tame words from a wild heart
Tame Words from a Wild Heart (2016) by Jean Weir via 50 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jean-weir-tame-words-from-a-wild-heart]
notes/quotes:
4
Words have been colonised by power, so that increasingly language can only carry the meanings of the dominant order. Hence words are a powerful weapon in the arsenal of power. Language does not operate as a vehicle for communication, but rather as a means for effecting separation.
John Moore
language as control/enclosure et al
The laboratories of power are programming a new model of renunciation for us. Only for us, of course. For the winning minority, the ‘included’, the model is still aggressivity and conquest. We are no longer the sanguinary, violent barbarians that once let loose in insurrections and uncontrollable revolts. We have become philosophers of nothing, sceptical about action, blasé and dandy. We have not even noticed that they are shrinking our language and our brains. We are hardly able to write any more, something that is important in order to communicate with others. We are hardly able to talk any longer. We express ourselves in a stunted jargon made up of banalities from television and sport, a barrack-style journalism that apparently facilitates communication, whereas in reality it debases and castrates it.
Alfredo M. Bonanno
whalespeak ness et al..
need 1st/most: means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening – so we can hear what’s already on each heart as global detox in order to org around legit needs
just read bonanno’s armed joy
6
Their action is therefore not reduced to simply striking the structures of the enemy but involves elaborating an informal coordination of attack to be grasped and experimented. In order to do this we need strong ideas and a methodological proposition, where words come into their own as part of the arsenal of attack.
to me.. if still attacking ness.. then just striking structures of econ.. no legit change/diff/freedom
7
Looted by the peddlers of abstraction into the web of illusions or immersed in the mud of leftist mystification, our words—our ideas—need to be stolen back into the totality of the struggle, from where we can revitalise them as transitory instruments to identify the enemy, ignite passions and transform reality.
need self-talk as data via idiosyncratic jargon et al
Only religions—including the secular ones—invest words with the authority of eternal truth. For us, words have the meaning that we give them after decolonising them from power at a given moment, in particular conditions of the clash. They become elucidating and propulsive, **help us to elaborate and actualize our attack making it discernible and multipliable. Precisely at a time when language is being flattened by power and its technologies, anarchists are in the forefront of a reduction to slogans, fetishisation and acronyms, ACAB surely winning the prize in the race for cerebral and projectual lobotomisation. We are not interested in locking up words, ourselves with them, in fortresses of identity or defending them as our property. *There is no point in arguing over words. When gone into they turn out to have completely different meanings for each of those using them. We need to find our affinities on the basis of a wider language, the language of knowing, experimenting, seeking, ‘encountering what our words betray rather than illuminate, elsewhere, in our hearts, at the cost of our lives’, not through repetition and incantation.
*yeah.. just as no point in **attackin ness et al
10
We think that language brings us together but language separates us. Yet we must try in some way, even more so at the present moment when capital has expropriated many of the terms that we use and taken them to empty them of meaning. In the same way as capital has taken our space it’s taken our time and our language, in other words it’s taking our lives. It’s taking our lives to sell back to us in the supermarket of identities: you can have an identity, you can’t have individuality. Individuals scare capital but identities are safe because they can interact.
left off top 11
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be you. 