joyful militancy
(2017) by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery – Joyful Militancy – Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times – from 141 pg kindle version via anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joyful-militancy-bergman-montgomery]
intro’d via simona ferlini‘s spinoza ness here [https://x.com/sonmi451it/status/1702782240072060992?s=20]:
For Spinoza, the whole point of life is to become capable of new things, with others. His name for this process is joy https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joyful-militancy-bergman-montgomery#toc5
found this while looking for simona tweet via astra taylor [https://x.com/astradisastra/status/1579128386823557120?s=20]:
Carla Bergmans work — for example Joyful Militancy and Trust Kids https://akpress.org/trust-kids.html
also reading poverty of joyful militancy
notes/quotes:
5
Foreword by Hari Alluri
Willing to be Troubled:
an essay with a love note to Gil Scott-HeronWe’ve all heard so many conflicting words
About life, whether wrong or right
How you gotta be workin’ hard
And it ain’t no easy job
To survive. Just keep it alive
—Gil Scott-Heron, “Willing”
to me.. takes a lot of work ness as cancerous distraction
Like the moment when I first heard Gil Scott-Heron, I knew upon first read that I would return to this book. The isolations of capitalism and the despairs of facing Empire’s increasingly blatant yet always insidious machinations, oppressions, and attacks will drive me to seek the reminders that are here: of how to recognize my own moments of rigidity, and of how to recognize—beside, within, and far from me—moments of transformation. Though written by two white folks with deeply different experiences than Gil—folks who crucially implicate not just their privileges but also their behaviors—this book, like the song “Willing” quoted above, offers the echoes of sparks that pull me through lamentation towards reflection and action. Against the types of moments that, within movements, can lead to a “loss of collective power,” both song and book offer me images of radical folks engaged in outright and everyday acts of resistance. They let me glance back, not nostalgically but gladly, at the faces of folks in my own communities actively supporting each other in radical friendships and lives whose resemblance to mainstream representations of happiness is only cursory: because there is a strength I see there that comes from—as carla bergman and Nick Montgomery identify it—the type of joy that looks and feels like growing more powerful together.
and yet.. we have no idea what it would/could be like if everyone where legit free
This book troubles the second line of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Willing,” a song which, like much of his most powerful and resonant work, itself carries an air of troubling. Joyful Militancy called me back to this song and also through it because the project of this book is to move beyond “wrong or right” into a space of ethical questioning that is always already conflicting yet, while shifting, can also be strong ground on which to build. As bergman and Montgomery identify in their Introduction, “rigid radicalism” stifles productive tension and risk taking by tending “towards mistrust and fixed ways of relating that destroy the capacity to be responsive, creative, and experimental.” They continue astutely, refusing to fix “joyful militancy” as an ideal, thinking of it instead as “a fierce commitment to emergent forms of life in the cracks of Empire, and the values, responsibilities, and questions that sustain them.” The structure and focus of the book are both attentive to moments of slippage and to regenerative practices. Because of this, I recall again listening to Gil Scott-Heron. I am thinking now of live versions of songs played with a full band that slip into and out of long and beautiful minutes of improvisation, especially versions of “The Bottle” in which Gil identifies the rhythm as Guan Guanco, “the rhythm of rebirth and regeneration” that survived the middle passage, a rhythm whose timing, like Gil’s lyric tenacity from “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” through “The Bottle” to “Willing” and beyond, can be troubling even as it cycles. One of the most powerful elements of Joyful Militancy is its commitment to remaining ever troubled: because no single program can give us the comfort of handing over to it the burdens of the work itself; because to remain troubled is to sustain a space of movement; because so many movements offer examples of a potential beauty that is itself improvised and cyclical.
warning ness et al
6
This book is about connections, about echoes. It is built, as “Willing” is, on an acknowledgment of uninterrupted survival and resistance. In choosing examples of movements and moments in which people offer everyday and organized versions of joyful militancy, bergman and Montgomery remind us that, despite all attempts to eradicate dissent, despite genocides and pogroms and police attacks and surveillance and micro-aggressions and the myriad ways in which we hurt each other, we are uninterrupted. *We are always already in conversation with movements and moments of the past that were themselves about growing more powerful together, having each others’ backs, resisting corrosive practices while retrieving supportive ones, choosing to work and grow in friendships less rusted by the imperatives of capitalism and Empire: “There are—and there always have been—many places and spaces where **alternatives are in full bloom.”
*if only.. need global detox leap first.. because nothing *legit al to date
Crucially, this book begins inside movement spaces, spaces in which critiques of colonization, capitalism, and Empire already exist: bergman and Montgomery are not set out to convince a non-radicalized audience of the need to resist. Rather, combining rigor with accessibility, they affirm the lineages and contemporary currents of radical thought and practice they draw from while acknowledging the historical violences that made and make them necessary. Echoing Rebecca Solnit, they state, “Everyday life under Empire is already a certain kind of disaster.” In a time when “anarchist” is treated by too many as an empty epithet, in a time when the most vulnerable communities are being targeted with cruelty, they openly state that “for joy to flourish, it needs sharp edges.”
This book’s opening urge is to respond to the affective imperatives of what the authors term rigid radicalism:
It is the pleasure of feeling more radical than others and the worry about not being radical enough; the sad comfort of sorting unfolding events into dead categories; the vigilant perception of errors and complicities in oneself and others; the anxious posturing on social media and the highs of being liked and the lows of being ignored; the suspicion and resentment felt in the presence of something new; the way curiosity feels naïve and condescension feels right.
need a means to get back/to curiosity over decision making
7
.. how our movements have built and can build from the small overlaps and resonances, not just because we all carry multiple identities but because certain common notions as well as differences we hold can bring us to have each others’ backs.
discrimination as equity .. the it is me ness
.. They offer a reading and imagining of empowerment that is Spinoza-inflected, anarchist-inflected, solidarity-inflected joy. Noting their own process, they acknowledge, “Neither of us could have written this book, or anything like it, alone. And the collaboration has made us each more capable, in different ways, together.”
As I write this, my love—after a morning drawing fists on butcher paper to paste to placards—has gotten to her sister’s to help their mom with caregiving for the babies. Her militancy, while divergent from the politics of some of her family, is steeped in an ethic of invitation and sharing that she learned from them and, right now, our niece is coloring in a cutout of a brown fist almost as large as her. This is another version of the troubled and beautiful messiness that bergman and Montgomery remind me of in Joyful Militancy. I am thankful for it even as I sit with my grief at the present political moment and my urge to activate and be activated by those I love and those I’ve never met who, though far, are never quite distant.
Dear Gil,
.. Here, Gil, are some words that trouble me and offer me hope, some words that, like your words below, in shifting from individual to collective, in invoking the work and joy of generations, move me to tears: “For us at least, there is no cure, no gas mask, no unitary solution: there are only openings, searchings, and the collective discovery of new and old ways of moving that let in fresh air. For the same reason that no one is immune, anyone can participate in its undoing.”
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
8
Love,
Hari Alluri, on Kumeyaay land, January 20, 2017.
What my life really means is that the songs that I sing
Are just pieces of a dream that I’ve been building
And we can make a stand and hey, I’m reachin’ out my hand
’Cause I know damn well we can if we are willing
But we gotta be …
reminds me of if i want ness
9
Introduction
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
—Audre Lorde
kind of goes with.. already on each heart ness
People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints—such people have a corpse in their mouth.
—Raoul Vaneigem
Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be a militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.
—Michel Foucault
I
This book is an attempt to amplify some quiet conversations that have been happening for a long time, about the connections between resisting and thriving, about how we relate to each other in radical movements today, and about some of the barriers to collective transformation.
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
There is something that circulates in many radical movements and spaces, draining away their transformative potential. Anyone who has frequented these spaces has felt it. Many (including us) have actively participated in it, spread it, and been hurt by it. It nurtures rigidity, mistrust, and anxiety precisely where we are supposed to feel most alive. It compels us to search ourselves and others ruthlessly for flaws and inconsistencies. It crushes experimentation and curiosity. It is hostile to difference, complexity, and nuance. Or it is the most complex, the most nuanced, and everyone else is simplistic and stupid. Radicalism becomes an ideal and everyone becomes deficient in comparison.
and/or thinking restate/update ness
The anxious posturing, the vigilant search for mistakes and limitations, the hostility that crushes a hesitant new idea, the way that critique becomes a reflex, the sense that things are urgent yet pointless, the circulation of the latest article tearing apart bad habits and behaviors, the way shaming others becomes comfortable, the ceaseless generation of necessities and duties, the sense of feeling guilty about one’s own fear and loneliness, the clash of political views that requires a winner and a loser, the performance of anti-oppressive language, the way that some stare at the floor or look at the door. We know these tendencies, intimately. We have seen them circulating, and felt them pass through us.
When we began talking with friends about this, there were immediate head nods, and sometimes excited eruptions—“YES! Finally someone is going to talk about this publicly!” No one knew exactly what it was or where it came from, but many knew exactly what we were talking about. Like us, they had felt it and participated in it. They had discussed it quietly and carefully with people they trusted. But it was hard to unpack, for a whole bunch of reasons. To complain or criticize it came with the risk of being attacked, shamed, or cast out. This phenomenon is difficult to talk about because it presents itself as the most radical, the most anti-oppressive, the most militant. It shape-shifts and multiplies itself: sometimes it appears as one rigid line, at other times as a proliferation of positions, arrayed against each other. How is it that explicitly radical, anti-oppressive, or anti-authoritarian spaces—the places where people should feel most alive and powerful—can sometimes feel cold, stifling, and rigid? *What contributes to a climate in which one is never radical enough, where we have to continually prove our radicalness to others? What makes insecurity, distrust, anxiety, guilt, and shame so pervasive? **Where does all this come from? What is this thing? Is it one thing, or many? What activates it, stokes it, and ***how can it be warded off?
**just two missing pieces
***hari rat park law.. ie: a nother way
10
We are not the first to try to get ahold of this phenomenon. It has gone by many names—sad militancy, grumpywarriorcool, manarchism, puritanism—each of which emphasizes different elements and sources. In this book, we call it rigid radicalism. Our research and experience lead us to think that its origins are as diverse as the phenomenon itself. Some say rigid radicalism comes from the way heteropatriarchy poisons intimacy with trauma and violence, while separating politics from everyday life. Others point to origins in the narcissistic and guilt-ridden individualism nurtured by whiteness. Or it is the way schooling replaces creativity and curiosity with conformity and evaluation. Or the humiliation of a life organized by capitalism, in which we are all pitted in petty competitions with each other. Or the way cynicism evolves from attempts to avoid pain and failure. Or it is identity politics fused with neoliberalism. And the terror and anxiety of a world in crisis. And the weakening of movements and a decline in militancy. Or it is the existence of radical milieus as such. And the deep insecurity nurtured by social media and its injunction to public performance. Or it is morality, or ideology, or the Left, or the Maoists, or the nihilists, or the moralists, or the ghost of Lenin. Probably there is some truth to all of these: it is definitely a tangled web.
It is important to say, from the outset, that we do not think the problem is simply anger, conflict, or difference. Whenever people name and challenge oppression and violence, there are almost always reactionaries telling them they are doing it wrong, that they need to be polite, nice, reasonable, peaceful, or patient. We want nothing to do with attempts to regulate resistance.
For this reason, we do not believe rigid radicalism can be countered by inventing a new set of norms for how to behave, or setting out a new ideal of what radicalism should be. There can be no instructions. This would just create a new ideal to measure ourselves against. It would just add to a long list of shoulds, dos, and don’ts that reactivates the problem..t We hope to help undo tendencies towards regulation and policing, rather than playing into them.
huge huge huge.. need a way sans any form of m\a\p
Maybe we are stoking rigid radicalism right now, in writing about it. Searching out its roots and inner workings can recreate a stifling atmosphere where we feel like we are stuck, always lacking, always messing up, with no escape. Pointing to shame, rigidity, guilt, competition, or anxiety does not make them go away, and might make things worse. It is not a question of revealing the fact that we don’t treat each other well sometimes, or that movements can turn in on themselves; we know this already. These tendencies are a public secret: widely known, but difficult to talk about. Tracing origins might not tell us much about what to do here and now. It is not about a few bad apples, or a few bad behaviors. For us at least, it cannot be reduced to those people over there, because we feel it arise in ourselves as well. There is no way to purify our movements of these tendencies, because the desire for purity is part of the problem..t
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
11
So our project is not about being against rigid radicalism. We have become convinced that rigid radicalism cannot be countered by critique alone. Our critique and interrogation are a way of asking: *how can we be otherwise? What makes it possible to activate something different?..t **How to protect the something different once it gains traction?..t How to share experiences of places and spaces where something different is already taking place—where people feel more alive and capable?
*need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
**legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p.. then protection et al.. irrelevant s.. gershenfeld something else law ..
The first step, for us, has been to affirm that *we are already otherwise: we all have parts of ourselves that are drawn towards other ways of being.. t Everyone has glimmers, at least, of the ways that fierceness can be intertwined with kindness, and curiosity with transformation. Every space is a complex ecology of different tendencies. Rigid radicalism is always only one tendency among others. There are—and always have been—many places and spaces where alternatives are in full bloom. **Beyond merely diagnosing or combating rigid radicalism, we seek to affirm the multiplicity of ways that spaces can be otherwise.
*yes.. to all of us ness.. and that we are all already enough ness.. already on each heart ness.. just need a means for a global detox leap
**huge to costello screen\service law et al.. but also.. beyond ‘affirming’ ness..
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
Questions
This is part of what we have been talking about with people: What makes radical spaces and movements feel transformative and creative, rather than dogmatic, rule-bound, or stifling? What sustains struggles, spaces, and forms of life where we become capable of living and fighting in new ways? What supports people’s capacities to challenge each other and undo deeply ingrained habits, rather than just saying the “right” thing or avoiding the “wrong” thing? How are people carving out relationships based in trust, love, and responsibility amid the violence that permeates daily life? What sustains these worlds—what makes them thrive?
With so much destruction in motion, this might all sound naïve to some readers: why speak of thriving and love when there are so many massive, urgent problems that need to be confronted? To write about the potential of trust and care, at this time in history, could seem like grasping optimistically at straws as the world burns. But durable bonds and new complicities are not a reprieve or an escape; they are the very means of undoing Empire.
We use “Empire” to name the organized destruction under which we live. Through its attempt to render everything profitable and controllable, Empire administers a war with other forms of life. The rhythms it imposes are at once absorptive and isolating. Even when this war takes the apparently subtle forms of assimilation and control, it is backed by brutal violence. Prisons and cops lurk alongside discourses of inclusion and tolerance. Empire works to monopolize the whole field of life, crushing autonomy and inducing dependence.
At the same time, there are cracks everywhere. A basic premise of this book is that resistance and transformation are always in the making at the margins, while Empire is always adapting and reacting. All of its mechanisms of control have been invented as responses to the constant upwelling of resistance, autonomy, and insurrection. This upwelling is a struggle not only against external domination, but against Empire’s control over identities, desires, and relationships. Undoing Empire also means undoing oneself. This is never a purely negative undoing, because it also means becoming capable of something new
12
We are convinced that what is needed is an activation and affirmation of other ways of being. Not a new norm, but the exploration of new (and old) capacities. This book explores some of these capacities alongside the ways that people are transforming their own situations without governments or hierarchical institutions. The capacity to treat each other well is connected, we think, to movements that nurture autonomy, trust, responsibility, and the collective power that is palpable when people are able to participate more fully in life. Amidst and beyond barricades and Molotovs there are new forms of care and belonging, quiet and humble forms of support. **There are emergent sensibilities based in listening, curiosity, and experimentation. There are reconnections with subjugated traditions and practices. There is hatred of the forces that threaten all this, and a willingness to fight. Some have been nurturing these capacities for a long time; others are just beginning to explore them. For this reason, rather than just dwelling in the pervasiveness of rigid radicalism or Empire, here we are exploring, celebrating, and connecting with other ways of being—other thriving forms of resistance and struggle.
