relations] would seem to provide the first step towards acting against them.” Is it possible then, as Meszaros argues, to realize “that the ultimate grounds for the persistence

of alienation…lies in the nature of capital [so that] it becomes only possible to envisage a transcendence of alienation, provided that one is formulated as a radical…transformation of the social structure as a whole.” (364) This is to say that while there are “revolutionary” or “radical” relations that can coexist with capitalism (and such coexistence allows capitalism to be reproduced, along with the exploitative relations inherent to it), there are other types relations that actively destroy capitalist relations, that do not reproduce capitalist relations, but eliminate the relations altogether (as opposed to reforming them, but leaving them intact) between oppressor and oppressed, building a society without classes, without alienation, without violence, without hierarchy, and perhaps without need for categorization, or even the inquiry itself (as the object of hatred no longer exists). Here, militant inquiry, or co-research has the potential to provide a method able to disrupt exploitation and create forms of freedom that are entirely autonomous, outside the realm of capital, to set themselves up against capitalist forms of exploitation altogether.

For these reasons, I question what a revolutionary practicum in a militant co-research program would look like, in terms of reformulation of methods that are inherently emancipatory, useful skills that can be put into service for those who seek effective weapons, organizational tactics that can both agitate and liberate, and strategies aimed at both establishing autonomous networks that can thrive physically and psychologically and defending them against attacks by hierarchizing capital. In terms of this kind of “experiential” and “holistic” intervention, a curriculum like this would necessarily implement an “understanding that social change involves building a confidence and capacity to organize, not just clarity of understanding of the workings of the capitalist system or an intellectual orientation towards revolutionary ideas and sentiments.” (368) This effective organizing method, I would think, must go beyond involving oneself in the day-to-day issues of workplaces and communities, reflecting on experiences, and developing systematic methods for improving their activities, as that would still allow for a structure to stay intact that can at any point be deployed against those in the workplace.

Rather, practical experimentation could be cultivated to help workers

depart entirely from the identity of “worker,” and the totalizing set of structures that create the relations and attack these identities. For this reason, it seems necessary to backwards design such a curriculum in the first place, seeking to establish some criteria for what liberation entails, and the metrics one could use to determine when the vision and experience of “total liberation” has been achieved, afer which processes and programs could essentially be determined to move the subject or site of struggle toward those ends, with each activity meant to move closer to that end goal, along with an evaluative or assessment measurement. This returns back to the critical need of co-research and the participatory nature of the subject and researcher in the first place, as there is no doubt a wide array of definitions of what constitutes liberation (“liberation from what…” “liberty to do what…”) that may differ or even conflict.

Not every militant co-research project is a revolutionary one. Thus the need to be deliberate in terms of choosing a site to research, the methodology through which to conduct the research, the goals and aims for the research, feedback mechanisms to reflect upon and alter the research process itself, and ultimately how to implement the research in ways that abolish the unofficial object of the research – the violence of a hierarchized capital-colonization-exploitation continuum in all of its forms.

For these reasons, militant co-research is undoubtedly important to the field of anthropology, but still must be honed and improved upon if it ever hopes to move beyond the parameters dictated by the subject-object relationship (oppressed – oppressor) as it stands today, and into an era of post-liberation fieldwork.

Further Reading: Various Authors (August 2014) Selected Essays, in Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization: “The Politics of Workers’ Inquiry.” Retrieved from http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/issue/143ephemera-aug14.pdf Various Authors (2013) A Workers’ Inquiry Reader: Assembled to Accompany The Politics of Workers’ Inquiry Conference. Ed. S. Shukaitis, J. Figiel, and A. Walker. Wivenhoe: Ephemera

Something Dangerous Carefully Done: On Resisting the Suffocating Trauma of the Cityscape Conscience, my dear, is a kind of stick that everyone picks up to thrash his neighbor with, but one never uses against himself.

-Honoré de Blazac Lost Illusions At the root of the spectacle lies that oldest of all social divisions of labor, the specialization of power. The specialized role played by the spectacle is that of spokesman for all other activities, a sort of diplomatic representative of hierarchical society at its own court, and the source of the only discourse which that society allows itself to hear. Thus the most modern aspect of the spectacle is also at bottom the most archaic.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

–Gospel of Thomas One idea that came up for me last week was the importance of a kind of cognitive archaeology in uncovering the beliefs and schematic patterns people operate from. From beliefs we can begin to understand the attitudes that drive those behaviors and habits that characterize social relationships and the ethical-moral forms we enter into as we approach larger political economic structures. For this reason, focusing attention on the sensations, emotions, and experiences that arise in our daily interactions can help to clarify the nature of reality in order to understand where people stand within these realities and the stories they tell themselves and each other. Precarias a la Deriva’s drif within the “circuits of feminized precarious work” similarly explores the stratigraphic layers of the urban spirit through a psychocartography that looks for conflicts to map territories of struggle, deriving hypotheses from the experiences they generate in their research for a “primary material for politics,” seeking out

propositions and points of attack with which to make more effective their socio-political defenses against capital (e.g. the general strike).

Theory here is built intimately, from historically marginalized voices, testing generalizations against personal experiences of living practice and action. Methods of radical organizing provide both mechanisms of truth-making against oppressive epistemologies, as well as critical weapons with which to attack and break down the paradigm that produces such realities, generating new knowledge to be adapted to the goals of each struggle to design action plans and demands rooted in the experience of (militant) action embodied within the research process itself.

Researcher and research becomes a catalyzing element, attending with care to those various planes of subjectivity whose transformative social action, able to generate a new and more just reality, is both object and result of the study, generating action that itself challenges the epistemological basis of science as a set of abstract, formalized methodological rules divorced from concrete realities; rather, it is now situated as a tool to empower social struggles by experiments designed to empower such struggles against the work of everyday life.

The proposals arising out of these hypotheses, drawn from concrete experiences, in service of social transformation, thus articulate various tendencies within the mapped relations, offering insight into how best to produce social wealth and “extract from care its transformative force.” Precariousness, for instance, is defined by the research as the “juncture of conditions, both material and symbolic, which determine an uncertainty with respect to the continued access to the resources necessary for the full development of a person’s life.” What must be confronted with this definition in mind then are the conditions that provide the certainty with regards to what resources are in fact necessary for the full development of life.

On this point, care is identified as a critical factor: Because care is what makes life possible (care generates life, nourishes it, makes it grow, heals it), care can make life happier (creating relations of interdependence among bodies) and more interesting (generating exchanges of all types of flows, knowledges, contagions), care can give life, definitively, some meaning. (41)

The focus on care as a constituent element of the militant research process helps demonstrate the basis of its revolutionary potential to reconstitute social relationships and replace the logic of security and profit that increasingly determine public and private life by attending to our basic human desire for freedom. In this regard, we might speak of, rather than a violent Capital-Colonization-Exploitation continuum, a Love-BeautySelf-Actualization continuum of care, the material basis and source of community wealth that is constantly under assault and eroded by the relationships we daily enter into throughout the city.

This is a critical insight because it demonstrates the poverty inherent to an urban landscape that constellates around power, capital, and the state, where every physical environmental dynamic and relationship is imbued with a paternalist, possessive, and dominant “care,” external to the individual they (we) are made dependent upon, and as such can be deprived by institutional mediations unless the logic of domination is internalized and reproduced by the individual (“get a job, slacker!”). That is, it is We who consistently create the conditions we describe. We outsource those necessary tasks we are dependent upon to others and so the very basis of our lives depends on a specialized hierarchy of labor that mediates our own lives back to us: we are separated from the land by a layer of concrete and so, must import what nourishes us and in so doing sell what is personal invaluable in return (granted, this is the result of a historical process of domination not chosen), our lives in turn driven by logics of money, profit, commodification, alienation…work. That is, while we may assume the source of oppression to be externalized, in fact it is our relationship to these external processes where exploitation arises.

In this regard, we can perhaps approach resistance to capital through an anamnetic method that radically relocates the source of oppression to an internal logic, simultaneously drawing on a pre-existing knowledge of the body’s experience of reality and what it needs to find a different (more natural?) logic able to subvert and overcome an inferior epistemology to transform one’s sense of value and meaning, and thus the personal and political world that manifests out of them. This retrieval of primacy (drawing from a Love-Beauty-Self-Actualization continuum of Care rather than the Capital-Colonization-Exploitation continuum of violence) may in turn be most effective in resisting corrupting relationships in that it reconnects one to what is primary for life: care, as was articulated, and the

land, from which the energy and power necessary to sustain this care bubbles up. Here then, an anamnetic method of resistance reestablishes psychological roots into both body and land, so that a community can reconstitute itself through a resonant psychophysical-osmosis able to overcome the mediating structures parasitizing this pre-cultural relationship we may instinctually gravitate towards.

Political laboratories then potentially represent moments where such reconstitution can take place, points where “radical experimentation with our bodies and precarious life conditions become manifest.” The Occupy movement in general, and the Oakland Commune in particular, provide examples of where this type of revolutionary praxis can take place, reconstituting individuals at a molecular level, in so doing producing maps where new radical modes of subjectivity are generated, communicated, explored, and compared with similar resonances across geographies, histories, and spacetimes.

One question for research: “why bother with any of it?” This is less a pessimistic retort or critique of the ineffectiveness of various political experimentations, but rather to hone the methodologies, make explicit the reasons behind the experimentations, and make more effective experimental coalition-building by identifying or producing common ground.

For instance, why is shutting down ports and organizing for general strikes important? Is it to create a symbolic display of power? Is it to practice disrupting the flow of capital? Is it to catalyze a decomposition and recomposition for those not yet radicalized? To me, this action in particular represents a kind of schizo-affective cartography of desire in that there is activity, but for a thousand different reasons, many of which are antithetical to one another: whereas the insurrectionists for example might seek to intervene in the motion of circulation of goods in order to bring the flow and production of goods to a halt (and with it factory-life altogether), port-labor, radical as it may claim to be, is necessarily opposed to this faction, as their very identity as port-workers assumes they have a stake in keeping the port open, even if they agree to close it to leverage this power for their own narrow objectives. Here, “moments of connectivity” represent a synthesis through dialogue that is achieved in specific actions and events, where barricades can become “a powerful dynamic of subjectification; they provide images, sounds, waves, even oceans.” Yet the

battle may be against the very identity of the working class, who are accomplices in the struggle, rather than capital.

Similarly, the question, “what do we do with this center?” must similar ask to what purpose any center will exist for. Will the activities it organizes (libraries, screen printing, radical theory workshops…) reconstitute and subjectivize individual identity? In a sense, there is a remaking of social relationship, at least in these radical pockets. But ultimately, the center realizes that while there is a need, its revolutionary potential must dissolve to service it: “OK, we need to find a place that we can rent, so we have to do a bit of fundraising, so it shifed from an occupation – which was road blocked—to a social center that we’d actually have to fund, and sustain.” Once more, an internal identity and relationships are coopted by a system that feeds off of the continuum of care, able to accommodate and subjugate revolutionary impulse within the relational field of capital.

In a way, then, Occupy and perhaps the Oakland Commune as a form of Occupy provides an example of this schizo-affective cartography of desire in general: that is, it provided glimpses of subjectification and recomposition, a retrieval of the wealth that is generated by the precultural creativity and care that is remembered during certain radical moments; but, resisting capital, the desire for relationships uncontaminated by capital dissipates by reproducing capital.

One example: I remember when I lived on Van Ness and Turk in San Francisco, walking by an abandoned building everyday with my dog and imagining all of the potential present in that building. It could be a community center, or housing for homeless, or a free skool, a community coop, a post-capitalist revolutionary warfare research institute, or...anything. It appeared Occupy San Francisco also had been thinking this way, because they marched from Market Street to this building opposite, broke open the locks, occupied it, declared it liberated, “decorated” it, and tweeted out their success. As police arrived, occupiers climbed on the roof and threw bricks at them. Afer some time, the police went in afer the occupiers with a Special Weapons and Tactics Team and emptied the building at gun point. What was the effect of this insurrectionary occupation? From what I could see, a shiny new fence was installed, a security guard was hired, the individuals who threw bricks were incarcerated for a couple of years, and a number of individuals were traumatized from the ordeal.

Several months later I happened to connect with one of the organizers of that action. I shared my critique and listened to a response that reified capitalist relationships and argued for insurrection to abolish capitalism and liberate land for the people. I didn’t disagree, but posed the question that, since the property in question was owned by the Archdiocese, and their mission was not unlike Occupy’s (feeding the poor, caring for the needy…), why not dialogue with them, “rent” the place for a dollar a year until the owners determined what to do with it, and conduct the services they sought to enact for free, without engaging in the kind of activity that “necessitated” state repression and led ultimately to the reproduction of capitalism, both psychologically and materially. It appeared the goal had been more symbolic than pragmatic, so as to subvert the dominant logic of capitalism and undermine the authority of the state through a temporary autonomous zone. I still wondered…why is transience and impermanence the goal? Together, we listened, spoke, and found common ground.

To be fair, I am not above insurrection as a strategy—indeed, in certain circumstances, I consider it imperative. My own affinities probably lay more with the insurrectionary anti-civilizational green anarchist wing of the Oakland Commune than any other faction described. What I am against is losing your life for a symbol or signifier when what is signified is impossible to attain (at least by one’s particularly chosen method in the moment). What I am for then, is attaining the signified, and determining a strategic and tactical pathway to do so. And I did not see this theory of action, or theory of transformation playing out well, in this moment, certainly, but also generalizing to the wider Occupy movement, and anticapitalist struggle either. “(Listening is not only a mere cognitive act of deciphering signs, but also involves a flow of signifiers that resonate beyond the intellect.)”

This I think was what was so difficult about Occupy as a whole. It seemed to attempt to monkey wrench capitalism with symbolic weapons, while at the same time producing a creative space where various potentials could be realized. Yet it sought to capitalize on the anger of individuals at a system that produced a 1%, by targeting the 1%, while reifying and reproducing the system that produced a 1%. It relied on charity and gifing, appropriating from the capitalist system those necessities it needed to sustain itself, and as such, collapsed in the face of repression because it had no roots, or sustaining material base that could stand up to such

repression. It didn’t refuse to integrate itself with the dominant system (so considered by the absence of demands)…it refused to recognize it was integrated and dependent on a capitalist system external to it, upon which it depended for housing, for food, for medicine, on the good graces of the police in allowing them to stay for as long as they did, for all of these things, attempting to circumvent the mediating institutions through donations, before collapsing under the weight of those forces charged with enforcing their dependency on mediating institutions. That is, it seems to me that even Occupy’s critique, by the end, was recuperated into the logic of capital, ghettoized, and finally destroyed and scattered. Did it improve the conditions of the precariat or create pathways out of the system?

Perhaps temporarily, at times, impermanently. (This is of course my analysis having only interacted with Occupy sporadically and at a distance) And yet, the counter-consciousness that perhaps developed in the moments that characterized Occupy and the Commune—the normalization of refusing domesticated forms of imposed life—may have reconstituted social forms and relationships that will serve as a foundation for whatever movement comes next, the next generation of wild, anti-capitalist activity, of pre-cultural affective relationality. Perhaps it created the kind of subjective discontent necessary to eventually overcome capitalism, bypassing a mediated society through the establishment of another.

“The resonance and/or articulation of the imaginaries unfolded by these types of subjectifying forms affect the fields of expression in which struggles are shaped, as well as the subjectifity and praxis of the newly politicized subjects.” (60) One can certainly hope…

I would however push back on this, suggesting that in the city, there is no wildness, and thus the “preservation of the world,” to reference Thoreau, is impossible in the city. There is only the urban aesthetic dictated by capital and managed by the state. Even our traditional forms of resistance seem to reproduce capital, cracks seemingly only proving the rule. Thus, if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to see different results, perhaps we can characterize both capitalism and (at least the traditional forms of) anti-capitalist

resistance as a mental illness. The spontaneity these movements evoke in the “auratic insurrectionary gesture,” and the “insurrectionary images” they produce are merely “stereotypies,” repetitive, invariant, and seemingly pointless behaviors hypothesized to exist when a biological need cannot be expressed (for instance when captured gophers dig holes to feel safe, or captured carnivores pace intensely for hours on end). The persistent repetition of these “senseless habits” suggests the animal is suffering in a barren environment, so that these abnormal repetitive behaviors help protect emotional stability through coping mechanisms to the horrible stress of being removed from a natural environment (and primary relationships) into the artificial, hyper-civilized life of concrete and capital. Protests, confrontations, occupations, etc. then represent “performative moments of visibility,” where one attempts to cope with their alienation by reconnecting with a similarly alienated community, producing “pointless” symbolic activities meant to satisfy the biological need of the suffering subject through coping mechanisms, repeated over and over, not because those actions are effective, but simply because they remind one they are alive, and rebellion remains a necessary task to preserve one’s sanity.

Against such insanities, we can seek to find other methods of analysis that break with traditional analyses: in particular, a militant coresearch that nurtures a self-empowering method whose process focuses on the self-awareness of feelings and experiences about one’s own generative capacity to promote a reinterpretation of social relations while establishing the possibility for transformation. The source of wealth is not external to oneself, but derives from the logic of care, a continuum of LoveBeauty-Self-Actualization and the relationship one has to “others,” including the land and community of life. For this reason, Occupy the Farm seemed to me to be one of the very few examples where such a relationship was being explicitly reconvened, where mediating institutions were overcome, and the sustaining relationships of care were nourished and protected, returning to the continuum of love-beauty-self-actualization through direct action that brought the individual back to the core skills and relationship one needed to enter into to survive again—no longer depending on the flow of capital, but instead closing a loop and generating energy through the most basic elements of survival: water, energy, food, land, sun, soil, plants, community, care. It is this type of relationship I think that represents the internal recomposition able to address the crisis,

subverting it by realizing the possibility for negating precariousness resides in self-reliance, the breaking of concrete, and the regeneration of soil and modes of subsistence lifeways. If not, the slave-master will remain dependent on the slaves that grow and cook, while the slaves have only to strike, and refuse to share or show up to regain their freedom as the master, like the state, “withers away.”

As a final point, on the idea of revolutionary leadership, there seems to be a tendency to conflate reformist and revolutionary projects, while depending upon others to discern the differences (again, the outsourcing of leadership, the specialization of power, the externalization of criticality). Here, one must ask oneself how necessary controlling (or influencing) the state is for realizing a liberatory/liberated praxis, and whether doing so may in turn blunt the efficacy of such praxis altogether.

To see the state and capital as primary entities we exist in relationship to (and must therefore struggle against) may prevent the possibility of recreating social relationships where these entities are absent, since they condition the struggle (and thus freedom) a priori. Refusing work (or at the very least, redefining it so completely it is unrecognizable), opening up spaces for playfulness, and engaging in a politics of enrichment with which to achieve an authentic life strikes me as more worthwhile and of ultimate value far exceeding attempts to struggle against that which I do not care for. To do so requires a recomposition of identity, of relationality, of community, and of experience, mapping the cracks in the system where life is remade in accordance with novel subjectivities, where concrete, mediation, and the logic of capital are broken, and a primacy is restored, learning to live in a natural state once more. (One might think of a wild animal, captured, caged, and at some point, freed, it’s identity shifing as its experience changes) To wrap this up, I am arguing that the Capital-ColonizationExploitation continuum and the violence it does to us is due to a logic that depends on the externalization and outsourcing of basic skills and needs, inherent to a “civilized” or specialized society where individuals are alienated from the land and the energy and power that comes out of it. Yet this logic is preceded by a logic of care, where a continuum of Love-BeautySelf-Actualization has generative capacity to create new forms of joy. This prior logic and continuum is the material basis necessary to reject the alienating logic of capital and refuse the identity of “dominated,” simply by instinctually remembering through anamnesis the assets we have available

to ourselves and each other. The cognitive archaeology or militant coresearch can prompt this anamnetic remembering, while equipping individuals and communities with the necessary questions, elements, tendencies, hypotheses, propositions, points of attack, forms, relations, tools, and logic required to recompose the beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, habits, patterns, and schema of everyday life to restore the primary ethic and relationship that precedes (or eventually eclipses) alienated existence.

In this regard, I will end will Jon Holloway, who I have been enjoying immensely recently: “Once we say this social cohesion is actually constituted by our own alienation, by our own alienation from ourselves, our own abstraction from ourselves, then we are immediately opening up another possibility and saying maybe we can actually give expression to the antagonism that is within our own activity, maybe there are ways in which we can say we will not labor. We will not subordinate our activity, at least not totally, to the dominion of capital…When we read that richness exists in the form of the commodity, when it sinks in what that means and the death and the misery it involves, we scream with anger, with the rage of entrapped dignity. The dignity is there, our richness, entrapped but also not entrapped, not entirely contained, existing in but also against-and-beyond the commodity form, as struggle, as creative experiment….our rage burns within us as the rage of entrapped dignity: rage against the society that entraps us, rage against ourselves that construct the society that entraps us.” (Holloway, 2016)

Why Emo Slit Its Throat: Relocating Anti-Authoritarianism toward the Internal Dynamic “This song will become the anthem of your underground…and at your funeral I will sing the requiem.”

-Saves the Day from the album Stay What You Are The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.”

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in The Idiot What follows is to some degree a joke, likely unfunny, with regards to the revolutionary potential of emo as a musical genre. In part it stems from the fact that I finished reading these essays late and didn’t have a good through-line, so this represents more of a stream-of-consciousness free write that riffs off the first essay on punk DIY culture. That said, I’ll try to keep it entertaining, or at least worthwhile.

-As an overarching or general response to the chapters and articles we read, I will first point out the single most common and vital thematic component (for me) was the idea of appropriating the means and materials of production in the flight from capitalism. This was especially evident in the DIY/Punk chapter by Holtzman, Hughes, and Van Meter, when they explain that while DIY culture takes place in a monetary economy, it “creates value outside of capitalism” through the “active construction of counter-relationships” outside and against it. While I am a bit skeptical of the importance and revolutionary potential of zines, and free shows, etc. in seriously disrupting capital, I will play along and suggest that just as the lyrics and the international cultural networks of punk that flout conservative norms, the genealogy of emo works to heighten and amplify these realities and aims.

I will argue that with the rise of Reaganism came a specific tendency: rather than the heightened engagement with macropolitics, the collapse of political engagement for many heralded a break with more

macropolitical approaches to music, and a refocusing of the subject of inquiry to the micropolitical (personal) relationship instead. Thus, the emotional life of the individual supplanted the original subject of punk, leading to themes of love, sex, rejection, nostalgia, despair, depression, insecurity, desperation, self-searching, emotional release…which, combined with a “queering” of the culture, led to a split from hardcore punk to a post-hardcore (“emo-core”) style better able to integrate the DIY culture into a mainstream one. Further, I’ll just throw out an absurd claim that emo represents not only a site of struggle militant researchers would do well to follow up on, but in fact provides a particular approach to militant co-research able to produce a more complete and revolutionary project better able to develop counter-hegemonic power. Wait, actually that was pretty funny.

