Anarchists in Public
Above, an anarchist bashes out the windows of the Royal Bank of Scotland surrounded by hundreds of reporters.
Is this an anarchist? An anarchist who has solidarity with, who, the bank? No, not the bank. The poor, overburdened and overtaxed Britons? No, what the fuck do they care about what the state does with the statists money. The poor, the downtrodden, the traditionally feigned target of Anarchist polemics? No, I can find none of them here. Here is an anarchist surrounded by cameras, in solidarity intentionally with himself and his conscience, and the story he's writing to gin up oppression after he's bashed in windows. But worse, he's in solidarity with the thousands of hanging cameras, the press and the pseudopresses and the personal presses, the culture of publishment. But worse and worst, he stands firmest alongside the outrage of the state. He is the spectacle, all by himself, performing the idiot caricatures of the government's internalized angers, only to justify the continuing police action against these here banks. His action contains, in itself, the purpose and logic of the states, enact small violences, establish them by and as rhetoric, in order to ensure vague, immediate greater goods, and the long term survival of your mode of being. Once again, the Anarchists have already become the Cops, dictating, demanding, forcing, wrecking, again, always justifying, becoming words, themselves and their labels, themselves and imagined histories, echo chamber congratulation, themselves and their recursive progeny, States themselves, the biggest anarchists. Solidarity didn't used to mean anything, on this point. It was a canard, a bourgeois lie made justified by establishing more-moral credentials, more-powerful unions of individuals, a more-universal state, but a lie only justified if we play dumb and portray the window-smasher as a good honest worker, producing outrage without blood. For our televised ingestion. They do portray the anarchist. An anarchist. Pressed up against the wall, not by cops, but by cameras.
3 comments:
A picture is worth a thousand words, and quite frankly I am tired of words. I hear them all day long, each syllable laced with a subtle violence. I am accused of much, but a word I am not. Let alone a thousand.
To exist within a state, whether to watch it burn or set it straight still plays within the confines of a system, a game. Is Anarchy just another paradigm of morals and code, rhetoric and trade? If one has to define their actions through left and right, or in between are we not carried on the crutches of our hands?
Perhaps this man's actions goes beyond politics or outrage. A severance of hands. An evisceration that transcends what you or I could analyze with words, curse-d words.
Is it the thought beyond the action or the action fore the thought that we zero into?
In any words, I believe Anarchism can only fester in the soul, entropy of the being, tactical displacement of the personality, the sinking ship of ego-driven idealism. If we are to use our contemporary minds to fork our contemporary words, we must awaken a modern spark of what it is to be free. The ever shifting paradigm of the self and the non. True anarchism, true freedom is found within, not in the portable toilet at the end of the paper trail.
So what's a broken window here or a bomb scare there? Just another story, just more words. Words spawning words. You read his story. Be wary where your chaos comes from; is the point of light, the clarity, reflected off the shattered glass or the reporter's lens?
All this aside, between you and I, within a system, a shared experience, the only way we can connect as two creators, I ask you: "What is it to be Free?"
forgive my words.
How serious and morose. It's probably because you're asking questions about paradigms or systems or games as if there was a place where they did not exist. You're acting like a mime, seeming to push against flimsy, temporary contingent walls when you're faced with an atmosphere. Or worse, the edge of a universe, a slippery internal surface where "to get out from" is meaningless.
This doesn't mean that the only surfaces we can recognize are the familiar ones, the ones you put in left and right. But they're not absent from the world either. They'e thrown into a reality as hard and cold and compromised as the rest of us, and with a history too. This man's actions cannot go beyond politics, because he has within him politics and is therefore political just as he is therefore outrageous. It is a lie, a knowing lie too, when we pretend that this meaningless act is somehow the transcendent escape from Being and words and systems into pure ... pure what? It is very nearly what it appears to be- and if there is a differential in meaning, it is not in his favor.
Pure what. Pure freedom? That is your word, as you used it. What does that mean? Free action, without parameters? Free behavior within a set of biological and physical characteristics? Free only in that it is a unique configuration of events not intentioned or caused by an agent? No, you mean none of these things, which is why you're so morose. You've taken an idiot, bashing in a window as performance, as speech, and pinned a universality to his idiot chest, and now his actions are the only ones you can look to to transcend the ego. Even your words, your "sparks", they smack of religious intentions, where you find things "within", "in the soul". Where within? It does no good to pinpoint an unverifiable or impossible location and root a definition deep or ground a mysterious source of power in there, not without mysticism and it's habit of life hating ways.
Look, the anarchist so dearly hates his life. At least those anarchists who still use those modern words in their modern paradigms and their modern games. They hate their minds because it has an ego to it, and their reality because it is so unmysterious and hard and, worst, it is material, they hate their intuition because it is correct, so they lie and choose the things that do not exist as those that exist most.
our continuing confrontation is my schooling...
cheap and how!
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