*ie: a nother way
**yeah that.. ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
Affirmative theory
In many currents of radicalism—especially certain strains of Marxism—radical theory tasks itself with directing the course of struggle, pointing the way forward, or handing down instructions and fixed ways of being. This kind of theory generates necessities or suggestions to be implemented. Theory directs practice. Either this, or theory is tasked with critique of the world, of practice, and of other theories: it is supposed to reveal the limits of current struggles, discover the mistakes and flawed ways of doing or thinking, or reveal the root of oppression. Often, both these modes of theory generate positions defined in opposition to others. They give us things to be for or against.
But there are other modes of theory. Theory can also explore connections and ask open-ended questions. It can affirm and elaborate on something people already intuit or sense. It can celebrate and inspire, it can move. We want a kind of theory that participates in struggle and the growth of shared power, rather than directing it or evaluating it from outside. We are after a kind of theory that is critical but also affirmative. Rather than pointing to the limits or shortcomings of movements and declaring what they should do, affirmative theory hones in on the most transformative edges and margins.
In writing this book, we’ve been influenced by many divergent voices and movements, and we want to value them all. We combine weighty philosophical concepts with conversations, and draw on zines, academic articles and books, speeches, and interviews. Furthermore, we think there’s a lot to be said for bringing things together in unforeseen ways that might intensify their aliveness and dynamism. This entails asking and provoking questions, many of which we leave open and unresolved throughout the book. For us, the most compelling questions are those that can be answered in a multiplicity of ways, in different situations.
One of our basic premises is that transformative potentials are always already present and emergent. Not only can things be otherwise; they already are, and it is a matter of tuning, tending, activating, connecting, and defending these processes of change that are already in the making. People are always enacting alternatives to the dominant order of things, however small, and there are always new connections and potentials to explore. We see this kind of sensibility happening in currents of feminism, queer theory, Black liberation, Indigenous resurgence, youth liberation, anarchism, autonomism, and radical ecology, among others, and we seek to affirm these movements and practices throughout the book.
13
But this is tricky: how are we to affirm and explore spaces where something transformative is taking place *without holding them up as ideals to imitate, or telling others to be a certain way? What we are after is not a new critique or new position, but **a process. Not a new direction for movements, but the process of movement itself, and the growth of creativity, struggle, experimentation, and collective power.
*sans any form of m\a\p
**need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
Joy and the Spinozan current
Against the grain of European thought that sought to subdue life through rigid dualisms and classifications, Spinoza conceptualized a world in which everything is interconnected and in process.
What we have found exciting about this current is the focus on processes through which people become more alive, more capable, and more powerful together. For Spinoza, the whole point of life is to become capable of new things, with others. His name for this process is joy.
Moreover, Spinoza’s concept of joy is not an emotion at all, but an increase in one’s power to affect and be affected. It is the capacity to do and feel more. As such, it is connected to creativity and the embrace of uncertainty. Within the Spinozan current, there is no way to determine what is right and good for everyone..t It is not a moral philosophy, with a fixed idea of good and evil. There is no recipe for life or struggle. There is no framework that works in all places, at all times. What is transformative in one context might be useless or stifling in another. What worked once might become stale, or, on the other hand, the recovery of old memories and traditions might be enlivening. **So does this mean anything goes? People just do what they want? Rejecting universal arbiters like morality and the state doesn’t mean falling into “chaos” or “total relativity.” The space beyond fixed and established orders, structures, and morals is not one of disorder: it is the space of emergent orders, values, and forms of life.
*why we need to org around legit needs .. huge
**but if legit free.. will be doing whatever you want.. we just need a global detox leap first.. so we legit know what we want/crave/need
14
Joyful militancy and emergent powers
When people come into contact with their own power—with their capacity to participate in something life-giving—they often become more militant. Militancy is a loaded word for some, evoking images of machismo and militarism. For us, militancy means combativeness and a willingness to fight, but fighting might look like a lot of different things. It might mean the struggle against internalized shame and oppression; fierce support for a friend or loved one; the courage to sit with trauma; a quiet act of sabotage; the persistence to recover subjugated traditions; drawing lines in the sand; or simply the willingness to risk. We are intentionally bringing joy and militancy together, with the aim of thinking through the connections between fierceness and love, resistance and care, combativeness and nurturance.
to me.. if legit free.. these would be irrelevant s
When people find themselves genuinely supported and cared for, they are able to extend this to others in ways that seemed impossible or terrifying before. When people find their bellies filled and their minds sharpened among communal kitchens and libraries, hatred for capitalist ways of life grows amid belonging and connection. When someone receives comfort and support from friends, they find themselves willing to confront the abuse they have been facing. When people develop or recover a connection to the places where they live, they may find themselves standing in front of bulldozers to protect that place. When people begin to meet their everyday needs through neighborhood assemblies and mutual aid, all of a sudden they are willing to fight the police, and the fight deepens bonds of trust and solidarity. Joy can be contagious and dangerous.
again.. irrelevant s.. cancerous distractions if all legit free
All over the world, there are stories of people who find themselves transformed through the creation of other forms of life: more capable, more alive, and more connected to each other, and *willing to defend what they are building. In our conversations with others from a variety of currents and locations, we have become increasingly convinced that the most widespread, long-lasting, and fierce struggles are animated by strong relationships of **love, care, and trust. These values are not fixed duties that can be imitated, nor do they come out of thin air. ***They arise from struggles through which people become powerful together. As people force Empire out of their lives, there is more space for kindness and solidarity. As people reduce their dependence on Empire’s stifling institutions, collective responsibility and autonomy can grow. As people come to trust their capacity to ****figure things out together rather than relying on the state and capitalism, they are less willing to submit to the fears and divisions that Empire fosters.
**if legit those 3.. then that means sans any form of m\a\p
***maybe in sea world.. but don’t need to
These emergent powers are at the core of the Spinozan lineage, of this book, and (we think) of many vibrant movements today. Drawing on Spinoza, we call them common notions. To have a common notion is to be able to participate more fully in the web of relations and affections in which we are enmeshed. They are not about controlling things, but about response-ability, capacities to remain responsive to changing situations. This is why they are a bit paradoxical: they are material ideas, accessed by tuning into the forces that compose us, inseparable from the feelings and practices that animate them. Abstract morality and ideology are barriers to this tuning-in, offering up rule-bound frameworks that close us off from the capacity to modulate the forces of the present moment.
response and responsibility.. both cancerous distractions
15
Beyond optimism and pessimism
While we want to insist that there are potentials bubbling up everywhere, it doesn’t always feel that way. This is not an optimistic book. We are *not interested in sacrificing the present for a revolution in the distance, nor are we confident that things will get better..t They may get worse, for many of us, in many ways. However, we are equally wary of pessimism and cynicism. Among others, feminist essayist **Rebecca Solnit has taught us to see optimism and pessimism as two sides of the same coin: both try to remove uncertainty from the world. Both foster certitude about how things will turn out, whether good or bad. Optimism and pessimism can provide a sense of comfort at the expense of openness and the capacity to hang onto complexity. They can drain away our capacity to care, to try, and to fight for things to be otherwise without knowing how it will turn out. ***A fundamental premise of this book is that no matter what, things can be otherwise.. t —there is always wiggle room, Empire is already full of cracks, and the future is always uncertain. Uncertainty is where we need to begin, because experimentation and curiosity is part of what has been stolen from us. Empire works in part by making us feel impotent, corroding our abilities to shape worlds together.
*that’s why we need a means to leap.. for (blank)’s sake
***wiggle room and cracks.. not deep enough
16
On anarchism
We do not focus much on these debates here, nor do we situate ourselves as particular types of anarchists. This is partly because we have learned from many different currents, and it seems counterproductive to elevate one above the others. We also want to avoid some of the debates that, to us, have become sedimented and stale. At its best, we think anarchism nurtures trust in people’s capacity to figure things out, while also supporting autonomy and leaving room for conflict. We are inspired by all the ways that anarchists are able to inhabit situations with strong values and fierce care, while also respecting and even welcoming difference.
We are particularly interested in currents of anarchism and anti-authoritarianism that have emphasized the importance of affinities over ideologies. Affinity is a helpful concept for us because it speaks to emergent relationships and forms of organizing that are decentralized and flexible, but not flimsy. Organizing by affinity basically means seeking out and nurturing relationships based in shared values, commitments, and passions, without trying to impose those on everyone else. Affinity is also important because many of the currents that inspire us either reject anarchism—along with all other “isms”—or just don’t have much interest in it.
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
matters huge.. who’s together in a space
17
There is a conversation going on, within and beyond anarchism, about the potential of strong relationships that are rooted in trust, love, care, and the capacity to support and *defend each other. The most exciting currents of anarchism, for us, are those that **encourage and enable people to live differently here and now, and to break down divides between organizing and everyday life..t
**a nother way
The beginning of a conversation
How can these processes of transformation be nurtured and *defended, not just in their most dramatic and exceptional moments, but all the time? Are there **common values or sensibilities that nurture transformative relationships, alive and ***responsive to changing situations, while ****warding off both Empire and rigid radicalism? What if joy (as the process of becoming more capable) was seen as fundamental to undoing Empire? What would it mean to be militant about joy? What is *****militancy when it is infused with creativity and love?
*****can’t infuse love.. all or nothing.. and.. already there
militant: the use of confrontational or violent methods in support of a political or social cause
It was with these questions—much vaguer and more muddled at the time—that the two of us began having intentional conversations with several others. And who are we, the two of us? Both of us live in so-called British Columbia, Canada—Nick in Victoria and carla in Vancouver. We come from different generations, and we have pretty different life experiences across gender, class, ability, and education. carla has been involved in deschooling, youth liberation organizing, and other radical currents for a couple of decades now, and she became a mentor to Nick several years ago as Nick was realizing that he was a radical in his mid twenties without many mentors from older generations (a common phenomenon in anarchist and other radical worlds). What began as a relationship of mentorship and political collaboration evolved into a deep friendship. In terms of our organizing, we are both oriented towards prefigurative experiments: trying to contribute to projects and forms of life where we are able to live and relate differently with others, here and now, and supporting others doing the same. Both of us are white cis-gendered settlers, and for us this has meant trying to write in conversation with people with very different life experiences and insights, including Indigenous people, kids and youth,
Over the course of a year and a half we spoke with friends, and friends of friends. This was a unique research process, in part, because we were inviting people into an ongoing conversation, asking them to reflect on and respond to our continually evolving ideas about joyful militancy and rigid radicalism. We formally interviewed fifteen people in all: Silvia Federici, adrienne maree brown, Marina Sitrin, Gustavo Esteva, Kelsey Cham C., Zainab Amadahy, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Melanie Matining, Tasnim Nathoo, Sebastian Touza, Walidah Imarisha, Mik Turje, Margaret Killjoy, Glen Coulthard, and Richard Day. We also had many more informal conversations with folks from a lot of different backgrounds, of all ages, who impacted our thinking immensely.
silvia federici.. seed & spark.. gustavo esteva..
These people are not representatives of any particular group or movement. Nor are we holding them up as the ultimate embodiment of joy, militancy, or radicalism. They are people with whom we share values and who inspire and challenge us. All of them are committed, in various ways, to forcing Empire out of their lives and reviving and nurturing other worlds. They are involved in a diversity of movements, struggles, and forms of life: the uprisings in Oaxaca and Argentina; small-scale farming and urban food justice; Black liberation and prison abolition; Indigenous resurgence and land defense; transformative and healing justice movements; radical ecology and permaculture; scavenging and squatting; youth liberation and deschooling; feminist and anti-violence work; the creation of autonomous, queer, BIPOC spaces; direct action and anticapitalist organizing, and much more, including the beautiful and fierce ways of being that are difficult to capture in words. Experiences among the people we interviewed ranged widely, from long-term commitments to places and communities to more itinerant and scattered spaces of belonging; from being steeped in radical theory to forms of knowledge arising through lived experience; from being well known in radical circles to being known primarily among friends, loved ones, and close collaborators.
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We learned a lot from the apprehensiveness of some of the Indigenous people and people of color we interviewed, whose emotions are constantly policed and regulated, and whose struggles are constantly appropriated or erased. We heard from them that centering things like kindness, love, trust, and flourishing—especially when it comes from white people like us—can erase power relations. It can end up pathologizing so-called “negative” emotions like fear, mistrust, resentment, and anger. It can legitimize tone policing and a reactionary defense of comfort. It can fall into simplistic commandments to “be nice” or “get over” oppression and violence. Similarly, pointing to the importance of trust and openness can be dangerous and irresponsible in a world of so much betrayal and violence. These misgivings have taught us to be clear that trust and vulnerability are powerful and irreducibly risky; they require boundaries. They can never be obligations or duties.
to me.. not legit love, trust, if require boundaries and negative ness.. siddiqi border law et al
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Here, we want to return to the dynamic space beyond fixed norms on the one hand, and “anything goes” relativism on the other. Outside this false dichotomy is the domain of relationships that are alive, responsive, and make people capable of new things together, without imposing this on everyone else. It is in this space where values like openness, curiosity, trust, and responsibility can really flourish, not as fixed ways of being to be applied everywhere, but as ways of relating that can only be kept alive by cultivating careful, selective, and fierce boundaries. For joy to flourish, it needs sharp edges.
but anything does (has to)go if conditions right
In Chapter 2 we look at how Empire maintains its hold through morality and toxic relationships.
ooooof
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We deepen this relational ethics in Chapter 3, arguing that joyful militancy is sustained by emergent values—common notions—of trust and responsibility.
In each of these stories, we try to show how rigid radicalism is constantly being undone and warded off by other ways of being, ethical responsiveness, strong relationships, and common notions.
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Chapter 1: Empire, Militancy, and Joy
To be militant about joy means being attuned to situations or relationships, and learning how to participate in and support the transformation, rather than directing or controlling it.
Holding assemblies where people can formulate problems together, make decisions collectively, and care for one another reveals the profound alienation and individualism of life under Empire
still alienation et al.. same song
23
t
In order to rule, those in positions of power need to constantly crush and subdue the forces of transformation. They do not merely need obedience; they *need their subjects to be separated from their own capacities. As Audre Lorde writes, “Every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.” Empire’s hold is increasingly affective: **it suffuses our emotions, relationships, and desires, propagating feelings of shame, impotence, fear, and dependence. It makes capitalist relations feel inevitable and (to some) even desirable.
*imagine a turtle ness
**hari present in society law..
An important insight shared by many radical currents is that these forms of violence and control are ultimately toxic for everyone. For men to “enjoy” the benefits of patriarchal masculinity, their capacities for vulnerability and care must be eviscerated, replaced by a violent and disconnected way of being built upon shame and woundedness. For white people to become white, they have to internalize entitlement and a hostility to difference, hiding from the ways their lives depend on institutionalized violence and exploitation. Settlers must build their lives on a living legacy of genocide, indebted to ongoing extraction and dispossession. Being privileged by Empire means being sheltered from its most extreme forms of violence and degradation, and to be enrolled in a stultifying form of life that recreates this violence. Most of what is called privilege has nothing to do with thriving or joy; this is why privileged white men are some of the most emotionally stunted, closed-off people alive today. None of this is to deny that there are pleasures, wealth, and safety associated with whiteness, heteropatriarchal masculinity, and other forms of privilege. Instead, it is to insist that everyone, potentially, has a stake in undoing privileges—and the ongoing violence required to secure them—as a part of transformative struggle. As Jack Halberstam writes in his introduction to Fred Moten’s The Undercommons,
The mission then for the denizens of the undercommons is to recognize that when you seek to make things better, you are not just doing it for the Other, you must also be doing it for yourself. While men may think they are being “sensitive” by turning to feminism, while white people may think they are being right on by opposing racism, no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing “this shit down” until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us..t Gender hierarchies are bad for men as well as women and they are really bad for the rest of us. Racial hierarchies are not rational and ordered, they are chaotic and nonsensical and must be opposed by precisely all those who benefit in any way from them. Or, as Moten puts it: “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”
none of us are free ness
Empire is killing all of us, in different ways,..t and all of us, in different ways, are marked by incredible legacies of movement and revolt. Its forms of control are never total, never guaranteed. The word “sabotage” comes from those who destroyed factory machinery by throwing their wooden shoes (sabots) in the gears of the early European factories. Slaves broke their tools in the field, poisoned their masters, learned to read in secret, and invented subversive forms of song and dance.