To briefly recount emo’s history, the 80s violent hardcore DC punk scene broke from bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag when Guy Picciotto formed Rites of Spring (produced by Minor Threat’s Ian Mackaye) in 1984, which moved to a more melodic version of punk with more emotional lyrics where band and audience would weep together during performances of the lyrics: “just a dream can bring me to my knees…can’t you see? I’m going down, going down, deeper than inside, the world is my fuse, and from inside, outside can just fall apart, and you wonder just how lost inside can be.” (Rites of Spring: Deeper than Inside) Eventually, this style of music combined post-hardcore with indie-rock and pop-punk through bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, Get-up Kids, and Weezer in the 90s before the genre broke into mainstream musical circles with the help of MTV, outlets like Hot Topic, and touring festivals like Warped Tour through bands like Dashboard Confessional, Jimmy Eat World, New Found Glory, Taking Back Sunday, and Blink 182 in the late 90s early 2000s, before its death throes set in with bands like Panic at the Disco!, Hawthorne Heights, Fall Out Boy, and My Chemical Romance (no offence).

Two things I want to bring up here:

The first (1) is that just as punk and Food Not Bombs, Revolutionary knitters, Guerrilla Gardeners, and others attempted to operate with a DIY attitude, reclaiming skills and materials in a capitalist system to challenge dominant economic paradigms, so too did emo: rather than make the subject of their craf something external to themselves (the state) as punk had done, emo instead relocated the object of their inquiry to their own internal psychological and emotional life, reclaiming the generative capacity of psychological suffering into a productive, valuable medium, while overlaying this new form onto the DIY punk culture it remained rooted in.

The second (2), is to bring up the reality that while such DIY attempts may be well-intentioned, they are to a large extent superficial, still ultimately dependent on a particular relationship to materials external to, relying on relationships to capital and capitalism first and foremost to maintain the culture—the musical instruments, the photocopiers, the paper and ink, the yarn and needles, the bikes for critical mass, the clothes at the free stores, the edible plants potentially—were any of these created by their users? Not likely. Understanding who produces these in the first place is an overlooked topic that subverts the “revolutionary potential” of such movements, in that they are necessary objects for these subaltern countercultures to have, and the relationships that are constellated around these objects do not meaningfully transform the economic relationships of the people who do produce them, since they still cannot sever their ties from capital.

I bring this up because while this theoretically creates a “temporary autonomous zone,” capitalism has only to wait it out before the alternative collapses on itself, in typical siege strategy, while eventually even commercializing and commodifying the spirit of revolt. Thus, the spirit of capitalism, hegemony, and empire remains unchallenged. Moreover, I’ll just go ahead and assert that emo explicitly recognizes this to be the case; but not only that, this relationship is inherent to both political and personal life: “We have burned their villages and all the people in them die, we adopt their customs and everything they say we steal, all the dreams they had we kill, we erased all their images

and dance, and replaced them with borders and flags…and in my own life I’ve seen it in the mirror, sometimes at the cost of others hopes…without conviction of heart you will.” (Thursday: Autobiography of a Nation) For Thursday, this war is a spectrum that moves from politics to the workplace (“these ties strangle our necks, hanging in the closet, found in the cubicle…don’t let me drown before the workday ends”) to the erosion of family life (“we grew up too fast, falling apart like the ashes of American flags, the sun doesn’t shine, we replaced it with an H-bomb explosion, a painted jail cell of blood in the sky like Three Mile Island nightmares on TV”) to personal relationship (“we draw diagrams of suicide on each other’s wrists, and trace them with razorblades”), to one’s own understanding of their relationship to themselves (“I can see the headlights coming, they paint the world in blood and broken glass”).

In all these lyrics, depictions of violence is analyzed to be at the heart of relationships, a source of internal turmoil where the connection is severed by the violence inherent to daily life. Still, the desire for connection remains in spite of (perhaps because of) this violence.

“A flash of light that's letting go of an empty bullet case By the time it hits the ground he's out of reach…

There's no room lef to make amends Do you remember when we’d fly that kite so high? …I ran down the stairs and into the garden Put both my hands into the soil In the spring you will bloom Like her heart through the blouse in the back of the ambulance As it turned and turned in the streets Just one more turn, won't you come back to me?

As it turned on its red lights You were turning into red roses” (Thursday: Steps Ascending) I will suggest this helps us to understand emo’s contribution to militant research in several ways then:

1) The willingness to remain concerned about the internal relationship makes a statement about the role of “idleness,” and with it the relationship of identity to work and time. That is, the phenomenon of kids staying in their rooms listening to music for hours might seem to be a “waste of time,” but perhaps it is better understood as a way to do co-research with those who experience similar modes of relationality, so that listening to album afer album provides both a field of resonances that can be drawn from, as well as spending time mapping and (over)analyzing the relationships in order to intervene in one’s own field of emotional dynamics.

“If it’s not keeping you up nights then what’s the point?

I’m in your room Are you turned on?

I’m on the corner of your bed, I’m thinking maybe, Are you turned on, Are you turned on?

(Taking Back Sunday: Great Romances of the 20th Century) This then provides a kind of adaptive or evolutionary benefit of emo in that the erotic desire for relationality (indeed, Eros as the necessary component for relationality between Psyche and the God of Love in Greek mythology) provides the basis for reflection as to how best to be, how to be better, how not to be terrible, how can anyone love me…etc.

2) Further, the emo revitalization of “idleness” rewrites one’s relationship to time in general. No longer are people’s relationship to work based on agricultural cycles, or a kind of segmented clocktime of industrialization. Indeed, it is not even task oriented time.

Rather, emo reconstitutes time in a deepened way: because the objective of the genre is emotional depth, the relationship is one that focuses on the time between segments, to experience the full range of emotions present in the complexity of a kiss, a heartbreak, a death, a fight, an orgasm, a suicide attempt. Emo is thus a convergence of musical ability developed over time, lyrics

that display a lifetime of experience, and a retrieval of the emotional intensity during a specific moment of “communication” or performance that provides psychosomatic outlet in the present.

If we can see time as distance, then that distance is abolished: there is no task to complete but for the expression and experience of emotional intensity “now.” There is no time to work until.

Rather the end goal is the means itself, achieved where body, emotion, lyric, audience, musical talent, and memory explode in the moment of a melodic and cathartic scream. Here, value is reclaimed, produced, and shared freely (eventually commodified), where the intensity of experience provides a reconnection to community through passionate embrace of suffering.

“And it makes me sad to know I had gotten myself Into something that I could not deal with…

And I will sit in my room and sleep all day And think up dreams like I am the cutest kid in school Or I could be crazy and sing about memories: Hey I remember when I sat on those steps watching the moon Chase the sky back until the world seemed like it would explode And I could picture going up with it It’d be just how I’d like to go and I’d sing…”

(Saves the Day: Houses and Billboards) 3) With the reconstitution of identity through a new relationship to depth-time, and the willingness to sit with this relationship for extensive periods of time in order to better understand the psycho-social and emotional dynamics at play, emo thus can be considered a form of auto-ethnography highly sensitive to the social composition in one’s own life. Songs then become drifs, or communiques, and radical experiments. The songs themselves are sites of resistance, but convey moments where struggle is performed elsewhere, and share effects of different tonal and linguistic interventions.

“I’ll take my time to slowly plot your end but now I will

spit bullets with my pen…

I’ll take you to the top, Of this building and just push you off, Run down the stairs so I can see your face As you hit the street (Senses Fail: You’re Cute When You Scream) 4) In terms of the “subjectification process” that emo alludes to, there is a sense that the oppressive “site” where resistance occurs is in the listener/performer’s own mind—the self-imposed abusive relationship. That is, whereas there exists a logic of emptiness, where one seeks to fill an existential void through love, sex, friendship, belonging, joy…(relationality), the human being is thus “radicalized” through the various stages of a disconnection process: fear, rejection, pain, depression, rage, nostalgia, despair, suffering, forgiveness of self and other, and finally hope for a restoration of joy. The result of this process is a kind of tentativeness or insecurity (“shyness”) that characterizes emo at times, where heartache co-arises between listener and performer, giving rise to a counter-hegemonic power against a theoretical prison or asylum both may be trapped within, isolating and deluding them perhaps, that is broken out of as the screams ultimately end, and the individual goes back to live their life once more.

“And the white coats, just don’t get it I’m a genius with a headache.

Am I a little sick or a little sane?...

I’m stuck in a coma, stuck in a never-ending sleep And some day I will wake up and realize I made up everything…

I’m finding a way to forget everything I know…

My best friend is a man, with a lab coat and a grin I hold my shaking hand and he gives me medicine I’ve lost control I stare at accidents in a sick attempt to feel at all” (Senses Fail: from Still Searching)

I could probably continue making connections but I think the point is roughly made: lyrics and the songs themselves establish space for cultural production in powerful, emotionally charged imagery. This cultural production attempts to internalize the emotional intensity so as to analyze it, appropriating the external object and turning it from a source of suffering to an asset through which to facilitate intervention in the particular rage and suffering-inducing dynamics. The “antagonistic subject” arises in “joint-research,” creating a “practical rupture” that transforms the conditions of suffering/relationality through practical responses that subvert a dominant logic through inquiring into the nature of the relationality.

This then brings up ethical and political questions, where performers and subjects, previously attacked or destroyed by the logic and now in an empowered situation, must learn how to use this power responsibly. (fucking girls, breaking hearts, etc. ) That is, the crisis inherent to relationality (the potential for abuse and power imbalances) which is abstracted to impoverish experience, determines for one how they are to act. What is the nature of the emo praxis post-liberation, with the expansion of potencia, where unmade bonds are to be forged on new values, and relationships will be determined in their material basis? Will they be reformed, abandoned, or remade altogether? If the latter, in destructive or positive ways? Emo is not anarchist and there is a tendency for the “revolutionary” to remake the hierarchical structure with the former category of elevated status (usually the significant other) to be put at the bottom with violence directed toward.

“I’ve got desperate desires and unadmirable plans my tongue will taste of gin and malicious intent…

You laugh at every word trying hard to be cute I almost feel sorry for what I’m going to do…

I will lie awake, and lie for fun and fake the way I hold you Let you fall for every empty word I say.”

(Brand New: Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis) Thus, the songs and experiences they represent provide sites of power, create new perceptions, locate problems and hypotheses through selfinterrogation, all while attempting to create common ground by exploring

how to be with others (and one’s self) through a new type of active configuration. The lyric/song/album/band/life is a drif through a circuit of relationships in different settings (high school, work, on the road, college, on the bathroom floor bleeding to death, etc…), producing the kind of counter cartographies or a multilayered topographical map, with which to reconstitute one’s identity and with it, the relationship to the source of oppressor; the question becoming how then to approach this source and overcome the oppression.

Here I think is another important contribution emo makes to militant coresearch in terms of seeing its pitfalls and blind spots. Throughout these chapters a very clear notion arises that each speaks in a pre-occupy context. That is (and here I recognize my limited experience with regards to the development of activism through the last two decades), in the twelve or so years between Seattle ’99 and Occupy, there seems to be a recognition that people-power can disrupt global institutions. However, I consider this a kind of fetishization of the subject, in the sense that while Seattle basically surprised everyone, by the time Occupy occurred, authorities were much better prepared, and so a multi-state repressive effort by the FBI effectively ended the operation. Moreover, I would argue Occupy was effectively ended within the first week or so of its beginning: I remember for instance a call put out by AdBusters to go to Wall Street: “our only demand: bring a tent.” This is to say, the only goal was to disrupt Wall Street. And yet, how quickly was this movement neutered, and transported to Zuccatti Park where it became something…else (granted, something creative and cultural, but unable to achieve its initially stated goal). Further, for the same reason every other movement spoken about in this book fails (reliance on capitalism to sustain itself, lack of selfsufficiency), so too did Occupy. Where does the food come from? Where do the resources come from? How do people sustain themselves while they are expressing discontent? Perhaps if Occupy had broken up the concrete and started planting food able to sustain every participant… but that of course would have been impossible, or rather, improbable.

My point here is that Temporary Autonomous Zones may function to distract people from the true goal, much in the same way wilderness areas distract people from restoring wildness. Rather, a movement from Temporary Autonomous Zones to Permanent Subsistence Zones should be

a major focus of any post-occupy movement. But this then necessitates a move from doing research within the movement, and relocating the research to the point at which the movement integrates with the oppressor. That is, if a thesis of society exists (“society sucks cuz _____”), and the movement represents itself as an anti-thesis (“our movement rocks cuz _____”), there may be a tendency to assume an unhinged movement is legitimate, when it has in fact collapsed into delusion (for instance, thousands of people coming together to try to levitate the Pentagon). Thus there is a need I think to refocus research on the synthesis (at the edges, between the movement and the oppressor, where they connect).

And, arguably it is emo that can provide some insight I think here. That is, the individual so engrossed in their emotional experience as to lose touch with reality (stuck in the asylum their room and thought process has become) provides a material basis for an intervention, which moves one from living in dreams (a theoretical distortion, or abstraction and impoverishment) to living in the world again, formulating new visions, experimenting with them, and building the utopian spaces where more nourishing relationships can emerge, the “third space” where the songwriter/audience as both activist and theoretician finds these dualities continually subvert one another.

“And the mindless comfort grows When I’m alone with my “great” plans And this is what she says gets her through it ‘if I don’t let myself be happy now, then when?

If not now, when?’

The time we have now ends And when the big hand goes round again Can you still feel the butterflies?

Can you still hear the last goodnight?”

(Jimmy Eat World: For Me this is Heaven) The movement then from disconnection to connection, whether external/macro/political or internal/micro/personal (but of course there is no difference) can then be formulated in a four part chart based on one’s perception of the state (legitimate or illegitimate) and strategy for operation (confrontation or avoidance), whether talking about approaching

the nation-state, or state-of-a-relationship-that-causes-suffering. Thus four strategies emerge based on the type of perception: lobbying, or persuasion (legitimacy, confrontation); autonomy, or resignation (legitimacy, avoidance); insurrection, or attack (illegitimacy, confrontation); and circumvention (illegitimacy, avoidance). These then have their macrocosmic correlates in the microcosmic relation, manifested in lyrics. Moreover, each has both a political persuasion (progressive, hippy, terrorist, radical) and an emotional feeling-type (hope, despair, rage, and desire).

At this point, it might seem I am rambling but I bring this up because I think while people may have a conscious intention for where they fall on this grid, there is in fact an unconscious operation they engage in that is quite different, and the distortion renders the activism inert. This is exemplified in Chan and Sharma’s chapter, Eating in Public: While they have the goal of challenging state power as illegitimate and seeking to circumvent authority by appropriating land to grow food, we might assume they are operating in the illegitimacy/avoidance box at first, where their strategy is to circumvent the state and grow their own food.

However, it is clear that their actions push them into direct confrontation with an illegitimate state, and so they are effectively engaged in insurrection to a degree, and, refusing to consider its legitimacy, avoid lobbying or persuading (seeking mediation) as a strategy so that the full force of state repression comes down on them as their plants are destroyed and the fence is expanded. This in turn forces the organization to move into the final box of avoidance as a strategy, giving away their plants individually, which they claim is successful. However, the reason it is successful I would argue is because people take the plants to put in their own private property (the strategy of autonomy), thus tacitly reifying the dichotomy between public and private space (and with it, the legitimacy of the state), and rendering their movement ineffective, save for provoking a temporary imaginative alternative. Thus the goal to decolonize imaginations by messing with the obsession of security and propriety essentially moves them into a progressive rather than radical mode of operation, where a society in which a state allows hippies to give plants away to private citizens for free upholds the ideology and hegemonic power of the state.

This is similarly the problem with the “Revolution Will Wear a Sweater” article. The DIY ethos is again present, but is it effective? The group seeks to undermine the logic of a system of oppression (illegitimate state) and does so by circumventing the consumption machine, knitting clothes for themselves. This would make them radicals, in the sense that they have reclaimed skills and materials, moving it out of the capitalist framework and into a post-capitalist one. At least, theoretically. In reality however, where is the person getting the yarn and needles? Did they grow the materials used? Did they whittle the knitting sticks? If not, then it remains purely in the realm of the symbolic, and thus creates a temporary autonomous zone in the social psyche, but does nothing to affect the material conditions of the sweatshop worker who is still making clothes for those who are still not knitting their own. This seems to again move it back to a legitimization of the state since the individuals are still reliant on the system for the things they re-appropriate for the post-capitalist system they are temporarily provoking imaginative glimpses of. Meanwhile, the state allows them to continue capitalizing on their skills.

The emotional correlate of this is a recognition of co-dependency, and willingness to engage in a full and honest recognition of this codependency, and an evaluation of strategy. If the abusive relationship creates suffering, can the individual persuade the other (the source of suffering) to engage in new ways of relating? Can they resign themselves to their own autonomy while the other? Do they attempt to fight back against the suffering to destroy the illegitimacy of the other? Do they seek to find what they seek in the other somewhere else and circumvent the source of suffering?

“I’ve got a big fat fucking bone to pick with you my darling In case you haven’t heard I’m sick and tired of trying I wish you would take my radio to bathe with you, Plugged in and ready to fall.

Shaking like a dog shitting razorblades Waking up next to nothing afer dreaming of you and me I’m waking up all alone, waking up so relieved While you’re taking your time with apologies, I’m planning out my revenge Red eyes on orange horizons

If Columbus was wrong I’d drive straight off the edge.”

(Alkaline Trio: Radio) Thus the “edges” of the movement, or “contact zone” where cultures clash are a critical point to explore, as opposed to “merely” the knowledge created within the movement itself. This requires an empathetic understanding of the other so as to disarm the other, rehumanize both participants, and restore a relationship, even if it means the two have no further contact. This is evident in the Hard Livin’ chapter, that gives an understanding for why emo is castigated and repressed by states internationally.

There is an inherent vulnerability to emo, where violence is threatened against its adherents, but more than that, the violence is internalized and even welcomed masochistically, as it is the source of creative struggle that generates the value in the first place.

“This turpentine chaser’s got kick and the rag that it’s soaked in is rich The fumes aide the pace of my cleaning And as soon as I’m done I am gone…

The new coats of paint will not reacquaint Broken hearts to broken homes” (Dashboard Confessional: Turpentine Chaser) Many people who dress, look, or act “emo” are called faggots or thought to be inferior, encouraged to kill themselves, so that a politics of exclusion is created. If then the self exists in relationship to others, and one’s identity is based on the relationship to these others, then to understand this identity, one must look at the relationship it exists in, in order to re-evaluate it and move from a self-identity of suffering to one of liberation. For this reason, we might pay more attention to the verbiage that declares emo to be a “dangerous teen trend,” and “negative ideology” such as the Russian “antiemo legislation” that “outlaws kids wearing black hair with fringes that cover half the face.” Here it is assumed emo “promotes suicide.” In another example the “emo killings” in Iraq was a campaign against Iraqi teenagers who dressed in a western emo style, where between six and one hundred men were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in Baghdad and Iraq in 2012.

The persecution of emo men and women has occurred in Saudi Arabi and Egypt as well, with security forces and morality police calling emo followers “disciples of Satan and homosexuals,” beating and even killing individuals, publishing statements criticizing emo teens for fashion choices, while instructing morality police to “eliminate the phenomenon as soon as pssible since it’s detrimentally affecting the society and becoming a danger.” Anti-emo flyers have similarly threatened death unless these usually gay men cut their hair, stop wearing emo-clothes, and stop listening to emo music.

This is to say the emo tendency to internalize violence is not exclusively psychological or delusional, but is situated in reality. These individuals, groups, and communities are invisibilized, their inferiority naturalized, ofen times internalized, victims of queer or emo-bashing which is justified in some neo-darwinian way. Like the homeless of BRE’s account, there is a sense they deserve these conditions, and the blame and shame of their situation. They too are bodies in struggle, unwelcome in social spaces.

Thus, if, as is stated that “poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in a society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization,” then perhaps emo is the scream of which John Holloway writes: “faced with the mutilation of human lives by capitalism, a scream of sadness, a scream of horror, a scream of anger, a scream of refusal: NO. It is from rage that thought is born, not from the pose of reason.” Emo then provides way to understand what is worth screaming about in society, opening up this scream to anyone to participate in, the object of desire conditioned by its absence “You are everything I want Because you are everything I'm not” (Taking Back Sunday: MakeDamnSure) And yet, when you’ve “dealt with various abuses the body becomes resilient.” There is beauty in the intensity of emotional suffering, because the degree of intensity necessary to feel it so deeply is similar present in moments of emotional ecstasy. Indeed, sensitizing oneself to the emotional dynamics of life that are re-presented in lyrical form allows one a reconnection to experience, and therefore that much more sensitivity to

joy, deepening the ability to rejoice when moments of suffering are overcome and eclipsed by an emotional dynamic on the other side of the spectrum: “My hopes are so high, that your kiss might kill me.

So won’t you kill me, So I die happy…

Hands down this is the best day I can ever remember I’ll always remember the sound of the stereo And you stood at your door with your hands on my waist And you kissed me like you meant it And I knew that you meant it. you meant it.

(Dashboard Confessional: Hands Down) I have attempted to suggest that emo, like punk, provides a site of struggle worthwhile for a militant co-research project to inquire into. I have also suggested that emo in fact is a kind of militant co-research project, inquiring into the psycho-social and emotional dynamics present in suffering, where micro-power is experienced in micro-politics. Emerging from the same DIY genealogy as punk, emo has sought to reclaim the productive capacity of emotional trauma, utilizing the subjectification process that arises in struggle and resistance, while at the same time embracing this process of suffering and its generative capacity to produce creative resolution that is meant to heal an individual’s wounds and move them towards emotional wholeness. In so doing, I have suggested this process offers salient advice for movements and communities in resistance against capital, namely that their identities are dependent upon capital and as such their struggle remains superficial for as long as it does not address this relationship of co-dependence, and its inherent violence, that emo makes a core topic, indeed its defining characteristic, in its work. For this reason emo’s contribution to militant research/research militancy is multifaceted: a revaluation of work and value, of relationality to time as qualitative rather than quantitative, of developing an auto-ethnography that sees the subject’s logic as a primary source of suffering and oppressive asylum to be emancipated from, stemming from a relationship to another onto which the subject projects their own aspirations to fill an existential

void. Further, the series of relational experiences are mapped in song and lyric to facilitate analysis of the relationship that causes suffering, used to find resonances to hypothesize interventions, and serve as outlets that themselves generate healing through instances of emotional intensity.

