Fun With Autonomy

My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure memory when I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling shrieks behind me were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of the yawning gulf ahead. And then I became aware of the added blasts and whistling in front of me—tides of abomination surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.
Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed—and, ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and plunged upward over the incline’s debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I saw the chasm’s edge, leaped frenziedly with every ounce of strength I possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a phandemoniac vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible blackness.

It is no doubt strange, and maddening to some, to find a book that is not easily consumed to be ‘popular’ according to academic standards. The surprise over this is perhaps attributable to the way we underestimate the reading public, its capacity and desire for reading complicated texts, when the complication is not gratuitous, when the challenge is in the service of calling taken for granted truths into question, when the taken for grantedness of those truths is, indeed, oppressive.
Neither grammar or style are politically neutral. Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalised language, where the price of not conforming is intelligibility itself. There is nothing radical about common sense. It is a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical thought, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed upon the thinkable itself. … Is there, perhaps, a value to be derived from experiences of linguistic difficulty? If gender itself is naturalised through linguistic norms, then the alteration of gender at the most fundamental epistemic level will be conducted, in part, through contesting the grammar in which gender is given. The demand for lucidity forgets the ruses that motor the ostensibly ‘clear’ view.

Underlying the appeal to truth of science and a progressive narrowing of rationalism, is a certian normativity. Rationalism refers to a necessary sanitary measure. It was the insertion of a filter against the flooding of individual consciousness… Rationalism is not only a scientific predisposition but, even more, a hygienic procedure for consciousness, namely, a method of no longer having to give everything its due. This hygienic selection of only a tiny island of truth in the middle of an ocean of vague and false assertions is unwittingly a selection of what counts as valid in both social life and thought: reason and logical order, not un-reason.

We are going to inherit the Earth, there is not the slightest doubt about that; The bourgeoisie will destroy their world before abandoning history’s stage. We carry the seeds of a new world in our hearts, a world that is growing every moment

Enlightenment is mythic fear turned radical. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product […] Nothing at all may remain outside, because the mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear.

If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is asocial; on the contrary. But it is explosive; there is no desiring machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors

I admire those who work with non-anarchists and participate in non-homogenous campaigns and struggles even though they don’t agree with everyone else participating. But I think we all need to fiercely reject the Ally as a primary identity of struggle. You cannot give solidarity if you are not struggling first and foremost for your own reasons. To be only or primarily an ally is to be a parasite on others’ struggles, with no hope greater than to be a benign parasite; it is to refuse to acknowledge our interests and place in the world out of a dogmatic insistence on identifying ourselves with the system we are supposed to be fighting. Being aware of relative oppression and privilege is vital, but emphasizing those differences over the fact that all of us have common enemies and all of us have reasons to destroy the entire system is deliberately missing opportunities to make ourselves stronger in this fight.