Empire reacts to resistance by entrenching and accumulating what Spinoza called sadness: the reduction of our capacity to affect and be affected. We’ve chosen not to use this word very much in this book because we’ve found it can be misleading in many ways, but the concept of sadness is important for Spinoza. In the same way that joy gets conflated with happiness, it’s easy to hear “sad” in terms of its familiar meaning as an emotion, rather than the way Spinoza intended it: as a reduction of capacities. For Spinoza, sadness cannot be avoided or eliminated completely; it is part of life. All things wax, wane, and die eventually, and the process can provoke thought, resistance, and action. Sadness and joy can be intertwined in complex ways. But Empire accumulates and spreads sadness. Drawing on Spinoza, here is how Deleuze put it:
We live in a world which is generally disagreeable, where not only people but the established powers have a stake in transmitting sad affects to us. Sadness, sad affects, are all those which reduce our power to act. The established powers need our sadness to make us slaves. The tyrant, the priest, the captors of souls need to persuade us that life is hard and a burden. The powers that be need to repress us no less than to make us anxious … to administer and organize our intimate little fears
huge huge
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Empire propagates and transmits sad affects. Sadness sticks to us; we are made to desire its rhythms. Terrible situations are made to feel inevitable. For this reason, we speak of the entrenchment of Spinozan sadness as that which is stultifying, depleting, disempowering, individualizing and isolating. But this entrenchment might not feel agonizing or even unpleasant: it might feel like comfort, boredom, or safety. . t We have found the notion of “subjection” helpful here, because it goes beyond a top-down notion of power. In an interview, the critical trans scholar and organizer Dean Spade explains why he uses this term instead of the more common activist term “oppression”:
“Subjection” suggests a more complex set of relationships, where we are constituted as subjects by these systems, engage in resistance within these systems, manage and are managed within these systems, and can have moments of seeing and exploiting the cracks and edges of these systems. I chose to introduce this term, despite its unfamiliarity in most activist realms I am part of, because I felt its intervention was a necessary part of my argument about how power works.
Today, especially in the metropolitan centers of so-called “developed” countries, subjects are enmeshed in a dense fabric of control. Some of us are steered into forms of life that are compatible and complicit with ongoing exploitation and violence, while other populations are selected for slow death. New forms of subjection are invented to contain each new rebellion, enrolling subjects to participate in the containment. Prisons and policing come to be felt (especially by white people) as a form of safety and security. Misogyny is eroticized and objectification reaches new heights, taking new forms. Desires for affluence and luxury are entrenched amidst growing inequality. Through cellphones and social media, surveillance and control are increasingly participatory. When they are working, these forms of subjection are felt not as impositions but as desires, like a warm embrace or an insistent tug.
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Joy is not happiness
With all this in mind, we want to pull happiness and joy apart, in hopes of further clarifying what we mean by joyful militancy. The happiness offered to us by Empire is not the same as joy, even though they are conventionally understood as synonyms. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary defines joy simply as “a feeling of great pleasure or happiness.” But whereas joyful transformation undoes the stultifying effects of Empire, happiness has become a tool of subjection.
Under Empire, happiness is seen as a duty and unhappiness as a disorder..t Marketing firms increasingly sell happy experiences instead of products: happiness is a relaxing vacation on the beach, an intense night at the bar, a satisfying drink on a hot day, or the contentment and security of retirement. As consumers, we are encouraged to become connoisseurs and customizers, with an ever more refined sense of the kinds of consumption that make us happy. As workers, we are expected to find happiness in our job. Neoliberal capitalism encourages its subjects to base their lives on this search for happiness, promising pleasure, bliss, fulfillment, arousal, exhilaration, or contentment, depending on your tastes and proclivities (and your budget).
The search for happiness doesn’t just come through consumption. Empire also sells the rejection of upward mobility and consumerism as another form of placid containment: the individual realizes that what really makes him happy is a life in a small town where everyone knows your name, or a humble nuclear family, or kinky polyamory, or travel, or witty banter, or cooking fancy food, or awesome dance parties. The point is not that these activities are wrong or bad. Many people use food, dance, sex, intimacy, and travel in ways intertwined with transformative struggles and bonds. But Empire empties these and other activities of their transformative potential, inviting us to shape our lives in pursuit of happiness as the ultimate goal of life. Rebecca Solnit explains this powerfully:
Happiness is a sort of ridiculous thing we’re all supposed to chase like dogs chasing cars that suggests there’s some sort of steady wellbeing … you can feel confident, you can feel loved, but I think joy flashes up at moments and then you have other important things to attend to..t Happiness—the wall-to-wall carpeting of the psyche—is somewhat overrated.”
when gershenfeld something else law.. all else irrelevant s
Similarly, feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes that “to be conditioned by happiness is to like your condition … consensus is produced through sharing happy objects, creating a blanket whose warmth covers over the potential of the body to be affected otherwise.” As wall-to-wall carpeting or a warm blanket, the search for happiness closes off other possibilities, other textures, other affections. Ahmed shows how the promise of happiness can be treacherous, encouraging us to ignore or turn away from suffering—our own or others’—if it threatens happiness. This promise has a gendered and racialized logic: Empire is designed to secure white male happiness in particular, while the feelings of women, genderqueer and trans folks, and people of color are intensely policed. As Nishnaabe scholar and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes,
I am repeatedly told that I cannot be angry if I want transformative change—that the expression of anger and rage as emotions are wrong, misguided, and counter-productive to the movement. The underlying message in such statements is that we, as Indigenous and Black peoples, are not allowed to express a full range of human emotions. We are encouraged to suppress responses that are not deemed palatable or respectable to settler society. But the correct emotional response to violence targeting our families is rage.
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Simpson shows how the restriction of negative emotions can take place in movements themselves: imperatives to be happy, nice, or kind can sustain violence, forcing out anger and antagonism. Unhappiness is pathologized along with so-called “negative” emotions like rage, despair, resentment, and fear when they get in the way of promised forms of happiness.
For those who refuse these imperatives, control and coercion lurk behind happy promises. Being perceived as a threat to the happiness of others—especially white men—can be lethal. These tangled webs of subjection are portrayed as individual failings or pathologies. Unhappiness, outrage, and grief are then perceived as individual disorders, to be dealt with through pharmaceuticals, self-help, therapy, and other atomizing responses.. t
The point is not that happiness is always bad, or that being happy means being complicit with Empire. Happiness can also be subversive and dangerous, as part of a process through which one becomes more alive and capable. But when happiness becomes something to be gripped or chased after as the meaning of life, it tends to lose its transformative potential. And if we are not happy—if we are depressed, anxious, addicted, or “crazy”—we are tasked with fixing ourselves, or at least with managing our symptoms..t The wall-to-wall carpeting of happiness is an anaesthetic under Empire.
The challenge is not to reject happiness in favor of duty or self-sacrifice, but to initiate processes of thinking, feeling, and acting that undo subjection, starting from everyday life. Because Empire has shaped our very aspirations, moods, and identities, this always entails grappling with parts of ourselves. This is one of the fundamental questions that runs through the Spinozan current: How are people made to desire their own stifling forms of subjection? How do we come to desire the violent, depleting forms of life offered up by Empire? How do transformative movements get drawn back into the rhythms of capitalism and the state? And most importantly, how can we bring about something different?
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
Because Empire has a hold on our desires and the rhythms of our lives, undoing it cannot be about discovering a truth or revealing it to others as if we have all been duped. The kind of transformation we are interested in is not about converting people, or finally being able to see clearly.
The power of joy
To emphasize joy, in contrast to happiness, is to move away from conditioned habits, reactions, and emotions. Bubbling up in the cracks of Empire, joy remakes people through combat with forces of subjection. Joy is a desubjectifying process, an unfixing, an intensification of life itself. It is a process of coming alive and coming apart. Whereas happiness is used as a numbing anesthetic that induces dependence, joy is the growth of people’s capacity to do and feel new things, in ways that can break this dependence. It is aesthetic, in its older meaning, before thinking and feeling were separate: the increase in our capacity to perceive with our senses. As Mexican activist and writer Gustavo Esteva explained in his interview with us,
We use the word aesthetic to allude to the ideal of beauty. The etymological meaning, almost lost, associates the word with the intensity of sensual experience; it means perceptive, sharp in the senses. That meaning is retained in words like anaesthesia. Comparing a funeral in a modern, middle-class family and in a village in Mexico or India, we can see then the contrast in how one expresses or not their feelings and how joy and sadness can be combined with great intensity.
not yet scrambled ness
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Esteva suggested to us that sentipensar still carries this meaning in Spanish: the conviction that you cannot think without feeling, or feel without thinking. As the feminist scholar Silvia Federici explained when we interviewed her, joy is a palpable sense of collective power:
I like the distinction between happiness and joy. I like joy, like you, because I think joy is an active passion. It’s not a stagnant state of being. It’s not satisfaction with things as they are. It’s part of feeling power’s capacities growing in you and growing in the people around you. It’s a feeling, a passion, that comes from a process of transformation. And it’s a process of growth. So this doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be satisfied with your situation. It means that again, using Spinoza, that you understand the situation, and you’re active in a way that you feel that you are comprehending and moving along in accordance to what is required in that moment. So you feel that you have the power to change and you feel yourself changing with what you’re doing, together with other people. It’s not a form of acquiescence to what exists.
to me.. if trying to change.. (rather than listening to the itch-in-the-soul) .. still perpetuating what is..
This feeling of the power to change one’s life and circumstances is at the core of collective resistance, insurrections, and the construction of alternatives to life under Empire. Joy is the sentipensar, the thinking-feeling that arises from becoming capable of more, and often this entails feeling many emotions at once. It is resonant with what the Black poet and intellectual Audre Lorde calls the erotic:
not going to get at alt if resisting.. cancerous distraction
For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
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Lorde makes it clear that this capacity for feeling is not about fleeting pleasure or contentment: following its line requires responsibility and pulls one away from comfort and safety. It undoes stuckness. It makes stultifying comforts intolerable. In our interview with writer and activist adrienne maree brown, she emphasized that joy is the capacity to be more fully present with ourselves and the world:
I feel very fortunate that my mother read The Prophet by Khalil Gibran to me many times. There is this whole thing on how your sorrow carves out the space for your joy, and vice versa. That has helped me a lot. In recent years I have been on a path to learn somatics, how to be in my wholeness, with my trauma, with my triggers, with my brilliance. It’s all about being present, being awake inside your real life in real time.
In this sense, joy does not come about by avoiding pain, but by struggling amidst and through it. To make space for collective feelings of rage, grief, or loneliness can be deeply transformative. Empire, in contrast, works to keep its subjects stuck in individualizing sadness: held in habits and relationships that are depleting, toxic, and privatized. This stagnation might be held in place by the pursuit of happiness, and the attempt to numb or avoid pain. To be more fully present, in contrast, means tuning in to that which affects us, and participating actively in the forces that shape us.
This tuning-in might be subtle and tender, or it might be a violent act of refusal. Sometimes these shifts are barely perceptible and take place over decades, and sometimes they are dramatic and world-shaking. For Deleuze, thought begins from cramped spaces where one is hemmed in by the forces of subjection. It is not an act of individual will, but a scream that interrupts unbearable forces, opening space for more active combat. This is why so many movements and struggles begin with a scream of refusal: NO, ¡Ya Basta!, Enough!, Fuck off. They interrupt Empire’s powers of subjection and make new practices and new worlds possible. One spark of refusal can lead to an upwelling of collective rage and insurrection. In this way, joy can erupt from despair, rage, hopelessness, resentment, or other so-called “negative” emotions.
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Jouissance is difficult to pin down because it is movement and transformation itself. By breaking the divide between pleasure and pain, it undoes habits that hold subjects in place. ..A paradox of joy is that it can’t be described fully; it is always embodied differently, as different struggles open up more space for people to change and be changed. In fact, to grip it, to nail it down, to claim to represent it fully would be to turn it into a dead image divorced from its lively unfolding. The way to participate in joyful transformation is through immersion in it, which is impossible if one is always standing back, evaluating, or attempting to control things. .t
Another part of why joyful transformation is difficult to talk about is because of the inheritance of a dualistic, patriarchal worldview in which “real” change is supposed to be measurable and observable, and “intelligence” is the capacity for a detached engineering of outcomes. t
intellectness as cancerous distraction we can’t seem to let go of.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
Rather than trying to rationally direct the course of events, an affective politics is about learning to participate more actively in the forces that compose the world and oneself. This is what Spinoza meant by intelligence. Supporting joy cannot be achieved through a detached rationality, but only through attunement to relationships, feelings, and forces—a practical wisdom that supports flourishing and experimentation.[27] This is how organizer and militant researcher Marina Sitrin put it when we spoke with her:
still cancerous distraction
endnote 27: This notion of wisdom is drawn from Claire Carlisle’s helpful explanation of Spinozan wisdom as something akin to “emotional intelligence.” See Claire Carlisle, “Spinoza, Part 7: On the Ethics of the Self,” The Guardian, March 21, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/21/spinoza-ethics-of-the-self.
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Militant about joy
We want to connect joy to militancy for a number of reasons. We are interested in how the capacity for refusal and the willingness to fight can be enabling, relational, and can open up potentials for collective struggle and movement, in ways that are not necessarily associated with control, duty, or vanguardism. We want an expansive conception of militancy that affirms the potential of transformation at the expense of comfort, safety, or predictability.
can’t.. any form of m\a\p
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Starting from where people find themselves
Joy arises not from the pursuit of a distant goal, but through struggle in one’s own situation. It often erupts through the capacity to say no, to refuse, or to attack the debilitating form of life offered up by Empire. It might come through a riot or a barricade. Or it might come about by refusing Empire’s offers of insipid happiness, or through the capacity to be present with grief. Ultimately it is up to people to figure this out for themselves by composing gestures, histories, relationships, feelings, textures, world events, neighborhoods, ancestors, languages, tools, and bodies in a way that enables something new, deepening a crack in Empire. This is at odds with the stiff, macho militancy that attempts to control change from above. It cannot be a kind of more-radical-than-you stance that occupies a fixed position or argues for a single way forward.
not joy.. just enduring ness.. just anti ness
*How do we create situations where we feel more alive and capable than before?. t What makes the intransigence of oppression feel a little less stable? What might create more room to move and breathe? What supports people to refuse the all-too-common traps of moralism, clarity, or perfectionism in favor of increasing collective power and creativity? The answers to these questions are infinitely varied and complex. Being militant about collective, enabling transformation is about trust in people’s capacities to figure out this way forward together, along with a willingness to participate openly in the process.
*easy.. people are doing it all over the place.. what we need is a means for something legit diff.. something beyond ‘more than before’ ness.. part\ial ness is killing us softly w its song
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
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Chapter 2: Friendship, Freedom, Ethics, Affinity
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Friendship is the root of freedom
These are not just words; they are clues and prods to earthquakes in kin making that are not limited to Western family apparatuses, heteronormative or not.
—Donna Haraway
Freedom and friendship used to mean the same thing: intimate, interdependent relationships and the commitment to face the world together. *At its root, relational freedom isn’t about being unrestricted: it might mean the capacity for interconnectedness and attachment. Or mutual support and care. Or shared gratitude and openness to an uncertain world. Or a **new capacity to fight alongside others. But this is not what freedom has come to mean under Empire.
*this .. maté basic needs.. **not this
Look for the dictionary definition of “freedom” today and you’ll find rights, absences and lack of restrictions at the core, applied to an isolated individual. Here are some of its definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary:
The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants:
“we do have some freedom of choice”
The state of not being imprisoned or enslaved:
“the shark thrashed its way to freedom”
The state of not being subject to or affected by (something undesirable):
“government policies to achieve freedom from want”
At bottom, all of these definitions are about *getting away from external restriction or influence: being unhindered, unaffected, independent. Under capitalism, freedom is especially associated with free markets and the free agent who chooses based on individual preferences. In spite of colonization and capitalism, this vapid form of freedom still can’t get a foothold in many parts of the world. Even in Europe, where so many tools of colonization were refined, the roots of freedom were different. Centuries ago, some Europeans had a more relational conception of freedom, which wasn’t just about the absence of external constraints, but also about our immersion in the relationships that sustain us and make us thrive.