For these reasons, we can extrapolate and generalize with regards to the findings that emo has provided, suggesting an emotional basis for effective activism that deepens the analysis of self in relation to other. Further, we can understand the discrepancies between ideological delusion and material experience, making our interventions to reconnect individuals and restore abusive relationships to non-harmful ones more potent by (re)establishing the very social links, horizontal or vertical, that is required to overcome fragmentation and establish an integrated network capable of relying on one another. Consider for example if each of the groups we have spoken about were integrated: perhaps a homeless youth could pick up a free zine that showed a map of free stores in the city. Perhaps a punk had stolen yarn and knit a sweater, donating it to the free store. Perhaps on the way to the free store the homeless youth could eat free fruit that had been planted in a number of neighbors’ yards. Perhaps this homeless youth could find a place to sleep afer attaining a full belly and warm clothes because an integrated community had found rooms not in use and buildings unoccupied. Perhaps a city-wide movement had refused to continue paying taxes, rent, or prices, dug up the sidewalks and roads, and planted the food they needed to survive, relearned the skills they needed to survive, and took the specific actions they needed to survive, circumventing the power structure by deriving sustenance, unmediated from the land, unalienated from each other, taking measures to adequately defend themselves when confrontation occurred, persuading others who thought differently to not attack their autonomy, and promoting affinity for one another through mutual aid, self-reliance, and free association, built on the basis of emotional sensitivity.

“To all of you dancing just don’t be afraid to fall, We will capture you in open arms when you’re tired and alone.

My life is better than it ever was My life is better than it ever was.

I’ll give blood to your dry veins We do this for the passion and not for the fashion or fame…

This could be your home, when you’re all alone To all the crowded rooms I say you gave me a home anyway To all the crowded rooms I say you gave me a home anyway (Senses Fail: To All the Crowded Rooms) Just as a final point, I wanted to just make mention of one individual Tom Delonge, former guitarist and singer for Blink 182, and current front man for Angels and Airwaves. I bring him up for several reasons, one because his band had a song called “emo” on their album Dude Ranch which probably brought punk rock, if not to mainstream, then at least to me.

“Why leave when you claim it is love?

But why stay when you're not the only one?

She's proved she's strong Be brave, be strong.”

(Blink 182: Emo) The other reason is that, while starting off as a punk band, Blink 182 became arguably the most popular pop-punk band in the world. With punk’s anti-authority streak however, it would seem to be almost hilarious the activity Tom is involved in today, as he explains in his youtube interview with Joe Rogan, if it didn’t seem so bat-shit insane. Stemming from his interest in aliens as a teenager, Delonge now claims to be working with former military officials and other individuals to prepare for “disclosure” (where aliens are revealed to the public), while working to fund the backwards design of alien technology that can circumvent technological monopolies from elite politicians, industry leaders, and capitalist investors, for the sake of distributing it in an equitable to the public with the hope of contributing in such a way to world peace.

“I know the CIA would say What you hear is all hearsay Wish someone would tell me what was right I’m not like you guys 12 majestic lies” (Blink 182: Aliens Exist)

Whether we think this is a crock of shit, misguided, the single greatest hope for the planet, or that he is a sell-out trying to commodify music, art, and a punk rock world view, his success began from learning a skill, searching his memories, writing emotionally charged lyrics that spoke to millions of kids and probably influenced many thousands of bands in a way that created emotional resonance across the planet; hell, potentially between planets too. And yet, between moments of communication and abstraction of experience, there is a life to be lived in direct action, unmediated by the written word.

“If I had my own world I'd love it for all that's inside it There'd be no more wars, death or riots, There'd be no more faiths, packed parking lots, Guns, bombs sounding off, If I had my own world I'd build you an empire From here to the far lands To spread love like violence.”

(Angels and Airwaves: Secret Crowds)

Wargames of Desire: Militant Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self

“For capitalism, work is a commodity, and because it is derived from activity carried out in exchange for a wage, man himself becomes a commodity. So a work market actually exists. Work has a price (wages), and there is a direct relationship between lack of work (unemployment) and the level of market prices…First, one ‘gets by,’ then one rebels. And rebellion threatens social peace, puts the future of all production in danger, prevents investment, creates panic in buyers, and so on.”

-Alfredo Bonanno, In Let’s Destroy Work, Let’s Destroy the Economy

“There is no question that the free use of space-time will bring about marvelous transformations in human behavior. Our perceptions of reality will be modified, and our senses, now eroded by the brutalizing habits of survival, will become refined to a level of acuteness that we can now scarcely imagine. Never-ending revolution is the rational pivot of all the passions.

-Raoul Vaneigem In From Wildcat Strike to Total Self-Management

For me, the Nanopolitics Handbook has been my favorite reading so far.

What I appreciated most was the initial realization that the transformation of society began with the individual and their perception of themselves in relation to others, as well as the willingness to explore methodologies, experiments, and exercises to those ends.

In Marx’s Capital, he speaks of the commodity as the concretized form of value. Any commodity is produced through labor to satisfy a desire, making it valuable for its utility, to be exchanged for money—the value of labor in its most developed expression. In this regard then, it is human desire which is responsible for the commodities, which in turn inform and produce social relations, impressing value into these products that are presented in their money forms in a marketplace. However, it seems to me that if we look at the culmination of this process-- the drive to accumulate commodities-- in terms of the cumulative effects of these desires, the mere fact our economic system is driving mass extinction and suffering suggests a degree of irrationality: that is, an irrational economy is the concretization of irrational desire; the mystical shell of an irrational kernel.

What strikes me as problematic here is Marx’s theory of value, namely the assumption labor creates value. Is there value in the extinction of species?

In rampant poverty or the unraveling of the fabric of life? To me this seems like the overall product of our economic system: a dead world.

Instead, it seems labor derives its intention and purpose from a psychological interpretation of what “should” be produced, and so, there is an adaptive mechanism at play: what is needed to survive and thrive? This is to say that value derives from this adaptive mechanism (or rather, process), which informs labor, just as a maladaptive mechanism might inform labor as well, to produce value in the former case, or whatever the opposite of value is in the latter. It is this (these) (mal)adaptive mechanism(s) or process(es) that is (are) concretized and reproduced as the tendency to commodify for exchange that not only produces commodities, but produces the specific exploitative social relations necessary to produce the commodities, and the identities of those who produce these commodities as “commodity-producers,” in turn determining the character of the culture in question—alienated, commodified, fetishized, superficial, violent, reified, abstract...

The identities, relationships, commodities, tendencies, processes, structures, etc. necessary to produce this spectacle, can all be located primarily in the psychosomatic experience of relationality between individual and community, contaminating everyday activities, workplaces,

politics, and other spaces accordingly. As such, the point of negation—the anti-capitalist struggle—must similarly be located in the psychosomatic experience of the individual in relationship to their community. The mindbody composite then is the primary battlefield in which any revolution must first take place.

It is here that the nanopolitics group makes a critical contribution with their Nanopolitics Handbook, seeking to reconstitute commodifying society by attacking the capitalist relationship and remaking the desire for commodities in the first place, escaping from those reified and “naturalized” structures that initially produce and then constrict this form of desire: “Whether then or now, it is clear to us that in as much as bodies can be liberated, they have to be vulnerable and desiring bodies, not perfectly functional machines or healthy organic wholes. In as far as ‘liberation’ is liberation from ‘repression,’ it needs to be understood as a process of freeing ourselves from dominant ways of normalizing our bodies, or better as the experimentation and construction of bodies that exit their normalization.

‘Liberation’ is disentangling our bodies from their normalization, and not from what the norm itself establishes as negative, sick, problematic, as against a supposed health.” (26) In contradistinction, an uncommodified, uncommodifying desire, found in the willingness to seek out new embodied approaches to relationality thus provides the core process for “revolutionary becoming,” guided by sensation, movement, and experience as processes to destabilize old worlds and generate new ones built around questions that inform activity and praxis: what is worth producing? Nanopolitical experiments that identify those spaces colonized by capitalist logic must then first begin with one’s self, and those collective arrangements where “modes of thinking and using mostly happen to be modeled upon the very systems that the same groups denounce.” (63) Understanding the techniques that reproduce and uphold unjust power relations can in turn help to change modes of relativity and thus reality. This refocuses the “frontline” of the battle spaces from the streets to the senses.

Thus the nanopolitical experiments represent rehearsals of new ways of relating, and thus research projects unto themselves. They provide “war games” in a sense, where the permanent rupture of obsolete modes of desire can be accomplished, practiced and promoted in public spaces to change reality. As new interpretations, new desires, new ways of understanding others and oneself (and the relationship between) are catalyzed through creative structured encounters, new mental spaces can be cultivated that extend qualities different from capitalist relations to physical spaces and the real relationships that pervade them.

Moreover, as we play through these games, new formats, practices, tools, etc. and engage in experimentations with words, tones, touches, visualizations, meditations, and sensitivities, to reconstitute beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, body-schemas, and awareness, we can map the “sickness” of the body politic by paying attention to our own reactions (symptoms), healing our own bodies and with them the wider body as mirror neurons “remember” the alternative modes of being these experiments remind them of, transforming relations that have been institutionalized to serve capitalist society through their commodifying tendencies, to normalize autonomous, liberated, non-capitalist relationships in their stead.

These experiments then are the foundations around which to self-organize alternative structures that produce non-capitalist, or anti-capitalist desires without reproducing undesirable (or rather, all too desirable) power imbalances, forming relational bonds that redesign concrete sites of struggle: the self, its relations, and the culmination of those relations, society--a new world emerging from the shell of the old.

The one real problem I found with the Handbook was that, in the retreat from macropolitical transformation to a focus on micropolitical realities, there seems to be an absence of reconnecting the micro back to the macro afer this micropolitical transformation has taken place—an absence that cannot endure if one wishes to scale this reconstituted revolutionary becoming up. In one chapter, “The bodies of proletarian reproduction,” Hansen says as much: “We mustn’t take such minimal politics of the body or the minor politics of care and reproduction as sufficient, even

if they are necessary. This is one of the ways nano- and micro-politics are folded in with macropolitics. What we learn from the current conjuncture of crisis and rebellion is that a revolutionary politics starting from our bodies consists in more than the affirmation of the sensitivity and intelligence of the body, and of dimensions of embodied collectivity and transindividuality (e.g. in affect), and more than our coming together to care for one another. However valuable, desirable and necessary as this may be, we must practice them in ways that go beyond self-organized self-help. If we don’t they merely help us reproduce ourselves so we can survive ‘in society’, i.e. continue to reproduce or be reading to reproduce the ‘social body’ of capital (as workers or ‘job seekers’) once it again finds those of us it hasn’t deported useful. This is why we affirm our politics of care, body and reproduction as aspects of a general ‘political warfare’ on the conditions which make us sick, precarious, and individualized.” (205)

What is most fun about this book I suppose, is the encouragement to invoke new community processes, methodologies, experiments, reflections, and ecologies. In this spirit, I lay out a few “exercises” below, that might link a nanopolitics back up to the macro: Nanopolitical Wargames ‘The [Situationist] game is the spontaneous way [that] everyday life enriches and develops itself; the game is the conscious form of the supersession of spectacular art and politics. It is participation, communication and selfrealisation resurrected … It is the means and the end of total revolution.’

-English Section of the Situationist International, From The Revolution of Modern Art and the Art of Modern Revolution 1.

The Present is a Gift. Walk outside, by yourself or with a friend.

Don’t think or talk about anything in the past or future. Concentrate on the present, what’s in front of you, its qualities and characteristics.

Use your senses. Notice what comes up in your body, conversation, mind. What places do you gravitate toward? What places do you avoid? What is it about these places that cause these feelings? How do you feel once you come back inside?

2.

Guerrilla Spectacles. Create an event that eliminates capital or a commodity from your life. Bring as much attention to it as possible. If possible, inspire others to do the same by making it fun. Make sure you have eliminated your dependence on this capital so it is not purely symbolic and you have to re-establish your relationship to the capital/commodity. If possible, disrupt the flow of capital to the greatest extent possible with your event.

In this way, the class relationships and commodities (and ecocidal commodifying tendencies) produced by capital can be abolished by a care that overcomes the boundaries between people to produce interdependent relationships unconditioned by violence.

What appeals to me most about this book then was the attempts to provoke ontological disturbances in one’s self and others (and their relationship) that could lead to the “revolutionary becoming,” afer which people could amplify and reproduce this new singularity; yet at the same time, none of the experiments, or exercises truly appealed to me.

I did appreciate elements of each. For instance, the recipes for metabolisms and ecologies reminds us that we can collect seeds, and out of them grow community kitchens, and nourishment for one another as we speak in meetings, in rhythms, in rituals, in trainings, in explorations, across boundaries, throughout networks, as we walk, talk, listen, and imagine.

(One example of this was a kind of political theater, where two drivers hit each other’s cars, took baseball bats out and started destroying each other’s windshields, lights, etc. At one point, the road rage turns into a flash mob dance party, after which everyone leaves, the destroyed cars remaining behind. Because the event took place in the middle of a busy

intersection, the amount of spectators was massive, unable to get to work to produce commodities due to the destruction of commodities literally acting as a barrier to halt the flow of capital. Many of whom joined the dance party when they realized there were not many other options. *note, I think this was a real event, though I may be projecting my own images onto it.)

3.

Ecolympics/Green Games. Avoid electricity, commodities, and/or commodities that use electricity at all costs. Hunt for, gather, or produce your own non-electrified goods and share products with others instead. Keep track of the places and processes where you have to avoid or resist these phenomena, and those territories where you do not have to engage in so much resistance. See how long you can go! Write down the skills or activities you need to get good at to accomplish this. Practice accomplishing this. Share techniques widely.

Find a tribe to share non-electric or commodified goods and skills.

4.

Free Society. Refuse to engage in money, but keep the services and products flowing. Halt the flow of money by refusing to engage in any purchases or sales, or processes and social arrangements that lead to them. Play with the body and communication to get good at this.

Notice the different ways and techniques needed to maintain this flow. (persuasion, circumvention, thef, deception, counterfeiting...) Find new pathways and circuits and invite others into them.

5.

Treasure Maps. As you play with the above exercises, create a map for yourself and others. Include places that appeal to you or should be avoided, places to stage actions, ecological and cultural assets available to survive without money, electricity, and commodities, and any networks, systems, infrastructure, circuits, etc. that emerge as critical or counterproductive to your aims. Build your network of care and work to erode any networks of repression. Have fun!

The goal of these games then is to eliminate the commodity, and indeed, the process of commodification, through active avoidance, direct destruction, personal subsistence, and collective sharing, as a departure

from either suffering and/or embracing commodities and commodification.

In reality, these four strategies similarly correlate to the four approaches to resistance I mentioned last week, based on the combination of one's interpretation of state power (legitimate or illegitimate) as well as strategic engagement (engagement or avoidance). This could likely be better worked out

Utopia, E-narchy, and the Philosopher’s Stone: Angels, Unicorns, and The Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow “Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.” ― Jacques Ellul, In The Technological Society “This group is too invested in the system to pose it much of a threat. A revolutionary ideology in the hands of privileged people can indeed bring about some disruption and change in the system. But a revolutionary ideology in the hands of working people can bring that system to a halt. For it is the working people who have their hands on the machinery. And only by stopping the machinery of destruction can we ever hope to stop this madness.”

-Judi Bari, in Revolutionary Ecology

Utopia is a play on words. Severing the first letters from Eutopia (good place) and Outopia (no place), it leaves the question of where this place exists hovering in our minds, oscillating in and out of reality. In this way, it represents the co-existence of perfection and its absence in the limited, defined space of our own social dreams that comes across in the spaces that are produced in our writing, our poetry, the castles in the air we build together in bars over beers.

Yet the fact it exists in our minds at all means it exists in reality. Space is hereby produced to give body and motion to such places in nature.The question then becomes, how do we become more lucid in our social dreaming? And how can we map these natural places through text, to communicate the whereabouts of where these places exist, and how to travel back and forth to them at all?

Utopian literature functions as a travel narrative, a journey of sorts into the self-preserving power relations in which sovereignty is constructed and given meaning—it thus explores the boundaries of the political self and what can dissolve those boundaries. And in doing so, the identity that emerges over the course of the journey encloses a specific logic by which the class relations of a political economy are located to provide alternatives to certain sufferings (while causing still others).

Utopia, then, is revolutionary: it creates space for the emancipatory project to take place, which must be located in a defined space if it is to exist at all.

Within its borders, it diagnoses and critiques those causal processes generating harm; it proposes theories of alternatives that mitigate and eliminate the harms of injustice; and it provides a theory of transformation by which the trajectory of social dynamics and unintended conflicts arise.

In short, utopia provides the core organizing principles that can guide conscious strategies for desirable, viable, and achievable alternatives through a strategic logic that offers a vision of transformed relations in a designated point in spacetime.

The potential contained in this space manifests as the externalized dream of the individual, the theory and logic of utopia providing a container for a primal, playful energy in which a utopian kernel exists within an ideological and theoretical shell. And because these projections of a “good society” do not (yet) exist beyond the minds of the writer and reader, criticizing the harsh conditions of work and strife in existing orders, one in turn can recognize the practical intent of utopia is survival: reflective judgement is utilized to improve the human condition. It would not be too far off to say utopia is an evolutionary mechanism.

It is for this reason can Oscar Wilde say,

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.”

Utopia, however, is an individual process. For to declare dominion over a place, and then extend the boundaries of this domain outward until all others are unwitting dwellers within is very much to create totalitarian structures and programs that impose and enforce relations upon those who might otherwise act differently and thus collapse the entire edifice, their individual activities antithetical to the very logic of the utopia in question. Establishing utopias, then, is a sure fire way to prompting insurgents, to which one must choose whether to neglect them, empower them, coerce them, or violently repress them. Hence, the difference between utopia and dystopia lies not in the place's geographic and social character, but merely in the prefix ascribed to the same place, and the perception of the place by the individual ascribing the prefixes. *** I begin with this conundrum because, in reading Notes from Below, I am struck by the lack of (utopian) imagination present in the theory; or rather, I am struck by the stark contrast between the “better world” dreamt of here, and what I see when I look out on the horizon from my own ship heading toward some unknown place. Further, I appreciate reading this issue in the wake of Nanopolitics/Micropolitics, as I see a large disregard for bodily instinct in these writings.

In the first place, the analysis is unapologetically Marxist, which is fine, except in so far as their premise begins with a theory of value I suggested was false, or rather, superficial, namely the fallacy that all value is produced by labor. Marx himself said that labor, value, and the commodity is entirely based on desire. It is not, as the editors state, labor by which we interact with our environment, but rather bodily perception, which informs our labor, in terms of what we do with that bodily perception.

Thus, our social context conditions our desire, and thus our labor, value, commodities, capital, social arrangements, and the nature of reality.

For instance, urbanization has made our labor entirely useless so that we desire to exchange it, even under exploitative conditions, for money, enriching others, since the objects of desire remain external to and mediated from us. (Marx, Capital pg. 262) None possess the object of their need, but rather we find such objects in the hands of others. For this reason, we exchange labor for something more useful: money. And it is here that the capitalist finds in labor-power the use-value that produces surplus value to make money out of money, as if by magic.In this regard, spending your waking life sitting, staring at a screen, typing and clicking into an electric box for money, benefits, and perks seems like the most desirable possibility available.

Here, our perception of (human) nature, barren as it is within the urban environment, repurposes it. Our perception of nature, informing labor, aided by capital, produces value we “freely” sell, producing new money, as there is no better alternative. (Classical philosophers like Aristotle, I believe, considered this fixation on money-making as opposed to producing anything of substantive value as being afflicted by a spiritual disease. This changed as the Protestant Ethic institutionalized this spiritual disease as the moral foundation for working/waking life).

Imagine, on the other hand, cultivating desire over years, so that the objects of desire are not external to oneself. Where one’s own labor is capable of satisfying one’s needs, and that labor and the services it provides are shared with others, and found to satisfy such needs completely. Would this possibility be desirable? Viable? Achievable?

The possibility is hardly even considered by the tech workers in this issue, who seem to take for granted the social stratification their hi-tech profiles (with their massive supply chains and carbon footprints) require to endure.. Rather, they seem to seek better conditions within capitalist society, leaving the relations of productivity intact that seek to erode those conditions in the first place. Most of the articles suggest unionization as a desirable goal—but why? For what ends are unions the means toward? A slightly less precarious condition? Similarly, is simply getting workers to talk to one another sufficient to agitate, organize, and wage effective campaigns that remake class composition and build autonomous networks? And again, to what ends? Unless organized, agitated campaigns by autonomous networks are the ultimate ends themselves?

While I am all for improved workplace conditions, better wages, refusal to engage in unethical practices, etc. for me, these goals seem reformist.

Worker control over projects seems important, but without revolutionary, nanopolitical recomposition, who’s to say similar relations will not be built back up, workers sharing in the very same profits of industrial capitalism, more equitably perhaps, but still complicit in the wider damage it does?

I appreciated Wright’s attempt in “Silicon Valley Startups” to spell out the reality of the capitalist firm—“the basic unit of production in capitalism”— as a dictatorship, reproducing exploitative social relations. Yet at the same time, his solution of profit-sharing worker cooperatives still leaves intact profit-making, and thus the very logic of capital in the first place, one that undoubtedly would “discipline” labor even without “management,” since these worker/bosses will simply “self-manage,” maintaining and reproducing their own exploitation, but moving this force from an external place ("the boss") to an internal one ("I'm my own boss").

present structural relations we are engaged in? Is educating more people to participate in technological processes or simply encouraging “more contact” with computers sufficient for a breakthrough when it comes to recomposing our own desires? For if we are capable of breaking down and building back up our desire, who’s to say computers or hi-technology would even remain in that world? Do they serve interests beyond those of capital?

Indeed, I agree there is a need for the “birth of a new productive unit,” able to disrupt the social relations of production. And perhaps this is what One Big Union can do: self-organize so workers do not have to fight capital, but rather build the platforms necessary to organize themselves, all the way down the supply chains, leaving the culture open to anyone willing to join, donating and repurposing capital and labor toward some other end.

In this regard, desire seems to me to be the basic unit of production (and perhaps the archetypal forces and dynamics at play within any instance of desire).

This goes beyond creating algorithms that automate undesirable tasks, or transfer skills to machines on behalf of capital or to get a higher wage, or increase our perks, or our value as scarce technical labor. If our desires are produced within a specific historical and social context, then we need to seize control of both that context as well as the desire, break it down, and reconsider the very source of how these desires and contexts are produced in the first place.

If we seek to “save” or “change” the world, for instance, is it possible to do so if the very processes that produce high technology are threatening that world? Can this redemption and transformation really take place within the

Here, the hegemony of the logic of capital is beyond attack. It cannot simply be “outflanked” by tech, because tech itself reproduces capital. In fact, it is capital. As Marx points out, the origin of capital can be identified

when “the savage flings a stone at a wild animal,” or a "first stick is seized to strike down fruit.” Even with the first Paleolithic toolkits, there is reason to believe that the competitive advantage bestowed upon those individuals and the bands coalescing around them encouraged further developments, specialization, and the eventual emergence of classes. Thus “relics of bygone instruments of labor possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic formations of society as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals.” (Marx, 286) What I have tried to say in too many words is that labor does not produce value alone. Rather, desire (stemming from the body) creates demand that is serviced by labor, united with capital, as it is given purpose that (re)produces any value to be used, exchanged, or profited from.

Simply put, consumers produce value.

This, I think, is more revolutionary. With this formulation, facebook users can demand stock options or threaten to "strike" (wagesforfacebook.com), bringing a billion dollar business into bankruptcy as advertisers and investors, dependent on users' attention for their own value, flee. Video game players, click-workers…any user can simply boycott, divest from, and sanction any (every?) capitalist firm, because they simply do not desire to make it profitable, and so, can bring its value to zero.

The question remains however, how to not just attack individual capitalist firms’ profit margins, but attack the concept of profit margins entirely, ending the hegemonic practice of competition based on exploitation.

While there are some glimpses of utopia one can read between the lines in Notes from Below, with words like “four-hour work day,” “universal basic services/income,” “free at the point of use,” “fully automated luxury communism,” “post work society,” etc. the desire, I think, cannot limit itself to simply “making work suck less.”

Rather, tech-workers have incredible value at the moment, in that the internet represents a new means of exchange whereby money, wages, commodities, profits and the specific social relations and arrangements they condition can be abolished, simply by giving individuals the means to produce their own utopian relationships and events. That is, if we desire a new way of relating without an obsolete means of exchange, they have the power essentially to satisfy that desire by laboring to produce a valuable product. (Whether that product will be shared or commodified is another question) One big self-organized union would no longer have to orient itself toward capitalists, or rather, “as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will,� or fight against profit-making. Rather, in "seizing" the means of production (i.e. desire, first and foremost), and specifically cultivating a world based on desires antithetical to profit-making, new relationships could be forged able to develop new techniques that satisfy these desires in novel ways, so that the object of desire can be eventually relocated back to oneself, and their relationship to others, the land, etc.

The element of play inherent in such an e-narchic utopias could then reflect the desire to not participate in capitalist relations back into the material world in various forms (a rent-strike, debt-strike, BDS campaign against a range of actors, green bans, and a thousand other games and tactics), all with value far surpassing any set price it could be exchanged for in a marketplace.

Or, it could just as easily reproduce the very relationships it set itself apart from if not discerning, and sensitive to the nanopolitical dynamics at play.

Separation and Solidarity: Accompanying Those Who Suffer the Conflicts of History as a Method of World-Building “Where two or three are gathered together in the name of bringing into being a world in which human beings share as members of one family, that world—so it was said of old—has already begun to exist.”

-Staughton Lynd, in Accompanying: Pathways to Social Change “Peace is a product of justice [but even] justice is not enough, love is also necessary. The love that makes us feel that we are brothers and sisters is what makes for true peace…Peace is thus the product of justice and love.”

-Oscar Romero “Guerrilla history” provides a way of both “doing history” and interpreting that history, to better understand what happened, why, and how we can live with and in such realities. It allows for historians to apprehend particular conflicts, and what is needed by those suffering the effects of such conflicts, according to an alternative expertise. At the same time, it erases the barriers of who is qualified to “do history,” by providing a method—“accompaniment”—to allow anyone to participate in the process. Here, actions are evaluated by consciously prioritizing specific sources of ofen unacknowledged experience at the beginning of any proposed inquiry: “the correct starting point is the poor person himself or herself…just as we need to do history together so as to act most effectively, so more generally, we need to journey side by side, confronting whatever comes.” (120) To me, this suggests a set of metrics to some degree by which any oral history that seeks to look “beneath the surface of capitalist society” can better challenge the structures and interpretations of mainstream history. Such a “history from below” produces a different interpretation of history (along with different proposals for what to do about such histories) simply because new and different causes of conflict are identified by marginalized perspectives that are, for the first time, given a voice and integrated into the history-making process. The effect is to rewrite history

based on “new” (i.e. newly acknowledged) sources of evidence. For instance, Staughton Lynd explains the choice by tenant farmers to take sides in the American revolutionary war as not simply due to an ideological motivation for “home rule,” but rather based on opposing the politics of the landlord, for simple economic self-interest.

Here, we can see such conflicts as not simply being waged during any historical moment in time, but rather that same conflict extends temporally into the very writing about such moments. This is to say, if ideas typically emerge from the economic settings in which historical actors are embedded, as Marx suggests, then the same economic settings must be acknowledged as implicitly informing the economic context any historical writing takes place in as well. In this regard, one must ask the question as to whether capital is better even than forms of “bottom up” social movements in winning a war of attrition against the minds of the oppressed, and certainly against those seeking to tell their stories. Do we tell the story of capital or those who suffer because of it?

This requires what Lynd calls “solidarity unionism,” where oppressed people, situated in the experiences they themselves struggle to make sense of, must analyze their own understandings, “but beyond that, that they interpret their action and on that basis project future actions. Unless this intellectual function is part of the process, the poor will always be at the mercy of persons who presume to tell them what their action means and what they should do next, whether those persons are members of a Leninist vanguard party, staff of a union like the Service Employees International Union, or anarchist theoreticians.” (147) To me, I wonder then if even radical intellectuals are not also oppressed by a situation of existential crisis and intellectual conflict, namely their own separation from the subjects they seek to know. Oral history then, along with empathic analysis of written accounts…indeed militant co-research and activist ethnography at large, seemingly strives to overcome such separation through specific methods with which to know (better) the

experiences of others, futile though that may seem. The willingness to begin any such inquiry by establishing a new kind of relationship is not only critical to knowledge-building in particular, but indeed prefigures a new society at large: the struggle to know one another is itself transformative through the very relationship it generates.

This is evident in lawsuits for instance, where, in coming to know how individuals and groups build meanings, aspire toward and intend new realities, generate analyses, accommodate pressures, learn lessons, and respond to the consequences of their actions, “manuals” can be put together that address systemic injustices by applying insights in ways that hone strategies and tactics more able to define and ensure any goal, setting precedents and milestones as others elsewhere build on these journeys.

Thus the historian and subject, in co-producing new evidence, are able to corroborate information, protecting against the disintegration of memory, resisting false memories, and ensuring the survivability of genuine memories by writing “history from the inside of people’s experience,” summoning into existence new worlds. (14) This is a powerful method of course, and as such, it seems as if, as two persons, the historian and the subject, “explore the way forward together,” the potency of their combined expertise as historical agents are threatened only by the possibility of mismatched desire. That is, in agitating, struggling, demanding justice, building solidarity, utilizing any weapon available (e.g. strikes) with which to bargain, voting, violence, etc. unless they have similar goals, any conflict between their goals of “where to go” will mean that they will eventually go down different paths alone.

In Lynd’s book Accompanying, he makes this clear, proposing the idea that organizing may itself be unnecessary. That is, much as ideological leanings emerge out of economic circumstance, ideas themselves follow action; as such, struggle transforms the subject and for this reason, one has only to bear witness to the journey taken in order to, rather than organizing others, instead engage in compassionate listening, where people can share experiences of where they come from and in what direction they now wish to go: “There is no way to predict when collective insurgency will become possible, and so the task of the organizer is to accompany, and thus to be present, to be available.” (40)

On this, we are able to accompany Lyn through his own journey as a guerrilla historian, “remembering” the conflicts of the labor movement (“the wage system has destroyed us”), the civil rights movement (“our problem is that our programs don’t change basic factors of exploitation”), the anti-war movement (“our army…is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers, drug ridden and dispirited, where not mutinous”), counter-counter insurgency campaigns like that accompanied by Oscar Romero (“our document must respond to the unjust distribution of the wealth that God has created for all”), prisoner-led movements (“we expect it may still come to some deaths before they act right”), seeing in this method pathways towards justice across particular movements, uniting disparate voices of a collective conflict and struggle. As Lynd points out, “accompaniment’ is actually an umbrella term that includes a family of related practices: equality, listening, seeking consensus, and exemplary action...the equality of all participants is foundational. If an organizer considers that he or she already knows not only the objective to be sought but how to get there, there is no reason to give equal importance to the people being organized.

Listening, under these circumstances, will be merely tactical, asking the question: Is there enough support ‘out there’ for our preplanned campaign to succeed?” (138) Not only is Lynd’s theoretical framework for doing history important then, but so too are his conclusions and interpretations. Indeed, in accompanying the oppressed, we can begin to see the prison system as a technique of a counter-insurgency strategy by a war-machine against a civil rights movement that emerges as a racialized labor struggle against capital. In confronting the socioeconomic and social structures that set up barriers to equality (class, race, gender, etc) then, these poor in turn share insights that, if taken to heart, can themselves overturn such systems. The civil rights movement, for instance, highlights an implicit anti-capitalism that elevates political morality above profit when it refuses to consider the economic impact of racial integration on businesses due to prejudiced and

racist patrons. Similarly, wars are vulnerable to economic slowdowns much as factories and prisons are as well.

Since violence occurs when structures operate to benefit a minority and deprive people of the necessities of life, one can see then the deeply threatening nature of a phrase like Romero’s “No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God,” (119) or, as an individual within the civil rights movement points out, the necessary structural economic change is “more likely to result from the eruption of a period of mass defiance” than anything else. In this regard we can see the subordination of political power to economic power, proposing strategies for social change.

This is to say, in looking at history as the temporal dimension of economic conflict, we are able to go to the source of the suffering generated by that conflict—the poor and oppressed—and, in listening to their voices, integrate new information and evidence that provides the material basis for new interpretations, generating new hypothesis, and helping us to design new experiments to resolve these conflicts: “Change the external requirements of daily life [one dictated by a hierarchy of values dictated by capital]…and over time, attitudes will change in response.” Here, “doing history,” particularly “from below,” helps to uncover contradictions and way forward, helping to provide tools necessary to aid in the legitimate self-defense against unjust threats by, for instance, creating systemic stoppages that have cascading effects.

Experimenting with new social modes and seeing to what degree of success they provide then, is dependent on a full range of understanding the source of oppression, the conflict they derive from, and those closest to the historical events they produce.

Accompaniment can thus provide both theoretical and material support for international solidarity efforts that disrupt the exploitation of land, law, and life, creating a novel reality, for instance in attacking the wage system (and with it global capitalism) to produce economic programs that provide anti-imperial justice. To quote Romero once more, “The idea was to work within the framework of people’s religious vision, but to deepen that traditional vision and to transform it from an attitude of passivity to an active struggle for change.”

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Several things comes to mind, in understanding the role of accompaniment in both hearing the suffering of the poor and those exploited by a world-capitalist system, and accompanying those who seek to address its injustices.

Firstly, if we are all living within such a system, then to some degree we all have expertise, both as subjects and potential historians—we have only to understand our position and develop the skills needed to make it visible. The second point to make is that a world-capitalist system is in fact a world-ecology system, in the sense that capital reorders both social and ecological systems towards its own logic: “Even the need for fresh air ceases to be a need for the worker. Many reverts once more to living in a cave, but the cave is now polluted by the mephitic and pestilential breath of civilization. Moreover, the worker has no more than a precarious right to live in it, for it is for him an alien power that can be daily withdrawn and from which, should he fail to pay, he can be evicted at any time…light air, etc.—the simplest animal cleanliness—ceases to be a need for man. Dirt—this pollution and putrefaction of man, the sewage (this word is to be understood in its literal sense) of civilization—becomes an element of life for him. Universal unnatural neglect, putrefied nature, becomes an element of life for him.” (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844) Yet while humans are victims of this world-capitalist/ecology system, they have, at least in potentia, a voice with which to express their suffering. Can guerrilla (oral) histories similarly be done for non-human life as well?

Only recently, soundscapes of ecosystems have begun to be recorded over time, seeking to do the kind of zooethnographical research on how wildlife and natural communities have changed over time. Not surprisingly, they too are suffering the burden of human encroachment and habitat destruction for the sake of profit, the diversity of voices in any one

place falling substantially over the course of only a few years as it is reordered by the dictates of capital.

In seeking methods to do any militant co-research, it seems critical to rethink participant-observation and observer-participant in terms of how to overcome a separation or alienation that is cultivated by systems that redesign relationships according to a logic of alienation. Yet the struggle against any one machine, person, or class of person (capitalists) should be recognized as simply themselves embodiments and effects of capital. For this reason, it will be necessary to journey with one another to amplify and communicate our voices to share our moral injuries, and share with each other too those voices that can heal such suffering as we begin to make new paths into a wild unknown.

Restoring a Methodological Balance: Activist Ethnography and Social Science as the Militant Doula and Medical Practitioner for Midwifing the Birth of a New Era. “So if you know these substructures in the lower levels of the ontic hierarchy (beyond the plant which is organism) and go into the physical, chemical, molecular and atomic structures, ever farther down, the greater becomes the miracle how all that thing is a plant. Nothing is explained. If you try to explain it in terms of some mechanism, you have committed the fallacy of reduction.

If you deform your experience by trying to explain what you experience by the things which you don't experience but which you know only by science, you get a perverted imagination of reality—if you see a rose as a physical or atomic process.”

-Eric Voegelin, The Drama of Humanity, “Myth as Environment” “Head trips and freak-outs cannot alter the material basis of exploitation and alienation.”

-Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches In many ways it seems this book remains unfinished.

The context each author provides is great; the Alana Apfel’s own insight is superb; and the interviews are phenomenal. I appreciate the “tales from the birth field” immensely as well as the willingness to provide the reader with both a dictionary of terms as well as a resource of herbal remedies. In many ways, the author provides any reader with the tools

they need to both understand the significance and starting point for birth/care work as itself a prefigurative politic through direct action in and of itself. As Graeber explains, direct action is

where economically disadvantaged communities of color bear the brunt of institutional forms of violence as they experience firsthand the presence of these particular health and economic disparities.

“form of action in which means and ends become, effectively, indistinguishable; a way of actively engaging with the world to bring about change, in which the form of the action—or at least, the organization of the action —is itself a model for the change one wishes to bring about.” 210

These stories from activist birth communities then identify a critical point of rupture with the logic of the “medical-industrial complex” that seeks to commodify bodies from the very first moments of life. As one interviewee points out,

The individuals situated in this kind of activist birthing communities are thus intimately engaged in both the point of (re)production as well as the point of assumption, intending to “shif the sterile and medical environment into a more warm and loving environment.” As such, they attempt to “function as we want the world to be,” reconfiguring language while holding spaces free of traumatic experience giving those who birth the power to rewrite the narrative of those abusive institutions and structures once more. Indeed, their goal, plainly stated, stems from a “desire to create safe spaces to express, create, and to birth,” providing birthing mothers with “access to the support they deserve no matter their economic resources,” and specifically access “under the conditions we choose.”

Such statements are without doubt revolutionary. Moreover, it gives an alternative to what seems to be the central injustice these activist birthing communities focus on: the disproportionate number of women who have problematic birth experiences, usually those of color or without economic means. In the sense that the current medical-industrial narrative overlooks and masks those “intersections of race, gender, sexuality, physical ability, citizenship, and economics that differentially affect health outcomes and determine the quality and extent of care that is given…it is deeply embedded within existing systems of social and racial stratification that produce highly variable birth outcomes across a diversity of reproductive communities,”(6)

“The drive of capitalism to commoditize resources that are of the commons and to monetize and privatize them in order to make a profit is contrary to any life-giving systems. Capitalism and birth become intrinsically connected because the effects of capitalist relations are physically embodied within us. In our current economic system, for example, there is no concern for the vast quantity of polluting substances that go into our bodies, and hence our babies, as a direct result of capitalist transactions. The main concern is about making profit and increasing the bottom line rather than the care and long-term health of MotherBaby. The unique profit motive and hierarchy of capitalism also seeks to control women’s bodies because it wants to control their knowledge, intuitive capabilities and reproduction.

Women are the producers of the next labor force and are therefore essential to sustaining capitalism. The autonomy that women have is a direct threat to the current economic system.” (50-51) In this regard, the theoretical foundations, concepts, and ideas are well taken. Indeed, the profit-driven market reorders the imaginative capacity and the activities they drive, so birth work is quite literally operating against a capitalism that exerts “control at the level of imagination—foreclosing the ability for people to literally imagine alternatives…we need a collective re-appropriation of the constraints capitalism places on our imagination around birth and

hence on our capacity to reproduce ourselves and our children in ways that would support our collective wellbeing.” (8) However, the actual shared practices referenced that supposedly embody such ideological predispositions seem scant in their ability to confront and transform the situation they operate and exist within. For example, in the birth experiences section, are the doulas significantly relieving and protecting the mothers, intervening in and pushing back against the traumatizing conditions on behalf of the families they speak of?

It seems the medical-industrial complex is in fact quite necessary for at least one birth that would likely end in the death of the child if not for its presence in the mother’s experience. Further, the section does not include much insight as to how a doula might provide support to those who do not have such happy outcomes? Nor does it speak of particular organizational structures doulas, midwifes, and nurses are professionally or informally engaged with, along with their capacities, training processes, donors, impact on different communities being served, etc. Further, the book makes a claim that the herbal sections makes a significant contribution to discussion about the politics of enclosing the commons? Really? Where?

Throughout my reading, I was similarly curious what the impact of these doulas would be on any individual, lower class families, and communities of color. In the same vein, what is the impact of a militant, or anti-capitalist doula (or is that the same thing?) as opposed to more traditional or noncritical doulas? What is the impact of these birthing communities on prisoners, minorities, and the poor, and how can that be pointed to in order to demand recognition from those to fund these groups with adequate resources?

For me then, this book demonstrates, along with a terrific analysis based on what appears to be a feminist Marxism, the all-too limitations of documenting anti-capitalist narratives alone for remaining relevant for scholarly activism. No doubt this is a conscious decision and speaks to the goals of the author and perhaps the needs of the audience, as well as the burgeoning field that is being introduced with this marvelous book.

This is not say the context, interviews, stories, and appendixes are not valuable in and of themselves, but rather that the hypotheses and

implications that emerge rely on anecdotal evidence and as such, are perhaps less generalizable beyond the personal impact such beautiful and poetic language might have on the reader. That is, while ethnography generates new concepts and analyses in the process of ethnographic engagement, what seems to be missing, both in this text and others firmly within the activist-scholarship discipline, is a willingness to translate the novel insight into the orthodoxy, confronting and integrating those research methods that have been critiqued and abandoned, for a more comprehensive and balanced approach to transformative inquiry to reach the largest possible audience: “The goal of the social science project is some kind of generalization, and the ‘data’ are selected ofen as cases to provide evidence for or qualifications of a theoretical proposition that advances a conversation in the literature. This type of project is consistent with theorydriven hypothesis testing in the quantitative social sciences, but in the qualitative social sciences the hypotheses may not be stated as explicitly as in quantitative research, and the data may be used to exemplify and explore propositions as much as to test explicit hypotheses…

“The social science model…is necessary in the higher prestige journals that will demand conformity to social science conventions in exchange for a venue that brings more visibility to one’s work…skepticism of the value of publishing at least some of one’s work in a mode of generalizing social science seems unfortunate, and this suspicion contributes to the involution of anthropology (or, to be more specific, the dominant networks of American cultural anthropology) with respect to the other social sciences.”

(Hess 2013, in Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political)

There is, it seems, ofen a tendency to neglect quantitative research methods in activist scholarship, erecting an ideological wall around social movements to make them ineffective in actualizing their aims. Because orthodox social science seems overwhelmingly quantitative, seeking to derive testable research hypotheses, it may be the case that purely qualitative research may be marginalized, thus impeding its integration into the larger literature that is ideologically pre-disposed to reject that type of research (and hence the choice to flee from purely quantitative methods in the first place). For this reason, a correct and purposeful critique of quantitative analysis, which outwardly rejects its use, handicaps itself in testing its own concepts—in turn raising the questions as to whether qualitative methods can alone provide any real advancement in understanding beyond the necessary philosophical debate or framing.

Instead, qualitative research illustrates and interprets, but does not ever actually test the theory. This then creates an assumption that such theories cannot be tested at all, rather than the fact they simply tend not to be assessed, facilitating a myth to justify distancing or separating more qualitative “humanities” disciplines from more quantitative “social science” disciplines. The result is the intentional isolation and insulation of a field of study caricatured as advancing “untestable” hypotheses to its own detriment.

But would these concepts derived from qualitative analysis be any more difficult to test than others grounded in positivist paradigms? A typical critique of case studies is that they “merely” study one event or process at a time and there is little assurance that information can be generalized, or connections across places can be established because observations must be made repeatable for it to approach “scientific rigor,” so that there is great difficulty in replicating qualitative research, since to do so relies on the unique subjective experience of complex individuals.

Thus there is both a need for valid qualitative research assessment methods as well as the willingness to engage in quantitative methods as well, both of which can provide a more effective framework to which militant co-researches might link studies and arguments, developing useful scripts for interpretive purposes form the basis of “scientific” (read empirical, i.e. grounded in reality) enterprises that develop the field of research in theoretical ways as well, to create appropriate research design

and controls for practical results. In this regard, co-research can itself provide a form of direct action, in so far as its liberatory practice is the ideology it affirms.

How then can we “infiltrate” the normal scientific model, creating a logical design that excludes alternative explanations, generalizes the evidence, and generates information that is replicable to create a theory that explains any relationship between variables (institutions or structures of abuse) that can be tested and generalized (and ultimately abolished)?

Moreover, to ensure that any hypotheses that remain are true and relevant to enhance the field, any hypothesis or theory must stand up to critique of its paradigmatic beliefs, so as to increase its acceptance and insulate it from false narratives that deride or dismiss its utility by demonstrating solutions can in fact be quantified or tested empirically, indicating that any policy based on its information will have the desired effect.

To refuse to engage in this process on the other hand is to limit the real world applications, reducing any potential influence in terms of its potency for transformation.

My concerns largely speak to the wider issue of methodology I believe: qualitative research methods are absolutely crucial to humanize any individual affected by an issue, and tease out the intricacies of ultracomplex structures, systems, forces, and ideologies, and the persons affected by or caught within this ecosystem. But quantitative methods are similarly crucial to ensure solutions are able to reach the mainstream and impact it in ways that ensure change is made. I am led to wonder then, whether it is possible to create research questions that fully embody the complex dynamics of the nuanced interpretations borne from qualitative research so as to facilitate the integration of such ideas and concepts so as to “infiltrate society.” (47) In this regard, framing birth work as a matter of prefigurative politics thus works well to rewrite the narrative for those who may feel like there is limited value in birth work. It is certainly the case that Apfel’s unique perspective is effective in teasing out the implicit logic of activist birthing communities while generating new analysis and concepts that detail how such communities are engaged in struggle and because of this, it makes an important contribution to activist-scholarship. If there is any

criticism, it is simply the book is not longer, and neglects a methodological technique it surely made the choice to avoid. Yet this lack of quantitative methodology ultimately hinders the integration of its major theoretical contributions as a result. As such, there seems to be a kind of lost opportunity.