*actually this .. from any form of m\a\p
“Freedom” and “friend” share the same early Indo-European root: fri-, or pri-, meaning “love.” This root made its way into Gothic, Norse, Celtic, Hindi, Russian, and German. A thousand years ago, the Germanic word for “friend” was the present participle of the verb freon, “to love.” This language also had an adjective, *frija-. It meant “free” as in “not in slavery,” where the reason to avoid slavery was to be among loved ones. Frija meant “beloved, belonging to the circle of one’s beloved friends and family.” As the Invisible Committee writes in To Our Friends,
“Friend” and “free” in English … come from the same Indo-European root, which conveys the idea of a shared power that grows. Being free and having ties was one and the same thing. I am free because I have ties, because I am linked to a reality greater than me.”
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A few centuries later, freedom became untied from connectedness. The seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes imagined freedom as nothing more than an “absence of opposition” possessed by isolated, selfish individuals. For Hobbes, the free man is constantly armed and on guard: “When going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests.” The free individual lives in fear, and can only feel secure when he knows there are laws and police to protect him and his possessions. He is definitely he, because this individual is also founded on patriarchal male supremacy and its associated divisions of mind/body, aggression/submission, rationality/emotion, and so on. His so-called autonomy is inseparable from his exploitation of others.
When peasants were “freed,” during this period, it often meant that they had been forced from their lands and their means of subsistence, leaving them “free” to sell their labor for a wage in the factories, or starve. It is no coincidence that these lonely conceptions of freedom arose at the same time as the European witch trials, the enclosure of common lands, the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, and the colonization and genocide of the Americas. At the same time as the meaning of freedom was divorced from friendship and connection, the lived connections between people and places were being dismembered.
As Empire was enclosing lands and bodies, it was overseeing the enclosure of thought as well. The Age of Reason was marked by a new kind of knowledge that could subdue and control nature and the human body, enabling capitalist rationalization and work discipline. Time and space would become measurable, stable, and fixed. Bodies were no longer conduits for magical forces, but machines to be harnessed for production. Plants, animals, and other non-human creatures were no longer kin, but objects to be dissected and consumed.
intellectness as cancerous distraction
Even among intellectuals in Europe, not everyone agreed with Hobbes’s fearful vision of freedom and the divisions imposed by Cartesian thought. Descartes’s contemporary, Baruch Spinoza, articulated a philosophy in which people were inherently intertwined with their world. Spinoza left instructions for his most important work, the Ethics, to be published after his death, because he knew he would likely face torture and execution for the ways his relational worldview undermined both monotheistic religion and the dualistic philosophy that was emerging during his own time. Instead of a passive Nature on one hand and an active, supernatural God on the other, Spinoza envisioned a holistic reality in which God is present in all things, and in which all things are active and dynamic processes. Everything is alive and connected. Mind and body, human and non-human, joy and sadness, are intertwined with one another.
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We do not mean to present Spinoza’s philosophy as a handbook for living in today’s world. In many ways, Spinoza remained a product of his time and place: he used the geometric method to create proofs for his philosophical claims, he couldn’t overcome patriarchal divisions, and he remained wedded to the state as a vehicle for security. Our interest is not in Spinoza himself, or even his philosophy as a whole, but in the way that his ideas are part of a minor current in Western thought that is more relational, holistic, and dynamic. Spinoza’s work remains marginal compared to that of Descartes and Hobbes, but his relational worldview has nevertheless been taken up by radicals at the margins of philosophy, ecology, feminism, marxism and anarchism.
Most importantly, for us, Spinoza’s philosophy is grounded in affect. Things are not defined by what they are, but by what they do: how they affect and are affected by the forces of the world. In this way, capabilities are not fixed for all time, but are constantly shifting. This is a fundamental departure from the inherently ableist and ageist perspective that measures all bodies in relation to the norm of a “healthy,” “mature,” or “able” body. When starting right from a body’s material specificity, without any intervening “should,” learning becomes fundamentally different: rather than detached categorization or observation of stable properties, it happens through active experimentation in shared, ever-changing situations.
perhaps let’s just let go of defining things..
From morality to ethics
By creating a philosophy based in affect, Spinoza initiated a radical critique of ruling institutions and authorities and the ways they exercise control through subjection, including toxic morality inherited from centuries of Christianity, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and the state. But Spinoza’s philosophy did not just undermine Empire’s dominant morality in order to replace it with a different one; it undermined morality itself. His worldview was at odds with any notion of an ultimate ground of right and wrong that was uniform for everyone, abstracted from the lively flux of relationships and situations. For Spinoza, life was an exploration of the forces of the world, not conformity to a fixed ideal.
For moralists this is dangerous because there’s no *guarantee against evil, and no ultimate foundation for moral **judgment. Yet the Spinozan lineage is not about everyone doing whatever they please, according to isolated interests and preferences. On the contrary, ***recognizing our interconnectedness means becoming capable of more fidelity to our web of relations and our situations, not less. ****This fidelity is not moral; it is ethical.
*gershenfeld something else law sans any **judge\ment
***thurman interconnectedness law
****see p6 of poverty of joyful militancy
endnotes ref michael hardt, antonio negri, gilles deleuze, as influenced by and resource for spinozian ideas
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Ethics is often spoken of colloquially as an individual morality: a static set of principles held by individuals (ethical consumption, codes of ethics, and so on). In fact, dictionary definitions conflate ethics with the “moral principles that govern a person’s behavior.” But as Deleuze explains, a Spinozan conception of ethics results in a completely different set of questions:
There’s a fundamental difference between Ethics and Morality. Spinoza doesn’t make up a morality, for a very simple reason: he never asks what we must do, he always asks what we are capable of, what’s in our power, ethics is a problem of power, never a problem of duty. In this sense Spinoza is profoundly immoral. Regarding the moral problem, good and evil, he has a happy nature because he doesn’t even comprehend what this means. What he comprehends are good encounters, bad encounters, increases and diminutions of power. Thus he makes an ethics and not at all a morality.
*Whereas morality asks and answers the question: “what should one do?” a Spinozan ethics asks: “what is one capable of?” Unlike the cold abstraction of morality, a body’s capacities can only be discovered through attunement and experimentation, **starting right where you are. You never know until you try. In trying, whether you “succeed” or “fail,” you will have learned and changed, and the situation will have changed, even if only slightly. This sounds simple, and in many ways it is. It speaks to the ways that many of us already try to navigate our everyday lives: not by adhering to fixed commandments, but by learning to **inhabit our own situations in ways that make us more capable and more jointly alive.
agree.. but hari rat park law
Someone gets in touch with bird migrations, insects, weather patterns: they affect her more and more deeply as she tunes into their rhythms, over months and years. They begin to make her up. The loss is palpable as fewer return each year, and her hatred of the destruction grows alongside her love of the few remaining refuges for non-human creatures where she lives. Her rage and despair finds resonance with others, similarly entwined, and they figure out how to fight together. This is neither individual self-interest, nor moral altruism. It is relational ethics: the willingness to nurture and defend relationships.
hari rat park law
Two friends fold their lives together; they draw new capacities out of each other. They hurt each other, and they work through it, emerging more intertwined than before. They are no longer sure which ideas and mannerisms were “their own” and which belonged to the friend. They know each other’s triggers and tendencies, intimately. One finds himself in trouble, and the other drops everything to help, at great personal risk. But this risk and sacrifice is not because it is morally right, or because they have calculated that it is in their own self-interest. It is not even felt as a choice; it is something drawn out of them.
hari rat park law.. so this is whalespeak
Ethics is the dynamic space beyond static morality and vapid self-interest: it is the capacity to be *responsive to the relationships that make us up. Whether consciously or not, our desires and *choices are the product of everything that affects us. While this kind of thinking and practice may be intuitive, it runs against dominant strands of both Western knowledge and morality, which strive for universalism and generalizability: they tend towards **pinning things down, dictating how we should act, or predicting what is likely. They ask what humans are and always will be, what we should always do, or what we usually do (and how we can be controlled). In contrast, a Spinozan ethics is attuned to the singularity and openness of each situation: what are we capable of here and now, together, at this time, in this place, amid the relations in which we are embedded?
*this .. same song as **this
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From this perspective, it is not about creating self-contained units, but about participating in complex, shifting, relational processes. We always begin in the middle: amid our situations, in our neighborhoods, with our own penchants, habits, loves, complicities, and connections. There is no individual that comes before the dense network of relations in which we’re embedded. This relational space eludes the traps of individual self-interest and moral duty. It is a space beyond isolated individuals and altruistic saviors. We are always participating in the making of our worlds, and being made by them. From this perspective, freedom can mean nothing other than the ethical expansion of what we’re capable of—what we’re able to feel and do together. In this vein, the Invisible Committee writes,
e
Freedom isn’t the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them … the freedom to uproot oneself has always been a fantasmic freedom. We can’t rid ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied.
in sea world.. not if legit free
Freedom here is not the absence of restriction or attachment, but the capacity to become more active in shaping our attachments..t This becoming-active is not about controlling things, but about learning to participate in their flow, forming intense bonds through which we become implicated in each other’s struggles and capacities. Within the Spinozan current, friendship is being revalued: not as a bond between individuals, but as an ethical relation that remakes us, together, in an ongoing process of becoming otherwise. Similarly, feminist philosopher Donna Haraway has argued that “making kin” across divides of species, nation, gender, and other borders is perhaps the most urgent task today..t Through friendship or kinship we undo ourselves and become new, in potentially radical and dangerous ways. In this sense, friendship is at the root of freedom.
if legit free.. legit attachments.. then restriction ness become irrelevant s
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
What can friendship do?
Friendship will be the soil from which a new politics will emerge.
—Ivan Illich
nika on friendship
Can friendship be revalued as a radical, transformative form of kinship? We are not sure, but we want to try. Maybe the concept of friendship is already too colonized by liberalism and capitalism. Under neoliberalism, friendship is a banal affair of private preferences: we hang out, we share hobbies, we make small talk. We become friends with those who are already like us, and we keep each other comfortable, rather than becoming different and more capable together. The algorithms of Facebook and other social networks guide us towards the refinement of our profiles, reducing friendship to the click of a button. This neoliberal friend is the alternative to hetero- and homonormative coupling: “just friends” implies a much weaker and insignificant bond than a lover could ever be. Under neoliberal friendship, we don’t have each other’s backs, and our lives aren’t tangled up together. But these insipid tendencies do not mean that friendships are pointless; only that friendship is a terrain of struggle. Empire works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake, and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination..t Perhaps friendship can be revalued in an expansive but specific way: friends, chosen family, and other kin, intimately connected in a web of mutual support.
aka: sea world
graeber violence in care law..
huge
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Intersecting currents of disability justice, youth liberation, queer movements, feminism, ecology, anarchism, Indigenous resurgence, and Black liberation have all emphasized the centrality of nurturing strong relationships. In our conversation with Glen Coulthard, he emphasized that joyful militancy can never be an individual choice, because transformation happens in and through relationships:
The first move toward some sort of self-affirmation or resurgence is often registered in a very negative reaction: hate, envy, these sorts of things … ..It’s not the effect of doing relationships well; it’s because we’re already in relationships of solidarity. We’re helping each other out, we’re drawing people out of the negative into more positive relationships. Joyful militants aren’t choosing and saying “oh, I’m going to do this.”
‘in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows
hange comes not from individuals, but from this *“constant working on each other,” which we have called ethics and relational freedom. It might entail supporting each other to become more present with despair, guilt, resentment, fear, or grief. It might include channeling anger into attacking Empire, blocking its flows, or breaking its hold, at least in part. Freedom is the space that opens when knee-jerk reactions and stifling habits are suspended. **It is the parent learning to trust their kid. It is the teen who flees a violent home with support from friends. It is the scream of refusal that elicits rage and action from others. But the key is that one never does any of this alone, whether a humble gesture causing a subtle shift, or a decisive act catalyzing dramatic change. Freedom, gentleness, and militancy always come from—and feed back into—the ***web of relationships and affections in which everyone is immersed.
*structural violence.. spiritual violence.. cancerous distraction..
**sea world.. whalespeak
***have to get out of sea world first
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By creating relational webs that reinforce the values we aspire to, relationships can help undo patterns that Empire has ingrained. Loving relationships can be what allow us to face the things we fear about ourselves. They can help undo the ways that we have internalized notions that we are not good enough, not worthy of love, or that we have to put up with things that deplete us and those we care about. Relationships of mutual love and support can enable us to see and feel the toxicity of some of our attachments. They can help us to look at our patterns of addiction or depression without shame. Those we love can be our reasons to stay alive when we aren’t sure that we want to. They can help us leave miserable situations by leaping with us into the unknown. Friendships can be the source of our capacity to take risks and get in the way of violence and exploitation. They can be what make us dangerous and capable of fighting in new ways. This might be something like what “friend” meant to some of our European ancestors before the witch trials: not just someone to hang out with, but someone whose existence is inseparable from one’s own. A relationship crucial to life, worth fighting for.
cancerous distraction since we now have means to detox leap
A persnickety linguist or historian might object that there is no unbroken line of insurgent friendship that lies hidden in history. These critics are right: it is a zigzagging, disjointed line, always being broken and reassembled, a story among other stories, resonant with many other non-European genealogies of relational freedom. But this elusiveness is what makes it precious and powerful: it is people’s capacity to constantly form new complicities amid terror and violence.
perhaps until now
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
Solidarity begins at home
I don’t need to be empowered by adults; I need them to stop having power over me.
—Lilah Joy Bergman, age 9
sans any form of m\a\p
While friendship is made vapid by Empire, coupledom and the nuclear family become the container for all other forms of intimacy. As anti-racist, Indigenous, and autonomist feminists have shown, the nuclear family—where one generation of parents lives with one generation of children, separated from everyone else—is a recent invention of Empire. It was (and is) a crucial institution for the privatization and enclosure of life. It is also central to the maintenance of a culture of authoritarianism, abuse, and neglect that underpins heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. It evolved as a way of reproducing wage-laboring men through the unpaid labor of women..t Violence against women and children within the family was condoned as part of a civilizing process, and it became a conduit for intergenerational violence, and for the accumulation of white wealth and property through inheritance.
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Through feminist struggle, some of the most brutal, state-sanctioned violences of the nuclear family (such as legalized rape and abuse) have been challenged, but it remains a site of isolation and violence, for children in particular. One of its most brutal effects is that it makes other forms of intimacy difficult or unthinkable for many of us. Through suburbs and apartments designed for a privatized existence, the nuclear family is even coded into the built environment..
huge.. and ugh
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Creating intergenerational webs of intimacy and support is a radical act in a world that has privatized child-rearing, housing, subsistence and decision-making. Challenging the nuclear family is not about a puritanical rejection of anything that resembles it; it is about creating alternatives to its hegemony, to the dismembering of social relations, to the spatial division of people through suburbanization, incarceration, schooling, dispossession, and displacement. This entails the proliferation of relationships that may or may not be based on blood but are built on care and love.
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Sometimes these divisions get in the way of our capacity to connect in ways that are enabling and transformative. Patriarchy has socialized Nick, as a man, to be self-assured, (over)confident, rational, and individualistic. carla has been socialized to be submissive, caring, diffident, and to put others before herself
The ethics of affinity in anarchism
Landauer also argued that the state’s power lies not only with armies or police, but in its capacity to get us to govern ourselves and each other, and to recreate its hierarchical and divisive relationships through our conduct:
A table can be overturned and a window can be smashed. However, those who believe that the state is also a thing or a fetish that can be overturned or smashed are sophists and believers in the Word. The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently..t
who’s together in a space.. huge
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In a way that resonates with many anti-authoritarian currents of today, Landauer refused to hold anarchism up as a single moral or ideological project that would free all of humanity from oppression. But while refusing this universalizing project, Landauer was also critical of individualist anarchists like Max Stirner, who also refused morality but rooted his philosophy in the liberation of the individual ego or desire. In contrast, Landauer insisted that individual people could not be abstracted from their already existing relationships, values, and communities. Like the state, the self-enclosed individual is a fiction of Empire. “I” am already a crowd, enmeshed in others.
today we can.. if we all are.. humanity needs a leap.. to get back/to simultaneous spontaneity .. simultaneous fittingness.. everyone in sync..
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These capacities are not based on abstract morality, nor are they about having the most bang-on anticolonial analysis. They are based on a web of connectivity that enables people to think and act differently.
aka: imagine if we ness
Friendship and freedom have sharp edges
If one would have a friend, then must one also be willing to wage war for him: and in order to wage war, one must be capable of being an enemy.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
oi.. has to be sans us & them ness
Working on relationships also means the capacity to dissolve and sever them, and to block those which are harmful. Affinity and bridging require selective openness, with firm boundaries. In this sense, cultivating joyful militancy not only requires cultivating “good” relationships, but also severing those that are unhealthy and damaging. Coulthard drove this point home when we talked with him:
oi..rather.. hari rat park law
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Relational freedom necessarily includes undoing destructive relationships, dissolving or attacking depleting or harmful forces. Freedom is the capacity to make friends and enemies, to be open and to have firm boundaries. Joyful, deeply transformative relationships are only possible through vulnerability and trust, but they also entail the risk of being deeply hurt. In this context, Mia Mingus speaks to the importance of a kind of love that is assertive and accountable:
oi.. again has to be sans us & them ness.. sans any form of m\a\p
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For us, this gets at the danger of setting up friendship or affinity as an ideal, norm, or expectation, *especially across the colonial divide and other hierarchical divisions created by Empire. While Simpson speaks to the importance of building trust and friendship among Indigenous people, she is clear that settlers (particularly white settlers seeking to be allies) **often end up perpetuating extractive, entitled tendencies. For settlers, getting out of the way might be more important than seeking connection.
**always.. as long as still in sea world
Just as intimacy and closeness can be enabling, they can also be sources of coercion, manipulation, and exploitation. To insist on, seek out, or use friendship—and to pathologize its refusal—tends to reinforce these divisions and hierarchies, rather than unravel them. It regenerates the worst of Empire, where oppressed people are expected to stay in oppressive relationships, and their refusal is dismissed as “counterproductive.”
58
who has experienced the liberal trope of “let’s all get along.” Entitlement to others’ time, energy, and love can be an unconscious strategy that reproduces domination through intimacy. Love and friendship can be contorted to erase power and exploitation, enforcing obedience to oppressive norms of politeness or devotion.
If relationships are what compose the world—and what shape our desires, values, and capacities—then freedom is the capacity to participate more actively in this process of composition. Friendship and resistance are interconnected: when we are supported, we are more willing to confront that which threatens to destroy our worlds. Friendship and affinity are not things but processes and open questions, which produce partial responses, further questions, flashes of certainty and confidence, but never definitive answers.
cancerous distractions.. need diff affinity ness..
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
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Chapter 3: Trust and Responsibility as Common Notions
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Trust and responsibility as common notions
It is clear that capitalism—administered by left- and right-wing governments—is a disaster for people, non-humans, and the earth. However, cynicism and disillusionment do not necessarily lead to revolt or struggle. Empire’s capacity for decentralized control no longer relies on legitimacy or faith. We do not have to believe capitalism is good for us, or that the state will help and protect us, so long as we remain enmeshed in Empire’s radical monopoly over life, from schooling to law to the built environment that surrounds us.
aka: sea world
In this chapter, we suggest that *trust and responsibility are emerging in Empire’s cracks. This is not about one way of trusting or a fixed set of responsibilities, but about the proliferation of different forms. A lot of what we get at in this chapter comes from carla’s longstanding involvement in youth and kids’ liberation movements, which **fundamentally upend some of the basic assumptions embedded in many forms of organizing. To create intergenerational spaces where kids can thrive means holding space for play and emergence by warding off the twin pitfalls of ***individualism and conformity. This requires nurturing a baseline of trust, responsibility, and autonomy. We also draw on other movements that we have learned from and been challenged by, including Indigenous resurgence, transformative justice, and anti-violence, all of which emphasize the importance of relationship-based trust and responsibility.
*if responsibility ness .. not trust
**not fudamentally if still any form of m\a\p
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Similarly, Marina Sitrin argues that “groups that are grounded in trust and affect tend to be more militant...Across North America and beyond, many Indigenous peoples are clear that their militancy stems from a responsibility to protect Indigenous land and life, animated by grounded normativities that we explored in the last chapter.
oi.. red flag
So what does it mean to nurture trust and responsibility? What do these concepts even mean today? Often trust is a catch-all word that suggests *there is only one all-or-nothing way to trust, and **this is part of the problem. Similarly, responsibility can be turned into a reductive set of stifling norms or duties. We want to walk with these questions: are there different kinds of trust? What makes it possible to trust people up front, without knowing them well? What does a joyful responsibility look and feel like? ***How can trust and responsibility be conceived and lived in ways that are open and enabling, rather than being imposed as fixed moral duties?
*if not unconditional.. not legit trust .. and rather **this the problem
***if responsibility ness.. imposed
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As common notions, trust and responsibility are emergent values connected to specific practices, movements, and forms of life. *A learned trust—in situations, in others, and in one’s own capacities—is in this sense an unfolding process. To trust in transformation is to undo fear and control. Similarly, the forms of responsibility we are discussing are not enshrined in law and formal agreements, but emerge instead through a sense of feeling **invited to participate in the world, care for others and be cared for, support and be supported.
*cancerous distraction.. if think have to learn it.. already scrambled
**oi.. invited vs invented ness
(Mis)trust and (ir)responsibility under Empire
Working through trust and responsibility is difficult because both of these words have been so thoroughly colonized by Empire. An important place to begin, we think, is with the ways that Empire sows mistrust and destroys our capacity for **collective responsibility by making us dependent on its destructive, depleting, violent ways of life.
rather.. *language as control/enclosure
**see.. already cancerously distracted
Many people’s impulse is to mistrust others from the start, and it makes sense, given that many of us have been living Hobbes’s dream, made real, for centuries. Most everyone we know has been touched by some kind of oppression and abuse, and Empire’s oppressive divisions often lead people to betray even their most intimate relations. For instance, feminists have coined the term “gaslighting” to get at a common patriarchal dynamic that undermines the perceptions of women and femmes by second-guessing, explaining away, and denying their experiences and insights. Gaslighting can be subtle and unintentional, but as feminist writer Nora Samaran explains, it is particularly insidious because it undermines people’s trust in their own capacities:
hari present in society law.. hari rat park law.. gaslighting
In other words, our capacity to know ourselves is immensely powerful.
why we need a legit nother way.. to undo hierarchical listening
All forms of oppression seem to have this tendency: racism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, ageism, colonization, and other systems of oppression contort people’s insights, experiences and differences into weaknesses or deny them outright. For this reason, the emergence of trust can be a powerful weapon, which is being recovered all the time through struggle.
oi.. if weapon not trust
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For many of us, mistrust in ourselves and others started when we were kids, and in a lot of cases in our homes. When they’re really young, kids are curious, open, vulnerable, and capable of radically trusting those around them, and this tends to get sucked out of them from many directions by Empire and the kinds of hierarchical and competitive relationships it promotes. One of the most damaging forms of distrust is built into modern disciplinary institutions, and schooling in particular. As organizer and scholar Matt Hern writes,
not yet scrambled ness.. supposed to’s of school/work ..
black science of people/whales law
At school children are always monitored, and schooled parents believe that they should similarly be constantly monitoring their offspring, in the name of safety. The last decades of this century has seen an exponential growth in concern for children’s daily safety, particularly in cities, and most parents I come into contact with want to keep a very close eye on their kids. This is a laudable concern, and one I share, yet I have a deep suspicion of the equation that safety = surveillance. There is a threshold where our concerned eye becomes over-monitoring and disabling, an authoritarian presence shaping our kids’ lives.
Hern is not singling out certain parents as oppressive, and he implicates himself in this, too. He is pointing to the collective inheritance of a way of life that divorces people from their capacities to trust each other. The model for inculcating these values was (and is) intense discipline and control: kids are encased in concrete for over a decade, trained to sit still, memorize, and obey authority. As the political theorist Toby Rollo has argued, it is no coincidence that colonization, racism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism all tell stories that constitute oppressed and dispossessed people as children. Empire conceives its Others as untrustworthy and lacking maturity, health, morality, knowledge, civilization, and rationality, and so they have all been targets for education, confinement, and control—or for total eradication and genocide.
Empire’s radical monopoly over life
Ivan Illich was a prominent radical intellectual in the 1970s, but aside from his radical critique of schooling, is not well-known today. For Illich, modern schooling was only one of the many ways that dependence was being entrenched—a dependence not only on capitalist production and consumption, but on a whole violent, industrialized, disciplined, and controlled way of life. His concept of radical monopoly points to something more systematic than the control over a particular market by a particular firm. Instead, radical monopoly gets at the way that Empire monopolizes life itself: how people relate to each other, how they get around, how they get their sustenance, and the whole texture of everyday life. A world built for cars forces out other ways of moving, and modern building codes and bylaws make it impossible and illegal for people to build their own dwellings, or even to live together at all if they cannot pass as a nuclear family. Modern medicine does not just create a new way of understanding the body: its scientific understanding is premised on a radical monopoly over health, and the subjugation (or commodification) of other healing traditions. To be healthy under Empire is to be a properly functioning, able-bodied, neurotypical individual capable of work, and to be sick often means becoming medicalized: isolated, confined, and dependent on strangers and experts. Law, policing, and prisons monopolize the field of justice by enforcing cycles of punishment and incarceration, forcing out the capacity of people to protect each other and resolve conflicts themselves. The rise of industrial agriculture has been accompanied by a loss of the convivial relations surrounding subsistence: the connection to the growing and processing of food, the intimacy with ecosystems and seasons it entails, and the collective rituals, celebrations, and practices that have accompanied these traditions. Empire’s infrastructure induces dependence on forms of production, specialized knowledge, expertise, and tools that detach people from their capacities to learn, grow, build, produce, and take care of each other.
ivan illich.. hari rat park law.. hari present in society law.. supposed to’s of school/work
aka: sea world
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Since Illich wrote, these monopolies have folded into ever more diffuse and generalized forms of control, sunk deeper into the fabric of life. Deleuze called this new form of power taking shape over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries “control societies.” Rather than telling people exactly what to do, this mode of power regularizes life, calling forth certain ways of living and feeling, and making other forms of life die. Surveillance no longer ends when one exits a particular institution: through social media, smartphones, browsing histories, and credit cards, surveillance is ubiquitous, continuous, and increasingly participatory. We are enjoined to share, consume, and express ourselves, and every choice feeds back into algorithms that predict our habits and preferences with ever increasing precision. The performance of self-expression is constantly encouraged, and as the Institute for Precarious Consciousness writes, “Our success in this performance in turn affects everything from our ability to access human warmth to our ability to access means of subsistence, not just in the form of the wage but also in the form of credit.” Under this apparatus, there is little room for silence, nuance, listening, exploration, or the rich subtleties of tone and body language. Anything too intense or subversive is either incorporated or surgically removed by security, police, or emergency personnel. Class, anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, ableism and other structured forms of violence are coded into the algorithms that make everyone a potential terrorist, thief, or error. Even those who are supposed to enjoy the most—those who can afford the newest screens and the most expensive forms of consumption—are inducted into a state of nearly constant distraction, numbness, and anxiety.
since forever
Perpetual individualization obscures the crushing collective effects of Empire. When this form of control is working, interactions are hypervisible, superficial, predictable, and self-managed. To be constantly mistrusted and controlled is also to be detached from one’s own capacity to experiment, make mistakes, and learn without instruction or coercion. To internalize the responsibilities of neoliberal individualism is to sink into the mesh of control and subjection. The responsible economic subject owns her own property, pays her own debts, invests in her future, and meets her needs and desires through consumption. She is individually responsible for her health, her economic situation, her life prospects, and even her emotional states. These forms of subjection make it difficult to imagine—let alone participate in—collective alternatives. From the dependence on armed strangers to resolve conflicts, to the hum of an extraction-fuelled world, to the glow of screens that beckon attention, to the stranglehold of policy and bureaucracy, to the intergenerational violence and abuse that permeate lovers and families, Empire is constantly entrenching dependence on a world that makes joy, trust, and responsibility difficult.
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It is not a question of revealing this to people, as if they are dupes. Struggling amid these forms of control means grappling with their affective hold on us and our daily lives. Anxiety, addiction, and depression are not merely secrets to reveal or illusions to dispel. Preaching about Empire’s horrors can stoke cynicism or ironic detachment rather than undoing subjection. One can still feel bound and depleted, despite one’s awareness. Empire’s subjects are “free” to be mistrustful and resentful of the system under which they live. One can hate Empire as much as one wants, as long as one continues to work, pay rent, and consume. There is no simple correspondence between intentions and actions, as if the problem is simply figuring out what to do and doing it. Undoing subjection is not about conscious opposition, or finding a way to be happy amidst misery. Challenging Empire’s radical monopoly over life means interrupting its affective and infrastructural hold, undoing some of our existing attachments and desires, and creating new ones..t
we need a problem deep enough to resonate w/8bn today.. a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough to set/keep 8bn legit free
ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8bn today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8bn legit free
Towards conviviality
Most people who have lived through any moment where formal institutions of power go away, or are forced away, agree with this point. When left alone, when left with one another, people turn to one another and use forms of mutual aid and support. The wake of the break is a beautiful opening up of possibility.”
—Marina Sitrin
At Empire’s edges, in its cracks, people are finding each other, recovering subjugated knowledges, revaluing their own traditions, pushing back against discipline and control. In dramatic uprisings and slow shifts, people are reconnecting with their own powers and capacities to make, act, live, and fight together. Conviviality is the name that Illich gives to ways of life that promote flourishing, which are being squeezed out by Empire:
v
I choose the term “conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value.
Illich’s conception of conviviality resonates with the relational form of freedom we explored in the last chapter. Conviviality names the creative relationships that emerge between people and their material surroundings, sustained by grassroots trust and responsibility. In other words, it is Illich’s name for joy sustained by common notions. Conviviality helps clarify that joy is not simply something felt by an individual, but the effect of enabling assemblages of bodies, tools, gestures, and relationships. It is not about a utopian future or a romantic past, but about breaking from dependence on Empire’s stifling infrastructures. This is most evident after natural disasters and during insurrections, when some of Empire’s radical monopolies are dramatically short-circuited.
need deeper than responsibility ness
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While these situations often trigger elite fear-mongering and fascist vigilantism, they are also spaces where joyful and convivial forms of life blossom, as people discover—in haphazard, decentralized, and emergent ways—how to live without Empire’s crushing monopolies. Here is what one anonymous participant had to say about their experience of the uprising in Cairo, Egypt, where people famously took over Tahrir Square:
Cairo was never more alive than during the first Tahrir Square. *Since nothing was functioning anymore, everyone took care of what was around them. People took charge of the garbage collecting, swept the walkways and sometimes even repainted them; they drew frescos on the walls and they looked after each other. **Even the traffic had become miraculously fluid, since there were no more traffic controllers. What we suddenly realized is that we had been robbed of our simplest gestures, those that make the city ours and make it something we belong to. At Tahrir Square, people would arrive and spontaneously ask themselves what they could do to help. They would go to the kitchen, or to stretcher the wounded, work on banners or shields or slingshots, join discussions, make up songs. We realized that the state organization was actually the maximum disorganization, because it depended on negating the human ability to self-organize. At Tahrir, no one gave any orders. Obviously, if someone had got it in their heads to organize all that, it would have immediately turned into chaos.