More importantly, if perspectives that critique the medical industrial complex and advance anti-capitalist narratives as healing spaces able to intervene within the racialized and gendered spectrums of violence and class hierarchies to protect expectant mothers and their children from traumatic abuse, how can such a powerful hypothesis be proved as anything more than a particular subcultural ideology? Without such research designs able to address and find physical evidence as to the quantitative impact on oppressed communities’ lives, the study remains firmly within a speculative bubble that appears unwilling to engage with a wider research community.

For these reasons, I am driven to ask these questions: What are the conditions we desire (beyond the critical location of the birth process as a site of rupture with a dominant logic), what are the methods necessary to create the conditions we describe, and how can we replicate these methods so others can most effectively create the desired conditions they describe as well?

If indeed we are engaged in a kind of mythological warfare, fomenting rebellion against sources of both alienation and oppression to define the situation we each operate within, we will need to both qualify and quantify a political ontology of imagination in contradistinction to those captured and degraded by capital. It may be that such a book finds its impact and import in providing an object around which to organize theorizations about conditions of labor and finding the language to name problems, state demands, and determine useful tactics and strategies. But to refuse attention to and intention toward quantifying the efficacy of such activities may only serve to delay any rupture or implementation of its highest ideals.

Civilization as a Cosmic Crime: Energy, Resistance, and the Insurrectionary (Wild Egoist) Approach to Food Ethics "Let a Christian hunter go to the Lord's woods and kill his well-kept beasts, or wild Indians, and it is well; but let an enterprising specimen of these proper, predestined victims go to houses and fields and kill the most worthless person of the vertical godlike killers, --oh! that is horribly unorthodox, and on the part of the Indians, atrocious murder! Well, I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears."

-John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk “A calloused coldness, or meanness, results when our animal senses are cut off for too long from the animate earth, when our ears—inundated by the whooping blare of car alarms and the muted thunder of subways—no longer encounter the resonant silence, as our eyes forget the irregular wildness of things green and growing behind the rectilinear daze.”

-David Abram Becoming Animal “It is logical, we will continue with these acts, and other scientists and the rest of techno-nonsense must pay the consequences of their actions, and better for it to be by some wild terrorists like ourselves.”

-Communique from Individualists Tending Toward the Wild, Claiming responsibility for a bomb wounding two professors at Technological Institute and of Superior Studies of Monterrey Abstract: This essay focuses on the inquiry process as applied to food ethics, emphasizing civilized systems as a particular type of cosmic energy

pathway that creates inequity while generating the conditions for its own collapse. In doing so, four suggestions are proposed to contextualize the assertion that civilization represents an assemblage of energy blockages that disrupt (resist) natural flows in ways that exacerbate harms and crimes, while pointing to a particular “anti-civilizational” tendency which attempts to address these concerns in unorthodox ways. The contribution of such a thesis is to generate a hypothesis as new forms of resistances that can overcome, circumvent, dissolve, or destroy such barriers (or, additionally, become a barrier—a resistance to resistance) through more integrated approaches to activism. Finally, this paper suggests interventions by militant researchers that can both reconfigure energy patterns in more equitable ways, while speculating on the kind of relationship to food ways post-domestic cultures might turn to.

Keywords: Food ethics, cosmic energy, collapse, anti-civ movements, green anarchy, dark green religion, resistance, militant research, immediatereturn lifeways, agriculture, domestication.

A Brief Introduction to the Nature of Inquiry into Food Ethics This essay begins with food ethicist Paul B. Thompson’s assertion that advocates of different philosophical systems ofen compare the most optimistic interpretation of their favored approach to the least successful applications of the alternative, resulting in a dichotomy in argumentation where both sides speak past one another, leaving real ethical concerns unaddressed. Resolving these tensions then demands “more tolerance for inconsistency than analytic philosophers have become accustomed to,” and as such, “it may be more important to adopt a style in ethics that avoids premature closure on normative issues rather than one which rushes to judgement.”1 It is in this spirit that this paper will inquire into issues of food ethics, and particularly the insurrectionary “anti-civ” approach to them.

The typical inquiry process as espoused by John Dewey, elaborated upon by David Kolb, begins with disturbance, prompting divergence (consideration of possible causes), assimilation (deciding upon the correct cause to account for the disturbance), convergence (formulating a plan of action or process to execute), and finally

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accommodation (supplements to the hypothesis resulting in the resolution of the problem).2 The inquiry process can thus be deployed toward the various elements within a field of ethics (constraints, conduct, consequences, and cumulative outcome) and applied to food issues, drawing from subsequently established schools of thought (utilitarianism, virtue theory, rights theory, neo-Kantian views, contractualism, etc.) to better understand the concerns at hand. As the author states, “Food ethics, then, is the study of how virtue, vice, rights, duties, benefits, and harms arise in connection with the way that we produce, process, distribute, and consume our food.”3 What is important here, Thompson suggests, is recognizing our epistemological process tends to imbue ethical assumptions, where deeply held convictions may be factually incorrect. Thus, philosophy must focus on epistemological claims, engaging in a kind of Habermasian “discourse ethics” where multiple approaches are brought in dialogue with one another, “focused on the process of engaging these different types of ethical reasoning in the form of discourse or debate where discussants trade arguments in the spirit of reaching a kind of agreement on what is right for the case at hand.”4 This would presumably lead to an epistemically sound ethical basis with regards to how to approach food relations, or at least, facilitate responses to difficult questions in the spirit of open inquiry.

Even this is exceedingly difficult, as humans engage daily in value-trading (making choices to value one consideration over another) between different people who have their own ideas of competing values; moreover, these individuals and communities may even be operating in completely conceptual paradigms antithetical to one another. 5

2 It is worth noting the corresponding learning styles, intelligence,

capabilities, and skills, and academic departments: humanities or arts (divergence), natural sciences (assimilation), engineers and technologists (convergence), and business (accommodation). This outsourcing of key components of problem­solving can be argued to be indicative of the kind of specialization upon which civilizations are based, and thus why they have such a particularly difficult time responding to initial crises.

3 11 4 15 5 On this point, Richard Bulliet’s thesis in Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers, that ethical considerations are conceived today in a modern,

By understanding the inquiry process as it relates to food ethics, and recognizing the value of discourse between competing perspectives and paradigms (and engaging in such discourse in open and honest ways), we can begin to integrate marginalized perspectives in a larger, integral framework to better handle inconsistences with the hopes of more comprehensively asking and responding to ethical queries. In this regard, I will end this section by making the first of four suggestions, one I will circle back to by the end of this paper: Suggestion #1: Marginalized voices (even radical, insurrectionary, terrorist, or “anti-civilizational” ones) have value and can make important contributions to ethical concerns related to food and security issues.

Cosmic Energy Pathways Another premise I will operate with is the idea that “food is energy,” and as such follows particular power-mass laws that qualify the psycho-physical dynamics within the relationship of food, energy, sovereignty, and meaning for culture.

Eric Chaisson and Fred Speier suggest that in cosmic evolution at particular moments of spacetime, the increase of energy-flows through mass over time leads to increasingly complex structures, including the emergence of complex adaptive systems (life, ecosystems, human communities, civilizations, etc).6 Moreover, the so-called “Constructal law” technological, industrial paradigm absent only a few generations ago is critical. It is now the case then that unlike different cultures and social groups now living in a domestic worldview (where the killing of animals is taken for granted with few ethical concerns in consuming animal products), today these domestic relationships have been severed by urbanization so that the most common relationship we have with non­human animals is either a romanticized affinity to the wild, or an exclusive “pet” relationship.

Such relationships imbue our sense of animals with novel ethical dispositions, prompting radical environmental and animal rights organizations to engage in criminal acts on the basis of moral compulsion.

This will be elaborated upon in upcoming sections.

6 Spier, Fred (2011) “Complexity in Big History” in Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History. UC Riverside. Retrieved

holds that as energy flows through a structure over time, it does so through the most equitable pathway: branching patterns remaining self-similar across scale.7 While increasing or stable energy flows can be directed to grow or maintain the complexity of simple non-adaptive structures (stars) or complex adaptive structures (civilizations), conversely, the deprivation of these energy flows necessarily lead to their collapse (e.g. supernovas, social breakdown…). Moreover, because the Universe is itself a closed energy system, there is no chance any complex structure within it can persist forever. The Second Law of Thermodynamics ensures such entities will eventually move toward simplicity.

Thus, since both simple and complex systems inevitably collapse, a stable, equitable flow of energy is necessary to sustain the complexity of the structure for as long as possible; an inequitable flow on the other hand will hasten its collapse. Generalizing to food systems, a second suggestion emerges, aligned to more pessimistic views of human development not unlike Jared Diamond’s “Worst Mistake” hypothesis, while drawing from Joseph Tainter’s theory of why civilization’s collapse, based on marginal productivity and declining returns of complexity for human systems 8: Suggestion #2: Agriculture, unlike subsistence strategies like hunting or foraging, intensifies energy flows in specific, non-equitable ways, depleting soil fertility and stratifying society in unequal ways, depriving energy flows to various communities, thus hastening its own collapse along with those dependent on agrarian systems.

10/28/18 from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3tk971d2 7 See Adrian Bejan's book, “Design in Nature”. One can see this in phenomena as diverse as lightning, blood vessels, river flows, from the largest structures (galaxies and superclusters) to the miniscule (neurons and those little branchy things). This is the same phenomenon that Kleiber’s Law refers to, and what is referred to in Big History as the most efficient pathway by which energy passes through mass over time.

8 Joseph Tainter (1988) The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK.

This may require further clarification.

“The Death System” Prior to the Neolithic revolution, the so-called foraging age, marked by hunting and gathering, meant a specific set of social relations thought to be marked by egalitarianism. 9 For the purposes of this essay, it is enough to suggest the process of domestication intensifies with agriculture to institutionalize coercive systems—supporting arguments of the oppressive nature of civilization in the first place—that initiate conditions and factors for collapse. Whether or not this is true is secondary; it is believed to be true by specific political groups, as I will show.

I would like to suggest then, that the process of domestication in general, and agriculture in particular, has elsewhere been argued to foster dependence on a form of socioecological interaction (“civilization”) that externalizes the skills and tasks to a complex, specialized social system that

9 The advent of domestication and agriculture was “revolutionary” in that it

introduces several new categories and phenomena: as the story goes, domestication, or agriculture, ensures an increasing dependency on specific territory which in turn necessitates a sedentary lifestyle and with it the subsequent loss of core skills, the need to store food, the requirement of defending territory and stored food, the privileging of male­dominance and violence to carry out this requirement, a social stratification that results from food distribution, the emergence of a state or governing apparatus to manage complex tasks, a coercive relationship both to the land, the animals, and the people who are needed to manage them, an increase in labor time, a decrease in health primarily for those at the lower levels of this stratified society, and ultimately, the exhaustion of the land’s fertility and the survival imperative to find or conquer new lands and repeat the cycle at ever increasing scales, ultimately leading to the emergence of civilization as a culture of cities that imports needed resources from elsewhere, imposing a logic of colonization and empire onto the surrounding bioregions that stems outward from the original colonization of the soil. While this is of course an oversimplified model, it has been defended by enough theorists to at least warrant consideration and, more importantly for this essay, forms the theoretical basis of anti­civilizational activism and insurrection.

cannot be sustained. That is, whereas foragers and hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic era and those in “uncivilized” circumstances in the contemporary era have a subsistence-based culture better able to live within the carrying capacity of the region, civilizations inherently cannot, and thus the seeds of their destruction are present wherever they are planted.10 “It is loss of soil fertility which pays for the primal idiocy of arrogant authority…our civilization remains, very much the creation of the soil we live on. No more than we ever could, can we afford exhaustive use—which is abuse— of fertility, or for that matter on any other natural resource.”11 These twin factors of oligarchy on the one hand, resulting from a highly specialized civilization where power is concentrated leading to crime and harm; and the ecological degradation required by a civilization that must grow to provide new resources to increase or sustain this complex system, is therefore described in Radical Transformation as a “death system,” whose thesis develops upon the major findings of a recent simulation, the Human and Nature Dynamic (HANDY) model, suggesting these two factors (inequality/oligarchy and environmental degradation) are primary factors involved in civilizational collapse: inequality disallows adequate responses to threats, while environmental degradation erodes the material basis for survival.12 Moreover, as the developing field of “green criminology” suggests, the environmental degradation (and thus depletion

10 This is due in large part to the alienation and distance that characterizes people’s relationship to the carrying capacity. Simply put, they are incentivized to continue unsustainable patterns.

11 Hyams, Edward (1952) Soil and Civilization. Harper Colophon: New York, NY 12 Moetsharrei, Sfa, Rivas, Jorge, and Kalnay, Eugenia (2014) “Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies.” In ScienceDirect.

Retrieved 10/28/18 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615

of potential energy flows) corresponds to a rise in criminality, as scarcity leads to constricted socio-economic activity, exacerbating crimogenic mechanisms, in turn leading to higher levels of crime. 13 What is important to recognize here is the deprivation of energy flows (leading to collapse) is correlated with increasing harms, and thus crimes, as individuals attempt to ensure access to those energy flows that remain, through thef, migration, terrorism, insurgency, ethnic conflict, organized crime, wildlife trafficking, fraud, poaching, water wars, riots, insurrection, etc.

For these reasons is civilization classified here as a “cosmic crime,” primarily due to its dependence on imposing a specific logic (domestication) onto the land, colonizing places while intensifying extractive and exploitative methods to sustain itself. The subsequent concentration of power therefore is antithetical to natural power laws (Kleiber’s law, Constructal Law…), in that rather than ensuring individuals participate in equitable energy distribution, an oligarchy emerges to monopolize power and energy, exerting control over others in society as well as the surrounding lands, depriving them of the necessary psychological and physical energy needed to survive and thrive. 14 The resulting environmental degradation, crime, and oppression precipitates unnecessary suffering as it unnecessarily prompts collapse on a wide scale.

A Third Suggestion: The Spirit of Resistance

these crises.15 In a similar way, we can see in moments of transcendence, or transpersonal identification with the entire phylogenetic tree of life, an experience not unlike notions of the Christian “grace,” defined as the “participation in the life of God.” Thus one’s ability to move beyond their own individual human perception to one that is commensurate with the entirety of life itself might be glimpses of insight into the psychological pole of a much wider circuit of energy, provoked in times where physical activity is performed with this wider energy network in mind – “I am the forest defending itself,” “Thinking like a mountain” etc. In this regard, we can potentially see ecological resistance movements as the transpersonal spiritual defense taken to restore equity and protect the phylogenetic tree of life (or specific branch of the community) against particular cosmic threats.

Moreover, as one article has pointed out, insurgencies themselves correspond to a power-law, in that their activities and communiques can be seen to conform to ecological principles in general.16 This is to say that resistance movements, regardless of whether they are explicitly ecological, are at the very least implicitly so. Further, as resistance movements seek to restore equitable energy flows to their own communities, or perhaps even universally, and such flows are themselves hindered by the imperatives of civilization, agriculture, and the logic of domestication hyper-intensified, we can suggest a third possibility:

The previous section suggests an argument for looking at civilization as a “death system,” or “cosmic crime,” based on the logic of domestication, the move along its spectrum towards agriculture, civilization, and the modern, industrial, technological, oligarchical type of civilization we exist within today. In this section I focus on a connection between spirituality and resistance and a kind of “endgame” for that spiritual resistance where the restoration of equity can restore the powerlaw relationship to distribute energy more evenly and avoid socioecological collapse, crime, and undue suffering within the community of life as a result of this “civilized” arrangement.

During times of crisis, there is a kind of renewal in which religious premises are reconsidered and actions are taken to resolve the roots of

Suggestion #3: Resistance is inherently, if unconsciously, anticivilizational, though the fact that this remains unconscious can dull its effectiveness to mere reformism rather than decisive action at times.

13 See Crime, Violence, and Climate Change 14

Insurgency.” In Nature: International Journal of Science, retrieved 10/28/18 from https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08631

In the following section, I will present two short case studies to demonstrate this reality, one movement I argue is implicitly anticivilizational, one explicitly anti-civilizational, in order to understand how spirituality and religion are utilized to resist oligarchical oppression (inequity), so that a synthesis between the two can help make resistance more effective (by focusing explicitly on what and how to effectively resist),

15 Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches.

16 See Bohorquez et Al. (2009) “Common Ecology Quantifies Human

while also giving context to our own evolutionary moment, as well as to help develop the disciplines of ecology, religious studies, critical security studies, and ethics, as a whole.

First Case Study: From the Axial Age to the Christian Aion Robert Bellah suggests the so-called Axial Age is marked by the specific tendency to “think about thinking.” That is, it provides a critique of the state of the world (the polis, the empire…) while initiating a utopian project to challenge external power and authority (“legitimation crisis”), relocating it to the individual, so as to rebuild the spiritual community out of that experience.

“These utopian projections took quite different forms in the four cases, but each one of them was harshly critical of existing social-political conditions. One thing being criticized was the harsh conditions of work, and almost all axial-age utopias had a large element of play.” 17 Further, the Jesus and Christ movements drew extensively from at least two of these Axial movements, specifically the Jewish prophets as well as Greek philosophers. In doing so, they systematized a spiritual philosophy, reconceiving of the flow of energy to be more equitable, retrieving a gif economy by reciprocating with its members to evoke a new “insurrectionary” figure (Jesus Christ, who was crucified for being an insurrectionist) to mediate access to divinity, circumventing the role of the Temple and State to access divinity through a personal savior, conceiving of Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, while establishing the church as an earthly structure or mechanism that would catalyze equitable energy distribution.

Thus, as the Roman empire collapsed due to its oligarchic tendencies on the one hand and the inability to maintain the energy flows needed to sustain its massive complexities, the Church, with its specific spiritual variant remained as a new “strange attractor” around which new systems were patterned.

17 Bellah, Robert (2011) Religion in Human Evolution: From the

Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.

The previous section has been extremely scant with regards to the complexities inherent in the various spiritual traditions referred to, and the various factors contributing to the Roman collapse. What is more important to consider however, is the crisis and tension that both Axial and Christian movements preserved, namely an anti-civilizational critique within a civilized, colonial, settler empire. That is, an intention subsumed within a medium. With this in mind I will propose a fourth suggestion: Suggestion #4: Within both Axial and derivative movements a latent conflict remains unconscious, driving forward the death machine process on the one hand, while at the same time spreading an “anticivilizational” tendency, where spiritual resources can be called upon in times of conflict where the call to normalize equity is able to become explicit.

Over the course of this essay I have so far laid a theoretical basis out of which four suggestions have emerged: 1) Marginalized voices have value and should be integrated in frameworks to resolve crises 2) A Death System (“civilization”) exists, grounded in the logic of domestication and oligarchy, intensified in a modern industrial and technological context where factors of degradation and exploitation lead to inequity, crime, suffering, and ultimately, collapse.

3) Resistance is inherently anti-civilizational, whether implicit or explicit 4) The Axial ages represent perhaps the most widespread form of anti-civilizational resistance, relocating authority from bureaucracy to individual, critiquing the root causes of suffering and, in what is sometimes called “second-order thinking,” proposes a spiritual alternative for the basis of community unmediated by external power relations.

These suggestions provide the necessary context for a second case study, an explicitly anti-civilization movement which, I argue, offers a unique, if unpopular, perspective with regards to the process of inquiry related to energy distribution, and thus food ethics in general.

Second Case Study: Rise of the Feral Insurrectionist

The normalization of anti-civilization discourse is beyond the scope of this paper, but I will point to several examples before turning to the major subject of this study.

In the first place, with the increasing understanding of the role of fossil fuels in contributing to climate change, species extinction, and the threat to human cultures, protests against pipelines have become increasingly popular, with key flashpoints including the Keystone XL pipeline as well as the Dakota Access pipeline, though there can be no doubt of many more. Elsewhere, I have argued these movements to be indicators of a kind of “cosmic warfare,” where movements seek to blow out the necessary infrastructure that sustain a social order (civilization) out of touch with sacred (ecological, or cosmic) principles. Whereas these movements tend not to name themselves as anti-civilizational per se, I argue that they are: in the first place due to their willingness to eliminate the energy sources that provide the energy return per energy invested (EREI) rate necessary to maintain civilization, but also because many of these movements take leadership from indigenous movements which have been the leading historic opposition to civilization’s encroaching, colonizing, settling directives.

Secondly, the increasing popularity of “militant” ecological resistance movements, for instance Earth First! and Earth Liberation Front but also groups like Deep Green Resistance (DGR), provide detailed analysis of the scope of the problem, and specifically name themselves as anticivilizational, or “anti-civ.” DGR for instance, attempts to set up an aboveground organization to promote and normalize underground resistance cells capable of asymmetric actions that sabotage industry, disrupt energy systems, and dismantle critical infrastructure. While DGR provides more theoretical support than physical action with regards to normalizing this type of discourse, it is growing in prominence and popularity in radical circles, so that its “decisive ecological warfare” provides a framework for any open-source anti-civilizational resistance movement to follow.

Finally, I will point to “anarcho-primitivism” as another recent explicitly “anti-civ” development in the anarchist lineage, deepening their analysis of power from simply the state and capital to the processes that produce state and capital, namely civilization and the domestication process, even going so far as to suggest a correlation between early power relations/oppression and the increasing prevalence of domestication and

the control inherent to symbolic thought. Thus anarcho-primitivism, as a variant of “green” anarchy, which finds inspiration in lifestyle anarchism, insurrectionary anarchism, and indigenous resistance movements, are similar in their attempt to disrupt energy systems and dismantle critical infrastructure by attacking the electrical grid while regaining subsistence skills. That is, they trace the root of civilization and domestication (and thus oppression) to an internal relationship to the world around them, seeking to overcome this separation or alienation through “rewilding” on the one hand and “resistance” on the other. That is, a primal participation can be regained through what is termed “primal warfare,” attacking domestication within themselves, and as it is present within the world, intensified through civilization, industrialization, and the technosphere as it stands today, in the hopes of being a “future primitive.” This is to say, their goal of disrupting energy systems includes both physical networks as well as psychological ones.

These three examples offer a sense of the increasingly explicit anti-civilizational nature of ecological resistance movements, and the movement from non-violent symbolic or tactical actions to increasingly “violent” insurrection as a strategy to dismantle civilization and thereby free ecosystems from the oppressive boot of its empire and logic. However, they also presage something much darker, specifically a kind of murderous rage that includes killing civilians.