Similar accounts can be found by people who have lived through disasters and insurrections throughout the world. For example, the upwelling of autonomy, experimentation, and joy was palpable in the Argentinean uprising that began in 2001. While corporate media and politicians framed it as a chaotic, short-lived riot, Marina Sitrin has shown how autonomous forms of life have endured, despite challenges, for over a decade. Workers have taken over factories and learned to run them collectively, without bosses, through a process of autogestion, or worker self-management. This is not merely a transition from top-down factory production to cooperative production, but a process of transformative struggle in which whole neighborhoods defended factories against police and capitalists. Similarly, the neighborhood assemblies that formed through the uprising have created new ways for people to resolve conflicts and support each other without relying on the state.
cancerous distraction iotunless sans any form of m\a\p
Anywhere that Empire’s form of life is suspended, emergent capacities to live otherwise rush in. Through struggle and experimentation, people formulate problems and respond to them together, taking responsibility for collective work and care, and bonds of trust take hold.
not trust
Rebecca Solnit speaks to the emergence of conviviality and joy amid disasters in her book A Paradise Built in Hell:
In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressive savage human being has little truth to it
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Solnit documents and interviews the survivors of several disasters, including earthquakes and hurricanes, economic collapses, and terrorist attacks. Consistently she finds that in the wake of disaster it is mainly elites who panic and resort to violence. Furthermore, bureaucratic disaster relief tends to entrench misery and despair. At the same time, in the midst of intense suffering and pain, large numbers of people engage in mutual aid and solidarity. In fact, many people reflect on their experiences of earthquakes, hurricanes, and even bombings as joyful experiences in the Spinozan sense, in which they feel more alive and connected to others. Without top-down organization or bureaucracies, they coordinate food and medical supplies, take care of injured and sick people, and defend themselves in ways that are decentralized but not disorganized.
imagine if we were to org around legit needs
Why is there joy in disaster? Solnit suggests that it is because Empire’s debilitating monopolies on life are suspended: “If paradise now arises in hell, it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act in another way.” Solnit is not arguing that we should wish for disasters. What her argument exposes is that everyday life under Empire is already a certain kind of ongoing and seemingly intractable disaster, in a world where distraction, anxiety, individualism, and dependence have become normalized. What is enlivening about disasters is the emergent capacity they unleash for trust, responsibility, care, and simply being present and feeling connected.
The upwelling of conviviality and joyful forms of life is only one tendency among others in situations where control is abated. Alongside these are other tendencies: waves of sexualized violence, hoarding, bunkerism, fascist vigilantes, intimidation and violence from military and police, and desires for control based in fear and mistrust. To reinstall its rhythms, Empire must turn these moments into situations of extreme deprivation and violence so that its subjects can only experience the suspension of control as a horrifying prospect..t. The bubbling up of decentralized, convivial forms of life must be crushed as quickly as possible and “order” must be restored. In this sense, Empire’s means of counterinsurgency include not only police repression but also the liquidation of emergent orders, the stoking of divisions and terror, and the reinstallation of individualizing and isolating forms of life. People go back to their jobs, their houses, their smartphones, and control returns..t
But never completely. A key question is how to keep these relations alive in everyday life, even as Empire’s stultifying rhythms are reimposed. Among the stakes in these struggles, as we have suggested, is their potential to elicit responsiveness as people are drawn out of themselves and their routines. In an interview with Naomi Klein, Leanne Simpson insists that responsibility and reciprocity are the alternatives to settler colonial extractivism:
oi.. responsibility and reciprocity ness
Naomi: If extractivism is a mindset, a way of looking at the world, what is the alternative?
Leanne: Responsibility. Because I think when people extract things, they’re taking and they’re running and they’re using it for just their own good. *What’s missing is the responsibility. If you’re not developing relationships with the people, you’re not giving back, you’re not sticking around to see the impact of the extraction. You’re moving to someplace else. *The alternative is deep reciprocity. It’s respect, it’s relationship, it’s responsibility, and it’s local. If you’re forced to stay in your 50-mile radius, then you very much are going to experience the impacts of extractivist behavior. The only way you can shield yourself from that is when you get your food from around the world or from someplace else. So the more distance and the more globalization then the more shielded I am from the negative impacts of extractivist behavior.
*oi.. not..
cancerous distractions
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Deschooling and youth liberation
A third convivial current is deschooling and youth liberation, and the proliferation of alternatives to schooling that are led by kids and youth, including those who are in school. The Purple Thistle, co-created with youth in Vancouver, Canada, has been a vibrant example of this: it nurtured a space for youth not only to hang out, but to experiment and learn together without being controlled and supervised, to take collective responsibility for running the space, and to build strong bonds with each other.
The youth-run projects includ*ed a community garden, screenprinting, photography, graffiti, zine publishing, discussion groups, filmmaking, animation, film nights, a radical library, sound and music recording, graphic design, fiber and textile arts, and more. These initiatives were emergent, based on people’s desires and priorities. **carla was the “director” of the Thistle from 2009 until it closed in spring 2015, but her job was basically to do the bulk of the paper work, support and mentor when asked, and to work as kind of matchmaker connecting youth to mentors and apprenticeships both formal and informal. Overall, carla’s role as director was to function as an anchor to support the fluid and flexible relationships at the heart of the Thistle..t Other adults also supported the Thistle as anchors, co-directors, and mentors, but all day-to-day decisions were made by the youth-run collective and the various pods that sprang from it. As Matt Hern, Thistle co-founder and director before carla, said of the project,
*be you house – interview.. year 2 – the be you house
**need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
ie: need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
I like to think of the Thistle as being really easy in the way that school is hard and really hard in the way that school is easy. So, you go to school for example, or you go to a workplace, or you go to many institutions, you know exactly what you have to do, you know what’s expected of you, you don’t really have to think a whole lot. And that’s nice sometimes; you just walk through it: essentially just follow orders and do what you’re told and you’ll be fine. So it’s really easy in lots of ways. It’s also very difficult because that’s really hard for most people, and because you fight against it and you resist, but the Thistle turns that on its ass in lots of ways. So it’s really easy because no one is telling you what to do, you can do whatever you like, you can come and go as you like, you can figure out how you can access it. So it’s very easy but it’s also very difficult, ‘cause that’s a tremendous kind of responsibility
doesn’t have to be takes a lot of work ness
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The Thistle can be understood as a counter-institution, a flexible container where the participants themselves shaped roles and responsibilities in an open, experimental way. Such counter-institutions can prefigure trust and conviviality, creating space where these ways of relating can be tried out, become patterns and habits, and eventually take hold in new communities and projects.
Many of these relationships ran outside the walls of the Thistle, but were nevertheless vital for creating webs of care and mutual aid. For example, when individuals or groups found themselves in dicey or difficult situations, folks could lean on each other rather than call the cops. Often this meant supporting someone to get the care they actually needed instead of being thrown into the criminal system. Other times it meant creating space for accountability to take hold. These forms of trust and responsibility never crystallized into a public website, handbook, or formal organization; they were relational and ad hoc. We think that people are doing this all the time. In fact, in order to keep it safer for many to engage in these ways, and to hold onto these values as common notions, institutionalization or publicity is often avoided.
batra hide in public law.. unjustifiable strategy
The power of baseline trust
*I think we cannot have any kind of trust in a mass of 100 million individuals,..t they will produce the horror. But if we bring everything to the human scale, to the communities, to small groups of people, then we can really trust that the people will have the wisdom to discuss and to generate consensus.
—Gustavo Esteva
*until now – there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. via matchmaking at scale of infinity.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
We have argued that Empire’s institutions are a ceaseless attack on conviviality, and we want to hold onto emergent forms of trust and responsibility as common notions. In this context, we want to share an excerpt from our interview with Kelsey Cham C.:
carla and Nick: Can you talk about the potential of trusting folks up front, and how you saw it play out at the Thistle?
Kelsey: Yeah totally, I think that’s awesome. Actually I think you [carla] were one of the first people to actually trust me without even knowing me. And I was like what the hell? Why? Why? How do you know I’m not gonna just fuck everything up and run away and steal a bunch of money and go? How do you know that? But in trusting me, I was like, holy shit: I trust this situation and this collective twenty times more and I want to give back to it because I’ve been given this opportunity to do something that I’ve never been able to do before, which is awesome. But I have been thinking about trust and how with trauma we build all these walls and we start to mistrust everything—I have a pretty hard time trusting people—there’s a point where I’m like this is too personal and too intimate and now my walls are going to go up. I was sitting and thinking about how it’s probably one of the best ways to break down the walls of the system is to break down the walls around each other first, and I think the only way we can break down those walls is with trust. And that’s the core thing you said.
huge huge huge resonations
Joyful militancy and trust, and compassion, and humility are all tied together: in other cultures, traditional cultures—I don’t know a lot about this—but from what I know, older Indigenous cultures have these ideas of respect, humility, compassion, and I think in karate I’ve seen it and it’s funny because karate is a martial art, a fighting tool, and one of the things that we learn is that we have to love everyone including our opponents. And that’s the toughest thing to say in this community. People are like, “what the fuck, how can you say that, you can’t just love your abuser.” And it’s true, I can’t just let go of everything. It’s not that, it’s being compassionate, I think, to situations.
carla and Nick: Can we have the expectation of trust up front? Is it an alternative to the idea that trust always needs to be earned?.. t
huge.. to me.. if not unconditional.. not trust.. and why we need nonjudgmental expo labeling for global detox/reset
Kelsey: Yeah that’s like our society: you gotta earn everything; you earn money, you build trust, and respect. You gotta prove to me that I should trust you, or respect you. And that’s an interesting point; I have a tough time with that, trusting people. But I think it’s a feedback system: probably the more you allow yourself to trust people initially, probably the more well-reciprocated that will be. I felt it: you trust me and I didn’t understand it. That’s how fucked up our system is. Even though I didn’t do anything wrong, or to harm you, I didn’t understand how someone could trust me without knowing me first.
huge
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At the core of this conversation is the potential—never an obligation or guarantee—of trusting people up front. In a practical sense, it’s our experience that when people offer trust up front, most people rise to the occasion. Without turning it into a commandment that everyone should follow, we want to affirm the ways that expanding up-front trust can be transformative and enabling. It can feel strange and scary to be in situations where people think well of us and trust us to do our best, without having to “earn it” or “prove it,” but it also can be incredibly freeing, making us feel more capable. This is a trust not only in individuals, but in unfolding processes with open-ended potential, without fixed rules. In this sense, it is trust in joy: in emergent capacities to increase collective powers of acting.
But what does this look like? It happens in all kinds of subtle, relational ways. One of the things that made the Thistle different from many other youth projects was that everyone in the collective had keys to the space and were free to use them anytime. No one had to go through a formal interview process, or sign over their life to have a set. Many bureaucratic procedures like this are based in distrust, as are many radical spaces that replicate institutional norms of Empire. But this up-front trust also entailed responsibility: it required that folks met regularly to check in, talk about how things were going, and so on. These practices helped to create an environment of shared connection and kindness, a space filled with friendship and mutual support, and ultimately a place to build community.
has to be sans any form of m\a\p
email to carla bergman after reading ch 3 joyful militancy
hello
in reading ch 3 of joyful militancy.. so many resonations with my last 15 yrs research/experimentation/prototyping
findings: there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. via taking matching ness to infinity
today have means for legit alt: ‘..expectation of trust up front? Is it an alternative to the idea that trust always needs to be earned?’
hoping we can have a convo about this
huge
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Infinite trust and responsibilities?
sans responsibility ness
infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b legit free people
There are good reasons why trust may be difficult. Distrust is often based on experiences of abuse, violation, or being used or taken advantage of.
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
In this sense, the questions of what we are responsible for, whom we are responsible to, and what we can be held accountable for are always open, ethical questions. This does not mean that they will be completely revised at any second, but that they are never completely fixed, held open by an ethical responsiveness. Responsibility is infinite in the sense that it is unbounded: we can harm each other in unforeseen ways, and infinite responsibility gestures at the potential of remaining responsive to this. As a way of furthering this line of thought, responsibility could be broken apart into response-ability. Writer and facilitator Zainab Amadahy writes,
cancerous distractions
Responsibility in this sense is not a burden but something that actually enhances our life experience. The word literally means “ability to respond.” In the relational framework we might understand responsibility as the ability to respond appropriately – that is, for the common good. In this sense, responsibility is seen as preferable to individualism, which doesn’t really exist.
in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows
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*Like all common notions, trust and responsibility are not guarantees that things will go well, or that oppression and violence will not happen. Trust, hospitality, and openness are precious and important precisely because they entail incredible courage and risk, especially in the context of Empire, with its many layers of violence and control. For this reason, Esteva and Prakash write that “nothing is more treacherous than that which violates hospitality.” To be open and vulnerable entails the risk of being hurt and betrayed in ways that we cannot be if we are on guard or closed-off. Pointing to the need for openness is not an injunction to remain open to everything. Instead, it is another open-ended ethical question about where, when, with whom, and how to be open and trusting.
*until now.. have means to set us all free.. and black science of people/whales law (we have no idea what legit free people are like).. legit trust would/could let the dance dance..
Holding common notions gently
Trust and responsibility are slippery for a number of reasons. They are not simply the result of rational thinking, or even a combination of theory and practice, because they are implicated in affect: they come out of thinking and feeling the transformative encounters with our own power and the powers of others.
This is part of why it is so important to hold onto trust and responsibility as common notions rather than prescriptions. Common notions emerge from the upwellings of joy that make them possible, as people (re)learn together how to nurture convivial forms of life. To turn trust into an imperative is to rob it of this potential. Still, even among the people who generated them, common notions can be converted into rigid doctrines that drain away joyful transformation, rather than supporting it. This happens when certainty arises about the only way forward; when “trust me” and “take responsibility” become injunctions. This turns them into dead words, lifted from the tangle of transformative movement that brought them into being. Common notions can only be held gently, as flexible ideas whose power lives within the relationships and processes they sustain.
if trust flexible.. not trust.. responsibility ness never flexible.. always has agendified coercion ness..
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Chapter 4: Stifling Air, Burnout, Political Performance
Capitalism, colonialism and heteropatriarchy make us sick. Are our responses healing us? Are our actions generating wellbeing for others? Or are we unintentionally reproducing the kind of relationships that made us sick in the first place?
—Zainab Amadahy
response ness is the perpetuation.. the cancerous distraction
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Ultimately, we think that rigidity is undone by activating, stoking, and intensifying joy, and defending it with militancy and gentleness; in other words, figuring out how to transform our own situations, treat each other well, listen to each other, experiment, and fight together.
oi..
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The paradigm of government
But rigid radicalism does not exactly mimic Empire; it emerges as a reaction to it, as an aspiration to be purely against it. When we spoke to adrienne maree brown, she suggested that it is an outgrowth of terror and violence:
Nick and carla: What sustains it?
brown: The culture that there is only one way to be radical in the world, one way to create change.
Nick and carla: What provokes or inspires it? What makes it spread?
any form of m\a\p
brown: Terror. We are dying out here. So much destruction is in motion. I think there is a feeling of urgency, that we need discipline and rigor to meet this massive threat to our existence—racism, capitalism, climate, all of it. It feels like we need to be an army.
for (blank)’s sake
Empire’s destruction in motion can trigger desires for control and militarized discipline. It can lead to a monolithic notion of the right way to be radical, hostile, and suspicious towards other ways of being. It forces out the messiness of relationships and everyday life in favor of clear lines between good/bad and radical/reactionary. In this sense, rigid radicalism imports Empire’s tendencies of fixing, governing, disciplining, and controlling, while presenting these as a means of liberation or revolution. In this sense, many radical movements in the West (and elsewhere) have been entangled in what Spanish intellectual Amador Fernández-Savater has called the paradigm of government:
In the paradigm of government, being a militant implies always being angry with what happens, because it is not what should happen; always chastising others, because they are not aware of what they should be aware of; always frustrated, because what exists is lacking in this or that; always anxious, because the real is permanently headed in the wrong direction and you have to subdue it, direct it, straighten it. All of this implies not enjoying, never letting yourself be carried away by the situation, not trusting in the forces of the world.
of sea world
In the paradigm of government, one always has an idea of what should be happening, and this gets in the way of being present with what is always already happening and the capacity to be attuned to the transformative potentials in one’s own situation. Under the paradigm of government, people are never committed enough. Silvia Federici spoke to this when we interviewed her:
This is why I don’t believe in the concept of “self-sacrifice,” where self-sacrifice means that we do things that go against our needs, our desires, our potentials, and for the sake of political work we have to repress ourselves. This has been a common practice in political movements in the past. But it is one that produces constantly dissatisfied individuals.
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
Because rigid radicalism induces a sense of duty and obligation everywhere, there is a constant sense that one is never doing enough. In this context, “burnout” in radical spaces is not just about being worn out by hard work; it is often code for being wounded, depleted, and frayed: “I’m fucking burning.” What depletes us is not just long hours, but the tendencies of shame, anxiety, mistrust, competition, and perfectionism. It is the way in which these tendencies stifle joy: they prevent the capacity for collective creativity, experimentation, and transformation. Often, saying one is burnt out is the safest way to disappear, to take a break, to take care of oneself and get away from these dynamics.
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The newcomer is immediately placed in a position of debt: owing dedication, self-sacrifice, and correct analysis that must be continuously proved. Whether it is the performance of anti-oppressive language, revolutionary fervor, nihilist detachment, or an implicit dress code, those who are unfamiliar with the expectations of the milieu are doomed from the start unless they “catch up” and conform. In subtle and overt ways, they will be attacked, mocked, and excluded for getting it wrong, even though these people are often the ones that “good politics” is supposed to support: those without formal education who have not been exposed much to radical milieus, but who have a stake in fighting
this is ie of all the ways we’ve tried.. to date.. always a form of m\a\p keeping us from us.. from the dance
None of this is meant to suggest that we should be more wishy-washy about oppression, or that hard lines are wrong, or that all radical practices are corrupt or bad. *Developing analysis, naming mistakes, and engaging in conflict are all indispensable. To undo rigid radicalism is not a call to “get along” or “shut up and take action” or “be spontaneous.” People’s capacities to challenge and unlearn oppressive behaviors, take direct action, or avoid selling labor and paying rent can create and deepen cracks in Empire. They can all be part of joyful transformation. **But any of these practices can also become measuring sticks for comparison and evaluation that end up devaluing other practices and stifling the growth of collective capacities.
*oi.. to sea world
**why we need a legit nother way .. for (blank)’s sake
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When politics circulates in a world dominated by hypervisibility and rigidity, there is *a huge swath of things that do not count, and can never count: the incredible things that people do when nobody is looking, the ways that people support and care for each other quietly and without recognition, the hesitations and stammerings that come through the encounter with other ways of living and fighting, all the acts of resistance and sabotage that remain secret, the slow transformations that take years or decades, and all of the ineffable, joyful movements and struggles that can never be fully captured in words or displayed publicly. Rigid radicalism is a **barrier to co-learning, listening, and questioning, and to undoing our subjection (our sedimented habits). It blocks the difficult recovery and discovery of ***responsibility, and the capacity to carve out relationships based in trust and care. The game of good politics makes it much more ***difficult to be humble, responsive, and creative.
*literacy and numeracy both elements of colonialism/control/enclosure.. we need to calculate differently and stop measuring/counting things
**gupta roadblock law.. any form of m\a\p
****takes a lot of work ness as cancerous distraction
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Chapter 5: Undoing Rigid Radicalism, Activating Joy
How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?.. t
—Michel Foucault
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
Three stories of rigid radicalism
We want to share three stories about some of the origins of rigid radicalism, along with the ways it is constantly being undone through people’s capacity for joy and the formulation of common notions. We focus on three overlapping sources: ideology, morality, and paranoid reading.
The story of ideology begins in currents of Marxism-Leninism that have animated movements throughout the twentieth century. But the problem is broader than Leninist vanguardism—it is ideology as such, and the ways that ideological thinking nurtures fixed answers, certainties, and sectarianism. In any movement, ideological rigidity is only one tendency among others, and it is being challenged by currents that are relatively non-ideological. Whether explicit or not, non-ideological ways of moving and relating recover space for experimentation, and they tend to privilege relationships and feeling over dogmatic principles.
any form of m\a\p chains us
A second story begins with Christian morality and its penchants for creating sinners and saints and for inducing guilt and fear. Rigid radicalism is stoked by a moralism that attempts to root out any shred of complicity with Empire, and in the process it often erases complexity and animates self-righteousness. At the same time, people are undoing this in a multiplicity of ways, including through ethical attunement to their own situations, and by making space for all kinds of responses that escape the grip of moralism.
response ness as cancerous distraction
Finally, the story of paranoid reading is traced back to schooling and the way that students are taught to internalize constant evaluation. Detached from the immediacy of life, measuring everything in relation to fixed standards, it becomes possible to find inadequacies everywhere. When these tendencies take over, there is no space for celebration or surprise. At the same time, we point to some of the ways that this is being undone, not by abandoning critique, but by recovering complementary capacities to explore potential and encounter new things.
supposed to’s of school/work..
needs to be sans any form of m\a\p
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Ideology
The militant diagram
Either you respect people’s capacities to think for themselves, to govern themselves, to creatively devise their own best ways to *make decisions, to be accountable, to relate, problem-solve, break-down isolation and commune in a thousand different ways … OR: you dis-respect them. You dis-respect ALL of us.
—Ashanti Alston
*cancerous distractions.. already all chained
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Though the goal was to create revolutionary forms of organization capable of overthrowing the US government, their ideological rigidity and norms of relentless self-sacrifice paradoxically isolated them further and further from the “masses” that they sought to mobilize.
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ideology is not simply rigid and cold: it can include a warm sense of belonging and camaraderie among its adherents.. t
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For us, this shows that militancy is always about more than tactics or combativeness; it is tied to questions of affect: how movements enable people to grow their own capacities and become new people (or don’t).
oi can’t be new (legit diff) if any form of m\a\p
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Ideology in anarchism
Anarchism is a vibrant and complex tradition. At their most joyful, anarchist currents support common notions such as *mutual aid, autonomy, direct action, and solidarity while refusing ideological closures. At the same time however, anarchists have always grappled with **ideology. The early twentieth-century anarchist feminist Emma Goldman shared this experience in her autobiography:
*this is **that
At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world–prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.
Since Goldman wrote about this a century ago, this kind of policing has continued, but in new and different ways.
structural violence.. emma on sea world
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We think this conception of anarchism—as a point of reference and an evolving set of questions—can help ward off the crystallization of fixed ideology. crow further suggests that anarchism is animated by a *trust in people’s ability to solve their own problems and take collective responsibility, rather than a prescription for how they should do it. This is the kind of anarchism we are after:.. t a non-ideological sensibility that nurtures trust in people’s capacity to care for each other and to be responsive, inventive, and militant.
*if assuming problem solving and responsibility ness.. already/still fixed/prescription ness
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The limits of ideology
In this sense, Ashanti Alston suggests that the problem is not about displacing Marxism-Leninism or Maoism with an anarchist ideology; the problem is ideology as such, and all the baggage that comes with it:
*Ideology … comes out of having a set of answers for something.
From this perspective, ideology is a screen that limits the possibility of open-ended encounters where *mutual learning and transformation can take place. Its inducement of conformity tends towards closed, stagnant little enclaves. Ideological and sectarian tendencies offer the comfort of being able to **pin things down, the pleasure of feeling that one is above or ahead of others, and the somber ability to sort new encounters into neat categories so that one is never too unsettled or affected by anything.
assuming *this = already **that
Undoing ideology
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As we insisted earlier, ethics here does not mean an individualized set of fixed principles (as in consumer ethics, or personal ethics) but instead a capacity to be attuned to the situation, to be immersed in it, and to create something emergent out of the existing conditions. Alston speaks to the power and potential of working across difference in ways that respect where people are coming from:
Different consciousnesses can come from different places … and we can figure out the dialog, how to create a way forward that respects us all, that respects the different worlds that we come from. So for me, if that had happened back then in 1970, where would we have been right now? And for me, that’s such a better way to go, ‘cause for the queer community, or the Yoruba community that may exist in Brooklyn, what’s best for them? Whether one is a small geographical community or tied to their ethnicity or dealing with a lifestyle, we should just be open to come together and see how we can do this in a different kind of way. That’s the challenge.
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
we need a problem deep enough to resonate w/8bn today.. a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough to set/keep 8bn legit free
ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8bn today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8bn legit free
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We would add that an important complement to *asking questions is being able to listen sincerely to responses, and to those with altogether different questions. The **power of questions comes from people being able to respond and hear each other in new ways. It comes from hanging onto the uncertainties they generate, and the new potential that comes along with them. ***To undo ideology is not as straightforward as taking off a pair of glasses to see the world differently. To ward off ideology is not finally to see clearly, ****but to be disoriented, allowing things to emerge in their murkiness and complexity. It might mean seeing and feeling more, but often vaguely, like flickers in one’s peripheral vision, or strange sensations that defy familiar categories and emotions. It is an undoing of oneself, cutting across the grain of habits and attachments. To step out of an inherited ideology can be joyful and painful.
*rather.. need a means to listen to 8b daily curiositys.. and use that data to connect us (nonjudgmental expo labeling)
**need to listen for itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday.. response ness.. et al as cancerous distractions
***actually closer to that.. ie: imagine a turtle ness
humanity needs a leap.. to get back/to simultaneous spontaneity .. simultaneous fittingness.. everyone in sync..
hari rat park law
****rather to be not yet scrambled
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Morality, fear, and ethical attunement
The Christian origins of morality
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue..t
—Erich Fromm
There is a second story, related and overlapping, but distinct: rigid radicalism can be traced to a Christian current of moralism, with its penchants for fear and hostility to a sinful world. Even within Christianity, this was not the only current; it has always also been a site of transformation and revolt. But the dominant form of Christianity over centuries in Europe was a colonizing force, seeking to crush its own rebellious currents within and to convert or annihilate the rest of the world. To be successful, the Church did not merely command obedience. Through practices like confession, it taught its subjects to internalize their own sinfulness, guilt, and inadequacy. This Christian subjectivity is one based in resentment of excess and transformation, bent on spreading guilt and shame. Inspired in part by his reading of Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche showed how Christian morality sacralized meekness and submission, turning powerlessness into a mark of blessedness. His concept of ressentiment names the nurturance of a deep-seated hatred and fear of otherness, and of one’s own sinful desires, based in a stultifying morality.
Over the last several centuries guilt and shame have undergone a secular conversion, rejecting the Church for its superstition, while embracing ressentiment. This secular subject hates the Church, but loves its poison. The affective structures of lack, guilt, fear, and purism remains intact.
all same song to date
Morality in movement
Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what you do, or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.
—Malcolm X
rather.. has nothing to do with knowing ness.. oi
intellectness as cancerous distraction we can’t seem to let go of.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
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Liberal morality seeps into movements in the form of incessant regulation and pacification of struggles. It replaces the transformative power of dignity with moral indignation and its tendencies of shame and self-righteousness. It pathologizes anger, hatred, and destruction, turning non-violence into a moral imperative rather than a tactic. This is the morality of the cop who tells you to calm down with one hand on his gun; the sympathizer whose “support” for you evaporates as soon as things become “violent”; the citizen who says you had better vote or you can’t complain. People in struggle are constantly told about the “correct” way of conducting themselves if they want to be respected and heard.
any form of m\a\p does that
Under the stifling weight of liberal morality, anti-liberal morality has grown in reaction. The targets and the enemies change, but the structure remains, and radical morality can reach new heights of corrosive self-righteousness and punishment.
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As Toronto-based writer Asam Ahmad writes,
Call-out culture can end up mirroring what the prison industrial complex teaches us about crime and punishment: to banish and dispose of individuals rather than to engage with them as people with complicated stories and histories.
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What allows for the constant imposition of external norms, criteria, and ideals for evaluation?
Surely it comes from many different places, but we think part of it can be traced to the ways schooling crushes openness to new encounters. Most of us have been exposed to at least some of this for big chunks of our lives: schooling replaces curiosity with instruction, memorization, and hierarchical evaluation. We are encouraged to internalize the notion that our worth is connected to our grades, that we are locked in competition with our classmates, and that we are like empty vessels awaiting knowledge.
black science of people/whales law
Not long after children learn to walk, they are often stuck in schools and subjected to constant monitoring, control, and evaluation. In school, new capacities can only be affirmed when they conform to the criteria set out by the institution; that is, when a student has learned a particular thing, at the right time, in the right way. Curiosity and the discovery of emergent connections need to be crushed in order to create this conformity, and those who refuse or resist are quickly labeled “problem” children, in need of remedial education, medication, therapy, or punishment.
Those who make it through learn to internalize incessant evaluation by externally imposed standards. By reducing lives to these external standards, schooling crushes the capacity for joy. *Adults, parents, and other caregivers are tasked with continuing this process outside of school, teaching children to categorize and measure everything, including themselves. There is always someone further along, who has done it better and more proficiently. Evaluation works by **removing the immediacy of life where we can sense the unfurling of newness and potential and learn by exploring the world, following our curiosities..t
*graeber parent/care law.. maté parenting law
**imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
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The result is that one is always on guard and never surprised..t
graeber unpredictability/surprise law.. safety addiction
When we interviewed Richard Day, he suggested that this tendency is linked to being in pain and converting that pain into an incessant search for lack:..t
maté addiction law.. missing pieces.. khan filling the gaps law
In general, I think rigid radicalism is a *response to feeling really hurt and fucked up. And the real enemy is the dominant order, but it gets mixed into this big soup, so the enemy becomes each other. It becomes oneself. It’s a finding lacking as such … a finding lacking almost everywhere with almost everyone. And when that lack is found, then of course there needs to be some action: which is going to be to tell, or force, or coerce, or get at that lack, and try to turn it into a wholeness. **So strangely enough I’d suggest that rigid radicalism is driven by a desire to heal. And it has exactly the opposite effect: of sundering the self more, of sundering communities more, and so on..t
*hari present in society law.. khan filling the gaps law
**graeber violence in care law.. steiner care to oppression law
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Having been “educated,” one becomes a pedagogue oneself, spreading the word about Empire, oppression, and violence, and in the process one tends to position others as naïve and ignorant..t
black science of people/whales law..
whalespeak perpetuating sea world
When everything is anticipated, or one can see immediately how something is imperfect or lacking, one misses the capacity to be affected and moved.
not sure that’s what legit free people would be about
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Outro
This is a book that does not have an ending. It is a definition that negates itself in the same breath. It is a question, an invitation to discuss.
—John Holloway
It can be difficult to talk about the ways that radical milieus can be stifling and rigid: how we don’t always treat each other well, how we hurt each other, and how shame, rigidity, and competition can creep into the very movements and spaces that are trying to undo all this. Of course there are tangles of despair, resentment, pleasure, and pain. Of course shitty encounters provoke anxieties and frustrations. Of course people bring their scars and fears. In his interview, Glen Coulthard put his finger on something we have carried with us throughout this process, about the way that sadness and anger often stem from love:..t
..So when we’re leveling our critiques, you just have to understand that yeah, *it’s a rational response to an irrational, violent, unthinking machinery..t So how do we direct that in ways that are able to topple these power relationships? And that’s when the kind of navel-gazing, defensive, puritanical radical becomes an obstacle, even though they may rightfully be that way, because of the position that they occupy. And the process of redirection comes from community, a community that we aspire towards and is always already there. So that’s the question: What do we do with that situation? **How do we make that community stronger? I don’t know what the answer is, but the question is there, or else we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We need it to be there more, with more people.. How can we pull each other into other ways of being together?. t
**need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
in a space ness is huge
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
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The real enemy is Empire itself, and rigid radicalism is a *poisonous reaction that presents itself as the cure. As such, rigid radicalism is one of the ways that Empire calls forth some desires and attachments and conjures away others, keeping its subjects stuck in a desolate form of life. ..As Empire’s subjects, we are increasingly fastened to an automated, industrialized infrastructure that consumes and poisons the living world. ..We are permitted to be as cynical and pessimistic as we want, as long as we remain detached from capacities to live and relate differently..t
*all the cancerous distractions that present as cure/care
People do not need some special training or education to be capable of transformation. On the contrary, we are constantly trained away from aliveness to change..t It is not a question of being right, but of assembling enabling ways of thinking, doing, and feeling in the present. This is most palpable in exceptional situations of disaster and insurrection, when everyday people have a little space from Empire’s exhausting anxieties and routines. Amidst a lot of suffering and scarcity, there are upwellings of mutual aid and connection. This is not evidence of some innate altruism. For us, it is evidence that everyone is capable of joyful transformation, and the ongoing disaster is the brutal isolation and exploitation of life organized by Empire. An increase in the capacity to affect and be affected—joy—means being more in touch with a world that is bleeding, burning, screaming.
imagine a turtle ness.. no train.. no prep
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
Transformation might begin with *rage, hatred, or sorrow. Refusing to “get over” some things can cut against the grain of obligatory productivity and optimism structuring capitalist life. Shared power might arise from accepting, refusing, hanging on, or letting go. This is the wiggle-room of freedom: not the absence of constraint, or a **do-what-you-like individualism, but an emergent capacity to work on relationships, shift desires, and undo ingrained habits.