Here I am speaking specifically about an international “eco-mafia,” a self-described criminal network of murderers and “nihilist terrorists” who follow a philosophy of “wild egoism.” Initially coming from the Animal Liberation Front, but influenced from the nearly twenty-year eco-terrorist bombing campaign of the Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, the actions and goals of the so-called Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (ITS) have become increasingly murderous and extinctionist, sending out communiques that take responsibility for stabbing to death technologists, killing female hikers, burning down Churches, injecting acid into coke bottles in supermarkets, targeting industrial mining executives with bombs, leaving improvised explosive devices on buses at random, and calling for the poisoning of city reservoirs along with the abstract goal of killing the human species off entirely.18

18 See ITS communiques #1­63

While a group like ITS may seem seriously unhinged, dangerous, and potentially a phenomenon we might all hope will simply go away, I would like to argue, in keeping with our stated directive at the beginning of this essay, that even this marginal, terroristic, violent, insurrectionary, seemingly immoral voice should be integrated into a conversation about ethics with regards to food; for, as I will argue, they too can make an important contribution to issues of security and food ethics. Thus, I will move to an analysis of their activities and ideology, followed by some concluding remarks meant to summarize the research, consider the integration of these contributions, and offer suggestions for future studies.

An Ethnography of the Inhumane Whereas it may be difficult to empathize with criminals, murderers, terrorists, and, for all practical purposes, “evil-doers,” I first recommend taking the tact of cultural relativism, in the same way we might approach those who were once called “savages.” That is, to judge these individuals for murder may be itself a form of ethnocentrism that depends on a particular moral framework that is paradigmatic and imposes its own sense of value onto a phenomenon. In the same way we might hesitate to judge a lioness attacking a zebra, or a hunter shooting a deer, or a bear eating a person, or a tribesman eating a monkey, or even at times the phenomenon of cannibalism as a ritualistic activity, I suggest we bracket our moral considerations for the moment and look at this group in a similar way. That is, following a philosophy of “wild egoism” that attacks the moral foundation inherent to civilization in the first place, ITS sees itself as engaged in a kind of “rewilding” seeking to overcome the separation between the human and animal by destroying their domestication and lashing out against the totality of domesticating structures, going so far as to kill its domesticates wherever they are found, not limiting their willingness to kill to only certain morally acceptable species.

The eco-extremist apologist journal Atassa explains their tendency to murder as anti-colonial resistance, specifically re-visioning the anarchoprimitivism “rewilding” to include the eradication of domesticity by eradicating domesticates entirely.19

19 Atassa, put out by the anarchist publishing house, “Little Black Cart,” takes its name from the war clubs, or “red sticks,” used by the Creek to

Thus I suggest several frameworks with which to think of ITS: through a lens of militant research, within an anthropology “beyond the human,” as a “dark green religion,” and finally, as a Derridean “Autoimmunitary process” for the social organism the terrorist is representative of.

In The Politics of Attack, Michael Loedenthal uses the idea of militant research to focus on insurrectionists like the Conspiracy Cells of Fire, Anarchist International, and Individualists Tending Toward the Wild among others, focusing on the communiques to, on the one hand determine the ideological dispositions of the groups, and at the same time suggest a process by which the communiques and insurrectionary actions are related in the wider context of resistance. Thus, he is able to spell out ten such principles that guide the activities and logic of these insurrectionists: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Direct, continuous, immediate, and spontaneous attack Attack now, in the present Making the war against the state and capital a social war Attack the totality for total liberation Unmanaged and temporary attacks outside of traditional Lefist organizations 6. Rejection of reformist measures and democratic participation for insurrectionary attack 7. Illegalist resistance, including thef, murder, arson, and rejection of civil engagement 8. Rewilding to end domestication, technology, and alienation 9. “Wild egoist individualism” 10. Radical, uncompromising social transformation In this way, we are able to see how symbols of civilization can be reappropriated to become symbols for resistance (a burning church, for instance). In a similar manner, an individual, domesticated or civilized, is similarly turned into a symbolic object, their death representing a kind of exterminate the colonists and internal enemies within the Creek Nation during the Creek War, or as Atassa labels it, a “primitivist war.” As they state, “war functions in primitive society as a way to preserve autonomy and prevent the accumulation of political power and the growth of the state.”

sacrifice to the wild gods, a manifestation of wild ego that signifies resistance to civilization in a more immediate, less strategic manner, attacking the physical manifestations of the totality as they present themselves.

“We the Secret Wilderness Society claim responsibility for the criminal fire set in San Geraldo Chapel of the Muncipal Park of Paranoa this past Saturday, the 16th.

We know that the fire was started since we set it with our own hands. We threw gasoline in the back of the church we set fire to that shit, and we disappeared into the cold dark night…Those believers spread their gospel to our ancestors and cursed our pagan beliefs. They profaned and destroyed our sacred lands and in their place they erected Christian statues and established the temples of their religions. They also financed progress and brought civilization with its foreign values. With their actions they catechized and destroyed our savage ancestors. They made them forget their Spirits who inhabited the cosmos and taught them to not respect the Earth. By the Cross and the sword they imposed the civic mentality and aided the expansion of this shame, for that reason they deserve our egoic ancestral vengeance…While you kneel and pray in vain to a sky empty of your divinity, we ecoextremists look to the heavens and we see storms, lightning, gusts of wind, torrential rains, the stars, the sun, the moon, and we believe in all of this and we violently defend it, immeasurable Wild Nature.” 20 This mindset can similarly be understood in light of an anthropology beyond the human. Here I am specifically referring to the text, How a Forest Thinks, in the sense that each action becomes a living signifier meant to communicate an inner world. Thus insurrectionary action, including murder, is done to impose a particular thought pattern, to

20 See communique at

http://maldicionecoextremista.altervista.org/tag/individualists­tending­ towards­the­wild­its/

amplify and exemplify a desired future made manifest in the present. The arson, or murder, we can say, represents a semiotic process where an organism embedded in a hostile environment is able to mediate through this action the sensory processes and experiences of a biological reality.

This response is a particular lived reality, where agency is reclaimed, spontaneously exhibiting value. The more symbols of resistance (of wildness), the more semiotic density, and the more alive one feels.

Thus, the wild ego provides a sign of agency, attuned to a spiritual, undomesticated experience. To think morally or act ethically requires a symbolic consciousness which is distinctly human, so that these “wild” actions force us to rethink of them beyond our own moral framework. If morality is a constituent element of domestic human life, an inhumane anthropology is necessary, so as to avoid imposing our own symbolic framework to other creatures which would simply attempt to domesticate them. Wild resistance then rejects this morality and acts outside of this moral framework in ways we consider “unethical,” but others might consider “wild,” or even, “natural.” We can see this kind of relationship where farmers attempt to kill wolves who attack their cows for instance.

Perhaps understandable, though operating with entirely different inclinations and (domestic) paradigms. I suggest therefore that we should not exclude those animals who are not able to exist within our morally acceptable paradigms from consideration, or else the wolf (perhaps even wildness), would likely be rendered extinct by the farmer and the domesticate, constricting the spectrum of possibility to create exclusively domestic forms, habits, and semiotic processes to the detriment of a wider biodiversity.

One last thing should be said here following the line of reasoning in How a Forest Thinks, namely that killing does not necessarily kill the relationship, but can in fact deepen it, reminding us that there are others that are animate, to therefore re-enchant our sense of an ensouled cosmos, deepening a sense of self and its relationship to life. Thus insurrection, including violence and killing, offers a kind of animist technique in which the insurrectionist, in depriving a domesticate of energy, creates an opportunity whereby this energy can be consumed and redistributed, helping people realize the dangerous reality that contextualizes them, while providing a wild sense of aliveness for both themselves and any others. This is not to impose a moral framework onto

the phenomenon, celebrate or condemn it, but rather to understand as opposed to judge it.

Having considered ITS from the perspective of a militant scholarship (thinking with them), as well as an anthropology beyond the human, I now turn to this “tendency” as a “dark green religion,” in the words of Bron Taylor, as well as a focus on this particular brand of “eco-extremist” as representing for the social organism a kind of “autoimmunitary process” as Derrida might describe. That is, as a wild reaction to the colonial, settler statism of western civilization, with its dualistic mindset, we are provided with a decidedly shadow side of nature religiosity in which “Wild Nature” is revered and violently defended as a sacred object of meaning, while at the same time indigenous gods are both called on to heal and protect them in their fight along with killing the enemy; and, at the same time, these wild egoists write in their communiques they experience a kind of demonic possession that fills them with a violent spiritual lust for blood: “We were on the hunt, and last night we turned into wolves. Our thirst for blood was satisfied for a moment, while the demons of our ancestors took possession of our minds and bodies…We are individualist-terrorists with egoist purpose…yesterday we stabbed the Chief of Chemical Services in the Department of Chemistry at the UNAM. Our knife pierced his flesh, his muscles, and veins, bleeding him and leaving him for dead. It’s a pity we couldn’t scalp him (as was the practice of our ancestors in war), but that’ll be for next time…the wounded and dead that we inflict will be as a blood offering to Wild Nature…we executed this man to show that we don’t have any respect for the lives of the hypercivilized of the university or anywhere else. We despise their routines, their norms and morality. We reject equality, human progress, tolerance, science, collectivism, Christianity, pacifism, modernity, and all of the other shit that reeks of civilized domestication…this civilization wants to eliminate our most wild instincts to impose on us its values that run roughshod over the individual…it wants us to consider this murder “evil”, even though it is a result of a war without morality. May

Eco-extremism and Terrorist Nihilism increase in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Italy, and other places. With Wild Nature on our side!”21 Here we move from a simple “I am the forest protecting itself,” to “I am the wild storm that will tear apart any community I come upon.”

While it may be easy enough to state this shadow aspect provides us with evidence of a pneumapathology, or spiritual disease, whereby the ten core directives provide us with a kind of anti-doctrine, the phenomenon of the wild egoist and nihilist terrorist, who sees murder and the bombing of the totality of civilization’s concrete manifestations as a worthy, lifeaffirming endeavor meant to jolt the domesticate out of their “dogmatic slumber,” might be conceived of as an auto-immunitary process, whereby an immune system attacks the body itself.

“As we know, an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its “own” immunity…once again the state is both self-protecting and self-destroying, at once remedy and poison. The pharmakon is another name, an old name, for this autoimmunitary logic…a symptom of an autoimmune crisis occurring within the system that should have predicted it. Autoimmune conditions consist in the spontaneous suicide of the very defensive mechanism supposed to protect the organism from external aggression.”22

21 Individualists Tending Toward the Wild –Mexico City, Eco­Extremist / Nihilist Mafia (2016) “Accepting Responsibility for the Assassination of a UNAM Worker: Tenth Communiqué of the Individualists Tending Toward the Wild.” Retrieved 10/31/18 from http://nechayevshchinaed.altervista.org/2016/07/08/accepting­ responsibility­for­the­assassination­of­unam­worker­tenth­communique­of­ the­individualists­tending­toward­the­wild/ 22 See Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida

Here then we return to our original suggestion that this marginal voice may have something to contribute to our conversation about food ethics, and specifically the equitable distribution of energy. That is, there is for the wild egoist a hint of a pre-cultural imperative, if not ethic, that seeks to attack those social structures and arrangements that would deny it the psychological and physical energy necessary to remain free from domestication. As such, the contribution of such a movement is not just to demand complete structural transformation, but actively disintegrate social structures that mediate or deprive access to Wild Nature, where “the ‘solution’ to insurrectionary attack is systemic, revolutionary change that reduces domination and marginalization…to ‘solve’ the insurrectionary critique would require system-level change aimed at a deconstruction of that very system and, as such, is unlikely to be embraced by power elites…[the problem is found] in the articulation of a system-level critique which rejects political representationalism, abhors domination, and seeks nothing short of total liberation.”23 This is to refuse the demand for bigger, better cages, and seek to destroy and tear apart the cages altogether, refusing to wear leashes, or to come to heel when punished, threatened, or “tamed.” Moreover if we are to follow Thompson’s suggestion that we consider each perspective in a collaborative discussion of “process ethics” as described in the outset of this paper, then we are tasked with perhaps radically transforming our own ethical considerations in ways that allow killers to walk amongst us, if we are to integrate these perspectives and address their concerns and the moral dilemmas they provoke. Further, it is also apparent that we are not in a position to converse and dialogue with such perspectives, any more than we could persuade a bear not to eat us, because “they” actively refuse to listen to other perspectives. Thus, we can only listen, and attempt to accommodate their needs as far as we are willing, much like we would for a wolf who seeks the freedom to live a life of hunting, killing, and feeding on

23 Loedenthal, Michael (2017) The Politics of Attack: Communiques and Insurrectionary Violence

the energy of another living soul in ways that are not immoral, but perhaps amoral.

Food as Medicine (Resisting the Death System); Hypotheses for Future Research (Generating a Life System) While this essay has touched upon notions of food ethics, it is perhaps not entirely clear how insurrection necessarily connects yet. Let me begin a kind of synthesis with two quotes: “Food is medicine,” spoken

by Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician, and “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a grand scale,” spoken by the German physician Rudolf Virchow in 1848. My suggestion is that if our ecological crisis is rooted in political reality, then perhaps this crisis can be healed by our relationship to food, and energy.

I have suggested therefore that food is energy, and as such, the complexities of our food system, with its concentration of power and wealth, and the deprivation of energy/food by impoverished communities can be traced back to the move away from immediate-return huntergatherer subsistence lifeways toward a delayed-return agrarian lifestyle that in turn provokes revolutionary change leading to oligarchy and environmental degradation via civilization. Moreover, the intensification and inequity demanded by the hierarchical political system emerging out of agrarianism catalyzes social and ecological collapse, crime, and conflict.

In this essay I have tried to liken a new development in ecological resistance movements as symbolic of an auto-immunitary process that seeks to destroy the body it considers to be responsible for illness and therefore necessary to attack. I have also spent time explaining this rationale, in that the body, in this case civilization, deprives certain critical components of energy, my hypothesis is therefore multifaceted. Thus the eradication of mediating structures, and thus the retrieval of a preseparated lifestyle in the present that is driven by an instinctual “wild egoism” can provide pathways toward a post-domestic culture whereby specialization and domestication are eliminated for a primal relationship driven by identification with the wild.

To begin, I suggest that the equitable redistribution of energy would “solve” the phenomenon of ecological terrorism, depriving it of the source of suffering that creates the phenomenon. Further, anticivilization ecological resistance movements solve ecological collapse and (therefore)

social crime and social harm in that they attack the very barriers that prevent equitable energy flows, to eliminate oligarchic tendencies and environmental degradation. Moreover, the intensification of resistance to the intensification of energy blockages suggest that we can consider our resistance in terms of four differing circumstances.

Typology of Resistances in Inequitable Energy Circuitry:

Energy Flow Totality is Legitimate

Energy Flow Totality is Illegitimate

Strategy of Confrontation

Integration: lobbying by progressives hoping persuasion will direct resources to them.

Insurrection: attacks by enraged terrorists seeking to destroy monopolies on power and energy

Strategy of Avoidance

Autonomy: retreat by despairing hippies resigned to live in autonomous communes

Circumvention: bypass by radicals who evade mediating structures

In this regard, we can see something a political typology of energy circuitry where four different resistances emerge: 1) Integration: where a need for political participation or representation assumes blockages exist because the larger society has not acknowledged a blockage exists. The remedy is thus to raise consciousness of the blockage so the larger systems can act accordingly.

2) Autonomy: where the wider society acknowledges the existence of a blockage but there is no excess energy, so the community must reconstitute itself accordingly to deal with the austere (lessened) flow of energy.

3) Insurrection: where political corruption creates the blockage, intentionally degrading the energy flows to the locales, and the locales attack the blockage and with it the totality.

4) Circumvention: where the political corruption creates the blockage, while locales bypass the barriers and reconnect with the energy flows.

Beyond this, I will make the somewhat non-contentious claim that religion and spirituality will continue to assimilate resistance narratives until such time as the equitable distribution of energy occurs. Here, a fifh resistance emerges, specifically the blockading of those processes that themselves represent energy blockages (e.g. preventing dams from being built).

This then has a number of implications for fields as diverse as education, criminology, activisms, critical security studies, and perhaps even literary analysis. To summarize these points, I am simply stating that the restoration of wildness will ease tension in a way that increased repression not only cannot do, but will likely increase or aggravate the very crimogenic mechanisms causing harm and crime in the first place.

Moreover, militant researchers can approach these blockages with a sensitivity toward the inhuman perspective, co-producing knowledge to radically transform and make manifest the latent contradictions inherent to a civilized perspective. Finally, I will end with some speculation as to the future of civilization, crime, the possibility of collapse, and the desire for a new way of relating within the community of life.

In Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships, Richard Bulliet ends his book by suggesting “it will take true genius to rediscover the magic of the predomestic era, when animals communed with gods, half-animal beings commanded respect, and killing inspired awe and incurred guilt.� This is necessary, he concludes, as the paradigmatic split between pre-domestic, domestic, and post-domestic lifeways has seen the rapid expansion of industrial exploitation of life and its commodification, along with a new moral outrage and guilt-ridden approach to killing animals, and the varied resistances that seek to reestablish connection to wildness.

Whereas the paradoxes of competing paradigms with regards to food (energy) paradigms are so far unresolved, and indeed the conflict between them seem not only immense but at times irreconcilable, I suggest that the wild egoists offer a particular post-domestic pathway to a future lifestyle, one that does not shy away from recognizing domesticity as ecologically destructive, and therefore seeks to increase wild spaces by

promoting subsistence living and the normalization of the death a living world demands.

For this reason alone, I have suggested this shadow side of an animistic death cult might still be able to teach us something with regards to humanity, relationality, spirituality, cosmic energy, domesticity, and forms of resistance that would hardly be fathomed, let alone seriously considered, if we were to take a superficial glance at the criminal violence they perpetrate. At its core, however, Individualists Tending Toward the Wild roots its activity in their experience of, identification with, and direct action on behalf of a “Wild Nature” violently opposed to a system that deprives it of unmediated access to that wild energy that nourishes it psychologically and physically.

“The difference for our terrorism is only the objective and the indiscriminate method, since for us the problem is not only the techno-industrial society and its progress, but humanity itself. But you practice terror with blind faith by looking at a new and unreachable human being, with hope in a sort of anarchist Eden for this catastrophe of almost 8 billion insatiable anthropocentric creatures…

You are an incoherent universal shame.”24 Individualists Tending the Wild - Brazil, Secret Wild Society

24 “[ES] (Brazil 63 ITS Communiqué – Sociedad Secreta Silverstre: About the Anarcho­Police of 325” MaldicionEcoextremista, Retrieved 10/28/18 from http://maldicionecoextremista.altervista.org/es­brasil­63­comunicado­ de­its­sociedad­secreta­silvestre­sobre­los­anarco­policias­de­325/? doing_wp_cron=1540784126.6932370662689208984375

A Tale of Two Anarchies: Dialogue Between Anarchist Criminology and Insurrectionary Theory "There is no freedom in ‘wildness’ if, by sheer ferality, we mean the dictates of inborn behavioral patterns that shape mere animality. To malign civilization without due recognition of its enormous potentialities for selfconscious freedom — a freedom conferred by reason as well as emotion, by insight as well as desire, by prose as well as poetry — is to retreat back into the shadowy world of brutishness, when thought was dim and intellectuation was only an evolutionary promise."

–Murray Bookchin “It’s useless to wait for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.”

-The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection Nearly twenty-five years afer the infamous Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was signed into law, Donald Trump has signed the First Step Act, called a “Christmas Miracle,” by Van Jones. Hailed as the product of a diverse and bipartisan coalition bringing together liberals and conservatives together, the bill gives a “second chance” to those caught up in the criminal justice system. Yet, for all the hype surrounding it, there are still voices that raise critical concerns about it, as well as perspectives absent altogether—perspectives that fundamentally diverge with regards to the premises about criminality, criminalization, and the role of the state in criminal justice. Does this mean we are again poised for a missed opportunity? Another failure? Perhaps we should simply expect more of the same under the guise of reform?

A System Beyond Repair or Reform?

Typically, in understanding the formative institutional influences on any ideological force behind any goal (family, school, civic structures, political activities, mass media…), most Americans, despite various ideological viewpoints, “tend to side with one of two perspectives: the liberal or the conservative ideological perspective.” (Marion and Oliver, 2012) Whereas liberals, striving to protect individual rights, are willing to allow government to intervene in socioeconomic aspects of life to rectify injustices, conservatives, in contrast, tend to believe in the individual responsibility of people for their own behavior, willing government to legislate against supposed immorality. In this way, liberals, skeptical of morality and the utility of criminal sanction, align themselves with a due process model to ensure the constitutional rights of individuals, while conservatives align themselves with a crime control model, attempting to repress criminal conduct through effective prosecution of offenders so that individual rights are subordinate to the security of the society in question.

In this way, we can understand policy to be the result of institutionalized ideology, built upon underlying assumptions behind crime causation (rational choice theory for conservatives, positivist psychosocial theories for liberals). Further, the goals and aims of these competing perspectives within the criminal justice system tend to fall in stark contrast with one another: a crime control model sees law and order as necessary for deterrence, incapacitation, punishment, and to teach morality; while a due process model seeks to promote rehabilitation, reintegration, and restoration, at times even seeing criminals as themselves victims of conditions that increase the probability of criminality.

The tension and fundamental difference between these are both real and discordant, so that ofen liberals and conservatives make arguments that talk past each other, mischaracterizing each other’s positions to compare the best version of their own perspective to the worst excesses of the other. Is crime a deviation from a justice system rooted in community consensus, or the failure of social institutions to provide the means to assimilate to such a consensus? Beyond this contradiction however, both perspectives, liberal and conservative, assume the ability of the justice system to be neutral and fair in their ability to dole out sentences that adequately distribute justice throughout society. This ideal “consensus model” can be distinguished from a “conflict model” that

suggests that the justice system’s processes may themselves be problematic, since various subcultures do not innately share in the same value systems, degree of political power, and so, are invariably in conflict with one another, especially as they engage with the criminal justice system. This is to say that conflict theories suggest social factions in conflict with one another, so that criminal justice processes and systems are in fact determined by the degree of power any political and economic interests holds. Put otherwise, within criminology, conflict theorists suggest, unlike liberal and conservative criminology, that there is something inherently problematic in the criminal justice process itself that needs to be resolved and reformed for justice to prevail.