*cancerous distractions to legit global leap
**part of our not letting go ness.. gershenfeld something else law
*We have suggested that the challenge is not to build a unified consciousness or position, but to find ways of coming together, collaborating, fighting, and discovering shared affinities. This is not about everyone getting along and becoming friends. Vulnerability is important, but also risky, and needs to be selective. As Coulthard said, “Some relationships are just bullshit and we shouldn’t be in them. We should actually draw lines in the sand more willingly.” **Joy needs sharp edges to thrive. How to create spaces, then, where vulnerability can happen and joyful encounters can take place? When to be open, and to what, and how to create and maintain boundaries? What can we do together? How can we support each other? How to create space for consensus and dissensus and difference? How to ward off imperatives to centralize and control things, without creating new divisions and sectarian conflicts? How to ward off rigid radicalism and its attachments to purity and paranoia?
*imagine if we ness.. sans any form of m\a\p.. ie: fighting et al
**all the cancerous distractions.. edges, creating spaces vs who’s together in a space.. invited vs invented, maintain, boundaries, what to do vs listening for itch, consensus, ward off ness, ..
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These are all ethical questions that people are exploring rather than answering once and for all. We have suggested that in the space between abstract morality and vapid individualism, common notions can help us remain open and responsive.
if responding.. not legit open/free
In a world of crushing monopolies, where so much is done to us or for us, some people are recovering the capacity to do things for themselves. From barricades to kitchen tables, they are generating collective forms of trust and responsibility. If such forms make people feel alive, if they deepen bonds of trust and love, militancy tends to grow along with them because people are willing to defend these emergent powers. Every moment that people find trust in each other and in their own capacities is precious. Through these messy struggles, people are becoming powerful and dangerous together.
not diff/dangerous/free if not unconditional
To be militant about joy means forging common notions that can enable, sustain, and deepen transformation here and now, starting from wherever people find themselves.
need to get out sea world of first.. hari rat park law
Three modes of attunement
We think people’s militancy and autonomy—their capacity to grapple with oppression, to break from comfort and certainty in favor of risk, to maintain forms of life that do not reproduce the state and capitalism—depend on participation in transformative struggles. With this in mind, we are interested in capacities to tune into transformative potential.
One mode of attunement involves increasing sensitivity and inhabiting situations more fully. It is in this sense that Amador Fernandez-Savater suggests that the revolutionary alternative to control consists in “learning to fully inhabit, instead of governing, a process of change. Letting yourself be affected by reality, to be able to affect it in turn. Taking time to grasp the possibles that open up in this or that moment.” What if the capacity to be really present is revolutionary? What potentials can be unleashed by connecting with the immediate, in a world that encourages constant distraction, deferral, and numbness?
same song if still in sea world
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Crucially, this attunement is not a new form of optimism, or a newfound faith that things will get better, but something open-ended and dangerous. This capacity to be present, what adrienne maree brown called “being awake inside your life in real time,” includes more of the messy multiplicities that we are: trauma, triggers, and brilliance. Joy is not the same as optimism. It is not happy, nor does it promise a future revolution. In fact, being present might be a way of tuning into the cruelty and self-destruction of certain optimistic attachments.
A second form of attunement comes through the capacity to connect with legacies of resistance, rebellion, and the struggles of the past. As Silvia Federici explained when we interview her, this is a pushing-back against the social amnesia imposed by Empire:
history ness as cancerous distraction.. since today we have means for detox leap
What most matters is discovering and recreating the collective memory of past struggles. In the US there is a systematic attempt to destroy this memory and now this is extending across the world, with the destruction of the main historical centers of the Middle East—a form of dispossession that has major consequences and yet is rarely discussed. Reviving the memory of the struggles of the past makes us feel part of something larger than our individual lives and in this way it gives a new meaning to what we are doing and gives us courage, because it makes us less afraid of what can happen to us individually.
still cancerous distraction
A final mode of attunement to potential is gratitude and celebration. Especially among white, secular radicals, gratitude is often seen as a “hippie” value: something associated with New Age gurus and self-help manuals that insist that positive thinking can overcome any obstacle. Gratitude and celebration are often seen as superfluous, or even counterproductive, as if feeling grateful requires turning away from the horrors of Empire or losing the desire for change. But as Walidah Imarisha suggested, celebration or gratitude can mean holding wins attached to losses, and letting them breathe together. Grief can be attached to gratitude, pleasure to pain, and celebration to determination. Similarly, Zainab Amadahy emphasizes the power of gratitude to renew our connection to the forces that sustain life, among human and non-human relationships:
You can be thankful and still want the world to be better; want your life to be better. At the same time, I don’t think it’s healthy to be grateful in every moment. Sometimes grief, sadness, or fear is the appropriate and healthy response. But when the crisis has passed or it’s a chronic situation, focusing one’s attention on what there is to be grateful for literally eases the pain—physical, mental, and emotional.
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Appendix 1: Feeling Powers Growing—An Interview with Silvia Federici
January 18, 2016
Silvia Federici: My politics resonate with your idea of “joyful militancy.” I’m a strong believer that either your politics is liberating and that gives you joy, or there’s something wrong with them.
I’ve gone through phases of “sad politics “ myself and I’ve learned to identify the mistakes that generate it. It has many sources. But one factor is the tendency to exaggerate the importance of what we can do by ourselves, so that we always feel guilty for not accomplishing enough.
Federici: Sad militancy comes from setting goals that you cannot achieve, so that the outcome is always out of reach, always projected into the future and you feel continuously defeated. “Sad politics “ is also defining your struggle in purely oppositional terms, which puts you in a state of permanent tension and failure. A joyful politics is a politics that is constructive and prefigurative. I’m encouraged by the fact that more people today see that you cannot continuously postpone the achievement of your goals to an always receding future.
*Joyful politics is politics that change your life for the better already in the present.
humanity needs a leap.. to get back/to simultaneous spontaneity .. simultaneous fittingness.. everyone in sync..
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
This is why I don’t believe in the concept of “self-sacrifice,” where self-sacrifice means that we do things that go against our needs, our desires, our potentials, and for the sake of political work we have to repress ourselves. This has been a common practice in political movements in the past. But it is one that produces constantly dissatisfied individuals. Again, what we do may lead to suffering, but this may be preferable to the kind of self-destruction we would have faced had we remained inactive.
*The inability to make politics a rewarding experience is part of the reason why, I think, the radical Left has been unsuccessful in attracting large numbers of people.
*oof.. reward ness as cancerous distraction.. way to legit have any (not to mention more) people is for it to be about something every soul already craves
we need a problem deep enough to resonate w/8bn today.. a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough to set/keep 8bn legit free
ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8bn today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8bn legit free
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Spinoza speaks of Joy as coming from *Reason and Understanding. But we forgot that all of us bear on our bodies and minds the marks of life in a capitalist society. We forgot that we came to the feminist movement with many scars and fears. We would feel devalued and easily take offense if we thought we were not properly valued. It was a **jealousy that came from poverty, from fear of not being given our due. This also led some women to be possessive about what they had done, what they had written or said.
*intellectness as cancerous distraction we can’t seem to let go of.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
I found a vision in the women’s movement that allowed me to overcome some bitter experiences and over time insulated me from disappointment. I see politics now as a process of transformation; a process by which we learn to better ourselves, shed our possessiveness and discard the petty squabbles that so much poison our lives.
we need to let go of that.. of any form of m\a\p
Federici: I like the distinction between happiness and joy. Like you, I like joy because it is an active passion. It’s not a static state of being. And it’s not satisfaction with things as they are. It’s part of feeling powers and capacities growing within yourself and in the people around you. It’s a feeling, a passion, that comes from a process of transformation and growth. It does not mean that you’re satisfied with your situation. It means, again using Spinoza, that you’re active in accordance to what your understanding tells you to do and what is required by the situation. So you feel that you have the power to change and feel yourself changing through what you’re doing, together with other people. It’s not a form of acquiescence to what exists.
but it is if ie: req by situation/anything.. any form of m\a\p perpetuates same song
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As Raúl Zibechi often points out, something new is emerging in these communities because they have *had to invent new forms of life, without any pre-existing model, and politicize the everyday process of their reproduction. When you work together, building houses, building streets, building structures that provide some immediate form of healthcare—just to give some examples—you are making life-choices, as all of them come with a high cost. You must **fight the state, fight the police, the local authorities. So you have to develop tight relations with each other and always measure the value of all things.
if **this.. not *this
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It is indispensable if we want to create “communities of resistance,” spaces where people are connected and can engage in some collective decision-making.
cancerous distractions.. (creative refusal, decision making is unmooring us law).. have same song
Reviving the memory of the struggles of the past makes us feel part of something larger than our individual lives and in this way it gives a new meaning to what we are doing and gives us courage, because it makes us less afraid of what can happen to us individually.
actually.. same song as khan filling the gaps law.. and comradery ness from war/soldier/military duty hype
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The problem has been the wedding of “identity” with the politics of rights, as when we speak of women’s rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights, as if each group were entitled to a packet of entitlements, but in isolation from each other, so that we lose sight of the commonalities and the possibility of a common struggle.
actually deeper.. identity ness itself is cancerous distraction.. ie: the it is me
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Federici: Hope is positive if it is an active passion; but only if it does not replace the work necessary to make our action successful.
takes a lot of work as cancerous distraction.. today we have means for a legit nother way.. for (blank)’s sake
Silvia Federici is an Italian activist and author of many works, including Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. She was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective and organizer with the Wages for Housework Campaign in the ‘70s. She was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.
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Appendix 2: Breaking Down the Walls around Each Other—An Interview with Kelsey Cham C.
Kelsey Cham C. is a former collective member of the Purple Thistle who worked with carla as a youth at the Thistle.
Nick and carla: One of the things we’re trying to think through with the notion of sad militancy is the way that Empire gets smuggled into radical movements in spaces through mistrust, fear, rigidity, shame, competition, and so on … but we want to think this through without blaming individuals. It’s not about individual feelings or behaviors; it’s about ways of relating that are coming out of this system.
Kelsey: Yeah, we’re recreating it.
Nick and carla: Yeah, and we’re interested in talking to people that seem to be able to tap into something different, and I think you do that.
Kelsey: (laughs) I’m glad you think so.
Nick and carla: I guess the first question is: does this resonate, does this description of sad militancy make sense to you?
Kelsey: Yeah, it’s funny because I don’t use those terms, but I find myself in situations where we’re having conversations about the exact same things, but with many different folks who are politically aware and trying to create change. It is really hard to not fall into sad militancy; I catch myself being overly critical of either myself or other people in their efforts to organize and create something better and new, or something that’s never been done before. It’s frustrating, and I find myself asking “why is this happening, this constant critique?” It’s totally internalized capitalist patriarchal shit.
I think it’s connected to perfectionism and the desire to do things “the right way” that becomes a part of us—it’s hard to not recreate that when that’s how you grew up and have learned that this is what’s true.
this why we need a legit global detox leap .. and to/for me.. anything short of that today (since we have means for leap) is a cancerous distraction
warning ness
Nick and carla: So what do you think made you get to a place where you’re able to catch yourself and do something else?
Kelsey: That’s a really good question … well, all those things are super isolating. Most people in this culture have experienced that pretty in-depth in their personal lives. I have, and when I’m critical of myself or other people, I try to strive for something that doesn’t exist, I’m always unhappy and I get frustrated, I get angry, I can get violent … those are things that aren’t productive.
I don’t know, I don’t know if there’s one specific thing; I don’t even know if I’m very good at being joyfully militant or whatever. I think my background in karate has helped, though … And basically recognizing that we’re all in this together and we all have a common goal, and making efforts to love each other—not just tolerate each other—but actually see how we can feel love for everyone to some degree. I think we’re capable—maybe that’s naïve or whatever—but I think we’re capable of doing that … that’s probably arguable too.
yeah to has to be all of us ness..
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
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Nick and carla: Do you think there are things that make rigidity or sad militancy spread?
Kelsey: Yeah for sure, I think people get sucked into stuff, right? I found myself going back to what’s comfortable. If I’m part of a group and people start hating on a certain thing in a way, I think it’s easy for me to get caught up in that. It’s something that I try to catch myself doing and recognize that’s not how I feel at all … it’s old patterns coming up again, and when you’re in new situations it’s easy for those patterns to come out.
thurman interconnectedness law: when you understand interconnectedness it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying – Robert Thurman
need legit global detox leap for all of us to grok that again (not yet scrambled ness)
Nick and carla: Have you seen spaces, conversations, or practices shift from joyful militancy to sad militancy, or vice versa?
Kelsey: Yes, I would say so. I think I’ve seen spaces where everything has ups and downs, and people have ups and downs—going from sad to joyful to sad again—it’s exciting and then a key person leaves, or a project falls through, or maybe people are not happy with the way that everyone is contributing … sometimes that energy falls or maybe people lose interest.
huge red flags.. and so.. cancerous distractions
there is a nother way for 8b people to dance..
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b legit free people
But sometimes I can shift the energy of an entire crew of people … I find that usually, when people are able to recognize that we’re all in this together and it’s not a battle against each other. I think that’s usually what it is: having that foundation of common vision or goals or whatever. And usually there’s someone who is able to be joyful … in the same way that sad militancy is contagious, joy is also contagious; people get excited by new energy.
Nick and carla: What do you think encourages and sustains joyful militancy?
Kelsey: I dunno … I’m pretty new to this whole way of being I guess, but I think humility is a huge part of it, and also community *credit—“we did that together”—and celebrating tiny *accomplishments can be really awesome; celebrating each other’s accomplishments, and *respecting that stuff. I think part of the sad militancy—just to go back to how it catches on—is because I think in our society we learn to be overly critical and perfectionist … it’s so easy to criticize people’s work and what they’re doing without recognizing what they’re **trying to do and what they’re actually accomplishing. At the same time, criticism can be a gift for everyone involved when it’s about learning and figuring things out together.
**makes no diff if still in sea world.. just spinning our wheels w/same song
hari rat park law
Nick and carla: So it’s not even that criticism equals sad militancy; is there a way to do criticism that can be joyful?
Kelsey: Oh, totally. I was just talking about this with a friend the other day. I think it’s important to talk to people about how they receive criticism and how they would want to, or if they even can safely, I guess. But for me I think it’s really, really, really awesome when people give me feedback and constructive criticism in a respectful way; even if it’s in a non-respectful way, I’ll take it, I might be angry about it, it might make me irritable or hate on something, but I’ll absorb it as well. All criticisms are gifts because they’re perspectives that I probably didn’t have before and I can work with. *And I acknowledge that I can’t make everyone happy and that’s not what I’m trying to do. I want to be as inclusive as possible with the work that I’m doing, but there’s **no way that every single person is gonna be super stoked about it.
*but today we can.. and so we can’t not.. berners-lee everyone law.. none of us are free ness
**there is a way ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8bn today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8bn legit fre
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Kelsey Cham C. is a community organizer and settler of Chinese and Irish descent. Being involved with projects like the Purple Thistle has brought them depth and insight into trying to understand what the hell is going on in the world. Kelsey is focused on organizing experiential learning projects with youth and adults in gardening, mycology, fermentation, and “ki” (chi) based karate.
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be you. 