What is missing altogether from any contemporary debate on criminal justice reform then, is the suggestion the criminal justice system is distorted so completely by the needs of power and capital (those most likely to affect any such reform) which dictate the priorities of the state, that any such reform will continue to reproduce and systematically structure bias against marginalized classes or ethnic groups. Such a radical perspective, unlike conservative, liberal, or even conflict criminologies, suggests then that the criminal justice system in turn cannot be reformed until the conditions that give rise to the political and economic pressures that distort the criminal justice system in the first place (i.e. the creation of surplus populations and thus the so-called “dangerous classes” from which criminals tend to derive) are addressed. (White and Haines, 2000) In his article, “Distinction between Conflict and Radical Criminology,” (1981) Thomas Bernard points out the difference between the conflict model of crime and more radical perspectives: “The primary purpose of conflict criminology is objective, nonpartisan analysis of the law enactment and enforcement process. Radical criminology, however, maintains that no criminology, including conflict theory, can be both objective and nonpartisan. All such criminology is said to ultimately serve the interests of the ruling class. The only objective criminology is said to be radical criminology, which explicitly sides with the working class against the interests of the ruling class. No middle ground exists between these two positions.” (377) Thus radical criminologists differs from conflict theorists in that they explicitly point to the capitalist economic system as generating any such

conflict in the first place; and moreover, align themselves with the exploited classes to act with and alongside their struggle. Indeed, there is a moral aspect to radical criminology that is not present in conflict theory, namely the willingness to assume such conflict expressed as crime is not inevitable, but rather can be addressed through certain conscious actions taken on behalf of those subjugated classes against capital and those who maintain relationships imbued by capitalist values.

Here then we can recognize the importance of a book like Contemporary Anarchist Criminology (CAC) for its willingness to provide the first sketches of a radical and critical criminology and inquiry that identifies incarceration, subjugation, power, and the state as itself antithetical to justice and freedom. Moreover, by bringing such a perspective in dialogue with Michael Loedenthal’s Politics of Attack (PoA), the combination of an anarchist criminology with an inquiry into insurrectionary theory is able to create a dialogue that makes important contributions to the field of criminology, critical security studies, and peace studies. In so doing, the interchange offers the opportunity to hear from neglected and marginalized voices aligned to the most systematically oppressed that must be integrated in any conversation about criminal justice reform and conflict resolution seeking to address the very roots of injustice.

Sketches of an Anarchist Criminology The previous sections sought to locate and differentiate an anarchist criminology within the wider tradition of radical and critical criminology, as distinguished from more traditional or orthodox perspectives. Still, discerning what separates anarchist from traditional Marxist criminology is at surface level, difficult to apprehend, yet altogether an important endeavor. To do so we must look first at those theorists who identify as anarchists before reflecting on the critical points they relate to make any sort of substantive claim.

In the first place, the book CAC, afer an introduction, sets out its chapters in three sections: contemporary classics, contemporary voices, and finally contemporary prisoner voices, all within an emerging anarchist criminology seeking alternatives to punitive justice. We can see then this discipline as emerging alongside of, as well as within, the social context of resistance movements opposing global neoliberal forces, seeking access to critical resources yet threatened by abusive laws and elite demonstrations

of power. Indeed, the integration of a variety of critical approaches to sociological theory—feminism, abolition, radical ecology, and radical criminology, alongside political and economic crisis, characterize the emerging discipline, informing and offering “cutting analysis of social structures of inequity, oppression, exploitation, and injustice…[pointing] to meaningful alternatives to present systems and goes beyond so-called pragmatic concerns within limited reforms to show that radical transformation is realistic and possible.” (2) Moreover, CAC is based in empirical, real world experiences of state violence and social war, aligning with those it targets to produce a militant co-research that seeks to map the battlefield for a more effective warfare, weaponizing its inquiry to erode the fundamental premises upon which power is built and abolish those conditions that generate criminality and criminalization to aid in the liberation of its victims. Thus, the book’s focus on transformative justice goes well beyond the liberal conception of restorative justice, seeking first to break out of the status quo arrangements, empowering individuals and communities to resist effectively and build alternatives informed by mutual aid and ecological justice, disrupting capitalist reproduction by intervening in historical processes that themselves produce these oppressed groups. As such, the authors offer a tool kit for revolutionaries, without assuming any significant division between revolutionaries, social theorists, and the oppressed classes for which the revolution is waged.

The first section locates anarchist criminology in the wider criminological context, built from transformative and abolitionist perspectives and movements. Moreover, the suggestion that crime is caused by criminalization alone gives weight to the idea that state legality reifies and empowers violence and enforcement institutions as indispensable to state definitions of what constitutes peace. The book thus begins, afer an introduction to the project, with Jeff Ferrell’s 1998 article, tracing anarchist critiques of law from early writers and activists like Godwin, Stiner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, Berkman, and the IWW to later theorists, demonstrating the cultural relevance of such moments as the Paris Commune, Situationists, the DIY and punk movements, as well as free radio and countercultural experiments. In doing so, he cobbles together an anarchist criminology out of the critical undercurrents anyone is able to participate in, as opposed to formally recognized and professional criminologists. Further, in contradistinction to the broad harms of state

legality, he suggests the public has outsourced its own authority in many cases to become reliant on centralized control systems, which in turn perpetuate and amplify crime, increasing the degree of social control in all aspects of sociocultural life. He thus articulates the impulses of anarchist criminology, focusing on criminalized activities from cultural expression to political resistance.

While Ferrell speaks to the various cultural strands anarchist criminology has inherited to better challenge and destabilize an orthodox criminological theory rooted in mainstream assumptions of crime, power, and the necessity of the state, Harold Pepinsky’s 1977 article “Communist Anarchism as an Alternative to the Rule of Criminal Law,” spells out how, while resource deprivation may in many cases necessitate crime, the rule of criminal law, in attempting to maintain swifness, sureness, and severity in its responses, cannot in fact eliminate such injuries, for the simple reason these three elements are mutually exclusive. Rather, his “logic of the magnet analog” suggests an inverse relation between these elements, where strengthening any ensures the repulsion of the others. The more severe a law, for instance, the less swif it can be implemented as the state must review the increasing complexity to impose any sanction. For this reason, Pepinsky suggests, lowering the severity of penalties makes arrest and prosecution surer. His conclusion is simple: for law to effectively deter crime, community mechanisms must not allow for crime control to “impede the swif, sure, severe application of the law.” (27) With this in mind, Pepinsky points out that the rule of criminal law is symbiotic to progress toward a communist anarchism, so that communist anarchists and criminal justice legalists must collaborate so as to reduce the force with which law is applied in order to better deter injurious behavior from occurring. To do otherwise might in fact be counterproductive: “[those] who seek to defeat the criminal justice system by attacking it defeat their own purposes instead, for the criminal justice bureaucracy expands in response.” (30) For this reason, says Pepinsky, gradual and respectful erosion of criminal justice enforcement must occur, or tyrannical backlash will terrorize and destroy both peace and community security. Such an argument may be counterintuitive for anarchists, who are asked to “empower” the criminal justice system “they now fear to act fearlessly,” while remembering that “law rules more the less it is imposed, and law is imposed less the more its agents are respected.” (34)

In the final essay of the “Contemporary Classics” section, Jeff Shantz offers a critical analysis of Cesare Lombroso’s 19 th century criminological analysis of anarchists. Shantz, one of the editors of the book and participant in the Critical Criminology Working Group at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, critiques statist criminology by identifying the ideological underpinnings of economic and political power and the social harms that thereby arise. (Shantz 2017) Shantz is thus well able to point out how Lombroso’s unscientific methods toward a positivist genetic criminological theory were used to discredit the political movement, pointing out the class and confirmation biases (and falsified evidence) used to generate the self-affirming prophesy aimed at naturalizing hierarchy and criminalizing resistance to it. Indeed, by doing so, a distinct understanding of how such perspectives from the standpoint of power and capital may indeed say more about those charged with developing the field in the first place: “[Lombroso] offers, then, no analysis at all…here again, then, his hereditary analysis is really a statement of Lombroso’s own morals…for Lombroso, resistance against economic injustice is simply a mark of some deviance or other (criminality, insanity, immorality, etc.).” (43) Such insight into the mind of persecutor and oppressor thus demonstrates how criminality is in fact ofen equated with resisting the conditions generated by “systems of economic and judicial inequality and oppression.” That is, the effects of poverty are demonstrated as traits of criminality, engendering criminal potential in any mindset that critiques such conditions. Thus in “Lombroso’s belief that all reforms should be introduced only very gradually,” we are able to see that revolutionary change can only be understood as the effort of the criminally insane.

Moreover, such class arrogance, speaking in the language of power, is able to generate the kind of cultural capital necessary to gain access to police and policy-making endeavors of those who fear such radical contagion, so that Lombroso exerted considerable influence on the field at large, inviting legal repression and segregation of those classified as “lunatics” for their political positions.

Indeed, as power conflates crime with the harmful conditions that reproduce social harms and behaviors classified as crime in the first place, the inclusion of these classical anarchist writings then provide a novel contribution, namely identifying counterintuitive insight and elucidations embedded, if concealed, in the discipline at large. Drawing from historical resistance to state constructions of justice, seeking symbiotic ways to erode

the legitimacy of criminal justice systems without directly attacking them, and reconsidering criminological theories that, if perhaps unscientific and projecting their own class prejudices on subjects to obscure reality, are at least indicative of the psychology of power, are all helpful in establishing a basis for any anarchist criminology to develop upon.

In the second section, “Contemporary Voices on Alternatives to Punitive Justice Within Anarchist Criminology,” the theoretical basis is expanded to disrupt punitive, dehumanization processes by empowering locales to effectively monkey-wrench an economic slavery, seeking to make incarceration financially impossible through effective prison resistance.

Differentiating between mere restorative justice seeking to rehabilitate offenders to operate within an unjust social setting, and transformative justice, and situating crime, power, state violence, and resistance within a hierarchy extending back far further than capitalism per se, the book instead proposes relocalizing autonomy and self-determination to just, ecologically sensitive, and spiritually attuned communities instead.

Hackett and Turk, in “Freedom First” suggest that prison abolition should seek leadership first in prisoner resistance movements, lending support to those who upset and disrupt the settler colonialist logic and the “aferlife of slavery.” In this regard, “prisoners provide an informed and grounded analytic of state repression, carceral power, and resistance that is invaluable to abolitionist thought and strategy.” (54) Even as domination mutates over the course of history, its “core function” of “racialized social control and the preservation of a white supremacist order” remains. For this reason, prison revolts are able to create new political spaces while resisting the “civil death” that legalized prison slavery creates. For the simple reason that, as the Free Alabama Movement makes explicit, “money is the motive,” economic resistance, removing the economic incentives of maintaining abysmal working conditions, is better suited to address core issues, since the costs of any response to organized prisoner uprising “in terms of finances, public legitimacy, and ability to maintain order are unsustainable in any correctional institution… More than 30 days would likely bankrupt most state budgets.” (60) The authors then detail ways in which prisoners fight with their bodies and voices in a “confrontational insurgency,” through work stoppages, organized and less organized uprisings, occupations, arsons, and frequent attacks on staff until shifs of correctional officers refuse to come to work, rendering prison facilities untenable by creating crises while competing with officials for credibility. In

doing so, the power, logic, and credibility of prisons are effectively eroded, the personhood of prisoners is asserted, and protests against prison slavery, school to prison pipelines, police terror, and post-release controls are sustained by utilizing political channels and popular support.

Laura Magnani similarly challenges the logic of the punitive nature of prisons and the American criminal justice system, undermining the rationalizations in which prisoners not only lose their freedom, but their dignity, humanity, and compassion as well. Thus it may be, she states, that police, courts, and prisons themselves are creating dangerous people, and that by dismantling prisons, one can work “to dismantle the whole punitive justice system grounded in punishment, domination and control, of which the police play a significant part…[Instead] by addressing the underlying causes of street crime…providing people with jobs, adequate housing, and healthcare will cut down on the instances of victimization and make people less desperate.” (78) Hence the potential for real community can occur only where reforms do not merely “prop up the existing system,” in the name of “restorative justice.” The state, if culpable for the violence produced at a micro-level, must then assume responsibility for any harm caused by adequately funding restorative and rehabilitative efforts.

Magnani then points to where disciplinary systems in schools have been replaced with restorative justice systems, transforming its Zero Tolerance Disciplinary Policies to decrease suspensions by 40% while successfully resolving conflicts in over 76% of cases. Moreover, as similar programs are integrated into the criminal justice system, recidivism rates are also reduced, victims report greater levels of satisfaction with the justice process, and post-traumatic stress symptoms among participants are cut. Such systemic changes suggest, for the author, that building parallel systems demonstrating healing methodologies can be done “without expanding the net of the criminal justice system, where the people sent to the parallel system were people who never would have found their way to prison in the first place.” (82) In the final chapter of the section, Mark Seis provides an insightful contribution to the emerging field of “green criminology” with his chapter, “An Anarchist Criminology for Understanding Environmental Degradation.”

In it, he draws attention to what is elsewhere called the “treadmill

production of capitalism,” namely that the impetus for “capitalist economies to endlessly grow violates the most basic laws of nature,” yet going further to attribute the declining health of our environment to be a product of sedentary agriculture and an alienated civilization that seeks to impose an anthropocentric logic onto the surrounding regions. As neolithic villages and agrarian cities develop “hierarchically organized governments fostering and protecting social systems of stratification” that produce surplus food, a division of labor, and organized institutions of power that in turn produce social forms that exceed carrying capacity, we are here reminded of the Marxist assertion that law and ideology are structured by an economic system, as “no legal system operating within the confines of consumer capitalism and the ethos of human supremacism will be able to change the suicidal trajectory of pursuing unlimited growth on a finite planet.” (88) This is to say the preservation of inequality through legal apparatuses ensure environmental degradation through an exploitative relationship extended to the natural world. As Seis points out: “the environmental crisis is a cultural crisis and requires a change in our cultural ethos as well as our social construction of economy, governance, and relationship.” (89) In identifying the key characteristics of sustainable cultures then, and drawing from indigenous practices and worldviews, Seis is able to identify the tame/wild binary as a source of spiritual sickness, catalyzing alienation and disenchantment, while advocating for more democratic technics that ensure access to land bases by all. Unlike the kind of alienated production incomprehensible to sustainable cultures, relocalization efforts can work to redesign urban areas through intentional place-making, decentralizing energy grids and allowing people direct access to nature that allows them to confront the overexploitation and hidden costs of urban and industrial lifestyles. This in turn means injustice is eradicated through equitable social relations and environmental justice efforts, where local communities are able to produce materials, food, energy, clothing, and other basic amenities people need by “building sustainable communities and steady state economies [that] all boils down to scale and a conscious awareness of the carrying capacity of your landbase and the ability of the community to reciprocate and replenish that which is renewable to the landbase.” (90)

Hence a local democratic politics, more able to provide for the basic necessities that in turn guide relocalization efforts and cultural transformation through alternative visions of justice is envisaged as an adequate response to reduce the deprivation and inequity assumed to prompt crime and injustice.

Part three of the book gives voice to contemporary prisoner voices within anarchist criminology, looking at how economic coercion destroys human relations, compassion, dignity, and humanity. In a sense then, crimes and social harms manifest as oppressive relations, generated by the political economy and reproduced at an individual level. Crime is motivated as a product of alienation and as an increasing sociocultural and economic necessity within the confines of capitalist society – indeed a product of the capitalist fear of rebellion. Thus those most affected by the punitive and retributive values underlying the criminal justice system – the prisoners themselves—offer solutions that imply nothing short of revolution. Not just political revolution, but social revolution, where an empathetic society can begin to restore the socioemotional bonds capital has broken, while the power system itself, defining what constitutes deviance and criminality, can itself be abolished. Social harms, it must be remembered, are not necessarily criminal, but rather may be normalized, naturalized, and rationalized by those who have the most to gain by dominating and controlling those they depend on for their wealth, themselves perpetrating harms and injustices that are ignored or incentivized by the powerful political and economic systems they maintain.

Reverend David “Wolf Eyes” Rose, Sr. thus looks at the specific logic of modern society for “possessing” Mother Earth, while discarding its spiritual elements. This in turn breeds a social values “out of balance, spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically,” seeping into our unconscious and extended throughout society through media influence, in turn skewing the justice system by class, race, and power relationships.

Indeed, ensuring justice prevails requires “people who are educated and spiritually developed…[to] help change the balance of today’s moral, ethical and spiritual/psychological imbalances—one soul at a time.” (106) If this does not happen, Wolf Eyes writes, such a crisis will become repressed and isolated without ever being corrected. Indeed, this is what occurs in prisons and society, so that a “total rebuilding of the educational system” is necessary in order to restore justice by teaching responsibility, self-respect, and honesty within any community.

Maurice L. Graham similarly continues on the theme of the spiritual sickness of an unbalanced society by focusing on the connections to slavery in the prison system. He recognizes both slavery and prisons as profit-making mechanisms, implying consumers in a global economy are themselves complicit with the post-abolition re-enslavement of blacks, as business machines find acceptable ways to retain profits to fuel their power to influence and direct the state. Indeed, as he points out, “the degrading of human rights is the only path to slavery,” so that even “due process is a security threat” to those meting out punishment. Here, the corruption generated by profit in slavery is present too in prison policy. For this reason, alternatives to incarceration will need to adequately address profit in order to resolve the dehumanizing processes that control, exploit, and enslave prisoners today.

The final, and perhaps most radical essay of the book is its last, by Sean Swain, “On Crime and Deviance.” This should come as no surprise, considering Swain, mounting a run for Governor of Ohio in 2018, promised to “decommission the Ohio National Guard, empty Ohio’s prisons and turn them into squats, recognize Native American land rights as set forth by the Treaty of Greenville, arm the tribes with national guard weaponry, to include tanks and attack helicopters, refuse to sign any budget causing the government to shut down, and sign an Executive Order making it legal to assassinate him if he remains in office longer than 90 days.” (Swain, N.D.) Indeed, his website explains his predicament and hints at what it will take to change it: “Sean will only be liberated when the illegitimate power of the lawless rogue state holding him hostage [‘without legal conviction or sentence’] is abolished once and for all.” He elaborates upon this position in his chapter by seeking to imagine alternatives outside of the socially constructed realities of “crime,” “justice,” and “punishment” as they are traditionally understood. Thus he challenges the premises of “deviant conduct” and the idea that such conduct should be “punishable” by those assuming a “right to rule,” pointing for example to when the legal practice of slavery in a moment suddenly became “illegal” due to the power of those able to decide (or not) to address an injustice. Thus, such premises of state legitimacy serve only the interests of the privileged elite of a political economy based on exploitation and suffering. Law, Swain asserts, functions

as “a tool to keep the rest of us in our places, to maintain our obedience to their system, to compel our conformity to a set of behaviors that has, for thousands of years, perpetuated wealth for the wealthy and power for the powerful.” (132) Moreover, these elite, he points out, have managed to persuade the rest of the population that to remain obedient is in their best interest as well.

In this way, Swain provides perhaps what becomes a fundamental principle of an anarchist criminology seeking to completely eradicate crime altogether: “To abolish ‘crime’—that is, perceived deviance designated as punishable by those who assume the ‘right to rule’—we need only eliminate the special category of the privileged elite and the special category of those who assume the ‘right to rule.’ If we eliminate both of these categories…there would be no one empowered to distinguish deviance that is not punishable from deviance that is. If there is no one to declare which instances of deviance is punishable, the category of behavior we now know as ‘crime’ ceases to exist.” (133) As Swain suggests, the eradication of influence, wealth, and power would themselves decrease the social forces that drive and label behaviors as deviant, and thus social deviance itself. Law, then, might be understood as obsolete, impotent, and ineffectual, in that it does not in fact prevent those actions it seeks to prohibit. Moreover, it is not meant to address those injustices that in fact cause the most harm in society, but rather is wielded against those least benefited by the systems that maintain their powerlessness. As such, in the absence of hierarchy, local communities operating through consensus would produce fewer instances of deviance by generating “a viable sense of meaning, purpose and connection, rather than compulsion, drudgery and alienation.” Hence to collapse the current system altogether, with its privileges and monopolies of power, would allow for spaces to comprehensively address the conditions that cause “deviance,” in new, more effective ways. Swain then perhaps captures Bakunin’s sentiment most: “Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!”

(Bakunin, 1842)

Analyses, Strategies, Tactics, and Approaches In many ways, the only critique of this book is that it is simply too short and cannot as a result include every element that would be necessary for a field of anarchist criminology to seriously be considered by mainstream criminology or policy-making; though of course, this is not the editors’ intention. While providing a host of theoretical critiques, apart from the first chapter there is little in the way of developing or linking the field to a past lineage or placing it within the wider context of other criminological theories, for instance explicitly differentiating its core tenets to Marxist, Critical, or other radical theories of crime. Admittedly, the authors state that it is a “short, concise text designed to aid in the development of a complex field of anarchist criminological study focused on alternative structures of organization and resistance movements.” (7) Moreover, in producing a book with only nine voices, it is not as inclusive as it could be and so would benefit from diverse viewpoints across various oppressed groups, as is pointed out by the editors themselves.

It is certainly the case, for this reason, that there is a deficit in testing hypotheses, with little attention paid to quantitative research able to substantiate some of the authors’ more radical claims. While those writing certainly base their critiques and suggestions in personal experience, the book is similarly short on implementation and real world examples that seriously close the gap between oppression and liberation.

In many ways, then this may contribute to a “willful failure,” as Ferrell describes it, undermining the hope for freedom by stopping short of developing a “master plan” and instead focused on a “useful corrective to encrusted certainty and the desire for domination.” (1 st chapter) Or, it may be a testament to a field in its early infancy, and a challenge to readers to develop its core tenets.

Nevertheless, the book highlights the different pathways and techniques anarchist criminologists can explore within the emerging field.

In this regard, the book provides a way to locate any tactics or strategies anarchist may employ to prefigure a new world. The somewhat useful heuristic below is meant to locate the various tactics, or methods, an anarchist criminology might utilize, based on the assumptions made (whether one accepts or rejects the legitimacy or relevance of the political economy) and the strategy employed (engaging the political economy or seeking to avoid it).

Criminological Typology of Anarchist Strategies, Assumptions, and Methods/Tactics Strategy of Confrontation (Communities of Opposition)

Strategy of Avoidance (Communities of Exile)

State/Capitalism is Accepted

State/Capital is Rejected

Integration: lobbying to ensure change

Insurrection: attacks to destroy power

-conversation among criminological perspectives -redirect energy of just causes into legitimate channels -civil engagement -media coverage -rebuild education systems -reconstitute law enforcement Autonomy: retreat to insulated communities

-work stoppages -uprisings -occupations -arsons -attacks on staff -protests -eradicate class system -abolish categories of privileged elite

-community mechanisms for selfmanagement -study groups for education -prisoner support programs -relocalization projects Figure 1.

Circumvention: evade power by establishing alternative structures -establish alternative processes for reconciliation -restorative justice programs -alternative ways to address deviance

Of course, this chart is ideal in the sense there is no firm boundary between methods, yet what is important to recognize is that while individuals and adjectives might seek to explicitly distinguish each typology from the other, in reality, such divisions are mostly ideological and break down in practice to form more effective campaigns. Moreover, there is a specific relationship between the insurrectionary field and the others— namely, that as each other field finds success, insurrection as a method becomes relatively obsolete, as there is less reason to attack for the sake of liberation. Still, one can assume that if these other pathways become blocked as effective methods of transformative justice, insurrection (direct attack) will become more widely seen as effective and necessary methods of transformation.

It is to this particular field of insurrection then that we will look at by reviewing Michael Loedenthal’s The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence (PoA).

A Politics of Attack Loedenthal’s focus on insurrectionary theory draws from queer, feminist, postmodern, and critical theories to approach the insurrectionary violence of the post-millennium period. As such, it represents, like Contemporary Anarchist Criminology, another example of militant coresearch, seeking in the written, anonymous communiqué the principles that explain, contextualize, and give insight into this form of anarchist praxis. Afer reminding the reader that any such analysis of communiqués must first not be for the police to repress such activity, Loedenthal instead encourages readers to look at such objects as themselves legitimate units of political analysis, written by subjects with worthwhile analyses able to contribute to the wider field seeking to understand political conflict.

For this reason, PoA examines the insurrectionary phenomena over the course of history to contextualize, analyze, and understand any insights such militant groups produce that may contribute to any such political analysis: “History must precede strategy, and strategy must precede ideology. Therefore it is essential that readers remain conscious of the historical precursors, but allow themselves to nuance that understanding as it is explored in light of the wider theory.” (132) Afer an introduction laying out the methodology, paradigmatic assumptions and framework, as well as the scope of the inquiry and its relevance for political theory, critical security studies, and social conflict,

Loedenthal uses the first two chapters to create a political and historical context for contemporary insurrectionist activity, demonstrating the broken lineage between Guy Fawkes, early tendencies in anarchist theories (e.g. “propaganda of the deed”), and pre-millennial social movements, to the post-9/11 activities by clandestine insurrectionary networks of urban guerrillas, laying out a number of groups, cells, and tendencies for consideration.

He is thus able to identify insurrection as a technique within the wider context of “social war,” a tactic meant not to induce the overthrow of state or economic regimes, but rather to “bring about radical social change through initiating conflict,” (99) demonstrating “alternative modes of existence, temporary sites of counter-systemic living.” (106) The insurrectionary tactics in question (arson, explosives, graffiti, animal release, vandalism, assassinations, etc.) are then understood as the materialization of a “socio-political critique of alienation, anti-capitalism, and anger finding a target in the infrastructure of corporate interests.”

(103) Moreover, the material structures attacked are done so, not because to do so would ever be effective in overthrowing capitalism or the state, but rather to ensure through demonstration the “socio-political arena of structural control is disrupted and its function temporarily changes from that of structural maintainer to symbol of resistance,” (107) one forcing the state to choose whether to either fail to stop terrorism and appear ineffective in securing the peace, or else to stop “terrorism” through repression and enact tyrannical and violent methods to further polarize the populace. This focus on targets is meant both to attack symbolic targets as well as disrupt the flow of localized manifestations of state and capitalist systems, attacking its “functional logistics” afer seeking to “diagram the weaknesses, bottlenecks, and sof underbellies of grandiose targets [that] are common in the post-millennial clandestine networks.”

Afer looking at the historical lineage of anti-authoritarian insurrectionary violence and its role in revolutionary design, Loedenthal explores insurrection as a strategy theorized in anonymous texts and communiqués. In doing so, he is able to tease out the internal logic of such groups, demonstrating how insurrectionary critique is leveled at a “Totality,” the “totalizing force of ever-present coercion that extends from the material to the spiritual,” (143) suggesting that their strategy is not to create a future utopia, but rather to focus on the present, attacking to show “the erroneous nature of the social spectacle and expose the

violence inherent in everyday life.” (146) To do so challenges the hegemonic logic of state monopoly on violence by generalizing revolt to a social war and the entirety of social relations, seeking to paralyze normality altogether. Here insurrection is meant more to rupture the very belief system of state and capital that has been normalized and naturalized, opening up pathways to new social forms by demonstrating a willingness to actively negate the totality wherever it is experienced.

In looking at the histories, tactics, strategies, and texts that are presented by the various insurrectionary actors then, Loedenthal leaves us with at least eight tendencies evoked in the communiqués: (1) immediate, continuous, and spontaneous direct attack; (2) waging this social war to create points of rupture with power and order by exacerbating points of dissatisfaction; (3) extending the idea of intersectionality to confront “The Totality” while seeking total liberation from oppressive systems (classism, sexism, racism, homophobia, speciesism…); (4) unmanaged, temporary forms of contestation that exist outside of any Lefist notion of social movement; (5) rejecting reformist programs for radical social transformation; (6) rejecting civil engagement for illegalist activity; (7) extending the insurrectionary critique to forms of alienation that generate ecological crisis through domestication and industrial technology; (8) and praxis informed by individualist “wild egoism,” evoking a barbaric, precapitalist worldview.

As these tendencies are shared and discussed through various communiqués, the temporary disruption of the status quo is able to further critique and political analysis, developing communal meeting places at “points of ideological, rhetorical, and strategic affinity, and it is on this basis of affiliation that the movement is constituted and reproduced.” (196) Thus Loedenthal is able to demonstrate how analysis by insurrectionary movements evolves its goals and praxis, tying any one strike to a wider historical legacy while seeking to inspire others to follow with new attacks on power and empire by violently rejecting the relations and structures they reproduce, at the same time “adding teeth to critique, and anti-social violence to praxis.” Based on the insurrectionary “canon” that speaks to the history of past attacks through an increasing body of communiqués, statements, letters, and other texts, such attacks are thereby meant to create content for new communiqués which explain, contextualize, and justify each attack, in turn influencing new attacks and all subsequent

communiqués. Loedenthal points out this is distinct from conceptions of terrorism, since insurrectionary violence “is a form of asymmetric, decentralized war carried out through networked and ideologically-linked attacks at a non-centralized, fluid target…it does not seek to terrorize, but rather to exhibit dissent and offer critique…the violence of the attack creates the space for the critic to ‘be heard’ and in doing so temporarily disrupts the discourse it is critiquing for example, the infallibility of market capitalism.” (221) This in turn suggests a flow of information from attacker to (ofen times online) reader, where insurrectionary sympathizers find insurrectionary hubs that receive and redistribute the authored critiques of insurrectionary attackers. Moreover, the increasing popularity of and effective spread and knowledge transmission suggests alternative, radical propositions for how to reduce insurrectionary violence: “If one hopes to quell resistance, one must seek to change the material conditions that oppress the masses and create the conditions for such a critique to develop.” (115) This is further elaborated in Loedenthal’s final paragraphs: “If we were to treat political violence in a manner akin to that of criminal violence, the ‘solution’ to insurrectionary attack is systemic, revolutionary change that reduces domination and marginalization. These solutions would likely be discounted summarily by policymakers who would prefer a list of targets than a list of arguments for better access to education, housing, healthcare, transformation, etc. In other words, to ‘solve’ the insurrectionary critique would require system-level change aimed at a deconstruction of that very system and, as such, is unlikely to be embraced by power elites.

Because the critique is aimed at power itself, to embrace its proscription of change would deny the brokers of that power a great deal of influence and control.” (223) For Loedenthal, redefining the political violence of insurrection as, rather than simply “terrorism,” a form of political critique, is to “disrupt the discourse that constructs it,” while changing the logical response which “reconfigures the discourse from system maintenance to system transformation,” no longer making state-centric policy that has the security

of the state as a primary goal, but rather uses revolutionary consciousness and the discourse and logic of anti-state attack to articulate “a system-level critique which rejects political representationalism, abhors domination, and seeks nothing short of total liberation.” (225) A Tale of Two Anarchies: Bridging the Divide What is most important about these two important books is their shared recognition that the crisis generating crime and insurrection is structural. Loedenthal makes this explicit, pointing to a NASA-sponsored study that suggests industrial civilization’s collapse may be imminent, due to “unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.” Moreover, this rise and collapse is recurrent, where upper classes “downplay the structural nature of the problem” and instead allocate only a small portion of accumulated surplus to the majority of the population at, or just above, subsistence levels. At the same time, he points out how “ongoing climate change is ‘substantially correlated’ to rises in violent crime and group conflict.” (190) Seis says as much, advocating structural transformation as a necessity, that class system is unsustainable, and, drawing from anarcho-primitivist theorists, implicitly suggests civilization, indeed sedentism itself, causes the violence, inequality, oppression, and suffering that prompts criminality.

Thus an anarchist criminology and insurrectionary approach to critical security studies are better able to approach social conflict with the intention of providing more radical peacebuilding strategies. By setting up alternatives to power and domination, through direct confrontation or active avoidance, both books overcome the state mythology and mystification of its bureaucratic and violently coercive role in resolving conflicts it creates itself, pointing out how the unequal distribution of power arrangements are themselves constitutive of the totality of social relations that spawn violent insurgency.

For these reasons, it is imperative to include in public debate such perspectives, integrating their insights, and refusing to allow their repression by a hegemonic narrative seeking to monopolize authority, legitimacy, and violence to such ends. Instead, the transformative strategies for justice that emerge out of these books address wealth, race, patriarchy, and ecocide in more comprehensive ways by addressing the fundamental root conditions that generate these symptoms in the first

place—strategies that neither conservative nor liberal, conflict, nor perhaps even more traditionally radical perspectives (i.e. Marxist) have to date offered.

Yet while both books provide a terrific assessment of the various anarchist positions and proposals for how to substantively address power to reduce crime, domination, violence, and coercion in the name of community security, there are certain theses that detract from both. CAC for instance, while searching for an insurgent theory, seems to derail at times into what can only be described as an “anarcho-liberalism,” falling somewhere between anti-capitalist Lefs and the positions of Social Democrats—anti-neoliberal perhaps, yet unable to adequately address the presence of the state and capital, indeed reifying the existence of both.

“Solutions” abound that can only be described as liberal, and at times no solutions seem present whatsoever. Thus while the book provides sketches for an anarchist vision of transformative justice, and sets out a kind of program or vision (decentralize autonomy, community based solutions, transformative justice…), it makes few contributions in terms of how to actually move from here to there, lacking empirical results to support its more piercing insights.

PoA also has important contradictions that seem not to be addressed. For instance, insurrectionary thought assumes violent confrontation will lead to more violent confrontation, thereby opening up possibilities to break with the hegemonic logic of the state, disrupt the flow of state power and capital, widen opposition to both, and negate the power totality in the present, by waging armed struggle. Yet as is pointed out, the insurrectionary anarchist strategy, descending from an urbanized form of guerrilla warfare, fails due to the fundamental paradox Pepinsky points out: in violently attacking the state and capital through small, nimble groups who assassinate political figures, free prisoners, destroy symbolic and functional targets, supporting themselves by robbing banks, and living illegally, these clandestine organizations, armed insurgents, and feral terrorists invite the full weight of political repression upon themselves while at the same time risking alienating others and driving them back to confirm the hegemonic logic of the state and capital which naturalizes its role as defenders of the public order against the violent, perceived “irrationality” of those anti-authoritarian elements whose logic, if it is ever shared to those outside of its sympathetic reader base, itself assumes the futility of armed attack in ever overcoming power. What is the point of

attacking then, when attacking undermines insurrections’ own longevity to compromise pathways for liberation?

This question can be answered with a second implicit contradiction, namely that while Loedenthal repeatedly suggests insurrectionism is not an attempt to create a prefigurative politics, this assessment is directly contradicted by the insurrectionists themselves: “The new anarchist urban guerrilla is not a means of struggle, it is our existence itself.” The establishment of an “Informal Anarchist Federation,” where anyone attacking the infrastructure of domination can claim membership, assumes a prefigurative politics that communicates intent through its own praxis. This is to say, the politics of attack exemplifies the insurrectionary logic in its tactics, strategy, rhetoric, and the image of a war waged against a specific target set—in the fires set, the people killed, the banks robbed, the insurrection pursued. Wherever structural and relational power is destroyed, another world is thus not only possible, but manifest.

In this regard, the prefigurative politics of anarchism is present in both books, albeit in categorically different ways. While both are certainly skeptical (to put it mildly) of power and authority, CAC offers the positive vision of social anarchism, proposing community building, communist anarchism and cooperation, prisoner support, transformative justice programs, sustainable relocalization projects, addressing the psychological imbalances of the dominant culture, rebuilding education systems, developing alternatives to incarceration and retribution, and abolishing the class system and power structure completely. PoA on the other hand leaves the “civic anarchism” to the social anarchists, instead developing its own prefigurative politics based on wild egoism and active nihilism, attacking the power that enslaves the individual will, always against real, concrete targets such as machines, buildings, and the humanoid automatons that personify and maintain these power relations. Moreover, the clandestine, armed and violent underground cells, affiliated with the wider insurrectionary milieu, actualizing the various tendencies in concrete demonstrations of praxis, also provide insight into an organizing strategy more conducive to the nomadic individualist anarchies of anti-social antiauthoritarians. Moreover, it takes for granted that civic anarchism is itself reformist, while socialist anarchism cannot effectively address the colonial settler logic inherent in documents like the Constitution (which CAC suggests can be a potentially liberating document) or social arrangements like relocalized sedentary ecotopias, which would potentially subordinate

the individual to the collective. Here, violent opposition to immediate conditions is seen as more effective in combatting oppression and opening up avenues for total liberation in the present than is integrating civic solutions and compromising or collaborating with power for the sake of gradual change.

This split, between collectivism and individualism, between reform and revolution, between insurrection and civic engagement, between gradualism and accelerationism, between violence and nonviolence, between pessimism and optimism, etc. are recurring themes present in both books, themes that each author seeks to navigate in contributing to an anti-authoritarian critique of those academic fields (criminology, security studies) usually dominated by conservative and reactionary perspectives that may themselves create the very paradigms that produce violence, political conflict, crime, and the political and social war that give rise to these critiques in the first place.

As academics, criminologists, militant co-researchers, and prisoners experiencing the very structures, instruments, processes, and relationships that cause and reproduce suffering, the authors of these two books effectively explain the source of criminality, deviance, and violence, providing critical solutions to crime and punishment both counterintuitive to power and at times anti-authoritarian movements as well. In doing so, they point to law itself as a form of class oppression as opposed to a legitimate response to what is superficially perceived as intrinsically criminal behavior, challenging the very methods and assumptions behind responses by the criminal justice system and representative democracy, driven by capitalistic social relations (class structure, ownership, control, rule…). There is a refusal to enter the realm of debate that is not selfconscious of such processes that compromise more comprehensive views of justice, and in doing so embrace the logic of breaking with the severe repression of a bourgeois-driven law itself antithetical to notions of peace, justice, and freedom, while reconsidering the premises on which responses to crime should be derived.

An anarchist criminology and insurrectionary theory are thus more action-oriented critiques, not anti-scientific, but anti-“objective,” highlighting that objectification of individuals and communities as “criminal” invisibilize those conditions that create criminality in the first place. The two books then refuse assimilation into the larger conservative and neoliberal dominated bodies of discourse on crime and security,

rejecting the possibility of reconciling the oppressed to imposed political and economic structures that would merely make more effective those structures able to control and suppress those most marginalized by the sociopolitical and economic contradictions underlying crime. The solution both books offer is thus the overthrow of the dominant order, its systems, and structures, creating ruptures in the very relationships that maintain them, albeit through a number of diverging methods, yet always beginning at the micro, personal level of experience. The abolition of crime and criminality then can only be initiated in the individual mind, before it is able to be extended to a macro, social scale. If the solution to crime is the overthrow of a specific type of political economy, this can only occur by supplanting a hegemonic logic of separation, hierarchy, and exploitation with an alternative that confronts, opposes, and abolishes it for another in the immediate moment, extending temporally as conditions become more favorable as they are increasingly normalized and naturalized.

If power assumes resistance, as Foucault suggests, then capital and the state assume attacks as inevitable. Yet rather than utilize criminology, security studies, the criminal justice system, and anthropological fields of political science, economics, etc. as ways to mitigate those attacks and that resistance, anarchist criminology and militant co-research is here used to confront this relationship and imply structural transformation that can make resistance (and thus violent attacks) as obsolete, unnecessary, and irrelevant once the conditions that generate violence are themselves removed from social experience. This then speaks to the revolutionary insight of both books, and as such, their specific points must not be allowed to be adopted by mainstream elements in ways that do not promote the overthrow of capitalism and the state.

Already, movements for “restorative justice” and “community policing” seek to defang radical critiques of law and criminal justice, using the rhetoric of radicality without integrating its most radical proposals. As even Lombroso suggested, the “restoration of popular tribunates…to give voice the grievances of the people, [means] just causes would not be abandoned exclusively to the advocacy of extremists.”

For this reason then, an anarchist criminology or critical security study must decide for itself whether it will relinquish control over words and deeds to adequately address the conditions of suffering to those historically, theoretically, and strategically responsible for generating or maintaining those conditions to ask the question: why leverage the power

for marginally better conditions when that power can be used to bankrupt the establishment and create radically new conditions altogether?

Both an emerging anarchist criminology and bourgeoning insurrectionary theory provide ways and means to deliver answers to this question, producing structural transformation through a wide range of tactics that prefigures this new reality—by living in ways that at times destroy oppressive structures, or build up new ones. Both however will undoubtedly be required if total liberation is ever to be experienced in the present.

Works Cited Bakunin, Mikail (1842) “The Reaction in Germany: From the Notebooks of a Frenchman,” Marxists.org retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1842/reaction -germany.htm 12/25/18 Bernard, Thomas (1981) “Distinction Between Conflict and Radical Criminology,” in Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Vol. 72. Issue 1 Spring. 362 Loedenthal, Michael (2017) The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence. Manchester University Press: Manchester, UK Marion, N., & Oliver, W. (2012). The Public Policy of Crime and Criminal Justice (2nd Edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. ISBN 13: 9780135120989 Nocella, Anthony J. II, Seis, Mark, and Shantz, Jeff (2018) Contemporary Anarchist Criminology: Against Authoritarianism and Punishment. Peter Lang Publishing Inc.: New York, NY Schantz, Jeff (2017) “Anarchists against (and within) the Edu-Factory: The Critical Criminology Working Group,” in Out of the Ruins: The Emergence of

Radical Informal Learning Spaces. Eds. Robert H. Haworth & John M. Elmore. PM Press: Oakland, CA SeanSwain.Org (N.D.) “About Sean Swain,” retrieved https://seanswain.noblogs.org/about-sean-swain/ 12/25/18

from

White, Robert and Haines, Fiona (2000) Crime and Criminology: An Introduction. Oxford University Press

Inquiry as a Weapon (an Activity) “Just as runaway slaves undermined the institutions of slavery, young people are able to derail educational reforms simply by acting in what they believe are their interests…If these crises are to be resolved, it will be through fully moral acts of a dramatistic character, through young people learning to demand that their interests be respected in massive, wellorganized interruptions of business-as-usual, through insurgency and the responses of the larger society to the insurgents…a strategy to help them fashion an insurrection in their schools, to interrupt the educational arrangements that do not meet their needs, and to devise new arrangements for both education and the larger society.”

–Jay Gillen, in Education for Insurgency

organizing for better wages is met with immediate dismissal, to be replaced by an unemployed laborer willing to work for less. Students must decide how to respond to increasingly dire circumstances, working longer hours for less income to survive.

Transnational Capital Auction: Students are leaders of developing nations competing with each other for investments from global economic institutions.

As new rounds transpire, students must find ways to become “friendly to capital credits,” by choosing to reduce minimum wages, remove workers’ rights to strike, eliminate child labor laws, lower taxation rates on corporate profits, and dismantle environmental laws. Students write down “Bid to Capital” slips in order to keep investments and stay in power. Countries that offer companies the most “freedom” are the ones who win.

Background:

Thingamabob Game:

The following scenario is drawn from three simulations, the Goody Game, the Transnational Capital Auction, and the Thingamabob Game. In these games, students navigate the international capitalist paradigm, balancing their own selfinterest with the interests of their fellow workers, the wider society, and the climate respectively, to describe and confront power.

Students are managers of a company that produces “thingamabobs” in competition with other thingamabob companies. They need to grow the company to make a profit for stockholders who expect a high rate of return on investments. Failure to do so will result in them losing their jobs. However, the more thingamabobs produced, the more resources are used, the more pollution results, and the more greenhouse gases are generated. Students are asked to be the most profitable company in each round, while keeping in mind that if they collectively surpass the safe limit for the climate they will trigger ecological catastrophe beyond repair.

Goody Game: Students are workers who work for a capitalist producing “goodies” according to one golden rule: whoever has the capital makes the rules. As new rounds transpire, students are forced to work for less wages which are used to pay for food.

Because half of the workers are unemployed, any hint of

In each game, students play over several rounds, with time between rounds given to devise and redesign appropriate strategies.

For Today: We will be attempting to update Marx’s Workers Inquiry by creating conditions out of which questions for a new questionnaire as well new courses of action can be proposed.

Scenario: You work for a technology start-up who produces a cutting edge product able to revolutionize society and lif people out of poverty through what is marketed as “efficient and transparent” processes.

However, to accommodate shareholders’ demands for profit, the CEO is considering cutting your wages to stay competitive unless another option presents itself. Little does s/he know you are a militant anthropologist…

Conditions: -To stay in business, your tech firm must deliver higher profits for shareholders -The boss’ salary must be high enough to stay competitive -There is a reserve labor force to draw from if workers’ salaries are determined to be too high -Community relations have been horrendous, with tax breaks, gentrification, urban density, and traffic driving up prices while straining the ecological resources of the bioregion.

-Each of you have family and kids to raise in a city whose costsof-living are only increasing -To the degree to which you are successful, more profit means more carbon in a too-hot world

Objective: 1) Develop as many inquiry questions as you can to map the battlefield in your chosen field 2) Propose at least one course of action, alternative, or option to ensure an ideal standard of living in your particular field.

3) Deliver both inquiry and action to Consensus process to incite action that overcomes and erodes logic of oppression and generate conditions for liberation.

Fields: A) B) C) D) E) F) G) H) I)

A Theory of the State A Theory of Political Entities That are Not States Yet Another Theory of Capitalism Power/Ignorance, or Power/Stupidity An Ecology of Voluntary Associations A Theory of Political Happiness Hierarchy Suffering and Pleasure: On the Privatization of Desire One or Several Theories of Alienation Process:

Read Conditions, Pick Theory, Discuss w/ Partner, Develop Inquiry, Propose Course of Action, Develop Consensus, Reflect on Process: Helpful? Barriers?

Desirable/Viable/Achievable Are there necessary/nonconsensual actions that can/should/will be taken to supplement these?